Psilocybin to Treat Smoking Addiction

Saturday, February 21st, 2015

Griffiths’s lab has conducted a pilot study on the potential of psilocybin to treat smoking addiction:

The sample is tiny — fifteen smokers — but the success rate is striking. Twelve subjects, all of whom had tried to quit multiple times, using various methods, were verified as abstinent six months after treatment, a success rate of eighty per cent. (Currently, the leading cessation treatment is nicotine-replacement therapy; a recent review article in the BMJ — formerly the British Medical Journal — reported that the treatment helped smokers remain abstinent for six months in less than seven per cent of cases.) In the Hopkins study, subjects underwent two or three psilocybin sessions and a course of cognitive-behavioral therapy to help them deal with cravings. The psychedelic experience seems to allow many subjects to reframe, and then break, a lifelong habit. “Smoking seemed irrelevant, so I stopped,” one subject told me. The volunteers who reported a more complete mystical experience had greater success in breaking the habit. A larger, Phase II trial comparing psilocybin to nicotine replacement (both in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy) is getting under way at Hopkins.

“We desperately need a new treatment approach for addiction,” Herbert Kleber told me. “Done in the right hands — and I stress that, because the whole psychedelic area attracts people who often think that they know the truth before doing the science — this could be a very useful one.”

I love that last dig.

The End of South Africa

Friday, February 20th, 2015

Things are very bad in South Africa:

When the scourge of apartheid was finally smashed to pieces in 1994, the country seemed to have a bright future ahead of it. Eight years later, in 2002, 60 percent of South Africans said life had been better under apartheid. Hard to believe — but that’s how bad things were in 2002. And now they’re even worse.

When apartheid ended, the life expectancy in South Africa was 64 — the same as in Turkey and Russia. Now it’s 56, the same as in Somalia. There are 132.4 rapes per 100,000 people per year, which is by far the highest in the world: Botswana is in second with 93, Sweden in third with 64; no other country exceeds 32.

Wait, Sweden?

The Swedish police recorded the highest number of offences – about 63 per 100,000 inhabitants – of any force in Europe, in 2010. The second-highest in the world.

This was three times higher than the number of cases in the same year in Sweden’s next-door neighbour, Norway, and twice the rate in the United States and the UK. It was more than 30 times the number in India, which recorded about two offences per 100,000 people.

On the face of it, it would seem Sweden is a much more dangerous place than these other countries.

But that is a misconception, according to Klara Selin, a sociologist at the National Council for Crime Prevention in Stockholm. She says you cannot compare countries’ records, because police procedures and legal definitions vary widely.

There are other factors, too.

Anyway, back to South Africa:

Before the end of apartheid, South African writer Ilana Mercer moved, with her family, to Israel; her father was a vocal opponent of apartheid, and was being harassed by South African security forces. A 2013 piece on World Net Daily quotes Mercer as saying, with all her anti-apartheid chops, that “more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.” The South African government estimates that there are 31 murders per 100,000 people per year. Or about 50 a day. That would make South Africa the tenth most murderous country in the world, outpacing Rwanda, Mexico, and both Sudans. And that’s using South Africa’s official estimates — outside groups put the murder rate 100 percent higher. Choosing not to trust the South African authorities is a safe bet — South Africa’s government, which has been led by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress since the end of apartheid, is outstandingly incompetent and corrupt.

Of course, de facto one-party rule doesn’t promote integrity. Unemployment is 25 percent, but President Jacob Zuma, of the ANC, recently spent $24 million of public money to add a pool and amphitheater to his private home. Not long after the story broke, he was elected to a second five-year term. Think-tank theorist Leon Louw, who helped defeat apartheid, calls the crime and corruption “a simple manifestation of the breakdown of the state. The government is just appallingly bad at everything it does: education, healthcare, infrastructure, security, everything that is a government function is in shambles.”

He adds — citing “anecdotal data” — that “most people don’t bother to report crimes.”

It appears that South Africa is about the most dangerous place you can be outside a war zone. What’s more worrying is the chance that it might become a war zone. Nelson Mandela was able to hold the “rainbow nation” together, but he’s passed on. Now, according to the human-rights organization Genocide Watch, South Africa is at pre-genocide stage 6 of 8: “Preparation.”

Genocide? Of which tribe?

