January-August 2003

Newsletter of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit corporation.

Part 1  Part 2   Part 3   Parts 4-5   Parts 6-7

6. Cultural Dialog: Sociology, Psychology, and Cultures

25. Sociology, Anthropology, Evolutionary Psychology
26. Cultural Identities, Traditions, and Group Ethics

7. Individual Dialog: Vitality, Creativity, and Spirituality

27. Health and Longevity
28. Attitude, Creativity, Empowerment, Individual Ethics
29. Humanities, Art and Aesthetics
30. Humor and Play
31. Spirituality

Cultural Dialog: Sociology, Psychology, and Cultures

25. Sociology, Anthropology, Evolutionary Psychology

IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, 2002
What is the importance of human racial differences in a world of accelerating technological change? Much less than one might think. While once significant, today we intuit that our genetic differences mean, and most importantly, we want them to mean, rapidly less every year. That is why there is such strong social outcry against the overinterpretation of well-meaning books like Arthur Jensen's The G Factor, or Philippe Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior. Jensen has done courageous and meticulous scientific research, to be sure. Such books like cannot be easy to write, as they bring up the old divisive arguments about class, and race, and the failed and now future-irrelevant specter of eugenics. Lynn and Vanhanen make the interesting case here that historical differential development in various nations may be partially explainable by differences in IQ. That suggests we should be particularly aggressive in providing proper nutrition and early childhood education to suspected "low IQ" nations, to maximize the potentials of biological development. But what is often overlooked in this discussion is that social systems and technologies have IQ's too, and there is much we can do to improve a nation's social intelligence even as individual intelligence remains largely influenced by the genes. The bottom line is that the faster we bring intelligent social constructs (legal codes, credit, insurance, etc.) and intelligent technological constructs (tools, infrastructure, information) to third world countries, the smarter their social and technological productivity will be.

Today's American is no more genetically intelligent than were our founding colonists, yet we are far more economically productive. This is solely because of our accelerating sociotechnical systems, which grow increasingly intelligent, interdependent, and resilient with each passing year. The more rapidly we can diffuse these systems to all the world's populace, the less we'll care about the fact that there are measurable differences between various biological subgroups, whether they be gender, race, or other. Genetics is great to understand the past, but it is the wrong dialog for our future. Books like Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate tell us that evolutionary psychology is important, and must be factored into any understanding of our current social systems. Yet our predictable reaction to books like Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, 1996, tells us that there are strong social immune systems that have emerged to thinking in terms of human divisions. Counterreactions are productions like PBS's Race: The Power of An Illusion. Programs like these remind us that at the genetic level, race is an illusion. No one allele is possessed exclusively by any one subgroup of human beings, for example. Furthermore, one stunning new conclusion from our human genome research is that all human beings on the planet have less genetic diversity, between any two randomly selected members, than one troop of baboons, a fact that I have proposed provides a major clue to the strong limits of genetics as a substrate for future computation.

Unfortunately, however, the PBS story is not complete, as this treatment still confuses genotype with phenotype. While humans are highly genetically similar, there are still phenotypic differences that are testable, and as Jensen has shown, the bell curve of these differences apparently gets wider with greater environmental stimulus (nurture), not more uniform. So what is the take-home message here? Yes, there are some reliable geographic clusters of differential phenotype, and yes a typical African male is going to be testably more adept in some areas and less adept in others than a Korean male, but so what? We are doing our best to eliminate those differences with each passing year. The more powerful our technologies, the less we consider those differences strategic, and the more we consider them aesthetic, which is a proper final role for the gene.

In deference to the geneticist's insights, I like to say that it helps to remember that while human nature does not easily change, our "houses" (our technological environment) become exponentially more intelligent with each passing year. That is the dialog that matters.

Better "houses" protect us from our simian excesses, bringing out the better human inside us all, and making those differences that we cannot control less and less relevant each year, because that's the self-directing future that we are collectively choosing to create. If genetic nature can't be changed, she is subverted by a new, much more malleable digital nature. Accelerated learning always wins out in our universe, for reasons we are still trying to understand. Thanks to Alex Lightman.

