Toxo is the craziest parasite you’ll hear about all day
Long time readers of stuckk are probably aware by now that I’m fascinated by neuroscience, evolutionary biology and philosophy of mind. So it’s no surprise that the recent story on Edge.org about Toxoplasma caught my eye.
Toxo is a parasite that can only reproduce in the guts of cats. The parasite exits its host cat in its feces, which (who knew) gets eaten by rodents. Rodents get eaten by cats, and so the cycle continues. So that’s kinda cool because it’s gross, but what makes it interesting is what toxo does to the rodents it inhabits.
Rodents have a natural revulsion to the smell of cat urine. This is an “oh no I might get eaten” revulsion, not a “dude clean up your side of the room” revulsion. Anyway, toxo flips a switch (lots of switches?) in the brains of rodents that makes them ridiculously attracted to cat pee. Turns out at least in males it’s the sexual channel. Yes, that’s right — rats become sexually aroused by the smell of cat pee and go check it out.
This of course leads to the rodent getting eaten a lot more often and toxo getting a free ride back into the cat guts it calls home. The circle of life.
This isn’t the first parasite to change the brains of its host. Grasshoppers get turned suicidal by some types of worms. It’s really crazy stuff. This one is interesting because it affects humans as well. In tropical locales, often more than 50% of people are infected. Pregnant women are evidently told to be wary of cats because if toxo gets into the system of an infant it can wreak havoc. We think that it doesn’t have an effect in adults, or at least we used to.
Turns out people with traces of toxo are way more likely to be in car crashes involving reckless speeding. Three to four times more likely. It seems that whatever sort of fear process that gets turned off in rodents wrt cats also affects us — makes us a bit less fearful in cars.
But it gets even weirder. Being infected by toxo increases your risk of schizophrenia. Additionally, giving toxo-infected rats schizophrenia drugs makes them less attracted to cat urine. There’s a real suggestion here that the “crazy cat lady” trope might be a real thing — just a severe toxo infection.
Just one more thought. Humans have tons of bacteria in our stomachs that help us digest stuff. Assume they implement the mechanism of hunger — that is, they let us know when we want to eat. Are our desires for, say, a PB&J at 1AM less ours for that fact? I’d say certainly not. Yet our desire to be surrounded by cat urine seems alien and imposed. I’ve long argued against a notion of medicine that references some normal state of affairs but when it comes to changes in one’s desires I think it’s really difficult to say what sorts of things we should regard as normal changes in behavior wrt changing circumstance (e.g. changing religion to marry someone) and what changes we should regard as coercion.
Cryonics and personal identity
Some people think that they could achieve immortality by “uploading” their consciousness to a computer. Roughly, the intuition is that a computer could execute the same function as the brain yielding an entity with the same memories and the same basic personality and other psychological characteristics.
Bryan Caplan thinks that’s crazy, and I doubt he’s alone in having that reaction. It just so happens that I’ve been spending some time reading about the philosophy of personal identity recently, and it turns out that some of our best ideas about what matters for survival are consistent with the belief that “uploading” is a way of surviving.
Locke thought two people were the same if and only if one had the memories and experiences of the other. There’s been a lot of development of the idea. One modern version is the so called Psychological Criterion according to which two people are the same person if they have overlapping memories, beliefs, goals, character traits or intentions.
The issue is challenging and really important. If survival is possible in this way, then that’s going to have huge implications for how we organize society.
Developmental surprises
Making aid effective is difficult. We get it wrong a lot; sometimes that means we just didn’t help much, but sometimes that means we made it worse. The MIT Poverty Action Lab has a list of “best buys,” that is, interventions that have proven to be successful and really cost effective too. Most are the sort of things you might expect, but some seem a bit odd.
Deworming in schools is really effective and costs 50 cents per child. Not only do these kids avoid painful and debilitating parasites but they also go to school about 25% more. Effective, cheap and about what you’d expect.
