You might also be interested in one of my other blogs

with some very simple examples of some fascinating phenomena

https://treecircles.blogspot.com/

pix for here we are

 

 

 

What good are people?

What on Earth do we do with all these people?

Right now there are 7.8 billion people on the planet,  increasing at 1% a year, which means it will increase by another 2 billion in 30 years.

We have about 1.4 billion people apiece in China and India,  and 330 million in the USA.

Almost every problem on Earth right now is made worse by the rapid growth of population, which continues to accelerate.  

The truly bad news is that we have more people than we know what to do with, by a substantial margin, and we probably have more people than the planet will sustain right now, certainly true if they all want to live the way Americans live and burn up resources at that rate.

Aside from environmental damage,  one result is huge social unrest, because there appears to be no way countries can employ all these people.

On top of that, artificial intelligence and robotics is steadily growing more capable and replacing humans with machines, so we need even fewer people to keep things running.

In the USA,   many of the 75 million people who voted for Donald Trump were either unemployed, or about to become unemployed, and in any case felt neglected, at risk in many ways of being left behind by society or replaced by hordes of immigrants or both.

As one reader pointed out in a NY Times piece today on "unemployment benefits" due to Covid-19 pandemic in the US,   most people are not knowledge workers and are not likely to be retrained as engineers or scientists.

So, again, the question is, what do we do with all these people?  

Are they doomed to live miserable lives being ever larger burdens on a smaller fraction with jobs until the system crashes under its own weight?  By some estimates we are not that many years from such a situation.

To answer that question we might rephrase it slightly to:  What are people good for?   Is there some factor or issue or constraint which, if solved, would turn 8 billion people from net drains on the planet to net resources,  changing the picture from one of growing desperation to one of astounding wealth?

Since machines can already do the actual heavy lifting jobs for society,  we can probably narrow our search to:   What knowledge-based activity can put 8 billion people to good use?

We know that we have on the planet many problems in how to deal with various crises, as well as problems agreeing on what crises are more important than others.

So again, rephrasing and recognizing that we do have both Google and a world-wide web and that most people have, or conceivably could have smart-phones or devices to connect them to that web, we get to:

What would it take to make the 8 billion of us, connected to each other via the web, into a massively powerful problem-solving machine?

Perhaps one way to approach that problem is to look at a simpler microscale problem -- How can we get N-people working together to be even smarter if we added one more person,  for any value of N?

Right now,  we seem to hit the worst of "committee" behavior and a consequent drop in net intelligence of decision-making groups with N around something like 10 to maybe a max of 100.   There are very few ways we can fruitfully use 1000 people on any given problem and end up with better solutions than 100 people working together would produce.

So - what's the rate-limiting factor here?    Maybe some analogies will reveal patterns or insights.

Today's supercomputers for example use tens of thousands if not millions of smaller computers to synthesize effectively a single huge "super" computer.   Can we do something like that with people?  Or if not why not?

The human brain uses 100 billion neurons, working together, to solve problems vastly more complex than any single neuron could possibly encompass let alone solve.    I'll assert without proof that a human being with 100 billion neurons inside their brain surely has at least the capability of a single neuron,    so, theoretically, not discussing how exactly,  100 billion people might,  if acting the way neurons act together,  somehow synthesize an emergent meta-brain or meta-intelligence.

Is that far fetched? Or is that reasonable?   Are we not "there" yet because we don't interconnect well or enough, or because we have too few humans connected to social media, or is there some other factor in the way of collective brilliance?

Because if we could multiply our collective wisdom the the same extent that neurons multiply up to a brain, we would surely be able to solve interstellar travel and spread out to other planets ( if we then wanted to ) and reduce our overloading of Earth.

Or, are we creeping up on this emergent meta-Brain situation without even realizing it, just as, probably no individual neuron in our brain really can imagine (?) what an entire brain is or can do?   Despite our obvious battles in social media, is there some axis or dimension along which we keep stumbling to better and better modes of interaction?

Surely,  appealing to greed now,  if there were some missing app,  something Thomas Edison would refer to as the "smallest missing piece" -- as the light-bulb was to the electric power industry he wanted to create -- if there were such an app it would surely be a 'killer-app', a "unicorn",   something worth over a $trillion to the inventor(s) who could both get rich and save humanity and Earth -- shades of Total Recall. 

So modestly approaching that problem can we somehow make a map or diagram of the situation such that the SHAPE of of the missing element becomes clear or even obvious?  What function is missing in what larger almost-complete set of functions that together would span this problem?

I'm thinking here that, if we knew the specs, if we knew what this missing component needed to DO, we could then relatively easily figure out HOW to do that.    I'm exploring the idea that the real stumbling block problem before us right now is figuring out the specs.

