What about recycling? Or imagination? As long as we have endless power from the sun, we can support lots of activity on Earth. I'm all for space habitats -- but why not just build them directly, rather than mess around with more "exploration" instead of actually building habitats that we knew how to build in the 1970s (Gerry O'Neill)?
With 3D printing and robots, work can be free and cheap -- in fact, that is a major crisis right now with the jobless recovery as trends in automation and better design are leading to widespread structural unemployment, that given limited demand by healthy humans for more stuff, means an end to mainstream economic cycles.
Here is an alternative: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm """
"It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free." """
I see the top post (my first) got modded down to zero, likely by pro-space people. Why are technologists often so blind to thinking through the implications of all the technology they are making? School is no doubt part of it. We need to use what we have to build a better world right here and right now, and then there will be lots of resources for space exploration and many other things. NASA and the space community have had a lot of good ideas already. Let's try using some of them to make the Earth a better place that works for everyone: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
Wikipedia only took about US$2 million to get to critical mass. A technology library (would probably be much more than a website) might only cost US$100 million or so to get to such a critical mass. http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/72fde8fa2a33ded8 """ So, to recap, there are a few paths to go down, ideally in parallel: * fund a specific hardware project like Factor-e-farm, CubeSpawn, RepRap or whatever, hoping to push it along specifically (or maybe several); * fund a specific simulation project like Second Life or some massive multi-player game that connects to open manufacturing, where people are creating 3D models that work in that world (or maybe several); * fund new software tools that make open design easier for everyone; * fund some sort of integration service, seen socially as the Wikipedia of open manufacturing, whatever that would look like whether it had a wiki aspect or not, like, Appropedia, SKDB, NIST's SLIM, my attempts at OSCOMAK/PointrelSemanticDesktop, or whatever, which defined a standard way to encode manufacturing recipes and licenses so everything interlinked and could be analyzed and visualized somehow (like to tease out the minimal self-replicating system that met some criterion);
3D printing, robots, AI, better design, renewable energy, and so on. These things can produce more than most people need for a good life. How about NASA spending money on this old idea first?
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions" http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ "What follows is a portion of the final report of a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly- elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press. What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the potential of this proposed system is undeniable. Please enjoy. "
But now, we get "taken for a ride" by a few scientists instead.
For US$400 million, people could create a Wikipedia of open technology and help the human race transition to a post-scarcity society. Instead we get a boat ride? (Not to say it is not a cool idea.) http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/index.htm
BTW, a post from someone else on a Crohn's forum on vitamin D: http://www.crohnsforum.com/showthread.php?t=4951 """ This video talks about the importance of vitamin D (which is best absorbed by humans from sunlight) for health. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/12/16/my-one-hour-vitamin-d-lecture-to-clear-up-all-your-confusion-on-this-vital-nutrient.aspx The video mentions how it is thought that a vitamin D deficiency is thought to lead to more autoimmune diseases (like Inflammatory Bowel Disease). They showed how more northern climates (which have colder climates/less sun) often have greater occurences of things like colon cancer and MS than southern climates. Vitamin D was also explained to be anti-inflammatory.
This was something new to me. It makes some sense to me as it seems that Canada has one of the world's highest rates of IBD. It may have a higher rate than the US due to a colder climate and less sunlight, even though the diets are fairly similar.
While vitamin D needs differs, the video said that we should all be trying to get something like 5,000 IUs a day, but some people may need double that or more. The daily recommended intake though is currently like 400 IUs. It recommends sunlight as the best source of this (and says that as long as exposure is not excessive, it is safe for you) or that if you take a vitamin make sure you are taking it in the form of D3 (cholecalciferol). D2 is another form that is synthetic and an inferior form.
Has anyone else heard anything about this before? """
I have not watched the video. That post is just a top match on a Google search on "vitamin+D"+Crohn's.
Posts in that thread then link to:
"Vitamin D deficiency tied to increased IBD activity, reduced quality of life" http://ccfa.org/reuters/vitaminD "Vitamin D deficiency is common in patients with IBD (Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis), but whether vitamin D deficiency parallels disease activity or adversely impacts quality of life is not known, Dr. Alex Ulitsky and colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee point out in a meeting abstract."
Dr. John Cannell, MD, who runs the Vitamin D web site, talks about how having just a little vitamin D can allow you immune system to get going, but you need enough vitamin D for your immune system to be able to shut itself down properly. For example: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/h1n1-flu-and-vitamin-d.shtml "In the macrophage, the presence of vitamin D also appears to suppress the pro-inflammatory cytokines. Thus, vitamin D appears to both enhance the local capacity of the epithelium to produce endogenous antibiotics and at the same time dampen certain destructive arms of the immune response, especially those responsible for the signs and symptoms of acute inflammation, such as the cytokine storms operative when influenza kills quickly."
He hypothesizes, that in the great Spanish Flu pandemic around WWII, given troops in the troop ships tended to die of it, but not the sailors on the ships, that it might also have been a case where adults had enough vitamin D to get an immune response going, but not enough to shut it down.
It is possible you are so deficient that getting just a little in the summer leads to this effect? So, would there be a transition phase where things mike get worse until they get better with more vitamin D? Or would things just get worse? Something to think through with your doctors, and referring to the scientific literature linked on that site.
You would need a blood test for 25(OH)D as mentioned here to begin to figure that out, to see if your levels in the summer were in the range he recommends here (50-80 ng/mL) or low. http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
The other obvious hypothesis might be that adequate vitamin D in the summer is causing your immune system to function normally, but it is hyper-agressive for some reason. This may be connected to why some Crohn's researchers might say that -- basically if you disable a person's immune system, it might reduce the problem? So, you may well be right about Crohn's researchers in general, I don't know.
There is one person (I forget his name, an electrical engineer?) who has treatments for issues involving reducing people's vitamin D level to zero in a variety of ways using vitamin D antagonists and inhibitors, and then using lots of some antibiotics or something. Dr. John Cannell comments negatively on that person's work on his site. I can wonder if that is who you are referring to, and it if might be this issue, that too little may create some problems? Normally, human beings who live outdoors in the sun would always have plenty of vitamin D in their system.
