Blocked

[Originally written 12/11/12 and published after noticing it was just a draft]

Listening to Freakonomics (and reading the book) has reinforced an idea of mine.  They often talk about the fact that a real analysis of some situation or system in society gives us answers that we don't like to hear.  They site examples and raise questions like, "is college worth it?" and "did the legalization of abortion lower crime?"  Things that may be reasonable and true, but that people repel away from.

Society is built on a lot of erroneous assumptions that we are more comfortable with than the truth.

I see a lot of problems that have solutions that are Soloman's baby solutions.  If you'd just be willing to cut the baby in half, you could solve the problem, but no one would be happy and no one is willing to do it.  The difference is that some of the solutions I can come up with are not going to sacrifice any babies.

Take abortion, for example.  The problem is that some people find abortion to be equal to murder and feel that it should never be allowed.  While you would have a hard time finding anyone that would tell you that abortion is a great thing, you have a lot of women each year that choose to do it as a way to prevent other problems.  While there are probably some that do it because they were not wise with birth control, and this is the whoops method of birth control, that's pretty hard to defend.  Many do it because they are not ready and feel they would not make a good parent, and trying to raise a child would limit their ability to get an education and place themselves firmly in the middle class.  Other's should not even consider bringing life into the world, as they are completely irresponsible or addicted to drugs.

My thought is that in an ideal world, there wouldn't be a need for abortions, but there also would not be any unwanted children brought into the world.  We talk about human rights, and I believe one of the most elusive human rights should be that each child should know that their parents really wanted them to come into the world.  This follows one of my other theories that one of our primary problems is that there are just too damned many people to begin with, so saying life is precious clearly is not how we're treating it.  Life is common.  We should treat it like it's more precious, and we should make it more rare, rather than more common.

My solution to the abortion divide is that we put children on birth control as soon as they are able to conceive.  Once they are 18, married or in a stable relationship, and financially secure (or in a position to expect to be financially secure), then they can be taken off birth control.  And I don't just mean women, I mean men, too.  My fantasy solution would solve another large problem, solving a lack of male control over procreative decisions.  This imbalance must be responsible for a portion of the divorce rate for men who are pressured into having families that they do not want.  The default should be that you're not able to have children until everyone involved is ready and agrees.  Then you could plan for the timing make it happen without undue complications or unwanted circumstance.

If you follow the consequences of this line of thinking, it solves a whole host of problems, not the least of which is teen pregnancy and children having babies.

Enacting a public policy that makes birth control mandatory for all pubescent teens under the age of majority will never happen.  The problem is that everyone feels their position has to be respected and because of this, no compromise is possible.  The "do nothing" option is the default.  I'm not saying that solutions such as these do not have problems inherent in them or will not need to be administrated fairly and subject to modification or exception in some cases.  I'm saying that you have to be careful doing these things, and you have to state up front what your intent is, and then you have to monitor the unintended consequences and adjust your approach along the way.  But over all, you have to make some decisions and put some policies in place that will seem strange at first, but solve the problem in the long run.  Good solutions will take into consideration objections from each end of the political spectrum, and find answers that address most concerns while moving society forward.

I do believe a world in which every person is brought up knowing they were planned for, had high hopes pinned on, and were loved before and after they were conceived would be a much nicer place to live.

The Value of an Individual: A Thought Experiment

I hate politically divisive subjects.  I hate the thought that people pick sides, stop thinking about the subject critically, and actively resist any information or argument that does not already support their position.  I find it more interesting to be able to disagree with someone, and yet exchange points of view and discuss the subject.

I hate all the debate about health care.  Is it a right or a privilege?  If you can't afford it, should you do without it?  If you provide it to people that can't afford it, how does society afford it?  What do you do about end of life care, where costs usually explode in the last months of a person's life?  If there is a concensus that a person is terminally ill, and no matter what you do they will still only life a short time, do we (assuming society has anything to say about it since they are paying the bills, or assuming an insurance company has anything to say about it because they too are paying the bills) still throw an extreme amount of effort at someone just to try to be doing something?

Well, I have a mixture of opinions, confusion, and ambivalence about these questions myself, but it's not really important what I think (to anyone but me - which is my point: who cares what I think).

I was pondering immortality (or near immortality).  As a counterpoint to overpopulation.  I believe our current medical studies will provide treatments that will reverse general aging in humans before much longer.  I crafted this thought experiment in my mind after listening to some opinions about three weeks ago, and today a Dan Carlin Common Sense Podcast came out that pondered a similar question and reminded me about my thoughts.  His point was to ask what happens when a human accumulates 500 years worth of experience, how does that change them?

My point was looking at how we would manage immortality treatments.  I'm assuming that this would be a one time procedure (possibly not a valid assumption, as it could be something that required maintenance) and that it would be expensive.