Do we need to talk faster? Do we need to all use the same language?  Do we need a better or different language? 

Actually, if we sketch out 8 billion interconnected people,  we have in the middle a huge network of the world-wide web,  and at the end of each branch we have a dyadic pair --- a smart-phone that acts, Janus like,  on the one hand connecting to the world in WWW-speak, and on the other hand,  connecting to that particularly human being in that-persons-native-speak.

I use awkward wording on purpose here.   We have some hypothesized set of tasks that need the dyad pair  ( phone plus person ) to carry out,  that needs to be divided up between stuff the phone does and stuff the person does. 

In electronics,  there is a concept of "impedance matching" where we insert a "transformer" between a component with its native impedance or resistance to a circuit with a preferred resistance and by tweaking the transformer we match up the two so that the circuit "sees" its desired load, being as it were faked out by the transformer.    If the load is too heavy, the circuit can't budge it; if the load is too light, the circuit can't transmit much power to it -- imaging trying to convey 5 horsepower to a feather, for example.  There is a "right" resistance that maximizes the effective delivery of power, a Goldilocks level, and the matching-transformer makes the end component not have to change itself, but makes it appear to the circuit too have exactly that level of resistance. 

So maybe, our problem is that the native resistance ( in some meaning of the word ) of a human is not well matched to the optimum resistance the overall meta-brain wants to "see", and similarly on the other side of the match,  the 'resistance'  or "receptivity" of the web needs to be matched better to values that encourage and draw out and receive "pushes" from the individual.

That's just one way we might try to find analogous human and social factors to align with.

Or maybe we need to ponder more fully how a brain operates.    Often the brain is modeled as a network of neurons but that's not actually true -- the brain is a network of neurons immersed in a responsive chemical soup.

The soup part is generally treated as noise.   Maybe it's not noise.  Maybe it's an important component that is what makes the whole thing work!

Just as with humans interacting,  we have tended to model communication as the words or text-based,  language-based interaction and until recent decades, considered the emotional context and body language, etc. as noise, which we sought to reduce to zero in a 'perfectly rational conversation" that didn't evoke strong emotions.

Possibly that's a mistake.  Possibly the emotional 'soup' in which the words are exchanged is as important as, or more important than the words.  

Or maybe "phase" matters.   After all there are THREE not TWO signal encoding modes -- Amplitude modulation ( AM ), Frequency modulation ( FM) and Phase Modulation (PM).   The first two are used in radios but not the third in which the meaning of a signal changes if the 'same' signal arrives a microsecond sooner or two microseconds later.      We know that, again by analogy, when creating "aperture synthesis" with an array of discrete radio antennas,   it is critical to capture the phase information, not just the Amplitude information, or emergent super-resolution is impossible.  

 

 We know on a large scale for humans that an answer to a question of  "yes!" has a very different torque or meaning to it than an answer of "...yes" where the difference is purely the timing of the response.   We blip that as noise on most exams but it matters for human communication.   Maybe it matters for neurons and maybe it matters a lot.  ( Actually it's strange that we don't measure time-to-answer on most computerized exams when assessing comprehension of a subject.  An instant confident "yes" is quite different from a "um.... yes". Why do we discard that information now that we can capture it with computerized testing when we are already using "adaptive question sequencing" to try to deduce not just how much people know but how well they know it ? )  

So maybe the hand-held smart-phone impedance matching transformer needs to subtly be shifting the phase of each individuals communication, especially on a global scale with a speed of light limit, so that it becomes less chaotic and more coherent?  After all the only difference between room quality light and a cutting laser is phase synchronization of the individual photons and achieving and sustaining "phase-lock".

And while Generation Z may be used to everything being digital,  once upon a time in electronics and all the time in the brain,  these effects are analog.

Does that matter? It might.   Massively parallel analog signal networks may be able to achieve in real-time emergent behaviors that digital signal networks cannot.   Until we understand fully how human brains operate, we can't rule that out.

And, perhaps, in fact it is our hope for mankind.    Possibly interconnected emotion-laden analog communications between human beings is capable of "computing" emergent behaviors that networks of silicon-based emotionless computers and AI devices cannot. 

It's a thought.  It gets back to the original question -- What are people good for ( that computers are not?)  Maybe what we considered bugs  ( human emotions and empathy ) are in fact features we can exploit.

Whether its an alien artifact or a property of nature or living things,  biological swarms such as termites and slime-mold and monarch butterflies seem capable of somehow plugging into and utilizing emergent intelligence far beyond what any individual agent can deliver.  