So, there could well be various sets of issues on a path back to health. The typical human body has, until the last century, never spend that much time indoors year round, so it is not adapted for that. For example, Dr. Cannell suggests people who are vitamin D deficient tend to sunburn more easily -- it is just not normal for the human body to be vitamin D deficient.
Also, historically, skin color has reflected latitude, and a balance of minimizing the risk of skin cancer with dark skin vs. maximizing vitamin D production in extreme latitudes with light skin. Now that everyone moves around so much, it's especially important for people with darker skins to check their vitamin D level and supplement as needed if they live far North or South from the equator -- so a dark skinned urban professional linking someplace like Maine with indoor hobbies and not eating much fish might be most at risk of vitamin D deficiency. If you have an indoor job, indoor hobbies, or darker skin, you would be more at risk of this issue.
Example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19269107 """ The peculiar geographic distribution of inflammatory bowel disease is a puzzle for researchers. A low vitamin D status has now been linked to several Th1-mediated autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, with the strongest evidence for the vitamin's protective role in multiple sclerosis. Sunlight and vitamin D may be potent immunomodulatory agents by down-regulating Th1-driven immune responses and inducing the synthesis of antimicrobial peptides considered as natural antibiotics of the immune system. Similarly to multiple sclerosis, we propose in CD the so-called north-south gradient may be partly explained by variations in the degree of sun exposure, with vitamin D being a "seasonal stimulus". These observations may yield a better understanding of the pathophysiology of Crohn's disease and pave the way for developing new therapeutic approaches for an incurable disease. Whether a low vitamin D status is associated with an increased risk of Crohn's disease in the general population and whether vitamin D and heliotherapy may be effective in treating Crohn's disease will require additional investigations. """
You could try a blood test for vitamin D right now as recommended there to see if you are deficient in vitamin D, and, if you are seriously deficient, you might talk with your doctors about trying vitamin D3 supplements first (or maybe even an injection of a megadose by a doctor in your situation) before trying surgery (or maybe a UV-B lamp if you can't absorb vitamin D supplements well right now). Have you noticed any correlation with the seasons? Is it a little better in summer? A little worse in winter?
Do you avoid the sun? I would think it would be common in writer types like Dan O'Bannon, or some other media people who work indoors a lot. Vitamin D deficiency is at epidemic levels across the USA and may be linked to a host of issues from cancer through autism to depression. Even if adequate vitamin D did not help with Crohn's, it might at least help with other issues that stem from it.
Obviously, there may be other factors as well (other vitamins -- vitamin A relates to membrane health but every one might be an issue, or other environmental issues). Best of luck finding something that works for you, and then afterwards in rebuilding strong roots in your life whatever they may be, relationships, hobbies, philosophies, laughter, helping others, enjoying time in nature, and so on, to help you weather the storms of life and Crohn's disease.
What about this? http://cabinet.auriol.free.fr/Documents/cache_catharsis.htm """ Popular belief in the catharsis theory remains strong despite the theory's dismal record in research findings. According to the catharsis hypothesis, acting aggressively or even viewing aggression is an effective way to reduce anger and aggressive feelings. One likely reason for the continued widespread belief in catharsis is that the mass media continue to endorse the view that expressing anger or aggressive feelings is healthy, constructive, and relaxing, whereas restraining oneself creates internal tension that is unhealthy and bound to lead to an eventual blowup.
The present research was concerned with a pair of related questions. First, can media support for the catharsis hypothesis cause people to engage in catharsis-seeking activities, such as aggressive action? Second, if media messages do persuade people to believe in the effectiveness of catharsis, will their own indulgence in aggressive action produce that effect?
The concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy suggests that people's beliefs can shape their choices and the outcomes of their actions, so that expectations tend to come true by virtue of the changed behaviors resulting directly from the expectations (e.g., Darley & Fazio, 1980). Although researchers have mostly failed to find laboratory evidence of catharsis effects, it is plausible that media endorsement produces such self-fulfilling prophecies, which in turn might be sufficient to sustain popular belief in catharsis. In the present research, we provided people with procatharsis messages telling them that acting aggressively or expressing anger is a good way to reduce inner tensions. Consistent with the self-fulfilling prophecy notion, we investigated whether such messages would increase behavioral choices of aggressive activity following an anger provocation (Study 1) and, more important, would help produce the anticipated benefits of expressing anger (Study 2)--specifically, by reducing aggressive behavior toward another person after the participant was supposedly able to reach catharsis by hitting a punching bag. """
That said, I agree with you lots of aspects of our current social system, especially the school system, are messed up in various ways. My own thoughts on how to fix them:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease" http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
The executive summary from the first (the second is a longer version of the first): """ Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. """
"For a true believer in Jesus Christ, there is in store, not another body buttressed by the technology of modern medicine, yet in the end subject to death, but a resurrected, transcendent, eternal, immortal body, with powers and abilities we cannot even imagine."
This may also be achieved in other ways, whatever one believes about universes beyond this one::-) http://www.simulation-argument.com/ "This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed."
But even with a "resurrected, transcendent, eternal, immortal body, with powers and abilities we cannot even imagine", the daily concerns of today will be gone for such people. Human behavior and aspects of personality emerge out of genetics (capabilities), history, environment, and free will (whatever that means) -- change the environment and capabilities and the behavior and much of personality is gone in that sense. Maybe it is better that way, but it would be very different. It would be a fundamental transformation, like a caterpillar into a butterfly. For more on this from a theological perspective:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore" http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671 "When it comes to spiritual growth, we humans are solar-seeking beings; eager for the bright lights of clarity and the bliss of illumination. Paradoxically, we all need to walk through the shadow of the dark night in order to discover a life worth living, according to psychotherapist and spiritual commentator Thomas Moore. Unlike depression, which is more of an emotional state, Moore calls the dark night a slow transformation process, which is fueled by a profound period of doubt, disorientation and questioning. Ultimately, a journey into the dark night will reshape the very meaning of your life. As a self-proclaimed "lunar type," Moore is comfortable leading his clients and readers into the shadows, where ambiguities and mysteries lurk around every corner. He describes the dark night journey in stages, starting with feeling distant from your life even as you continue to go through the motions. The second phase is "liminality," meaning living on the threshold between the known self and the unknown self. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable phase as the dark night may "take you away from the cultivation and persona you have developed in your education and from family learning," he explains. After dwelling in this murky darkness, there's a stage of "re-incorporation," in which one integrates the profound inner transitions into daily life. Like a tour guide to the underworld, Moore leads readers through all these phases, offering tools and rituals for making the journey more tolerable or at least more meaningful. He also speaks to the many arenas and stages of life in which we might find ourselves stumbling through the dark, with chapters on marriage, parenting, sexuality, creativity and health. The scope is ambitious, and at times the structure seems disjointed--but this is perhaps Moore's best contribution since Care of the Soul, proving once again that he is a wise and formidable spiritual teacher."
One might suggest we go through fundamental transformation after transformation along the path of life.
Except that the switch to agriculture was a *result* of increasing populations, not a cause. As the skeletal evidence shows, humans were much worse off in terms of health and size after the switch and starved much more often. Hunter/gathers adapted to their climates. How much worse can winters be than in the arctic but hunter/gatherers learned to live there. You are just repeating all the "conventional wisdom" that Jane Jacobs debunked. It is popularized in part because it justifies a lot of present day evils to say how much better things are today even when they may not be in some ways. Kings are not a good standard of comparison because they are part of agricultural empires. The fact is, you probably have it worse in many ways than most hunter/gatherers. They had more "job security". They did not have to worry about "taxes". They did not have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy. They always knew where there next meal was coming from because they could easily catch it themselves or walk to somewhere they could gather it. They likely had a much greater sense of community. Look at the history of, say, the Iroquois in the book "The Walking People". Hunter/Gatherers had their problems, but it is not as black and white as conventional wisdom tries to paint it. Fighting also was only necessary because of the increased populations and greater competition based on hunter/gatherer success. For many tens of thousands of years that was not a big deal -- only the last few thousand years, and then people reluctantly turned to agriculture out of desperation. They eventually got good at it, but it was still a lot more work than hunter/gathering (until the last fifty years or so with mechanization).
Except today's hunter/gatherers are the ones who have been pushed onto the most marginal lands with the least natural productivity. The agricultural empires in general took over the best land (including using bronze weapons). If you look at Marshall Sahlins wrote, in many productive areas, hunter/gatherers spend maybe two hours a day on food related work most of the time -- and it is mostly fun and interesting and engaging work. It is things like fishing to catch just one big fish. Or collecting ripe fruit off a tree in season.
By the way, there is one pill these days that can help a lot with life-extension for most US Americans. Vitamin D3 gelcaps 5000 IU, with this treatment protocol including blood testing: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Human lifespan in hunter-gather times past infant mortality might have been into the 60s or older.
Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.
As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
"Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization."
Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens But, they miss the big picture of the phase change transition from pre-scarcity hunter-gatherers (like the Hmong or Iroquois in older times) to
Jane Jacobs suggests that conventional wisdom is wrong -- cities existed before agriculture as trading posts; agriculture was then invented in cities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
The Earth has long been very abundant and ecologically productive in ways that we cannot even imagine these days. It was said of North American in the 1700s and 1800s: Skies darkened for days with a single bird flock (passenger pigeons). Streams with so much fish you could walk from one shore to the other over them. Plains full of Bison. (Well, at least when most of the Native Americans had died with the invasion of the Americas and the ecology had recovered and not yet been beaten back down.) If there are relatively few people, there is a lot of natural capital and natural income to go around.
But that is not to disagree with your main point. Malaria (as a significant disease) also is a product of agriculture.
Yes, we are out of touch with our roots. We either change our ways or change ourselves (evolution or engineering or equipment) or change our environment or some mix of those (or we go extinct). Humans have been slowly changing genetically and culturally to adapt over the last few thousand years.
The Earth is very big, plus an open system as far as solar energy. We can use energy and materials far more efficiently than we do, and we can move into space. Our problem in the industrialized word is too much doomsterism, a loss of hope, and an economic system based around managing scarcity and not creating abundance (so, we need to transition to a "basic income", a gift economy, or local subsistence with advanced nanotech and 3D printing, or some mix). We have plenty of resources to do all sorts of amazing things -- if we had more of an ideology of creating and sharing abundance. See also Julian Simon's writings called "The Ultimate Resource" about how every person overall can add much more to society by their effort and imagination than they consume.
Related to your point:
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness" http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
"Learn how to escape the dietary pleasure trap!" http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm """ From the perspective of our natural history, a daily life with such dietary choices is extraordinary. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancient ancestors scratched and scraped, struggling against the harsh forces of nature in order to get enough food to survive. Even today, in undeveloped countries, significant food shortages are still a great concern, with millions dying each year from starvation. Yet, in a mere blink of history's eye--in just a few decades--industrialized societies have arisen from environments of scarcity and have transformed themselves into societies of unprecedented abundance. The most striking feature of that abundance is a virtually unlimited supply of food.
An abundance of food, by itself, is not a cause of health problems. But modern technology has done more than to simply make food perpetually abundant. Food also has been made artificially tastier. Food is often more stimulating than ever before--as the particular chemicals in foods that cause pleasure reactions have been isolated--and artificially concentrated. These chemicals include fats (including oils), refined carbohydrates (such as refined sugar and flour), and salt. Meats were once consumed mostly in the form of wild game--typically about 15% fat. Today's meat is a much different product. Chemically and hormonally engineered, it can be as high as 50% fat or more. Ice cream is an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste pleasure--an artificial concoction of pure fat and refined sugar. Once an expensive delicacy, it is now a daily ritual for many people. French fries and potato chips, laden with artificially-concentrated fats, are currently the most commonly consumed "vegetable" in our society. These artificial products, and others like them, form the core of the American diet. Our teenage population, for example, consumes 25% of their calories in the form of soda pop!
Most of our citizenry can't imagine how it could be any other way. To remove (or dramatically reduce) such products from America's daily diet seems intolerable--even absurd. Most people believe that if they were to do so, they would enjoy their food--and their lives--much less. Indeed, most people believe that they literally would suffer if they consumed a health-promoting diet devoid of such indulgences. But, it is here that their perception is greatly in error. The reality is that humans are well designed to fully enjoy the subtler tastes of whole natural foods, but are poorly equipped to realize this fact. And like a frog sitting in dangerously hot water, most people are being slowly destroyed by the limitations of their awareness. """
Personally, I feel many hunter/gatherers twenty thousand years ago may have lived longer and better than some people say they did (even as things got worse with rising population, competition, and agriculture). It really depends on where exactly they lived in what time period and what the local climate was like. There are places and times where six foot and taller skeletons were common, like on the shores of inland places that had big lakes.
From: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily sat
Just as a personal footnote, I had quoted James Loewen writing: """ A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. """
In college, probably the summer between sophomore and junior year, I remember a suitemate who was taking some history classes (otherwise he was an engineer), telling me essentially the above, and that what I knew about history from high school was baloney, and I would not believe him.:-) I mean, I had great grades in social studies, I had even been President pro tempore of a mock Congress in high school. How could I not know the basic of US or world history? Thankfully, my interest in the history of technology at least started me down a road to greater enlightenment.
I had written: "Now that you have a reputation to protect, you may find [taking risks and accepting repeated failure] difficult." And that seems too negative a place to leave my previous remark, sorry.
To put that more positively, you have a choice. You can take that honor of winning in a major science competition and protect it, most likely freezing who you are right now as you become risk-averse, especially if you attribute that success to "intelligence" as opposed to mainly luck, hard work, previous conformity, access to assistance, and general affluence. Or, you can say it proves whatever you might want to prove to the world about your character and ability to do hard work (including perhaps negative things like a disposition to conform to arbitrary authority), and from that confidence, move on and focus more on doing things because they are fun or healthy or uplifting to yourself and those around you rather than because you have to prove anything to anybody (even to yourself), and so take all sorts of creative risks (whether with choice of classes, or travel, or new hobbies, new friends, or whatever).
From that perspective, what do you have left to prove at this point given your previous honors? Even if you fail at something, you can look back and say, yes, I'm OK. One of my most liberating moments was for this previous A student to take, and fail, a course which I had not had the preparation for or been willing to put the time into (plus disagreeing with some of the approach). I had previously taken another such random advanced course in a different discipline and done surprisingly well in it (and that later became a new direction in my life). So, the willingness to try, and fail, and move on, is really important.
From how you state there was essentially no "competition", I have some hope that you can loosen up rather than freeze up. I too did not really see competition around me, even though I can look back and see it, and see how, like water to a fish, it was so non-obvious because it was everywhere. The larger social context may not be so obvious to you right now out of high school (which is mostly what I comment on). One way to take some reasonable risks might be to do something out of the ordinary from your (presumably) science and technology coursework, like take some history courses on a wide range of topics from different perspectives. For example, to help explain why you may not have learned the historical and social context of such competitions:
"Introduction to Lies My Teacher Told Me" http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/content.php?file=liesmyteachertoldme-introduction.html """ African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn it especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. Pardoning my grammar, they do more worse in English and most worse in history. Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult than trigonometry or Faulkner. I will argue later that high school history so alienates people of color that doing badly may be a sign of mental health! Students don't know they're alienated, only that they "don't like social studies" or "aren't any good at history." In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth.... College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had more rather than less exposure to the subject before they reach college. Not in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don't
You wrote: "They aren't so much competitions as they are organizations who try to determine which students have best displayed future potential for their fields. It's not like a one-on-one "science off" where two students try to one-up one another with their mastery of arcane mathematical facts; it's a bunch of students, all of whom are amazing in their own right, versus panels of distinguished judges. You don't "compete" beyond the fact that an organization can't give an award to everyone - in fact, some of my best friends are the ones that I met through these competitions."
More from: http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm """
Kohn defines competition as any situation where one person's success is dependent upon another's failure. Put another way, in competition two or more parties are pursuing a goal that cannot be attained by all. He calls this 'mutually exclusive goal attainment' (MEGA).
Kohn goes on to define two distinct types of competition. In 'structural competition' MEGA is an explicit, defining element in the nature of the interaction. For instance in a game of tennis there can be only one winner. The same is true of beauty contests, presidential elections, and wars. Everyone knows they are out to beat the others though the rules of engagement may vary considerably between events.
Intentional competition' is a state of mind, an individual's competitiveness or his proclivity for besting others. Anyone can go to a party determined to establish him or herself as the most intelligent, the most attractive, etc. Similarly, in school, the work place, and on teams people can try to beat others whether or not anyone is formally keeping score and declaring winners and losers.
One place where competition cannot exist, according to Kohn, is within oneself. Such striving to better one's own standing is an individual, not interactive matter; it does not involve MEGA. Of course some people cannot imagine pushing themselves without the possibility of 'winning' or the threat of 'losing', but this by no means implies that all motivation is dependent upon competitive frameworks. Throughout history countless large and small accomplishments have been achieved simply out of an individual's desire to do better without any thought of beating others. Such striving for mastery cannot be confused with competition. """
Also, as was pointed out to me by Hans Moravec when I hung out in his lab, good research involves taking risks, and coping with repeated failures. He suggested that he was as successful as he was (and he is brilliant and a thought leader in many ways) because he failed a lot early in life.:-) Now that you have a reputation to protect, you may find this difficult.
See the ideas outlined here to see more on why I am concerned about this (as a parent for my own child):
"How Not to Talk to Your Kids" http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ [multiple pages] "Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control," she explains. "They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure." In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't nee
As outlined here:
"http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html" http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html """ New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still, homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. """
John Taylor Gatto says it best: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm """ Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling. """
Related Links About Academia: http://novia.net/~pschleck/academia/ Sample link:
"Generation Debt; Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty" http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0417,kamenetz,53011,1.html
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air...."
Another approach: http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ """ [Jeff Schmidt] argues in Disciplined Minds that work is an inherently political activity and that hiring therefore involves political screening....
Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job. """
Slashdot Mirror
What about recycling? Or imagination? As long as we have endless power from the sun, we can support lots of activity on Earth. I'm all for space habitats -- but why not just build them directly, rather than mess around with more "exploration" instead of actually building habitats that we knew how to build in the 1970s (Gerry O'Neill)?
With 3D printing and robots, work can be free and cheap -- in fact, that is a major crisis right now with the jobless recovery as trends in automation and better design are leading to widespread structural unemployment, that given limited demand by healthy humans for more stuff, means an end to mainstream economic cycles.
Here is an alternative:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
"""
"It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."
