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sciencespies · 3 years

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Following The Scientific Consensus Is The ‘Least Wrong’ Line Of Thought

https://sciencespies.com/news/following-the-scientific-consensus-is-the-least-wrong-line-of-thought/

Following The Scientific Consensus Is The ‘Least Wrong’ Line Of Thought

There are two important and common words that, when used scientifically, have a very different meaning than how we use them in everyday language: theory and consensus. These two words, in our commonplace usage, have meanings that imply a large degree of uncertainty. A theory is merely a thought that anyone can put forward: an idea, a wild guess, or even baseless speculation all count as “theories” the way we talk about them in our daily lives, where ideas like gravitation and that the Earth is flat get lumped in with the same word: theory.

While most of us recognize the difference between a scientific and non-scientific use of the word theory, this line is even blurrier when it comes to the notion of a consensus. Consensus, when we use it commonly, simply means, “most people believe this thing,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean such a thing is correct or true. Consensus could apply just as equally to statements like “the Earth is warming” as it could to those like “ninjas are cooler than pirates.”

However, when a scientist talks about consensus, they are talking about something far more powerful: the least wrong approximation of reality supported by the full suite of evidence and the overwhelming majority of professionals in a particular field. Here’s how following the scientific consensus empowers all of us who do so, and imperils all who reject it.

If you decide to argue against the scientific consensus, you’ll have a very large suite of evidence … [+] to overturn, explain, and supersede. If you yourself are not an expert in the specific sub-field of science that you’re seeking to overturn, the odds are very much against your success, and if you’re not even using a shared scientific vocabulary, no one will even take your arguments seriously.

MacLeod / Union of Concerned Scientists

Theory: this is the starting point of it all. If we ever want to understand what it means to abide by or reckon with the scientific consensus on an issue, we have to go back to this definition: that of a theory.

I’m not talking about the colloquial definition, which is any proposed explanation for why some phenomenon occurred. (E.g., flat Earth theory.)

Nor am I talking about the mathematical definition: a self-consistent set of axioms or postulates that allow the construction of a framework. (E.g., string theory.)

I’m also not talking about a speculative extension to the mainstream, accepted theories that we have that don’t have adequate supporting evidence behind them. (E.g., supersymmetry theory.)

And finally, I’m not talking about an idea that was once viable, until it failed to explain key pieces of evidence, conflicting with a key measurement or observation. (E.g., Lamarckian evolution.)

Instead, when scientists most frequently talk about theories, they talk about the accepted theories that are overwhelmingly supported by the evidence: the starting point for modern science. General Relativity is our theory of gravity; the Standard Model is our theory of elementary particles; genetics and Darwinian evolution are our theory of how living organisms pass on their traits to future generations; etc. When scientists talk typically mention a theory, they’re discussing what’s already been robustly established and outlining the framework for all current and future discussions.

The Standard Model particles and their supersymmetric counterparts. This spectrum of particles is an … [+] inevitable consequence of unifying the four fundamental forces in the context of String Theory, but supersymmetry, string theory, and the presence of extra dimensions all remain speculative and without any observational evidence. They are not part of the scientific consensus.

Claire David

The novel phenomenon: ideas like “scientific consensus” never come up in a vacuum. Instead, they come up in discussions surrounding an issue because something new, important, or unexpected has been observed to occur.

We observe that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is rising, that the pH of the oceans, globally, are acidifying, and that extreme temperatures are being recorded more frequently all over the world.

We observe that an astrophysical cataclysm occurred some 130,000,000 light-years away, and that gravitational waves arrived ever-so-slightly before the very first electromagnetic signal did: by 1.7 seconds.

Or we observe the emergence of a novel disease in humans, the genetic sequence of which is similar to, but evolutionarily divergent from, other known disease-causing agents in the same family.

Although these may seem like wildly disparate examples from a variety of scientific fields — the climate change problem in the context of environmental and geological/atmospheric sciences, the astrophysical neutron star-neutron star merger observed in both gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation, and the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in the context of virology, disease ecology, and epidemiology — scientists take the same approach in every instance.

This figure shows the structure of the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2. Panel A shows the spike … [+] homotrimer in its open configuration, while panel B shows the cleavage sites on the spike protein.

Walls et al., Cell, 181 (2) (2020), pp. 281-292 e6

Identify the null hypothesis: this is an unspoken step that any scientist will recognize, but that simply doesn’t occur to most non-scientists. When we say “the null hypothesis,” what we mean is, “what explanation for this novel phenomenon would indicate that its emergence is already accounted for by the known laws, theories, and frameworks that are already in place to elucidate the Universe?”

The null hypothesis would mean that, sure, you’ve discovered a new phenomenon, but no new rules or outside influences need to be invoked to explain it.

The null hypothesis sometimes means, “things are behaving as they’ve always behaved, and what we’re observing is within the realm of natural variation.” Numerous announced discoveries that were later overturned occurred because of an unlikely fluctuation in the data that regressed to the mean when more data was taken. Ruling out the null hypothesis, however, can be an incredibly powerful achievement. In the case of the temperature of the Earth, going all the way back to the earliest global temperature records in the early 1880s, the null hypothesis is now ruled out at greater than 5-sigma confidence, with less than a 1-in-3.5 million chance of it being a fluke.

The best-fit amplitude of an annual modulation signal for a nuclear recoil with sodium iodide. The … [+] DAMA/LIBRA result shows a signal at extreme confidence, but the best attempt to replicate that has instead yielded a null result. The default assumption should be that the DAMA collaboration has an unaccounted for noise artifact.

J. Amaré et al./ANAIS-112 Collaboration, arXiv:2103.01175

So, we’ve found something’s new. Now what? Again, there’s an unspoken step that scientists take that’s rarely discussed. Scientists often ask themselves an important question, particularly when a novel phenomenon crosses the threshold of ambiguity and whose existence can now be considered non-controversial.

The Earth is warming, the oceans are acidifying, and the carbon dioxide concentrations have been rising, too.

