Progress Report

If everything goes well, I will have to shed my General Malaise persona, and step into the the role of Mary Poppins next year, when I engage with college freshman students about how awesome the world is! ;)

I am forced to play the optimist in the classroom because I worry that all through the k-12 years, and in college classes too, it is more likely than not that students are presented only with the negative stories.  Like how population growth is a problem. Or about the polar bear. Or about the wars.  And how the country of Africa is messed up. How corporations have ruined lives. ... the list is endless.

I tell ya, if I were a college freshman, after listening to such stuff over and over and over, I will simply drop out and move to Montana and live in a cabin waiting for the end of the world as we know it.

My General Malaise personality is with a clear understanding that the world now is a much, much better place than the ones that the people who preceded us experienced.  Smartphones, internet, abundance of food, all the entertainment that people want, long lives, eye glasses, varieties of food, ... why do we so conveniently forget that the world in which we live is a fabulous place?

I suppose whether it is in the news media or in college education, only bad news is sexy.  Nobody wants to talk about the number of planes took off and landed.  It is one crazy way we humans operate.

Consider, for instance, the following graphic of the progress in India since the time I was born:

In case the chart is not clear:
Life expectancy at birth: An increase of 56 percent
Infant survival: Increase of 76 percent
Personal income: Increase by 457 percent
Food supply: 23 percent increase

Notice a zero growth in democracy level.  Because the country was democratic even when I was born.  Only for two years was the country under a strong leader with individual rights suspended--the kind of a political system that the modi-toadies would love to re-create now!

BTW, income and food supply are all per capita numbers.

The following chart shows the improvement in life in the US, since my birth in the old country:

So, why do I complain?  Simple.  I want even better conditions and I want them to come about faster.  My complaints are not because I think this is a crappy world that is inferior to some good old days. 

Further, it is not just about me and my welfare.  For me, the neighborhood does not stop with my yard.  As I look around, I recognize that we humans are also fully capable of screwing things up. Exhibit 1: Syria. Exhibit 2: Yemen. Exhibit 3: .... you get my point that we humans can intentionally make things worse.

We do all that even when we are fully aware that we have come a long way!

Trend lines, not headlines

First, read the following:

If you had to choose a moment in time to be born, any time in human history, and you didn't know ahead of time what nationality you were or what gender or what your economic status might be, what time would you choose? Paleolithic? Neolithic? Ancient Greece or Rome? Medieval times? Elizabethan England? Colonial America? The 1950s?

Think about it.

Think again.

Remember, that in this thought experiment "you didn't know ahead of time what nationality you were or what gender or what your economic status might be."

Yes?

So, which moment in time would you choose to live?

My answer is no different from the one the questioner himself provided: I would choose today.

What if I were one of the struggling plebes and did not inherit millions from his father?

 “We are fortunate to be living in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history,” he opined, adding that “it's been decades since the last war between major powers. More people live in democracies. We're wealthier and healthier and better educated, with a global economy that has lifted up more than a billion people from extreme poverty.”

I agree with him.  This is the best of times all over the world.  It is phenomenal.  

I have proposed to teach a freshman seminar course in which I want students to verify for themselves how much we are all better off today compared to decades and centuries past.  The title of the course that I have proposed, which is the title of this post also, is from one of the talks that Bill Clinton gave years ago, Clinton suggested that people should understand the trend lines and not simply be glued to the headlines.

So, if all is well, then "why the doom and gloom heaped on us by politicians and pundits"?

Micheal Shermer, from whose column in the Scientific American I excerpted those quotes, gives a few explanations.  To me those explanations are rather immaterial.  I am amazed at how much we can't seem to think about the big story of the phenomenal success on various fronts that we humans have achieved over the past two hundred years.  Our inability to situate an unfortunate event against a an appropriate measure over time blows my mind.

BTW, the questioner who posed that thought experiment with which I began this post?  Another former President. Thanks, Obama!

We can't rewind, we've gone too far

It has been a few days since the president theatrically announced that he is pulling the United States out of the Paris agreement on climate change.  I cannot even begin to understand his (ill)logic!

I am increasingly reminded of my younger days in the old country, when politicians would simply lie through their teeth and say whatever they needed to say in order to get the votes.  As a tween and as a teenager, I would read Thuklak and laugh at the idiot politicians, but fully aware that I--like most others--was being screwed.

It is one thing when a local DMK or an ADMK thalaivar entertains the crowd in the nearby maidan with his lies, but it is another when it is the president of the US--words have global implications in trump's case.