I imagined a debate about this treatment.  Assuming that it would be in great demand, and assuming that some form of governmental regulation or oversight of the procedure would be enacted, how would this work?  Who merits the treatment?  From a simplistic point of view, I was thinking in terms of a simple cash balance sheet.  Who is contributing to society and who is taking from society.  This debate comes up from time to time when people are discussing taxes, unemployment, and welfare.  I have heard the opinion that we should limit people who are a net drain on the economy or the government taxation versus benefits equation.  From a simple cost control and regulation of the benefits of health care, would the same question be applied to immortality treatments.

Think about it from a practical standpoint.  If you had to limit this in some way, if this was not something that was possible to provide to everyone, how would you determine who you provided it to?  What if some prominent party or person was rallying to prevent the "takers" from being immortal and thus permanent takers, a permanent drain on society?  What if simple planetary survival dictated that this was necessary?  As a side note, would it be reasonable to require that those that requested and were granted immortality would also have to give up any future procreation?  Would this be another separation point, a class of people who would live and die limited lifespans, but would procreate?  They would continue to mix genes and promote our evolution, so there would be some value to have a separation, the price of making a family being eventual death.

But let's say that the notion that one had to be a net contributor took hold and was determined to be a requirement.  Can you imagine how that would work?  How would you determine net worth to society?  How would you determine who was a drain?  Some might suggest just looking at a tax return, but if you used wealth as the only dividing line, wouldn't that be a recipe for a world with an increasing number of people incapable of doing ordinary labor?

How do you measure the intangibles?  Stephen Hawking would not be someone you would want to keep around forever from a standpoint of his physical contributions, but what would a few hundred years of life extension do to his ability to discover new things?  What about love?  What about people with no commercial or capitalistic success that are nevertheless loved more intensely than many are?  You have to admit that many people have a higher emotional value to society, like Nelson Mandela, for example.  Or Mother Teresa.  How would you value them?

Who gets to be immortal?  How would you answer that question?  What other answers that other people may come up with would be offensive to you?

What would you require of people who opted to be immortal?  Would you limit their wealth, because compound interest is often heralded as the vehicle to wealth, and if you live forever, does your wealth just keep increasing without limit?  Would they have a retirement age?  If you didn't, you'd have a perpetual social security drain on the system, far beyond the amount the individual ever put into the system.  What if your price for immortality was that you could never rest, relax, slow down, take it easy?  What if retirement had to be sacrificed to justify immortality?

I think in reality, as a practical matter, people would not want to live forever.  I think some would try for it, but I believe that rather than accumulating more and more experience and becoming uber-wise, they might tend to get burned out and tired of learning and working.  Many would become depressed and decide they were tired of life.  If life wasn't always threatening to be withdrawn from you, would you tend to cling to it less tightly?  Would dangerous pursuits be more attractive at some point?  Sky diving or climbing mountains would suddenly seem more attractive, or perhaps something truly dangerous like shark wrestling.

Are we even equipped to handle an extremely long life time?  Would we tend to go insane from cumulative stress or pain?  Perhaps it wouldn't be immortality, but just doubling or tripling your life span.  Would that change all the calculations?  Could materialism be lessened by immortality?  Could it be that the pursuit of experiences, achievements, or accomplishments would start to be more important than things?  Of course, if you lived long enough, your things would be rotting and breaking down and would need replacement.

I don't know my answers to any of these questions, because each answer I've proposed to myself has good and bad points to it.  I don't know if immortality would be a good thing or a terrible thing.

I do know that I would want to try it myself.  I would want to see where we are going with this life, with our global society, with the planet we inhabit.  I want to see flying cars, free energy, a restored environment, space colonization, ocean colonization, and a possible collective intelligence.  I assume that if humans were going to live a long time, they'd take better care of the planet, themselves, and each other.

Oh, and I assume immortality doesn't mean you live forever in the body of a 100 year old with failing physical and mental capabilities.  If you can't be in reasonably good health, there's no point to the whole exercise.  I'm not sure about pets.  Do you want your dog to live forever with you?

We're of an age.  This question may actually have to be addressed in my lifetime.

Folding Proteins

I recently heard a podcast about folding proteins.  It was an interview of a company that thinks their scientists have figured out a therapy to refold misfolded proteins in an animal's body.  Protein folding is a complex subject I won't try to pretend that I understand well.  What I do understand is fascinating.  I've been studying starch lately, and I know that when you heat starch up to a high enough temperature, it denatures, which means that the way it is folded becomes unraveled.  This is why your jello pudding goes from liquid to a gel.  DNA does this complex dance when cells divide, where it unwraps itself and rewraps itself back into a double helix that is wound around itself in a complex pattern.  I liken the close up view of a strand folding to the way a stream sometimes meanders in a valley, looping back on itself.

