Are 12 Steps Necessary?

A new book by Lance and Zachary Dodes suggests there might be better alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous:

Peer-reviewed studies peg the success rate of AA somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. That is, about one of every fifteen people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober. In 2006, one of the most prestigious scientific research organizations in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration, conducted a review of the many studies conducted between 1966 and 2005 and reached a stunning conclusion: “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA” in treating alcoholism. This group reached the same conclusion about professional AA-oriented treatment (12-step facilitation therapy, or TSF), which is the core of virtually every alcoholism-rehabilitation program in the country.

Many people greet this finding with open hostility. After all, walk down any street in any city and you are likely to run into a dozen people who swear by AA—either from personal experience or because they know someone whose life was saved by the program. Even people who have no experience with AA may still have heard that it works or protest that 5 to 10 percent is a significant number when we’re talking about millions of people. So AA isn’t perfect, runs this thread of reasoning. Have you got anything better? 

In a review of the Dodes’ book, Jake Flanagin considers how AA took hold:

According to Dodes, when the Big Book [AA’s founding literature] was first published in 1939, it was met with wide skepticism in the medical community. The AMA called it “a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation.” A year later, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases described it as “a rambling sort of camp-meeting confession of experiences … Of the inner meaning of alcoholism there is hardly a word. It is all surface material.”

That perception has since radically changed, albeit gradually, thanks in no small part to the concerted efforts of AA’s early pioneers. They “realized early on that to establish true legitimacy, they would eventually need to earn the imprimatur of the scientific community,” writes Dodes. Which they did, with aplomb, largely by manufacturing an establishment for addiction scholarship and advocacy that did not previously exist. They created a space for AA to dictate the conversation.

Meanwhile, Mano Singham questions how we define rehabilitation:

One thing that I have not been clear about is what constitutes a ‘success’ in such rehabilitation efforts. Does it mean that the person kicks the habit entirely forever? Is it considered a failure if an addict replaces the addition with a more harmless substitute (like chewing gum) that they never get rid of? What if they stop being severely addicted to alcohol (say) but end up drinking the occasional beer or at socially acceptable levels? Or if they find that they are totally dependent on a support group for their entire lives to stay sober?

I see all of these things as successes because people have replaced a practice that was harming their lives with one that is under control. But maybe that is because I have no experience with such extreme addictions and that there is no escape from them unless you make a total break.

Previous Dish on AA and its alternatives here, here, and here.

Knowing The Score

How do we identify “expressiveness” in music? It depends on who’s listening:

Recent empirical work has shown that listeners tend to be unable to say if the expressiveness they are hearing originates from the composition or the performance. Studying the experience of professional musicians highlights how differently they approach their performance. For them the score is never just notes on paper but already music imagined as sound. This imagination depends on their socio-cultural, historical position, personality, and education. They use metaphors and heuristics, short-cuts that package up accumulated knowledge and speeds up problem solving in preparation for and during performance. They rarely speak of specific emotions to be conveyed but conceive of music as “emotional,” “dramatic,” “uplifting,” or “turbulent,” for instance.

This is true of music and musicians of other artistic traditions, like classical Hindustani music. According to the dhrupad singer Uday Bhawalkar, “Music without emotion is not music at all, but we cannot name this emotion, these emotions, we cannot specify them.” The sentiments or emotions that we encounter in daily life become transformed into aesthetic experiences in theatre.

(Video: Uday Bhawalkar sings Dhrupad)

Ukraine’s Candyman Candidate

Polly Mosendz profiles billionaire Petro Poroshenko, now the front-runner in the race for the presidency:

Put simply, he is the Willy Wonka of Ukraine. His company, Roshen, is Ukraine’s leading sweets brand and a household name in Eastern Europe. Roshen produces over 450,000 tons of confections a year, fueling his personal net worth to $1.79 billion. And unlike most billionaires in the former-Soviet bloc, he came by it honestly.

Ukrainian politics are so lathered with corruption that the country has a non-profit organization — “CHESNO” (which translates to ‘honest’) — dedicated to examining the root of politicians’ wealth. Svitlana Zalishchuk, the spokesperson of CHESNO, confirmed that “We [CHESNO] couldn’t find any instances of corruption” in the amassing of Poroshenko’s fortune. In this sense, Poroshenko is the anti-Yanukovych.

