Category Archives: Philosophy

Heparin, analytical chemists to the rescue, and how bias could hurt open science

I was really impressed by the science that tracked down the problem with the contaminated heparin. It made me think of the enormity of coming up with good data in contentious issues like this. I have to wonder what this kind of issues a loaded question like “is this heparin contaminated?” would present for open science.

For people who are unfamiliar, heparin is a drug derived from meat animals that prevents blood coagulation. It’s really important for dialysis patients because in dialysis, blood is passed through a machine to remove the wastes that would usually go out as urine. The machine doesn’t like coagulated blood, an your body doesn’t want the coagulated blood back. So it’s important that it stay un-coagulated. Given that, heparin is pretty important. A bunch of people got sick taking heparin recently (66 died, sadly) and it was up to the analytical chemists to figure out why. It turned out that an impurity was causing the adverse reaction, but the impurity was so similar to the real heparin that it was being missed by the usual tests. In fact, thee have been some allegations that the impurity was deliberately introduced because it is cheaper, and in standard tests will show up as the legitimate compound.

So, to get this figured out, the FDA did something clever. They gave a bunch of samples of the questionable heparin and the good heparin to some analytical chemists, but they didn’t tell the chemists which was which. Two groups of chemists looked for a contaminant and found the same thing independently. The fact that they both found the same impurity in the same sample is good evidence. But without knowing in the first place which sample caused health problems made the conclusion all the stronger.

But I would like to point out that this kind of science is hard. We’re looking at a lot of work, yes. But in this kind of business, it’s so murky and so easy to be biased that careful people need to blind themselves to the facts that might affect their interpretations. I’ve been reading a lot about open science recently, and I think it’s a marvelous idea: share data the way people share code so that the maximum good can come from whatever work people are doing. The problem with the idea is that whole “science is hard” thing. If people start sharing preliminary data, and they have biases and they share these biases, we could end up with open sciecne discrediting itself pretty fast. Unlike broken code that just doesn’t work, broken science can persist for a long time. It would be a shame to see something so promising become the home of charlatans and the self-delusional.

-Peter

Sam Harris, reason, the common agenda, discussion of Deep Topics

Sam Harris gave a speech to the American Athiest Alliance about how he doesn’t think atheists should identify themselves as such.He wants atheists to be champions of reason, maybe, but campaigners against belief?No.He makes an interesting case. I think the video would be interesting for any person who thinks about these things. Sam Harris, by the way, wrote The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, of which I have read neither.

There are some really subtle issues here that surround the contention that atheism constitutes just another religion.The idea is this: there are a lot of people who identify themselves as atheists, and they have a social agenda based on their stated and committed belief.Based on this, they form a de facto religion.The fact that the core belief of this “religion” is that there is no god is somewhat irrelevant; if the group of people take up the structure of a religion, so the theory goes, so it should count as one.

I can see the logic in that argument, but most atheists I know are not that kind of atheist.They don’t belong to an atheist club and they don’t see themselves as ascribing to an external social agenda.They don’t commit themselves to the belief that there is not a god; they simply don’t care.It might be better called Apatheism (apathy-ism). That’s different again from agnosticism, which holds that the issue might be important, but we just don’t have an answer.

Apatheism can’t be called a religion in the same way that the American Athiest Alliance can be called a religion, even in the superficial sense.The point is that, on the whole, the agenda of thinking, caring people is not served by anyone representing themselves as anti-religion. For people who care to talk about these issues like truth and morality (the non-apatheists) the common ground is the desire for reason and understanding what is going on.Those desires are served by people being kind and reasonable to each other.

And when it comes to intellectual pursuits, intellectual honesty and integrity are things upon which people of any creed may insist.Even people without any other creed can insist on intellectual honesty and integrity.And that’s enough to accomplish our shared agenda.Nobody needs to insist on anybody giving up a belief as long as it is either (1) held up to standards of reason, or (2) held only as a private conviction and not as a social standard.

Reason is the cornerstone of a civil social space for a diversity of opinion and perspective.The Big Upshot is that I am not going to insist that people agree, but in the interest of a discussion I insist only that they be reasonable – that is that the views that they contend that I should also hold must be internally consistent and consistent with the observations of the world which we can all share.And even then, I certainly acknowledge silence as another option.

Thanks for reading.

-Peter

Durable goods, maintenance, the maker ethos, and the first inroad to voluntary simplicity

Durable goods:

Real durable goods last and can be repaired and maintained.Then there are consumables, things you use for a while then throw away.The problem is that some things, in order to be competitive in price, look like durables but actually are designed to be consumables.Take air conditioners for example.