With the country skidding toward anarchy, naturally, the people want to know whom they should blame. In 2010, a prominent member of the African National Congress named Julius Malema revived an old anti-apartheid song whose lyrics — says Genocide Watch — call for genocide: “Shoot the Boer, shoot, shoot.” “Boer” means “farmer” in Afrikaans; colloquially, it means “white South African.” Malema was ejected from the ANC and convicted of hate speech; he has since formed a new opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, which is currently the third largest party in parliament. Seven months after Malema’s conviction, President Zuma sang the genocide song himself, leading a crowd in a musical chant: “We are going to shoot them with machine guns, they are going to run… The cabinet will shoot them, with the machine gun… Shoot the Boer, we are going to hit them, they are going to run.” Watch the video on YouTube — it is surreal. Nelson Mandela’s successor, the president of South Africa, addresses a crowd of — according to the Guardian — tens of thousands, in a giant stadium, and calls for the murder of what amounts to about 10 percent of his constituents. Among the audience, uniformed members of the military dance.

According to Genocide Watch, the murder rate among South African white farmers is four times higher than among South Africans en masse. That rate increased every month after President Zuma sang his song, for as long as accurate records are available: The police have been ordered to stop reporting murders by race. The police have also disarmed and disbanded groups of farmer-minutemen, organized to provide mutual security. Consequently, says Genocide Watch, “their families” have been “subjected to murder, rape, mutilation and torture.” Meanwhile, “high-ranking ANC government officials… continuously refer to Whites as ‘settlers.’”

Josh Gelernter recommends that the settlers form their own Singapore-style city-state.

Spiritually Significant Experiences

Friday, February 20th, 2015

Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance, Roland Griffiths, et al. found, in 2006. Griffiths’s double-blind study reprised the work done by Pahnke in the nineteen-sixties, but with considerably more scientific rigor:

Thirty-six volunteers, none of whom had ever taken a hallucinogen, received a pill containing either psilocybin or an active placebo (methylphenidate, or Ritalin); in a subsequent session the pills were reversed. “When administered under supportive conditions,” the paper concluded, “psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.” Participants ranked these experiences as among the most meaningful in their lives, comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Two-thirds of the participants rated the psilocybin session among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; a third ranked it at the top. Fourteen months later, these ratings had slipped only slightly.

Furthermore, the “completeness” of the mystical experience closely tracked the improvements reported in personal well-being, life satisfaction, and “positive behavior change” measured two months and then fourteen months after the session. (The researchers relied on both self-assessments and the assessments of co-workers, friends, and family.) The authors determined the completeness of a mystical experience using two questionnaires, including the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire, which is based in part on William James’s writing in “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” The questionnaire measures feelings of unity, sacredness, ineffability, peace and joy, as well as the impression of having transcended space and time and the “noetic sense” that the experience has disclosed some objective truth about reality. A “complete” mystical experience is one that exhibits all six characteristics. Griffiths believes that the long-term effectiveness of the drug is due to its ability to occasion such a transformative experience, but not by changing the brain’s long-term chemistry, as a conventional psychiatric drug like Prozac does.

A follow-up study by Katherine MacLean, a psychologist in Griffiths’s lab, found that the psilocybin experience also had a positive and lasting effect on the personality of most participants. This is a striking result, since the conventional wisdom in psychology holds that personality is usually fixed by age thirty and thereafter is unlikely to substantially change. But more than a year after their psilocybin sessions volunteers who had had the most complete mystical experiences showed significant increases in their “openness,” one of the five domains that psychologists look at in assessing personality traits. (The others are conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.) Openness, which encompasses aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and tolerance of others’ viewpoints, is a good predictor of creativity.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘mind-blowing,’ ” Griffiths told me, “but, as a scientific phenomenon, if you can create conditions in which seventy per cent of people will say they have had one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives? To a scientist, that’s just incredible.”

So, it’s an unalloyed good that the most important events in your life end up being the births of your children, the deaths of your parents, and that time you took mushrooms?

Occupation is the Root Cause

Thursday, February 19th, 2015

The main risk factor people think is associated with suicide attack is Islamic fundamentalism, Robert Pape says:

Religion, and specifically Islamic fundamentalism, because they witness, they observe the attackers on 9/11 were Islamic fundamentalists. Many of the attackers in Iraq, ISIS is an Islamic fundamentalist group. Well what this research found, really for the first time, is that religion is not as prominent a cause of suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader during that 24-year period was not an Islamic group. They were the Tamil tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist group, a secular group, a Hindu group. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka did more suicide attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad. What over 95% of all suicide attacks have in common is not religion, but a specific strategic objective: to compel a democratic state to withdraw combat forces from territory the terrorists see as their homeland or prize. From Lebanon and the West Bank back then to Iraq and Afghanistan today, this idea of military occupation is the leading risk factor producing over 95 percent of the suicide attacks that we see even as we speak.