In an interview with Poroshenko, Anna Nemtsova takes stock of his style as well as his positions:

[A]s I listened to Poroshenko speaking in his office there were echoes of an old-school Soviet diplomat being very, very careful about what he says. When Poroshenko talks about Putin, for instance, his language is never hateful, always calculated. In a political landscape filled with populist provocateurs, Poroshenko has never played that game, and that may well be why he’s leading all other announced and potential candidates for the critically important presidential elections to be held May 25. …

Poroshenko reminded me that for the last decade and a half his aim has been to bring Ukraine into the European Union while at the same time keeping good relations with Russia. And according to the Ukrainian media Poroshenko’s strong position in the polls comes from widespread hopes that he is the candidate who can find a way to make peace with Russia even now.

Robert Coalson points out that the chocolate baron’s viability as a candidate may be due to this video:

Perhaps the high point of Poroshenko’s performance in the latest political crisis came on March 12. That night, Poroshenko visited the Crimean capital, Simferopol, in a quixotic bid to prevent the peninsula from holding a referendum on joining Russia. Widely seen amateur video showed the stoic Poroshenko walking through the dark streets of the city being hounded by hundreds of chanting, pro-Russian demonstrators:

That night in Simferopol may have elevated Poroshenko to the front ranks in the eyes of many Ukrainians, says Andreas Umland, an associate professor of political science at Kiev-Mohyla Academy. “Him being chased by these pro-Russia militiamen or Russian soldiers—that, perhaps, played a role in making him look credible and a serious politician and not just an oligarch,” Umland says.

But Peter Turchin is not looking forward to an election battle between two oligarchs, Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, who made her fortune in shady gas deals in the 1990s:

Not anybody who is super wealthy is an “oligarch,” of course. The sources of true oligarchic power must include both a huge fortune and the access to the highest levels of political power. Both Tymoshenko and Poroshenko fit this definition perfectly, since both have been in and out of government, occupying a variety of posts. Since 1999 Tymoshenko has been the Deputy Prime Minister for Fuel and Energy and Prime Minister (twice). Poroshenko hasn’t climbed quite as high as that, but he occupied the two next most powerful posts in the government: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister of Trade and Economic Development. Just as Kevin Philips wrote, political power begets economic power, and economic power begets more political power. At least, that’s how it works in oligarch-dominated countries.

“The Men Who Lost America”

That’s the title of a new book by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, offering an account of the American Revolution from the perspective of Britain’s leaders. In an interview, he claims many will be surprised by his portrait of King George III:

The reader will indeed find many attractive qualities in George III.  He was the first British monarch to have a real interest in science.  He was the greatest collector of art since Charles I.  He knew more about the navy than any king since James II.  He was an intensely religious man who spent long hours with his family in devotion.  He disapproved of the sexual immorality which so common among his contemporaries and he was faithful to his wife unlike George I and George II.

George III has long been the subject of revisionist historians in Britain.   It has almost gone too far.  My portrayal is more nuanced.  George III was not a tyrant who was responsible for the policies that led to the American Revolution.  He had little to do with colonial policy.  However, after the Boston Tea Party, he became the leading war hawk and may actually have helped to perpetuate the war by several years.  He wanted to continue after Yorktown.  It was revelation to me that he felt so passionately that Britain would cease to be a great power if it lost America.

The reasons O’Shaughnessy believes the British lost to the upstart Americans:

They initially believed that resistance would be largely confined to Massachusetts.  They greatly underestimate the ability of ordinary citizens to be able to confront a professional army.  However, their greatest error was in assuming that the majority of Americans supported Britain.  Their views while mistaken were defensible since were encouraged in their beliefs by loyalist Americans.  This was indeed a civil war and a foreign war in which it was difficult to interpret popular opinion when the situation was fluid and when many did not openly express their sympathies.  The contempt for citizen soldiers was held most strongly by officers who had served in America during the French and Indian War.  It may have been partly a product of imperial and social superiority but it was also a more modern vice of professional elitism and the belief that regular citizens could not be trained to the standards of those who had made the army a lifelong career.

(Video: An interview with O’Shaughnessy)

A Middle-Schooler’s Idea To Save The Federal Government $136 Million, Ctd

Suvir Mirchandani suggested the government cut ink-use by changing the font on printed documents. Typographer Thomas Phinney runs through various problems with the 14-year-old’s plan. A big one:

Many of the documents that account for a substantial percentage of the government’s overall printing costs are printed on a printing press, using offset lithography. For offset printing, the percentage of the cost of that is associated with ink is in fact much smaller than for laser or inkjet printing. But it isn’t a fixed percentage, either, due to the large proportion of the cost that is associated with setup. It will be a higher percentage for short runs, and lower for long runs. Additionally, because of the huge cost of owning printing presses, many or most offset litho jobs will be printed out of house, using third-​​party printers.

