New Science Review

Troll from Daily Mail hits mark, thousands meow

The secret of success in marriage

English journalist Samantha Brick excited a great deal of scorn and derision on the Web last week after she wrote a column in the Daily Mail complaining about the downside of being “beautiful”. Viewers were very anxious to point out that she was not beautiful, if that implied great regularity of features, which is what science has confirmed is the chief requirement of the rating.

Ms Brick has slightly squiff eyebrows and a tiny lopsidedness to her mouth, true, but she is quite clearly pretty, attractive, good looking and cute. Anyhow her stories of getting spontaneous tribute from men in the form of gifts from strangers, including a claim that the pilot of a plane sent her a bottle of champagne before takeoff, won over 3000 comments and a busy Twitter topic, with suggestions that she was “deluded”, should “get a mirror”, and so on, but few addressed her basic point, which is that every pretty woman has to deal with the jealousy she excites from her own sex:

Too Pretty” Columnist Samantha Brick Ridiculed

By COLLEEN CURRY
April 3, 2012
Going through life as a “tall, slim, blonde” woman is harder than it looks, according to British columnist Samantha Brick, who has become the focus of criticism and ridicule for writing that her life as a beautiful woman has been especially difficult.

Brick, 41, published a column in the Daily Mail on Tuesday entitled, “‘There are downsides to looking this pretty’: Why women hate me for being beautiful.”

Brick bemoaned having to go through life as a beautiful woman, constantly receiving free champagne and wine from suitors, flirting with male bosses, and angering female friends and co-workers with her looks.

“While I’m no Elle Macpherson,” Brick wrote, “I’m tall, slim, blonde and, so I’m often told, a good-looking woman. I know how lucky I am. But there are downsides to being pretty, the main one being that other women hate me for no other reason than my lovely looks.”

By Wednesday morning, Brick had become the center of a Twitter campaign aiming to take her down a few notches for her perceived vanity. Twitter users created the tongue-in-cheek hashtag #samanthabrickfacts to make jokes about Brick’s alleged beauty.

“James Blunt wrote “You’re beautiful” after he briefly caught sight of Samantha Brick in a crowded place. #samanthabrickfacts,” Tony Cowards wrote on the site.

“Samantha Brick was originally cast in title role in Pretty Woman but Richard Gere vetoed it because she was too pretty,” a user named Susan Cullen said Wednesday.

The Daily Mail’s website, where the column was published, received more than 3,000 comments in response to Brick’s essay, many of which called into question whether Brick was as pretty as she declared. The column was accompanied by seven photos of the alleged British beauty, and anecdotes of occasions when Brick was hated by other women for her looks.

Brick, who was not able to reached for comment, recalls in the column posing next to a male friend for a photograph on his birthday, at the suggesting of the photographer.

“Another woman I barely knew pushed me out of the way, shouting it wasn’t fair on all the other women if I was dominating the snap. I was devastated and burst into tears,” she said.

Brick’s article raised ire with many women for her early accusation in the column that any woman feeling angry at Brick was just jealous.

“If you’re a woman reading this, I’d hazard that you’ve already formed your own opinion about me and it won’t be very flattering. For while many doors have been opened (literally) as a result of my looks, just as many have been metaphorically slammed in my face and usually by my own sex,” she writes.

Brick ponders her relationships with women, noting that she has never been asked to be a bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding, often gets snubbed by female neighbors and acquaintances in social situations, and is targeted by married women who think Brick is trying to steal their husbands.

“I’m not smug and I’m no flirt, yet over the years I’ve been dropped by countless friends who felt threatened if I was merely in the presence of their other halves. If their partners dared to actually talk to me, a sudden chill would descend on the room,” Brick said.

Many of those who commented disagreed with Brick’s assessment, writing “Can we get a serving of humble pie with a side order of reality check over here please?” and “Oh get over yourself dear. You are NOT THAT pretty, just average. : VERY average. I think you’ve lost female friends because you’re a conceited delusional prat. Is this a belated April Fool’s story DM?”

Brick, however, notes that she is now looking forward to the time when age will finally fade her beauty, so that she can “blend into the background” in her life.

“I can’t wait for the wrinkles and the grey hair,” she writes.

But following her inflammatory column, Brick’s name and face may be more recognizable than ever before.

“April 3rd will now by known as international Samantha Brick day! #SamanthaBrickFacts,” Twitter user @Rossildinio.

Added another: “Disney have renamed their film ‘Samantha Brick & the Beast.’ #samanthabrickfacts. ”

Science backs Samantha

The amusing thing is that amid all the cacophony of women bitchily proving her point with what she calls “vile messages” on line the Economist noted a scientific study which exactly bears out her complaint.

The piece reports that an Israeli study showed that women rated good looking had to send out an average of 11 resumes for each job interview they won, compared with only seven for the plain Janes.

The researchers ruled out any idea that the pretty ones were being downgraded because they were thought dumb. Seems that the raters in the study did not associated good looks with being less smart.

They concluded that the real factor was the jealousy of the women in the Human Resources departments of the corporations hiring. They would tend to put the good looking women in the circular file to avoid rivals for the attention of the men in the company.

Physical attractiveness and careers – Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful – Attractive women should not include a photo with a job application (Mar 31st 2012 Economist):

AT WORK, as in life, attractive women get a lot of the breaks. Studies have shown that they are more likely to be promoted than their plain-Jane colleagues. Because people tend to project positive traits onto them, such as sensitivity and poise, they may also be at an advantage in job interviews. The only downside to hotness is having to fend off ghastly male colleagues; or so many people think. But research by two Israelis suggests otherwise.

Bradley Ruffle at Ben-Gurion University and Ze’ev Shtudiner at Ariel University Centre looked at what happens when job hunters include photos with their curricula vitae, as is the norm in much of Europe and Asia. The pair sent fictional applications to over 2,500 real-life vacancies. For each job, they sent two very similar résumés, one with a photo, one without. Subjects had previously been graded for their attractiveness.

For men, the results were as expected. Hunks were more likely to be called for an interview if they included a photo. Ugly men were better off not including one. However, for women this was reversed. Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot. When applying directly to a company (rather than through an agency) an attractive woman would need to send out 11 CVs on average before getting an interview; an equally qualified plain one just seven.

At first, Mr Ruffle considered what he calls the “dumb-blonde hypothesis”—that people assume beautiful women to be stupid. However, the photos had also been rated on how intelligent people thought each subject looked; there was no correlation between perceived intellect and pulchritude.

So the cause of the discrimination must lie elsewhere. Human resources departments tend to be staffed mostly by women. Indeed, in the Israeli study, 93% of those tasked with selecting whom to invite for an interview were female. The researchers’ unavoidable—and unpalatable—conclusion is that old-fashioned jealousy led the women to discriminate against pretty candidates.

So should attractive women simply attach photos that make them look dowdy? No. Better, says Mr Ruffle, to discourage the practice of including a photo altogether. Companies might even consider the anonymous model used in the Belgian public sector, where CVs do not even include the candidate’s name.

Secret: Marry the handsome guy or the less beautiful girl

A more important result which the Daily Mail had actually added to the brew a few days before was that trouble arises when one spouse is more attractive than the other:

Downside of dating a beauty: If a woman’s more attractive than her man, the relationship may be doomed

This of course is the crucial factor which disturbs so many relationships and leads to many divorces, since the women who are more attractive than their husbands tend to mate outside marriage to gain their preferred quality of genes for their offspring, which results in ten per cent or more babies mysteriously lacking the genes of their supposed Daddy.

Handsome men do not present the same problem, for some reason, perhaps because they do not have babies themselves, or perhaps because they have the right genes for the plain Jane they have married so from the woman’s point of view there is no problem in that regard.

And as everyone knows it is usually the woman’s decision as to whether a relationship continues or not, as one of the researchers, Rob Burriss, notes.

When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, you really do have to watch your friends.
Just like Dr Hook warned in their 1979 hit, research has revealed that relationships in which the woman is more attractive than the man may be doomed to failure.
However, having a handsome husband or boyfriend is no barrier to the couple’s success, according to the study.

The phenomenon was spotted by British researchers who were studying whether it is true that we tend to pair up with those who are similarly attractive to ourselves.
Their findings could help explain why Angelina Jolie’s marriages to actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton barely lasted three years a piece.
In contrast, her relationship with Brad Pitt, one of the world’s most handsome celebrities, has already lasted six years, suggesting she has found her match.

The Stirling, Chester and Liverpool university researchers took photos of the men and women in more than 100 couples. Some had been together for just a few months, others for several years. The individual men and women were then rated on their looks.
The analysis revealed having an attractive husband or boyfriend was no barrier to a relationship succeeding. But, if it was the woman who was the one blessed with good looks, the relationships tended to last only a matter of months, the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin reports.
Researcher Rob Burriss said: ‘This would indicate it is the woman who is in control of whether the relationship continues.
Beautiful women may realise they can afford to pick and choose, he suggests. They may also have the confidence to leave behind relationships that have run their course.
‘Attractive women might generally prefer short-term relationships. They’re better placed to move on.’
It is also possible the relationships end due to jealous behaviour from the woman’s less photogenic partner.
Conversely, the less attractive women ‘may have to make do with what they have, hence the longer relationships’, he said.
Dr Burriss said the idea echoes the Dr Hook song When You’re In Love With A Beautiful Woman. The lyrics advise a man who is outshone by his woman to ‘watch your friends’ as ‘everybody wants her, everybody loves her, everybody wants to take your baby home’.
The study also found we tend to pair up with people whose facial features have a similar level of symmetry – a sign of beauty – to our own.
Dr Burriss said: ‘Are all men trying to go out with Anne Hathaway or Angelina Jolie, or do you really want to be with someone at the same level of attractiveness as yourself? These findings suggest our ideal partner is one on our own kind of level.’

So the secret of happiness appears to be, marry a woman who is not more attractive than you are, or a man at least as good looking.

His warnings of aerosol danger met deaf ears, even at Nature

Vindicated, he understood disdain and why

The case of F. Sherwood Rowland, who died on March 10, Saturday, of Parkinsons, is a tutorial in how valid novelty in science reliably meets the same reflex rejection as crackpot notions peddled by amateur researchers.

