The Hunt for a Healthy Microbiome

What does a healthy forest look like? A seemingly thriving, verdant wilderness can conceal signs of pollution, disease or invasive species. Only an ecologist can spot problems that could jeopardize the long-term well-being of the entire ecosystem.

Microbiome researchers grapple with the same problem. Disruptions to the community of microbes living in the human gut can contribute to the risk and severity of a host of medical conditions. Accordingly, many scientists have become accomplished bacterial naturalists, labouring to catalogue the startling diversity of these commensal communities. Some 500–1,000 bacterial species reside in each person’s intestinal tract, alongside an undetermined number of viruses, fungi and other microbes.

Rapid advances in DNA sequencing technology have accelerated the identification of these bacteria, allowing researchers to create ‘field guides’ to the species in the human gut. “We’re starting to get a feeling of who the players are,” says Jeroen Raes, a bioinformatician at VIB, a life-sciences institute in Ghent, Belgium. “But there is still considerable ‘dark matter’.”

Currently, these field guides are of limited use in distinguishing a healthy microbiome from an unhealthy one. Part of the problem is the potentially vast differences between the microbiomes of apparently healthy people. These differences arise through a complex combination of environmental, genetic and lifestyle factors. This means that relatively subtle differences can have a disproportionate role in determining whether an individual is relatively healthy or at increased risk of developing disorders such as diabetes. Understanding the clinical implications of those differences is also a challenge, given the extensive interactions between these microbes, and with their host, as well as the conditions in which that individual lives. “One person’s healthy microbiome might not be healthy in another context — it’s a tricky concept,” says Ruth Ley, a microbial ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany.

Researchers such as Ley are trying to better understand the forces that shape the human gut microbiome — both in the modern era, and across evolutionary history. The emerging picture indicates that even if there is no one healthy microbiome, there are ample opportunities for our lifestyle to interfere with the proper function of these complex commensal communities. And to understand how the breakdown of these ecosystems drives disease, researchers will need to move beyond microbial field guides and begin dissecting how these species interact with their hosts and with each other.

by Michael Eisenstein, Nature | Read more:
Image: Antoine Doré

[ed. Probably one of the most exciting fields of study these days. The influence of the microbiome on health (mental and physical) appears to be amazingly important (if not enormous) and we're just beginning to understand why. In other news: Powerful antibiotics discovered using AI (Nature).]

Harding Icefield

The Harding Icefield: A shrinking landscape on the Kenai Peninsula (FWS - pdf)

There’s something as big as the island of Maui on the Kenai Peninsula that many locals have not seen or not seen well. Unless you’re a pilot, your exposure to this mystery blob has likely been constrained to the hiking trail at Exit Glacier, or perhaps to viewing the tidewater glaciers in Northwestern Fjord from a commercial tour boat, or perhaps to the edge of Skilak Glacier if you’re hunting sheep or goat. These glaciers, as big as they seem, are three slivers among the more than 30 glaciers that feed off the Harding Icefield.

The icefield embraces Truuli Peak, the highest point in the Kenai Mountains at 6,612 feet above sea level, suggesting that the Harding is likely a mile deep in some places.

Image: Mario Tama/Getty Images

[ed. This isn't the Harding but it's the best photograph I could find that really captures what it looks like. One of the most stunning and humbling places I've ever visited in Alaska - horizon to horizon, as far as you can see, just snow and ice and emergent mountaintops.]

It's Complicated

In the second episode of HBO’s Watchmen series, Angela Abar, also known as Sister Night, explains a few things to her adopted son, Topher. (...) Some people think that world is rainbows and lollipops, Angela tells Topher. But “we don’t do lollipops and rainbows. We know those are just pretty colors that hide what the world really is.” And what is the world really? The world is “black and white.”

More and more of us seem willing to share in Sister Night’s wisdom. There is black and there is white; there’s right and there’s wrong. No lollipops, for sure, and no multi-toned rainbow zones, either. As a nation and a people, we are what the pundits like to call “polarized.” We are divided, radically and insistently on any number of matters: abortion, immigration, race, the politics of gender, homosexuality, or transgender rights. We’ll even fight about who’s going to use which bathroom. For many, if not most of us, it seems there is no going back and no backing down. Right is right; wrong, wrong. What more is there to say?

Every issue is manifest in extremes. Someone is not “racially insensitive” if he laughs at a dopey joke. He’s a racist out and out. Pose questions about the motives for gender transition? You’re a transphobic, and that’s all there is to say. Don’t believe all women all the time when they discuss sexual assault? Misogynist.

It works both ways. Question the president’s fitness to lead? You’re disloyal. Maybe you’re a traitor. Ask moderate questions about abortion rights and join the ranks of the baby-killers. Insult the military, refuse to honor all the police all the time: Maybe you’re not a real American.

Not only have our opinions become more emphatic and violent, served up like roundhouse punches. We’ve developed a proclivity for suppressing the opinions of others. We cancel. We de-platform. Some of us stage a riot even before hearing the scheduled talk by the controversial speaker. We will not risk our own simplicities by exposing them to the views of others. Direct, clear, and emphatic is what we aspire to be, making our pronouncements from the judge’s elevated chair.

What’s up with us humans, us American humans, that we’re committing ourselves more and more to unbending postures? Why have we developed what seems an allergy to nuance, complexity, irony?

One answer might be that the world has grown radically complex—perhaps unbearably so, for some of us. Or at least it has taken on the appearance of boiling complexity. Information comes our way at an unprecedented speed and in unprecedented amounts, through our various technologies. Step into the world of the Internet and you can see how much blooming, buzzing, laughing, teeth-gnashing, mind spinning confusion is on offer.

