What You Should be Thinking as You Fill Out Your Paperwork at the Doctor’s Office

When you arrive at the doctor's office to check in with the receptionist, you are often handed a small pack of paperwork to fill out. Until that moment, you have probably been focused on your own ailment or your own medical worries. Luckily, for most of us--most of the time--our own health concerns will more or less resolve and life will more or less go on.

For all of us, however, that typical pack of doctor office paperwork contains a magic page that has the power to boost our happiness through the roof, if only we employ the correct frame of gratitude.  I'm referring to the page that looks something like this:

This page gives us the opportunity to breathe a cosmic sigh of relief that we do not have most of those ailments on that list.  That's how I try to see it as I check off all most of those boxes with a "no." Thank goodness I don't have most of those medical problems. And this is merely the beginning of what I'm proposing as a journey of gratitude.

Instead of thinking about my own health problem, instead of being frustrated that my own body is not operating perfectly, the above page is a reminder that my body is an extraordinarily complex adaptive system--lots of little parts have self-organized into something so complicated that it seems miraculous. No humans could possibly make a tongue or an eye or a liver as high functioning or as elegant as the natural versions.

Imagine that humans in the distant future worked very hard and came much closer to making a reasonably functioning robotic human. Then imagine their supervisors sending down a new work order to make sure that this robot is also sentient.  Imaging the groaning you would hear from the engineering team! Then imagine that the supervisors send down another new work order to make sure that this artificial human could also repair itself if it became damaged!  Imaging louder groaning, especially when the supervisors remind the team that this self-repair must respond to hundreds of millions of microscopic threats and do it as well as the human immune system. 

Then imagine that the supervisors send down yet another work order advising the team that they must design their human so that it runs on almost anything that it puts in its mouth.  Even louder groaning.  Mutiny is threatened.

Finally, thousands of years later, when millions more engineers (and their great great great great grand-engineers) have successfully created a passable artificial human, the supervisors call down with one more new request:  Make sure that these artificial humans can create tiny artificial humans the size of a pinpoint that will grow, within the body of one of the robots, into large artificial humans who become wise through their interactions with any of dozens of environments.  Then imagine all the engineers quitting their jobs.

At the doctor's office, our question should not be "Why doesn't my body work perfectly?"  We shouldn't even complain that we sometimes have one or more of those ailments on the long checklist handed to us by the doctor's receptionist. A better question is "How is it possible that the actions of countless individual molecules self-organize into trillions of cells that result in emergent coordinated macroscopic behaviors such as the ability to walk into a doctor's office?"  Even more simply, the first question should always be "How is it possible that human bodies work at all, ever?"

Answer not forthcoming.

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Anecdotes v Statistics

When do a handful of anecdotal events observed in a complex system prove millions of unseen events? Almost never. Our vast time-tested literature on statistics must guide our extrapolations in these situations and anyone suggesting otherwise should be ignored. These were my thoughts as I read this Tweet by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman. In a comment to this Tweet, Scott mentions these specific problem areas: "Tail ratios, normal distribution, statistical significance, probability, hypothesis testing . . ."

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Complexity’s Stern Challenge to Understanding

I just finished reading Michael Crichton's Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century. It's a long read, but well worth it. Crichton was a true Renaissance Man.

I first learned of the existence of complex systems in about 1975, when I observed that the world did not operate in a linear manner. The next thing I learned was that, while many people considered themselves clever by defining crazy as "Doing the same thing and expecting different results," that was more cleverness than truth. Anyone who is married will understand this. It is possible to do exactly what you did earlier, and your spouse will react in a completely different manner. With teenagers, it's more probable than possible.

Everywhere I looked I found complex systems, and began to do some self-study. The first thing I learned is that complex systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and we are foolish to believe we know all of them. In the "spouse" example, above, the second interaction is not a precise duplicate of the first. Your spouse weighs 2.4 grams less than yesterday, talked with your mother-in-law in the intervening period, and got a massage. All of these things affected your spouse and you're interacting with a different person.

The lecture is about fear, complexity and environmental management. Crichton set out to write a book about a global catastrophe in the late 1990s, so he looked at the Chernobyl meltdown. He read the predictions of up to 3.5M or more eventual deaths and the destruction of ecosystems. Articles about the event were heavily sprinkled with fear-inducing words such as cancer and catastrophe, and there were calls for urgent immediate action to save the planet. Then he looked at reality: 56 people died. The health issues with residents near Chernobyl were largely a reaction to bad information about direness, certainty of destruction, urgency, cancer, catastrophe, etc.

He winds his way through a series of predicted civilization-ending imminent catastrophes with calls to set aside all normal rules and turn over resources to "experts'" control, none of which actually came to pass. He concluded that the planet is far more resilient than doomsayers understand. And the pattern is too obvious to ignore. We are controlled through fear, created by bad information from authorities. Today's existential crisis is decarbonization, but Crichton notes that is already underway without surrendering control to authority. That appears typical of the successes claimed by authorities due to their actions. They urged action that was already underway, and he uses Y2K as an example. Governments' contribution to solving the real problem was negligible, not to mention unnecessary, since banks, heavily dependent on old mainframe systems, had already identified the problem and were working to fix it.

We're told many things by authorities, who are rarely held accountable for prior bad information, to maintain a State of Fear, the title of one of one of his last books. About global warming, we're assured that the earth will end in 12 or 50 or 100 years, and this time we're smarter because we've got all the information. That is exactly what we were told about Global Cooling in the 1970s. "But, this time is different." Right.

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This six-minute TED video by Janet Iwasa inspires me. It's a story about what goes on inside of you and me. Iwasa is a bio-molecular animator. She creates animations of the processes within our cells. Her workspace is an extraordinarily beautiful but disorienting mini-universe.

The molecules Iwasa studies function as the support team within cells. Even though these many non-living things that are clearly not alive, they seem to be alive and even purposeful in these animations. They appear as tiny magical robots. Iwasa offers many examples of her animations in this video, including molecules that allow DNA to function. DNA is not an intricate code that simply sits there. DNA allows your body to be alive via the synthesis of proteins.

That this highly coordinated activity can happen at this scale is mind-boggling, especially given that the DNA is so incredibly complex and so tightly folded. It is mind-boggling that the DNA from one microscopic human cell, completely unfolded, would stretch six feet in length. I hope you as amazed as I was when you see Iwasa's animations.

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Progress on the origin of life?

From News.Mic:

One of the most challenging questions in basic biology and the history of evolution and life stems from the unknown origin of the first cells billions of years ago. Though many pieces of the puzzle have been put together, this origin story remains somewhat murky. But a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge believe they've accidentally stumbled on an answer, and a very compelling one at that.

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