The arrival time of gravitational waves and electromagnetic signals have been accurately measured and their origin point has been confirmed to be identical, and yet the gravitational waves still get there 1.7 seconds earlier, even though both should travel at the same speed: the speed of light.

And the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 did, in fact, emerge in humans in late 2019, even though the precise origin of how this virus found its way into the human population remains obscure.

What we typically do in this situation is resort to what some scientists also call “the null hypothesis” but which I prefer — to distinguish it from our earlier “nothing to see here” example — to call the default hypothesis: the idea that everything needed to explain this emergent phenomenon is already known, but that we just need to correctly identify the important contributors.

Light that’s polarized in a particular fashion from the Big Bang’s leftover glow would indicate … [+] primordial gravitational waves… and demonstrate that gravity is an inherently quantum force. But misattributing BICEP2’s claimed polarization signal to gravitational waves rather than its true cause — galactic dust emission — is now a classic example of confusing signal with noise.

BICEP2 collaboration

Identifying what matters: a lot of people have this misconception that science is wedded to what we’ve already established, and that scientists are incredibly resistant to new ideas.

This is not how it works at all, and although you can certainly find people — even a few scientists among them — who feel that way, the truth is far less exciting.

The reality is that what’s already been established, scientifically, provides us with an incredibly strong and versatile foundation to accommodate almost any new phenomenon we observe.

The default hypothesis, in practically any case we encounter, is that there is a completely mundane explanation for this novel phenomenon that only relies on correctly applying the science of what’s already known to the situation at hand. The default hypothesis is the least radical suggestion of all: that you might need to add an additional ingredient or component in order to get the full story out, but that when you do and you apply the underlying scientific rules correctly, you wind up fully explaining everything that you observe.

The global surface average temperature for the years where such records reliably and directly exist: … [+] 1880-2019 (at present). The zero line represents the long-term average temperature for the whole planet; blue and red bars show the difference above or below average for each year. The warming, on average, is by 0.07 C per decade, but has accelerated, warming at an average of 0.18 C since 1981.

NOAA / climate.gov

Recognizing alternatives for what they are: of course, sometimes there really are novel rules that come into play, and oftentimes our first clue that our current theoretical framework needs modification comes exactly in the form of a novel, unexplained observation. However, elevating the alternative explanation to the status of leading explanation requires something more: a demonstration that the default hypothesis is somehow insufficient.

This has happened numerous times throughout history, of course, and whenever it has, it’s led to a scientific revolution.

The fact that Mercury’s orbit around the Sun couldn’t be explained by Newtonian gravity led scientists to hypothesize an unseen, inner planetary companion to Mercury: Vulcan. Only when Vulcan failed to turn up was the alternative hypothesis — that Newtonian gravity needed to be superseded — explored and eventually validated.

The fact that the Earth is, geologically, billions of years old seemed incompatible with the Sun’s current power levels sustaining itself over billions of years. The mechanism of gravitational contraction could only sustain the Sun for tens of millions of years; it wasn’t until decades later that the secrets of nuclear physics would pave our way for understanding how the Sun worked.

And the fact that galaxies are zipping around inside galaxy clusters at speeds far too great to be consistent with the amount of matter present inside them led to the idea that some “dark” form of matter was present throughout our Universe. Only after decades of robust observations confirmed that there was no form of normal matter that could account for these motions — and additional observations (of individual galaxies) independently confirmed the cluster problem — was dark matter accepted into the mainstream.

After discovering Neptune by examining the orbital anomalies of Uranus, scientist Urbain Le Verrier … [+] turned his attention to the orbital anomalies of Mercury. He proposed an interior planet, Vulcan, as an explanation. Although Vulcan did not exist, it was Le Verrier’s calculations that helped lead Einstein to the eventual solution: General Relativity.

Wikimedia Commons user Reyk

However, these examples are exceptional; far more frequently, the default hypothesis is the one that carries the day. It’s important, as a scientist, to entertain the possibility of alternative explanations for any phenomenon you might have observed, but to relegate them to the status of both speculative and unproven until you establish the insufficiency of the default hypothesis. And that, perhaps unfortunately, is tremendously difficult to do.

The default hypothesis is that the Earth’s temperatures are warming, its climates are changing, and its oceans are acidifying because humanity has significantly modified the contents of our atmosphere, largely through the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

The default hypothesis is that gravitational waves arrive before electromagnetic waves because the light that’s generated from a neutron star merger must travel through matter — which slows down light — before arriving at our eyes, while the gravitational waves simply pass, unimpeded, right through that same matter.

And the default hypothesis is that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in humans through zoonotic spillover, before the superspreader event at the Wuhan market, likely through some form of animal agriculture, farming, or encroachment of human activity into previously wild territory.

Illustration of a fast gamma-ray burst, long thought to occur from the merger of neutron stars. The … [+] gas-rich environment surrounding them, as well as the matter from the neutron stars themselves, could delay the arrival of the signal, explaining the observed 1.7 second difference between the arrivals of the gravitational and electromagnetic signatures. This is the best evidence we have, observationally, that the speed of gravity must equal the speed of light: to approximately 1 part in 10^15 (a quadrillion).

ESO

Consensus. So, now let’s say we’ve done our homework. We’ve learned everything that humanity knows about this particular scientific issue, just like all the leading scientists in a particular discipline try to do. Now, the critical moment comes: we’re trying to synthesize together everything that we know and obtain a scientific consensus.

What does that mean?

A scientific consensus can only be achieved if:

a single framework explains all of the legacy puzzles as well as the novel phenomenon,

no unproven, evidence-free conjectures need to be true for the explanation to hold,

when the full suite of evidence is considered — scientifically admissible evidence, as opposed to speculation — there are no “dealbreaker” puzzles still left to solve,

and if the overwhelming majority of professionals actively working in the field all draw the same conclusion: that this one, favored, consensus picture is the best explanation for everything we’ve observed.