Quotas for women in politics seem like something progressives might like, but would have little effect on development. Turns out women are good at spending on cool public goods that women want like clean roads and water. They also improve the political participation of women for obvious reasons. The development literature consistently winds up saying that giving women more rights and more power is good for countries not just because they deserve it but because it improves the lives of everyone.
But turns out giving free school uniforms is good too. They reduce school dropout rates and teen childbearing. It seems like schools all require them, so giving them for free reduces the costs of going to school pretty directly. You might also imagine that they remind people about school on a more daily basis by being a symbol of it in the home. That’s just speculation, but I’d be interested in a comparison of giving money equivalent to buying school uniforms (including the cost of travel and time to buy it) and the uniforms themselves.
The rest are mostly obvious — subsidizing schools, bednets, vaccines and remedial reading classes. Another thing that’s key to note is that these should all be fairly uncontroversial interventions. No one can argue that better health or more access to education isn’t a good thing, while a lot of our policy interventions are really hard to get right and wind up screwing things up.
Last it’s also important to note that these are direct interventions in the sense that they don’t rely on the governments of African nations. That makes them both more politically palatable there and probably more effective.
LHC warming up
People are getting excited about the Large Hadron Collider again. When it comes to large dramatic science machines like the Hubble telescope or the Very Large Array, it’s hard not to get excited. It’s clear that we have a lot of romance about space, and that physics is a very prestigious field — name four physicists and four chemists or four biologists and I can bet you’ll be a lot quicker with the first — but I also think that we’re impressed just because it’s big.
My hunch is that things that Craig Venter are doing with synthetic biology are probably significantly more important to humanity the next few decades, and once people realize exactly what we’re doing these days, I think there’s going to be a shock. But because it’s a private enterprise and because it operates on the really small instead of the really big I don’t think we pay it as much attention.
The manhunt for Evan Ratliff
Wired has a writeup of a project they set up wherein one of their writers attempted to shed his identity entirely and build a new life undetected while his editor at Wired organized a internet and real-life-wide manhunt to track him down. Ultimately he was found out, but it’s a fun story and well worth the read.
Some parts that I found interesting: a really good way to disguise yourself if you’re a hip young writer for Wired is to become less attractive — going bald, gaining weight or looking generally slubby. Also, using Tor and maybe some additional proxying just to be sure is pretty effective at anonymizing your behavior on the internet. It helps not to be really engaged with social media; don’t go making a twitter or a facebook account. Fake business cards and a credit card can be a substitute for ID in most places.
I’m not entirely sure how society feels about people who want to disappear, as it were. We obviously romanticize the notion, and I think we sort of want to live in a society that has that option, but it’s obviously hurtful to the people with whom you’ve formed emotional connections. Evan’s experience reveals that it’s not so plesant to be the person hiding either. He complains a lot about being lonely and tired of suspecting everyone.
It also seems almost impossible to form any sort of authentic relationship with other people. Imagine how often you mention something that happened in your somewhat distant past? That sounds absolutely exhausting to me, and I’m sure it alienates you wrt talking to other people. In short, to all of you who were worried about me suddenly exiting someday, fear not. It doesn’t seem like a good way to live life, though it’s of course still sort of interesting to read about.
I’ll only add one more thing: in this instance I think the internet was valuable to the manhunters much less for the information about Ratliff it made available than for the communication and coordination it enabled. Things like emailing the glutein-free pizza places in New Orleans from across the globe were really key in actually finding him. That seems to me much more challenging than getting clues from a twitter account or something like that.
Utilitarianism and the organ lottery
Is it ever OK to kill one person to save five? What if it’s just a random person on the street? What if it’s a societal institution that we all sign on to in the same way that we agree to taxes or the draft? The proposal to create an organ lottery has been around for a long time now. That is, a random societal lottery like the draft lottery that would randomly select among people with healthy organs. If someone’s “organ card” were selected, then she would be killed and her organs given to someone who needed them to survive.