 ( For that matter,  noting that human beings have a trillion cells but tracing backwards in time they once were all just "one" ancestor cell,  viral swarms of a billion Covid-19 bits all of which derived from a single one and may in fact still be connected to it via space-crossing quantum entangling comes to mind. How "intelligent" is such a swarm and what problems can it detect and solve that we had never realized it could, and if it uses that process can we disrupt it and thereby defeat it? )

Again, it's worth pondering. This is a central research question that deserves a place at the table. 

 

 

 

Searching for advanced alien civilizations - some thoughts

Let's ponder the question - Are aliens out there?

Why haven't we seen them yet?

Given Earth's late arrival, half the civilizations started out there could have a 15 billion year head start on us. If only ONE survived adolescence, in that time good odds they've surveyed, alarmed, and even visited the known universe and may be busy farming / nursing along it / us. If they were hostile we'd already be dead. 

Sure, I know about the Drake equation, which computes odds of survival of any given civilization.  I had Frank Drake as an instructor! ( Carl Sagan too, for that matter! ) I'm reversing the logic and saying that, yes, odds that any given one will make it may be tiny, but,  despite that, given the huge numbers we start with,  the burden of proof is on the hypothesis that ZERO civilizations have ever crossed that sound barrier of adolescence.   It only takes one success to change the entire picture.

Looking for electromagnetic waves or messages seems akin too seeking smoke signals. 

Look - by now we would have installed universe-wide GPS, broadcast wireless power, and Google++. We would have put in guard-rails against predictable catastrophes.

Knowing anthropology they'd want to intervene here, but gently and remaining invisible, again as we would so as not to destroy our unique flowering with simply a clone of their own.   From what we've seen, cultures grow stale and need injections of new life to remain vital:  new food, new music, new fashions, new ideas.  Anything but Rocky-#3,782,421 reruns!

Maybe we don't see them because the whole galaxy is synchronized to bloom at once, like a Queen Anne's Lace. 

 

Regardless, a valid Scientific question is simply this: Are we being nudged along by an unexpected outside entity? We don't need to leap abruptly to "God did it!". If we were, as posited above, how would we know?

Does 'religion' count as evidence that maybe, details to be determined, something is going on along those lines? . For example, given that viruses mutate 1000x faster than we can keep up, why are we still alive? Shouldn't we all be dead by now? Search for that sort of question, not radio waves!

So that may not be the right question but it's the kind of question I think might be scientifically valid and productive to search. In the case of that question, what's more surprising than that life started on Earth is that, despite our best efforts ( ?! ) we haven't managed to kill ourselves off yet. 

Given daily headlines, that is a surprising observation, and worth digging into.

We shall not cease from exploration 

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

  ― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Letter to editor - New Scientist - re mistaking what "intelligence" measures

 In the 16 January 2021 issue Robert Sternberg proposes some ways for
"Rethinking intelligence" ( p26),  but mixes individual intelligence
with collective social intelligence,  which matters because it is surely
social collective intelligence which will be needed to address problems
such as water, energy, climate change, etc.

He is not alone in this, as an unstated implicit social assumption is
that by maximizing the former we will maximize the latter.  However as
any sports coach will tell you,  a team of stars does not generate a
star of a team.   Interactions and relationships matter.   Similarly
airlines have crashed and patients died because professionals when
measured solo failed to form great teams.  Virtues such as  empathy, 
compassion, humility, honesty, and trustworthiness all come into play,
especially over repeated encounters.  A diversity of backgrounds
improves decisions, as does being sure the team includes women.

Socially we operant-condition people, from Kindergarten to Tenure,  to
focus on individual skills -- then act surprised when teams of them act
like committees and fail us.  In aviation and the military teams are now
trained as teams; the entity being taught is "the team".  This
demonstrably works.   Modifying STEM education metrics can take decades
to have an impact;  modifying group decision-making can be done in an
afternoon of professional coaching.  But long-term we should educate
youth in what matters not what counts.

 

Moral Distress in Nursing: thoughts on voice, failures, errors and system-level issues

 This post is inspired by a tweet from Tese Stephens ( Teresa M. Stephens, PhD, MSN, RN, CNE ) reflecting her current work on "moral distress" in nursing.

The subject of abusive contexts in teams or organizations is tangled with the subject of "psychological safety" as taught by Professor Amy Edmondson.

Her poster is here but you need an image-processing program to zoom in enough to read the text. ( it's a 4096 x 4096 pixel image! )  This is the expanded version of this tweet:

https://twitter.com/DrTese/status/1221089268740902915

 

 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPIuNZ1X0AUOHGe?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

She's on twitter as @DrTese.  Her self description is: "Christ follower. Boat Rocker. Nurse researcher/educator exploring resilience as a means to fight moral distress and burnout. Holocaust educator. Views are mine."