Any consensus we achieve is always provisional, of course; any one of the alternatives could always turn out to be true. But if you are to truly compete with a consensus opinion — the Standard Model, dark matter, cosmic inflation, Darwinian evolution, human-caused global climate change, the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, etc. — you have to identify where and how the consensus opinion breaks down, and to demonstrate where your preferred alternative not only succeeds where the consensus fails, but to demonstrate its success in every place where the current consensus also succeeds.

Tycho Brahe conducted some of the best observations of Mars prior to the invention of the telescope, … [+] and Kepler’s work largely leveraged that data. Here, Brahe’s observations of Mars’s orbit, particularly during retrograde episodes, provided an exquisite confirmation of Kepler’s elliptical orbit theory.

Wayne Pafko, 2000 / http://www.pafko.com/tycho/observe.html

Over the course of human history, what was once a consensus opinion among scientists has been found to be insufficient on one or more accounts. When this occurs, the “old consensus” doesn’t suddenly become wrong, but rather gets demoted to a mere approximation or special case of a more comprehensive framework: a new, superior scientific consensus. Our current consensus is not evidence of groupthink, but rather is the culmination of our modern scientific enterprise: the best approximation of reality that the full suite of evidence — in the context of our most successful scientific theories — can possibly put forth.

As in all things, many of today’s consensus positions will no doubt be found to be lacking in some key way, and will someday be regarded the same way we regard Newtonian gravity: revolutionary for its time, accurate and useful under certain conditions, but only an approximation of a deeper, more fundamental description of reality. That is not a flaw in the scientific method nor in our way of thinking today; that is the nature of science.

When we interrogate the Universe in just the right fashion, a deeper truth may yet be revealed. The key to advancing, however, is to understand the limitations of the current consensus position and to identify the criteria necessary to overthrow it. Unless that’s precisely what you��re doing when considering an alternative, you’re arguing against the common, rather than the scientific, meaning of consensus.

#News

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davidmann95 · 7 years

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How do you feel about this idea that the concept of superheroes are fundamentally facist? Yeah, Watchmen exist and Garth Ennis is Garth Ennissing but what's your whole take on that, especially in our current political climate.

I definitely disagree with that interpretation; I don’t especially see it in either of those works either, as Watchmen’s heroes acting in accordance with authoritarianism leads to their own near-extinction and ostracization by the first page since there’s no place for the likes of them in such a world, and the one hero Ennis seems to actually venerate as in line with his generally humanist values is Superman, the one most often accused of having fascist underpinnings (in spite of having consistently left-leaning values over the years). I’m instead of a mind with Colin Smith’s viewpoint that the superhero is fundamentally an egalitarian, fair-minded concept that while often acting violently outside the law - and I’d say it takes a very strict, narrow-minded viewpoint to see that in and of itself as an inherently fascistic, anti-democratic action, especially in today’s political climate - does so in service of upholding social ideals generally professed by society and the powers-that-be, if rarely lived up to, in a self-consciously idealistic and symbolic manner so as to show the way for others to do the same. They stand up to criminals and fascists and those of all stripes who would stand against human rights and dignity, both within and without their given nations and its representatives, and then return to relatively humble private lives until their fellow citizens are once again imperiled or oppressed. Hell, even the Authority as the poster-children for supposedly authoritarian superheroes only act overtly against governments of the openly non-democratic variety, attempting as best they can in the original run to cooperate with the nations of the world rather than outright conquer them as they so easily could.

Obviously it’s incredibly easy to push this the other way even by accident, with all sorts of benignly-intended comics showing superhumanity as essentially its own elevated social class, or contemplating how they need to work to stay morally superior to the generally vile masses, or fighting again and again and again against villains presented as violent leftist reformers (though even that in moderation I think has some kind of place in the genre when they’re presented as seeking singular personal power in the destruction of the prevailing social order at the cost of human life against the will of the people, even if in pursuit of noble goals). But I think it’s notable that when that sort of approach takes hold fans seem to slowly recoil as the concept loses its fundamental spark to the kind of amoral violence that its detractors claim make up its core. It takes work to make sure that doesn’t happen, but it’s certainly possible; as an example, I’ll once again go to Colin Smith, who speaks here on Al Ewing’s Doc Thunder in the novel Gods of Manhattan, and how he stands for the best of what you might call traditional superheroic values.

EDIT: Anonymous said: I dunno, but while I wouldn’t say fascist, I’d say there is something inherently small c-conservative about superheroes - they’re premise is predicated on the government being unable to maintain order and private entities having to step in, which is a pretty conservative role, all-in-all.

There’s something to that, but it’s as a matter of individuals or personal groups rather than corporate entities, and working towards broad social good rather than ‘correcting the markets’ or lobbying in their own interests. I don’t think it’s inherently conservative in and of itself to acknowledge the value of individual action or that governments can act against the public interest, especially when the idea as it’s so often framed in superhero stories is to lead others to action as well by example in making society work for its own professed ideals - there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of opposition most of the time to the concept of the government playing an important role in making that happen.

#Superheroes #Fascism #Liberal #Left #Colin Smith #Al Ewing #Gods of Manhattan #El Sombra #Doc Thunder #Watchmen #Garth Ennis #Superman #Convervative #Opinion

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kantkid · 4 years

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Hi Kantkid, lately I've been trying to diversify my taste in literature and I noticed that I don't know any Italian writers and poets, like at all. Can you recommend some artists I shouldn't miss, if i want to familiarize myself with Italian literature?Wishing you a lovely summer xxxx

This message is probably ages old, from a long period of semi-inactivity on Tumblr. I apologise to the anon for not answering earlier!! Now quarantine is giving me the time to go through all the old asks, and I hope this person will see the answer. I am always glad when foreign people are interested in my country’s literature and culture xxx

The basics:

- Dante’s Divina Commedia: an absolute classic masterpiece, written in 1.321, during the golden age of Italian city-states (Italy as a united state was not born yet). It was a flourishing time for commerce, conquest, and literature, where Florence and many Italian cities were the peak of European culture. This poem in three books is the theological tale of the author descending in the underworld, to discover the destiny of souls after death, a symbolic tale of the highest beauty, with a deep philosophical meaning. It’s divided in three books: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). The English translation unfortunately looses the impressive musicality and structural perfection of the text - still unparalleled today in our literature - but retains the beauty of the story and its message.

