Would Math Exist Without Us?

Mathematician Edward Frenkel argues yes:

When Pythagoras discovered his theorem there were, of course, inferences from physical reality, and a lot of mathematics is drawn from our experience in the physical world, but our imagination is limited and a lot of mathematics is actually discovered within the narrative of a hidden mathematical world. If you look at recent discoveries, they have no a priori bearing in physical reality at all. The naive interpretation that mathematics comes from physical reality just doesn’t work.

The other interpretation that mathematics is a product of the human mind also has serious issues, because it seems clear that some of these concepts transcend any specific individual. Take Evariste Galois, who was killed in a duel at the age of 20. He came up with a beautiful theory on symmetry called Galois theory. His contemporaries didn’t get it but this theory now forms the core of modern mathematics. But what if the work had been burned? Would we never have known Galois theory? No. Someone else would have discovered it because it is inevitable.

The Land Without Internet

Chris Beam visits Aba County, a rural part of Sichuan province where rather than censor the Internet, the Chinese government has turned it off altogether :

Aba was first stripped of its connection in 2008, after riots in Tibet led to unrest in this place known for its wide grasslands and Buddhist monasteries. Both mobile phone signals and the Web have been erratic ever since, coming back for months at a time only to disappear again, usually after a Tibetan monk sets him or herself on fire in protest. For example, the Internet returned last December and January and then, according to residents, disappeared again in February. With politically charged “incidents” occurring as recently as September, no one knows when—or if—the information blackout will end for good.

Beam’s hosts explain what life is like for them:

Over tea, [22-year-old Shuangquan Zou] told me that he arrived in Aba last year and found the transition jarring. He had missed some big announcements—his friends threw a huge graduation party without him, because he never saw the invitation—and had trouble keeping in touch. Relationships, he explained, become stratified by communications tools: There are close friends and family, whom you call; less intimate friends, whom you text; then still less intimate ones, whom you message on QQ or WeChat. Removing social media doesn’t mean you start texting and calling those less intimate friends. It just means you lose touch.

Ask Rick Doblin Anything: How To Experience Psychedelics?

In our second video from MAPS founder Rick Doblin, he explains how patients should primarily guide themselves through a psychedelic experience, rather than rely too much on someone else (though it is important to have a sober sitter present to protect the person from the outside world). Doblin also shares an illuminating story about an Israeli who suffered PTSD after witnessing 10 people killed in a terrorist bombing:

From his bio:

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences.

His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife and three children.

Doblin’s previous answer about the myths surrounding psychedelics is here. Our extensive coverage of the spiritual and therapeutic benefits of psychedelics is here (or, in chronological order, here).

The NSA Knows Exactly Where You Are

The latest revelation from the documents leaked by Edward Snowden is that the NSA has been snatching up cell phone location records by the billions:

The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.

Amy Davidson finds this development especially horrifying:

What would Joseph McCarthy have done if he could have looked up who had been in a particular college dorm room on a day, twenty years before, when students were talking about socialism?

What if people got used to the idea that the government could and would do this, and so picked up the pace and turned away when they saw people gathering to listen to a speaker, or reading a sign on a wall, and never heard or saw what was being said? (The freedom to assemble is linked, in the First Amendment, to the right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”) You would know that the government was taking attendance at your church. (This is one reason that the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles has brought suit against the N.S.A., with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.) You would think again before showing up at a talk by a lawyer representing someone the government has called a terrorist. If you were a reporter, or a source, you would wonder how you could safely meet. You might never at all.

Meanwhile, in a lengthy piece on the NSA’s ever-expanding powers, Lizza paints a picture of a compliant Senate Intelligence Committee that has acted by and large as a rubber stamp, or even a lobbying group, for the intelligence community:

[O]n October 29th, the Senate Intelligence Committee retreated to its secret chambers, on the second floor of the Hart Office Building. The room has vaulted doors and steel walls that keep it safe from electronic monitoring; the electricity supply to the room is reportedly filtered, for the same reason. The committee’s fifteen members, eight Democrats and seven Republicans, debated [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein’s intelligence-reform bill, the fisa Improvements Act, for three hours. As Congress and the public have digested the details of Snowden’s disclosures, the legislative debate has narrowed to three big questions: Should Congress reform the e-mail and phone tapping allowed by Section 702 to insure that the communications of innocent Americans are not getting swept up in the N.S.A.’s targeting of terrorists? Should the N.S.A. end the bulk collection of phone metadata now authorized by Section 215? Should the fisa court be reformed to make it less deferential to the government?

The committee’s answer to all three questions was no. By a vote of 11–4, it endorsed the Feinstein bill.

He muses on the NSA’s place in the era of “big data”:

In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.’s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information. Feinstein maintains that data collection is not surveillance. But it is no longer clear if there is a distinction.

Running To Clinton’s Left

Waldman doubts it will pay major dividends:

If that serious challenger to Clinton does emerge, he or she is going to need to do a whole lot more than run to the former secretary of state’s left, because in presidential politics, ideological crusades almost always fail. In the last half-century, spanning 13 presidential elections and 26 nominees, there are only three candidates one could plausibly argue became a party’s nominee by being the most ideologically true candidate. All three—Barry Goldwater in 1964, George McGovern in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980—ran superlative primary campaigns. And none had to overcome a candidate with the strength Clinton would have in 2016.

In a later post, he expands his argument:

As they approach the end of the Obama years, Democrats are going to have to hash out who they are, what they believe, and where they want to go. But the reason being the most liberal candidate is insufficient is that primary voters aren’t ideological maximizers, they’re ideological satisficers.

Satisficing is a term originated in the 1950s by economist Herbert Simon, who argued that the classical understanding of economic actors seeking to maximize utility not only didn’t make much sense (because obtaining all relevant information to reach that maximal point can involve huge costs), but didn’t reflect the way people and firms acted in the real world. Instead of making the best choice, people often search for something that is good enough. After some threshold of acceptability is reached, they stop their search. If there’s a reasonably good taqueria down the block, you’re not going to spend weeks searching for the best burrito in the state; you’ll just get your burritos there. And subsequent research suggests you’ll be happier for it.

The Concussion Crisis: Not Just Football Any More

Concussions College

A snapshot of the expanding crisis:

Football may have the highest number of concussions by sport because of the roster size, but many other sports see higher occurrence rates per athletic exposure. According to a National Academy of Sciences report released last month, field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, wrestling, ice hockey, and basketball have all proved about as dangerous or more so than football in recent years. That’s why, a year after the Ivy League decreed limited contact in football practice, its members did the same for  lacrosse, soccer, and ice hockey. The league, in conjunction with the Big Ten Conference, also launched a cross-institutional research project to study the effects of head injuries in multiple sports.

Former Northwestern goalkeeper Anna Cassell describes how she had to retire from soccer after multiple head injuries:

Unfortunately, the harm of these concussions extend beyond the field. I suffered severe headaches, bouts of anxiety and depression, and balance problems, which all contributed to my falling weeks behind in my pre-med studies. As I think about this sad trend, I am struck by two things. The first is the lack of convincing research regarding concussion prevention. … I am also bothered by the lack of consequences for the opposing players who commit fouls that cause concussions. While referees are instructed to “protect the goalkeeper,” neither of the players who gave me my concussions had any sort of meaningful consequences, despite the fact that both were flagrant fouls where neither of them made any contact with the ball. While their team merely lost possession of the ball, I was losing my soccer career.

Read the related thread on head injuries in professional football here.