Professor Pape recommends two things:

First is not make the problem worse. Before the invasion of Iraq, there were about 50 suicide attacks occurring around the world in 2001 and 2002 and only a handful of those were anti-American. Then we thought we’d fix the problem of terrorism by going into Iraq and essentially wringing the Islamic fundamentalism out of the Middle East by democratizing it. Well what happened by 2007 is that there were over 500 suicide attacks that year, over 300 of them in Iraq, which had never experienced a suicide attack before. So we made the problem dramatically worse. And in fact, the roots of ISIS and as I just told you the Paris attack, go back to the American occupation, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib. These are the ingredients, the cocktail of what we’re living with today. So if we were to then respond to the terrorism that we see by putting another massive army in either Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, these are very big countries, very big populations. Many people might think that we couldn’t make the problem worse. Oh yes, we can make it much worse, very quickly, as we saw with Iraq.

The second thing is we should be focusing on especially empowering moderates in local communities to compete head-to-head with terrorists. We did this in Iraq, starting in 2000- late 2006 and 2007 and 2008 in the Sunni community when we started to foment and foster and empower the Anbar Awakening. This was essentially 100,000 Sunnis, many of them connected with local Sunni tribes, where the United States paid individuals $300 a month to do just one thing: Don’t kill us. Don’t shoot at us. Some of these had been shooting us before. This was a controversial thing when the Bush administration did it. But this had a dramatic effect in weakening suicide terrorism, the most important effect of anything that we did. We should be doing this as we go forward in Iraq. We should be doing this as we go forward in Yemen.

The ROI on terrorism is immense — if you do in fact have a zero-sum mentality:

9/11 by all estimates, including the 9/11 Commission, cost Al Qaeda less than a half million dollars and it produced many billions of dollars of damage, not just in the loss of air traffic over the next year and a half, but in launching two major wars, one of which, in Iraq, turned out to be extremely expensive, extremely costly.

Two governments understand terrorism:

One is the Basque government. So we used to have in Spain a Basque terrorism problem. That terrorism problem has essentially gone away. It was a major problem for several decades in Europe. And in the early stages like many governments, the government tries heavy-handed military force to try to deal with the issue. Publics, of course, are afraid and fearful. The publics like to see tough talk and tough action. But that just made the problem worse. And then basically through a series of education and demographic policies, the Basque separatists, basically that political movement disappeared. And it disappeared because the Spanish government stopped treating the underlying Basque community as a separate community and started to have more integrationist and assimilationist policies.

In the case of Northern Ireland with the IRA, the British had an enormous problem with the IRA that really was just awful, thousands of people dying in the early 1970’s. And the British at first tried to deal with this problem by being very tough. And Maggie Thatcher, who was a very conservative leader of Britain in the 1980’s, was known as being a very tough woman. Well she’s the one who started the secret talks with the IRA leaders, which the public didn’t know about at the time, but ended up leading to the Good Friday accords in 1998 that essentially cut a deal for a tremendous amount of political autonomy for the local communities in Northern Ireland, which effectively ended, virtually ended, I guess I would say, terrorism that had gone on for decades. So what we have see is we have seen a pattern. And we’ve seen a pattern where states who face terrorism initially want to react with very heavy-handed force — some force, of course, is necessary, I’m not saying none — but often overreact, make the problem worse, and then over time learn.

Excessive Exuberance

Thursday, February 19th, 2015

The first wave of research into psychedelics was doomed by an excessive exuberance about their potential — which seems perfectly predictable when you’re working with drugs that cause excessive exuberance:

For people working with these remarkable molecules, it was difficult not to conclude that they were suddenly in possession of news with the power to change the world — a psychedelic gospel. They found it hard to justify confining these drugs to the laboratory or using them only for the benefit of the sick. It didn’t take long for once respectable scientists such as Leary to grow impatient with the rigmarole of objective science. He came to see science as just another societal “game,” a conventional box it was time to blow up — along with all the others.

Was the suppression of psychedelic research inevitable? Stanislav Grof, a Czech-born psychiatrist who used LSD extensively in his practice in the nineteen-sixties, believes that psychedelics “loosed the Dionysian element” on America, posing a threat to the country’s Puritan values that was bound to be repulsed. (He thinks the same thing could happen again.) Roland Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, points out that ours is not the first culture to feel threatened by psychedelics: the reason Gordon Wasson had to rediscover magic mushrooms in Mexico was that the Spanish had suppressed them so thoroughly, deeming them dangerous instruments of paganism.

