Month: February 2014

In an excerpt from her new book on failure, McArdle unpacks the research of psychologist Carol Dweck:

While many of the people she studied hated tasks that they didn’t do well, some people thrived under the challenge. They positively relished things they weren’t very good at—for precisely the reason that they should have: when they were failing, they were learning.

Dweck puzzled over what it was that made these people so different from their peers.

It hit her one day as she was sitting in her office (then at Columbia), chewing over the results of the latest experiment with one of her graduate students: the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you’re either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it’s something you can nourish by doing stuff you’re not good at.

“There was this eureka moment,” says Dweck. She now identifies the former group as people with a “fixed mind-set,” while the latter group has a “growth mind-set.” Whether you are more fixed or more of a grower helps determine how you react to anything that tests your intellectual abilities. For growth people, challenges are an opportunity to deepen their talents, but for “fixed” people, they are just a dipstick that measures how high your ability level is. Finding out that you’re not as good as you thought is not an opportunity to improve; it’s a signal that you should maybe look into a less demanding career, like mopping floors.

Yuval Levin highly recommends McArdle’s book:

We conservatives value markets and like to argue that they make for far better means of obtaining and applying knowledge than the a priori certitudes of technocratic know-it-alls. But we are not always ready to contend with what that commitment to decentralized, dispersed, trial-and-error learning really means: It means lots and lots of errors, and lots and lots of failures, and it requires us to constantly keep in mind that these errors and failures are what make success possible.

That sort of humility doesn’t come easy, especially if you’re the person doing the failing.

Brad Plumer interviews Elizabeth Kolbert about her new book on the coming mass extinction:

BP: One thing your book explores is that there’s no one factor causing modern-day extinctions. There’s hunting. There’s deforestation. There are changes in land use. There’s climate change and the acidification of the oceans. Which of these stands out as most significant?

EK: To me, what really stood out… And I always say, look, I’m not a scientist, I’m relying on what scientists tell me. And I think many scientists would say that what we’re doing to the chemistry of the oceans is the most significant. One-third of the carbon-dioxide that we pump into the air ends up in the oceans almost right away, and when CO2 dissolves in water, it forms an acid, that’s just an unfortunate fact.

The chemistry of the oceans tends to be very stable, and to overwhelm those forces is really hard. And we are managing to do it. When people try to reconstruct the history of the ocean, the best estimate is that what we’re doing to the oceans or have the potential to do is a magnitude of change that hasn’t been seen in 300 million years. And changes of ocean chemistry are associated with some of the worst crises in history.

Bill McKibben also has a fascinating conversation with Kolbert:

McKibben: The hallmark of evolutionary biology is adaptability. Is the main thing that’s different in this era the speed with which we are forcing things to adapt? Is that the single biggest new variable in this new system?

Kolbert: I once got this question from a person who said, “Well, if things start going extinct, won’t new things just evolve?” It was like extinction and evolution were a one-for-one trade. But the answer is that you can drive things extinct quickly, but it is very difficult to speed up evolution. If we were driving these changes at a pace that’s hundreds, even a million times slower, then yes, maybe most things would adapt to that, and we would get a very different world but not necessarily a humongous wave of extinctions. But otherwise you can do the math yourself.

In yet another interview, Kolbert discusses our denial of culpability:

Mother Jones: I was fascinated by your discussion of the “perception of incongruity,” and how humans create more and more elaborate explanations to account for contradictory evidence. Where does this turn up in the modern debate on extinction?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn’t fit into an existing paradigm. For a long time the story that we’ve been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn’t particularly special. What I’m trying to convey in the book is that we are unusual. We turn out to be the one species altering the planet like this, and that puts people back in the position of being responsible for what happens. There’s a big resistance to the idea that we could be such a big deal. The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can’t find anything like us.

A fluent Mandarin speaker writes:

I totally support more people learning Mandarin Chinese, not least because it’s a rewarding and interesting language that (believe it or not) is fairly easy to pick up as a spoken language due to its fantastically simple grammar. However, I also have to point out that your reader who compares learning Mandarin Chinese to “learning European” obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Speaking Mandarin in most parts of Mainland China is not the same as speaking English in France. Instead, it is more like speaking Latin in the Roman Empire, or German in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wherever you go, there will always be educated people who can speak to you. And if people are in a field where they have to work with the general public, it is certain that they will be able to speak Mandarin to a reasonable standard. Yes, every part of China has a local dialect (although in some parts this dialect is little different than Mandarin – Nanjing, for example), but this dialect is normally only used in circumstances where the speaker is fairly sure that those listening to them will understand.