The Times obituary, F. Sherwood Rowland, 84, Dies; Cited Aerosols’ Danger has the theme in a nutshell: A discovery met with disdain, but later rewarded with a Nobel Prize.

SAN FRANCISCO — F. Sherwood Rowland, whose discovery in 1974 of the danger that aerosols posed to the ozone layer was initially met with disdain but who was ultimately vindicated with the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died on Saturday at his home in Corona del Mar, Calif. He was 84.

Perhaps computers should be employed to assess new ideas in science, since they can presumably be shorn of the oh-so-human responses of scientists at the top of a field (and its middle and lower rungs too, of course) to an idea which they didn’t think of, which shows that their own ideas are up the creek, and that they missed a key notion:

Industry representatives at first disputed Dr. Rowland’s findings, and many skeptical colleagues in the field avoided him. But his findings, achieved in laboratory experiments, were supported 11 years later when British scientists discovered that the stratospheric ozone layer, which blocks harmful ultraviolet rays, had developed a hole over Antarctica.

The discovery led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, a landmark international environmental treaty to stop the production of the aerosol compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC’s, and other ozone-depleting chemicals and to eliminate inventories of them.

Along with a colleague, Mario Molina, Dr. Rowland found that chlorinated fluorocarbons, the supposedly inert building blocks of aerosol sprays that were then common in deodorants, hair care products and grocery freezers had the potential to deplete the ozone layer to dangerous levels.

In a paper published in the journal Nature in 1974, the two scientists showed that when CFC’s rise into the stratosphere, they are bombarded by powerful doses of ultraviolet rays. A single chlorine atom knocked free, they found, can absorb more than 100,000 ozone molecules. More disturbing, the atoms could linger in the stratosphere for up to a century.

“The clarity and startling nature of what Molina and Rowland came up with — the notion that something you could hold in your hand could affect the entire global environment, not just the room in which you were standing — was extraordinary,” Ralph Cicerone, the president of the National Academy of Sciences and a longtime colleague of Dr. Rowland, said in an interview.

But Rowland was a realist in sociology as well as science, and he survived the trial by fire unscathed.

“Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s — I call it the cold war period for ozone depletion — there were a lot of potshots taken at Sherry,” said Dr. Donald Blake, a colleague of Dr. Rowland’s at Irvine, “and I don’t think his pulse went up by a beat.”

He added: “How could he remain so calm? Because he believed what he did was right.”….

“He mentioned to me that he had not been invited to any chemistry department to give a lecture” from about 1975 to 1985, Dr. Blake recalled. Dr. Cicerone said, “You could probably name any top chemistry department in the country and say, ‘Did they invite Rowland to lecture in that period?’ And the answer would be no.”

But the resistance was understandable in many ways, and Rowland forgave it.

Dr. Cicerone, whose own work established the possibility of a chlorine chain reaction, said “the situation 30, 35, even 40 years ago was so different.”

“The territory they stepped into and defined were so new that most scientists felt they didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “They didn’t feel prepared — or they felt the linkage with an ongoing human activity was too big a step.” ….

When Dr. Rowland was asked around the time of the Nobel ceremony if he considered himself a hero, he said, Not really. As Dr. Cicerone paraphrased his reply: When you make a big discovery, you either show that everybody else was wrong, or that they missed something important. How do you think that makes them feel?

Here’s a description of how his discovery came about in the University of Chicago Magazine. It describes not only how it was made but how the reaction was much more resistant than the Times politely suggests.

Graduate students vanished, for example, knowing on which side their bread was buttered. The industry speculated darkly that he was an agent of the KGB and mounted the usual snow job against an “unproven” claim.

Shades of Peter Duesberg of Berkeley and his ostracism after he reviewed HIV/AIDS in 1987 and found it was a false description of AIDS, without any basis in evidence, and that HIV was an inert retrovirus that did not cause any illness whatsoever.

Of course if reason is blocked physical evidence for a negative as in notHIV is almost impossible to find so the physical evidence for Rowland and Melino’s fears which changed everything after eleven years of rejection was not repeated in Duesberg’s case, so his professional ostracism has burdened him now for 25 years and withheld from society much of the potential benefits of his pioneering research in cancer which is so promising:

In the early 1970s, Rowland, alreadyan expert in the chemical reactions of radioactive isotopes and their useas tracers of chemical and biological processes, was stepping down as chair of the Irvine chemistry department and looking for a new avenue of investigation. As a graduate student at Chicago–where he was best known as a standout varsity basketball and baseball player–he had studied under Willard Libby. Libby would later win a Nobel for developing the carbon-14 dating technique, which uses the formation, by cosmic rays, of a long-lived radioisotope incorporated into carbon dioxide to date plants and animal tissues up to 45,000 years old. Much of the carbon-14 chemistry takes place in the lowerstratosphere, and Rowland now found himself drawn to environmental applications of radioactivity.

Attending a chemistry-meteorology workshop in early 1972,he learned that James Lovelock, a British biospheric scientist, had developed a highly sensitive instrument to measure trace organic compounds in the atmosphere. Taking air samples from shipboard in the North and South Atlantic, Lovelock had detected one particular CFC throughout the troposphere, the 6-to-10-mile-high layer of the atmosphere between the earth’s surface andthe stratosphere. Lovelock was enthusiastic about the finding: He thoughtthe CFC molecule would prove an excellent tag for air-mass movements and wind direction, since its chemical stability would prevent its removal from the atmosphere. Rowland, however, saw the matter differently.

“I knew that such a molecule could not remain inert in the atmosphere forever,” Rowland says, “if only because solar photochemistry at high altitudes would break it down.” The next year, when he submitted his regular yearly proposal to the Atomic Energy Commission, which had supported his research for 17 years, Rowland posed a new question: What would eventually become of CFC molecules in the atmosphere?

With Molina, a photochemist from Mexico City who had just joined his lab, Rowland began investigating the atmospheric fate of CFCs.The two knew that, like all molecular gases, the CFCs could be broken down into their constituent atoms by short-wavelength ultraviolet radiation from the sun once they reached the stratosphere, from 12 to 23 miles up,where the sunlight is unshielded by the ozone layer.

After careful study, Rowland and Molina ruled out any chance that the CFCs might be rinsed out of the atmosphere by rainfall, as these organic compounds are insoluble in water. Nor was there any other known mechanism for the removal of the inert CFCs from the troposphere. Moreover, Lovelock’s measurements suggested that the total amount of a particular CFC in the troposphere was, in fact, equal to the total amount of it ever manufactured–which by that time, for all CFCs combined, totaled several million tons.

Although heavier than air, the CFC molecules would eventually bounce up to the stratosphere, Rowland and Molina figured, and get zapped by the high-energy ultraviolet light, which would break off an atom of chlorine. Each free chlorine atom would immediately react with a molecule of ozone, a highly unstable form of molecular oxygen that contains three atoms rather than the usual two. This would initiate a lengthy and complex chain reaction, destroying many thousands of ozone molecules for every chlorine atom unleashed in the stratosphere.

Rowland and Molina shared a chilling realization: A major, possibly irreversible, catastrophe had already been set in motion. Working from rough calculations, they estimated that an eventual loss of approximately 20 to 40 percent of the ozone was possible. This was a few days before Christmas of 1973.

“It was like staring into a pit and not being able to see the bottom,” Rowland recalls. “Molina and I had discussed the overall calculations, and we were looking for flaws, and each of us would sort of realize that as far as we could tell, there were no flaws.

“I’d come home at the end of the day,” Rowland continues, “and my wife would ask me how the work was going. ‘Good,’I'd say, ‘but it might mean the end of the world.’” Her reaction, Rowland says, was to immediately throw out every aerosol can in the house.

“Fifteen down,” he says, “six billion to go.”

Initially, Joan Lundberg Rowland, PhB’46, was one of very few people to act quickly on the news. There was no urgent phone call to Washington. “I didn’t know anybody,” her husband explains. “Not anybody in power, not anybody in the press.”

In January 1974, convinced of the veracity and gravity of their findings, Rowland and Molina submitted an article to the British journal Nature–where it languished for eight months. Even after publication, the news media paid little attention until the two chemists presented their findings at a September meeting of the American Chemical Society in Atlantic City.

By that time, they had calculated that if CFC production continued at the then current (peak) rate of about a million tons per year, between 7 and 13 percent of the ultraviolet-blocking ozone would be destroyed within a century. They told the meeting that society could expect a significant rise in skin cancer, crop damage, and perhaps even changes in global weather patterns.

Within a few weeks, their calculations for ozone loss were confirmed by Crutzen, a meteorologist then working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, and by other groups as well. Still others produced numbers that suggested even more rapid destruction of the ozone layer.

Now the press took notice, as did the environmentalists, who called for an immediate ban on the purchase of CFC aerosol sprays. The National Academy of Sciences announced it would mount a full-scale investigation, and congressional hearings were soon under way.

Nor did the CFC industry remain inert. Its response was to insist that ozone destruction was just a hypothesis, based on computer projections–and that there was no proof the molecules would ever reach the stratosphere, let alone behave so malevolently if they did. The industry position was that CFCs should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty–prompting one government official to retort: “We cannot afford to give chemicals the same constitutional rights that we enjoy under the law.” But government action was not forthcoming; it was not until 1978 that the U.S. unilaterally banned the use of CFCs in aerosol sprays. Other countries did not follow suit until the Antarctic ozone hole was found in 1984.

The 40-percent ozone depletion and the 10-percent increase in ultraviolet penetration discovered at the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley Bay station would lead to the landmark Montreal Protocol of 1987,in which many of the world’s developed nations quickly agreed to halve CFC production by 1999. In 1990, as evidence of ozone loss continued to mount, delegates took the protocol a step further, agreeing to a total phaseout by the year 2000. The catastrophic loss of ozone also quieted Rowland’s aerosol-industry detractors, who had mounted a withering attackon him since 1974.