 

 =======================================

Before going on let me put in a plug for the opposite end of the spectrum -- innovation and entrepreneurship and solution of uncharted waters by use of virtue-driven consultation and listening to every voice at every level:

Spiritual Solutions to Economic Problems - through Baha'i consultation
https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2014/05/spiritual-solutions-to-economic.html

I think religious and spiritual factors are extremely relevant because it is precisely a strong fellowship and membership in an organization which upholds very high standards and is polarizing about it that gives a person the strength to stand up in strong headwinds and insist on having a voice.

Examples would be nursing professional organizations,  church or other worship communities, and the US Army.   It takes a village to be a strong individual, especially if it involves going toe-to-toe with a social culture that opposes virtue, or finds virtue in an assumed culture that accepts, winks at, or even worships selfishness, greed,  etc.

=================================== 

And one more totally surprising fact - the most top-down mission-critical organization in the world probably, the US Army,  uses after-action debriefings in order to hear the voices of the lowliest private as to what is working and what is not.   So if the US ARMY is capable of retaining authority at the top and still listening to their own staff, why can't every organization?

US Army Leadership Field Manual FM 22-100

===================================

 I'm an IT systems analyst ( retired ) and worked 15 years at the University of Michigan 890 bed teaching hospital in Ann Arbor where I observed first hand many ways the nurses were left out of the conversation about what sort of Electronic Health Record or Physician Order Entry system the hospital should have. 

Around the globe,  it is extremely common for large-scale IT project to fail, and Electronic Health Record System implementations are high on the list of disasters caused by failure of higher ups to listen to the staff.  This sort of thing is common across industries, not just in health care.   Arrogance of management is wide spread.

Part of the problem is that we have confounded "authority", meaning one who is an expert, with "authority", meaning one who is in charge.   In the 1800's this would have been the same person, but today the world is vastly more complicated and no person can possibly be an expert in everything, but the powerful narrative that 'the boss' is supposed to be 'the expert' massively distorts necessary conversations as dissent and well-deserve advice is taken as hostile enemy action.   

The Toyota Way describes how Honda and Toyota managed to rise from war devastated Japan to overtake the Big Three auto makers in the USA and a key part of that process was a culture of massive transparency and efforts to expose, and then fix, errors and waste, on every level, including management.     There was no taboo on a "360-degree assessment" actually looking up for sources of problems in operations as well as the normal looking around and down -- that's why it worked and that's why it was so unpopular in America.

As a private pilot myself I also had been following the literature on aviation safety as well as Amy Edmondson's work on "Psychological Safety".     I did my MPH work at Johns Hopkins and took the course in Patient Safety from Dr. Peter Pronovost which covered many of these topics in depth.   I also ended up working the Office of Clinical Affairs, a decade ago now,   harvesting data on medication administration and preparing the monthly internal reports as well as the federally mandated reports on same.

Here's an index into some of the post I wrote in the past on safety, errors,  system-level errors, etc.  I actually wrote several hundred and these are the most important and immediately relevant ones.

 

A systems-level analysis of why large organizations develop blind spots

The road to error - illustrated

The Crash of Comair 5191 in Lexington KY -- taking off on the wrong runway

The crash of ComAir 5191 - a multi-lelvel systems analysis of how things go so wrong

Comair 5191 - Confirmation Bias and Framing (1/20/07)
Cockpit voice recorder transcripts

 
Washington DC Crash of Air Florida was 25 years ago - remembered
(with links to BMJ, High-reliability engineering, TEM, etc.)  

 

On the Deepwater Horizons oil-spill into the Gulf of Mexico

https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2020/02/deepwater-horizon-lessons-we-still.html

https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2010/05/oil-next-time.html

https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2010/11/gulf-spill-report-reveals-lack-of.html

 

Hypnotized in high places - Northwest Flight 188

 https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2009/10/hypnotic-trance-in-high-places.html

 Things we have to believe to see

Why men don't ask for directions

Pisa/OECD - Why our education stresses the wrong way of seeing

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

Active strength through emergent synthesis

US - Economy of arrogance (and blindness)

Virtue drives the bottom line - secrets of high-reliability systems

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help

Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper)

High-Reliability.org web site

Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

The importance of social relationships.

Houston - we have another problem (on complexity and limits of one person's mind)

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help(my thoughts)
Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper, MIT)
High-Reliability.org web site
Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety - Texas

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Nineteen case studies of health care organizations that dramatically improved their operations through the use of feedback-regulated small-team ("microsystems") operations are well documented in another  post.

 

 

Three tips to help you make it through the day!

 We all have hidden strength - the trick is to claim it!   Here's some hints and thoughts that might help. They might not be totally accurate but they're close enough to be helpful!