It’s natural, isn’t it, that we would revert to simplicities and reductions in the face of all this whirl?

Another reason for this state of our culture is what could be called the pleasures of judgment. The more affairs threaten to run out of control, the more it may help to have not only a firm position but also a judgmental temperament. Judgment brings order. We go thumbs-up, or we go thumbs-down, and so appear to rule our own lives in imperial fashion. When we judge emphatically, it seems that the world is our domain. Simplification (which we might also call “reduction”) and judgment: These are the ways we hold complexity at bay.

The Internet? We shape our tools, Marshall McLuhan famously said, and thereafter our tools shape us. The most powerful tool of our time is the Internet, which McLuhan would probably call an extension of the mind. (To McLuhan, tools are always extensions of the human: A shovel extends the hand; a steam-shovel is a super-extension. The mind is made larger by the Internet, but it is made more confusing, too.) We’re not being shaped by this tool so much as we are being mis-shaped by it—confused, disordered, maybe slightly deranged. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be with a tool as marvelous as the Internet, but that appears to be the way that it is. (...)

Is the Internet chaos? It may approach that condition. But the Internet is also a collaboration (if we follow McLuhan), a collaboration between the mind of the individual and the scattered, revealing, often invaluable pseudo-mind of the technology. A person takes of two things, says Chaucer, that which he finds and that which he brings. To use the Internet well, you need to bring a lot. You need an existing cognitive and (dare one say it?) spiritual frame to order what you learn there. You need to know some history, and preferably more than some. It helps to understand the rudiments of philosophy, religion, economics, and science. You have to have an education, in other words, to be educated by the Internet. You need to have created a context for what you know and what you might learn. You also need to have standards for what to believe and what not to. A built in bullshit detector, a la Ernest Hemingway? Nothing so emphatic, but surely a strong, functioning sense of skepticism. To be educated by the Internet, you first need to be educated by something other than the Internet.

by Mark Edmundson, Hedgehog Review |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: On Critical Thinking (Hedgehog Review).]

Locust Swarms Despoil Kenya

‘Like an Umbrella Had Covered the Sky’: Locust Swarms Despoil Kenya (NY Times)

Image: Khadija Farah

[ed. Pretty horrifying, and another unforseen consequence of climate change.]

Politics Without Politicians

The political scientist Hélène Landemore asks, If government is for the people, why can’t the people do the governing?

Imagine being a citizen of a diverse, wealthy, democratic nation filled with eager leaders. At least once a year—in autumn, say—it is your right and civic duty to go to the polls and vote. Imagine that, in your country, this act is held to be not just an important task but an essential one; the government was designed at every level on the premise of democratic choice. If nobody were to show up to vote on Election Day, the superstructure of the country would fall apart.

So you try to be responsible. You do your best to stay informed. When Election Day arrives, you make the choices that, as far as you can discern, are wisest for your nation. Then the results come with the morning news, and your heart sinks. In one race, the candidate you were most excited about, a reformer who promised to clean up a dysfunctional system, lost to the incumbent, who had an understanding with powerful organizations and ultra-wealthy donors. Another politician, whom you voted into office last time, has failed to deliver on her promises, instead making decisions in lockstep with her party and against the polls. She was reëlected, apparently with her party’s help. There is a notion, in your country, that the democratic structure guarantees a government by the people. And yet, when the votes are tallied, you feel that the process is set up to favor interests other than the people’s own.

What corrective routes are open? One might wish for pure direct democracy—no body of elected representatives, each citizen voting on every significant decision about policies, laws, and acts abroad. But this seems like a nightmare of majoritarian tyranny and procedural madness: How is anyone supposed to haggle about specifics and go through the dialogue that shapes constrained, durable laws? Another option is to focus on influencing the organizations and business interests that seem to shape political outcomes. But that approach, with its lobbyists making backroom deals, goes against the promise of democracy. Campaign-finance reform might clean up abuses. But it would do nothing to insure that a politician who ostensibly represents you will be receptive to hearing and acting on your thoughts.

The scholar Hélène Landemore, a professor of political science at Yale, has spent much of her career trying to understand the value and meaning of democracy. In recent years, she has been part of a group of academics, many of them young, trying to solve the problem of elected democratic representation—addressing flaws in a system that is widely believed to be no problem at all. In her book “Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many” (Princeton, 2012), she challenged the idea that leadership by the few was superior to leadership by the masses. Her forthcoming book, due out next year and currently titled “Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century,” envisions what true government by mass leadership could look like. Her model is based on the simple idea that, if government by the people is a goal, the people ought to do the governing.

“Open democracy,” Landemore’s coinage, does not center on elections of professional politicians into representative roles. Leadership is instead determined by a method roughly akin to jury duty (not jury selection): every now and then, your number comes up, and you’re obliged to do your civic duty—in this case, to take a seat on a legislative body. For a fixed period, it is your job to work with the other people in the unit to solve problems and direct the nation. When your term is up, you leave office and go back to your normal life and work. “It’s the idea of putting randomly selected citizens into political power, or giving them some sort of political role on a consultative body or a citizens’ assembly,” said Alexander Guerrero, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers who, in 2014, published an influential paper arguing for random selection in place of elections—a system with some precedents in ancient Athens and Renaissance Italy which he dubbed “lottocracy.” (It’s the basis for his own forthcoming book.) In open democracy, Landemore imagines lottocratic rule combined with crowdsourced feedback channels and other measures; the goal is to shift power from the few back to the many.