"""
I see the top post (my first) got modded down to zero, likely by pro-space people. Why are technologists often so blind to thinking through the implications of all the technology they are making? School is no doubt part of it. We need to use what we have to build a better world right here and right now, and then there will be lots of resources for space exploration and many other things. NASA and the space community have had a lot of good ideas already. Let's try using some of them to make the Earth a better place that works for everyone:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
Wikipedia only took about US$2 million to get to critical mass. A technology library (would probably be much more than a website) might only cost US$100 million or so to get to such a critical mass.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/72fde8fa2a33ded8
"""
So, to recap, there are a few paths to go down, ideally in parallel:
* fund a specific hardware project like Factor-e-farm, CubeSpawn, RepRap or whatever, hoping to push it along specifically (or maybe several);
* fund a specific simulation project like Second Life or some massive multi-player game that connects to open manufacturing, where people are creating 3D models that work in that world (or maybe several);
* fund new software tools that make open design easier for everyone;
* fund some sort of integration service, seen socially as the Wikipedia of open manufacturing, whatever that would look like whether it had a wiki aspect or not, like, Appropedia, SKDB, NIST's SLIM, my attempts at OSCOMAK/PointrelSemanticDesktop, or whatever, which defined a standard way to encode manufacturing recipes and licenses so everything interlinked and could be analyzed and visualized somehow (like to tease out the minimal self-replicating system that met some criterion);
3D printing, robots, AI, better design, renewable energy, and so on. These things can produce more than most people need for a good life. How about NASA spending money on this old idea first?
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"What follows is a portion of the final report of a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly-
elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press. What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the potential of this proposed system
is undeniable. Please enjoy. "
But now, we get "taken for a ride" by a few scientists instead.
For US$400 million, people could create a Wikipedia of open technology and help the human race transition to a post-scarcity society. Instead we get a boat ride? (Not to say it is not a cool idea.)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/index.htm
BTW, a post from someone else on a Crohn's forum on vitamin D:
http://www.crohnsforum.com/showthread.php?t=4951
"""
This video talks about the importance of vitamin D (which is best absorbed by humans from sunlight) for health.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/12/16/my-one-hour-vitamin-d-lecture-to-clear-up-all-your-confusion-on-this-vital-nutrient.aspx
The video mentions how it is thought that a vitamin D deficiency is thought to lead to more autoimmune diseases (like Inflammatory Bowel Disease). They showed how more northern climates (which have colder climates/less sun) often have greater occurences of things like colon cancer and MS than southern climates. Vitamin D was also explained to be anti-inflammatory.
This was something new to me. It makes some sense to me as it seems that Canada has one of the world's highest rates of IBD. It may have a higher rate than the US due to a colder climate and less sunlight, even though the diets are fairly similar.
While vitamin D needs differs, the video said that we should all be trying to get something like 5,000 IUs a day, but some people may need double that or more. The daily recommended intake though is currently like 400 IUs. It recommends sunlight as the best source of this (and says that as long as exposure is not excessive, it is safe for you) or that if you take a vitamin make sure you are taking it in the form of D3 (cholecalciferol). D2 is another form that is synthetic and an inferior form.
Has anyone else heard anything about this before?
"""
I have not watched the video. That post is just a top match on a Google search on "vitamin+D"+Crohn's.
Posts in that thread then link to:
"Vitamin D deficiency tied to increased IBD activity, reduced quality of life"
http://ccfa.org/reuters/vitaminD
"Vitamin D deficiency is common in patients with IBD (Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis), but whether vitamin D deficiency parallels disease activity or adversely impacts quality of life is not known, Dr. Alex Ulitsky and colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee point out in a meeting abstract."
Dr. John Cannell, MD, who runs the Vitamin D web site, talks about how having just a little vitamin D can allow you immune system to get going, but you need enough vitamin D for your immune system to be able to shut itself down properly. For example:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/h1n1-flu-and-vitamin-d.shtml
"In the macrophage, the presence of vitamin D also appears to suppress the pro-inflammatory cytokines. Thus, vitamin D appears to both enhance the local capacity of the epithelium to produce endogenous antibiotics and at the same time dampen certain destructive arms of the immune response, especially those responsible for the signs and symptoms of acute inflammation, such as the cytokine storms operative when influenza kills quickly."
He hypothesizes, that in the great Spanish Flu pandemic around WWII, given troops in the troop ships tended to die of it, but not the sailors on the ships, that it might also have been a case where adults had enough vitamin D to get an immune response going, but not enough to shut it down.
It is possible you are so deficient that getting just a little in the summer leads to this effect? So, would there be a transition phase where things mike get worse until they get better with more vitamin D? Or would things just get worse? Something to think through with your doctors, and referring to the scientific literature linked on that site.
You would need a blood test for 25(OH)D as mentioned here to begin to figure that out, to see if your levels in the summer were in the range he recommends here (50-80 ng/mL) or low.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
The other obvious hypothesis might be that adequate vitamin D in the summer is causing your immune system to function normally, but it is hyper-agressive for some reason. This may be connected to why some Crohn's researchers might say that -- basically if you disable a person's immune system, it might reduce the problem? So, you may well be right about Crohn's researchers in general, I don't know.
There is one person (I forget his name, an electrical engineer?) who has treatments for issues involving reducing people's vitamin D level to zero in a variety of ways using vitamin D antagonists and inhibitors, and then using lots of some antibiotics or something. Dr. John Cannell comments negatively on that person's work on his site. I can wonder if that is who you are referring to, and it if might be this issue, that too little may create some problems? Normally, human beings who live outdoors in the sun would always have plenty of vitamin D in their system.
More scientific studies on Vitamin D and autoimmune illness:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/researchAutoimmune.shtml
So, there could well be various sets of issues on a path back to health. The typical human body has, until the last century, never spend that much time indoors year round, so it is not adapted for that. For example, Dr. Cannell suggests people who are vitamin D deficient tend to sunburn more easily -- it is just not normal for the human body to be vitamin D deficient.
Also, historically, skin color has reflected latitude, and a balance of minimizing the risk of skin cancer with dark skin vs. maximizing vitamin D production in extreme latitudes with light skin. Now that everyone moves around so much, it's especially important for people with darker skins to check their vitamin D level and supplement as needed if they live far North or South from the equator -- so a dark skinned urban professional linking someplace like Maine with indoor hobbies and not eating much fish might be most at risk of vitamin D deficiency. If you have an indoor job, indoor hobbies, or darker skin, you would be more at risk of this issue.