“There is such a sense of authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures,” Griffiths told me when we met in his office last spring. “We ended up demonizing these compounds. Can you think of another area of science regarded as so dangerous and taboo that all research gets shut down for decades? It’s unprecedented in modern science.”

I can definitely think of other areas of science regarded as so dangerous and taboo that all research gets shut down for decades.

I also have no trouble imagining how a loosed Dionysian element could go awry. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…

Waltzing with (Leo) Strauss

Wednesday, February 18th, 2015

The first part of Philosophy Between the Lines is a simple chronicle of evidence of just how widespread the use of esoteric writing really was from the pre-Socratics through the 18th century:

Melzer presents an impressive litany of important (and not-so-important) thinkers across the centuries, including Cicero, Alfarabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Bacon, Hobbes, Diderot, and Rousseau, who either pointed to hidden meanings in their own writings, or acknowledged esotericism in their reading of other writers. He also presents some clear examples of esotericism in practice, as when Machiavelli in The Prince misquotes a familiar Bible story in a way that underscores the broader critique of Christianity he is apparently making.

This section of the book is wonderfully erudite and leaves no uncertainty that esotericism was indeed a major art that is now all but lost. Melzer points to four reasons for past uses of esotericism. First, it served as protection from prosecution; he notes its widespread use in totalitarian countries like the former Soviet Union and contemporary China. Second, it served to protect the political community from dangerous truths, such as philosophical skepticism about the city’s gods and traditions; third, it served a pedagogical purpose by forcing readers to engage on a deeper level; and fourth, it was used as a transitional strategy for modern writers seeking to undermine dogmatism.

Its greater merit, Francis Fukuyama believes, lies in the final chapter, which explains why esotericism was so important to Leo Strauss.

Seeking the Magic Mushroom

Wednesday, February 18th, 2015

R. Gordon WassonPsilocybin mushrooms first came to the attention of Western medicine (and popular culture) in a fifteen-page 1957 Life article by amateur mycologist — and J. P. Morgan vice-president! — R. Gordon Wasson:

In 1955, after years spent chasing down reports of the clandestine use of magic mushrooms among indigenous Mexicans, Wasson was introduced to them by María Sabina, a curandera — a healer, or shaman — in southern Mexico. Wasson’s awed first-person account of his psychedelic journey during a nocturnal mushroom ceremony inspired several scientists, including Timothy Leary, a well-regarded psychologist doing personality research at Harvard, to take up the study of psilocybin. After trying magic mushrooms in Cuernavaca, in 1960, Leary conceived the Harvard Psilocybin Project, to study the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens. His involvement with LSD came a few years later.

In the wake of Wasson’s research, Albert Hofmann experimented with magic mushrooms in 1957. “Thirty minutes after my taking the mushrooms, the exterior world began to undergo a strange transformation,” he wrote. “Everything assumed a Mexican character.” Hofmann proceeded to identify, isolate, and then synthesize the active ingredient, psilocybin, the compound being used in the current research.

Perhaps the most influential and rigorous of these early studies was the Good Friday experiment, conducted in 1962 by Walter Pahnke, a psychiatrist and minister working on a Ph.D. dissertation under Leary at Harvard. In a double-blind experiment, twenty divinity students received a capsule of white powder right before a Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel, on the Boston University campus; ten contained psilocybin, ten an active placebo (nicotinic acid). Eight of the ten students receiving psilocybin reported a mystical experience, while only one in the control group experienced a feeling of “sacredness” and a “sense of peace.” (Telling the subjects apart was not difficult, rendering the double-blind a somewhat hollow conceit: those on the placebo sat sedately in their pews while the others lay down or wandered around the chapel, muttering things like “God is everywhere” and “Oh, the glory!”) Pahnke concluded that the experiences of eight who received the psilocybin were “indistinguishable from, if not identical with,” the classic mystical experiences reported in the literature by William James, Walter Stace, and others.

Here’s Morgan description of that first trip:

They tasted bad — acrid with a rancid odor that repeated itself. Allan and I were determined to resist any effects they might have, to observe better the events of the night. But our resolve soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms.