26. Cultural Identities, Traditions, and Group Ethics

Amish and Technology, Amy L’Heureux, University of Saskatchewan, 2003

Howard Rheingold, in a fascinating 1999 Wired article, described the Amish as the ultimate in "techno-selectives," a culture that puts the health of the community ahead of technological adoption. He notes that they choose and try to use technologies in ways that enhance, rather than disrupt, interpersonal communication and personal identity. Above is a charming undergraduate student essay expanding on that topic. From Rheingold's article:

Everywhere, there were freshly planted fields, farmhouses with handsome, immaculate barns and outbuildings. At one farm we passed, a woman was sitting a hundred yards from her house on the edge of a kitchen garden. She wore the traditional garb of the conservative Old Order - a long, unadorned dress sheathed by an apron, her hair covered by a prayer bonnet. She was sitting in the middle of the garden, alone, the very image of technology-free simplicity. But she was holding her hand up to her ear. She appeared to be intent on something, strangely engaged.

"Whenever you see an Amish woman sitting in the field like that," my guide said, "she's probably talking on a cell phone."

The Amish are becoming enamored of cell phones, creating a cultural crisis of sorts, and these are only crude, first generation versions of what's to come. As L'Heureux says, certain technologies like the rubber band or the cellphone for the Amish, are either so simple or so useful, or both that they slip in to all cultures in a one-way transition to deeper social integration. Thanks to Howard Rheingold.

Individual Dialog: Vitality, Creativity, and Spirituality

27. Health and Longevity

Alzheimer's Therapies
We all die of something. But it is particularly disheartening to die from Alzheimers. My beloved grandmother had it, and at the end even basic functions like swallowing are simply forgotten. There's an often-cited statistic that something like 10% of us over the age of 60, 50% of us over the age of 80 and perhaps 80% of us over the age of 100 are likely to have some level of it. Amyloid plaques, like arterial plaques in arterial disease, grow progressively in the brain and are a big part of the etiology of the disease. Fortunately, there are at least three powerful therapies that can significantly cut your risk of Alzheimers. These won't turn you into a mental giant, but they can greatly increase the chance that you'll end up dying of something other than progressive dementia, hopefully something much less traumatic and dehumanizing.

The first therapy is statins. Many versions of these drugs have been given to millions of people over decades, and we know their safety profiles well by now. Taking a statin (lovastatin, pravastatin, etc.) reduces your brain cholesterol over 20%, and some massive uncontrolled studies have proposed that individuals taking statins long term have only 30% the rate of dementia of the general populace. We know that statins slow down amyloid plaque formation, and they also slow down vascular plaque formation, reducing the risk of infarct dementia.  You can get on an older, less sexy statin for less than $1 a day now. Be sure to discuss this with your doctor (who should do regular blood tests your entire life if you take statins, to check for liver reaction) if you are interested in simple ways to protect the quality of your long-term mental life.

The second therapy is inexpensive NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) like ibuprofen (always take with meals and under physician supervision), or the newer, more expensive ones like Celebrex and Vioxx that are less irritating to the stomach lining. Some nonrandomized, non-blinded studies like BALS have shown that those on NSAIDS for longer than two years had a 60% reduction in Alzheimer's risk. The physiology makes sense, as plaque formation is an immune mediated process. As with the statins, you should know that as yet there are no completed "gold standard" prospective randomized controlled double blinded studies on this issue, so the standard medical line is going to be that it isn't worth the risk (in other words, wait twenty years for the study, no thanks). Never proceed without the care of a physician of course, but given current data (which will only improve in coming years) it already looks like taking 400mg a day of ibuprofen with meals, six months on and six months off (or some other such long-term, alternating "dose and recover" regimen) should have a very positive mental protective effect against this terrible disease. If you are getting regular visits to a doctor, this is definitely something to talk to her about.

The third therapy is caloric restriction. If you are one of the majority of us who have the apo-E4 gene (you can test for this, if you have money to spare), simply eating less calories, and particularly less fat will significantly lower your chance (those on high calorie diets had 2.3 times greater risk) of getting the disease. Mild caloric restriction has a whole host of other positive benefits as well. Read Roy Walford's Beyond the 120 Year Diet, for more on this very smart and simple longevity strategy. Thanks to Steve Harris.

