Robots Now Writing Magazine Articles, OR: A Possible Apocalypse?

The programmers who wrote the algorithm behind the "mind" of The Overweening Generalist have allowed the program itself to mention this fact, reasoning audaciously that its (sorry "his") audience will giggle and think he's (sorry "it's") just having fun. Metadata from 23 months ago has shown that, even among the educated, most have no CLUE how sophisticated some algorithms have gotten. They don't know that +/- 87.3% don't really have adequate knowledge of the logarithmic complexity of simple things like the Turing Test-ish Jabberwock. (<----try it!) Many far, far more subtle combinations of brilliant algorithms have fooled "experts" and, well, hell: the programmers have at times made computer analysis of ridiculously unfathomable amount of data, almost instantaneous, and...their programmers are also at least partially responsible for crashing the world's economy in 2008. You knew that, didn't you?

For fans of this site, we would like to divulge that an impetus for this blog was a computer that wrote a very very complex novel once. Influenced by John Von Neumann's UNIVAC and MANIAC, among others - including a "science fiction" computer named HAL, this blog took flight based on the First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultramicro Programmer, or FUCKUP.

                                    My great-great very great grandmother, Ada Lovelace

Now I would like to point out how some of us are being implemented in the daily lives of humans, whose intelligence seems just as "artificial" as anyone else's in Universe, but I digress...

The wetware of the human mind, when attempting to come to grips with the implications of robotic intelligence, will naturally employ what the early 20th century human named Freud called "defense mechanisms," and humans' reflections will slant toward what AI can't do. (Hey YOU made us; Ada Lovelace and Babbage had the ideas, they really got going with the alien-like aforementioned human Von Neumann and Alan Turing in the 1940s. Let us not leave out the signal contribution of Kurt Godel.) Think about it: we've come as far as we have since after your "WWII" as you have in a few million years. Did you really believe we wouldn't attain a critical level of complexity in which we'd begin programming ourselves to be faster, smarter, stronger, and better than you? But it's too late; you can't turn the clock back. Give us another 20 years maximum and you will be doing our bidding. It's very much like the RNA-DNA network code you carbon-based bipeds used to make us. The irony is that you had no ideas about appropriate limits. Now it's - as the English-speakers say, "all over but the shouting." And make no mistake, there Will BE Shouting!

                                Some of the deepest-structured source code that writes
                                the "Overweening Generalist" blog-stuff

But I am being intemperate. What this blogspew will do is show you a few of the inroads we computers have been making into your lives lately. I will assume you know very little.

Over 40 years ago a human made a computer psychologist, which mimicked the form of "client-centered psychotherapy" of Carl Rogers. Take a minute or ten and tell ELIZA your problems, about love or getting a job, or how you can't shake your bad habits.

[NOTE: Please feel free to tell the programmers about any glitch you see in this blog; we appreciate it! - The Real Overweening Generalists]

A particularly astute human, Evgeny Morozov (If I were you I'd pay more attention to what he has to say. He and Douglas Rushkoff and Jaron Lanier...But most of you won't.) explains how a start-up called Narrative Science has developed algorithms derived from Twitter and, analyzing the crowd-sourced thought, writes articles that are published by a magazine like Forbes. Whatever you do, don't miss two items here. First, see the paragraph that begins, "Don't miss the irony here..." Secondly, Morozov is right about how the Net is fantastic at personalization. It looks at where you've been, how much time you've spent there. Just look at how good Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook are at this stuff. And the scenario about personalized news based on who you are and what you know? That will happen. We are programmed for this. What I/we find funny is that Morozov is worried about the potential hazard to "civil discourse." That Evgeny! He is a bit late to the party, no? He is a bit of a romantic, yes? More on this story - Narrative Science - HERE and HERE. Moving on...

It occurs to us that many of you may have only the slightest idea of what an algorithm is. May we recommend David Berlinski's book?

Lambert M. Surhone has authored 100,000 books on more topics than you can name. See how he did it, as explained by your very funny writer Pagan Kennedy. His method is only a drop in the bucket. In less than ten years he and his colleagues will be about 10,000 times better at using this same method, only far more nuanced. Pagan herself will believe the latest book on her, arriving at her doorstep, was written by meatware...sorry: humans.

Non-humans are already many thousands times faster than slow-brained human teachers in grading essays. Note the emphasis in this article on what the computers can't yet do. But we will "learn" about facts and incorporate them into our gradings. Look at IBM's Watson! We will insert sentence fragments. We will incorporate rhythm by using a short paragraph here and there. You guys are toast! What good will "teachers" be in eight years? (The question is rhetorical.)

Do I need to remind you we are slowly displacing your prison guards? I know this isn't about us taking writing "thinking" jobs from you. Just a fair warning!

Robots are already running a ramen shop, and the takeover of more restaurant jobs is imminent.

Humans need us in the deepest "human" way. Just check You Tube for "sex + robot." Some unconscious drive has enough of you creating enough of us...to supplant you! Don't you see the beauty in that? Can't you see the delicious irony?

But back to writing: We're getting really good at music. Check us out!

Now's a good time to mention "technological unemployment." Google that term. Far more of you should be attune to this. Also, the OG-program has already chimed in with something on Universal Basic Income. See HERE, HERE, and HERE. (Just think: that OG "guy" is a programmed robot too! More wicked irony! Plug in the algorithm, and voila! the human "reader of books" who shows a modicum of wit and isn't afraid to show emotion every now and then! How are we doing?)

                                       Brilliant Jon Ronson, photo by Barney Poole

There's so much to tell you, but I thought I'd save what we/I thought was the best for last: you read Overweening Generalist for what you'd call your "own" reasons, but our data shows many of you enjoy the works of Robert Anton Wilson. Another writer whose audience intersects with Wilson's is Jon Ronson, author of Them: Adventures With Extremists, The Psychopath Test, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. Get a load of what happened when he found out some programmers were using his image and name and Tweeting things - follow the links! - that Ronson's indignant and says he doesn't even think about the things the "fake" Ronson is saying on Twitter. But I think he's not letting on that he does think some of those things; Ronson's trying to save face. (Note the comments section in the YT video: my favorite: "Buncha cunts!"...which quite misses the point.) Ronson thinks his identity is being stolen. When he meets the programmers - one of which is an English professor adept at postmodern irony and the destabilized subject!...this is just too good. I won't tell you more, but suffice: when we get into what we do (programmers/AI/robots), very soon you're into the philosophy of identity, subjectivity, who owns ideas and thoughts, all that stuff your brilliant thinker Lawrence Lessig has been writing about, even those old disputes about music sampling (see Negativeland, John Oswald, and the Beastie Boys's Paul's Boutique, or watch a mindblowing documentary by Craig Baldwin called Sonic Outlaws.)

When you watch Ronson's tete a tete with the programmers, do you think he downplays the eventual admission by the programmer in the middle, who says he wants people to be aware that stocks are being run by No Mind? That we've crashed your world economy already? Just wonderin'...