Another reader offers an important, and basic, clarification:

The comment that “learning Chinese is like learning European” irritated me so much that I feel the need to write to you for the first time in a decade-plus of reading your blog. Chinese is a written language. Mandarin is the most common spoken dialect of Chinese. Mandarin and Chinese are not interchangeable terms.

Update from a reader:

“Mandarin is the most common spoken dialect of Chinese.” This statement isn’t exactly true. Mandarin, in its current form, is a refinement and standardization of the dialect that’s spoken in the capital city, Beijing. The practice of making the dialect of the capital city the “official dialect” goes back hundreds of years. While the adaptation of the Beijing dialect as the “official dialect” probably goes back to the Ming Dynasty, the refinement/standardization that lead to its current form occurred during the early years of the KMT/Republic of China government.

Another reframes the discussion:

Setting out to learn any foreign language only for practical reasons – I’ll be able to order in restaurants! I’ll be able to get a better job! – is, for most people, an enormous waste of time.

Foreign languages – that is, languages not spoken where you live, languages that you have little or no opportunity to use in daily life – are incredibly difficult to acquire, requiring thousands of hours of focused study over a span of years, and are quickly forgotten if not used. And even if you’re one of the few people who become fluent in a foreign language, you might still end up not having much chance ever to use it.

If, on the other hand, you set out to learn a foreign language to challenge yourself, to learn about other parts of the world, to learn how other people think, to make yourself think in different ways, then it will be worth the effort. In that case, the target language matters little. It would be just as rewarding to learn Korean, Tamil, or Hungarian as French, German, or Mandarin Chinese. Dead languages – Latin, classical Greek, classical Chinese, Sanskrit – are great, too. Pick one and go for it.

Or pick many, as this reader has:

As someone who’s studied English, Gujarati, Marathi, French, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese, in addition to my native Hindi, at some point or another, I can attest to nuggets of brilliance in all languages. German is stupendous for its clarity and directness; Japanese for the detail in which allows the speaker to describe things; Hindi for its vigor and vitality; English in the way it allows itself to be molded by the speaker, whether she’s from Nigeria, Nala Sopara, or Nantucket. Arabic and Persian poems are the most heart-wrenching. Each language has its charm.

Eve Tushnet criticizes both the disease theory of addiction and those who react against it with contempt. She admits that, “When I was drinking my will really was damaged.” But that’s not the whole story:

I am convinced that there were times, within this compulsion and constriction, when I was capable of choice.  Sometimes I chose heaven—often tiny little choices which seemed pointless at the time, like the choice to read a book about addiction even though I was stressed and scared, or sincere prayers which were quickly swamped by rationalization, exhaustion, and fear—and a lot of times I chose the other place. But even in my own past, I doubt I could accurately gauge the depth of my own freedom in any individual moment. How can I hope to gauge it for others?

This is the point that both sides of the disease/choice divide get wrong. Of course your will is constrained. Your background, what you were taught (explicitly or implicitly) growing up, your brain chemistry, your mental health—a whole host of factors out of your control, unchosen and not always even noticed, constrain your choices. But within that landscape of constraint we often do choose. We make huge leaps or crawl tiny, painful inches up or down. You’re not trapped in your brain or your past—at least, not always. But even from the inside, you can’t always see the moments when you’re free.

Relatedly, Keith Humphreys offers an explanation of why programs like needle exchanges help addicts make better choices:

People are more prone to take care of themselves if they think that others care about them. If you are using drugs and sleeping rough, you can go through long periods where no one expresses any feelings toward you other than contempt, disgust or hostility. In contrast, when a stranger stretches an open hand into the cold night and offers to help you, it communicates something markedly different: You have worth. Knowing that you are not worthless after all provides a motivation to try to make changes that will improve your health and well-being.

Recent Dish on addiction here, here, here, and here.

When Tocqueville visited America, he wasn’t impressed with our humor, claiming that “people who spend every day in the week making money, and the Sunday in going to Church, have nothing to invite the muse of Comedy.” Reviewing John Beckman’s American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt, Ben Schwarz thinks that’s not the whole story:

The country’s true comic muse, [Beckman] suggests, has always resided in rebellious, unacceptable humor and entertainment. He begins this chronicle with the forgotten hedonist pilgrim Thomas Morton and his lively seventeenth-century settlement, Merry Mount. The name alone was a pornographic joke to the locals. In his satirical poetry, Morton referred to Puritan leader Myles Standish as “Captain Shrimpe,” and at Merry Mount he encouraged forbidden Maypole dancing, refused to recognize bonded service, embraced Native American culture aesthetically, and Native American women literally. Within a year, Standish’s and Morton’s followers negotiated at gunpoint for Morton’s expulsion from the New World, after which Standish had the pilgrim playboy’s Maypole chopped down. From there, Beckman offers a narrative history touching on the revolutionary bonhomie of Samuel Adams’s taverns (a barroom insurgency that led, in turn, to the rowdy, whooping Boston Tea Party), the subversive revelry of plantation slave culture, Western prank journalism, P. T. Barnum, jazzmen, flappers, merry pranksters, and riot grrrls. In American Fun, humor and music catalyze cultural subversion, breaking out spontaneously in response to intolerant majority rule.