“One of the people in the industry in an interview suggested that [Molina and I] were probably agents of the KGB,” Rowlandre calls. He had spent much of that 11-year period testifying at congressional hearings and speaking at universities and scientific conferences around the world. He had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he received the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Award for physics in the public interest. But he was also shunned by the chemistry community. From the time he and Molina published in 1974 until DuPont agreed to halt production of CFCs in 1988, he says, he did not get any applications from American graduate students or postdocs from outside the California system. “American grad students are pretty cagey,” he says. Most of his university speaking invitations during that time came from toxicology or atmospheric-science departments.

Still, Rowland–a man well known for his patience–is magnanimous even to the point of defending his erstwhile industry adversaries.”Every young person I ever knew getting into chemistry or physics really thought that they were on the good side and were trying to make life better for people,” he explains. “So it came as a disturbing shock to them that people were saying that some things that they had done weren’t actually making life better, but worse.”

Rowland says that in a world polarized between tree huggers on one extreme and midnight dumpers on the other, he is closer to being an environmentalist. But his natural home is with academic scientists;the 1974 Nature paper, he notes, was his 171st publication. In 1971 he even drew the ire of environmentalists by showing that levels of mercuryfound in tuna were in fact no higher than those in specimens preserved decades earlier…..

(Continued on this page at the University of Chicago Magazine, continuing with this well written biography Clean UP Hitter: Long before F. Sherwood Rowland began to study chlorofluorocarbons,the man-made gases were a household force. His work in atmospheric chemistry made CFCs a household word–and halting their production a global issue, by William Burton)

A fine outcome to a classic case study of what happens to a fine scientist who discovers something that disturbs the status quo, but because he has character, integrity and further research bears him out can overcome the resistance of those who do not think before they think, which large, perhaps overwhelming portion of the human race we are sorry to say includes most scientists, whose brains reject new ideas with the same alacrity as the rest of us.

Non participant ladies upset

Abuse of trust or power?

The roots of yoga in sex cults have emerged again in the US, to the chagrin of disillusioned practitioners among older women. A salacious summary by Wiliam Broad appears today, to fan the flames.

Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here

The wholesome image of yoga took a hit in the past few weeks as a rising star of the discipline came tumbling back to earth. After accusations of sexual impropriety with female students, John Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles, told followers that he was stepping down for an indefinite period of “self-reflection, therapy and personal retreat.”
Mr. Friend preached a gospel of gentle poses mixed with openness aimed at fostering love and happiness. But Elena Brower, a former confidante, has said that insiders knew of his “penchant for women” and his love of “partying and fun.”

Few had any idea about his sexual indiscretions, she added. The apparent hypocrisy has upset many followers.

“Those folks are devastated,” Ms. Brower wrote in The Huffington Post. “They’re understandably disappointed to hear that he cheated on his girlfriends repeatedly” and “lied to so many.”

But this is hardly the first time that yoga’s enlightened facade has been cracked by sexual scandal. Why does yoga produce so many philanderers? And why do the resulting uproars leave so many people shocked and distraught?

One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult — an omission that leaves many practitioners open to libidinal surprise.

Hatha yoga — the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe — began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness.

The rites of Tantric cults, while often steeped in symbolism, could also include group and individual sex. One text advised devotees to revere the female sex organ and enjoy vigorous intercourse. Candidates for worship included actresses and prostitutes, as well as the sisters of practitioners.

Hatha originated as a way to speed the Tantric agenda. It used poses, deep breathing and stimulating acts — including intercourse — to hasten rapturous bliss. In time, Tantra and Hatha developed bad reputations. The main charge was that practitioners indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.

Early in the 20th century, the founders of modern yoga worked hard to remove the Tantric stain. They devised a sanitized discipline that played down the old eroticism for a new emphasis on health and fitness.

B. K. S. Iyengar, the author of “Light on Yoga,” published in 1965, exemplified the change. His book made no mention of Hatha’s Tantric roots and praised the discipline as a panacea that could cure nearly 100 ailments and diseases. And so modern practitioners have embraced a whitewashed simulacrum of Hatha.

But over the decades, many have discovered from personal experience that the practice can fan the sexual flames. Pelvic regions can feel more sensitive and orgasms more intense.

Science has begun to clarify the inner mechanisms. In Russia and India, scientists have measured sharp rises in testosterone — a main hormone of sexual arousal in both men and women. Czech scientists working with electroencephalographs have shown how poses can result in bursts of brainwaves indistinguishable from those of lovers. More recently, scientists at the University of British Columbia have documented how fast breathing — done in many yoga classes — can increase blood flow through the genitals. The effect was found to be strong enough to promote sexual arousal not only in healthy individuals but among those with diminished libidos.

In India, recent clinical studies have shown that men and women who take up yoga report wide improvements in their sex lives, including enhanced feelings of pleasure and satisfaction as well as emotional closeness with partners.

At Rutgers University, scientists are investigating how yoga and related practices can foster autoerotic bliss. It turns out that some individuals can think themselves into states of sexual ecstasy — a phenomenon known clinically as spontaneous orgasm and popularly as “thinking off.”

The Rutgers scientists use brain scanners to measure the levels of excitement in women and compare their responses with readings from manual stimulation of the genitals. The results demonstrate that both practices light up the brain in characteristic ways and produce significant rises in blood pressure, heart rate and tolerance for pain — what turns out to be a signature of orgasm.

Since the baby boomers discovered yoga, the arousal, sweating, heavy breathing and states of undress that characterize yoga classes have led to predictable results. In 1995, sex between students and teachers became so prevalent that the California Yoga Teachers Association deplored it as immoral and called for high standards.

“We wrote the code,” Judith Lasater, the group’s president, told a reporter, “because there were so many violations going on.”

If yoga can arouse everyday practitioners, it apparently has similar, if not greater, effects on gurus — often charming extroverts in excellent physical condition, some enthusiastic for veneration.

The misanthropes among them offer a bittersweet tribute to yoga’s revitalizing powers. A surprising number, it turns out, were in their 60s and 70s.

Swami Muktananda (1908-82) was an Indian man of great charisma who favored dark glasses and gaudy robes.

At the height of his fame, around 1980, he attracted many thousands of devotees — including movie stars and political celebrities — and succeeded in setting up a network of hundreds of ashrams and meditation centers around the globe. He kept his main shrines in California and New York.

In late 1981, when a senior aide charged that the venerated yogi was in fact a serial philanderer and sexual hypocrite who used threats of violence to hide his duplicity, Mr. Muktananda defended himself as a persecuted saint, and soon died of heart failure.

Joan Bridges was one of his lovers. At the time, she was 26 and he was 73. Like many other devotees, Ms. Bridges had a difficult time finding fault with a man she regarded as a virtual god beyond law and morality.

“I was both thrilled and confused,” she said of their first intimacy in a Web posting. “He told us to be celibate, so how could this be sexual? I had no answers.”

To denounce the philanderers would be to admit years of empty study and devotion. So many women ended up blaming themselves. Sorting out the realities took years and sometimes decades of pain and reflection, counseling and psychotherapy. In time, the victims began to fight back.

Swami Satchidananda (1914-2002) was a superstar of yoga who gave the invocation at Woodstock. In 1991, protesters waving placards (“Stop the Abuse,” “End the Cover Up”) marched outside a Virginia hotel where he was addressing a symposium.

“How can you call yourself a spiritual instructor,” a former devotee shouted from the audience, “when you have molested me and other women?”

Another case involved Swami Rama (1925-96), a tall man with a strikingly handsome face. In 1994, one of his victims filed a lawsuit charging that he had initiated abuse at his Pennsylvania ashram when she was 19. In 1997, shortly after his death, a jury awarded the woman nearly $2 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

So, too, former devotees at Kripalu, a Berkshires ashram, won more than $2.5 million after its longtime guru — a man who gave impassioned talks on the spiritual value of chastity — confessed to multiple affairs.

The drama with Mr. Friend is still unfolding. So far, at least 50 Anusara teachers have resigned, and the fate of his enterprise remains unclear. In his letter to followers, he promised to make “a full public statement that will transparently address the entirety of this situation.”

The angst of former Anusara teachers is palpable. “I can no longer support a teacher whose actions have caused irreparable damage to our beloved community,” Sarah Faircloth, a North Carolina instructor, wrote on her Web site.

But perhaps — if students and teachers knew more about what Hatha can do, and what it was designed to do — they would find themselves less prone to surprise and unyogalike distress.

More salacious testimony at leavingsiddhayoga

I am one of the girls that Baba had sex with in his room on the now infamous table, at Shree Muktananda Ashram. I was 26 years old at the time this happenened; Baba was about 73. This year, I turned 50. I have spent a lot of the past year coming to terms with what happened to me when I was just 26 years old, so long ago.( You must
realize,for me there was no choice,I considered him God incarnate,I would have jumped in front of a trunk if he told me to at that time. ) And, for all the years in between, I have struggled with the meaning of my experience: was it a great tantric blessing, was it
not a blessing at all, why am I so confused? I searched books for answers, left SY, I came back to SY, I left again, and on and on. The truth is, I was stuck in the past, frozen in that room in my 26th year, trying to make sense of it all since then.

The science of seduction

From a scientific point of view the phenomenon has aspects related to hypnotism, under the general heading of framing ie seduction achieved by framing the action in the mind of the seductee in a way which makes it moral and acceptable, even a part of worship. Exactly why women are susceptible to this kind of persuasion by rearranging their minds conceptually until the social cum moral obstacles are removed is a matter for psychologists to explain to us. Presumably it has to do with paternal authority, or some other confusion of power with permission and aphrodisiac.

As always where the line is to be drawn seems to be a function of cultural mores and individual psychology. Words after all have been a most powerful tool for seducers since time immemorial. The issue is where cultural sanctions come in, since they are evidently capable of crippling a woman’s emotional life in the aftermath of such a seduction.

This is the basis for laws against teachers seducing students which have been established in certain US states, often with consequences which seem to be debatable ie severe punishment for incidents which would be permissible in other cultural contexts.