If trump wants to continue believing that coal will come back, whatever happened to the brains of the rest of the GOP leaders?  Are they all zombies now?

Here in the real world, the data and the trends have been so clear for so long:

The coal-mining jobs that President Trump thinks were destroyed by government regulation — adopted to combat air pollution and global warming — were actually lost to old-fashioned competition from other American firms and workers. Eastern coal mines lost market share to Western coal, which was cheaper. And natural gas grew at coal’s expense because it had low costs and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s the conclusion of a new study by economist Charles Kolstad of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research ...
Government isn’t killing the coal industry. “Progress is the culprit,” concludes Kolstad’s study.

How much more clearer and simpler should this message be for the GOP idiots to understand?

Source

Technological progress happens.  And we are thankful for it.  Well, unless your livelihood depended on, say, renting video tapes of movies!  Without the technological progress, trump would not have Twitter, and he would, not have become president either back when coal was king!

Why does science fail in the popularity contest?

A few years ago, when visiting with the parents, my mother complained that science was one day reporting that coffee was bad and then changing it another day.  I told her that science is a work in progress and that as we know more we might have to revise what we previously knew.  She seemed disappointed and unconvinced.

What disappointed my mother is precisely what always excites me about science.  A refreshing feeling that we don't know and we are trying our best to find out.  What we know now is incredibly more than what people knew only a few generations ago.  And there is a good chance that quote a bit of what we now know will be overthrown in a couple of generations.  It is awesome.

But, we humans like a clear story, a story that does not keep changing.  We like narratives that provide us with a sense of certainty.  Religions offer that comforting feeling of certainty.  "Where did we humans come from?  God created us" is a simpler narrative with a remarkable sense of certainty.  To answer that question with "we evolved from apes, and in fact we could even be separate category of apes.  We are still searching for the missing links in the evolution. But then these are recent stories.  We have no idea where this universe came from" are not the answers that provide any certainty at all.

Writing about this incremental progress that science offers, David Barash, who is "an evolutionary biologist and Professor of Psychology and Biology at the University of Washington" notes:

The capacity for self-correction is the source of science’s immense strength, but the public is unnerved by the fact that scientific wisdom isn’t immutable. Scientific knowledge changes with great speed and frequency – as it should – yet public opinion drags with reluctance to be modified once established. And the rapid ebb and flow of scientific ‘wisdom’ has left many people feeling jerked around, confused, and increasingly resistant to science itself.

Exactly.  That's what my mother's question/comment was all about.

Perhaps we mourn the loss of certainty, of the sort that most religions offer to their followers. Perhaps it’s more a search for authority, of the sort once provided by our parents. Or a universal yearning for any reliable port – even if conceptual rather than maritime – in the storms of life’s unknowns. Whatever the underlying cause, people have difficulty accepting the unstable, shifting, impermanent reality of how the world is put together. And this difficulty, in turn, renders us uncomfortable with precisely the only stability and certainty that science offers: that paradigms come and go.

Paradigms come, and paradigms go.  That is how science works.

The loss of paradigms might be painful, but it is testimony to the vibrancy of science, and to the regular, unstoppable enhancement of human understanding as we approach an increasingly accurate grasp of how our world works.

I often mention in my classes about the increasingly accurate understanding, which is why I am confident that a couple of generations from now, humans will have that much better an understanding of this universe than we now have--unfortunately, I won't be around at that time! ;)

Denied the comforting blanket of illusory permanence and absolute truth, we have the opportunity and obligation to do something extraordinary: to see the world as it is, and to understand and appreciate that our images will keep changing, not because they are fundamentally flawed, but because we keep providing ourselves with better lenses. Our reality hasn’t become unstable; it’s just that our understanding of reality is of necessity a work in progress.

A work in progress, unlike the well-defined and unchanging holy word of god that the faithful believe in.

Science is a process, which, unlike ideology, is distinguished by intellectual flexibility, by a graceful, grateful (albeit sometimes grudging) acceptance of the need to change our minds, as our understanding of the world evolves. Most people aren’t revolutionaries, scientific or otherwise. But anyone aspiring to be well-informed needs to understand not only the most important scientific findings, but also their provisional nature, and the need to avoid hardening of the categories: to know when it is time to lose an existing paradigm and replace it with a new one. What is more, they need to see this transition as progress rather than a sign of weakness, which is more difficult than one might think. 

I suppose we have quite a bit of work ahead of us then.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows