-
Real Anti-Racism:
Posted in Thoughts
Shaking the hand of someone you disagree with isn’t as much fun as shouting them down, but it is far more effective.
When you live in small groups on the savanna, as our ancestors did for most of our evolutionary history, it pays to be suspicious of strangers. Other groups were competition. Strangers didn’t drop by for a cup of tea and a friendly chat about our emotional well being. We couldn’t afford to see a stranger as a real person at all. It was an “us versus them” world. Fear and aggression were the only rational responses. People who did well in that world (AKA our ancestors, the people from whom we get our DNA), knew that the only safe thing was to beat strangers with a club first and ask questions later.
Fear of “The Other” is hardwired, and talking about it doesn’t help.
We may not live in small groups on the savanna any more, but our brains don’t know that. For better or worse we are stuck with our evolutionary baggage. Nothing is going to change that. When you encounter someone who your brain perceives as “other”– and by this I mean you personally, dear reader, as well as myself and every other human on the planet — all of that machinery jumps to life in milliseconds. Long before we are consciously aware of anything, our brains are screaming “Danger Will Robinson! Danger!”
Call this tribalism. Call it racism. Call it in-group/out-group dynamics. Call it identity politics. Call it polarization. Call it whatever you like. It all comes down to the same thing. When we perceive someone as other our reactions are hard wired, preconscious, and impossible to turn off.
Good intentions don’t matter. Get high and sing Kumbaya all night. Talk about it until the cows come home. Hold workshops. Post platitudes or scream about it on the internet. If you want to judge the effectiveness of those strategies all you have to do is pick up the paper. The louder the mob screams, the more ground they lose. We’ve tried those approaches. They make things worse, not better.
Quoting Einstein’s famous parable, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
There is only one solution: Humanize yourself by embracing the humanity of others.
If you perceive someone as other you will respond to them as a threat. There’s nothing we can do about that. Or is there? Take a step back and the answer is obvious. We can’t change how we react to other, but we can change who we perceive as other.
There is going on 70 years of really fascinating sociological, psychological, political and even neurological research that all supports the same conclusion: If you know and respect someone, it’s hard not to care about them. Break bread together, laugh together, talk deeply, listen, show respect (even when it’s difficult), build bridges, find common purpose and work arm in arm.
I could dig into that research, but mercifully for you I won’t. Instead I am going to share an uplifting and illustrative story of what effective anti-racism really looks like.
How did a Black musician change the hearts of hundreds of Klansmen?
Daryl Davis is a Black blues and jazz musician with a very strange hobby. He goes to events like KKK rallies not to shout or protest, but to listen, shake hands, talk, and befriend. Literally hundreds of the Klan members who Daryl Davis has become friends with have renounced the Klan. He has a large collection of their robes, including the robe of a man who, when they met, was the Grand Wizard himself.
Read that last sentence again. Then if you honestly care about fighting racism you owe it to yourself to invest 18 minutes and listen to Daryl Davis’s story in his own words.
This is not your Woke friend’s Anti-Racism.
It feels good to gang up and shout at people. The difference between the shouters and the shoutees makes it really easy to tell who is “us” and who is “them.” Our brains love that. The dopamine flows like a river.
But that is not what Daryl Davis did. There was no shouting about racism. Terms like “White privilege” and “White fragility” were never used. Daryl Davis never complained about microaggressions or political correctness. DEI workshops were not part of the program. Mr. Davis did not wear his feelings on his sleeve. Quite the contrary, Daryl Davis listened even to open hatred and tried to understand where it was coming from. There was no talk of victims and oppressors. There were no social media attacks or calls for deplatforming. There was no virtue signaling about Wokeness.
Instead, Daryl Davis treated those who were predisposed to hate him with dignity and respect. He listened. He questioned. He befriended. He humanized himself by seeing and acknowledging the humanity of others, including those with whom he deeply disagreed. In the process he did what few have ever accomplished. Daryl Davis changed the hearts of hundreds of the most committed racists in the nation.
This is what real, effective anti-racism looks like. And as Davis mentions at the end of his talk, if he can do it, so can we.
-
Watching Rome Burn & Hell Freeze
Posted in For Your Consideration
What do record fire seasons in the West, record hurricane seasons in the Atlantic, record winter storms in the South and the hottest years in history have to do with each other? Everything.
This article originally appeared in the December 2019 issue of my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.
Schools in the Time of COVID
Posted in Thoughts
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. Yes, schools are desperately important to kids. No, COVID-19 doesn’t care, and COVID is making the rules right now. Attempts to open schools this fall will fail of their own accord. The relevant question is how to meet the needs of children, families and the community in the face of that reality.
COVID-19 Arrives
Posted in Thoughts
Currently new cases of COVID-19 in Arizona are doubling every 7 days. ICU beds in the state are already full. The rest of the country isn’t that far behind us. You do the math.
Correctly Predicting Failure
Posted in Thoughts
Now is not the time for scientists to be circumspect and silent. We are on the short end of a battle over whether truth even matters. If scientists do not stand up for what is real, who will?
Typhoid Mary on Two Wheels
Posted in Thoughts
The morning cyclist in my neighborhood may not be standing in the Michigan Statehouse carrying a gun and demanding her right to spread contagion far and wide, but she may as well be.
Pine Boxes
Posted in Success & FailureThoughts
You know those nice charts and graphs that make it look like we are over the hump of COVID-19 and that things are about to get better? Those predictions are dead wrong, with an unfortunate emphasis on “dead.”
Scientists Stuck Inside
Posted in For Your ConsiderationThoughts
Imagine three gregarious scientists, each with the gift of the gab, all coping with stay-at-home orders. Of course we started a livestream/podcast talk show! What else would we do? Welcome to the kickoff episode of Scientists Stuck Inside.
After COVID’s First Wave
Posted in Success & FailureThoughts
Even after COVID-19 kills hundreds of thousands in the U.S. over the coming weeks, we will still be almost as vulnerable to the pandemic as we are today. We’d all love to “get back to normal” after that, but the price could be a second wave, worse than the first. Some see us facing either economic Depression or allowing vast numbers of preventable deaths, but that is a fool’s choice. There are better options if we have the will to find them.
COVID-19
Posted in Success & FailureThoughts
There is a lot of information about COVID-19 out there, much of it misleading. When looking at the future, start with what the science really says.
Great Deceiverism 101
Posted in For Your ConsiderationUnreasonable Faith
If someone can’t tell you how they would know that they are wrong, they don’t have a clue whether they are right.
This article originally appeared in my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.
One Step at a Time
Posted in For Your ConsiderationUnreasonable Faith
Once seemingly incomprehensible, the origin of life no longer seems such a mystery. Most of what once appeared as roadblocks are turning out to be superhighways.
This article originally appeared in my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.
Click on thumbnail to select post:
-
Shaking the hand of someone you disagree with isn’t as much fun as shouting them down, but it is far more effective.
When you live in small groups on the savanna, as our ancestors did for most of our evolutionary history, it pays to be suspicious of strangers. Other groups were competition. Strangers didn’t drop by for a cup of tea and a friendly chat about our emotional well being. We couldn’t afford to see a stranger as a real person at all. It was an “us versus them” world. Fear and aggression were the only rational responses. People who did well in that world (AKA our ancestors, the people from whom we get our DNA), knew that the only safe thing was to beat strangers with a club first and ask questions later.
Fear of “The Other” is hardwired, and talking about it doesn’t help.
We may not live in small groups on the savanna any more, but our brains don’t know that. For better or worse we are stuck with our evolutionary baggage. Nothing is going to change that. When you encounter someone who your brain perceives as “other”– and by this I mean you personally, dear reader, as well as myself and every other human on the planet — all of that machinery jumps to life in milliseconds. Long before we are consciously aware of anything, our brains are screaming “Danger Will Robinson! Danger!”
Call this tribalism. Call it racism. Call it in-group/out-group dynamics. Call it identity politics. Call it polarization. Call it whatever you like. It all comes down to the same thing. When we perceive someone as other our reactions are hard wired, preconscious, and impossible to turn off.
Good intentions don’t matter. Get high and sing Kumbaya all night. Talk about it until the cows come home. Hold workshops. Post platitudes or scream about it on the internet. If you want to judge the effectiveness of those strategies all you have to do is pick up the paper. The louder the mob screams, the more ground they lose. We’ve tried those approaches. They make things worse, not better.
Quoting Einstein’s famous parable, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
There is only one solution: Humanize yourself by embracing the humanity of others.
If you perceive someone as other you will respond to them as a threat. There’s nothing we can do about that. Or is there? Take a step back and the answer is obvious. We can’t change how we react to other, but we can change who we perceive as other.
There is going on 70 years of really fascinating sociological, psychological, political and even neurological research that all supports the same conclusion: If you know and respect someone, it’s hard not to care about them. Break bread together, laugh together, talk deeply, listen, show respect (even when it’s difficult), build bridges, find common purpose and work arm in arm.
I could dig into that research, but mercifully for you I won’t. Instead I am going to share an uplifting and illustrative story of what effective anti-racism really looks like.
How did a Black musician change the hearts of hundreds of Klansmen?