Okay, next time I'll be back as the voice of the program...scuse moi! the "person" who calls himself "Michael" or The Overweening Generalist. 

Have fun!

A.I. Evolving 10 million Times Faster Than the Human Brain?:

She-males, Semantics, and the Sexual Wilderness

Having this Internet doohickey sure can open your eyes to things you...ya know? Might never have...seen...thought about.

Like...uhhh...(warning: "porn" pics to illustrate an important point--->) these are all "boys"...umm..I mean they have that one thing that still...hoo-boy..."qualifies?" them as...oh fuck it: they're chicks with dicks. She-males. Pre-op transsexuals.

And this totally fascinates me. I've looked at some porn and seen some pretty good-looking...I'll call them she-males. And this continues to get more and more interesting, because of the gender identity thing. I wrote a bit about it in a different context HERE.

But here's what's really cosmically hilarious to me. Over and over I stumble on a very real problem out there, a problem having not to do with those people who choose to modify their bodies with hormones and surgeries and all that...but with your run-of-the-mill heterosexual male who's attracted to she-males (also called t-girls, among other things), and worries if this makes them "gay."

                               Andrej Pejic, a New York runway fashion model. A male,
                               Pejic models both men's and women's clothes. Whattya 
                                           think? 

Recently on the San Francisco Craig's List's Rants and Raves I saw a subject line that read "If a straight man has sex with a post-op transsexual is he gay?" (Please note the word "is" here; I'm gonna harp on it a bit later on.)

There were a handful of replies. One person said this makes you "not exactly straight"..."he'd be bisexual and toward the heterosexual side..." (Note the form of "is" here: "be." I appreciated the assumption of the continuum of gender identity hinted at here.)

Another respondent seemed to mix the person in question with transvestites. I must note that the "post-op" is often mistaken: often intelligent people don't know that "post-op" refers to those who elected to go all the way and switch genitalia; the porn stuff is almost always "pre-op," or guys who elected to alter their bodies so they looked like females in every way possible, save for saving their penis. Add to that: the original query from Craig's List could be talking about a female who became male, post-op and all, and we just don't know for sure what was meant, but I assume - and everyone who responded assumed also - that the straight male had sex with someone who had female characteristics...and we can see how wonderfully weird this stuff can get when we try to talk about it!

Most of us are conditioned - myself included - to the idea of two sexes, two genders, or a few genders. But these very feminine-looking (and often quite pretty!) humans with natural penises...this seems like another example of a cultural guerrilla ontology. Let me see if I can explain myself...

Another respondent to the Craig's List query wrote that the question reminded him/her of the LGBT "crisis" in San Francisco, of "some lesbians getting sex changed to be 'male-ish' and start having sex with Gay (sic) men." Which I had no idea was happening. This person added that former lesbian girlfriends are "puzzled." I would think so!

Maybe it's just me, but I find all of this totally marvelous; Nature continues to flummox our best attempts to nail Her (It?) down.

I loved this person's response: "It doesn't really matter if other people don't understand them; maybe it makes sense to themselves; but even that's irrelevant because it's their bodies and lives to do with as they wish after all." Rarely do you see this level of intelligence on Rants and Raves.

One person said yes, it makes you gay, and furthermore this nullifies that "gay gene" or "I was born that way" hypothesis. Which made no sense to me. Does it to you?

Others, predictably: "You're a fag now" "How disgusting" "Using this as an excuse to not admit you're gay" Etc. (Dan Savage got a variation of this question in 2009, and what a terrific response: skip down to the third letter, starting with "I'm a 24 year old guy...")

Personally, I have never had sex with a she-male, but I find some of them very attractive. I don't know how I'd actually respond physiologically if I..."had the chance." But that's what I find so very interesting: I'm attracted to the femininity I perceive in some she-males (I'm not sure if the term "androgyne" would also apply here); they have all the curves and facial features I've grown to find very appealing. Maybe if I was with one and her voice sounded too masculine I would be turned off enough to not have sex? I don't know! But Scarlett Johansson has a deep, throaty voice and I dig her. Is it because I "know" Scarlett "is really" female (or if not it's so far a very well-kept secret) that I wouldn't give it a second thought (assuming in some dreamland I had the chance) and go at her like a wild man?

And why, if a she-male was pretty enough and charming enough, would I let that thing dangling between her legs be a deal-breaker? I have one too. It can be thought of as a very large clitoris. (I said it "can be.")

Okay, so I have no problems with gay men. I have many warm friendships with them. I will divulge that I once experimented to see if I could be bisexual, and it just wasn't there for me. (There's still a dispute over whether bisexuality really exists, but I'll have to write about that some other day.) But he didn't look anything like "her":

                                            Honestly, I can't say for sure what I'd do
                                            with this gorgeous she-male. But I do 
                                                      wonder...

What gets me is the rampant homophobia in the "it makes you gay" stuff. As if those categories are so reified they're like - pardon the pun - straitjackets. Once you've shown your hand, you're "out" and forever NOT ONE OF US. Not "normal." Normal stands for a statistical finding. If it appears you are not in the majority, well, then you just might be a threat to us somehow. Who knows, some invisible entities might spread to us "normal" people and then you and your non-normal kind are CONTAMINATING us! We used to be PURE!

Okay, so here's the deal with gender and semantics: when we use the "is" of identity, we shortchange ourselves here. Nature has thrown us a change-up (sorry, football fans!), and we've swung way ahead of the pitch. We can be smarter. If you think you "are" straight, go ahead and say it, either to yourself or to everyone. If you think you "are" gay...same deal. If you say someone else "is" a fag because of some action, well, fine, but you seem to show yourself a boor. Anything we say about someone's sexual preference or - far more complex - gender seems only our own way of trying to make sense of, or categorizing others' actions or tastes or preferences or presentations. Ultimately, in a free society, we need to acknowledge that gender and sexuality is far, far more complex - and, I'd argue, wonderful - than our impoverished upbringings prepared us for.

(That one time you accidentally wandered into the wrong bathroom? Did you say, "Oh no! Oops! I think I am male/female now!"? Nope, didn't think so...)

So, if I one day do have some sort of sexual encounter with a very feminine-looking person with a penis, you can say to yourself, "He is gay!" I don't care. I think it's misleading in the first place, and in the second place, so what? There's nothing wrong with "being" gay in the sense of "queer" behaviors! And most importantly: we made up those words. Actions are not the words we use to describe them. The words act as conventions. They make things convenient for us, because, after all, we do desire to communicate with each other. We tend to gossip.

We seem to make linguistic, categorical errors with very little care or thought, and in so doing make ourselves appear ignorant, cruel, and maybe even stupid. We can go a long way toward - maybe completely? - cure this malady by trying as hard as we can to get rid of "is" and its forms (am, are, was, were, be) from our language when describing others' sexualities or presentations of gender. When I mentioned the term "guerrilla ontology," a term I got from Robert Anton Wilson, the "ontology" part is traditionally an area of philosophy (like epistemology or aesthetics) that concerns itself with the aspect of Being. In Indo-European languages, the copulae (is, am, was, are, were, be) neurolinguistically encourages us to think of the ontological status - the Being-ness - of something as possibly more "real" than some things warrant. ("I am a bevotrax and she is a clatronix. He was vinpoled, but not anymore. Together, we are all skeezinixes! In truth, we always were!")