Before midnight the Señora (as Eva Mendez is usually called) broke a flower from the bouquet on the altar and used it to snuff out the flame of the only candle that was still burning. We were left in darkness and in darkness we remained until dawn. For a half hour we waited in silence. Allan felt cold and wrapped himself in a blanket. A few minutes later he leaned over and whispered, “Gordon, I am seeing things!” I told him not to worry, I was too. The visions had started. They reached a plateau of intensity deep in the night, and they continued at that level until about 4 o’clock. We felt slightly unsteady on our feet and in the beginning were nauseated. We lay down on the mat that had been spread for us, but no one had any wish to sleep except the children, to whom mushrooms are not served. We were never more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They emerged from the center of the field of vision, opening up as they came, now rushing, now slowly, at the pace that our will chose. They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens — resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens. Three days latter, when I repeated the same experience in the same room with the same curanderas, instead of mountains I saw river estuaries, pellucid water flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun. This time a human figure appeared, a woman in primitive costume, standing and staring across the water, enigmatic, beautiful, like a sculpture except that she breathed and was wearing woven colored garments. It seemed as though I was viewing a world of which I was not a part and with which I could not hope to establish contact. There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.

The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and colors being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes. I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries? Could the miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying witches that played so important a part in the folklore and fairy tales of northern Europe? These reflections passed through my mind at the very time that I was seeing the visions, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses.

Apparently some people read that and think, “I have got to try that!”

The Opposite of Post-Freudian Liberation

Tuesday, February 17th, 2015

Randall Collins suggests we’re seeing the opposite of post-Freudian liberation

The more gender equality in the future, the more Neo-Victorian repression in the realm of work and politics.

Accidents in North American Mountaineering

Tuesday, February 17th, 2015

The longtime editor of the American Alpine Club’s annual Accidents in North American Mountaineering report is stepping down:

Collectively, the stories in Accidents illuminate patterns and trends. “People will often say, ‘The majority of these accidents happen to inexperienced climbers,’ but that’s not the case. The majority of accidents happen to experienced climbers,” Williamson says.

After 40 years of reviewing accidents, Williamson knows the most common mistakes climbers make. He points to several mental traps, factors that might distract a climber from looking at a situation from a safety-first perspective.

Immediate Cause of Climbing Accidents in US (1951-2013)

One is trying to please people. Another is feeling tied to a self-imposed schedule. Both of these points might apply to a guided party that included several Iraq veterans on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. The group continued despite being warned by a ranger of the risk, and three of the climbers were swept away by an avalanche (they were later rescued).

The most climbing fatalities ever occurred in 1976 — the year of the U.S. bicentennial, when many inexperienced teams attempted ascents of Mounts Denali and Rainier in honor of the occasion.

Reported Climbing Accidents in US (1951-2013)

“A lot of accidents happen to experienced climbers simply because they are rushing to try to make it to the restaurant on time,” Williamson says. He’s considering writing a book that would condense his knowledge into easily digestible lessons.

As for the publication he has done so much for, Williamson hopes it won’t change too much. “I hope that the continuing focus is on case studies, and I hope it doesn’t fall in the trap many magazines have fallen into. Some publications have so much distraction going on each page,” Williamson says.

“There’s a curious similarity to climbing, because one of the causes of accidents that has increased is distractions,” he continues. “One of my favorite recent accidents was a kid who was texting while belaying. He thought his partner asked for tension, but really he called for slack—and he pulled his partner off!”

The Doors of Perception

Tuesday, February 17th, 2015

The idea of giving a psychedelic drug to the dying came from novelist Aldous Huxley — but not from his Brave New World:

In 1953, Humphry Osmond, an English psychiatrist, introduced Huxley to mescaline, an experience he chronicled in The Doors of Perception, in 1954. (Osmond coined the word “psychedelic,” which means “mind-manifesting,” in a 1957 letter to Huxley.) Huxley proposed a research project involving the “administration of LSD to terminal cancer cases, in the hope that it would make dying a more spiritual, less strictly physiological process.” Huxley had his wife inject him with the drug on his deathbed; he died at sixty-nine, of laryngeal cancer, on November 22, 1963.

American Sniper Is An Ordinary War Movie

Monday, February 16th, 2015

American Sniper is what most well-written war movies were like pre-Vietnam:

Watch a movie like 12 O Clock High for a change and you won’t get the critique of Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, Platoon, and other similar films. You won’t even get the postmodern bricolage of Inglorious Basterds. You will get a grim, character-based war film. Or, for example, see Eastwood’s own Letters from Iwo Jima, which is not a critique of the Imperial Japanese Army (an institution far more clearly in the wrong than the US military in Iraq) as much as an attempt to relay to American audiences that there were human beings on the other side of the beachhead during the brutal island-hopping subset of the Pacific campaign.