Daryl Davis is a Black blues and jazz musician with a very strange hobby. He goes to events like KKK rallies not to shout or protest, but to listen, shake hands, talk, and befriend. Literally hundreds of the Klan members who Daryl Davis has become friends with have renounced the Klan. He has a large collection of their robes, including the robe of a man who, when they met, was the Grand Wizard himself.
Read that last sentence again. Then if you honestly care about fighting racism you owe it to yourself to invest 18 minutes and listen to Daryl Davis’s story in his own words.
This is not your Woke friend’s Anti-Racism.
It feels good to gang up and shout at people. The difference between the shouters and the shoutees makes it really easy to tell who is “us” and who is “them.” Our brains love that. The dopamine flows like a river.
But that is not what Daryl Davis did. There was no shouting about racism. Terms like “White privilege” and “White fragility” were never used. Daryl Davis never complained about microaggressions or political correctness. DEI workshops were not part of the program. Mr. Davis did not wear his feelings on his sleeve. Quite the contrary, Daryl Davis listened even to open hatred and tried to understand where it was coming from. There was no talk of victims and oppressors. There were no social media attacks or calls for deplatforming. There was no virtue signaling about Wokeness.
Instead, Daryl Davis treated those who were predisposed to hate him with dignity and respect. He listened. He questioned. He befriended. He humanized himself by seeing and acknowledging the humanity of others, including those with whom he deeply disagreed. In the process he did what few have ever accomplished. Daryl Davis changed the hearts of hundreds of the most committed racists in the nation.
This is what real, effective anti-racism looks like. And as Davis mentions at the end of his talk, if he can do it, so can we.
-
What do record fire seasons in the West, record hurricane seasons in the Atlantic, record winter storms in the South and the hottest years in history have to do with each other? Everything.
This article originally appeared in the December 2019 issue of my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. Yes, schools are desperately important to kids. No, COVID-19 doesn’t care, and COVID is making the rules right now. Attempts to open schools this fall will fail of their own accord. The relevant question is how to meet the needs of children, families and the community in the face of that reality.
Currently new cases of COVID-19 in Arizona are doubling every 7 days. ICU beds in the state are already full. The rest of the country isn’t that far behind us. You do the math.
Now is not the time for scientists to be circumspect and silent. We are on the short end of a battle over whether truth even matters. If scientists do not stand up for what is real, who will?
The morning cyclist in my neighborhood may not be standing in the Michigan Statehouse carrying a gun and demanding her right to spread contagion far and wide, but she may as well be.
You know those nice charts and graphs that make it look like we are over the hump of COVID-19 and that things are about to get better? Those predictions are dead wrong, with an unfortunate emphasis on “dead.”
Imagine three gregarious scientists, each with the gift of the gab, all coping with stay-at-home orders. Of course we started a livestream/podcast talk show! What else would we do? Welcome to the kickoff episode of Scientists Stuck Inside.
Even after COVID-19 kills hundreds of thousands in the U.S. over the coming weeks, we will still be almost as vulnerable to the pandemic as we are today. We’d all love to “get back to normal” after that, but the price could be a second wave, worse than the first. Some see us facing either economic Depression or allowing vast numbers of preventable deaths, but that is a fool’s choice. There are better options if we have the will to find them.
There is a lot of information about COVID-19 out there, much of it misleading. When looking at the future, start with what the science really says.
If someone can’t tell you how they would know that they are wrong, they don’t have a clue whether they are right.
This article originally appeared in my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.
Once seemingly incomprehensible, the origin of life no longer seems such a mystery. Most of what once appeared as roadblocks are turning out to be superhighways.
This article originally appeared in my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.
Over his 30 year career as an internationally known astrophysicist, Dr. Jeff Hester was a key member of the team that repaired the Hubble Space Telescope. With one foot always on the frontiers of knowledge, he has been mentor, coach, team leader, award-winning teacher, administrator and speaker, to name a few of the hats he has worn. His Hubble image, the Pillars of Creation, was chosen by Time Magazine as among the 100 most influential photographs in history.
Our Roots in the Cosmos
There’s nothing mythical about this creation story.
For the first time in history we can tell the story of our existence beginning with the origin of the universe, and ending with you sitting there reading this article. And an amazing story it is!
Republished from my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.”
We are alive at a remarkable moment in the history of humankind.
Count yourself lucky! Not everyone can say they were present at the moment humankind’s conception of itself changed. But you can.
Since the dawn of history, humans have built whole civilizations around myths and fables linking our existence to a mystical celestial realm. And yet in the end it took less than a lifetime to overturn that whole framework and replace it with something radically different: real answers.