Dr. Cannell talks about vita
Here are science papers on Vitamin D and Inflammatory Bowel Disease:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/science/research/vitamin-d-and-inflammatory-bowel-disease.shtml
Example:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19269107
"""
The peculiar geographic distribution of inflammatory bowel disease is a puzzle for researchers. A low vitamin D status has now been linked to several Th1-mediated autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, with the strongest evidence for the vitamin's protective role in multiple sclerosis. Sunlight and vitamin D may be potent immunomodulatory agents by down-regulating Th1-driven immune responses and inducing the synthesis of antimicrobial peptides considered as natural antibiotics of the immune system. Similarly to multiple sclerosis, we propose in CD the so-called north-south gradient may be partly explained by variations in the degree of sun exposure, with vitamin D being a "seasonal stimulus". These observations may yield a better understanding of the pathophysiology of Crohn's disease and pave the way for developing new therapeutic approaches for an incurable disease. Whether a low vitamin D status is associated with an increased risk of Crohn's disease in the general population and whether vitamin D and heliotherapy may be effective in treating Crohn's disease will require additional investigations.
"""
How to get adequate vitamin D:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
You could try a blood test for vitamin D right now as recommended there to see if you are deficient in vitamin D, and, if you are seriously deficient, you might talk with your doctors about trying vitamin D3 supplements first (or maybe even an injection of a megadose by a doctor in your situation) before trying surgery (or maybe a UV-B lamp if you can't absorb vitamin D supplements well right now). Have you noticed any correlation with the seasons? Is it a little better in summer? A little worse in winter?
Do you avoid the sun? I would think it would be common in writer types like Dan O'Bannon, or some other media people who work indoors a lot. Vitamin D deficiency is at epidemic levels across the USA and may be linked to a host of issues from cancer through autism to depression. Even if adequate vitamin D did not help with Crohn's, it might at least help with other issues that stem from it.
Obviously, there may be other factors as well (other vitamins -- vitamin A relates to membrane health but every one might be an issue, or other environmental issues). Best of luck finding something that works for you, and then afterwards in rebuilding strong roots in your life whatever they may be, relationships, hobbies, philosophies, laughter, helping others, enjoying time in nature, and so on, to help you weather the storms of life and Crohn's disease.
What about this?
http://cabinet.auriol.free.fr/Documents/cache_catharsis.htm
"""
Popular belief in the catharsis theory remains strong despite the theory's dismal record in research findings. According to the catharsis hypothesis, acting aggressively or even viewing aggression is an effective way to reduce anger and aggressive feelings. One likely reason for the continued widespread belief in catharsis is that the mass media continue to endorse the view that expressing anger or aggressive feelings is healthy, constructive, and relaxing, whereas restraining oneself creates internal tension that is unhealthy and bound to lead to an eventual blowup.
The present research was concerned with a pair of related questions. First, can media support for the catharsis hypothesis cause people to engage in catharsis-seeking activities, such as aggressive action? Second, if media messages do persuade people to believe in the effectiveness of catharsis, will their own indulgence in aggressive action produce that effect?
The concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy suggests that people's beliefs can shape their choices and the outcomes of their actions, so that expectations tend to come true by virtue of the changed behaviors resulting directly from the expectations (e.g., Darley & Fazio, 1980). Although researchers have mostly failed to find laboratory evidence of catharsis effects, it is plausible that media endorsement produces such self-fulfilling prophecies, which in turn might be sufficient to sustain popular belief in catharsis. In the present research, we provided people with procatharsis messages telling them that acting aggressively or expressing anger is a good way to reduce inner tensions. Consistent with the self-fulfilling prophecy notion, we investigated whether such messages would increase behavioral choices of aggressive activity following an anger provocation (Study 1) and, more important, would help produce the anticipated benefits of expressing anger (Study 2)--specifically, by reducing aggressive behavior toward another person after the participant was supposedly able to reach catharsis by hitting a punching bag.
"""
That said, I agree with you lots of aspects of our current social system, especially the school system, are messed up in various ways. My own thoughts on how to fix them:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
Also related by me more recently on education issues:
http://www.cnewmark.com/2009/12/making-govt-work-a-huge-step.html#comments
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Two related items I've written on this:
"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"On Funding Digital Public Works "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
The executive summary from the first (the second is a longer version of the first):
"""
Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations.
"""
"For a true believer in Jesus Christ, there is in store, not another body buttressed by the technology of modern medicine, yet in the end subject to death, but a resurrected, transcendent, eternal, immortal body, with powers and abilities we cannot even imagine."
This may also be achieved in other ways, whatever one believes about universes beyond this one: :-)
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
"This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed."
But even with a "resurrected, transcendent, eternal, immortal body, with powers and abilities we cannot even imagine", the daily concerns of today will be gone for such people. Human behavior and aspects of personality emerge out of genetics (capabilities), history, environment, and free will (whatever that means) -- change the environment and capabilities and the behavior and much of personality is gone in that sense. Maybe it is better that way, but it would be very different. It would be a fundamental transformation, like a caterpillar into a butterfly. For more on this from a theological perspective:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore"
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671
"When it comes to spiritual growth, we humans are solar-seeking beings; eager for the bright lights of clarity and the bliss of illumination. Paradoxically, we all need to walk through the shadow of the dark night in order to discover a life worth living, according to psychotherapist and spiritual commentator Thomas Moore. Unlike depression, which is more of an emotional state, Moore calls the dark night a slow transformation process, which is fueled by a profound period of doubt, disorientation and questioning. Ultimately, a journey into the dark night will reshape the very meaning of your life. As a self-proclaimed "lunar type," Moore is comfortable leading his clients and readers into the shadows, where ambiguities and mysteries lurk around every corner. He describes the dark night journey in stages, starting with feeling distant from your life even as you continue to go through the motions. The second phase is "liminality," meaning living on the threshold between the known self and the unknown self. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable phase as the dark night may "take you away from the cultivation and persona you have developed in your education and from family learning," he explains. After dwelling in this murky darkness, there's a stage of "re-incorporation," in which one integrates the profound inner transitions into daily life. Like a tour guide to the underworld, Moore leads readers through all these phases, offering tools and rituals for making the journey more tolerable or at least more meaningful. He also speaks to the many arenas and stages of life in which we might find ourselves stumbling through the dark, with chapters on marriage, parenting, sexuality, creativity and health. The scope is ambitious, and at times the structure seems disjointed--but this is perhaps Moore's best contribution since Care of the Soul, proving once again that he is a wise and formidable spiritual teacher."