To many Americans, such a system will seem viscerally alarming—the political equivalent of lending your fragile vintage convertible to the red-eyed, rager-throwing seventeen-year-old down the block. Yet many immediate objections fall away on reflection. Training and qualification: Well, what about them? Backgrounds among American legislators are varied, and members seem to learn well enough on the job. The belief that elections are a skills-proving format? This, too, cancels out, since none of the skills tested in campaigning (fund-raising, glad-handing, ground-gaming, speechmaking) are necessary in a government that fills its ranks by lottery.

Some people might worry about commitment and continuity—the idea that we are best served by a motivated group of political professionals who bring experience and relationships to bear. Historically, such concerns haven’t weighed too heavily on the electorate, which seems to have few major reservations about choosing outsiders and weirdos for important roles. If anti-institutionalism has become a poison taken as a salve, then maybe it’s the institutions that require adjustment. Landemore’s open-democratic model purports to work with the people as they are, with no reacculturation or special education required—and its admirers describe the idea as being durable, sophisticated, and able to channel populist sentiment for good.

“Democratic governments are losing perceived legitimacy all over the world,” Jane Mansbridge, a professor of political leadership and democratic values at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told me. “The beauty of open democracy is that it has a firm understanding not just of the complexity of democratic principles but of how to make those principles cohere in a way that meets people’s deepest intuitions.” She sees it as an apt response to population-sized problems, such as climate change, that seem to require solutions more pervasive and willful than professionalized leadership can muster. “Landemore is very much on the side of all the young people in the world who are saying, ‘How the heck are we going to manage this?’ ” Mansbridge said.

Landemore herself would point to the last U.S. Presidential election—a contest between two candidates so unpopular with the people as to have the lowest approval ratings in the history of American Presidential races. Roughly four in ten eligible voters did not bother to show up at the polls, and Donald Trump was elected against the will of the majority of citizens who did. Such an outcome seems to strain the premise of democracy. Could picking leaders randomly, and getting everyone involved, be worse?

by Nathan Heller, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Rose Wong

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Lyrics (Louie Louie)
[ed. See also: Psychotic Reaction (starting at 2:20) and God Bless Our Mobile Home. And, Is This the Dirtiest Song of the Sixties? (New Yorker).]

Making Kids Great Again

Sales of 'Make Kids Great Again' spanking paddles draw criticism, praise (KOMO News)

Image: Screenshot: MuricaWoodworks/Etsy

Bombs Away

Whenever you see pictures of U.S. military combat aircraft, drones, and helicopters deployed on operations overseas, or even just during exercises in the United States or abroad, they're often loaded down with various missiles and other precision-guided munitions. It's no secret that the United States spends a lot on defense, but how much do each of these various weapons actually cost?

via: Here Is What Each Of The Pentagon's Air-Launched Missiles And Bombs Actually Cost (The Drive)

Image: USAF

The Future We Choose: Two Scenarios

The Future We Choose, a new book by the architects of the Paris climate accords, offers contrasting visions for how the world might look in thirty years.

It is 2050. We have been successful at halving emissions every decade since 2020. We are heading for a world that will be no more than 1.5C warmer by 2100

In most places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot like walking through a forest and very likely this is exactly what you are doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution. We have trees to thank for that. They are everywhere.

It wasn’t the single solution we required, but the proliferation of trees bought us the time we needed to vanquish carbon emissions. When we started, it was purely practical, a tactic to combat climate crisis by relocating the carbon: the trees took carbon dioxide out of the air, released oxygen and put the carbon back where it belongs, in the soil. This, of course, helped to diminish climate crisis, but the benefits were even greater. On every sensory level, the ambient feeling of living on what has again become a green planet has been transformative, especially in cities.  [Best Case Scenario]

It is 2050. Beyond the emissions reductions registered in 2015, no further efforts were made to control emissions. We are heading for a world that will be more than 3C warmer by 2100

The first thing that hits you is the air. In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy and, depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear. You think about some countries in Asia, where, out of consideration, sick people used to wear white masks to protect others from airborne infection. Now you often wear a mask to protect yourself from air pollution. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air: there might not be any. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality will be.

Fewer people work outdoors and even indoors the air can taste slightly acidic, sometimes making you feel nauseated. The last coal furnaces closed 10 years ago, but that hasn’t made much difference in air quality around the world because you are still breathing dangerous exhaust fumes from millions of cars and buses everywhere. Our world is getting hotter. Over the next two decades, projections tell us that temperatures in some areas of the globe will rise even higher, an irreversible development now utterly beyond our control. Oceans, forests, plants, trees and soil had for many years absorbed half the carbon dioxide we spewed out. Now there are few forests left, most of them either logged or consumed by wildfire, and the permafrost is belching greenhouse gases into an already overburdened atmosphere. The increasing heat of the Earth is suffocating us and in five to 10 years, vast swaths of the planet will be increasingly inhospitable to humans. We don’t know how hospitable the arid regions of Australia, South Africa and the western United States will be by 2100. No one knows what the future holds for their children and grandchildren: tipping point after tipping point is being reached, casting doubt on the form of future civilisation.  [Worst Case Scenario]

by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, The Guardian | Read more: Best Case Scenario and Worst Case Scenario
Images: Ichiro/Getty Images Noah Berger/AP

The Beatles, Paris, June 20, 1965
via:

via:

Stop Pursuing Us With Happiness

Is there anything more depressing than the happiness industry? Never mind Google, just check out Amazon Books for something to read about this mental snake-oil, and just look at that — “50,000 results for Happiness.” With so much advice available, it’s hard to grasp how there could be any misery left in the world. At the top of the list among the “happiness projects” and “happiness how-tos” sits The Art of Happiness by no less a global guru than His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet. But wait; there’s less. The small print reveals that the Dalai Lama didn’t even write the book. It is a set of “observations and analysis” by some American psychoanalyst who “echos” the ideas of the world’s favourite holy man. I wonder if he’s happy with that.