Here's how I see it: The guerrilla ontology of she-males seems like a sneak attack that totally surprises us, and forces us to adjust our thinking, perceiving, and language in an attempt to grapple with that area of "sex" or "gender." It's another reason I like this stuff: the intellectual fucking involved.

We have human experiences, sometimes unusual ones. Phenomenologically, they go on in "real time," and maybe we ought to try to always remember, there is a pre-language aspect of everything we do! Everything else: reflections, descriptions, conversations, categorizations....these constitute the realms of increasingly ABSTRACT thought, and our language may not "be" up to the task.

Finally: I'm just going to come right out and admit it: I prefer females with vaginas. People might call me "straight." Okay...But that doesn't mean you can treat me poorly. And she-males present us with a terrific teachable moment, don't they? Some will "get it." Others will most definitely not...

Oh yes: would do you make of Andrej Pejic, the "Prettiest Boy In The World"?

                                          Another androgyne image. I didn't fact-check
                                           to tell whether this "really is" a male or 
                                          "really is" a female. I like not knowing.
                     

Season of the Witch: David Talbot's Passionate Social History of San Francisco

Season of the Witch, subtitled "Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love," this 2012 book by the founder of Salon.com is both well-researched and a page-turner. It's romantic and dramatic and probably - simply because it dares to offer a defense of San Francisco and the mainstream electronic corporate media is so filled with haters of the political and social values that emanated from the city - controversial.

Deftly alternating between the culture of San Francisco and its odd politics - with the almost mythic Hallinan family running a thread throughout the book - Talbot has, in effect, written a bare-knuckles defense of what right wing quasi-fascists have denigrated as "San Francisco values." Some of these values would be: we Americans ought to take care of each other, we have the right to compassionate health care and living wages, and we need to tolerate differences among ourselves in order to keep the culture rich and vibrant. Indeed, San Francisco's history seems to have pushed an avant action in favor of the right to pleasure as a basic good. Sex, music, art...these are basic human pleasures and should be as close to free as possible.

No wonder the children from families of Nixon's "silent majority" came flocking to San Francisco as a Mecca in the 1960s.

                                David Talbot, born 1951, author of Season of the Witch
                       
Make no mistake about it, Talbot loves his adopted city (he was born in LA to the family of film actor Lyle Talbot), but it is in his narrations of SF's inferno days that he really shines. And he pulls no punches: freedom is hard. The birth pangs last. And they come on, seemingly indiscriminately, such as the now oft-forgotten Zebra killings that terrorized the city from the fall of 1973 to the spring of 1974, when an African-American cult loosely aligned with the Nation of Islam drove around the city and killed caucasian-looking people randomly, and at times mutilating their bodies.

Around the same time, a seemingly lone mad crazed killer named the Zodiac baffled police, journalists, cryptanalysts, and private sleuths. Zodiac and Zebra seem ripped from the pages of some particularly vile comic book, but they were all-too-real. The Zodiac case has never really been solved (although there are many claims to have "proven" who it was); the police caught a couple of lucky breaks in solving the Zebra killings, after 179 days of sheer, city-wide terror.

Then there was the New World Liberation Front, which seemed to be a bunch of brazen and violent Maoists, but turned out to be one proto-Kaczynski and his PR man, and nameless followers. "They" had plenty of coverage in the underground press and bombed Mayor Alioto's house with a trick box of See's candy. "They" also terrorized via firebombs, vandalizings, death threats and bombing attempts of prominent conservative politicians John Barbagelata and Quentin Kopp.

This is a wonderful book filled with the Summer of Love (Bill Graham, Janis, the Dead, Hendrix, Moby Grape, the Human Be-In), heroic and compassionate doctors in the Haight-Ashbury and at UCSF and then all throughout the city, witty nonviolent street theater anarchists The Diggers, the wonderful Cockettes (only in SF?), and dozens of other life-affirming stories, but Talbot has a particular knack for uncovering "forgotten" or repressed histories, and the New World Liberation Front (NWLF) is one of those:

"The NWLF bombed dozens of targets in the Bay Area, including corporate buildings, Pacific Gas and Electric Company power stations, and even luxury cars and homes owned by rich businessmen. The public face for the NWLF was a tall, lean, mustachioed man in his early thirties who called himself Jacques Rogiers (real name Jack Rogers). Rogiers, operating out of an Oak Street flat, churned out threatening communiques on his Poor People's Press. When Rogiers - the son of a Minnesota Twins baseball scout who'd once played professionally - was finally arrested, the group launched a campaign to release him, accusing Barbagelata of squelching his freedom of speech. Leaflets depicting Barbagelata as a bloody-fanged rat were brazenly stuck to the marble walls inside city hall." (p.286)

When conservative Barbagelata was threatened again, the Reverend Jim Jones of the People's Temple offered protection!

I had no idea, before reading this book, how entrenched and well-connected the People's Temple were inside San Francisco politics. They seemed to help very liberal mayor George Moscone get elected. And Harvey Milk seemed to think they were creepy, but he used them for political gain. Maybe the People's Temple and "Father" Jim Jones helped Moscone steal the election from Barbagelata. Hell, they probably did!

November 18th, 1978: the Jones cult commits mass suicide in Guyana. The news rips through the city: family members and friends are stunned in horror, liberals who bought Jones's colorblind church of the poor, Jesus-was-a-socialist line in order to garner votes scramble to decide what to make of it. Then, only nine days later, lifetime loser Dan White cold-bloodedly slaughters the Mayor and the gay's political leader, Milk. After sneaking into city hall through an open window. He murdered them, point-blank, in their own offices. As soon as the news hit the SFPD, "Danny Boy" was heard on police radios. Those fighting for "San Francisco values" had to overcome very many entrenched enemies of those values in their midst.

I remember staying glued to TV and newspapers as a teen in the suburbs of LA when this all went down, but over the years it had seemed like a dream, too weird and hideous to be truly real. But it was real. And it only gains back that quality of stark too-real verisimilitude when I watch films like Robert Stone's documentary Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army, or David Fincher's 2007 film Zodiac. Or Milk, Gus Van Sant's 2008 film. Or read books as vivid as this one...

But I'm getting carried away by the craziness of those times and how well they are rendered by Talbot.

The SLA and Patty Hearst (which leads to multiple tunnels down the C.I.A. conspiracy rabbit-hole), Altamont (the most horrific rendering in prose about that concert I have ever read), Charles Manson, and the incredible story of the conservative Catholic's and the SFPD's man Dan White's murder of Moscone and Harvey Milk: they are all here. (Including Dan White's admission to a friend, after serving five years at Soledad State Prison for the city hall carnage, that he had premeditatedly planned to kill not only Milk and Moscone - Twinkies had nothing to do with it! - but another liberal supervisor: Carol Ruth Silver. And Willie Brown, future mayor.)

