To be happier, talk to strangers

From Let’s make some Metra noise¹ in the Chicago Tribune:

Commuters asked to interact with other passengers reported having the most pleasant commute. Commuters asked to enjoy their solitude reported the least pleasant commute. The pleasure of conversation was not just restricted to friendly people; we found the same results among introverts and extroverts.

If connecting with others is more pleasant than sitting alone, why the strong preference for quiet cars, silent cabs and empty rows on airplanes? People have strong beliefs about what will make them happy. Sometimes those beliefs are systematically wrong.

This has a surface similarity with Ben Casnocha’s idea that comfortable and interesting are mutually exclusive. You can ignore that stranger and be comfortable, or you can make a leap into the unknown, talk to them, and have a more satisfying experience (and memory of it).

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1. Metra is a commuter rail service in Chicago. ↩

The temptation of smart drugs

Mental prowess in pill form is always tempting. Modafinil offers heightened alertness and wakefulness even during sleep deprivation; piracetam promises enhanced cognition and intercerebral blood flow; ergoloid offers purported memory and anti-ageing enhancements. There are many more.

I’ve promoted these agents to friends and taken some of them myself. The philosophical and ethical case for cognitive enhancement is well established¹; that they work is (at least for some drugs) beyond doubt.²

But advocates of their use might want to consider the alternatives first. Those taking them rarely consider the ‘optimised base case’—a scenario in which everything else cheaply possible is done before making an intervention. It’s another way of asking: what’s the control group for this experiment? Testing a drug on people who have a severely deficient diet is all well and good, but your potential consumers might be best advised to make sure their diet is adequate (cheap) instead of taking your drug (expensive).

Compared to taking smart drugs, the optimised base case is distinctly unsexy: exercising, meditating, getting enough sleep and a good diet that avoids insulin spikes will get you most of the benefits that cognitive enhancers offer. These things are cheap, easy, free of side-effects and proven to work (unlike many cognitive enhancers). Edge cases³ excluded, it’s worth doing them first.

Gwern offers readers a warning in his article on dual n-back, a technique for enhancing working memory and possibly increasing IQ, suggesting they turn back and focus on interventions with bigger marginal returns:

To those whose time is limited: you may wish to stop reading here. If you seek to improve your life, and want the greatest bang for the buck, you are well-advised to look elsewhere.

Meditation, for example, is easier, faster, and ultra-portable. Typing training will directly improve your facility with a computer, a valuable skill for this modern world. Spaced repetition memorization techniques offer unparalleled advantages to students. … Modest changes to one’s diet and environs can fundamentally improve one’s well-being. Even basic training in reading, with the crudest tachistoscope techniques, can pay large dividends… And all of these can start paying off immediately.

Work on your optimised base case by making easier, cheaper interventions to your productivity first. Only then is it worth improving it further.

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1. Bostrom and Roache, 2009. Smart Policy: Cognitive Enhancement and the Public Interest. [http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/smart-policy.pdf] ↩
2. Modafinil’s alertness-boosting effects are clinically proven, and the drug increases working memory. Piracetam and others purport to genuinely increase ‘cognition’, but for the most part the studies supporting this claim are small and old. ↩
3. Such as where an immediate boost is needed—if you’re sleep-deprived or jetlagged but need to make an important presentation, for example. ↩

Notes from FutureFest

FutureFest was yesterday. Here are some (very rough) notes from the talks I heard.

Rachel Armstrong: black sky thinking. Not sure what’s going on here. Organic, natural computing and chemistry. Other audience members nearby seemed befuddled.

Tamar Kasriel: business planning for future growth in the face of uncertainly. Scenario planning: Kahn broke apart the way the future is thought of by asking what the world would look like after nuclear way. What about personal scenario planning? Applying business futures to one’s personal life. Accept uncertainty, be objective/distant, treat it as a process that won’t happen by itself. Such planning can be a good defence against regret. Thinking far out can depersonalise planning.

Rohan Gunatillake: meditation is a mirror to the mind. Lots of tech exists for fostering mindfulness. But how do we develop eg websites, social networks aimed at increasing human happiness/wellbeing? How do we design interfaces to reward patience? How do we make email more connective? What about wearable technology that reminds people of their physicality? Is a ‘technoptimist’. The web is 22-33; when Rohan was that age he was interested in sex, money and status. The web is the same. As people grow with time and through crises, so the internet will develop.

Kathy Hinde: Open scores allowed musicians to play a ‘choose your own adventure’ piece. A little bit on emergent complexity. I really need to read Gödel, Escher, Bach. Showed an exhibit of a piano board that plays itself based on the silhouettes of birds on telegraph lines. Showed Twitchr, a map-based ‘open score’ using recorded birdsong.