- Il Principe by Niccolò Machiavelli: a treatise of incredibly modern political philosophy, written in 1513 at the court of Lorenzo ”The magnificent” de Medici, prince of Florence. Machiavelli was a courtesan and intellectual of the prince, known for its acume and his “the aim justifies the means” philosophy, still famous to this day, and present in worldwide popular culture. Inspired by the figures of of pope Alessandro VI Borgia and his son Cesare Borgia, the treatise describes the perfect ruler as a cunning, unscrupulous man devoted to reach the good of the country with shrewdness, at whatever cost. It has shaped the political vision of most European politicians of his time and after, and the author gives the name to the well-known “machiavellic” personality trait.

- Anything by Giacomo Leopardi, genius poet of strong philosophical insight, born to the Count of San Leopardo in 1789 in a small country town. He lived a very secluded childhood and youth, his conservative father and his cold mother were extremely strict and stopped his various attempts at escaping the family house. Giacomo grew up a shy, intelligent boy, with severe health problems. He dedicated his whole life to reading, studying, and writing. He was a child genius, composing in latin and Ancient Greek aged eight or nine years old. He spoke 8 languages, most of which he learned independently, reading alone in his room. He is one of the brightest minds of the whole Italian literature, father of the pessimist philosophy, and an incredibly talented poet. Despite his general pessimism, and probably a severe form of depression, his poetry ultimately portrays human contact and social interaction as the only salvation from the nihilistic, indifferent world we live in.

The contemporary:

- La coscienza di Zeno by Italo Svevo: a memoir of a patient writing to his psychotherapist (inspired by the figure of Sigmund Freud). Through Zeno’s relationship with tobacco addiction, the book explores both the mind of the protagonist and the social atmosphere of a country on the verge of the Great War. The author was a friend of James Joyce, and the themes explored by the two authors are somehow parallel.

- La noia (Boredom) by Alberto Moravia: prominent existentialist author, Moravia analyses the theme of emotional void and lack of meaning through “the story of a failed artist and pampered son of a rich family who becomes dangerously attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, and imperiled masculinity. This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life is one of the masterworks of a writer whom as Anthony Burgess once remarked, was "always trying to get to the bottom of the human imbroglio” (from Goodreads)

- Our ancestors trilogy by Italo Calvino: The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight compose the trilogy of novels published between 1952 and1959. Moral tales set in an eerie, imagined middle-age, with a surreal and often hilarious twist, they tell three stories that sound like fairytales but with an undoubtedly modern and introspective flair. The Cloven Viscount, for instance, tells the story of a knight who is split in half battling the Turks during a crusade, and his two halves keep living with different characters, one sweet and one cruel, which were both parts of the original personality of the knight. The Baron in the Trees is the tale of a noble-born child who is annoyed by family life and decides to move up a fig tree, never to return on the ground, and leads his whole life up on the branches of the tree. The Non-Existent Knight, Agulfus, is an empty suit of armour with a conscience...

I hope they can be a good start!!

#philosophynet #prosewritersclique #Greta risponde #lit #italia

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diamondadvenutres-blog · 5 years

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scootoaster · 4 years

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Why do so many diseases come from bats?

Members of a newly discovered bat species, the Hipposideros bats, flying out of an abandoned gold mine in Western Kenya. (B.D. Patterson, Field Museum/)

Much about the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic remains unclear, but it’s likely that the novel coronavirus originated in bats, perhaps then spread to another animal that in turn passed it to people.

This isn’t the first disease we’ve faced that has come from the little flying mammals. Other coronaviruses that researchers are aware of that also cause severe illnesses in people—the original SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)—have been linked to bats. A recent study found that bats and the coronavirus family have in fact been evolving together for millions of years, although it’s rare for different bat species to pass coronaviruses to each other.

Bats are natural hosts for other high-profile pathogens such as the Ebola and Nipah viruses as well. Scientists have found that bats seem to harbor a particularly large number of viruses that can infect people compared with most other animals.

So what is it about bats that causes them to carry so many of these viruses? Researchers have identified a few possible explanations—although none of them mean we should live in fear of bats or blame them for the spread of COVID-19. Just because bats harbor viruses that can infect people doesn’t mean that they’re spreading disease in their wake while flitting across the countryside every night.

Bats have some unique characteristics that might allow them to host an abundance of viruses, says Bruce Patterson, a curator of mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. These mammals are “extraordinarily social” and spend much of their time packed together. During the summer, the world’s largest bat colony descends on Bracken Cave in Texas, bringing more than 15 million Mexican free-tailed bats together. The pups born in this cave can roost in densities of up to 500 bats per square foot.

“We’re all learning about social distancing and its effects on breaking up viral transmission—well, that’s hard to do when your whole biology involves huddling and taking care of one another in these very…tight social groupings,” Patterson says. “It doesn’t take very long for any pathogen or parasite to make its way through the entire population.”

Because of this gregarious way of life, bats evolved powerful immune systems in order to survive, Patterson says. This robust defense allows them to carry viruses without falling ill or at least withstand deadly diseases such as rabies longer than other mammals can.

“Bats are able to keep rabies at arm’s length and actually live with it for a while, whereas a human that comes down with rabies is gone in very little time,” Patterson says.

This natural protection powers down only when bats hibernate in winter to save energy. That’s part of why the tiny mammals are so vulnerable to the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome, the disease devastating bat populations in North America, while hibernating.

In addition to having this beastly immune system, bats are also the only mammals with the ability to fly. Some of the adaptations bats have evolved to help them stay aloft could also make them resilient to viruses.

