Isegoria

You’ve probably heard of Norman Borlaug, the Father of the Green Revolution, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for developing high-yield varieties of wheat.

You probably haven’t heard of Henri de Laulanié though, a French Jesuit priest who worked in Madagascar starting in the 1960s. He found that four changes in traditional practices had a big effect:

• Instead of planting seedlings 30-60 days old, tiny seedlings less than 15 days old were planted.
• Instead of planting 3-5 or more seedlings in clumps, single seedlings were planted.
• Instead of close, dense planting, with seed [densities] of 50-100 kg/ha, plants were set out carefully and gently in a square pattern, 25 x 25 cm or wider if the soil was very good; the seed [density] was reduced by 80-90% . . .
• Instead of keeping rice paddies continuously flooded, only a minimum of water was applied daily to keep the soil moist, not always saturated; fields were allowed to dry out several times to the cracking point during the growing period, with much less total use of water.

The effect of these changes was considerably more than Borlaug’s doubling of yield:

The farmers around Ranomafana who used [these methods] in 1994-95 averaged over 8 t/ha, more than four times their previous yield, and some farmers reached 12 t/ha and one even got 14 t/ha. The next year and the following year, the average remained over 8 t/ha, and a few farmers even reached 16 t/ha.

Seth Roberts’ point is that Henri de Laulanié resembled a personal scientist:

Like a personal scientist, he cared about only one thing (improving yield). Professional scientists have many goals (publication, promotion, respect of colleagues, grants, prizes, and so on) in addition to making the world a better place. Like a personal scientist, de Laulanié did small cheap experiments. Professional scientists rarely do small cheap experiments. (Many of them worship at the altar of large randomized trials.) Like a personal scientist, de Laulanié tested treatments available to everyone (e.g., butter). Professional scientists rarely do this. Like a personal scientist, he tried to find the optimal environment. In the area of health, professional scientists almost never do this, unless they are in a nutrition department or school of public health. Almost all research funding goes to the study of other things, such as molecular mechanisms and drugs.

Personal science matters because personal scientists can do things professional scientists can’t or won’t do. de Laulanié’s work shows what a big difference this can make.

(Hat tip to Aretae.)

Relationship researchers have developed a fast friends protocol, which helps establish a feeling of closeness between strangers in about 45 minutes:

Researchers give people working in pairs three sets of 12 questions written on index cards. The questions must be answered in order, with partners taking turns answering each question.

Questions in the first set are only slightly personal (“Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say?” “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”). In the second set, they are a little more personal (“What is your most terrible memory?” “Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?”). The last set is personal (“When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?” “Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find the most disturbing?”). Each set of questions also includes a relationship-building exercise (“Tell your partner what you like about them”).

The point is to build connection gradually, even if it’s happening in a 45-minute window.

“You want to be slow and reciprocal,” says Arthur Aron, professor of psychology at Stony Brook University, in New York, who developed the protocol. “If you disclose too much too fast, you put someone off.”

A Berkeley version of the protocol includes two lists of questions.  Here’s the first:

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
7. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take 4 minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
12. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

Here’s the second:

1. Do your close friends tend to be older or younger than you?
2. Does living as if you control your own destiny lead to a more powerful life?
3. If you could choose the sex and physical appearance of your soon-to-be-born child, would you do it?
4. What would your ideal or perfect life be like?
5. How many times a day do you look at yourself in the mirror?
6. Would you be willing to have horrible nightmares for a year if you would be rewarded with extraordinary wealth?
7. What sorts of things would you do if you could be as outgoing and uninhibited as you wished?
8. What important decision in your professional life have you based largely upon your intuitive feelings? What about in your personal life?
9. While on a trip to another city, your spouse (or lover) meets and spends a night w/ an exciting stranger. Given they will never meet again, and you will not otherwise learn of the incident, would you want your partner to tell you about it?
10. Do you judge others by higher or lower standards than you judge yourself? Why?
11. How do you feel when people like you because they think you are someone you are not?
12. How many children do you hope to have? Do you know what you will name them? If yes, what?

Several distinctive East Asian traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts — can be traced back to a mutation in the EDAR gene that occurred about 35,000 years ago:

The Broad team engineered a strain of mice whose EDAR gene had the same DNA change as the East Asian version of EDAR.

When the mice grew up, the researchers found they did indeed have thicker hair shafts, confirming that the changed gene was the cause of East Asians’ thicker hair. But the gene had several other effects, they report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Cell.

One was that the mice, to the researchers’ surprise, had extra sweat glands. A Chinese member of the team, Sijia Wang, then tested people in China and discovered that they, too, had more numerous sweat glands, evidently another effect of the gene.

Another surprise was that the engineered mice had less breast tissue, meaning that EDAR could be the reason that East Asian women have generally smaller breasts.

East Asians have distinctively shaped teeth for which their version of EDAR is probably responsible. But the mice were less helpful on this point; their teeth are so different from humans’ that the researchers could not see any specific change.

The finding that the gene has so many effects raises the question of which one was the dominant trigger for natural selection.