Marek Kohn: images of cities underwater are unrealistic and risk encouraging fatalism. But climate change is about more than just the weather: it’s about social change, both within Britain and between countries. Britain will warm, but less than almost anywhere else in the world. British weather will become the envy of the world, and people will flock. Terraces will be favoured over detached houses. Life will become more communal and social, relying on shared resources. Notably, Britain will gain economically relative to continental Europe because Europe will heat up much more significantly. Perhaps the continent will be a test bed for new forms of communal, convivial living. Britain’s fortunes will depend entirely on immigration from other countries. The divisiveness of climate change may cause conflict, both within Britain and between European countries. We need to evolve a more nuanced from of freedom, not in individual consumption but in collaborative political decision-making.

Ian Goldin: this is a great and very previous moment in history – during the twenty minute talk, life expectancy of the audience has increased by five minutes – but it risks being an exception rather than a trend. The source of progress, connectivity and immigration, is at risk of being rejected and its benefits lost. The unwieldy institutions of the 1950s are no longer fit for purpose. At the centre, the tension between individual and collective freedoms and tragedy of the commons. Accepting a loss of individual and national sovereignty and freedom will be required. Climate change, antibiotic resistance are all examples of this. Increasing population density will mean pandemics are a serious risk. The financial crisis may have been the first of a number of 21st-century crises. So what does the future hold, and what can we do about it?

Ben Hammersley: began the talk by getting us all to stand up, stretch, say hi to our neighbours (such a good idea). IARPA is an intelligence technology agency, and advertises its requests for technology proposals at iarpa.gov. Its recent METAPHOR programme looked for talented linguists to help interpret metaphors and analogies in tapped materials. Looked at analogies and metaphor in architecture, operating systems, the floppy disk icon meaning save. “To those of you in the room with the last remaining BlackBerrys in the world…” Shifting analogies and metaphors is, in a way, the definition of innovation. Ben shared two works in progress: one on judging counter-terror measures in the same way we judge new drugs, setting off the greater good for the various negatives these measures involve; the other, on countries. Since 1492, only one European country (Portugal) has survived in an identical shape. What if we redrew the map based on culture, social connection, trade, intellectual cooperation? Think about where you live, and where your allegiances lie – with similar people, not clumps of soil. Examine metaphors and try as work out what’s behind that symbolism and whether it’s still valid. The compere notes the weird etymology of country names, including Welsh being the German word for ‘foreigner’.

Alex Fleetwood: “Where are the monoliths built to our artists?” Imagines a future game space in cities, with salaried employees choosing games for players based on their expertise and experience. Such spaces will be supported by governments, and will focus on archiving old games and hardware. Argues that such cultural institutions have a great impact on what art is made. Games are rarely made for their own sake – usually in service of the prevailing culture’s values.

Alice Taylor (married to Cory Doctorow): from maker movement to commercial product. MakieLab allows users to design an avatar to make a co-created doll. Manufacturing can happen wherever there are 3D printers. Each toy is unique. The toys have passed safety/CE certification. Boy and girl dolls have knees and elbows (so they can ride motorbikes!). 3D printing has totally changed the way toys can be made and personalised. Similarly, toy shops traditionally get toy companies to bid for shelf space – selling online has changed this. Also allows for agile, iterative development – impossible in mass manufacturing. A/B test and experiment as you go. Makies are now available in Selfridges – a podium let’s customers design dolls on tablets. Challenges include getting to a £20 price point, building up the brand, building games around Makies.

Google fights aging

Details are thin at this point, but Google co-founder Larry Page has announced Calico, a company that will focus on “the challenge of aging and associated diseases.” Art Levinson, former Genentech CEO, will be Calico’s Chief Executive.

Art and I are excited about tackling aging and illness. These issues affect us all—from the decreased mobility and mental agility that comes with age, to life-threatening diseases that exact a terrible physical and emotional toll on individuals and families. And while this is clearly a longer-term bet, we believe we can make good progress within reasonable timescales with the right goals and the right people.

The front cover of the September 30 issue of TIME, which has an exclusive interview with Page, makes an apt point: that the search giant’s plan to extend human lifespan “would be crazy – if it weren’t Google”.

For years, the anti-aging movement and its big players, notably Aubrey de Grey’s SENS, have been members of the transhumanist vanguard and little else ¹, not noticed or supported by mainstream scientists. Part of that is down to stubbornness, poor marketing and bad PR, and part down to status quo bias on the part of everyone else. I’ve wondered what the anti-aging movement will do to be taken seriously.

This is how it happens. Getting someone as influential and moneyed as Google on board is the credibility and funding boost longevity science needs.

Fight Aging! has a good analysis of the ways this one could go (ranging from Calico backing very conservative anti-aging efforts to it directly funding rejuvenative medicine) but offers a caution:

This effort by Google has just started, and we have no idea how it [will] turn out. Google doesn’t have a good track record for going above and beyond the safe, staid norm when it comes to philanthropy. Their initiatives in that respect have generally been very mainstream, very similar to what other factions of Big Philanthropy are up to, and very unlikely to change the world. … That said, I will also be surprised if significant money fails to flow from Google to SENS by 2018 or so[.]