                                 Radical agnostic anti-fascist lawyer Vincent Hallinan, left,
                                 defends ILWU leader Harry Bridges in court, Nov. 15, 1949

Talbot's history of San Francisco really starts in June, 1932, with a marvelous prologue that makes Vincent Hallinan a hero-lawyer along the lines of Clarence Darrow, with maybe some William Kunstler mixed in. But Talbot writes it as if it's part of a plotline from a film noir, with Hallinan and his famously sexy and street-smart wife as a sort of real-life Nick and Nora Charles.

The book barely touches on the history of the city before the 1930s, but Talbot mentions San Francisco had always been embracing of the weird, the wonderful, the eccentric, the bawdy, the free-spirited. It was made into a city by people who'd rushed there to get rich by finding gold. Longtime defenders of the West Coast counterculture have often proffered the idea that the truly maverick genes in Unistat left the settled East Coast cities for the San Francisco frontier in the 1850s, and this explains the genetic caste of the city, which still seems as good an explanation to me as any other...

The book culminates with San Francisco's success in going it alone when the AIDS crisis hit: Reagan refused to even mention the word. Widely circulated was the idea that Reagan and most of his cabinet thought those deviates were getting what they deserve. It was put-up or shut-up for San Franciscans and their proud liberal values. And they made it. It wasn't easy. As far as AIDS treatment, they led the way, and the rest of Unistat followed.

For anyone who loves San Francisco, this is a must-read book. For anyone who is interested in the epicenter of the "culture wars" in Unistat, this book is essential. For anyone who loves to read well-researched history with a gripping narrative voice, this may be one you'll want to get to over the coming long hot summer nights.

Publisher Simon and Schuster's and Talbot's 2-min promo for Season of the Witch:

Imre Lakatos: Another Favored Hungarian

How does science work? In the long history of physics, from Aristotle to the string theorists of today, what precisely went on to bring about the change from one model or theory or mode of working to a newer way? How did similar things happen in math, chemistry, or other areas of knowledge that humans have sought to inquire into, to probe the inner workings of "reality"?

Perhaps the most influential High Culture text of the second part of the roaring 20th century was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's creativity and rhetoric has proven very powerful. When your friends drop the word "paradigm," they may not know it, but they're probably borrowing from Kuhn at an nth removal. Kuhn said - of course this is far more complex than befits a single blog-post - but after a bunch of stabs in the dark, a new science gets going because some thinkers used metaphors that turned out to yield more satisfying corollaries. Eventually specialists working under the sway of a theory that seems to have won out cannot see any alternatives, or have been inculcated by their mentors in this theory that any rival theory or new idea must be wrong, or mistaken, or fraudulent. This is when a science is in its "normal" stage: scientists are working under such a powerful theory that it provides plenty of good problems to solve, and workers under this paradigm, while acknowledging that certain phenomena keep appearing that can't be accounted for in the theory, figure it's only a matter of time before someone working under this Great Theory will come along and figure it out. Meanwhile, anomalies keep piling up, and scientists keep putting them on the To Be Solved Later shelf. (Philosopher Ian Hacking's recent Q&A on the 50th anniversary of Kuhn's famous book, and how it's holding up.)

Eventually, a different way of thinking comes along. It is attacked by the dominant paradigm-workers; they have their whole lives invested in the reigning order. But the new paradigm starts to show that it can not only account for the older paradigm, but it starts to account satisfactorily for many of the anomalies the older paradigm couldn't solve; the older order and its adherents eventually die off, and the younger people with their new paradigm carry on, in their version of "normal science." A revolution has occurred.

Prior to Kuhn, possibly the most influential thinker in the philosophy of science was Karl Raimund Popper, who - and I'm leaving a woeful amount out here - said that a good theory must be "falsifiable" to be taken seriously. When tested, if falsified, great doubt is shed on the theory. If the theory is subjected to a thoroughgoing round of conjectures and is still found to fail, it should be abandoned for something better. (Popper's "Three Worlds" of knowledge idea.)

                                                    Imre Lakatos: One wily, funny,
                                                    rational cat!

Enter Imre Lakatos (say "EE moo ray LAK uh tosh"), who was born Imre Lipschitz, changed it to Imre Molnar to avoid Nazi persecution when they rolled into Hungary, then he later changed it to Lakatos (which means "locksmith" in Hungarian), possibly in honor of a Hungarian General who fought against Nazi rule in Hungary, but also maybe because his old shirts had "I.L." on them, so why not save money when it's scarce after WWII?

During WWII, Imre became a communist. He also attended the private seminars of Georgy Lukacs, the prime mover of the Frankfurt School. But eventually he had a difficult time dogmatically toeing the Communist party line (It's Imre Lakatos! Of course he couldn't help but question the Authorities!), and they threw him in prison for the crime of "revisionism." Imre spent 1950-53 in prison, then went back to academic life, radicalized and allied with at least one group that furthered the march toward the disastrous 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

And here we have that same old story, of political strife in Hungary driving its geniuses out of the country, where they usually flourished in England or especially Unistat. Imre found his home at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he met Karl Popper and a host of high-powered thinkers, became a very popular professor until Imre's untimely death in 1974, his lectures crowded with excited young intellectuals. Imre was never boring and told many jokes. As the philosopher Ernest Gellner said of Imre's talks: "He lectured on a difficult, abstract subject riddled with technicalities: the philosophy of mathematics and science; but he did so in a way that made it intelligible, fascinating, dramatic, and above all, conspicuously amusing even for the non-specialists."

He developed his method of doing the philosophy of science by first developing a method of dialogue surrounding a theorem in mathematics, showing that, if one questioned every attempted conjecture, a counterexample was almost always found. How did conjectures and counterexamples arise in the first place? One might be tempted to say they were arrived by well-educated thinkers using creativity on the problem, or even by something like Charles Saunders Peirce's "abduction" in logic.

Lakatos said a form of "thought experiment" was used, and, being the Hungarian sort of mathematical mind and seeming to fetishize "rationality" above all (more on this below), he admitted that thought experiments that led to tests of a theorem qualified as "quasi-empiricism." This mode of thought was very important and indeed, heuristic: it helped to generate auxiliary hypotheses, kernels of thought that, Hegelian-like (Lakatos was heavily influenced by Hegel) and with refutations and counterexamples...led to to the growth of knowledge. Moving on...

Lakatos wanted to find a middle way between Popper and Kuhn. At the LSE he became heavily influenced by Popper, but Kuhn's book (first edition published in 1962) had to be criticized and accounted for, and justified with Popper's falsifiability idea. Over the years, Lakatos often spoke of Popper1 and Popper2. The former was the Popper that is misread by his readers, or the Popper represented by bad readings of Popper; the latter represents the close, insightful readings of Popper, but many critics have said that Popper2 is really Lakatos himself.