Believe it or not, wars are not experienced by most participants as a series of Political Big Issue Statements. A casual read of many military memoirs will reveal more close-to-the-bone matters such as family, relationships and concern for fellow comrades, frustrations and bitterness with bureaucracy, a mixture of fear, loathing, and sometimes admiration for the opponent, and often crude and politically incorrect sentiments about opponents and noncombatants. When politics enters, it isn’t necessarily sophisticated or empirically accurate. It’s often black and white, fuzzy, or an afterthought altogether.

Whatever their opinions about the war, audiences used to enjoy watching movies about these kinds of people. Because they can relate to them more than walking, talking, mouthpieces for liberal antiwar critics that ritually denounce Richard Perle and Dick Cheney stand-ins every half hour of the movie. Almost every single Iraq War movie has been an enormous financial failure. But a nation that nonetheless is still remarkably ambivalent and divided about the war itself nonetheless managed to make the makers of American Sniper quite rich, if the box office gross from the last two weekend alone is evidenced. Maybe that has to do with American audiences wanting a well-made war film, not Michael Moore redux or an high-end art movie.

China’s Wealthy Parents Are Fed Up With State-Run Education

Monday, February 16th, 2015

China’s wealthy parents are fed up with state-run education and are turning to “progressive” Western alternatives, like Montessori, Waldorf, and unschooling:

Parents hope to spare their children the dull, stressful grind of the state education system by finding them something more laid-back that affords greater freedom for intellectual exploration. Some, like Zhang, have established private academies featuring curricula inspired by ancient Chinese philosophies from Confucianism to Daoism; others have opted for home schooling. With some schools costing up to $8,000 a year, more than three times the average annual income of a Chinese household, alternative education is an option only for a wealthy minority. It has thrived on the growing desire to drop out among those Chinese best positioned to lean in.

[...]

Many of the well-connected and affluent parents who have opted to remove their children from the Chinese state education system have themselves often emerged as winners from that system. That means they understand its drawbacks and perils better than most. Nicholas Chang, a former IBM sales manager, attributes his decision to quit his job and home-school his 8-year-old son, Felix, to his personal experience with Chinese schools. Bespectacled and with a youthful smile, not to mention an engineering Ph.D. from prestigious Tsinghua University, Chang exudes the self-assurance of a scholar. But he remembers his time in the classroom as one of ennui and confusion. “I never understand what the purpose of school was,” said Chang, who easily mastered its required routines but felt little interest in learning. “I spent most of my time wondering what one gains from the practice, and what should be the meaning of a true education.”

Chang is seeking the answer by experimenting with his son’s schooling. Chang had enrolled his son in a top-ranked public elementary school, but it was rigid and monotonous; Chang then tried a swanky private academy, but found it too conscious of status and wealth. “The primary role of education is to produce workers and consumers,” Chang said of these schools. “It is a factory.”

Drawn to the philosophy behind the “unschooling movement,” which grants children full autonomy in deciding what to learn in an environment free from institutional constraints, usually at home or within their local community, Chang is testing the method by degrees. His son, Felix, spends his morning memorizing German vocabulary and practicing guitar chords. (“Rote learning is still a crucial skill,” Chang reiterated). In the afternoon, Felix roams the spacious apartment, thumbing through books such as the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and the popular Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Young foreign expats stop by now and then to provide private lessons in piano, drums, and playwriting.

Chang says he plans to expand the experiment. He named his project Armada Education, embodying his conviction that learning should resemble a joint voyage between the adults, who are the proverbial aircraft carriers, and the children, who are the boats. “They are free to explore,” he explained, “but we are there if they need to come back for fuel.” Asked if he believes his method could be widely adopted in China, Chang strikes a more ambivalent tone. “I believe the way to cultivate a general is not the same as that to train a soldier,” he said. “A true general definitely does not walk such a conventional path. It requires a different set of skills.”

Chang’s view echoes the traditional belief of elite Chinese scholar-officials that education is a vehicle for self-cultivation. In the past century, as China came into increasing contact with the West, this belief often found expression through an admiration for progressive Western ideologies. A few days before the 1919 protests that sparked the May Fourth Movement, the famous American educator and philosopher John Dewey had arrived in China to promote his theory. Among the intellectuals intrigued by Dewey was a young Mao Zedong, a fresh graduate from a local teachers college and Dewey’s stenographer in Changsha. Mao, later to become the figurehead of China’s communist revolution, called Dewey’s thoughts on education and democracy “worth studying.” He carried the philosopher’s books when he opened a revolutionary bookstore in Hunan in 1920.