Above is a 1993 standup routine from Bill Hicks that Letterman initially refused to air. Update from a reader:

The whole interview with Bill Hicks’ mom is priceless:

In addition to being sugar-sweet and tack-sharp, Mrs. Hicks offers some fascinating background on her son. He wasn’t an easy comic for a parent to watch, and her pain at his loss remains palpable. The whole visit was an unusual move by a talk show host, but it was as close as Letterman could come to correcting the mistake … especially since he used the opportunity to go ahead and show the original routine in full.

Previous Dish on Hicks here and here.

A long-term study published this week found that mammograms don’t increase women’s odds of surviving breast cancer:

The University of Toronto study split a group of 89,835 women in two. Half of them got mammograms, and half did not. After 25 years, the rate of death from breast cancer was the same in both groups. Some of the women who underwent mammograms ended up with unnecessary treatment.

The research is well done and will influence a global conversation. Dr. Richard Wender, chief of cancer control for the American Cancer Society, said an expert panel will factor this research into new guidelines to be released within the year. Until then, current recommendations stand.

Moreover, they can actually be harmful:

The BMJ study calculated that 22 percent — more than 1 in 5 — breast cancers diagnosed by a screening mammogram represented an overdiagnosis. These were breast cancers that did not need treatment, and the women who received these diagnoses needlessly underwent treatments that could damage their hearts, spur endometrial cancer or cause long-lasting pain and swelling. …

These treatments are totally worth it if it means that you avoid dying from the cancer. But if they’re aimed at curing a cancer that was never going to become deadly, then what early diagnosis has actually done is made a healthy person sick. I think it’s safe to say that no one wants that. Treatments and awareness about breast cancer seem to have created most of the improvements in breast cancer outcomes, and we should celebrate those accomplishments.

Still, Kate Pickert says regular mammograms are likely here to stay:

Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the ACS, has been outspoken about the downside of various types of cancer screening, arguing that benefits are often over-stated. But even he points out that the ACS examined the ongoing Canadian study when the group last updated its breast cancer screening guidelines seven years ago and concluded that annual mammograms for women over 40 were still warranted. (Findings from the study back then were similar to those published this week.) The ACS will take a fresh look at the research on mammography this year and may change its recommendations, but there’s no guarantee.

Cohn gets Ezekiel Emanuel’s take:

“There will never be a truly definitive mammogram study,” says Emanuel, who was longtime head of the National Institutes of Health Bioethics Department and is now a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania. “You’re in this circle where you will never resolve the issue. You need a long timeline to get the best results, but in that time span the technology always improves—and people will always say, well, this is based on old technology so it’s not so relevant anymore.”

Aaron Carroll adds:

If you’re not going to be swayed at all by a randomized controlled trial of 90,000 women with 25 year follow up, excellent compliance, and damn good methods, it might be time to consider that there’s really no study at all that will make you change your mind.

John Horgan thinks it’s up to patients to stop demanding expensive, ineffective medical tests:

[U]ltimately, the responsibility for ending the testing epidemic comes down to consumers, who too often submit to—and even demand–tests that have negligible value. Our fear of cancer, in particular, seems to make us irrational. When faced with evidence that PSA tests and mammograms save very few lives, especially considering their risks and costs, many people say, in effect, “I don’t care. I don’t want to be that one person in a million who dies of cancer because I didn’t get tested.” Until this attitude changes, the medical-testing epidemic won’t end.

But Leah Libresco sympathizes with patients:

It’s tempting to be skeptical whenever a medical recommendation is reversed. If the last thing they told us was wrong, why should we trust them again? However, health care has changed since the advent of mammography. The old studies on the benefits of mammography weren’t necessarily wrong, just out of date. As awareness of breast cancer has increased, self-screenings have begun to do the work of mammography. As cancer drugs have improved, it’s no longer critical to identify diseases at their earliest stages to be able to survive.

But for a patient, who just hears conflicting recommendations, and not a discussion of research methods or the history of medicine, it’s hard not to come away with a sense of unease.