There are two other instances of protein folding that I know about.  One is prion based diseases like Mad Cow Disease and its human form, Creutzfeldt–Jakob's disease (also known as Chronic Wasting Disease in deer).  I once heard that the prion acts a little bit like a virus, except that it's not even RNA, it's just a protein, but its misfolded shape spreads once it's in a new host, and the misfolded proteins damage the functionality of the brain.  I don't think that is an accurate scientific description, and I'm not certain that the disease is even understood in that much detail at this time, but that's an approximation of some descriptions I've heard in the past, and I was impressed with the knowledge that the good protein and the bad protein are the same combinations of atoms in the same order, in effect the same molecular description, but just folded into a different shape, and therefore not chemically equal.  I find this to be fascinating.  It makes biology seem like a miracle when you consider that everything must work perfectly in order to work at all.  I guess it's not that surprising that shape matters, if you consider anything else you were going to make, just throwing the ingredients together in a pile means nothing, they have to be assembled into the right structure.  You couldn't just throw bricks and mortar together hap hazardously and expect to make a house.

The other protein folding disease I have heard about is Alzheimer's Disease.  Again, this may not be the correct understanding of the situation as it is now understood, and the scientific community will no doubt understand the biochemistry and mechanics of this disease much better some day than is understood right now.  From what I understand, there are amyloid plaques present in Alzheimer's victims that were thought to be related to misfolding proteins (I may be confusing this with tau protein tangles - I'm not researching this column, just writing it from memory).  One theory is that once the misfolded form is present in the brain that it spreads and disrupts the healthy function of the brain.

The company I started to explain about above is saying that they have come up with a way to refold proteins.  They claim that the body makes misfolded proteins all the time, and in most cases, the body recognizes the error and holds the proteins aside until it can break them back down into their building blocks and recycle them or dispose of them.  If they can perfect and target this therapy, there are many other diseases and conditions that could be treated.  It's really cool technology.

But the trivial reason I sat down to write this post is a bit different that folded proteins.

I was recently travelling, and one of the people at our meeting during the day begged off going to dinner because he said that he thought that his diverticulitis was acting up.  My understanding is that this means that there is a pocket in the intestines that forms a little closed off sack and gets something irritating in it, which then causes the intestinal wall to swell and further trap a portion of material.  This can cause breakdown of the intestine wall and subject that closed off portion to an infection.  This is why you should eat a diet high in fiber, kids.  Gotta keep things moving along and scoured out clean.

Anyway, I got very sick after going to dinner that night.  This started a gastrointestinal ordeal that lasted 5 days.  Did I eat something bad?  Did I have a shellfish allergy that I did not know about?  Did I catch some bug that was going around?  The guy I talked with that day was sick, maybe not with a chronic condition, but with something infectious.  Then I did something truly stupid on the way home.  While at the airport, I got a bag of Skittles.  I suspect that candies that have chemical thickeners in them could create partial blockages, creating a painful situation similar to Diverticulitis.  I had previously vowed to stay away from such foods, but unfortunately, had forgotten my vow and had not maintained healthy habits right at a time when I was already in distress.  So while feeling absolutely terrible for a few days, I spent a lot of time wondering if I needed to go see a doctor or if this was something that would resolve with a little time.  I read a lot of reports on the Mayo Clinic's site and wondered if it was possible that I had ingested some Salmonella (how could that be, and yet I was still somewhat functional - doesn't that stuff kill you?).  I wondered about the status or structure of my cilia lining my intestines.  You can really damage them, and within a few days, they will grow back.  I pondered celiac disease, and how that allergy can also damage cilia.

Then it all cleared up and I got better.  I was still thinking about it today, and I pondered the way the intestines loop around the abdominal cavity, packing such a long organ into such a tight space.  I was wondering how hard it is to have it get twisted or kinked and why it doesn't happen more often.  If you're out of shape with extra weight, it stands to reason that you're probably smashing or pinching your intestines, so why doesn't being morbidly obese tend to kill you?  How does being in shape help with the layout and routing of the intestine in the abdomen?  Does the routing change over time?  If you could trace out the path the way a kid traces a maze on a page, would it be different today that it was when you were little?  Would a group of 10 people each have different routing of their intestines, or would most people tend to have an identical route?

And then I put the two subjects together and wondered about how similar the folding of proteins is to the folding of intestines.  Is this a macro example of the same kind of phenomena?  How much do we really know about the shape of proteins' folds?  There is a website that crowdsources examination of protein folding possibilities, I've heard about it and done similar websites like Zooniverse, but I've never looked at it.

This just proves that you have a lot of time to think about shit when you're sick.