That flirtation with liberalism ended in 1949, when China’s new communist leaders introduced an education infrastructure closely based on the Soviet model. Teaching instead focused on inculcating a communist worldview and developing skills that would help graduates fulfill assigned social roles. Though the ideological component faded after Mao’s death, today’s education system, with its emphasis on math and science and its tendency to funnel students into narrow academic paths early, still bears a Soviet imprint.

Unearthing a Buried Body of Knowledge

Monday, February 16th, 2015

Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) met with Anthony Bossis and Stephen Ross to discuss their psilocybin trials at NYU:

Ross, who is in his forties, was dressed in a suit and could pass for a banker. He is also the director of the substance-abuse division at Bellevue, and he told me that he had known little about psychedelics — drugs that produce radical changes in consciousness, including hallucinations — until a colleague happened to mention that, in the nineteen-sixties, LSD had been used successfully to treat alcoholics. Ross did some research and was astounded at what he found.

“I felt a little like an archeologist unearthing a completely buried body of knowledge,” he said. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, psychedelics had been used to treat a wide variety of conditions, including alcoholism and end-of-life anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association held meetings centered on LSD. “Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding,” Ross said.

Between 1953 and 1973, the federal government spent four million dollars to fund a hundred and sixteen studies of LSD, involving more than seventeen hundred subjects. (These figures don’t include classified research.) Through the mid-nineteen-sixties, psilocybin and LSD were legal and remarkably easy to obtain. Sandoz, the Swiss chemical company where, in 1938, Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD, gave away large quantities of Delysid — LSD — to any researcher who requested it, in the hope that someone would discover a marketable application. Psychedelics were tested on alcoholics, people struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressives, autistic children, schizophrenics, terminal cancer patients, and convicts, as well as on perfectly healthy artists and scientists (to study creativity) and divinity students (to study spirituality). The results reported were frequently positive. But many of the studies were, by modern standards, poorly designed and seldom well controlled, if at all. When there were controls, it was difficult to blind the researchers — that is, hide from them which volunteers had taken the actual drug. (This remains a problem.)

By the mid-nineteen-sixties, LSD had escaped from the laboratory and swept through the counterculture. In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and put most psychedelics on Schedule 1, prohibiting their use for any purpose. Research soon came to a halt, and what had been learned was all but erased from the field of psychiatry. “By the time I got to medical school, no one even talked about it,” Ross said.

The clinical trials at N.Y.U. — a second one, using psilocybin to treat alcohol addiction, is now getting under way — are part of a renaissance of psychedelic research taking place at several universities in the United States, including Johns Hopkins, the Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center, and the University of New Mexico, as well as at Imperial College, in London, and the University of Zurich. As the drug war subsides, scientists are eager to reconsider the therapeutic potential of these drugs, beginning with psilocybin. (Last month The Lancet, the United Kingdom’s most prominent medical journal, published a guest editorial in support of such research.) The effects of psilocybin resemble those of LSD, but, as one researcher explained, “it carries none of the political and cultural baggage of those three letters.” LSD is also stronger and longer-lasting in its effects, and is considered more likely to produce adverse reactions. Researchers are using or planning to use psilocybin not only to treat anxiety, addiction (to smoking and alcohol), and depression but also to study the neurobiology of mystical experience, which the drug, at high doses, can reliably occasion. Forty years after the Nixon Administration effectively shut down most psychedelic research, the government is gingerly allowing a small number of scientists to resume working with these powerful and still somewhat mysterious molecules.

As I chatted with Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross in the treatment room at N.Y.U., their excitement about the results was evident. According to Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months. The data are still being analyzed and have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review, but the researchers expect to publish later this year.

“I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants — that they must be faking it,” Ross told me. “They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death — they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”

Conan the Corded Ware Maker

Sunday, February 15th, 2015

In the second half of the 20th Century, academics engaged in a concerted effort to make the prehistory of Eurasia sound kinder, gentler, and much, much duller, Steve Sailer notes:

For example, the Battle Axe culture of Northern Europe of 4,000 to 5,000 years ago was renamed the Corded Ware culture. Less invasion, conquest, enslavement, and rapine; more different peoples getting together in a spirit of sharing to teach each other their arts, their crafts, their languages, their values, their hopes, their dreams.

For the entire 21st Century, though, Greg Cochran has been predicting that when genome analyses of ancient buried corpses are finally done, the prehistory of Eurasia will wind up looking a lot less like the later 20th Century conventional wisdom and more like the fantasy world created by the bookish Robert E. Howard for his Conan the Barbarian stories in the 1930s. Howard summarized the fantasy prehistory of his Conan stories in an essay entitled The Hyborian Age published in 1936, shortly before he killed himself at age 30.