Dr. Sabeti said the extra sweat glands could have been the feature favored by natural selection, with all the other effects being dragged along in its train.

The imagery of a meteor streaking across the Russian sky is indeed striking:

As Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch points out, much of the video has been shot by ordinary people — specifically with dashboard cameras:

The dash cam has become a familiar presence in Russia. It’s grown in popularity as a way for drivers to help protect themselves in cases where they have car accidents, or have been pulled over by corrupt police and demanded to pay “fines” for alleged illegal driving, by recording what it is that actually happened.

A larger meteorite could leave (some of) us the problem of bootstrapping society.

We need to beware low-risk hazards — if they’re frequent, low-risk hazards, as Jared Diamond learned in New Guinea:

I first became aware of the New Guineans’ attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest when I proposed pitching our tents under a tall and beautiful tree. To my surprise, my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us.

Yes, I had to agree, it was indeed dead. But I objected that it was so solid that it would be standing for many years. The New Guineans were unswayed, opting instead to sleep in the open without a tent.

I thought that their fears were greatly exaggerated, verging on paranoia. In the following years, though, I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view.

Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.

I now think of New Guineans’ hypervigilant attitude toward repeated low risks as “constructive paranoia”: a seeming paranoia that actually makes good sense. Now that I’ve adopted that attitude, it exasperates many of my American and European friends. But three of them who practice constructive paranoia themselves — a pilot of small planes, a river-raft guide and a London bobby who patrols the streets unarmed — learned the attitude, as I did, by witnessing the deaths of careless people.

So an older man, like Diamond, needs to beware the dangerous shower:

Life expectancy for a healthy American man of my age is about 90. (That’s not to be confused with American male life expectancy at birth, only about 78.) If I’m to achieve my statistical quota of 15 more years of life, that means about 15 times 365, or 5,475, more showers. But if I were so careless that my risk of slipping in the shower each time were as high as 1 in 1,000, I’d die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy. I have to reduce my risk of shower accidents to much, much less than 1 in 5,475.

[...]

It turns out that we exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control, that cause many deaths at once or that kill in spectacular ways — crazy gunmen, terrorists, plane crashes, nuclear radiation, genetically modified crops. At the same time, we underestimate the risks of events that we can control (“That would never happen to me — I’m careful”) and of events that kill just one person in a mundane way.

Having learned both from those studies and from my New Guinea friends, I’ve become as constructively paranoid about showers, stepladders, staircases and wet or uneven sidewalks as my New Guinea friends are about dead trees. As I drive, I remain alert to my own possible mistakes (especially at night), and to what incautious other drivers might do.

My hypervigilance doesn’t paralyze me or limit my life: I don’t skip my daily shower, I keep driving, and I keep going back to New Guinea. I enjoy all those dangerous things. But I try to think constantly like a New Guinean, and to keep the risks of accidents far below 1 in 1,000 each time.

Modern communication technology magnifies rare, spectacular risks, Bruce Schneier adds, and one of his commenters continues on that line:

Human beings seem to have a limited bandwidth for hearing about threats — about three per day seems to be the limit, what you can fit into a five minute news segment. Those news segments are prioritised by severity, not probability and severity, and so the events we hear about are the rare, extreme ones, not the ones that are an actual threat.

In our modern scientific world, the human need for ritual is typically denied and scoffed at, Al Fin notes, but a ritualistic inclination is built into our species:

Imagine you are a five-year-old being led into a small office. A woman with a warm smile shows you an assortment of strange objects. Some of them are shiny. You feel like playing with them. That’s OK, that’s allowed. Soon the friendly lady takes the objects away and says she wants to show you a video. On the screen is another woman. She has an identical set of objects lined up neatly in a row and she’s doing odd things with them — she lifts one and taps it on another, then puts it back and takes something else, twirling it in a peculiar fashion before replacing it. This goes on for some time. Then the strange objects are pushed back towards you and the lady says: ‘It’s your turn.’ What would you do?

If you were a five-year-old, you would imitate at least some of the actions you observed in the video. No instruction would be necessary. And yet, the behaviour doesn’t appear to achieve anything. The psychologist Cristine Legare and I have been working together for several years trying to understand why young test subjects bother to copy it. Our starting point is that they treat it as a convention of some kind. That is to say, they adopt what we call ‘the ritual stance’, imitating without questioning the purpose of the actions.

In our experiment, however, the behaviour of the woman in the video is ambiguous. Children can’t be sure it if is oriented to a goal or not. A surprisingly simple shift helps them to decide: we just alter the last move in the sequence. If the woman puts the last object into a box, it looks like the whole procedure was just a ‘funny’ way of putting an object away. We call this the ‘instrumental condition’. On the other hand, if the objects all end up back where they were originally placed, the whole action sequence appears not to have any tangible purpose. We call this the ‘ritual condition’. When the start and end states are identical, children are more confident that the demonstration on the video should be interpreted as a kind of ritual. And guess what? They copy it much more faithfully, and are less inclined to try out variations on their own initiative.