The last few decades have seen sweeping changes not only in astronomy, but in every scientific field from biology and geology to particle physics and information theory. Drawing on insights from all of those fields and more, we have traced our own cosmic journey back to the beginning of time. That story doesn’t hinge on appeal to authority or interpretation of revealed truth. There are things left to learn, but there are no glaring failures that have to be swept under the rug. Each chapter is grounded firmly in hard-won knowledge, wrested from the universe through the potent combination of human creativity and the unforgiving standards of scientific knowledge.
Cosmology is the envy of historians.
At this point, a historian might raise an eyebrow. “Sure, if you want to know about ancient Greece, you can visit ruins; you can study artifacts; you can read Homer. But history is always open to interpretation. It’s not like you can sit down with an engineer and go over a video of them building the Parthenon!”
Historians might have to put up with such annoying limitations, but astronomers and cosmologists do not. When you look at the center of the Milky Way, you see it as it was 27,000 years ago, during a time when our ancestors were Cro-Magnons living in caves in Europe. Turn a backyard telescope on the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, and you are looking back almost 66 million years to the time when an asteroid impact ended the 160-million-year reign of the dinosaurs.
So it goes, all the way back to the birth of the universe itself. When we look at the sky’s dim microwave glow, we see the universe as it was 13.8 billion years ago. There is no trick here, no twisted meanings. An image of the microwave sky is literally a baby picture of the cosmos.
Calculating the universe, from soup to nuts.
Last year saw one of the most extraordinary results in the history of science. That result came not from a powerful new telescope or high-energy particle accelerator. Instead, it emerged from 19 million CPU hours of supercomputer time spent doing physics calculations.
Beginning with the Big Bang, the Illustris Simulation uses physics to calculate the evolution of stars, galaxies and large-scale structure in a piece of our expanding universe.
The Illustris Simulation is no less than an effort to calculate the evolution of the universe. The calculations started with the conditions in the early universe (remember that baby picture?), along with well-understood rules like general relativity and the physics of star formation and evolution. Then computers turned the crank in cold, methodical fashion, following what happened over the next 14 billion years. When it was done, the computer showed large-scale structure much like what we see in today’s universe and galaxies so realistic that even experts have trouble telling them apart from images of the real thing.
Here is what we know. Start a universe like ours was in the beginning. Hydrogen and helium will form in an early hot bath of matter and energy. As things cool down in that expanding universe, clumps of matter will form and ultimately collapse under the force of gravity to form galaxies and large-scale structure. Clouds of gas will collapse to form stars, and within those stars nuclear forces will build new chemical elements. Stellar winds and explosions will blow that chemically enriched material back into interstellar space. As stars continue to form, flat rotating disks will form around those stars and give birth to planets laden with new elements. And on at least one such planet (and probably many, many more), chemistry and the inexorable algorithm of evolution will lead to the rise of the remarkable phenomenon we call life.
Why will all of this happen? All of this will happen because physics works!
Science goes where reality leads, but societies and cultures don’t turn on a dime.
Indeed, we live in an extraordinary moment in the history of our species. But it truly is a moment, a historical blink of the eye. Cultures change more slowly, and this is a big change! Once we thought ourselves the products of special creation sitting at the center of the universe. Where does science get off trying to demote us to insignificant specks adrift in a vastness beyond comprehension? I can understand how some might recoil from that thought.
I can understand that reaction, but I do not share it. You see, when I look at the individual human mind, I’m blown away. In the midst of all we have seen, a spark of consciousness arose, capable of pondering its own existence. Remarkable!
The heavens might be a place of grandeur, but they are not the home of meaning or purpose. That honor resides right here, in the thoughts and experiences and aspirations of each of us.
I’ll settle for that any day.
Our Roots in the Cosmos ^ There’s nothing mythical about this creation story. ©
Dr. Jeff Hester
Content may not be copied to other sites. All Rights Reserved.
Chris Mathews
| #
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION – Feb 2016
Interesting article about intelligence in the February 2016 issue of Astronomy. When discussing such a high-level concept as ‘intelligence,’ I think it would be helpful to start with the definition. That way it makes it easier to assess if we are dealing with intelligence when we consider other earthly specie, such as the octopus. Intelligence is the facility to deal with a broad range of abstractions by subsuming perceptual data into concepts, then integrating concepts into generalizations. We store concepts in our brain’s filing system. For example, we store the concept ‘chair’ to represent every chair that has ever existed, currently exists, and will exist in the future. There would be no way to store information about every chair. This conceptual form of consciousness is what differentiates humans from all other species. If you can form concepts, you have intelligence. Every concept is denoted by a word, hence the vital importance of language. No language, your intelligence is severely limited.