A new genomic paper suggests that the barbarians of the distant past were quite barbaric: Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe.

How to Minimize Politics in Your Company

Sunday, February 15th, 2015

Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, explains how to minimize politics in your company:

A CEO creates politics by encouraging and sometimes incenting political behavior—often accidentally. For a very simple example, let’s consider executive compensation. As CEO, senior employees will come to you from time to time and ask for an increase in compensation. They may suggest that you are paying them far less than their current market value. They may even have a competitive offer in hand. Faced with this confrontation, if the request is reasonable, you might investigate the situation. You might even give the employee a raise. This may sound innocent, but you have just created a strong incentive for political behavior.

Specifically, you will be rewarding behavior that has nothing to do with advancing your business. The employee will earn a raise by asking for one rather than you automatically rewarding them for outstanding performance. Why is this bad? Let me count the ways:

  1. The other ambitious members of your staff will immediately agitate for raises as well. Note that neither this campaign nor the prior one need be correlated with actual performance. You will now spend time dealing with the political issues rather than actual performance issues. Importantly, if you have a competent board, you will not be able to give them all out-of-cycle raises, so your company executive raises will occur on a first-come, first-serve basis.
  2. The less aggressive (but perhaps more competent) members of your team will be denied off-cycle raises simply by being apolitical.
  3. The object lesson for your staff and the company will be the squeaky wheel gets the grease and the political employee gets the raise. Get ready for a whole lot of squeaky wheels.

Now let’s move on to a more complicated example. Your CFO comes to you and says that he wants to continue developing as a manager. He says that he would like to eventually become a COO and would like to know what skills he must demonstrate in order to earn that position in your company. Being a positive leader, you would like to encourage him to pursue his dream. You tell him that you think that he’d be a fine COO some day and that he should work to develop a few more skills. In addition, you tell him that he’ll need to be a strong enough leader, such that other executives in the company will want to work for him. A week later, one of your other executives comes to you in a panic. She says that the CFO just asked her if she’d work for him. She says that he said that you are grooming him to be the COO and that’s his final step. Did that just happen? Welcome to the big time.

As he developed as a CEO, he found three key techniques to be extremely useful in minimizing politics:

  1. Hire people with the right kind of ambition.
  2. Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate.
  3. Be careful with “he said, she said.”

The last is the most interesting:

Once your organization grows to a significant size, members of your team will, from time to time, complain about each other. Sometimes this criticism will be extremely aggressive. Be very careful about how you listen and the message that it sends. Simply by hearing them out without defending the employee in question, you will send the message that you agree. If people in the company think that you agree that one of your executives is less than stellar, that information will spread quickly and without qualification. As a result, people will stop listening to the executive in question and they will soon become ineffective.

There are two distinct types of complaints that you will receive:

  1. Complaints about an executive’s behavior
  2. Complaints about an executive’s competency or performance

Generally, the best way to handle complaints of type 1 is to get the complaining executive and the targeted executive in the room together and have them explain themselves. Usually, simply having this meeting will resolve the conflict and correct the behavior (if it was actually broken). Do not attempt to address behavioral issues without both executives in the room. Doing so will invite manipulation and politics.

Complaints of type 2 are both more rare and more complex. If one of your executives summons the courage to complain about the competency of one of their peers, then there is a good chance that either the complainer or the targeted executive has a major problem. If you receive a type 2 complaint, you will generally have one of two reactions: a) they will be telling you something that you already know or b) they’ll be telling you shocking news.

If they are telling you something that you already know, then the big news is that you have let the situation go too far. Whatever your reasons for attempting to rehabilitate the wayward executive, you have taken too long and now your organization has turned on the executive in question. You must resolve the situation quickly. Almost always, this means firing the executive. While I’ve seen executives improve their performance and skill sets, I’ve never seen one lose the support of the organization then regain it.

On the other hand, if the complaint is new news, then you must immediately stop the conversation and make clear to the complaining executive that you in no way agree with their assessment. You do not want to cripple the other executive before you re-evaluate their performance. You do not want the complaint to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you’ve shut down the conversation, you must quickly re-assess the employee in question. If you find that they are doing an excellent job, then you must figure out the complaining executive’s motivations and resolve them. Do not let an accusation of this magnitude fester. If you find that the employee is doing a poor job, there will be time to go back and get the complaining employee’s input, but you should be on a track to remove the poor performer at that point.