Tip #1 - Don't drive on your starter engine!

Humans are like cars.   All gas-powered cars have two engines - a small electric one to get the big engine going, and the big one.    When you wake up in the morning you are running on your starter engine.   You need to get your main engine started with a totally different source of power. 

Some ways people do that are prayer,  rituals,  meditation,  and music.  

One quote I like as near as I can recall is by Martin Luther, the guy who started the Protestant reformation and the Lutheran church.   He said "Work, work, work - from early morning till late at night! I have so much to do I shall spend the first 3 hours in prayer.!"

 

 Tip #2 - Act from love

My favorite paraphrased quote from Boys Town's motto is "He ain't heavy, Father -- He's my brother!"

Tip #3 - Don't travel alone!

Studies show that hills seem easier to climb if you walk with someone else. There are about a zillion other reasons why partnering up during a crisis is a great idea.

==============

More stuff:

U. of Michigan "teach-out" on how to thrive in these hard times:

  https://online.umich.edu/teach-outs/thrive-in-trying-times-teach-out-fl/?

Music:

He ain't heavy, he's my brother ( the Hollies )

Hands ( Jewel )

Smart Meeting Rooms, a concept for Second Life

Here’s what I’m working on 

and I'm looking for collaborators!  

 
“Smart meeting rooms” in Second Life


Here's the concept:
* Current teams and meetings in RL are often not very productive

        Either mind-numbing or hostile

* In almost all cases,   remote meetings via Zoom, etc. are worse. Every day there's a new article in the news about how "remote meetings" are a massive drain on our energy.   The major reason is that they are not designed to manage the "emotion channel",  the non-verbal clues and cues we send each other constantly in Real Life interactions and meetings -- all those little grunts, twitches, shifts of body positions, tension in the face, etc. add up -- a lot!





* Linden Labs Virtual World Second Life has affordances that RL doesn’t, and that many-faced "remote conferencing" system such as Zoom or GoToMeeting or Skype lack, so possibly the whole “meeting” User Experience ( UX ) could be crafted to boost the odds of having a great meeting. 


 How could that be done?


Answer:  tilt the emotional playing field! 

 

 What can be "tilted"?  In a virtual world essentially everything can be changed, from the "room" if there is even a room,  to the avatars.  It can be changed in real-time, and potentially managed as effectively with a control panel as the lighting is for a stage play, or the audio in a recording studio.

Why meet in "rooms" anyway?   Would comfortable chairs around a fire-pit make for a better conversation?


  Every aspect of a meeting space in Second Life could in principle be controlled dynamically by a wise facilitator using a sophisticated dashboard and controls:    seating arrangement, environment ( ambient or response-sounds, lighting, spot-lighting, weather, size of room,  walls, fog , table shape/size, jungle?, city?, mountain vista? )



*  Since permissions can be given to a Second Life “Experience”, every aspect of avatars themselves could be dynamically controlled:   age, sex, size, muscles, clothing, species,  ambient and responsive-gestures.

*  In practice humans are exquisitely aware on an unconscious level of  subtle changes in other humans’ expressions, body language, or echoing behavior, etc.  As the book Nudge points out, the clues we respond to may all be both gentle-touches and not even consciously noticed to have a measurable impact on behavior.  Participants may not even realize their emotions are being manipulated.

* Someday a human DJ emotional-channel facilitator could be replaced with an AI expert system, relieving the chance that the additional person was a security risk or had an agenda that favored one “side” or another, and lowering the cost and thereby increasing availability of such “smart meeting rooms” to the public.

* side benefit - the changes in concepts, self-image,behaviors, and relationships created in SL may in fact persist once logged out into RL, so a great UX in SL could have downstream benefits as well that compound over time.

You can read more of my ponderings on what's wrong with meeting rooms and why, in my mind, that is potentially the most important question of the decade in terms of addressing how to make better decisions come out of the same groups of people, in a billion small ways, every day, as we actually learn how to work together and put our heads together and solve problems together.

Click to read; We need Serious R&D On How to Improve Meetings

The Baha'i concepts of "consultation" are quite relevant to how meetings should happen and this technology in my mind is only a way, using socio-psycho-biofeedback,  to have groups get there in a week, not 20 years, the same way biofeedback can help a person locate their alpha-rhythm in 15 minutes instead of 20 years in a cave in Tibet.     The end goal is that the people, once they grok and latch onto the idea, can carry on without the training wheels of technology

It can be compounded, so that those who grok the concept can act as guides to bring new people on-board, and if it can be done in virtual reality,  then distance is no barrier and the entire globe can tap into this way to vastly improve the outcomes of their own organic processes of decision-making.