So let’s examine the octopus. All those things you listed that they do are not characteristics of intelligence. For example, living in dens is not a characteristic of intelligence. Rather, the octopus is performing at the perceptual level of consciousness, and has developed a wide range of skills to survive. To claim that an octopus takes things apart ‘to see how they work’ is a huge logical leap. How did you get from the observation of taking something apart to what is motivating the action to be ‘see how it works?’ The ‘see how it works’ concept itself is pretty high-level and subsumes many other concepts. You have made too big of a leap.
Among other things, octopus feed on mollusks and crabs. Perhaps they have been taking these shelled creatures apart for millions of years, motivated by hunger. As for the cut off arm continuing to capture food and attempt to feed a missing mouth, this is proof that there is no intelligence in this creature. An intelligent (i.e. conceptual) creature would recognize that the mouth was missing and cease wasting time catching food. The octopus is performing an instinctive action with no thought involved.
And what in the world is ‘social intelligence?’ Intelligence pertains to individual human beings. There is no such thing as a collective brain. We can have the same thoughts, but that is it. Or do you mean smarts about others of our own specie? Actually, the term social intelligence means nothing. It is a floating abstraction tied to nothing in reality.
Anyway, when we head for the stars and seek out intelligence, we must look for those creatures possessing the conceptual facility. And they will help us do this. They will be the ones looking for us!
Cheers!
Jeff Hester
| #
Hi Chris. It’s a shame this discussion will happen here! You saw the article on the Astronomy.com site. But since I wait for a couple of months before posting my column here, it will be a while before “The Octopus and E.T. – Is intelligence a forced move” appears here! Maybe when I post that article I will move our discussion there.
My column is limited to about 800 words, which isn’t much when you are tackling a subject like the evolution of intelligence. As a result, there are always lots of interesting details (or even whole fields of study) that are glossed over. Had I had another few thousand words to play with, I think that most of your questions would have been answered. 😉
The definitions that I was using came from the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, cited in the column, as well as longstanding thoughts of many scientists who work on this stuff. (Here is a nice Op-Ed from LiveScience.com: After 2,500 Studies, It’s Time to Declare Animal Sentience Proven.) When you say that “this conceptual form of consciousness is what differentiates humans from all other species,” the scientific consensus is that you are wrong.
Language absolutely shapes the way we think about the world, but your assertions about language being necessary to constructing any generalized categories is incorrect. I might ask, for example, whether you consider a prelinguistic child, or a child raised absent exposure to language (a rare but not unheard of situation) to have intelligence.
The line that you draw between perception and concept is also artificial. Cognitive scientists now view perception itself as a constructed framework based on a combination of sensory input and learned concepts. (Take a look at Brains, Perception and the Dress that Ate the Internet.)
I also would have loved to have a few thousand words to devote solely to octopuses. You take issue with my choice of phrase, “take it apart to see how it works.” There are experiments where, for example, an octopus in one tank is presented with a problem while another octopus is looking on. Two interesting things then happen. One, the octopus that solved the problem is then able to apply what it has learned to novel situations. And two, the octopus that was watching from afar is able to duplicate the task that it saw the first octopus carry out. And so on and so forth. People who work with octopuses have been consistently amazed by just what they can do. You might take a look here to find out more.
There are lots of other things to say… Consciousness resides in the brain, which for humans is a fairly localized thing. But what if our brain were distributed throughout our bodies? Such is the case with the octopus. The fact that an octopus arm, severed from the body, still carries out complex tasks in an interesting observation in that regard. (If you are a Spiderman fan, this is the notion that they are playing with when Dr. Octopus’s arms exert a will of their own.)
As for social intelligence, you can get some background in the field from the Royal Society, Philosophical Transactions B, 29 April 2007, volume 362, issue 1480, “Social Intelligence: From Brain to Culture.” The Larger Pacific Striped Octopus is so fascinating because while most octopuses live solitary lives, breed once, and die, the LPSO has made huge steps in the direction of the sort of social existence that is a prerequisite to culture.
With all of that said, yes, other intelligence in the universe will have concepts and ways of communicating. The point of the article is that humans and octopuses have not shared a common ancestor since long before any semblance of a complex brain had appeared. That means that animals like humans and animals like octopuses evolved large, complex, problem-solving brains completely independently of each other! Like eyes, intelligence may be something of an evolutionary forced move. The implication is that intelligence might not be all that uncommon in places where complex life takes hold.
But while ET will certainly have concepts, communication and the like, there is no reason to imagine that they will experience and/or think about the world in ways that are at all similar to humans.