The British feminist Lynne Segal has suggested that the “happiness agenda” ought to be named the “misery agenda”. She argues that it adapts people to the causes of their misery, rather than addressing them. That’s a nod to Professor Pangloss, of whom more later. The Dalai Lama is elsewhere reliably quoted as teaching that “the purpose of our lives is to be happy.” The American people’s genius, Benjamin Franklin, wrote that “wine is constant proof that God loves to see us happy.” Come on guys — this is a serious existential topic, and that’s all you’ve got?

The mystery of happiness, once owned by ancient high philosophy, is now all over the place. As with so much else in the disintegrated temples of ancient values, we can probably blame the Americans. The ancient wisdom of the Greeks, of Marcus Aurelius, the Buddha, Confucius and other giants has been deconstructed into streams of glib cliches that can be transformed into dollars by slapping them on mugs, T-shirts, Hallmark cards and blurbs for “self-help” trash. What have they wrought, those framers of the U.S. Constitution, by sticking into it that fuzzy inalienable right to “the pursuit of Happiness”?

Not happiness itself, mark you, as if a little happiness would be too much to ask. No, instead you can have the lifelong pursuit of happiness, alongside the pursuit of money, to bring joy to your life, and good luck with both of them. Of course, if you can’t catch actual happiness, you can always sell the illusion of it in small bottles from the back of a covered wagon, or later, on Amazon. As an aside, just ponder that word “inalienable.” It means something that cannot be bought, sold, or transferred from one person to another.

It’s about now that one should pose that question begging to be asked — exactly what is happiness? The cartoonist Charles Schulz said it’s a warm puppy. For John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Happiness is a warm gun, yes it is (bang, bang, shoot, shoot).” Take your pick. Since the middle of the last century, happiness research has slithered out of theology and philosophy into a plethora of scientific disciplines — psychiatry, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, gerontology, medicine and even economics. The United Nations publishes an annual World Happiness Report — last year Finland was ranked as the happiest country in the world for the second year running. In 2008, the government of Bhutan enacted a constitutional amendment to install GNH (Gross National Happiness) as a government goal.

Since 2013, the UN has celebrated an annual International Day of Happiness to promote the importance of happiness in the lives of people around the world. In 2015, it launched a list of development goals, “aimed at ending poverty, reducing inequality, and protecting the planet – three key aspects that lead to well-being and happiness.” This is all very worthy and commendable of course, but so far our cynical fractured world has seemed more happy to ignore than embrace World Happiness Day. (It’s on March 20, if anybody cares.)

Because of its modern scientific drift, the term happiness is now associated with mental or emotional states, including positive emotions like contentment or joy. For personal happiness, choose from your thesaurus — delight, enjoyment, peace of mind, well-being, contentment, hopefulness, exhilaration, delectation, exuberance, contentment, flourishing. The multiplicity is unhelpful, but the word that probably introduced the concept in the west was eudaimonia. (In the early Pali language of Buddhism, it was sukha.) The Greek eudaimonia came from eu, meaning “well”, and daemon, a minor guardian deity. Eudaimonia implies a positive state of being that a person may strive toward under the protection of a benevolent spirit. This state of being was the best a person could hope for, so it has been translated as “happiness”, but like the translation of the Greek arete as virtue, the English misses the divine nature of the word that the Greeks would have understood to be implied. In other words, happiness was not just a contented state, but a blessed one, rendering its pursuit elusive and not altogether within human power to achieve.

But even in early Greek philosophy, eudaimonia would have no overt religious or supernatural significance. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics says that eudaimonia means “doing and living well.” The modern concept of happiness tends to lose this attribute of doing and living well. When we observe that someone is happy, we usually mean they are feeling pleasant because things are going well in their life. Eudaimonia was a more encompassing idea than feeling happy. The philosopher Zeno believed that happiness was not dependent upon present enjoyment and security, but also on an expectation that the good times would continue. This gave rise to the concept that no person can be judged happy before they are dead. While we are alive, something can go badly wrong, and goodbye happiness.

by Thomas O’Dwyer, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Image: Pollyanna, uncredited

The Future of Social Ordering

When might future courts operate more like self-driving cars, and when like auto-piloted planes? When might future legal proceedings still require human attorneys and firm handshakes? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them to Tim Wu. This present conversation focuses on Wu’s recent Columbia Law Review article “Will Artificial Intelligence Eat the Law? The Rise of Hybrid Social-Ordering Systems.” Wu is the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School. (...)

Automated judicial decision-making raises predictable sci-fi-infused anxieties about which most precious human qualities our judicial process stands to lose. Your paper remains somewhat agnostic on what this “special sauce” for a functional and credible court system might entail, but you do point to a cluster of concerns that arise in any number of AI-related conversations, particularly concerns of perverse instantiation (in which digitized mechanisms somehow fail to realize our true aims), and of unaccountability (in which we cannot assess certain decisions produced by a computer program operating far beyond our own cognitive capacities). Could you flesh out those problematic prospects with a couple of present-day and near-future examples? And could you offer any comparable possibilities here of AI helping to improve on the judicial special sauce — beyond just freeing up time by farming out the most predictable cases?