History is littered with the carcasses of wealthy men who suddenly became aware of their mortality and tried to fight it. But the study of the biology of aging has matured hugely in the last two decades. Maybe this marks a turning point in biogerontology’s story.

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1.  This isn’t necessarily a criticism. But biogerontology’s aims need mainstream scientific recognition if it’s to be seen as a serious field and funded commensurately. ↩

Do the groundwork, but keep the vision in mind

“One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”

Tackle big projects by taking the time to build the required ‘small skills’. But at the same time, keep one eye on the prize.

Merely deciding you’re committed for the long-term vs the short-term makes an enormous difference. [In the study] progress was determined not by any measurable aptitude or trait, but by a tiny, powerful idea the child had before even starting lessons. The differences were staggering. With the same amount of practice, the long-term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-commitment group by 400 percent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-termers who practiced for an hour and a half. When long-term commitment combined with high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed.

Wrong about nearly everything

An illuminating article (with the best headline ever) in the UK Independent. Notable figures:

• Crime in England and Wales is 53% lower now than it was in 1995
• 0.6% of girls under 16 become pregnant every year (the public believes it’s more like 15%)
• £74.2bn is spent on pensions annually
• £4.9bn is spent on Jobseekers’ Allowance annually
• Offical estimates say £0.70 in every £100 of benefits claimed is fraudulent

British public wrong about nearly everything, survey shows – Home News – UK – The Independent.

Summing up happiness research

In a previous post of mine, I devoted a couple of paragraphs to summing up the current state of psychological research into happiness. It occurred to me that Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss has a much better précis than I did at the time:

Extroverts are happier than introverts; optimists are happier than pessimists; married people are happier than singles, though people with children are no happier than childless couples; Republicans are happier than Democrats; people who attend religious services are happier than those who do not; people with college degrees are happier than those without, though people with advanced degrees are less happy than those with just a BA; people with an active sex life are happier than those without; women and men are equally happy, though women have a wider emotional range; having an affair will make you happy but will not compensate for the massive loss of happiness that you will incur when your spouse finds out and leaves you; people are least happy when they’re commuting to work; busy people are happier than those with too little to do; wealthy people are happier than poor ones, but only slightly.

(Via Eric Barker’s excellent Barking Up The Wrong Tree.)

Preparing for the pandemic

Cross-posted from Nature Student Voices.

Is some research too dangerous to be published? Lab-made strains of bird flu have raised questions about state involvement in mitigating the threat from “dual use” research. Henry Stanley explains

In November 2011, a Dutch group succeeded in making a highly pathogenic variant of avian flu (H5N1) which, if released, could cause a global pandemic. Ever since, a storm has raged as scientists and governments worldwide attempt to deal with the findings and how they should be safely disseminated—if at all.

H5N1, the avian flu strain which caused so much concern in the past decade, is poorly transmitted between birds and humans, and its spread has been limited mostly to those who worked with infected poultry. While only a few hundred cases were confirmed, the WHO estimates that sixty per cent of those infected died from the disease. By comparison, the seasonal H1N1 virus is easily spread but rarely fatal, killing only the very young, the elderly and the infirm. This difference in transmissibility is crucial and sets the two strains of the virus apart.

Dr Ron Fouchier’s team, based at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, have found that five mutations in two genes in H5N1 marry bird flu’s lethality with seasonal flu’s airborne transmissibility between mammals, creating a strain which its creator describes as “probably one of the most dangerous … you can make”[1]. The 1918 flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million had a comparatively low mortality rate[2], with no more than one in five infected dying[3]. That the new superstrain is only five point mutations away from wild H5N1 shows that the virus could easily acquire genetic changes which would make it a highly contagious killer. More concerning still, the mutations observed are all present in nature, but have so far only occurred separately in various wild strains of the virus. Genetic recombination—as occurs when an individual is infected with multiple strains of the virus—could randomly produce the ultra-lethal variant.

Another researcher, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, made a somewhat different discovery. He combined the H5 gene—a variant of hemagglutinin, the protein which allows flu virus to recognize and fuse with vertebrate cells[4]—with the rest of the genome from a seasonal H1N1 virus from 2009, and found that, while the new virus spread rapidly between ferrets (the model organism of choice for studying flu), it was no more lethal than seasonal flu. Importantly, current antivirals and flu vaccines were effective against it[5]. Before publication, Science sent Kawaoka’s draft manuscript to the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) for counsel, as is standard practice when carrying out “dual use” research, or work which has the potential to threaten public health. The NSABB, an organization known to generally exercise a light touch when it comes to such research[3], advised that the paper be altered, with experimental and genetic details redacted and released to scientists on a ‘need to know’ basis[6].