It seems like utilitarians like Peter Singer should be excited by the idea, but in fact Peter Singer makes a classical economic argument against this. Essentially he argues that creating this system of social insurance leads to moral hazard. In other words, if I know I’m likely to get a new kidney if I destroy my current one, I’m much less likely to take care of the one I’ve got now. Because I don’t take care of my kidney, more people die in a needless way.
While this argument might get Singer out of having a poorly instituted lottery, a well-designed lottery might work. Just as health insurance companies might require us to have a deductible or co-pay of sorts, we might be forced to accept a lot of risk if our kidneys fail. Alternatively, people could be monitored and their behavior regulated to ensure they aren’t negligent with their own organs. I’m not entirely sure what the right sort of incentive structures are for a game like this.
Is killing worse than letting die?
I had a conversation this weekend about what sorts of things philosophy majors would be much more likely to say than similar but non-philosophy major college students. I think philosophers would be far more likely to say that there’s not a morally relevant difference between active and passive euthanasia. That is to say, it’s no worse to kill than to let die.
For a lot of people it’s counterintuitive, but the arguments (from James Rachels above) are really good.
First, in some cases killing is far more humane than letting die. This is the most obvious rejoinder — for people whose existence is consumed by suffering, life is a burden. Forcing a patient to die of painful throat cancer rather than relatively painless lethal injections seems like an incredible cruelty.
Further, in some cases it’s used to make life or death decisions on irrelevant grounds. The example Rachels uses here is children born with both Down’s syndrome and an intestinal blockage. In some cases, the blockage could be removed with surgery, but parents and doctors decide that it would be better for the child not to live. Now regardless of whether you think the baby should live or die in such a case, the intestinal blockage seems entirely irrelevant. Yet when such a blockage is present one can “let the baby die” rather than kill it. This then seems like a hard case for those who wish to defend the distinction between killing and letting die.
It’s also strange to think that doctors perform no action by letting patients die. I can insult someone by not shaking their hand. Alternatively, if a doctor let a patient die who was suffering from a routine and curable illness that would also be morally and probably legally impermissible (assume the doctor doesn’t tell the patient her life is in danger — a non-action in itself).
One worry people might have about allowing doctors to perform such mercy killings is that patients will be pressured into dying. As with kidney donations and other things today it would be good to surround the process with some basic checks to ensure patients choose death freely. But even if patients only wish to die as a way of reducing the burden on others, that seems like a good enough reason that we shouldn’t necessarily preclude the possibility.
What if everyone spoke English?
Suppose in a few decades, everyone in the world spoke English. Would that be a bad thing?
Some people have strong opinions about “language death,” to the point where there are several different entire ideologies devoted to the preservation of minority (or even much larger) languages. See the language ecology movement, or see EU policy on promoting minority languages.
I’m not totally convinced that it would be a bad thing. A recent article argued the same thing. The article argues that because differences in language are generated by a combination of fairly arbitrary geographic separations and predictable linguistic operations that differences are unlikely to reflect deep cultural attitudes. If languages are randomly generated, it seems that preserving them is fairly unimportant.
It’s true that some modern researchers have found an area of interaction between language and thinking, but it’s not the sort of thing that would produce radically different ideas or differences in predictions. It’s things like whether we envision time as a vertical list or as a horizontal line or whether we envision tables as male or female. Hardly the sort of diversity of thought that we need to take broad steps to preserve.
But imagine the benefits of everyone speaking one language. We could easily view and interpret the perspectives given by news authorities in other countries. International business would become far easier, as would international travel. Moreover, I think we’d feel more like a single human community, strengthening the crucial sense of empathy that seems lacking in a lot of our foreign policy attitudes.
Finally, it would open far more exchange and competition between cultures; I think right now there’s a linguistic lock-in for many cultural ideas and possible life projects. Many children today simply aren’t exposed to all of their potential options because they only speak the language of their home country. I think it would do a lot to improve their lives.