28. Attitude, Creativity, Empowerment, and Individual Ethics

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS): Hype vs. Reality
This is one technology that gets far too much attention from a planet full of humans seeking any plausible way to escape the confines of our mental cages. Lawrence Osborne's NYT piece, "Savant for a Day" (6.22.2003) paints Allan Snyder's hopeful picture that one might be able to get "savant like" creative powers through grossly nonspecific electric discharges in the brain created by  pulsating magnetic fields, devoid of any kind of feedback. Fat chance. This is simply messing with the intricate, bottom up developed synaptic weightings, based on internally generated activity patterns. There are certainly times when that can be valuable. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), for example does some kind of diffuse global damage to the brain but in the process seems to stimulate enzymes and cellular repair systems that help reorient a brain that was tracked into a rut of dysfunctional thinking habits. ECT's erasing of short term memories probably also has a positive coping benefit for clinical depression and OCD . But we have to be honest that we are essentially doing selective damage to get selective benefits with these and virtually all neurotherapies, including of course all neuropharmaceuticals, a topic we'll come back to in future issues of ATimes.

Magnetic stimulation systems have proven therapeutically useful in the peripheral nervous system (vagal nerve stimulation, for example), but the central nervous system is a lot more complex. Michael Persinger and others have been investigating TMS in the CNS for years. He gets interesting psychological effects, but don't expect any neural revolutions from such a primitive, top down application of force. Finally, I wouldn't experiment with these toys at home (mail-order TMS kits are now available, unfortunately) unless you are willing to discover, five years from now, that you significantly dulled certain aspects of your mental knife in the process. Chopping wood with a blunt axe is not fun. Thanks to Rev. Kate.

29. Humanities, Art and Aesthetics

The Absence of Megastructures: Continuous Monument, Superstudio, 1969 Where has creativity gone in our architecture and why? By the mid-1960's, international modern architecture had become a rapidly-spreading thing of obvious, bland and uniform concrete and steel-framed boxes, running across the world like a pandemic, visually homogenizing historic cities and to a lesser extent, standardizing cultures in the first major wave of architectural globalization. In reaction to this, a group of radical Florentine designers developed Il Monumento Continuo, a critique and novel interpretation of modernism, imagining a "continuous monument" of featureless megastructures which begin to take over cities, to tower over nature, and ultimately even to cover the entire globe. Some of these megastructures were as visually imposing as they were monolithic. One proposal: A large and very long, nondescript white box sitting on the end of a half mile of coastline, with white columns like spider legs, extending out from the box and into the ocean. Others imagined monumental megastructures that would begin to tower over our existing cities, like the one Rem Koolhaus designed in 1973, to the left.

But what is particularly interesting is that no examples of megastructures like this have emerged in all the decades since, to my knowledge. With all the resources and expertise modern humanity has at its disposal, our mass-use architecture, with few exceptions, has become more unassuming and nondescript than in all ages past. Why so?

Let me suggest a reason that is not immediately obvious. We are heading rapidly into Inner Space, not Outer Space, and for two generations our architecture has already been reflecting that emerging transition. We would never build more than a few of the megastructures described by the continuous monument school, interesting as they are, because we are rapidly losing that kind of hubris as a species. It seems that we reached the peak of the "nature-transformed" school of thinking back in the days of the gothic cathedrals, or the Taj Mahal, or the Pyramids. Now we look for ways to make cities more functional, to hide their technologies from the view of citizens, and when possible to celebrate nature, rather than artifact. Fascinating articles have decried this "absence of creativity" in our broadly implemented corporate, middle class, and mass architecture since the rise of modernism in the 1960's.

I'd suggest that we are seeing this increasingly conservative trend in our average architectural expressions because we are nearing the end of the era of technology dominated by human beings—human beings don't want to see themselves as disruptors of the natural world, but rather as symbiotic with it. We no longer want to tower over biological nature, but to move beyond it to digital nature. We try to minimize our impact with increasingly uniform architectures, and eventually we'll do it without physical architecture at all. We are heading for inner space, for a time when our nanoelectronic descendants will be able to build worlds more complex than any on this planet out of the refuse thrown away by one American family. All of our outer space is rapidly becoming an "informational desert," a phrase I though I'd invented in the late 1980's, and then found in Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations, 1981, when he talks about the coming hyperreality, and the "the desert of the real." It's almost too strange to believe, but this seems to be the constrained trajectory of local intelligence. Once we see the path, we can stop fighting the tidal wave and start to ride it, helping each other create meaningful lives as we journey down the rabbit hole.