For example the story at Teacher’s ‘four-month affair with her student, 17, revealed when they were caught having sex in a school bathroom

The undersheriff was clear that no illicit sex happened at the high school when the two were discovered on February 9, as the student was 18 – and considered an adult – at the time.
Per Colorado state law, a 17-year-old can have a sexual relationship with an adult of any age as long as it is consensual. However, the latter cannot be considered a person of trust.
Mr McWilliam told MailOnline that a person of trust is ‘anybody who would be responsible for care – namely, we use it for teachers.’
He said: ‘If she weren’t a teacher, it wouldn’t be a criminal act.’

Another case where the punishment was excessive by most standards was Elementary school teacher, 39, jailed for FORTY years for her affair with boy of 14

An elementary school teacher has been jailed for 40 years for having sex with a 14-year-old student.
Shannon Alicia Schmieder, 39, was told she will have to serve 20 years – by far the toughest sentence ever handed out by a U.S. court to an educator accused of underage sex.
Legal experts said the jail term was the same for manslaughter and other serious crimes.
The 39-year-old knew the boy since he was born and was at one stage like a mother-figure to him, according to his family.
His mother said: ‘She was a close family friend. We had gone to the same church together for 10 years. Our children were friends. Our families were friends. We did everything together. It’s impossible to describe how we felt to find out this was going on.’
The victim’s parents noticed a change in the relationship between their then 13-year-old son and Schmieder, saying she was acting more like a friend than a parental figure.
It was when they opened the boys Facebook page they realized something was wrong.
The mother said: ‘Never in a million years did I think I would find what I thought was evidence of inappropriate behavior between them. But there it was.’
The sentence was handed out after the mother of his young victim spoke of her ‘heartache and betrayal’ after discovering her son was involved with Schmieder.
In an emotional impact statement to the court, the mother spoke of the loss of innocence of her son and how she is struggling to come to terms with what happened to him.
The mother said: ‘As a mother of five boys, there are some things I’ve thought I would never have to worry about. April of last year our world was turned upside down.
‘We were told by investigators that our 14-year-old was a victim of child molestation. This was horrifying and unbelievable. I prayed that this was not true.

Here’s one commenter disagreeing with the sentence:

I read the article. The mother goes on forever about her own feelings of heartache and betrayal, and how SHE’S trying to come to terms with it. And all this is being said in the press! Only one mention of the effects on the boy, and that is that he is now having trust issues (cue the gasps). I’m quite sure. If my mom was splashing the most intimate parts of my life across the internet where every employer and girl friend will be able to find it for the next 100 years, she would most certainly find that I had “trust” issues, and they would start with her. Where is the husband, with a little more sense, to put a muzzle on her. Meanwhile, he’s out bragging to his mates on facebook. Sounds like he’s positively traumatized. DM has a story a week about this. You never hear about the “outrage” of the husband, and the evidence in the majority of the cases is the same, the young man bragging about it. It seems like she got 40 years for making a mother angry, the kid seems fine with it. Travesty
- resident, somewhere in America, 18/2/2012 16:12

Jan 17 2012 NYTimes Science section lede above the fold is Cracking Open the Scientific Process:Driven by the Web’s collaborative potential, many want to replace an age-old (and costly) system of submitting private research to commercial journals. Seems with the site ResearchGate offering publication to all qualified (working) scientists the rate of collaboration and progress in scientific fields is expected to be revved up in efficiency and speed because the barriers of peer review and limited print space are going to be removed.

January 16, 2012
Cracking Open the Scientific Process
By THOMAS LIN
The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others.

For centuries, this is how science has operated — through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate.

The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”

Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.

On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.

And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.

Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”

Dr. Nielsen, 38, who left a successful science career to write “Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science,” agreed that scientists have been “very inhibited and slow to adopt a lot of online tools.” But he added that open science was coalescing into “a bit of a movement.”

On Thursday, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”

Indeed, he said, scientists who attend the conference should not be seen as competing with one another. “Lindsay Lohan is our competitor,” he continued. “We have to get her off the screen and get science there instead.”

Facebook for Scientists?

“I want to make science more open. I want to change this,” said Ijad Madisch, 31, the Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist behind ResearchGate, the social networking site for scientists.

Started in 2008 with few features, it was reshaped with feedback from scientists. Its membership has mushroomed to more than 1.3 million, Dr. Madisch said, and it has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook.

A year ago, ResearchGate had 12 employees. Now it has 70 and is hiring. The company, based in Berlin, is modeled after Silicon Valley startups. Lunch, drinks and fruit are free, and every employee owns part of the company.

The Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons (but without baby photos, cat videos and thinly veiled self-praise). Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions — a rule that should not be hard to enforce, with discussion threads about topics like polymerase chain reactions that only a scientist could love.

Scientists populate their ResearchGate profiles with their real names, professional details and publications — data that the site uses to suggest connections with other members. Users can create public or private discussion groups, and share papers and lecture materials. ResearchGate is also developing a “reputation score” to reward members for online contributions.

ResearchGate offers a simple yet effective end run around restrictive journal access with its “self-archiving repository.” Since most journals allow scientists to link to their submitted papers on their own Web sites, Dr. Madisch encourages his users to do so on their ResearchGate profiles. In addition to housing 350,000 papers (and counting), the platform provides a way to search 40 million abstracts and papers from other science databases.

In 2011, ResearchGate reports, 1,620,849 connections were made, 12,342 questions answered and 842,179 publications shared. Greg Phelan, chairman of the chemistry department at the State University of New York, Cortland, used it to find new collaborators, get expert advice and read journal articles not available through his small university. Now he spends up to two hours a day, five days a week, on the site.

Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiology instructor who supervised Dr. Madisch at Harvard and was one of ResearchGate’s first investors, called it “a great site for serious research and research collaboration,” adding that he hoped it would never be contaminated “with pop culture and chit-chat.”

Dr. Gupta called Dr. Madisch the “quintessential networking guy — if there’s a Bill Clinton of the science world, it would be him.”

The Paper Trade

Dr. Sönke H. Bartling, a researcher at the German Cancer Research Center who is editing a book on “Science 2.0,” wrote that for scientists to move away from what is currently “a highly integrated and controlled process,” a new system for assessing the value of research is needed. If open access is to be achieved through blogs, what good is it, he asked, “if one does not get reputation and money from them?”

Changing the status quo — opening data, papers, research ideas and partial solutions to anyone and everyone — is still far more idea than reality. As the established journals argue, they provide a critical service that does not come cheap.

“I would love for it to be free,” said Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, but “we have to cover the costs.” Those costs hover around $40 million a year to produce his nonprofit flagship journal, with its more than 25 editors and writers, sales and production staff, and offices in North America, Europe and Asia, not to mention print and distribution expenses. (Like other media organizations, Science has responded to the decline in advertising revenue by enhancing its Web offerings, and most of its growth comes from online subscriptions.)

Similarly, Nature employs a large editorial staff to manage the peer-review process and to select and polish “startling and new” papers for publication, said Dr. Clarke, its editor. And it costs money to screen for plagiarism and spot-check data “to make sure they haven’t been manipulated.”

Peer-reviewed open-access journals, like Nature Communications and PLoS One, charge their authors publication fees — $5,000 and $1,350, respectively — to defray their more modest expenses.

The largest journal publisher, Elsevier, whose products include The Lancet, Cell and the subscription-based online archive ScienceDirect, has drawn considerable criticism from open-access advocates and librarians, who are especially incensed by its support for the Research Works Act, introduced in Congress last month, which seeks to protect publishers’ rights by effectively restricting access to research papers and data.

In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last week, Michael B. Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founder of the Public Library of Science, wrote that if the bill passes, “taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.”

In an e-mail interview, Alicia Wise, director of universal access at Elsevier, wrote that “professional curation and preservation of data is, like professional publishing, neither easy nor inexpensive.” And Tom Reller, a spokesman for Elsevier, commented on Dr. Eisen’s blog, “Government mandates that require private-sector information products to be made freely available undermine the industry’s ability to recoup these investments.”

Mr. Zivkovic, the ScienceOnline co-founder and a blog editor for Scientific American, which is owned by Nature, was somewhat sympathetic to the big journals’ plight. “They have shareholders,” he said. “They have to move the ship slowly.”

Still, he added: “Nature is not digging in. They know it’s happening. They’re preparing for it.”

Science 2.0

Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has refused to conduct peer review for or submit papers to commercial journals. “I got tired of giving free labor,” he said, to “these very rich for-profit companies.”

Dr. Aaronson is also an active member of online science communities like MathOverflow, where he has earned enough reputation points to edit others’ posts. “We’re not talking about new technologies that have to be invented,” he said. “Things are moving in that direction. Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago.”

Dr. Leshner, the publisher of Science, agrees that things are moving. “Will the model of science magazines be the same 10 years from now? I highly doubt it,” he said. “I believe in evolution.

“When a better system comes into being that has quality and trustability, it will happen. That’s how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well.”

Matt Cohler, the former vice president of product management at Facebook who now represents Benchmark Capital on ResearchGate’s board, sees a vast untapped market in online science.

“It’s one of the last areas on the Internet where there really isn’t anything yet that addresses core needs for this group of people,” he said, adding that “trillions” are spent each year on global scientific research. Investors are betting that a successful site catering to scientists could shave at least a sliver off that enormous pie.

Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs.

“If you said years ago, ‘One day you will be on Facebook sharing all your photos and personal information with people,’ they wouldn’t believe you,” he said. “We’re just at the beginning. The change is coming.”

See http://blog.researchgate.net/masterblog/7221_Four_pillars_of_Science_20_How_to_enable_web_20_for_scientists_and_overcome_the_legacy_gap

Also mentions at http://www.kurzweilai.net/cracking-open-the-scientific-process

http://www.bio-itworld.com/els/01/17/12/cracking-open-scientific-process.html

Denis Overbye gives Randall a big boost hours ahead of “hints” of Higgs boson

Risks of energy escalation ignored – including creation of new galaxy

The CERN project of hunting for the Higgs boson has been escalated recently with the transition to using lead ions, which are a lot heavier than the protons previously smashed headon to see what bits and pieces result. This is the so-called ALICE experiment, which led to the report today on the progress of the hunt for the Higgs boson, whose field lends mass to the universe, if it exists. We are now told that there are “hints” in the form of “lumps” in the data that have the tantalizing prospect of turning out to mean that the Higgs has been sighted.