“Flying is one of the most expensive ways to get around; it’s far more costly energetically than swimming or walking or running,” Patterson says. “Bats have to really work to stay in the air and do it hour after hour through the night.”

Because bats use so much energy to fly, they have a high metabolic rate. When animals metabolize food and turn it into energy, though, this process creates byproducts called free radicals that are harmful to our DNA. Animals, including humans, have ways of preventing or repairing DNA damage, and these capabilities seem to have become particularly efficient in bats to help them cope with their whirring metabolisms, Patterson says.

When viruses infect an animal, they invade its cells and force them to build more viruses instead of copying their own genetic code into new cells. But viruses might not be able to hijack bats’ genetic machinery as effectively as they do in other mammals because bats have such excellent DNA editing and repair mechanisms.

“That same property translates into really exceptional longevity in bats,” Patterson says. A little brown bat living in your attic might survive 30 years or more, he says, while the house mouse, another mammal of similar size, has a lifespan of only two or three years.

It’s also possible that flying gives bats such an incredible workout that their bodies heat up enough to fight off viruses while on the wing. This is in some ways similar to the way a fever helps fight infection.

All of these factors combined—their super social behavior, adaptations for turbo-charged metabolisms, and elite immune systems—creates the perfect storm for harboring and transmitting diseases. “The things…that are peculiar to bats that make them pretty good at keeping viruses from overwhelming their systems also make those viruses persist in their systems longer than they do in other groups,” Patterson says. “And that increases the potential for bats to pass it along to somebody else.”

Bats are extremely social, have turbo-charged metabolisms, and elite immune systems. Combined, these characteristics provide an ideal situation for harboring and transmitting diseases. (B.D. Patterson, Field Museum/)

However, detecting a virus in a given animal only provides evidence that it can infect that particular species, Nardus Mollentze, a viral ecologist at the University of Glasgow, told Popular Science in an email. It doesn’t directly imply that the species in question is actually transmitting the virus to people. In fact, his team found that bats are not the most common animal to transmit infectious diseases to humans. There are other species that are just as likely.

Mollentze and his colleague Daniel Streicker, also at the University of Glasgow, recently created a database of viruses found in mammals and birds. They found that groups of closely related animals that had a lot of species within their group had more human-infecting viruses associated with them compared to groups of animals with less species. In other words: there are a lot of different bat species, so it’s not surprising that we’ve detected so many zoonotic viruses in bats.

They reported their work on April 28 in Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.

“The number of zoonotic viruses coming from bats is certainly high, but that is also true of other species rich groups such as rodents,” Mollentze said. “What our data shows is that as a group, bats do not transmit more viruses to humans than other mammalian groupings of comparable size, and are not more likely to transmit viruses to humans than any other group.”

Many species of bats are endangered and very rarely come into contact with humans, he added. In fact, a number of diseases found in bats are typically passed to people by other animals. You’re more likely to catch rabies from a skunk or raccoon than a bat, MERS is often transmitted by dromedary camels, and the SARS epidemic in 2003 probably began with captive civet cats.

To avert future pandemics, it’s essential that we discover which viruses are circulating in wild animals and could potentially infect people. That means monitoring animals that could play a role in their transmission to people, including bats.

However, there’s a lot we still don’t know about this diverse group of animals, Patterson says. In the journal ZooKeys, he and his colleagues recently reported their discovery of four new species of leaf-nosed bats, which are closely related to the family of horseshoe bats from which the novel coronavirus may have originated.

Despite the fact that bats contain and spread disease, they are still vital members of the world’s ecosystems and we are far better off with them than without them. Bats often escape our notice because they’re nocturnal and different species tend to look very similar. “They aren’t colorful [and] they don’t have beautiful songs that we can listen to and recognize the way we can with birds,” Patterson says. “Twenty-five percent of the bat species we recognize today were thought to be something else 15 years ago; that’s a shocking number.”

What we do know, however, is that bats are incredibly valuable members of their ecological communities. They gobble up insects that would otherwise feast on crops; bats are estimated to save farmers in the United States at least $3.7 billion per year in pest control services. Their hearty appetites also keep insects that transmit diseases such as West Nile Virus in check.

Nectar-drinking bats pollinate the plants they feed from; in Africa, baobab trees are mainly pollinated by fruit bats. As they fly about, bats also help plant new vegetation in tropical forests by pooping out seeds from the fruit they dine on.

“All of these things are really important ecological roles and we can’t lose track of that because of our fears and concerns about viruses associated with [bats],” Patterson says. Bats are facing threats enough from habitat loss, climate change, diseases like white-nose syndrome, and the bushmeat trade. “They’re already on the ropes because of human activities and we should do all we can to make sure we don’t further imperil them through our actions.”

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asiastemcells-blog · 5 years

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Genomic Profiling of Structural Abnormalities in Human Cells

Near Genomic Hybridization (CGH) is the name given to the technique that permits recognition of duplicate number changes in Chromosomes without the requirement for genuine cell refined. It is the strategy used to break down duplicate number varieties (CNVs) in the DNA of a test in contrast with a reference test.

The until now customary techniques for cytogenetic investigation of Fluorescence in-situ Hybridization (FISH) and Giemsa Banding were horribly restricted by the goals of the magnifying lens used to decide and translate last readings and results. Other than vagueness bringing about brought down unwavering quality on results, the two methods are high-work power methodology. CGH was initially produced for assessing the contrasts between chromosomal supplements of ordinary tissue and strong tumors. The point of CGH is to productively and rapidly look at and assess two DNA tests from two unique sources to decide increases of misfortunes of entire or sub chromosomes.

Similar Genomic Hybridization can distinguish just 'unequal chromosomal variations from the norm's as these are the ones that influence CNVs contrasted with 'adjusted chromosomal anomalies.' However, the full scope of each of the 46 human chromosomes can be investigated with CGH in a solitary test to decide cancellations and duplications even on an infinitesimal scale, which can help recognize other 'applicant qualities.' Other cytological methods can further investigate the disclosures of these 'competitor qualities.'