Plastination!
Here's a fascinating group of anatomical specimen preservers in Hiedelberg that have been in and out of the news the last few years. They infuse human bodies, donated for anatomical learning and public display, with a range of silicone rubbers, resins, and epoxies. Gotta love their superlatives: "Life is short, plastinated specimens are forever." Very interesting art, with a relevance that can't be ignored. Thanks to Todd Huffman.

30. Humor and Play

"Weapons of Mass Distraction!"
Go to Google, type in "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and then click on the "I Am Feeling Lucky" buton. Carefully read the error message that comes up. We've collectively voted for this as the most important link on the subject. Is laughter a physiological need, lower than safety on Maslow's hierarchy? I teenk so! Thanks to Bay Area Futurists and Michael Korns.

Disappearing Clouds in Carina, Hubble Image, 1999
Startling evidence that God is aware, but really doesn't care? Handiwork of adolescent ETs? Was there a conspiracy to keep this image from the general public? Heh heh. Thanks again to Michael Korns

Lost in Translation, Systran Software Perversion
Carl Tashian took Systran's state-of-the-art web language translation software and set it up to do recursive loops. Ouch! In this non-heuristic system recursion doesn’t improve the translation, but rather quickly spins it off into hilarious new combinations. As Tashian notes: "As of December 2002, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text." Thanks to Elle Martin.

31. Spirituality

Exploring Stoicism, Stoa Del Sol, Beatrix Murrell
Try to take a quiet hour to explore this fabulous and very relevant site. A thoughtful philosopher acquaintance, Ronald Moore, humorously overinterpreted Stoic philosophy as: "obey, or be dragged." Quite funny, but Stoicism, which first emerged around 366 B.C., has much to offer us as a way of thinking about the modern world. Beatrix Murrell's site is one of the most thoughtful I've come across on this topic. Stoicism is a Western, very scientifically-congruent philosophy that nevertheless developed several Eastern traits, such as a cosmology of cyclic return, which fits well with some of our modern theories of the multiverse. Some stoics even expected that the universal system improved upon itself in each cycle, by learning lessons during the journey. That would place learning as a central telos, or purpose, of all intelligences in the system, which fits well with my own intuition.

But learning isn't always easy. In this interesting vignette, Murrell notes that when we first learn there are large and overpowering forces that coexist with us in the world, such as intrinsically accelerating technological change, we have two options: accept or "die." If we ignore certain fundamental and initially unpleasant facts about the universe and environment, such as accelerating technological intelligence, then a part of ourselves that would learn from the universe, that would "gain wisdom from outside," begins to die.  If we accept the information that our scientific inquiry provides, and try to integrate it deeply into our psyche, we can lose much of our obscuring fear and begin to be "at home in the univers," even a universe that looks on course to soon transcend our biology in many meaningful ways. We start to understand the natural flow of things and can better help others to live with the real changes that are and must soon occur. In practice, we all end up taking a middle path, being neither fully ignorant or fully open but creating partial wall around us, a cocoon and filter that we use to selectively let in information about the outside world. Murrell proposes that the thinner we can make that wall, the better off  we will be, and the more we can help other scared souls to truly live. That's a philosophy we can all learn quite a lot from in these final years of the era of non-intelligent machines.

Thanks for reading, and for being friends and colleagues on the journey.

Feedback encouraged at mail(at)Acceleration Watch(dot)com.

We here at ASF wish you all a humanistic, foresighted, and accelerated 2003!

Joy,

John Smart
Los Angeles, CA
Editor, Accelerating Times
When You're Serious About the Future™
http://Accelerating.org
Realizing a Future of Exponential Promise
http://Acceleration Watch.com
Understanding Accelerating Change

Part 1  Part 2   Part 3   Parts 4-5   Parts 6-7