The day before we enjoyed the piece in the Times by Denis Overbye which consisted of a major boost for Lisa Randall, the Harvard physicist whose book is prominently displayed in bookstores and whose theories have a chance of being vidicated by the LHC also. This was Physicists Anxiously Await New Data on ‘God Particle’, by Dennis Overbye (Dec 11).

High noon is approaching for the biggest manhunt in the history of physics. At 8 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday morning, scientists from CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, are scheduled to give a progress report on the search for the Higgs boson — infamously known as the “God particle” — whose discovery would vindicate the modern theory of how elementary particles get mass.

The report comes amid rumors that the two competing armies of scientists sifting debris from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C., outside Geneva, have both finally seen hints of what might turn out be the elusive particle when more data is gathered next year.

Alternatively, the experimentalists say that a year from now they should have enough data to rule out the existence of the most popular version of the Higgs boson, sending theorists back to their blackboards in search of another explanation of why particles have mass.

So the whole world will be watching.

Among them will be Lisa Randall, a Harvard particle theorist and author of the new book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World.” In an interview with Dennis Overbye of The Times, Dr. Randall provided this guide to the action for those of us in the bleachers.

Q. What is the Higgs and why is it important?

A. The name Higgs refers to at least four things. First of all, there is a Higgs mechanism, which is ultimately responsible for elementary particles’ masses. This is certainly one of the trickier aspects of particle physics to explain, but essentially something like a charge — not an electric charge — permeates the vacuum, the state with no particles.

These “charges” are associated with a Higgs field. As particles pass through this field they interact with the “charges,” and this interaction makes them act as if they had mass. Heavier particles do so more, and lighter particles do so less. The Higgs mechanism is essential to the masses of elementary particles.

The Higgs particle, or Higgs boson, is the vestige of the simplest proposed model of what created the Higgs field in the first place. Contrary to popular understanding, the Higgs field gives mass — not the Higgs boson. But a discovery of the Higgs boson would tell us that the Higgs mechanism is right and help us pin down the theory that underlies both the Higgs mechanism and the Standard Model.

In the simplest implementation of the Higgs mechanism, the experimental consequence is the Higgs boson. It is the particle that the experimentalists are now searching for.

Of course, Higgs is also the name of the person, Peter Higgs, who first developed the underlying theory (along with five others who will be in contention for the Nobel Prize if and when the Higgs particle is discovered.)

Q. How will we know it when we find it?

A. In the simplest implementation of the Higgs mechanism, we know precisely what the properties of the Higgs boson should be. That’s because of its connection to the Higgs mechanism, which tells us that its interactions with any particular particle are determined by that particular particle’s mass.

Knowing the interactions, we can calculate how often the Higgs boson should be produced and the ways in which it should decay. It can decay only into those particles that are light enough for energy to be conserved. Roughly speaking, the Higgs boson decays into the heaviest such particles the most often, since it interacts with them the most strongly.

What we don’t know, however, is the Higgs boson’s mass. The Higgs boson decays differently, depending on its mass, since a heavier Higgs boson can decay in ways that a light Higgs boson can’t. So when experimenters look for the Higgs boson, they look over a range of masses and employ a variety of search strategies.

Q. What do we know about it so far?

A. Experimenters have already ruled out a large range of masses. The Higgs boson, if it exists, has to be heavier than 114.4 giga-electron volts (GeV), which are the units of mass that particle physicists use. By comparison, protons, the bedrock of ordinary matter, are about 1 giga-electron volt, and an electron is only half a million electron volts.

Based on recent searches by the L.H.C., the Higgs boson is also excluded between about 140 GeV and 500 GeV. This makes the most likely region for the Higgs mass to be between about 115 and 140 GeV, which is the range Tuesday’s results should focus on, although in principle heavier Higgs boson masses are in contention too.

I don’t want to shatter hopes, but don’t count on Tuesday’s results being definitive. This is the toughest range of masses for the L.H.C., and detection is tricky for this range. I suspect they will have enough evidence not to exclude the Higgs, but too little to fully pin it down without next year’s data.

Q. What difference does its mass make?

A. Actually, as far as matter’s properties go, it doesn’t really make a great deal of difference. As long as the Higgs mechanism is in place, elementary particles that we know about will have the masses that they do.

But no one thinks the Higgs is the final word about what underlies the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that describes the most basic elements of matter and the forces through which they interact. Even if the Higgs boson is discovered, the question will still remain of why masses are what they are.

According to quantum field theory — the theory that combines quantum mechanics and special relativity — masses would be expected to be ten thousand trillion times bigger. Without some deeper ingredient, a fudge of that size would be required to make it all hang together. No particle physicist believes that.

We all expect a richer theory underlying the Standard Model. That’s one reason the mass matters to us. Some theories only accommodate a particular range of masses. Knowing the mass will give us insight into what that deeper underlying theory is.

Q. Is the L.H.C. a flop if we don’t find the Higgs boson?

A. The great irony is that not finding a Higgs boson would be spectacular from the point of view of particle physics, pointing to something more interesting than the simple Higgs model. Future investigations could reveal that the particle playing the role of the Higgs has interactions aside from the ones we know have to be there for particles to acquire mass.

The other possibility is that the answer is not the simple, fundamental particle that the Large Hadron Collider currently is looking for. It could be a more complicated object or part of a more complex sector that would take longer to find.

Q. Does this have anything to do with neutrinos — specifically, the ones that were recently reported as having traveled faster than light on a journey that originated at CERN?

A. Neutrinos have tiny masses. The Higgs mechanism is probably partially responsible for those, too. Just nothing that encourages them to go faster than light (which they most likely don’t).

Q. In 1993, the U.S. Congress canceled a larger American collider, the superconducting super collider, which would have been bigger than the CERN machine. Would it have found the Higgs particle years ago?

A. Yes, if it had gone according to schedule. And it would have been able to find things that weren’t a simple Higgs boson, too. The L.H.C. can do such searches as well, but with its lower energy the work is more challenging and will require more time.

Meanwhile the only note of dissent in applauding this great project and the energy escalation at the LHC which according to conCERNed skeptics (and according to the papers CERN scientists have written about in the past, and other papers by Chinese physicists) is at the site of Lifeboat.com, where Professor Otto Rossler has been issuing a stream of increasingly alarmist posts, based on his own theoretical analysis of the possibilities.

Here is his latest one today (Dec 14):

As CERN Accepts the Worst Reproach of History, the Latter Sticks to Their Advisor
Posted by Otto E. Rössler in categories: existential risks, particle physics
Professor Hermann Nicolai is the only public voice on the planet defending CERN against my scientific results, with his 3-year-old, long-refuted counterclaims on the Internet that he refuses to take back. His denial of dialog (only the day before yesterday again) enables CERN to do the same and continue. In view of the severity of the accusation accepted by CERN (“attempted panbiocide”), I dare publicly compare my responsible colleague Nicolai with a Himmler playing a musical instrument in a concentration camp.

I shall take the comparison back as soon as he exculpates himself. I apologize that I see no other way to get him to respond to my given proof of the danger consciously incurred by CERN.

This is attacked by the usual suspects (who seem to be assigned or have taken upon themselves the duty of jeering at Rossler and picking apart his theorem) and supported in his conCERN only by a couple of people, notably Robert Houston, who states that:

Robert Houston on December 14, 2011 9:37 pm
The Earth has never faced a menace so great as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The number of potential victims is 140 times the 50 million who perished in World War II — about 11 million of whom were executed by Himmler, according to Wikipedia.

The criminal negligence of CERN in failing to hold any safety conference or safety review since 2008, or even to discuss the concerns of its critics, makes its operation of the LHC an act of reckless endangerment threatening all mankind and future generations. This cabal of arrogant, mad scientists should be closed down by civilized nations — and by NATO if necessary — before it unleashes destructive black holes and strangelets that could annihilate the world.

We thought it was worth backing up Houston and clarifying the situation by adding the following:

Professor Rossler’s note of desperation, and Robert Houston’s measure of the size of the risk that CERN is undertaking, reflects their estimate of the credibility of the papers and pronouncements of those who have analyzed the situation, including the scientists of CERN. Are the conCERNed skeptics hysterical and wrong in their evaluation of the crisis, or are they right and reasonable?

The answer to this question is that they seem to be only too justified in their anxiety. One reason is that in the case of Houston it is the papers and pronouncement of the scientists at CERN that form the bulk of his references. In other words, he is accepting the authority of CERN physicists and pointing out that if you read them thoroughly you will find statements and calculations in their public papers and reports that predict precisely the dire consequences that conCERNed critics fear.

Professor Rossler has his own analysis estimating a high risk that the conseuqnces will be frightful, which some here have tried to pick holes in as far as details are concerned, but have not demonstrated that his overall view is any more flawed than the predictions of CERN have proved so far.

The search for the Higgs boson which is the main outcome of the CERN LHC energy escalation is so far rather fruitless, though we were told yesterday that there were “hints” in “lumps” observed in the data which may yet prove out.

The significant observations that others should take into account are those emanating from Lisa Randall, the personable Harvard physicist whose career would be boosted to the stratosphere if the Higgs appeared, but also, she say, if it doesn’t appear, since that result would be equally “spectacular”, as she informed Denis Overbye of the New York Times (published on Monday).

One things has become fairly clear to outside observers. The theories which they hope that the LHC may prove or at least support are possibly just as much fantasy as Professor Rossler’s, possibly more so. There is nothing to choose between them until more data comes through. They are all fantasies of concrete interpretation of mathematics which seems beautiful (Higg’s mathematics, mainly.)

On the other hand, if the fantasies of the critics turn out to be correct, the result will be very ugly. Given that possibility, it is indeed deplorable that CERN should be so irresponsible as not to proceed more cautiously. The supposedly alarmist cries of Rossler and Houston are in fact perfectly justified by the insider statements made at CERN, as well as the complete lack of any basis to prefer their safety assurances and the theories of even their best thinkers over those of outsiders. In fact, the safety record of CERN already suggest that they can’t keep it together even on the simple engineering level, since they have blown up their own machine twice before getting it to run properly.