So, for in-​​house printing-​​press printing, the savings will be a much smaller proportion than the quoted 26%. For outside printers, they will not charge based on minor variations in ink usage; they just check things like whether it’s a page of text vs graphics. Either way the savings will be less.

David Graham adds that the government has already made solid progress eliminating its printing costs:

Take the annual federal budget. In the 1980s, GPO says it was printing around 130,000 copies every year. This year, that number was down to 25,000 copies. At 250-plus pages apiece, that adds up quickly. Meanwhile, getting access to the document is easier than ever. The budget gets about 500,000 views online every year, and there’s a mobile version, too. Officials have made similar reductions in the print run for other documents, such as the Congressional Record and Federal Register, and they have started using more recycled paper.

Which Children’s Books Are Best?

A new study found that books with anthropomorphized animals may teach children fewer facts:

Over two experiments, the researchers tested preschool- and kindergarten-aged kids’ knowledge of a few obscure animals—cavies, oxpeckers, and handfish—by reading books about the animals with them and then asking questions. Some books contained realistic pictures and descriptions, some cartoon drawings and humanized language (e.g., “mother cavy tucks her babies into bed in a small cave”), and some a mix.

While all kids learned something about the three animals from whichever book they read, those who read the realistic books ended up with a better factual understanding of the creatures. Those who read the anthropomorphized books didn’t learn as much and also had a harder time reasoning about the animals.

Study author Patricia Ganea talked about how the results have been misinterpreted:

People have gone crazy out there. They think we are saying, don’t read books that interweave fantasy with reality. That’s not the message from this.

It’s if you want your children to learn more facts about animals, it would be better to use books that are more realistic. Of course parents should read a variety of books to their children. Fantasy is important for their imagination and their cognitive development. … I think [this study is important] because it may have implications for our use of picture books as a tool for science education. Studies say picture books are an excellent tool for giving kids knowledge about the world. You can have a five- or six-year-old learn important biological concepts. So our work suggests if you want to establish foundations for a more accurate scientific understanding of the world early on, you use factual books.

Katy Waldman defends talking animals:

Sometimes, an overly anthropomorphic view of animals can be harmful, as when people get mauled by bears because they regard them as cuddly human friends in bear suits. But to the extent that humanized characters are both more accessible to and more likely to inspire empathy in young readers, I don’t see how they could be construed as bad for kids, the animal kingdom, or even science.

Scaffolding familiar traits onto alien subjects is a powerful way to promote learning, one that children do naturally from the age of 12 to 24 months. And imaginative play—the type where you pretend a badger gets jealous of her baby sister—has cognitive benefits: “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Albert Einstein once said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

Ask Dayo Olopade Anything: Africa’s Aid Problem

In our second round of videos from the Nigerian-American author of The Bright Continent, Dayo addresses the distorted influence that foreign aid has on African countries:

In a followup, she considers the impact of Chinese investment in particular, as well as how the “colonial hangover” affects the African aid dynamic:

A summary of Dayo’s book from Kirkus:

Distinguishing “lean” from “fat” economies, the author, a Knight Law and Media Scholar at Yale, observes that Africa is perhaps uniquely well-prepared for a future marked by scarcity. In a time when global food needs are expected to rise by 70 percent by 2050, “African agriculture holds an obvious value proposition for the rest of the world—one that defeats local poverty and hunger at once.” In other words, making [Africa] a world breadbasket will both enrich the continent and keep people from starving. Yet, as she notes, there are numerous structural impediments to effecting this green revolution, not least the lack of irrigated farmland and of the technology needed for irrigation, to say nothing of larger problems such as inefficiency and corruption.

African nations, she argues, can overcome these difficulties. For example, she cites the case of the region of Somalia known as Somaliland, which, against all the odds, has in the last two decades “held four peaceful rounds of elections, established a central bank, printed its own currency, and built an elaborate security apparatus.” Announcing a distaste for the word “development,” Olopade writes persuasively of the need for Western-style aid that is adapted to local customs and institutions, allowing for a mix of traditional and modern, market-based solutions to address challenges such as the lack of credit and the uneven distribution of resources. For all those challenges, she argues, the various “maps” of Africa—technological, commercial, agricultural, natural—all point to a wealth of possibilities to help “build wealth, strengthen formal institutions, and aid the least fortunate.”

Buy the book here.

(Archive)