Covid-19 pandemic response - Reprise

I believe that our personal and social responses to the covid-19 pandemic have some gaps that I wanted to address.  Here are the main risk factors for you dying from the pandemic virus:

[click the picture to enlarge it ]

In order to die from covid-19, you have various risk factors that policies like "social distancing" are supposed to address.     Briefly, left-to-right, you have odds of being exposed, which "social distancing" is supposed to improve. If you're exposed you have odds of being infected, and if infected you have odds of it becoming serious.   Most of us, 80% of us in fact, if we get infected,  will not have a serious illness requiring hospitalization.    If we were that serious, we have some odds of not getting admitted to a hospital, because it's already full,  or even if we get into a hospital bed, of the hospital not having the resources they need to care for us -- those two are factors, again, that social-distancing and "shifting the curve" are supposed to improve.   Finally,  even with the best of care, you could die anyway.   No one is looking at changing that factor right now.

What I do not see addressed in social media are the two important boxes on the left -- the ones that protect 80% of us already!    What factors would make it less likely that we would be infected by the virus if we were exposed to it?   And,   even if we got infected, what factors prevent the infection from becoming life-threatening and requiring a hospital visit?   

It's become increasingly clear that the human immune system can be depressed by many social determinants.   Here's a scholarly paper on what's known about how simply reducing stress can improve resistance to infection:

Effectiveness of Stress-Reducing Interventions on the Response to Challenges to the Immune System: A Meta-Analytic Review

Many studies show that these psycho-social,  non-medical interventions can affect both of two boxes I highlighted above -- resistance to being infected if exposed,   and,  resistance to developing serious complications if infected.

The effect of this sort of non-medical intervention is real,  evidence-based,  and in some cases quite powerful.  

So, why aren't we talking about doing something about those two things?    Studies have shown that there are many "social-determinants" of health,   such as exercise and eating right,  or overcoming stress, anxiety, and depression, which can have a strong impact on increasing our immune system.

One of the most powerful impacts on our immune system is the least understood -- the power of social connectivity and emotional intimacy to increase our odds of living.  [  That's "intimacy" as in deep friendship or closeness,  not "intimacy" in a sexual way! ]     Perhaps anxiety about things even remotely sounding sexual as research topics is a good thing -- but if it is blocking us from having a powerful boost to our immunity that doesn't require quarantines or shutting down the economy,  it's a bad thing!

I have a deep suspicion that if a company could figure out how patent and package such intimacy we'd be flooded with ads and everyone would be buying it.   As it is, no one can patent it -- its not only a power boost to our immune system, it's absolutely free, no health insurance required. 

Maybe that's why it, like the "placebo effect" -- the impact of our brain on our body which is so powerful it's the gold standard for clinical trials -- there is no commercial interest in the "product" and it slips from our attention.

The exact route by which human intimacy improves our immune system is unclear, but no one knows how aspirin works either but we use it all the time.  The effect of intimacy is not easily controlled and may sometimes be counter-productive -- but for drugs we take every day the original discovery was almost certainly a small,  perplexing effect that we spent billions of dollars on studying in order to enhance it, clean it up,  remove unwanted side-effects, etc.     Right now we're spending two thousand billion dollars on this virus problem, with more yet to come.  

You might think one billion dollars would not be out of line to spend on an effect that has shielded 80% of us successfully from dying,  wouldn't you?   Heck if we could make that number 85% of us instead of 80%, that could equate to 2 million lives saved even without needing a quarantine or social distancing.

I'm bringing our attention back to it.  If we want to reduce deaths even more than the 80% due to such factors already,   we should focus more attention on it, and maybe more dollars on advertising and advocating it, and on research to make it even more effective.

One big plus for more attention on such psycho-social factors is that, unlike vaccines or other specific drugs,  an improvement in the immune systems and general fitness of Americans provides protection against all future pandemics as well as against Covid-19.   

In fact, if you could do the math, an improvement in the mental and physical fitness of American workers probably more than pays for itself with fewer sick days and higher morale and productivity during days when employees are at work.   This kind of improvement and improved social cohesion may in fact help people, companies, and the country deal with other crises besides pandemics. 

Not surprisingly, the former US Surgeon General recently declared that the number one health problem in America is "loneliness".   You can read about this or listen to the 3/23/20 talk here.

"Long before coronavirus spread around the world, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy was sounding the alarm about a different, quiet epidemic: loneliness. We’ll talk to him about why so many Americans are suffering from loneliness and what we can do to take better care of each other even as we’re asked to be physically apart."