The difference here is that we cannot repair the Earth once it is swallowed up by a black hole, a strangelet or — and this is a possibility reckoned by one theorist — the Higgs boson itself, which might create a new galaxy right in the heart of Geneva.

The CERN cheerleaders here who throw brickbats at Rossler and those who know his conCERN is justified are not better than the defenders of the castle in Monty Python’s movie who throw dead cows over the parapets at the righteous King Arthur in search of the Holy Grail.

One wonders whether any of them have wives and children, or are they just willing to sacrifice them along with the population of the planet just to see what happens?

The posts on Lifeboat have been discussing the topic of the safety of the LHC for many months now, without Rossler being discouraged by the lack of response or any aid in accessing influential politicians or other responsible citizens who might have the power to intervene.

But his mounting conviction of the high risk of planetary catastrophe is reflected by his high rate of posting his complaint and argument in various forms, which recently rose to a peak of two in one day.

Given that the danger posed now includes the formation of a new galaxy, we are keeping our fingers crossed, which apparently happens to be the only safety strategy of CERN itself.

Vanity Fair (Jan 2012)just arrived also has a disturbing essay by and photograph of Christopher Hitchens, who has been worn down badly by the treatment he has suffered at the hands of conventional medicine and its experimental drugs (which his buddy Francis Collins, head of the NIH, gave him access to) in clinical trials being conducted on possible genetically targeted drugs for his throat (esophageal) cancer.

Hitchens’ natural skepticism, which saw through the camouflage of Clinton and even Mother Theresa, not to mention God, was evidently completely banished by his vulnerability and he gulped its only antidote, complete trust in his medical authorities and their deadly ministrations. Now he is pleased with the results of his treatment which is grotesquely damaging to his otherwise healthy body as well as the cancer, he sstates.

He clearly has no idea of recent modern research into the power of phytochemicals, even though with a little help he could see for himself by accessing PubMed. He also has no idea how his new buddy Collins and his colleagues tend to ignore and suppress these findings, and fail to finance the clinical trials they call for.

Update: Hitchens has now died. See “Christopher Hitchens Dies at 62 At Hands of Conventional Medicine at Science Guardian.

Specter manages sketch of how placebo research is advancing in New Yorker

But is he still unaware of how it can be applied to HIV/AIDS?

The New Yorker this week runs a piece by Michael Specter reviewing the science of the placebo, Annals of Science: The Power of Nothing: Could studying the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine?

The piece seems logically challenged in parts, and makes too much of the definition of the word placebo and how researchers are unsure how far the concept extends, when they could simply say it covers all psychological responses to medication or supposed medication, or other intervention.

The rearguard action conducted by those who cling desperately to narrow and outdated ideas is very evident in the piece, which quotes the often poorly reasoned blog Respectful Insolence (on the low quality site Science Blogs run by the fitful SEED Magazine) as if it was some kind of authority. One wonders if Specter is really up to the job of science reporter for the New Yorker, for though he has the journalistic chops for writing deftly and in good sound bites about a complex subject, one gets the impression he hasn’t really fathomed the material himself.

What is interesting is that the story accounts for the front page story in the New York Times we dimly recall from the past which trumpeted the non existence of the effect. This is no longer being peddled as good science, and a special research unit has been set up at Harvard.

(More later)

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF SCIENCE about the placebo effect. For years, Ted Kaptchuk performed acupuncture at a tiny clinic in Cambridge, a few miles from his current office, at the Harvard Medical School. He opened for business in 1976, having just returned from Asia, where he had spent four years honing his craft. Not long after he arrived in Boston, he treated an Armenian woman for chronic bronchitis. A few weeks later, the woman returned with her husband and told Kaptchuk that he had “cured” her. “It had to be some kind of placebo,” Kaptchuk stated. “I’ve always believed there is an important component of medicine that involves suggestion, ritual, and belief.” This year, Harvard created an institute dedicated wholly to the study of placebos, the Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. It is based at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Kaptchuk was named its director. He has already recruited leading researchers from around the world. The program was formed to explore an idea that even twenty years ago would have seemed preposterous: that placebos—given deliberately—might be deployed in clinical practice. As medicine. Kaptchuk has no shortage of critics. They acknowledge the power of the mind to influence health but question the vigor of studies suggesting that placebos could possibly prove as valuable as drugs. The research has been propelled in large measure by the emerging discipline of neuroimaging. In several recent studies, placebos have performed as well as drugs that Americans spend millions of dollars on every year. Kaptchuk acknowledges that placebos are not magic potions. Describes the history of placebo-controlled trials. Mentions Lieutenant Colonel Henry Beecher. A meaningful picture of the placebo response began to emerge only in the nineteen-seventies, with the discovery of endorphins. Mentions scientists Jon Levine, Newton Gordon, and Howard Fields. There will be no prescriptions for any placebo, unless clinical trials have demonstrated its effectiveness to the satisfaction of the Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.). Mentions Robert Temple and Wayne Jonas. In 2001, Asbjøm Hróbjartsson, of Copenhagen’s Nordic Cochrane Center, along with his colleague Peter Gøtzsche, published a systematic review of a hundred and fourteen clinical trials that compared patients who received placebos with subjects who were told that they would receive no medicine at all. The Danish researchers repeated the study in 2004, and again last year, incorporating new data each time. “We found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects,” Hróbjartsson wrote. Hróbjartsson and Kaptchuk were united on at least one front: they agree that the medical system needs to change. Kaptchuk wants to broaden the definition of healing, which is exactly what enrages so many scientists. It boils down to one question, Kaptchuk asserts: “Do you think this entire field is based on a foundation of magical thinking, or do you not?”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/12/12/111212fa_fact_specter#ixzz1fnMh6x6m

Tricky questions reveal pitfalls we all face in thinking logically

Key figures in this new science of stupidity

Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar Straus)

AN exciting piece in Vanity Fair this month (Jan issue) by Michael Lewis, The King of Human Error

Michael Lewis has taken a great interest over the years in people he has met who explore the sources of human stupidity, including one neighbor in Berkeley in particular, who has just brought out a book which sound like a must buy. What’s interesting is that Lewis, a sharp cookie who is unfazed by the complexities of Wall Street thought processes, seems a little befuddled by the ideas he is explaining, or conveying from his source to the reader. At least, the piece is in need of better editing for clarity and precision where it summarizes the analysis of his hero.

For example, is the second choice of the question about the bank teller literally “impossible”? Clearly it is less probable than the first choice, so people – the 85% of them – who choose it are not thinking straight. Or are they? The question characterizes her in terms which make it very likely she is a feminist, so the second choice is not impossible, and quite probable, just not the most likely, since simply a bank teller is a larger category of possibility than bank teller feminist.

LETTER FROM BERKELEY
December 2011

The King of Human Error
Billy Beane’s sports-management revolution, chronicled by the author in Moneyball, was made possible by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. At 77, with his own new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize-winning Kahneman reveals the built-in kinks in human reasoning—and he’s Exhibit A.
Related: “The Quiz Daniel Kahneman Wants You to Fail.”

By Michael Lewis Photograph by Patrick Ecclesine

We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them. The book attracted the attention of a pair of Chicago scholars, an economist named Richard Thaler and a law professor named Cass Sunstein (now a senior official in the Obama White House). “Why do professional baseball executives, many of whom have spent their lives in the game, make so many colossal mistakes?” they asked in their review in The New Republic. “They are paid well, and they are specialists. They have every incentive to evaluate talent correctly. So why do they blunder?” My book clearly lacked a satisfying answer to that question. It pointed out that when baseball experts evaluated baseball players their judgment could be clouded by their prejudices and preconceptions—but why? I’d stumbled upon a mystery, the book reviewers noted, and I’d failed not merely to solve it but also to see that others already had done so. As they put it:

Lewis is actually speaking here of a central finding in cognitive psychology. In making judgments, people tend to use the “availability heuristic.” As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have shown, people often assess the probability of an event by asking whether relevant examples are cognitively “available” [i.e., can be easily remembered]. Thus [because they more readily recall words ending in “ing” than other words with penultimate “n”s, such as “bond” or “mane”], people are likely to think that more words, on a random page, end with the letters “ing” than have “n” as their next to last letter—even though a moment’s reflection will show that this could not possibly be the case. Now, it is not exactly dumb to use the availability heuristic. Sometimes it is the best guide that we possess. Yet reliable statistical evidence will outperform the availability heuristic every time. In using data rather than professional intuitions, Beane confirmed this point.

Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists, without a single minor-league plate appearance between them, but they had found that people, including experts, unwittingly use all sorts of irrelevant criteria in decision-making. I’d never heard of them, though I soon realized that Tversky’s son had been a student in a seminar I’d taught in the late 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, and while I was busy writing my book about baseball, Kahneman had apparently been busy receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he wasn’t even an economist. (Tversky had died in 1996, making him ineligible to share the prize, which is not awarded posthumously.) I also soon understood how embarrassed I should be by what I had not known.

Between 1971 and 1984, Kahneman and Tversky had published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty. When we are trying to guess which 18-year-old baseball prospect would become a big-league all-star, for example. To a reader who is neither psychologist nor economist (i.e., me), these papers are not easy going, though I am told that compared with other academic papers in their field they are high literature. Still, they are not so much written as constructed, block by block. The moment the psychologists uncover some new kink in the human mind, they bestow a strange and forbidding name on it (“the availability heuristic”). In their most cited paper, cryptically titled “Prospect Theory,” they convinced a lot of people that human beings are best understood as being risk-averse when making a decision that offers hope of a gain but risk-seeking when making a decision that will lead to a certain loss. In a stroke they provided a framework to understand all sorts of human behavior that economists, athletic coaches, and other “experts” have trouble explaining: why people who play the lottery also buy insurance; why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).