Have you ever felt angry or frustrated when your computer or some site doesn’t function properly, and when you then encounter the complete lack of human accountability that is the essence of software-based systems? I think that captures the worst of what “robotic justice” could become: impersonal, inhumane, and unflinching. As scholars Richard M. Re and Alicia Solow-Niederman put it, software decision-systems already have a bad tendency of being “incomprehensible, data-based, alienating, and disillusioning.”

We’re already familiar with the automated speed traps that mail you a ticket if you drive too fast. It is not hard to imagine a future where the combination of pervasive surveillance and advanced AIs leads to the automated detection and punishment of many more crimes: say public littering, tax evasion of any kind, conspiracy (agreements to commit a crime), possession of obscene materials, or threatening the President.

Automated enforcement of these crimes would, perhaps, make for a more orderly society, since many of the laws I just mentioned are under-enforced. Yet you don’t need to be a committed civil libertarian to wonder about a future of being constantly watched, accused, and potentially convicted, all without human involvement.

But despite the examples I’ve just given, I still think that full automation of most aspects of our legal system will remain implausible for quite some time. And in this paper I want to stress why problems in legal decision-making may be particularly resistant to full automation.

When it comes to making complex AI-augmented decisions, what counts as “success” differs from one field to the other. Consider medical diagnosis: as a patient, if AI will give you a more accurate reading than a human doctor, you probably have little reason to prefer the human doctor just because she’s human. If self-driving cars come to have fewer accidents than cars operated by humans, same thing. In each example, we tend to defer to a relatively objective metric of success or failure.

In the law, however, success (or certainly “justice”) can’t be so easily measured. Legitimacy and procedural fairness can play a large role in what one considers a just result. Decisions might put people in prison for the rest of their lives, or even put someone to death — and how that decision is arrived at seems to matter a great deal. Even if somebody writes a program that, on evidence, tends to outperform the average trial jury in terms of compliance with the law as written, I doubt many of us would accept as legitimate that program’s determination of guilt or innocence for a serious crime.

In a typical commercial dispute, meanwhile, both sides usually think they are right. The cases that get litigated, as opposed to settled, could usually go either way. Hence the quality of a decision often has less to do with the particular claims before the judge (or judges), but with how the logic of this decision, as precedent, will fare as a rule of decision for future cases.

These are just a few of the calculations that makes a metric for high-quality legal decisions difficult to arrive at. Those who have spent time in legal theory know there are other challenges as well, such as Karl N. Llewellyn’s distinction between the written rules and the real rules — with the law, in the hands of a fluent judge or lawyer, rarely operating precisely as it has been written. This makes the potential for absurd or even dangerous results through perverse instantiation very high. In fact, even without AI, the legal system remains highly prone to yielding absurd results. One basic job of a judge involves preventing lawyers from abusing the system to achieve such ends.

I do concede though that some AI advocates might view all these concerns as epiphenomenal or empty. With the legitimacy of computerized adjudication, for example, it may just be a matter of time. Maybe right now we still can’t accept the idea of a computer finding a prisoner guilty. But if you told someone from an earlier generation that we could trust a computer to fly an airplane or dispense large sums of cash without supervision, they’d surely look at you funny.

And it isn’t as if humans are perfect. “Judgment” can be another word for bias. In the US, African Americans regularly get arrested and convicted of minor crimes for which white people might get a pass. So if, over time, software proves itself fairer and more accurate in legal decision-making (less subject to such biases, more likely to weigh objectively all of the evidence), then perhaps we’ll come to regard computerized judges as more legitimate than human judges or juries. As the Bitcoin believers like to say: “In code we trust.”

by Andy Fitch, LARB |  Read more:

Image: Tim Wu, uncredited

Mickey Wright (February, 1935 – February, 2020)

Mickey Wright is without question the greatest female player of all time, compiling a staggering 82 LPGA victories, including 13 major championships. Her swing, an aesthetic and technical miracle, was assessed by Ben Hogan as the best ever. By 1969, at age 34, she had attained almost mythical status. Then, just like that, she was gone. She retired, mysteriously, playing sporadically until 1973, before receding to her Florida home and a private life of her design. Since that time, Wright has spoken occasionally, but never at length. No golfer, Hogan included, has ever left us wanting more for insight into the player's thoughts and experiences. On this occasion, she let us in. In conversation, Mickey speaks with an easy precision, her voice strong and alert. It's a two-way deal—she asks questions, issues funny rejoinders to your answers, points out ironies. Her takes on others are generous, her self-assessments modest. She is fiercely pro golf and, not surprisingly, a traditionalist. She is a delight. For this, the 111th edition of My Shot, we present the one and only—the best there ever was—Mickey Wright. —Guy Yocom

I'M IN GREAT SHAPE FOR 82. I had a couple of surgeries earlier this year I don't care to advertise, but I'm recovering nicely. So well, in fact, that I went out on my back porch yesterday and hit five wedge shots out to a fairway of the course I live on. I went out and picked up the balls, like I always do. It might not sound like much, but these Florida summers are no joke. How many 82-year-old women do you know who have been out hitting balls in 95-degree weather?

I STILL LOVE SWINGING A GOLF CLUB more than just about anything. For years after my last competitive appearance in 1995, I'd hit balls from my porch. When the USGA Museum put together the Mickey Wright Room in 2011 and needed a few mementos, I sent, among other things, the little swatch of synthetic turf. I hit balls off it one last time and figured that was it. Then some good friends of mine in Indiana heard about it and sent me a brand-new practice mat. You know how it works: Put out a mat, some balls and a club in front of a golfer, and the temptation to use them is going to be too much. So I keep my hand in, five or six balls at a time. Just enough to remain a "golfer."