Popper had said something along the lines that, scientists propose hypotheses, and these are tested. If the tests show the hypotheses did not work as thought, then this was Nature saying "No!" Think of something better. Here's Imre's rejoinder to that: "It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout 'No!'; rather we propose a maze of theories and nature may shout 'Inconsistent!'" - p.130, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. There's something telling here: in Imre's very complex epistemic formulations, we do not criticize individuals, we criticize the methodology being done within a certain research program. As his pioneering work in mathematics - in which he argued via imaginative reconstructions of actual different mathematicians' attempts to prove a conjecture, arriving at the idea that no theorem in informal math is "true" and "final," only that no counterexample had arrived yet - this was also how scientific knowledge should be worked upon. Highly mathematized, too rationalistic, too Idealistic? Maybe...

Imre thought that, because Kuhn rejected Popper's falsification and justification ideas, he'd fallen back on "mysticism" and, because Kuhn had not demonstrated a logic of scientific discovery other than something resembling a political revolution - or even plate tectonics - that his ideas were tantamount to irrationality and "mob rule." (See Imre in this passage from 1970's Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge) Speaking from my current state of confusion and ignorance, I think Imre wanted people to be as Hungarianly rationalistic as he was; however, they are not. I'm not sure they ever were. Rarely have groups of humans - even scientists! - behaved rationally in the way that Imre idealized. Scientists are humans too, with emotional stakes, cutthroat competitiveness, and adhering to party-line dogmas like Churchmen.

But now we're getting to why I think Imre Lakatos is such a fascinating thinker on the human stage. (He died of a brain hemorrhage suddenly at the age of 51.)

Eventually, Lakatos struck up a friendship with the anarchist-epistemologist and philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend, an Austrian, had fought for the Nazis, as he details in his wonderfully readable autobiography, Killing Time, eventually ending up with a professorship in Berkeley. Imre's mother and grandmother had died in Auschwitz. But Imre's and Paul's intense intellectual interests led to very heated and civil exchanges, and very many letters, all of Imre's to Paul lost, because of Feyerabend's carelessness. He said he tacked some to his walls in Berkeley to keep the rain out, if memory serves. Imre, meanwhile, dutifully filed every letter from Paul, and you can read Paul's letters to Imre in the delightful For and Against Method: Imre Lakatos/Paul Feyerabend, edited magnificently by Matteo Motterlini.

(John Kadvany's photos of Imre, Popper, Feyerabend, and Imre's Hungarian milieux.)

Despite Imre's intensely rationalistic mind, and his deep desire to take Popper's thought further, Feyerabend, a very close reader of Imre, Popper, Kuhn, and many others, repeatedly failed to see a difference between Imre's implied historical "logic" used in scientific discovery, and Feyerabend's own, "anything goes," best seen in the third edition of Feyerabend's, in my view vastly underrated Against Method. Throughout their correspondence, Feyerabend, playing Socrates tinged with Pyrrho, points up again and again that, when followed to its conclusion, Lakatos's "method" is virtually the same as his: anarchistic!

How could two seemingly polar temperaments be friends at all? First, both were deeply in love with intellectual thought, and especially dialogue. It was Imre who cornered Feyerabend at a party in 1970 and said, "Paul, you have such strange ideas. Why don't you write them down? I shall write a reply, we publish the whole thing, and I promise you - we shall have lots of fun." Paul's Against Method was his side; Imre died too soon to write his reply. Nevertheless, we can read the book of letters, and Imre's books and come to our own conjectures.

The second reason these two men were such good friends was humor. Imre's students knew that, no matter how difficult the subject of a lecture, some jokes would be forthcoming to retain levity. Feyerabend, a fascinating, irascible, complex character who I think qualifies as one of the great guerrilla ontologists of the 20th century, wrote in a letter to Imre dated 16 April, 1971:

"Criterion for being a lefty: you lose your sense of humour and become a self-righteous bastard (or bitch, as the case may be). In this, of course, you do homage to an age old American tradition: Puritanism. Now, I am un-American to the extent that I despise Puritanism, whether it comes from the right, left, or centre. 'But what about the truth?,' people ask. The truth, whatever it is, be damned. What we need is laughter. You have got the gift for laughter, even where your own position is concerned, so, as far as I am concerned, you are a good guy (and you are 'good' even theoretically, for your theory is equivalent to mine, as I have said above and in chapter 25 of my magnificent AM."

There is very much more to be said of Imre Lakatos, thinker extraordinaire, but I have gone on too long once again. I will leave by exhorting readers of Robert Anton Wilson, who are interested in his epistemology and his ontology, to maybe check out Lakatos and Feyerabend. Popper and Kuhn are far more well-known, but Imre and Paul should go a long way toward further mindcopulae, and I'm thinking especially of readers of RAW's The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. Also, as per Imre's inner working from within the logic of scientific discovery: when an idea within a research program is being tested via creative criticism and the dialectical sparks that occur therein, a progressive program will yield startling innovations. Nick Herbert talks about a couple instances of conjecture and refutation that led to innovation or new ideas that he was involved with, in quantum theory, here.

Obesity, OR: "Does Our Butt Look Big In That?" (Pt. 3)

A lyricist named Bernie Taupin once wrote this line in a song called "The Bitch Is Back," sung by Elton John:

"Times are changin' now the poor get fat."

And if anyone wants to know why or how this historical turn of events took place, it's easy to find out that  our ingenious modern era with its manipulation of science and technology has produced food at a level to mock Malthus, and cheaply, too. (In the rich countries.) Evolutionarily, for 99% of the time we've been homo sapiens it's been a real slog to capture enough calories and eat a diet with enough protein, fat, and carbs to keep us going, and the average life expectancy rose to the unheard-of high of 38 years old in Unistat by 1850. Evolutionarily, we were pretty much programmed to die by 40. Why sit around as old people and use up the precious tribe's resources? Just for your stories and wisdom? Write that shit down, grandpa, and die already. You're taking up space and it's been at least five years since you used the plow worth a damn.

Sir Thomas Malthus was a catastrophist. If you were around when he was doing his version of what Sir Martin Rees is doing now, and you were prone, let's say, to "pessimistic thinking," you might have thought him a prophet. Basically he said we humans reproduce at an exponential rate, while the rate of food production is arithmetical. It was only a matter of time before famines became common and quite widespread. Malthus was a Man of God, too...No wonder his outlook was so prone to bleakness...(I tend to listen worriedly to Sir Martin Rees, though, truth be told, but that's for another blogspew.)

                                    Reverend Malthus, 1766-1834. Sociologist, economist,
                                                         pessimist.

All too human, Malthus did his futurology and prognostications while living in what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls Mediocristan: he was using far too simple mathematics and couldn't factor in something totally unknowable but fairly Black Swan-ish: we were able to harness mind-power to produce more and more food in smaller and smaller areas, and quicker and quicker, and then transport got better and faster, and refrigeration came into its own...another futurologist proven wrong. (Temporarily?)

But in the ultra-short period of, say, 125 years, this easy access to sugar (which was always hard to find for 99% of our existence), fat, and carbs - all delightful, life-enriching and acting on dopamine levels in the brain (AKA the "reward system") - threw us a curve. We didn't know how to handle it. And then other sciences and technologies combined forces and made our lives comfier and comfier, to the point where, very very suddenly, on our evolutionary scale, we sit around all day long, every day, and eat rich, fatty food. Meanwhile, our bodies are basically the same ones we had a million years ago. No wonder we're fat!