I should comment that I have no stock in any company that would benefit from such investment, no "skin in the game" other than my own.  I just don't see what's wrong with the logic above.  Please feel free to comment in the comment section and enlighten us all!  I welcome comments, even critical ones, or new directions, if they help us make better decisions now, when it matters the most.

Finally,  it's a little rough around the edges, but I recently published in this blog some thoughts on how to operate in crisis conditions,  when the normal rules no longer apply and nothing is where it used to be, in this post:  Tips for Reliable Operation During the Covid-19 Crisis.   These are suggestions such as "buddy up with someone", "don't trust your memory", and "be tolerant of other people who are near their breaking point and having trouble concentrating."   Please feel free to add your own gems in the comments.

Anyway...

Here's a tweet chain from this morning,  slightly amplified and annotated:

===============================

Karen Rachel Heckert

@RachelHeckert

Do Americans ever stop to think what they're doing? Would you call on an IT guy to fix your car? Drill your teeth? Fix your plumbing? So why on earth do we trust every idiot with a computer background to expound on epi?

Quote Tweet

All I don't wanna do is zoom-a-zoom-zoom-zoom

@hypervisible

· Apr 19

“While neither man has a background in health or epidemiology, the same statistical modeling that applies to fast company growth might also be useful for tracking virus growth.” Stop bros. Just stop. https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-17/instagram-founders-build-website-tracking-spread-of-covid-19

7:38 AM · Apr 20, 2020·Twitter Web App

 -----

Wade Schuette

@shuweide

·

1h

Replying to

@RachelHeckert

Great point, Karen! The pandemic has exposed a loss of American social systems which place the most qualified experts into respected leadership roles. Epi modelers are one such group. 

 https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2020/02/systems-thinking-about-outbreak-science.html

-----

That said, the entire complex adaptive social system is way larger than modeling a virus, or the collective responses to it, or recursively, to prior models, responses, etc. The risk of unjustified predictions is about 100%.

Mixing ABM and policy...what could possibly go wrong?

Invited talk at 19th International Workshop on Multi-Agent Based Simulation at Stockholm on 14th July 2018. Mixing ABM and Policy ... what could possibly go wrong?

https://www.slideshare.net/BruceEdmonds/mixing-abm-and-policywhat-could-possibly-go-wrong

 -----

Meanwhile, fixation on huge system-wide actions from FEMA to social distancing to hospital systems neglects a key intervention point -- what can be done on a personal level to reduce: (a) odds of becoming infected if exposed, and (b) odds of becoming serious if infected.

 -----

Obvious candidates are stress-reduction, exercise, enough sleep, nutrition, micro-scale mutual-support networks, all of psychoneuroimmunolgy including clinical-trial supported power of social connection to boost our immune system more than drugs.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3816362/

 -----

"Love and intimacy are [ crucial] ...If a new drug had the same impact ...it would be malpractice not to prescribe it. ... the breakdown of the social structures that used to provide us with a sense of connection and community ...are [the key.]

 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1054066.Love_and_Survival

The Medical Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy 

We all know that intimacy improves the quality of our lives. Yet most people don't realize how much it can increase the quality of our lives -- our survival.

In this New York Timesworld-renowned physician Dean Ornish, M.D., writes, "I am not aware of any other factor in medicine that has a greater impact on our survival than the healing power of love and intimacy. Not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery."

He reveals that the real epidemic in modern culture is not only physical heart disease but also what he calls spiritual heart disease: loneliness, isolation, alienation, and depression. He shows how the very defenses that we think protect us from emotional pain are often the same ones that actually heighten our pain and threaten our survival. Dr. Ornish outlines eight pathways to intimacy and healing that have made a profound difference in his life and in the life of millions of others in turning sadness into happiness, suffering into joy. 

Note - UCLA launches New Ornish Lifestyle Medicine Website

UCLA Health has launched a state-of-the-art new website to support their Ornish Lifestyle Medicine program. Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease is the only scientifically proven program to stop the progression and even reverse the effects of heart disease.

This nationally-recognized program has been so effective that the Centers for Medicare & Medicade decided to make it available to Medicare members under a new benefit category called “Intensive Cardiac Rehabilitation Programs.” UCLA Lifestyle Medicine is the first integrative medicine treatment program of its kind to receive this level of support.

-----

[ it seems appropriate here to insert a slide-show I mashed up over the weekend with a range of tips and suggestions for how to thrive in a time of crisis.

Here's the link to the GoogleDoc with the full slide-show,

and here's some excerpts from that slide show with the hot-links a little easier to follow if you are so inclined:

Learn tips for community organizing and maintaining well-being during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging individuals, communities, and businesses across the globe to work together like never before.

On this course – led by experts from the Center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan – you’ll learn how to develop practices to help you get through this crisis.