NOT TOO LONG AGO, the nice people at Wilson Sporting Goods sent me a new set of irons. It had been awhile since I'd seen a new set, and what a shock it was. The shafts today are so much longer, the lofts so much stronger than I'm accustomed to. I felt I could barely handle them. Swinging them feels almost like a different game, and not necessarily an easier one. So I stick with my old gap wedge with a Wilson Fat Shaft that is at least 20 years old. I carry the ball 100 yards, maybe 110. Not much different than I used to, really.

I'M ALWAYS WORKING ON SOMETHING. Setup, ball position, weight distribution, mainly. The fundamentals. How far I stand from the ball, the first moves of the takeaway. There never was a time in my life when I wasn't trying to work on something. To me, that was the whole point. That's where the joy comes from, in identifying problems and then fixing them. I might very well be better at something next year than I am right now.

I'VE BEEN TRYING the new swing ideas I keep hearing about, things I see players doing on TV. They leave me cold, to be honest. I watch the way players keep their feet planted, their backs perfectly straight and rigid with their lower bodies hardly moving at all, and just know they're going to get hurt. They look overly "leveraged," not the perfect word perhaps, but one all those angles bring to mind. It's just the opposite of how I learned, which is the swing happening from the ground up. I guess I just don't understand the modern way. One thing's for sure, I see an awful lot of players wearing medical tape. Hands, arms, legs, back, everywhere. That can't be a good sign. (...)

WHEN I WAS 12, I began taking part in clinics put on by a pro named Fred Sherman at Mission Valley Country Club in San Diego. They were at night, and a lot of people came out to watch. The range was lit by these enormous lights in the distance, similar to a baseball stadium. At the height of the evening, Fred would bring me forward to demonstrate. "Mickey, show the people how you can make the ball disappear," he'd say, and I would drive the ball so it went out of sight, still climbing as it passed beyond the lights. Over the years, when I needed a big drive, I'd whisper to myself, Make it disappear.

WHEN I DROVE THE BALL through those lights, the crowd would go, "Ooh." I found, to my surprise, that I liked the attention. The best golfers, I believe, have a little bit of ham in them, a little show-off. Even shy golfers have a "just watch what I can do" part of their makeup that is a huge asset to them. The desire to embrace the spotlight, to put your talent on display and show people you can do this one thing really, really well, is a gift. I can't think of a really good pro who hasn't had that.

I ONCE PLAYED AN EXHIBITION with the late Mickey Rooney, who when I was a kid was a huge Hollywood star. He was my partner, and I opened the show with a good drive down the middle. Nice applause from the gallery. Now it was his turn, and he went through an elaborate series of antics—waggles, stretches, deep breaths and so on—that lasted a good 30 seconds. The crowd was silent. Finally he took the club back. When he got to the top he froze momentarily, then fell over like a statue. Didn't break his fall or anything, just tipped over like a tree, hitting the ground with a thud. A planned pratfall, done only the way those old pros could do it. The crowd was almost helpless with laughter.

SAVE FOR THE WOMEN'S WESTERN OPEN, there was precious little match play in women's pro golf back then, and I was glad for it. I always saw medal play as a better test. I never could reconcile how someone could score a couple of 8s and still be declared the winner. But that's just me.

AFTER I BEAT BARBARA MCINTIRE in the final of the 1952 U.S. Girls' Junior, I felt as sorry for her as I was happy for myself. She was a friend, and I knew winning would have meant so much to her. Later, I won the 1962 Titleholders and '64 U.S. Women's Opens in playoffs, beating the same woman—Ruth Jessen—both times. Poor Ruthie had played so well, too. All these years later, their losses still bother me. I suppose there are players who don't mind seeing their opponents suffer. But I was never that way.

by Guy Yokum, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Mickey Wright, One of the Greatest Players in Women’s Golf, Dies at 85 (NY Times), and Why the incomparable Mickey Wright belongs on the Mount Rushmore of American golf (Golf).]

Oleg Khvostov, Landscape with the Cows, 2010.
via:

Who’s Profiting From Your Outrageous Medical Bills?

Every politician condemns the phenomenon of “surprise” medical bills. This week, two committees in the House are marking up new surprise billing legislation. One of the few policy proposals President Trump brought up in this year’s State of the Union address was his 2019 executive order targeting them. In the Democratic debates, candidates have railed against such medical bills, and during commercial breaks, back-to-back ads from groups representing doctors and insurers proclaimed how much the health care sector also abhors this uniquely American form of patient extortion.

Patients, of course, hate surprise bills most of all. Typical scenarios: A patient having a heart attack is taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital and gets hit with a bill of over $100,000 because that hospital wasn’t in his insurance network. A patient selects an in-network provider for a minor procedure, like a colonoscopy, only to be billed thousands for the out-of-network anesthesiologist and pathologist who participated.

And yet, no one with authority in Washington has done much of anything about it.

Here’s why: Major sectors of the health industry have helped to invent this toxic phenomenon, and none of them want to solve it if it means their particular income stream takes a hit. And they have allies in the capital.

That explains why President Trump’s executive order, issued last year, hasn’t resulted in real change. Why bipartisan congressional legislation supported by both the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Health Committee to shield Americans from surprise medical bills has gone nowhere. And why surprise billing provisions were left out of the end-of-year spending bill in December, which did include major tax relief for many parts of the health care industry.