When you wander into the work of Kahneman and Tversky far enough, you come to find their fingerprints in places you never imagined even existed. It’s alive in the work of the psychologist Philip Tetlock, who famously studied the predictions of putative political experts and found they were less accurate than predictions made by simple algorithms. It’s present in the writing of Atul Gawande (Better, The Checklist Manifesto), who has shown the dangers of doctors who place too much faith in their intuition. It inspired the work of Terry Odean, a finance professor at U.C. Berkeley, who examined 10,000 individual brokerage accounts to see if stocks the brokers bought outperformed stocks they sold and found that the reverse was true. Recently, The New York Times ran an interesting article about a doctor and medical researcher in Toronto named Donald Redelmeier, whose quirky research projects upended all sorts of assumptions you might not know you even had. He’d shown that changing lanes in traffic is pointless, for instance, and that an applicant was less likely to be admitted to a medical school if he was interviewed on a rainy day. More generally he had demonstrated the power of illusions on the human mind. The person who had sent him down this road in life, he told the Times reporter, was his old professor Amos Tversky.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that, in a not so roundabout way, Kahneman and Tversky had made my baseball story possible. In a collaboration that lasted 15 years and involved an extraordinary number of strange and inventive experiments, they had demonstrated how essentially irrational human beings can be. In 1983—to take just one of dozens of examples—they had created a brief description of an imaginary character they named “Linda.” “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright,” they wrote. “She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” Then they went around asking people the same question:

Which alternative is more probable?

(1) Linda is a bank teller.

(2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The vast majority—roughly 85 percent—of the people they asked opted for No. 2, even though No. 2 is logically impossible. (If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.) The human mind is so wedded to stereotypes and so distracted by vivid descriptions that it will seize upon them, even when they defy logic, rather than upon truly relevant facts. Kahneman and Tversky called this logical error the “conjunction fallacy.”

Their work intersected with economics in the early 1970s when Tversky handed Kahneman a paper on the psychological assumptions of economic theory. As Kahneman recalled:

I can still recite its first sentence: “The agent of economic theory is rational, selfish, and his tastes do not change.”
I was astonished. My economic colleagues worked in the building next door, but I had not appreciated the profound difference between our intellectual worlds. To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.
The paper that resulted five years later, the abovementioned “Prospect Theory,” not only proved that one of the central premises of economics was seriously flawed—the so-called utility theory, “based on elementary rules (axioms) of rationality”—but also spawned a sub-field of economics known as behavioral economics. This field attracted the interest of a Harvard undergraduate named Paul DePodesta. With a mind prepared to view markets and human decision-making as less than perfectly rational, DePodesta had gone into sports management, been hired by Billy Beane to work for the Oakland A’s, and proceeded to exploit the unreason of baseball experts. A dotted line connected the Israeli psychologists to what would become a revolution in sports management. Outside of baseball there had been, for decades, an intellectual revolt, led by a free thinker named Bill James, devoted to creating new baseball knowledge. The movement generated information of value in the market for baseball players, but the information went ignored by baseball insiders. The market’s willful ignorance had a self-reinforcing quality: the longer the information was ignored, the less credible it became. After all, if this stuff had any value, why didn’t baseball insiders pay it any attention? To see the value in what Bill James and his crowd were up to you had first to believe that a market as open and transparent as the market for baseball players could ignore valuable information—that is, that it could be irrational. Kahneman and Tversky had made that belief reasonable.

Coffee with Kahneman
Kahneman is a professor emeritus at Princeton, but, as it turned out, he lived during the summers with his wife, Anne Treisman, another well-known psychologist, near my house in Berkeley. Four years ago I summoned the nerve to write him an e-mail, and he invited me for a safe date, a cup of coffee. I found his house on the top of our hill. He opened the door wearing hiking shorts and a shirt not tucked into them, we shook hands, and I said something along the lines of what an honor it was to meet him. He just looked at me a little strangely and said, “Ah, you mean the Nobel. This Nobel Prize stuff, don’t take it too seriously.” He then plopped down into a lounge chair in his living room and began to explain to me, albeit indirectly, why he took such an interest in human unreason. His laptop rested on a footstool and a great many papers and books lay scattered around him. He was then 73 years old. It was tempting to describe him as spry, but the truth is that he felt more alert and alive than most 20-year-olds.

He was working on a book, he said. It would be both intellectual memoir and an attempt to teach people how to think. As he was the world’s leading authority on his subject, and a lot of people would pay hard cash to learn how to think, this sounded promising enough to me. He disagreed: he was certain his book would end in miserable failure. He wasn’t even sure that he should be writing a book, and it was probably just a vanity project for a washed-up old man, an unfinished task he would use to convince himself that he still had something to do, right up until the moment he died. Twenty minutes into meeting the world’s most distinguished living psychologist I found myself in the strange position of trying to buck up his spirits. But there was no point: his spirits did not want bucking up. Having spent maybe 15 minutes discussing just how bad his book was going to be, we moved on to a more depressing subject. He was working, equally unhappily, on a paper about human intuition—when people should trust their gut and when they should not—with a fellow scholar of human decision-making named Gary Klein. Klein, as it happened, was the leader of a school of thought that stressed the power of human intuition, and disagreed with the work of Kahneman and Tversky. Kahneman said that he did this as often as he could: seek out people who had attacked or criticized him and persuade them to collaborate with him. He not only tortured himself, in other words, but invited his enemies to help him to do it. “Most people after they win the Nobel Prize just want to go play golf,” said Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology at Princeton and a disciple of Amos Tversky’s. “Danny’s busy trying to disprove his own theories that led to the prize. It’s beautiful, really.”

Over the next few years I followed the progress of Daniel Kahneman’s attempt to explain to other people what he knew about their minds. In the bargain I learned a bit more about who he was and where he had come from, though he tends to be reticent, even uninterested in his own life story. He was born in 1934 and grew up a Jew in France during the German occupation. His boyhood had been punctuated by dramatic examples of the unpredictability of human behavior and the role of accident in life. His father was captured in a German dragnet that sent many French Jews to die in concentration camps—but then, at the last moment, he was mysteriously released. With his parents and his sister, Danny fled from Paris to the South of France and then to Limoges, where they lived in a chicken coop at the back of a rural pub. One evening he violated the curfew for Jews, and found himself face-to-face in the street with a man in the black uniform of the German SS. The man picked him up and hugged him, then showed him a picture of his own little boy and gave him money. Later in the war, after his family had disguised their Jewish identity, he watched a young Frenchman, a Nazi collaborator and passionate anti-Semite, be well enough fooled by his sister’s disguise to fall in love with her. (“After the Liberation she took enormous pleasure in finding him and letting him know he had fallen in love with a Jew.”) For a time his father held a job, but it was a long bus ride from the chicken coop, and he was away during the week. On weekends Danny and his mother would watch the bus stop from their house, waiting for his father’s bus to arrive. Each time was a cliff-hanger: he knew his father was in constant danger and was never sure that he would come home. “I remember waiting with my mother, and as we waited we darned socks,” he said. “And so darning socks for me has always been an incredibly anxious activity.” His relationship to his father, whom he adored, was further queered by a mere typo; in the phony identity papers his father procured for them there was a mistake. Danny’s last name had been printed as “Godet”; his father’s had been printed as “Cadet.” Because of this typo Danny was required to address his father as “uncle.”

Through it all his father suffered from diabetes, which, after the Germans arrived, went untreated. On the day of his death, in 1944, he took Danny, then 10 years old, out for a walk. “He must have known he was dying,” says Kahneman. “I remember him saying it was now time for me to become the man of the family. I was really angry about him dying. He had been good. But he had not been strong.”

After the war his mother moved the family to what was then Palestine and would soon become Israel, where he became first a platoon commander in the Israeli Defense Forces and then a professor of psychology. It apparently never seriously occurred to him to become anything else. He was always bookish, precocious, and curious about what made people tick. His wartime experience may or may not have heightened his curiosity about the inner workings of the human mind; at any rate, he’s reluctant to give the Germans too much credit for his career choice. “People say your childhood has a big influence on who you become,” he says. “I’m not at all sure that’s true.”

When I first met Kahneman he was making himself more miserable about his unfinished book than any writer I’d ever seen. It turned out merely to be a warm-up for the misery to come, the beginning of an extraordinary act of literary masochism. In effect, the psychologist kept trying to trick himself into doing things he didn’t want to do and failing to fall for the ruse. “I had this idea at first that I could do it easily,” he said. “I thought, you know, that I could talk it” to a ghostwriter, but then he seized on another approach: a series of lectures, delivered to Princeton undergraduates who knew nothing about the subject, that he could transcribe and publish more or less as spoken. “I paid someone to transcribe them,” he says. “But when I read them I could see that they were very bad.” Next, he set out to write the book by himself, as he suspected he should have done all along. He quit and re-started so many times he lost count, and each time he quit he seemed able to convince himself that he should never have taken on the project in the first place. Last October he quit for what he swore was the last time. One morning I went up the hill to have coffee with him and found that he was no longer writing his book. “This time I’m really finished with it,” he said.

Then, after I left him, he sat down and reviewed his own work. The mere fact that he had abandoned it probably raised the likelihood that he would now embrace it: after all, finding merit in the thing would now prove him wrong, and he seemed to take pleasure in doing that. Sure enough, when he looked at his manuscript his feelings about it changed again. That’s when he did the thing that I find not just peculiar and unusual but possibly unique in the history of human literary suffering. He called a young psychologist he knew well and asked him to find four experts in the field of judgment and decision-making, and offer them $2,000 each to read his book and tell him if he should quit writing it. “I wanted to know, basically, whether it would destroy my reputation,” he says. He wanted his reviewers to remain anonymous, so they might trash his book without fear of retribution. The endlessly self-questioning author was now paying people to write nasty reviews of his work. The reviews came in, but they were glowing. “By this time it got so ridiculous to quit again,” he says, “I just finished it.” Which of course doesn’t mean that he likes it. “I know it is an old man’s book,” he says. “And I’ve had all my life a concept of what an old man’s book is. And now I know why old men write old man’s books. My line about old men is that they can see the forest, but that’s because they have lost the ability to see the trees.”