It’s not implausible to think that we’d be better off with a single global language, and it’s not implausible to think we might get close in a few generations from now.
Stickking to Stuckk
The name Stuckk comes from Stickk, a site that helps people sign self-binding contracts. It’s basically a formalized version of telling your friend, “Here’s $20. Only give it back if I lose 10 pounds this month.” Except with Stickk, you hand over your credit card information, and it charges you if your “referee” says you failed to keep your commitment (giving the money to your charity, hated organization, or friend of your choice).
When Andrew and I were considering starting a blog, we thought Stickk would be a good way to make sure we consistently write so we contracted to write 750 words a week. The penalty for breach was $250. The contract ended September 20th, and I haven’t written a word since. Though I’m planning to begin writing again, I have decided not to contractually commit this time. Still, I wanted to write a little on my experience Stuckk.
Stickk works. This summer I worked a pretty demanding job and didn’t have internet where I lived (something I wish I had known when thinking about the contract terms last spring). Nor did any of my neighbors feel altruistic or naive enough to not password protect their own internet. Our contract weeks ended 6am on Monday, so my Sundays were frantic. Often, I grabbed magazines in Grand Central before taking the train back home, flipping through them desperate to find something to write about. Then, starting around midnight Monday morning, I would slink around my neighborhood laptop open and my hands raised high, hoping to find some signal strong enough to post (did I mention my computer’s wireless connection was also broken?).
After writing/internet-stealing until 3 or 4 in the morning, I went to work most Mondays exhausted. The marginal cost of failing to post was just so high, that - despite the annoyance and sleep deprivation - I always posted. That I squeezed out 750 words each week doesn’t mean they were good. They mostly weren’t. Andrew and I structured the contract with a lot of hope in the parable of the pottery class. If we were successful and there were a few good pieces among the masses of broken pots, the idea that I was producing much more quantity than quality did bother me some those Sunday nights.
The other thing that worried me about Stickking to writing is that it eroded the importance of each individual choice to write. There was something weighty in signing the original contract, but every post that followed was colored by the notion that I was writing instrumentally - to fulfill the contract. This doesn’t matter if you plan to use Stickk to lose weight or floss everyday because then only the result matters. But if the process - the personal ritual of choosing at every step to devote some of your time to a project - is important, then Stickking can kill some of the meaning or weight of your commitment.
I’m not swearing off Stickk. I have an informal self-contract set up with Andrew to get me to try vegetarianism for a month, and I’m setting up a contract to get me waking up earlier. But, because committing to writing is important to me, I won’t be self-contracting to post again anytime soon.
Why scientists should blog
Seed magazine has a really fascinating article on Saturn’s moons. It’s a cool read and you should check it out if you’re as amazed by space as I am. I want to talk about a different part of the article.
Seed links to the blog of one of the authors of the paper under discussion, where he talks about some of the academic drama that went on behind the scenes. I’m hardly the first to point out that scientists are taking a much more active role in communicating with the general population, but I’m curious what the humanization of scientists through interactions with social media will do.
Humans make mistakes, and a lot of scientific research is wrong. Sometimes it’s wrong only in little ways, and it takes a really careful eye to pick out research mistakes that matter and those that don’t. It’s worrisome that people who wish to oppose the conclusions of new research will be able to point to blog posts by (at least seemingly) reputable people pointing out small mistakes and implying that the whole conclusion is forfeit.
I think this happens a lot when ordinary people try to read legal documents. Every once in a while reddit will happen across the text of some law that seems really extreme but in practice is applied reasonably. This was especially true pre-Obama for obvious reasons.
The internet gives us access to original research but doesn’t necessarily give us the tools for understanding it and more importantly for evaluating it. That’s why science blogs are so essential. Strong authorities that can act as a guide to a subject are going to be extremely valuable to society getting important facts right.