One might suggest we go through fundamental transformation after transformation along the path of life.
Except that the switch to agriculture was a *result* of increasing populations, not a cause. As the skeletal evidence shows, humans were much worse off in terms of health and size after the switch and starved much more often. Hunter/gathers adapted to their climates. How much worse can winters be than in the arctic but hunter/gatherers learned to live there. You are just repeating all the "conventional wisdom" that Jane Jacobs debunked. It is popularized in part because it justifies a lot of present day evils to say how much better things are today even when they may not be in some ways. Kings are not a good standard of comparison because they are part of agricultural empires. The fact is, you probably have it worse in many ways than most hunter/gatherers. They had more "job security". They did not have to worry about "taxes". They did not have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy. They always knew where there next meal was coming from because they could easily catch it themselves or walk to somewhere they could gather it. They likely had a much greater sense of community. Look at the history of, say, the Iroquois in the book "The Walking People". Hunter/Gatherers had their problems, but it is not as black and white as conventional wisdom tries to paint it. Fighting also was only necessary because of the increased populations and greater competition based on hunter/gatherer success. For many tens of thousands of years that was not a big deal -- only the last few thousand years, and then people reluctantly turned to agriculture out of desperation. They eventually got good at it, but it was still a lot more work than hunter/gathering (until the last fifty years or so with mechanization).
Except today's hunter/gatherers are the ones who have been pushed onto the most marginal lands with the least natural productivity. The agricultural empires in general took over the best land (including using bronze weapons). If you look at Marshall Sahlins wrote, in many productive areas, hunter/gatherers spend maybe two hours a day on food related work most of the time -- and it is mostly fun and interesting and engaging work. It is things like fishing to catch just one big fish. Or collecting ripe fruit off a tree in season.
By the way, there is one pill these days that can help a lot with life-extension for most US Americans. Vitamin D3 gelcaps 5000 IU, with this treatment protocol including blood testing:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Human lifespan in hunter-gather times past infant mortality might have been into the 60s or older.
The following is from something I wrote elsewhere:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.
As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
"Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization."
Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
But, they miss the big picture of the phase change transition from pre-scarcity hunter-gatherers (like the Hmong or Iroquois in older times) to
Jane Jacobs suggests that conventional wisdom is wrong -- cities existed before agriculture as trading posts; agriculture was then invented in cities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
The Earth has long been very abundant and ecologically productive in ways that we cannot even imagine these days. It was said of North American in the 1700s and 1800s: Skies darkened for days with a single bird flock (passenger pigeons). Streams with so much fish you could walk from one shore to the other over them. Plains full of Bison. (Well, at least when most of the Native Americans had died with the invasion of the Americas and the ecology had recovered and not yet been beaten back down.) If there are relatively few people, there is a lot of natural capital and natural income to go around.
But that is not to disagree with your main point. Malaria (as a significant disease) also is a product of agriculture.
Yes, we are out of touch with our roots. We either change our ways or change ourselves (evolution or engineering or equipment) or change our environment or some mix of those (or we go extinct). Humans have been slowly changing genetically and culturally to adapt over the last few thousand years.
Adequate vitamin D may help explain why people in the Mediterranian have less heart disease more than the diet itself.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=site%3Awww.vitamindcouncil.org+mediterranean
The article is all baloney because the solar system can support trillions of humans (so, you can have your farm on Ganymede for real) and the galaxy many more -- and when we reach those limits, we may well understand more about the universe or find a universe of Universes. James P. Hogan talks about this in his sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear". I outline the issues here:
"[p2p-research] Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html
"[p2p-research] Peak Population crisis (was Re: Japan's Demographic Crisis)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004174.html
The Earth is very big, plus an open system as far as solar energy. We can use energy and materials far more efficiently than we do, and we can move into space. Our problem in the industrialized word is too much doomsterism, a loss of hope, and an economic system based around managing scarcity and not creating abundance (so, we need to transition to a "basic income", a gift economy, or local subsistence with advanced nanotech and 3D printing, or some mix). We have plenty of resources to do all sorts of amazing things -- if we had more of an ideology of creating and sharing abundance. See also Julian Simon's writings called "The Ultimate Resource" about how every person overall can add much more to society by their effort and imagination than they consume.
Related to your point:
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness"
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
"Learn how to escape the dietary pleasure trap!"
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
"""
From the perspective of our natural history, a daily life with such dietary choices is extraordinary. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancient ancestors scratched and scraped, struggling against the harsh forces of nature in order to get enough food to survive. Even today, in undeveloped countries, significant food shortages are still a great concern, with millions dying each year from starvation. Yet, in a mere blink of history's eye--in just a few decades--industrialized societies have arisen from environments of scarcity and have transformed themselves into societies of unprecedented abundance. The most striking feature of that abundance is a virtually unlimited supply of food.
An abundance of food, by itself, is not a cause of health problems. But modern technology has done more than to simply make food perpetually abundant. Food also has been made artificially tastier. Food is often more stimulating than ever before--as the particular chemicals in foods that cause pleasure reactions have been isolated--and artificially concentrated. These chemicals include fats (including oils), refined carbohydrates (such as refined sugar and flour), and salt. Meats were once consumed mostly in the form of wild game--typically about 15% fat. Today's meat is a much different product. Chemically and hormonally engineered, it can be as high as 50% fat or more. Ice cream is an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste pleasure--an artificial concoction of pure fat and refined sugar. Once an expensive delicacy, it is now a daily ritual for many people. French fries and potato chips, laden with artificially-concentrated fats, are currently the most commonly consumed "vegetable" in our society. These artificial products, and others like them, form the core of the American diet. Our teenage population, for example, consumes 25% of their calories in the form of soda pop!