Surprise bills are just the latest weapons in a decades-long war between the players in the health care industry over who gets to keep the fortunes generated each year from patient illness — $3.6 trillion in 2018.

Here’s how they came to be:

Forty years ago, when many insurers were nonprofit entities and being a doctor wasn’t seen as a particularly good entree into the 1 percent, billed rates were far lower than they are today, and insurers mostly just paid them. Premiums were low or paid by an employer. Patients paid little or nothing in co-payments or deductibles.

That’s when a more entrepreneurial streak kicked in. Think about the opportunities: If someone is paying you whatever you ask, why not ask for more?

Commercial insurers as well as Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans, some of which had converted to for-profit status by 2000, began to push back on escalating fees from providers, demanding discounts.

Hospitals and doctors argued about who got to keep different streams of revenue they were paid. Doctors began to form their own companies and built their own outpatient surgery centers to capture payments for themselves.

So today your hospital and doctor and insurer — all claiming to coordinate care for your health — are often in a three-way competition for your money.

As the battle for revenue has heated up, each side has added new weapons to capture more: Hospitals added facility fees and infusion charges. Insurers levied ever-rising co-payments and deductibles. Most important they limited the networks of providers to those that would accept the rates they were willing to pay.

Surprise bills are the latest tactic: When providers decided that an insurer’s contracted payment offerings were too meager, they stopped participating in the insurer’s network; either they walked away or the insurer left them out. In some cases, physicians decided not to participate in any networks at all. That way, they could charge whatever they wanted when they got involved in patient care and bill the patient directly. For their part, insurers didn’t really care if those practitioners demanding more money left. (...)

So, nothing has changed at the federal level, even though it’s hard to imagine another issue for which there is such widespread consensus. Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about being able to afford an unexpected medical bill — more than any other household expense. Nearly eight in 10 Americans say they want federal legislation to protect patients against surprise bills.

by Elizabeth Rosenthal, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Michael George Haddad
[ed. See also: What the Heck Happened to Surprise Billing Legislation? (Or, It’s Never Too Late for the Lobbyists to Win) (Health Care Renewal).]

The $99 Watch With $20,000 Ambitions

A G-Shock knows nothing of ostentation. It doesn’t care about the distinction of its wearer. It's remarkably unfussy. There's something about a G-Shock that goes against the core principles of purist watch obsessives: It works off a small circuit board, it's made from tech-forward materials, and it was born in 1983, centuries after the era when the first watchmakers started writing the history of the mechanical timepiece.

And yet, the G-Shock GA2100 1-A-1 is perhaps the single G-Shock that's most likely to convert people who don’t generally embrace the line of rugged watches.. And it does that all for $99.00.

Historically, Casio has indulged in the frequent introduction of new G-Shock models. Since Kikuo Ibe introduced the hard-wearing watch to the world, the range of models has grown dramatically, with certain models spawning sub-followings within the larger G-Shock world, but the GA2100 1-A-1 has found popularity with folks beyond the typical G-Shock fanbase.

So how does this sub-$100 watch manage to charm like the best of them? To start, it's the thinnest G-Shock currently in production. The case is 11.8mm tall, and even more, it wraps around the wrist in a way that makes it feel even thinner. Its plastic case is practically weightless if you're used to wearing an even a modestly proportioned 316L case. By design, the strap is angled down so that there's little room at any point between the 48.5mm case and the watch. There’s something else notable about the case, and that's the Carbon Core Guard tech that's incorporated. The case is constructed with a thin layer of carbon fiber in order to bolster its strength so the overall amount of material used in the case can be decreased, without sacrificing any sort of material strength. The Carbon Core Guard doesn't change the feeling on the wrist, but it does inspire a sense of confidence that the watch would be fine even if it were run over by a car. There’s a reason why G-Shocks are often worn by military and law enforcement personnel. (...)

And what's more, it’s still very much an analog piece in that it features a traditional dial layout. Casio, king of digital timekeeping, is still fighting the good fight when it comes to keeping analog alive with the GA2100 1-A-1. Sort of. There is a digital display on the southeast quadrant of the dial, and that's where you can cycle through all the aforementioned functions. And of course it lights up by pressing the clearly labeled "light" button at 2 o'clock. There’s even an analog day indicator at 9 o'clock.

And if a basic Royal Oak retails at $20,400, that means that a G-Shock would be 0.5% the cost at $99. Talk about a value proposition! Not to mention with the GA2100 1-A-1 you get a series of complications like a perpetual calendar, chronograph, chiming alarm, worldtimer, and great lume to boot. Oh yeah, it also runs well within COSC specs. And servicing costs? Don't even worry about it. You can take it off, throw it at a brick wall, and it will run just the same.

by Cole Pennington, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Hodinkee

Billie Ellish

James Taylor on Lennon, Love and Recovery

James Taylor looks out at the sprawling London skyline. “This is where it started,” he says. “The moment.” He made his first trip here in 1968, playing for Paul McCartney and George Harrison and becoming the first artist signed to the Beatles’ record label, Apple Records. This was before he moved to Laurel Canyon with the rest of the denim-draped California dreamers who defined the sound of the late 60s and far beyond. Before he met David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King and Joni Mitchell. Before he and Mitchell fell in love. Before he wrote his pivotal album Sweet Baby James during a stint in a psychiatric hospital. Before his marriage to Carly Simon, which opened up his personal life – including his long battle with heroin addiction – to public consciousness. Before he sold 100m records, performed for the Obamas and the Clintons, and then, decades later, appeared on stage with one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Taylor Swift, who is named after him.