The principal distributed report of CGH method investigation was in 1992 at the University of California, San Francisco to ponder strong tumors. Utilizing this system, Prof Olli Kallioniemi and his group recognized 16 distinct areas of intensification in cell lines and tumors; huge numbers of these enhancements were novel disclosures.

Further investigations and test conventions alongside picture examination programming reasoned that CGH was an extremely helpful and precise cytogenetic scientific device and it started to be used far and wide.

Immature microorganism Characterization

Immature microorganisms are antecedents to every single living cell found in the human body just as creatures; they are exceptionally amazing and are considered the 'focal points of regenerative drug.' The forte of undifferentiated cells is that they are incredibly moldable and regenerative and they are a zone of steady medicinal research and concentrate that includes the development of new cells, organs or tissues to supplant ones that are harmed by illness or damage.

Undifferentiated organism portrayal includes the way of life of cells in research centers which was fundamental to developing these new organs and tissues; anyway studies demonstrated that delayed culture incited genomic variations from the norm. It was understood that these chromosomal abnormalities could have expansive outcomes on their regenerative capacity, potential and survival and furthermore bring about problematic outcomes imperiling their utilization. As a rule in lab conditions, undifferentiated organism specialists usually utilize the G-banding (or Giemsa Banding) Karyotype Analysis which enables them to screen these distortions through the genomic soundness of cell lines. Be that as it may, since this technique just identifies huge varieties, it passes up a dominant part of littler varieties. As of late, various research gatherings have begun utilizing different strategies and systems for undifferentiated organism portrayal; one of these is the Array-based Comparative Genomic Hybridization which can recognize unequal cell auxiliary irregularities.Asia Stem Cell

#Asia Stem Cells #stem cell treatment #stem cell therapy #stem cell medicine #stem cell treatment cost #stem cell institute

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jeroldlockettus · 7 years

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Thinking Is Expensive. Who’s Supposed to Pay for It?

Google spent nearly $5.4 million on lobbying in the second quarter of 2017. (Photo: Vladislav Reshetnyak/Pexels)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Thinking Is Expensive. Who’s Supposed to Pay for It?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Corporations and rich people donate billions to their favorite think tanks and foundations. Should we be grateful for their generosity — or suspicious of their motives?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

I’m sure you’ve been hearing the ever-more-anguished calls to regulate the huge tech firms collectively known as GAFA: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.

Barry LYNN: These companies, these super-large platform monopolists, they have developed the capacity to manipulate us, to control us, to control the information that is delivered to us, to control the pricing at which products are delivered to us, to control us as producers.

The GAFA companies are far bigger, richer, and arguably more dominant than tech companies in the past. Google, for instance, has more than 80 percent of global search-engine market share. Facebook has nearly 2 billion monthly active users. Amazon has an estimated 90 million prime members in the U.S. — that’s something like 70 percent of all American households! It’s estimated that 40 percent of all online spending goes to Amazon. This kind of scale creates a lot of concern. We’ve examined this concern in previous episodes, like “Who Runs the Internet?” and “Is the Internet Being Ruined?”

Zeynep TUFEKCI from a previous Freakonomics Radio episode: We’re seeing the birth of a new center of real power. We depend on these technologies that have been, in many ways, wonderful and fascinating. But they’re making significant decisions unilaterally.

There’s also the question of whether the mission of these firms is as socially beneficial as many people believed they were in the early days of the internet:

TUFEKCI: There’s all these really smart engineers. They’re the brightest computer scientists, and all they’re thinking about is, “How do I keep someone on Facebook for 10 more minutes? What’s the exact combination of things that will keep them staying on the site as long as possible so that we can show them as much advertisement as possible?”

So here’s a question: if you were one of those huge, dominant, super-wealthy firms, what would you do to ensure that the good times stay good? You’d probably spend a lot of money lobbying politicians — which, yes, they do. There’s been a huge ramping-up lately in lobbying by tech firms. But you might also do something a bit subtler than that.

Robert REICH: Yeah. There’s been a parallel ramping-up of the philanthropy that’s associated with the tech firms. That philanthropy comes in a variety of different forms.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: corporations using philanthropy to shape the public debate — and how that can go terribly wrong:

Barry LYNN: That was on June 27th. And on June 29th, I was told that my entire team had to leave.

* * *

Our story today begins with a journalist …

Franklin FOER: I’m Franklin Foer, a writer with The Atlantic.

Stephen J. DUBNER: You are one of three brothers who write books. Talk about that for just a minute, and the family that produced all of you.

FOER: Right. So I have two brothers: Jonathan, who’s written a good number of novels, including Everything is Illuminated. I got a younger brother named Josh, who is a science writer [and] wrote a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. It’s actually incredibly uncomfortable for us to talk about growing up in a family of other writers just because— I’m sure in some ways, we benefit from the novelty act of being three brotherly writers. But then we all, of course, want to be known for our own accomplishments.

DUBNER: Right.

FOER: But our parents didn’t do anything— They didn’t force us to play violin four hours a day or sit down and study the great chess masters. We watched a lot of He-Man and Addams Family reruns on television when we were growing up. But one of the things that they did was they gave us a credit card, which they said we weren’t allowed to spend essentially on anything except in the event of an incredible emergency. There was one exception to this: they said that we could basically spend the credit card at will at the bookshop. They basically guided us to one thing.

DUBNER: Your first job in journalism was at Slate, one of the very first mainstream online publications, which was started by Microsoft. There was this huge enthusiasm, certainly among the chattering classes.

FOER: There was a certain amount of utopianism that was associated with the emergence of the internet, this idea that we were going to tie the world together. I love search engines. I love the fact that I can access every book in human history in a nanosecond. I love that I can get things delivered to my door incredibly quickly. These things, arguably, make life much better; maybe inarguably make life much better. These technologies were incredible! Amazon is an incredible company. The Kindle was an incredible invention. The iPad and the iPhone were incredible innovations. We were right to marvel at them.