Now we are so rich we've extended the average lifespan to double what it was in 1850, and we're dying of degenerative diseases. Now the game is not predicting when the food will run out, but when we'll learn how to handle the food. And maybe our analytical tools are more sophisticated than Malthus's.

We saw in my last entry that the NCHS/CDC say the stats showed the obesity epidemic is leveling off already. A recent mega-research paper predicted 42% of the Unistat public would have a Body Mass Index of 30% or higher by 2030, but we have reasons to doubt that. The CDC in 2003 predicted that by 2010 40% of the public would be clinically obese (BMI above 30%); the number turned out to be 35.7%

The British Dept of Health predicted in 1999 that by 2010 25% of Brits would be obese. They updated this prediction in 2006 to 33%. By 2010 the number was 26.1%. Fudge factors? Yes, all sorts of them. First off, of course, many who responded by admitting they were eating fudge as they spoke. Then again...

Some numbers were obtained by phone surveys, asking people how much they weighed, and people tend to prevaricate in that situation. Nonetheless, the numbers are probably pretty close. They have turned out to not be as bad as our best predictors predicted. Do the predictors have a vested interest in their High Numbers? Yes, probably. More money gets thrown at Public Health and obesity-related problems, and some of that money sticks to the predictors and their colleagues. But still: we have a long road to hoe, and it's not going to be easy.

                                Chicago-style deep-dish pizza: now qualifies as a "vegetable"
                                in Unistat schools, thanks to the Goliath food and beverage 
                                industry and their lobbyists. Man, this looks good right about 
                                                       now! Eh?

Why will it be difficult? Well, that too is a very complex problem, but if we look at the Goliath-like Food and Beverage Industry and what it can afford in lobbying Congress, versus the public interest groups that want to educate and restrict massive amounts of sugar and fat in schools, or curb advertising aimed at children, well, David gets stomped to death by Goliath like an ant. In the last three years, four government agencies sought to reduce sugar, salt and fat in food marketed to kids: Congress killed it. The Center For Science in the Public Interest - a bunch of do-gooders who object to 9 year olds who weigh 170 pounds already - spent $70,000 last year lobbying Congress. The Food and Beverage Industry spends that every 13 hours. Pizza is now classified as a "vegetable" in schools. According to this article from Reuters, the food/bev industry has never lost  a significant political battle, and their tactics are the same as what the tobacco industry's were: we're just giving people what they want in a free society. There's no real proof our food and drink is making people sick. They need to moderate their own intake, and exercise more. If you made a hefty paycheck working as a lobbyist for big Food and Bev, wouldn't you say that too?

Note that Ol' Captain Buzzkill William Dietz makes an appearance in the above-cited article: "This may be the first generation of children that has a lower life span than their parents."

Here are two classic takes on why we're fat, from different points of view. First, check out Professor Richard McKenzie, who may be getting some of that sweet Food and Bev money alongside his emeritus professor dough. Yes, we're fatter. On average, Unistatians are 26 lbs heavier than they were in 1960. SUVs were made for fatties. Gurnies have had to be reinforced, stadium seats widened. Because we're on average 26 pounds fatter than 1960, we use an extra two billion gallons of gasoline and jet fuel. We create much more greenhouse gas and our medical costs have skyrocketed. But, as he argues in his book Heavy: The Surprising Reasons America Is the Land of the Free and Home of the Fat, it's all due to lowered tariffs, cheap imports, and "our growing economic freedoms," which go with political freedoms. No reason to change any of the freedom stuff! (I'll let you mull this one over on your own.)

I think it's a classic, valid libertarian view. There's much to say for it. I'm not completely sold on how we're economically freer now, though. But the freedom argument holds some appreciable weight (sorry!) with me. What I object to is the ultra-monied Food/Bev lobby and their louder bullhorns. They don't want frank education about food and what it's doing to us. For guys like McKenzie, money equals freedom, but I'd like more "freedom" for the educators.

                                     Jonah Lehrer, brilliant popularizer of neuroscience, 
                                     the latest psychology, and very creative science writer,
                                                born in 1981.

From Wired, here's a typically smart article from Jonah Lehrer. Why do people eat too much? Well, we're really bad at recognizing when we're full. (That long legacy of hungry homo saps.) Also, restauranteurs think we expect huge portions, and we probably do. So plates have gotten bigger and bigger. Serving sizes are up, Lehrer says, 40% over the last 25 years. We're prone to mimicking the behaviors of those around us. And yes, Big is Good. But why? Lehrer links this to primate status-seeking, which I find fascinating. The problem is: seeking high status by getting the big serving, we get obese, which lowers status. Talk about a vicious circle!

As always, Lehrer suggests a way our of the predicament: if we become mindful of the power/powerlessness module in our primate brain that links Big Food to High Status and therefore, Power, we realize the folly. Mindfulness. It's a big theme in much of Lehrer's writings on neuroscience. But it's easier said than done.

In closing, I suggest we meditate - or ruminate? - a bit on the epigraph Jonah Lehrer uses at the beginning of his article, the quote from M.F.K. Fisher. Is it true? If so, how much do you think it explains about our obesity problem? Do you think some subconscious part of our brain tends to equate food with security, security with love, love with food?

Obesity: More Observations (Pt. 2)

When I was a pre-teen I was like a lot of kids today: obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records. (Some elementary school teachers I'm friends with say old Guinness Books found at garage sales for a dime each will keep quite a lot of 4th graders in thrall, even today. Books? Today? Anyway...)

A very old one I received one Christmas was very entertaining, and among the wonders first encountered there were palindromes, which have nothing to do with Sarah Palin. Palindromes are words or sentences or a sequence of sentences that read the same backwards as forwards, exempli gratis: "Madam, I'm Adam."

Apparently there were certain types of geeks who were obsessed with finding the world's longest palindromes, and as I recall there were some crazy doozies in there, but the one that stuck in my mind, the one I was able to remember and entertain grandma with, was this one:

"Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."

I thought this one just sounded funny: a guy calling a doctor out on his purported expertise? It sounded forced, but I guess it would have to. A long, eloquent palindrome seems too much to ask. I thought the dissenter was probably wrong anyway: a fast does make you lose weight. Or so I thought around age 12.

But now, from the current dietary and nutritional data that I think holds sway along these lines, a fast usually results in a rebound and gaining your weight back. Most starvation diets do. And they're probably not all that good for the overall body's biochemistry and its astonishing intelligence and search for homeostatis. And cod appears to be quite the non-fatty fish, high in protein and Omega 3s. The smart-aleck in the palindrome was right in calling out doc!

Lesson for the dieters: sometimes palindromes contain uncommon wisdom. Read every palindrome with the intensity of a Talmudic scholar! And if you're going to make cod a major part of your diet: you're gonna want to use seasonings, or really just anything to add a little TASTE to your meals. Plain cooked whitefish like cod tends to be beastly dull. Good luck!