Most of our citizenry can't imagine how it could be any other way. To remove (or dramatically reduce) such products from America's daily diet seems intolerable--even absurd. Most people believe that if they were to do so, they would enjoy their food--and their lives--much less. Indeed, most people believe that they literally would suffer if they consumed a health-promoting diet devoid of such indulgences. But, it is here that their perception is greatly in error. The reality is that humans are well designed to fully enjoy the subtler tastes of whole natural foods, but are poorly equipped to realize this fact. And like a frog sitting in dangerously hot water, most people are being slowly destroyed by the limitations of their awareness.
"""
Personally, I feel many hunter/gatherers twenty thousand years ago may have lived longer and better than some people say they did (even as things got worse with rising population, competition, and agriculture). It really depends on where exactly they lived in what time period and what the local climate was like. There are places and times where six foot and taller skeletons were common, like on the shores of inland places that had big lakes.
From:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily sat
Just as a personal footnote, I had quoted James Loewen writing:
"""
A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen.
"""
In college, probably the summer between sophomore and junior year, I remember a suitemate who was taking some history classes (otherwise he was an engineer), telling me essentially the above, and that what I knew about history from high school was baloney, and I would not believe him. :-) I mean, I had great grades in social studies, I had even been President pro tempore of a mock Congress in high school. How could I not know the basic of US or world history? Thankfully, my interest in the history of technology at least started me down a road to greater enlightenment.
I had written: "Now that you have a reputation to protect, you may find [taking risks and accepting repeated failure] difficult." And that seems too negative a place to leave my previous remark, sorry.
To put that more positively, you have a choice. You can take that honor of winning in a major science competition and protect it, most likely freezing who you are right now as you become risk-averse, especially if you attribute that success to "intelligence" as opposed to mainly luck, hard work, previous conformity, access to assistance, and general affluence. Or, you can say it proves whatever you might want to prove to the world about your character and ability to do hard work (including perhaps negative things like a disposition to conform to arbitrary authority), and from that confidence, move on and focus more on doing things because they are fun or healthy or uplifting to yourself and those around you rather than because you have to prove anything to anybody (even to yourself), and so take all sorts of creative risks (whether with choice of classes, or travel, or new hobbies, new friends, or whatever).
From that perspective, what do you have left to prove at this point given your previous honors? Even if you fail at something, you can look back and say, yes, I'm OK. One of my most liberating moments was for this previous A student to take, and fail, a course which I had not had the preparation for or been willing to put the time into (plus disagreeing with some of the approach). I had previously taken another such random advanced course in a different discipline and done surprisingly well in it (and that later became a new direction in my life). So, the willingness to try, and fail, and move on, is really important.
From how you state there was essentially no "competition", I have some hope that you can loosen up rather than freeze up. I too did not really see competition around me, even though I can look back and see it, and see how, like water to a fish, it was so non-obvious because it was everywhere. The larger social context may not be so obvious to you right now out of high school (which is mostly what I comment on). One way to take some reasonable risks might be to do something out of the ordinary from your (presumably) science and technology coursework, like take some history courses on a wide range of topics from different perspectives. For example, to help explain why you may not have learned the historical and social context of such competitions: ... College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had more rather than less exposure to the subject before they reach college. Not in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don't
"Introduction to Lies My Teacher Told Me"
http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/content.php?file=liesmyteachertoldme-introduction.html
"""
African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn it especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. Pardoning my grammar, they do more worse in English and most worse in history. Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult than trigonometry or Faulkner. I will argue later that high school history so alienates people of color that doing badly may be a sign of mental health! Students don't know they're alienated, only that they "don't like social studies" or "aren't any good at history." In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth.
You wrote: "They aren't so much competitions as they are organizations who try to determine which students have best displayed future potential for their fields. It's not like a one-on-one "science off" where two students try to one-up one another with their mastery of arcane mathematical facts; it's a bunch of students, all of whom are amazing in their own right, versus panels of distinguished judges. You don't "compete" beyond the fact that an organization can't give an award to everyone - in fact, some of my best friends are the ones that I met through these competitions."
More from:
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"""
Kohn defines competition as any situation where one person's success is dependent upon another's failure. Put another way, in competition two or more parties are pursuing a goal that cannot be attained by all. He calls this 'mutually exclusive goal attainment' (MEGA).
Kohn goes on to define two distinct types of competition. In 'structural competition' MEGA is an explicit, defining element in the nature of the interaction. For instance in a game of tennis there can be only one winner. The same is true of beauty contests, presidential elections, and wars. Everyone knows they are out to beat the others though the rules of engagement may vary considerably between events.
Intentional competition' is a state of mind, an individual's competitiveness or his proclivity for besting others. Anyone can go to a party determined to establish him or herself as the most intelligent, the most attractive, etc. Similarly, in school, the work place, and on teams people can try to beat others whether or not anyone is formally keeping score and declaring winners and losers.
One place where competition cannot exist, according to Kohn, is within oneself. Such striving to better one's own standing is an individual, not interactive matter; it does not involve MEGA. Of course some people cannot imagine pushing themselves without the possibility of 'winning' or the threat of 'losing', but this by no means implies that all motivation is dependent upon competitive frameworks. Throughout history countless large and small accomplishments have been achieved simply out of an individual's desire to do better without any thought of beating others. Such striving for mastery cannot be confused with competition.
"""
Note also that:
"Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
Also, as was pointed out to me by Hans Moravec when I hung out in his lab, good research involves taking risks, and coping with repeated failures. He suggested that he was as successful as he was (and he is brilliant and a thought leader in many ways) because he failed a lot early in life. :-) Now that you have a reputation to protect, you may find this difficult.
See the ideas outlined here to see more on why I am concerned about this (as a parent for my own child):
"How Not to Talk to Your Kids"
http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ [multiple pages]
"Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control," she explains. "They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure." In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't nee
As outlined here: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still, homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not.
"http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"""
New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
"""
John Taylor Gatto says it best:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.
"""
"[p2p-research] College Daze links..."
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
A mixed message:
"[p2p-research] Slashdot | Study Says US Needs Fewer Science Students"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005489.html
Related Links About Academia: ..."
http://novia.net/~pschleck/academia/
Sample link:
"Generation Debt; Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty"
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0417,kamenetz,53011,1.html
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air.
Sounds like it is getting worse. Here is part of why:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
Another approach: ...
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"""
[Jeff Schmidt] argues in Disciplined Minds that work is an inherently political activity and that hiring therefore involves political screening.
Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job.
"""
Links with four different approaches:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.thevenusproject.com/