DUBNER: After writing for Slate for a while, you moved on to the New Republic — as you call it, the “intellectual organ for hard-nosed liberalism.” You ultimately became editor there not once, but twice.

FOER: The New Republic was this little magazine that always had outsized influence in politics and culture. It was an incredibly elitist organ and it managed to persist over a hundred years while never really turning a profit. As we entered the Internet Age, that became a more and more difficult thing to continue to do. We ended up shifting from one ownership group to the next. I got so exhausted trying to find an owner and sick of that, I ended up resigning as editor. But then a couple of years after I resigned, the magazine got bought by a guy called Chris Hughes who had been Mark Zuckerberg‘s roommate at Harvard, and co-founder of Facebook. He bought the magazine and, to me, this seemed almost too good to be true. You had this guy who understood social media, who had incredible number of resources, and seemed devoted to this little magazine that I was also devoted to. So I came back, I edited the magazine, and Chris and I tried to re-make it.

DUBNER: The relationship in the beginning seemed like it was unbelievably good.

FOER: We became really good friends and it was exhilarating. We felt like we were trying to save something that was imperiled in the world and that maybe we could help provide some dignified solution to the rest of journalism, which was grappling with a lot of the same issues that we were grappling with. But there was a moment when things just took this turn. Chris had always talked about wanting to make a profit with the New Republic, and he suddenly decided that he didn’t want to lose, at least not a whole lot of money with it. So we had to turn around our financial position incredibly quickly. He insisted that we start chasing clicks. In 2013, the surest way to get clicks was to post a clip from last night’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart. You slap a headline on it and maybe write a couple sentences about it and everybody would click on it.

DUBNER: You got caught up in, at least, monitoring the numbers, right?

FOER: Yes, I did. Look, data is crack cocaine. If you’re the guy who had a hard time getting a date in high school, to suddenly find yourself producing things that are extremely popular — you become obsessed with replicating that popularity. In some ways, everybody in the magazine wanted to be successful on Facebook. We wanted to master social media and this new environment. But we didn’t want that new environment to dictate how we did our jobs.

DUBNER: All right, so we should say that [you were] quitting as you were about to be fired from the New Republic.

FOER: Yeah. I took the brave decision to resign when I learned that there was some guy who already had my job and was offering other people jobs at the New Republic.

DUBNER: It’s funny. You’re describing what was happening to you at the New Republic. But it sounds as though you’re also perhaps describing your view of what happened at places like Google and Facebook over time, where you may begin with a certain set of motivations, but as those motivations lead you to this overwhelming commercial success, you’re so seduced by the magnitude of that success that you can’t help but want to replicate it over and over again.

FOER: Yeah, that’s completely right. In retrospect, I realized that I was living this compressed version of recent history.

The recent history of the internet at least. Over the years, Franklin Foer’s views of the internet had shifted. The same guy who used to think this …

FOER: There was a certain amount of utopianism associated with the emergence of the internet.

And this:

FOER: I love search engines!

And this:

FOER: These technologies were incredible! Amazon is an incredible company.

Has now come to think this:

FOER: Amazon thinks of itself as “the everything store.” It’s gotten itself in pretty much every conceivable business. It owns Whole Foods, it powers the cloud, it houses data for the C.I.A., and so on. There’s really nothing that it doesn’t try to squeeze into its empire.

He also thinks this:

FOER: As Facebook shapes the way that we consume news, as Google shapes the way that we interact with information, and as Amazon has shaped the way that we interact with books, the dominance that these companies exert ends up trickling through the cultural intellectual ecosystem. With Amazon, my concern is that the book business has become utterly dependent on them, that they hold one of the few true monopolies in the world.

Actually, that’s not quite true.

Swati BHATT: My name is Swati Bhatt. I teach at Princeton.

One course she teaches: The Economics of the Internet.

BHATT: The existence of a monopoly — of a single firm in any product space, unless it’s a government-granted monopoly — is rare in the digital economy.

So even though Amazon has, for instance, at least 70 percent of e-book sales, that doesn’t make it a monopoly.

BHATT: Technically, no. Because that leaves 30 percent for some other set of firms.

When describing firms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, Bhatt prefers the term “behemoth.”

BHATT: Yes, there is a difference. “Behemoth” suggests that it’s simply a large firm, whereas a “monopoly” suggests that it’s the only firm.

Okay, economic semantics aside: Bhatt does see strong parallels between these modern behemoths and what we traditionally think of as monopolies. But a modern tech behemoth has a particularly modern advantage:

BHATT: Ownership of a scarce resource is the definition of a natural monopoly. What we’re seeing with the behemoths today is an ownership of a scarce resource called “personal data” or “data” in general. There’s an interesting self-reinforcing dynamic here. Whereas a firm transacts, buys and sells, [a behemoth] acquires data about its consumers. That enables it to grow by producing more personalized products by advertising more effectively. That brings in more customers, which brings in more data, which then enables the firm to grow even further and that leads to the behemoth status.

And that is what Franklin Foer, and a growing chorus of other critics, are so concerned about. Foer recently published a book called World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. It’s part-memoir, part-screed against the dominance of the big tech firms. It’s not a particularly empirical book; and it’s hard to say how much of Foer’s argument was informed by personal experiences, like the New Republic disaster. It also turns out that Foer’s family, in addition to encouraging his love of books, encouraged his distrust of monopolies.

FOER: My dad was a University of Chicago-trained lawyer who’d worked in the antitrust division of the Carter administration. I grew up in this household where antitrust was part of the family religion. My dad would drive around in a car that had a bumper sticker that said “bust the trust” on it. It was a real obsession and passion of his. For a long time he was this lonely activist who was railing for greater, more aggressive enforcement of these laws prohibiting monopolistic behavior. I always admired him for this quixotic stand that he took, but I never really fully bought into his arguments until Amazon got in this fight with the book publishers, when it started to hit close to home.