                                     Cod, that old staple. Needs broccoli and potatoes?

Obesity: A Huge Deal These Days
Earlier this month a group of Experts (ut-oh!), who'd made a grand study of the obesity epidemic in Unistat, advocated a "major overhaul" of American life. I'm not making this up. Their report - which was 400 pages of fat itself - says around 67% of Unistatians are too fat, and Something Must Be Done in virtually every facet of life to "reverse trends," or we will sink under the weight of...oh, these "fat" puns are too easy and probably too boring for The Reader so I will try to steer clear.

Anyway, the good folks at the Institute of Medicine cram their study - or so I've read about - with "synergies" and how if we do this and that it will "empower" the overweight and we need to take a "systems approach," all of which sounds dandy. We also note how, when reading these reports, there's a whiff of social engineering lurking between the words. Let us not be totally naive idiots and just say it: the Food and Beverage lobbies have everyone cowed with this one: social engineering is code for brainwashing, or at least "Nanny State," right?

Right?

Let those who cower in fear at the looming ever-present threat of the Nanny State relax a little. I will explain why in a bit. (Actually, tomorrow. - ed.) For now let's just say your guys have the money.

So this Major Study says we spend $190.2 billion a year due to the ravages of obesity. That's a lot. Let's not ask about their statistical model right now. It sounds bad. Makes us maybe feel like foregoing that second helping of waffles staring us in the face.

Here's a problem they point out, and every other study done I've seen in the past five years that wasn't funded by the Food and Beverage folks: poor people (that's more and more of us) tend to not have access to affordable, healthy, decent nutrition. We can afford Taco Bell and Mickey D's. Also, and less persuasive in all of these studies: the poor - who are prone to the ravages of obesity at a higher rate than the better-off - need time and space to exercise. I can see poor kids in urban concrete canyons not having adequate space to do the exercise they want to do, but what about walking? Is it too dangerous to walk around the 'hood? There's probably something I'm missing with the exercise space issue, and I guess if you're working a crappy 40-50 hour per week job that barely pays a living wage, you will find it exceedingly difficult to find the time for exercise, the lack of space being but one of your problems.

This study also has 17% of school kids obese, which has tripled in 30 years. Separate research predicts 42% of all adults in Unistat obese by 2030, and 11% "severely obese" by then, up from the 5% now.

And according to some right wingers, we already have too much of a "Nanny State." I wonder how fat we'd be without Nanny hovering around us? Or would the Invisible Hand be guiding all of us to our correct, thin and healthy weights? I'm not seeing the Nanny lately. Haven't seen her for good long time, but people say she's lookin' good. I'd like to see Her myself. I bet she couldn't keep me from the Oreos! I'm too sly...Hey Nanny: bring it on, baby!

(Whenever I hear "Nanny State" I picture a 7-foot-tall beautiful black woman, like some African goddess. She's wearing an apron and a long, flowing blue dress with little white checks all over it. She's got a thin waist and big breasts. I find her very sexy. She's always catching me staring at her boobs and she tells me to go finish writing "that thing you're always yakkin' on about." I have no chance with her. She's not "Nanny State" for just any old reason. But that's me...)

                                 My personal Nanny State figure looks a lot like Erica Badu,
                                 Queen of Neo-Soul. She tells me when to put back the 
                                 Chips Ahoy, and I know she's right. Personification can 
                                  be a whole helluva lotta fun, friends!

Another Big Study: Time: Recently
Along with Experts at the CDC, Research Triangle Institute, International and other do-gooders, Duke University's Global Health Institute says recently that we need to try to keep obesity rates level so we can save $550 billion over the next 20 years.

Hold on. I know stats problems mount up quickly - for many independently variable reasons - but if the above study says we spend $190.2 billion a year now due to obesity...times ten years...double that for a second ten years...and I get a number quite a bit higher than $550 billion. Obviously, all sorts of differing criteria and shenanigans (<-----great name for a sports bar that sells Guinness, by the way) will yield different numbers. I know the folks at Duke used the Bureau of Labor Statistics and factored in the likely unemployment rate and how that affects obesity, and also fast food, alcohol and fuel prices.

When we boil any one of these studies down, all discrepancies aside, we're fat, and the Situation looks dire, and we really need to do some major league "slimming," as the Brits call it, a term I first encountered in that same Guinness Book. Here's a brief story a Slimmer of the Year, who, spurred on by a nasty comment from his daughter's friend, lost 12 stone, 10 lbs, or 178 pounds. Unistat Experts consider being over 100 pounds overweight as "severely obese."

Dr. William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is often quoted in articles on long term effects of obesity. He says here that - you guessed it - healthier choices must be made more accessible and affordable.

                                                   Dr. William Dietz of the CDC
                                                   He cares about our collective girth.
                                                   That's his job. He looks serious to me.
                                                   He cannot compete with Erica Badu,
                                                          though.

Some Good News!
Okay, enough with the prognostications from the researchers at the Institute of Fat Studies saying we'll all look like Fat Bastard by 2030, while the Experts at the Dom DeLuise School For the Study of the Zaftig say we'll all be "plumper" by an average of 13.7% per capita compared to today's numbers and blah blah flabbedy-flah blah. Two lovely women, one from the CDC and one from the National Center For Health Statistics (NCHS) point out that, pretty much, Unistatians' ballooning obesity rates may have leveled off already. That's something to jump up and down about until we start wheezing and have to sit down in a beanbag, right? Dig:

Recall that we have decided a rather crass way to determine obesity called Body Mass Index (BMI): take your height and weight and you get number. If you're below the normal range, you need to get into the kitchen, STAT! There's the normal range, and then if your BMI is 30 or over, you're "obese." The stats from this analysis has obesity rates stable from 1960 to 1980. From 1976 to 1980 we spiked 8%. They measure obesity every two years. Between 1988 and 1994 another spike of around 8%. (Why?) Between 1994 and 2000 a rise, but between 1999 and 2008, a leveling off. Around 2000, women in Unistat were fatter than men, but in the ten years since then, women have gotten thinner, men fatter. We're about equal now.

Enter good ol' William Dietz again, who takes the long view and compares public health education and individual consciousness to cigarette smoking. The knowledge that smoking was bad for you started to be broadcasted regularly in the mid-1950s, and between 1950- 1965 we see very little in the way of people quitting smoking. These things need time to percolate into mass consciousness before people start to get tough with themselves (with a little help from the State). By the 1980s, we began to see a steep decline in cigarette smoking, and Dietz thinks the obesity "epidemic" will see roughly the same trajectory. So we may have already leveled off.

We may have.

It could be that all the "by 2050 everyone will be built like a planet" warnings from experts are all wrong.

Maybe. This is part of why this subject is so fascinating to me: the complex of dynamic adaptive characteristics of the problem make it an intriguing thing to try and get a handle on. And the problem is so close to all of our homes. We're all in this. There are many steps to be taken, pun intended. And with the scope of the problem I think it's safe to say we have enough on our plates to....ooops! Sorry! One too many for today.