It has been quite the trip, he admits.

Taylor is in a reflective mood when we meet, and says he is always like this. “I’m a very self-centred songwriter. I always have been. It’s the personal stuff I like, for better or for worse.” He is here to promote his 19th album, American Standard; a covers album of the old standards and Broadway show tunes he was raised on. He says there was a period when his generation wanted to distance themselves from this music, but he now recognises it as “the pinnacle of American popular song ... It was sheet music, anyone would sing it, so the songs had to stand on their own. It’s what informed me as a songwriter, and others of my generation; Lennon and McCartney, Randy Newman, Elton [John] and Bernie [Taupin], Paul Simon ...”

He has also released an audio memoir – Break Shot – which takes him back to his turbulent early years, finishing with that first London trip. He is anxious, he says, about how the memoir will be received. It covers his father’s alcoholism and his brother’s death from the disease, as well as his own drug addiction, all of which, he worries, could be sensationalised. But the memoir is mostly about the shattering effect that early childhood trauma, addiction and grief can have generations later. It’s a subtle exploration of the “ripples”, as Taylor puts it. (...)

Taylor began playing guitar in his teens, strumming along to his parents’ record collection: Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Lead Belly. Fingerpicking became his vernacular as much as his lyrics. His first big hit, Fire and Rain, about the suicide of a friend, includes the themes that came to define his songwriting – the precarity of our emotional lives, happiness as something to be treasured and the natural world’s capacity for renewal. The line “I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend,” prompted Carole King to write You’ve Got a Friend for him in response.

It was during high school that he and his family began to unravel. He was admitted to the McLean psychiatric hospital at 16 with what we would now probably call depression and anxiety, staying there for nine months. Two of his siblings followed him there. “When I jumped the tracks and went to McLean, it’s like they thought: ‘Yeah, that’s right, we need this help.’ It became an option.”

When Taylor left hospital, the fund set aside for his university tuition had been spent on his treatment and he decided to go to New York to pursue music. He formed a band, the Flying Machine, and developed a heroin habit. “To be able to take a juice that solves your internal stress ...” he trails off. “One of the signs that you have an addiction problem is how well it works for you at the very beginning. It’s the thing that makes you say: ‘Damn, I like my life now.’ That’s when you know you shouldn’t do it again.” His wasn’t the addiction of rock mythology, chaotic and glamourised. Taylor says mostly he used the drug to “get normal”. (...)

While in rehab, he had written most of the songs for his second album, his breakout, Sweet Baby James. He enlisted King to play keyboard; he then played on her 1971 album Tapestry. His relationship with Mitchell lasted a year, much of it on the road: she was composing the songs for her classic album Blue – he, meanwhile, was writing his third album, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, including the gorgeous You Can Close Your Eyes, written for her. But behind the scenes, their relationship was struggling. As Taylor’s career took off, his addiction dragged him down again. Mitchell mourned their split on her album For the Roses in the song Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire, a devastating eyewitness account of a person “bashing in veins for peace”. I ask Taylor if he is able to listen to Mitchell’s music from that time. “Blue, oh yes,” he says. “And she sings so beautifully on my songs.” What about Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire? He goes quiet. “It’s not like listening to me,” he whispers.

What is it like? He hangs his head for some time, silent. “I’m not able to listen to it,” he says.

by Jenny Stevens, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Richard E. Aaron, via

Mono no Aware

Mono no aware is a key term in Japanese culture. ‘Mono’ means ‘thing’ or ‘things’; ‘aware’ means ‘feeling’ or sentiment, and the particle ‘no’ indicates something an object possesses. So mono no aware signifies the deep feeling or pathos of things, the powerful emotions that objects can evoke or instil in us. It is often associated with a poignant feeling of transience, a beautiful sadness in the passing of lives and objects, like the glorious colour of autumn leaves as they are about to fall.

Japanese art and literature has been especially concerned with the moods of pathos around mono no aware: falling blossoms, the changes of the moon, the passing of the seasons, the plaintive cries of birds or insects, and the absence of friends or lovers.

The word ‘aware’ was first used, in the Heian period of Japan (794-1185), as an exclamatory particle to express a spontaneous and inarticulate feeling – as with the particles that we use like ‘ah’ or ‘oh’ or ‘wow’. Mono no aware has hence also been translated as ‘the “ahness” of things’. It is the way in which something affects us immediately and involuntarily, before we are able to put that feeling into words – and Japanese art has often sought to present objects and experiences whose emotional impact is both powerful and obscure to us.

by The Book of Life |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Kubina/Flickr via

[ed. See also: Mono no aware, literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a term for the awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life. "Mono-no aware: the ephemeral nature of beauty – the quietly elated, bittersweet feeling of having been witness to the dazzling circus of life – knowing that none of it can last. It’s basically about being both saddened and appreciative of transience – and also about the relationship between life and death. In Japan, there are four very distinct seasons, and you really become aware of life and mortality and transience. You become aware of how significant those moments are. (Wikipedia)]

[ed. I woke today with the strongest sense of mono no aware - a feeling of gratitude for life's loves and experiences, and sadness at their passing. Maybe it was the way the light filtered through the blinds, or something else, but I had the sense that I'd been dreaming the feeling as well. I can remember and feel exactly what it was like to be twelve years old again and waking up on a Saturday morning... the early sun and gentle morning breeze coming through the bedroom window, soft clattering of pans in the kitchen as my mother went about making breakfast, a feeling of unlimited possibilities opening outward to the day.]