You’ll discover the scientific grounding behind terms like thriving, resilience, and compassion.
You’ll also consider the value of gratitude and staying connected in a time of social distancing, including tangible steps to take as an individual or part of a larger community

This course is designed for anyone interested in learning more about how to thrive during difficult times and how to respond to crisis effectively.

https://online.umich.edu/teach-outs/thrive-in-trying-times-teach-out-fl/

Jewel - (song)   Hands

If I could tell the world just one thing

It would be that we're all OK

And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful

And useless in times like these

I won't be made useless

I won't be idle with despair

I will gather myself around my faith

For light does the darkness most fear

My hands are small, I know

But they're not yours, they are my own

But they're not yours, they are my own

And I am never broken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfsS3pIDBfw

full lyrics:  https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=lyrics+hands+jewel

Suzanne - by Leonard Cohen, sung by Judy Collins:

...And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him

He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them...

Suzanne [ song ]

Leonard Cohen

sung by Judy Collins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkamRumVXn4

If men do not build how shall they live?   ( T.S.Eliot)

The men you are in these times deride

What has been done of good, you find explanations

To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.

...

They constantly try to escape

From the darkness outside and within

By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

…

I will show you the things that are now being done,

And some of the things that were long ago done,

That you may take heart. Make perfect your will.

Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen. 

...

In the vacant places

We will build with new bricks

There are hands and machines

And clay for new brick

And lime for new mortar

Where the bricks are fallen

We will build with new stone

Where the beams are rotten

We will build with new timbers

Where the word is unspoken

We will build with new speech

...

The river flows, the seasons turn
The sparrow and starling have no time to waste.
If men do not build
How shall they live?
When the field is tilled
And the wheat is bread
They shall not die in a shortened bed
And a narrow sheet. In this street
There is no beginning, no movement, no peace and no end
But noise without speech, food without taste.
Without delay, without haste
We would build the beginning and the end of this street.
We build the meaning: 

T.S. Eliot -- Choruses from “The Rock”

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39346786-walking-each-other-home

Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying ( Ram Dass)

( goodreads)

We all sit on the edge of a mystery. We have only known this life, so dying scares us—and we are all dying. But what if dying were perfectly safe? What would it look like if you could approach dying with curiosity and love, in service of other beings? What if dying were the ultimate spiritual practice?

Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush began their friendship more than four decades ago at the foot of their guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji. He transmitted to them a simple philosophy: love everyone, tell the truth, and give up attachment to material things. After impacting millions of people through the years with these teachings, they have reunited once more with Walking Each Other Home to enlighten and engage readers on the spiritual opportunities within the dying process. They generously share intimate personal experiences and timeless practices, told with courage, humor, and heart, gently exploring every aspect of this journey. And, at 86 years old, Ram Dass reminds us, “This time we have a real deadline.”

In Walking Each Other Home, readers will learn about: guidelines for being a “loving rock” for the dying, how to grieve fully and authentically, how to transform a fear of death, leaving a spiritual legacy, creating a sacred space for dying, and much more.

“Everybody you have ever loved is a part of the fabric of your being now,” says Ram Dass. The body may die, but the soul remains. Death is an invitation to a new kind of relationship, in the place where we are all One. Join these two lifelong friends and spiritual luminaries as they explore what it means to live and die consciously, remember who we really are, and illuminate the path we walk together.
 

In the Google-doc slide show I go off into more emotional, philosophical, and religions directions from there,   possibly or probably leaving many readers behind.

In my understanding,  extending our  emotional and psychological self out to our neighbors,  perhaps in a metaphysical or spiritual sense, making them true friends,  has a clinically proven measurable effect, a very large effect it turns out,  on our own physical well-being.

In a mathematical and systems sense,  the boundaries of our "self" seem to be unlimited by our skin, and can extend out to include other people,  groups of people,  entire religions and nations, or the entire planet... and perhaps, beyond that.

It would seem that we should be exploring not only how to be better friends with each other on a local scale, but on ever-larger, even a global scale as well.

We are all on one small planet,  and as our numbers increase it is also increasingly clear that we are in the same lifeboat, and our fates are inextriciably linked on a planet-wide scale.    The old boundaries of nation and culture are fading away,  as supply-chains,  zoom-meetings, and pandemics ignore them and simply form world-wide connectivity.

I think we should go with the flow, accept that, and figure out ways to preserve the best of our heritage and culture while the old boundaries dissolve and new ones form,  retaining diversity but also recognizing unity.     It makes no sense to talk about or rejoice in "holes in their end of the life-boat."       There is only one life-boat.      We are all going to sink or all going to survive together.

Eat the meat, spit out the bones.

Wade