The team’s work has sparked fears that the virus could be weaponized by being reassembled from the published data, amidst other concerns. The facility in which work on the virus was done is at biosafety level 3+ (BSL-3+). Critics argue this doesn’t reflect the true threat accidental release poses, arguing that maximum-security BSL-4, which demands all lab workers wear positive pressure suits and be subjected to multiple decontamination steps, be the required standard for working with such a dangerous pathogen.

Fouchier is unimpressed with the furore. He doesn’t think that an as-yet theoretical bioterrorist attack merits censorship of vital science. “Bioterrorists can’t make this virus; it’s too complex, you need a lot of expertise.” Besides which, the NSABB doesn’t properly weight the public health benefits gained from a better understanding of potential future flu strains, he says. He draws comparisons with the 1975 Asilomar Conference, in which scientists agreed to a voluntary code of conduct regarding then-emerging recombinant DNA research, except that those restrictions were agreed by the scientific community as a whole, whereas the moratorium on publishing work on mutant H5N1 is a top-down imposition[7]. He hopes that by developing and studying these very virulent strains we can better understand how the flu virus develops the ability to spread as an aerosol, and insists that no half-measures will do[8]. Moreover, the NSABB’s recommendations expose the vagaries of censoring science: who exactly ‘needs to know’? Other, less-secure labs working on H5N1 may unwittingly produce an ultra-virulent strain; these labs presumably ought to have access to Fouchier and Kawaoka’s sequence data[6].

Nonetheless, Fouchier, Kawaoka and thirty-seven coauthors signed an open letter declaring a sixty-day hiatus in research on highly pathogenic H5N1 strains to provide time for the debate on the appropriateness of their work to be carried out[9]. Fouchier insists the moratorium is a response to the threat of the NSABB taking matters into its own hands to regulate biological research directly, and only a temporary measure as he waits for the US government to decide how best to proceed. “My preference,” he states in a recent radio interview[8], “is to publish in full.” Kawaoka agrees, claiming that enough information already exists publicly to allow the production of an H5-bearing pandemic virus, and that any attempts to redact papers would be unwieldy and unworkable[5].

While the number of fatalities may be small, John Oxford, Professor of Virology at Queen Mary University of London, points out that the equivalent of two million life-years were lost in the recent bird flu outbreak, mostly from young people. That more people were not killed, he says, was a direct result of the measures taken to stop the spread of the virus and of research into its mechanism[8]. This view, that it would be short-sighted to censor research on H5N1, is shared by many in the scientific community. Others are more guarded: Kwok-Yung Yuen, Chair of Infectious Disease at the University of Hong Kong, is well aware of the insights the work provides and the potential benefit to public health. But at the same time he believes that partly-censoring the research would at least buy time to develop and stockpile vaccines against H5N1 to pre-empt an epidemic (be it natural or man-made)[10].

The January 19 issue of Nature gave a cross-section of views from biosecurity, infectious disease and global health experts. Their opinions were divided, with some calling for part-redaction, some expressing concern at lab infections and others at the threat of accidental release of virus from a secure facility[10]. The WHO is convening a meeting in Geneva in mid-February to which flu experts—and an NSABB representative—will be invited[11]. In the meantime, it is hoped a consensus will emerge in the two months before the hiatus ends.

References

1. Enserink, M. Scientists Brace for Media Storm Around Controversial Flu Studies. ScienceInsider, November 2011
2. Taubenberger J. and Morens, D. 1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics. Emerging Infectious Diseases, January 2006; doi:10.3201/eid1201.050979
3. A deadly balance. The Economist, December 2011
4. Goodsell, D. Hemagglutinin. PDB-101, April 2006; doi:10.2210/rcsb_pdb/mom_2006_4
5. Kawaoka, Y. H5N1: Flu transmission work is urgent [online]. Nature, January 2012; doi:10.1038/nature10884
6. Fouchier R., Herfst S., Osterhaus A. Restricted Data on Influenza H5N1 Virus Transmission [online]. Sciencexpress, January 2012; doi:10.1126/science.1218376
7. Enserink, M. Ron Fouchier: In the Eye of the Storm. Science 335 (6067): 388-389, January 2012; doi:10.1126/science.335.6067.388
8. Redfern, M. Material World [radio]. BBC Radio 4, January 2012
9. Fouchier R., García-Sastre A., Kawaoka Y. & 36 co-authors. Pause on avian flu transmission studies. Nature 481, 443 (January 2012); doi:10.1038/481443a
10. Fouchier R. et al. Preventing pandemics: The fight over flu. Nature 481, 257–259, January 2012; doi:10.1038/481257a
11. Branswell, H. Researcher at heart of bird flu studies controversy reveals details of his findings. Winnipeg Free Press, January 2012