The laboratory where I work bought a a consumer-quality air conditioner for ~$500.It was supposed to run in a hot lab to take the thermal stress of some of the equipment.Within a year it had failed.It seems that the fail point was a single motor among 3 or 4 of the motors in there.Now, there might be a cascade failure situation.But in the end, it’s probably one motor replacement and the thing is back in shape.But we can’t get that one motor.The company won’t sell us just a part, and they want $75 plus transportation to have a rep come look at it without any guarantee he will be able to do anything.

So, what we have here is a disturbingly common situation of a consumable product masquerading as a durable product.What that means is that AC units used to be considered something you install, maintain, fix and keep around.It was durable.Maybe it cost $1000, but you expect that with $100 per year maintenance, it will last forever.Well, this AC unit only cost $500! A great deal! Except it wasn’t a durable good.It doesn’t cost $100 per year to maintain, it has to be fully replaced every year.

This is a different business model.How this works: produce the cheapest possible product in order to compete for foolish consumers’ attention.People are going to impulse buy on credit, so they are not investigating what is the best deal.So the lowest sticker price is going to get the sale.And, if the product is cheap and breaks, that’s all the better.Since it had a very limited warranty and no plan for maintenance (this thing doesn’t even have screws – it’s snapped together) it was virtually guaranteed to produce a second sale quite soon after.

Now I’m far from being the first to notice this trend; there is a growing subculture of people who are saying they want to be anti-consumers.They want to conserve and maintain.It’s a service-oriented culture that looks at making things last rather than making more things.I like that mentality for lots of reasons.It means more thought has to go into the product.It means less stress on the environment.It makes people more aware of their purchases and happy with their decisions.It’s a lower stress, higher reward lifestyle for more people. The people involved are contributing directly to the quality of each others’ lives rather than trying to produce as much crap as possible and trick each other into buying it.

-Peter

P.S. Here’s the Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping to break it down.

Personal interactions, management, relationships and trust – Part 1

On personal leverage:

Low-level personal interactions come down to leverage. We can get into high-level personal interactions some other time; suffice it to say that they are a function of trust.Frankly, most inter-personal relations that I see are low-trust affairs. These are not bad people, and they don’t (apparently) have a dysfunctional relationship.But there is very little trust being exhibited.So they fall back on leverage.

Leverage 1: Money.This one is widely used in the workplace, home-life and most everywhere else.It can be generalized to other commodities, like sex or a place to live.The whole idea is this:”you want something that I have, and you will only get that thing if your behavior conforms to my expectations.”

Leverage 2: Being a Jerk: Another widely used leverage point at work and at home, people will motivate other people to change their behavior by treating them poorly.”If your behavior is not what I want, I will behave toward you in a threatening and cruel way.”

Leverage 3: Violence: Although not so common in functional relationships, perhaps the oldest way to get people to do what you want is to hurt them physically. It’s what people use when there is very limited communication or extremely low trust, as between warring clans of cavemen or with small children with limited understanding.”If you don’t stop that, I will spank you,” or between so-called adults, “If you don’t think this song is the greatest song ever, I will fight you.” (Ron Burgundy)

Whole books have been written about how to avoid people who use the “Being a Jerk” mode of leverage, like The No Asshole Rule. But avoidance is not the best strategy.Violence is right out.Money is the common denominator, but it’s still a weak way to deal with people.The big upshot: there is a better way.It’s about investing in relationships, not about other peoples’ behavior.

-Peter

The changing nature of mass telecommunication

Slashdot covered a story that inspired a whole line of thought. Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of thought, approximately. That represents a unit of time that is vaguely meaningful: it is a very useful product that took a lot of people a lot of time and effort. So how many wikipedias worth of effort do we spend watching television? In the US alone, “we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms.”

And, by my estimate, we have spent about 300 wikipedias watching advertisements every year.

The horror of that statement is still registering in my mind. In a sense, the supreme, central cultural goal of our culture has been to live up to the expectations we see on the glowing tube.

But the beautiful thing is that the tide is shifting. Wikipedia couldn’t exist until now, but times have changed. The old media did not see themselves as the sponge to soak up surplus hours. They saw themselves as the shepherds of those in need of entertainment. Then they saw themselves as the elite, entitled to power and money based on their positions as the conduit through which the consumer saw the world.

Well, their tall towers are crumbling. They had a monopoly on information transmission, and it has been broken. Amusingly, the DOJ had nothing to do with it. They want the DOJ to protect them, but it is too late. It’s as though they controlled the only well in the desert, but a lake has appeared. They want it to be illegal to take water from the lake. They want people to keep coming to their foetid well. Wouldn’t you?

-Peter