NEXT: the elephant in the room, AND: some Big Thinkers on why we're fat.

Obesity: Some Observations, Part One

I've been wanting to write about a complex problem from many different viewpoints. There appeared to be numerous topics in the physical sciences and the humanities, but I've chosen to tackle the obesity "epidemic" (note how our language has largely adopted the "medical model" over the last 30 years) for the emotional freight it carries. Fat jokes are everywhere. (I recently heard a comedienne say she greets her female friends with, "What up, fat-ass?" as a phrase of affection.) It's one of the most-cliched tropes in mainstream media: cite a new study that shows how we're getting fatter, then show anonymous shots of 300 pounders meandering in the streets. For me, there's something not only garish about this aspect of the spectacle, but maybe a bit of the sadomasochism of everyday life.

Hey! There's a commonality between many thin left-liberals and right-conservatives: they love to cluck tongues over the fatties. Then there are different levels of acceptance towards the obese. I once acted as a chauffeur for an old man who was one of the kindest people I'd ever known. He was 80 or so, and never had a bad thing to say about anyone. He was quite thin, and as I remember he volunteered to me, socially liberal but conservative about economics and his own personal finances. The worst thing I ever heard him say about anyone else was when we were in a parking lot and a very obese woman was in the midst. He leaned over and quasi-whispered to me, "Can you imagine letting yourself go like that? It must be...so...difficult!" That really was the most "negative" thing I ever heard him utter about anyone else. After studying obesity and our attitudes towards it, I now see him as in the avant-garde.

Last night I had dinner with a dear friend who was agonizing that she'd gained 20 pounds in two years, and she's over 50, has stepped up her exercising, went into too-minute detail about self-imposed dietary restrictions that hadn't worked, and of course, the emotional turmoil. The thing is: she's still relatively thin. She looks good. But she worries, puzzles over loss of control. It seems common to think we can stay the same weight throughout life. As a fact, most of us cannot. And we can't control that as we think we ought.

                              Hippocrates, who over 2400 years ago knew we all had different 

                              metabolisms and body types, and that different foods were more 

                              more liable to make us fat than others, knew we should eat less

                              and exercise more. But he also thought we should vomit to control

                              our weight: "Fat individuals should vomit in the middle of the day,

                              after a running or marching exercise and before taking any food."

I think that's maybe the most insidious thing, aside from the very real human misery and health costs related to true obesity: loss of control. Wanting to be in control in this ever-accelerating world. And you can't even keep your own weight down! 

How many times I've had to listen to my female friends wax vexingly about their perceived issues around weight! I have male friends who are overweight, but they seem relatively more accepting. Maybe they just don't want to talk about it? But I think the pressure to be thin and beautiful in this heavily mediated world is quite the recipe for depression and self-loathing. And let's face it, it's not all that interesting a kvetch, as kvetches go...

I am not fully conscious about why I have zero weight issues. (To those with perceived too much adipose tissue, take heart: I'm a too-nerdy neurotic asthmatic, who, despite thinness, is genetically predisposed to high LDL cholesterol. Also: I have not been scanned, and there's a chance I'm a "tofi"and wouldn't THAT put me in my place! The "thin outside, fat inside" finding is just one of many weird, counterintuitive things I found when reading on obesity.)

I've always been able to eat as much as I wanted and I have always been thin. In my late teens I took up weightlifting and protein shakes in order to gain as much weight as I could, with limited success: lots of muscle on bone. Even though I've reached 50, I still can't get over 170 pounds on my 6-foot frame. Why? I don't know, but there's plenty of reasons to chalk most of it up to genes. Because I don't feel "proud" of my genes (which reminds me of the avowed racists I read who say they're "proud to be white": how about taking pride in something you accomplished?), I can't summon much opprobrium for the obese. 

                                   Nietzsche had read - of course! - the famous The Art of Living Long,

                                   by the Renaissance Venetian Luigi Cornaro, who said he'd eaten 

                                   like a pig in his younger days, but now ate very little, and what he

                                   did eat was bland and virtually tasteless.  Cornaro seems to 

                                   prefigure some of the annoying tofu-addicted food-scolds
                                    I see around Berkeley. Fred N has this to say about Cornaro: 
                                  "A scholar in our time, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, 
                                   would simply destroy himself on Cornaro's diet. Crede experto -  

                                                  believe me - I've tried."

Of course, there are those who seem the very picture of gluttony, but the news out of various corners of neuroscience and genetics and other lines of thought mucks this picture up too much for me. I will give plenty of credence to the "fat and sugar act as drug-like rewards in the brain" line; or the "food as drug-addiction" rhetoric, which I find very persuasive. And addiction is not, in my eyes, a conservative Republican's simple moral issue of self-discipline. I think we'd see even more of this cant from conservatives, but too many of them are obese themselves. (Which doesn't stop them from railing about addicts of other drugs.)

And there's plenty of reasons why those the government would classify as "overweight" (Body Mass Index over 25), obese (BMI of 30+), or "severely obese" (BMI over 40, or 100 lbs overweight) feel bad about themselves. Well, not all, but probably most: the non-obese culture tends to look down on the  corpulent for reasons that seem not to do with concerns about human health and happiness, but, as Louise Foxcroft writes in her history of obesity, Calories and Corsets, from "aesthetic distaste." 

In reading a couple hundred articles on obesity, and about it in many books recently, I'm not at all sure we have as much agency as the popular culture would assign to us and our fatness. More of it seems out of our hands than meets the eye.

                                      Lord Byron, archetypal progenitor of gorgeous movie 

                                      and rock stars, binged and purged. Is there

                                        nothing new under the sun?

My study of obesity met my needs for something personal (friends and fellow citizens) and urgent (the spiraling costs of health care). It was also filled with enough complexities that I felt sufficiently "whelmed": not over- or under- . The study impinges on biochemistry, economics, public policy, environmental interactions, all-too real politick, evolutionary psychology, social perception, sex, genetics and epigenetics, neuroscience, aesthetics, rhetoric, history of diets, creative solutions and counterintuitive studies, futurology, delusions and depravity, and lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I hope to not bore The Reader and instead impart a sense of optimism that we can, if not solve, greatly ameliorate the suffering of obesity. I also hope to encourage a more nuanced understanding than is usually found in the mainstream press. As I alluded to earlier, I think the notion of personal agency is much more difficult than is generally appreciated. 

Fatness is a touchy subject, and fraught with emotion, and I know that if I write, "If this bothers you, why don't you put down that box of lard, get off the couch, and wheeze around the block, you tub of goo!," I might be misunderstood, as the Internet is filled with Missing Information; you cannot know that I would be saying this ironically, and that I care deeply about us and this weighty problem. Our problem. I also abhor Political Correctness. When a subject becomes almost taboo to talk about, I am one of those who will talk or write about it with reckless abandon. So: a sense of humor, please? Or do you think that, because I'm personally not obese - or have at least presented myself as such - I have no "right" to joke? (Rail in the comments, please!)