Hold That Thought
The book was originally titled Thinking About Thinking. Just arriving in bookstores from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, it’s now called Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s wonderful, of course. To anyone with the slightest interest in the workings of his own mind it is so rich and fascinating that any summary of it would seem absurd. Kahneman walks the lay reader (i.e., me) through the research of the past few decades that has described, as it has never been described before, what appear to be permanent kinks in human reason. The story he tells has two characters—he names them “System 1” and “System 2”—that stand in for our two different mental operations. System 1 (fast thinking) is the mental state in which you probably drive a car or buy groceries. It relies heavily on intuition and is amazingly capable of misleading and also of being misled. The slow-thinking System 2 is the mental state that understands how System 1 might be misled and steps in to try to prevent it from happening. The most important quality of System 2 is that it is lazy; the most important quality of System 1 is that it can’t be turned off. We pass through this life on the receiving end of a steady signal of partially reliable information that we only occasionally, and under duress, evaluate thoroughly. Through these two characters the author describes the mistakes your mind is prone to make and then explores the reasons for its errors.

Along the way the reader has the dawning sense that he is in the presence of an unusual author, who perhaps does not fully realize how unusual he is. Any number of passages would do the trick but here is one:

Amos and I once rigged a wheel of fortune. It was marked from 0 to 100, but we had it built so that it would stop only at 10 or 65 One of us would stand in front of a small group, spin the wheel, and ask them to write down the number on which the wheel stopped, which of course was either 10 or 65. We then asked them two questions:

Is the percentage of African nations among UN members larger or smaller than the number you just wrote?

What is your best guess of the percentage of African nations in the UN?

The spin of a wheel of fortune had nothing to do with the question and should have had no influence over the answer, but it did. “The average estimate of those who saw 10 and 65 were 25% and 45 respectively.”

This is known as “the anchoring effect,” of which Kahneman explains in his book, “We were not the first to observe the effects of anchors, but our experiment was the first demonstration of its absurdity.” It’s unsettling to know that your judgment can be so heavily influenced by some random number and disturbing to realize it is probably happening all the time. The anchoring effect turns out to explain all sorts of strange phenomenon in the world around us—why, for instance, when German judges, before mock-sentencing a shoplifter, were asked to roll a pair of dice rigged to come up either three or nine, those who rolled nine said on average eight months, while those who rolled three said five months.

Kahneman knows how interesting all of this is. What he doesn’t seem to notice is the natural question that springs into the mind of the lay reader: Who rigs up a wheel of fortune to show how people can be deceived by a number? How does that occur to anyone to do? And why? There’s a quality both impish and joyous to Kahneman’s work, and it is most on display in his collaboration with Amos Tversky. They had a rule of thumb, he explains: they would study no specific example of human idiocy or irrationality unless they first detected it in themselves. “People thought we were studying stupidity,” says Kahneman. “But we were not. We were studying ourselves.” Kahneman has a phrase to describe what they did: “Ironic research.”

Kahneman has always insisted that the ideas for which he’s best known, along with his Nobel Prize in Economics, are not his but theirs. Once upon a time he collided almost by accident with another curious person, Amos Tversky, and the collision wound up defining them both.

At some point in my conversations with Kahneman I wanted to know more about his other half. My former student Oren Tversky put me in touch with his mother, Barbara, who put me onto the papers left behind by her husband. As I paged through these a pattern presented itself to my mind. Perhaps I was just seeing what my mind expected to see, but it seemed to me that anyone who had become deeply aware that our species often did not make a lot of sense eventually found their way to Kahneman and Tversky.

Then one afternoon I came upon a letter dated June 4, 1985, from Bill James. The baseball analyst whose work was then being blithely ignored by professional baseball people had wanted help answering a question that vexed him: Why were baseball professionals forever attempting to explain essentially random and therefore inexplicable events? “Baseball men, living from day to day in the clutch of carefully metered chance occurrences, have developed an entire bestiary of imagined causes to tie together and thus make sense of patterns that are in truth entirely accidental,” James wrote. “They have an entire vocabulary of completely imaginary concepts used to tie together chance groupings. It includes ‘momentum,’ ‘confidence,’ ‘seeing the ball well,’ ‘slumps,’ ‘guts,’ ‘clutch ability,’ being ‘hot’ and ‘cold,’ ‘not being aggressive’ and my all time favorite the ‘intangibles.’ By such concepts, the baseball man gains a feeling of control over a universe that swings him up and down and tosses him from side to side like a yoyo in a high wind.” It wasn’t just baseball he was writing about, James continued. “I think that the randomness of fate applies to all of us as much as baseball men, though it might be exacerbated by the orderliness of their successes and failures.”

Bill James was clearly roubled that the human mind settled so easily on false explanations when the truth was readily at hand. He wondered if students of the human mind might help him to explain why.

What Daniel Kahneman now swears is the last book he will ever write does exactly this. But in a funny way it is not his book. It’s theirs.

If you want to test yourself Vanity Fair provides a test as follows:

The Quiz Daniel Kahneman Wants You to Fail
In the December 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis profiles Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who pioneered research into “heuristics,” or the shortcuts humans use when making decisions. Below, take our quiz to see how your own mind works.
By Jaime Lalinde
Plainly put, a “heuristic” is a tool we use to simplify the decision-making process. For example, if you’re driving in the United Kingdom for the first time and don’t know the traffic laws, heuristics might help you correctly assume that a green light means go and a red light means stop. By applying what you already know about driving in America, you won’t have to waste hours reading up on England’s traffic laws. However, that same heuristic could prove harmful if you start driving in the right-hand lane, against traffic. Research psychologist Daniel Kahneman—Nobel Prize winner, and the subject of Michael Lewis’s article in this month’s issue, “The King of Human Error”—spent a great part of his life’s work discovering and cataloging the heuristics people use. Specifically, he concentrated on the situations where they lead us astray. By nature, heuristics are both useful and inaccurate; our minds have developed them to deal with a wide-ranging set of problems. In Kahneman’s forthcoming book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he separates the thinking process into two types—System 1, in which efficiency comes at the cost of accuracy, and System 2, which requires a lot of focus and can sometimes prevent System 1 from making mistakes. When you’re asked what “2 + 2” equals, System 1 takes over, but when you’re asked what “17 x 24” equals, System 2 takes the reins. The questions in this quiz are designed to trigger System 1, which relies heavily on intuition to provide us with answers that we perceive to be correct. Whenever you find yourself “going with your gut,” that’s System 1—often standing in the way of rational thought. It’s no wonder that the word “heuristic” has its root in the word “eureka.” Go ahead and take this quiz, based (loosely) on Kahneman’s four decades of research; follow your gut and see just how wrong you are.

1. A town has two hospitals: one large and one small. Assuming there is an equal number of boys and girls born every year in the United States, which hospital is more likely to have close to 50 percent girls and 50 percent boys born on any given day?

A. The larger
B. The smaller
C. About the same (say, within 5 percent of each other)

Reveal explanatory note ↓

2. A team of psychologists performed personality tests on 100 professionals, of which 30 were engineers and 70 were lawyers. Brief descriptions were written for each subject. The following is a sample of one of the resulting descriptions:

Jack is a 45-year-old man. He is married and has four children. He is generally conservative, careful, and ambitious. He shows no interest in political and social issues and spends most of his free time on his many hobbies, which include home carpentry, sailing, and mathematics.

What is the probability that Jack is one of the 30 engineers?

A. 10–40 percent
B. 40–60 percent
C. 60–80 percent
D. 80–100 percent

Hide explanatory note ↑
If you answered anything but A (the correct response being precisely 30 percent), you have fallen victim to the representativeness heuristic again, despite having just read about it. When Kahneman and Tversky performed this experiment, they found that a large percentage of participants overestimated the likelihood that Jack was an engineer, even though mathematically, there was only a 30-in-100 chance of that being true. This proclivity for attaching ourselves to rich details, especially ones that we believe are typical of a certain kind of person (i.e., all engineers must spend every weekend doing math puzzles), is yet another shortcoming of the hyper-efficient System 1.
3a. How many dates did you have last month?

A. 1–3
B. 3–5
C. 0

3b. On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you these days (5 being the happiest)?

A. 1
B. 2
C. 3
D. 4
E. 5

Hide explanatory note ↑
Regardless of how you answered, it is likely that your answer to question (a) is positively correlated to your answer to question (b)—that is, you rated your happiness higher if you had more dates and lower if you had fewer dates. However, when the order of these questions was reversed, as was done by two German researchers, people’s happiness became untethered from their dating life. This experiment demonstrates the brain’s deferral to System 1, the faster and easier of the two processes. When faced with an objective question (in this case, How many dates did you have last month?), followed by a subjective one (How happy are you these days?), people often simply carry over their answer for the first to the second. This heuristic is called substitution.

4. Imagine that you decided to see a play and you paid $10 for the admission price of one ticket. As you enter the theater, you discover that you have lost the ticket. The theater keeps no record of ticket purchasers, so the ticket cannot be recovered. Would you pay $10 for another ticket to the play?

A. Yes
B. No

Reveal explanatory note ↓

5a. Choose between getting $900 for sure or a 90 percent chance of getting $1,000.

A. Getting $900
B. 90 percent chance of getting $1,000

5b. Choose between losing $900 for sure or a 90 percent chance of losing $1,000.

A. Losing $900
B. 90 percent chance of losing $1,000

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The results of this simple problem set, for which most participants answer A and then B, were used to develop the thesis that would make Kahneman and Tversky famous: prospect theory. In a 1979 paper, they documented a peculiar behavioral tendency: when people faced a gain, they became risk averse; when they faced a loss, they became risk seeking. As a result of their discovery, Kahneman and Tversky debunked Bernoulli’s utility theory, a cornerstone of economic thought since the 18th century. (Bernoulli first proponed that a person’s willingness to gamble a certain amount of money was a product of how that amount related to his overall wealth—that is, $1 million means more to a millionaire than it does to a billionaire.)

Along with playing a large role in Kahneman’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, the theory also spawned a new academic pursuit, the field of behavioral economics. Prospect theory, Michael Lewis writes, explains “why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).”

We haven’t sen the book yet, but it looks very promising as a guide to how scientists in crowds can go astray as far as they have in, for example, HIV/AIDS research and its paradigm.