DUBNER: This was the Hachette deal, yes?

FOER: Exactly. Let’s just say something about book publishing, which is that book publishing is an incredibly oligopolistic industry. There are four or five big companies that dominate book publishing. They’re oftentimes jerks. It’s hard to have a whole lot of sympathy for the book publishers. But suddenly you have these five big companies that were up against one big company, which was Amazon. Amazon basically controlled their access to the marketplace. Amazon was renegotiating their ebook contract with the publishers one by one, trying to strong-arm them with their market power into pricing their books lower and lower. To me, it was grotesque and ominous that Amazon was able to use its market power to try to dictate to the publishers in this incredibly aggressive way.

DUBNER: Where do you draw the line between winning — or competing — and being evil?

FOER: Right.

DUBNER: Persuade me that it’s not just a case of big companies being really good at what they do and winning and you having sympathies with the people who are not winning.

FOER: My book, in some ways, is a valentine to competition. I believe that a marketplace is most healthy when you have a number of market players. I might not love book publishing. It might be too concentrated in some ways for my taste. But at least there are five companies competing against one another for the marketplace. If I don’t like the way that one company is treating me, I can always go to another company. Or if I don’t like the goods that one company is selling, I can go to another company. The problem with Amazon, and the problem with Google, and, to an extent, with Facebook, is that they become the only market player. The choice that we have as consumers is limited and competition is limited. My argument is against the big technology companies, which are racing to expand into every nook and cranny of our lives.

As it happens, this expansion had just raced into Franklin Foer’s own life. We spoke to him in early September, just before his book was to be published. And there had been a plot twist.

FOER: The New America Foundation supported my book.

The New America Foundation is a center-left think tank devoted to “renewing American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age.” It’s run by the political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter, who’s a former top official in the Obama State Department.

FOER: One of the cool things that New America does is that they give money to journalists who are writing book projects. I didn’t get a lot of money from them, but I got a small sum. They were especially generous to me because I’d just been fired from a job at the New Republic.

And the partial funding of Foer’s book about the dominance of firms like Google suddenly became relevant because—

FOER: That’s since become relevant just because they fired a vociferous critic of Google from the foundation. Which is noteworthy because the foundation has received a fair amount of money from Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

DUBNER: Right. How much fun is it for you to be publishing a new book and already distancing yourself from the foundation that funded the writing of it?

FOER: It actually doesn’t feel good because New America has been supportive of me over time. I’d rather not seem like a jerk and disavow them when they’ve been so nice to me. But this does feel sadly reflective of a much bigger issue.

DUBNER: Who was the critic who was fired?

FOER: His name is Barry Lynn and he ran something called the Open Markets program there. Very active opponent of monopoly and a very vociferous critic of Google.

LYNN: We used to have an affiliation with the New America Foundation, but that ended on August 31st. We were kicked out of New America.

And that is Barry Lynn.

LYNN: And I direct the Open Markets Institute.

So the name of his project has not been taken away; but his affiliation with the New America Foundation has.

LYNN: We’re working out of a WeWork on the 1400 block of G Street in Washington.

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: the story is not as neat as the headlines would have it:

Anne-Marie SLAUGHTER: At no point did Google or any funder tell me to fire Barry Lynn.

Also: funding controversies can reach across many decades. Like all the way back to the founding of Stanford University.

REICH: There is an effort to unearth the sordid history of the university’s initial benefactor.

* * *

Barry Lynn started out as a journalist …

LYNN: I worked in Venezuela and in Peru as a foreign correspondent. Then, I ran a magazine called Global Business Magazine.

We should say it was a pro-business magazine.

LYNN: We were a magazine that aimed at the people who ran businesses. We had a[n] inside look at how globalization actually works at the institutional level.

That inside look led to Lynn crossing over to the other side. He came to believe that corporations are too powerful, and that their power is too concentrated. This was a theme he pursued in a couple of books and, since 2002, with the New America Foundation. His project came to be known as Open Markets.

LYNN: We got the work going. We did it with increasing effect over the last seven years, to the point where in 2016, we had a number of folks on the Hill starting to understand that, indeed, America has a monopoly problem. The first person who really reached out and said, “I want to actually help shine a light on this problem,” was Senator Warren. The result was a speech that she gave on Capitol Hill.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s speech was part of a conference, organized by Open Markets, called “America’s Monopoly Problem.”

Elizabeth WARREN: Today in America, competition is dying.

LYNN: This was probably the most important speech about concentration in the United States, about the monopoly problem, since a series of speeches that F.D.R. gave in the 1930s.

WARREN: Google, Apple, and Amazon provide platforms that lots of companies depend on for survival. But Google, Apple, and Amazon also, in many cases, compete with those small companies. That platform can become a tool to snuff out competition.

LYNN: She said, “It’s not just an issue that affects us as consumers. It also affects our democracy, because it’s this concentration of power that leads to concentrations of wealth. Concentrations of wealth lead to concentrations of control over government, and other institutions of authority.”

This line of criticism would seem to be very much in sync with the mission of not only Open Markets, but also its parent organization, the New America Foundation.

SLAUGHTER: In my own scholarship, I’ve written about monopolies and risks of consolidation and data ownership.

That’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department official and Princeton professor, who’s now president and C.E.O. of New America.

SLAUGHTER: What convinced me to leave Princeton and become head of New America — which was a big move, because I had a wonderful position at Princeton — was this idea that we really could be a place that hosted fundamental debates about our future in the digital age.

But as Barry Lynn tells the story, New America didn’t share his enthusiasm for the conference he put together where Senator Warren spoke.

LYNN: Well, a few people in my organization at New America were not happy with the way we were framing the conference, and the fact that we were focusing some of our attention on the platform monopolies and especially on Google.

What was wrong with focusing on Google in a conference about monopoly? Remember, they do own some 80 percent of the global search market.

LYNN: Or I guess the question is, “Why was our work at New America problematic for Google?” Eric Schmidt, who is now the chair of the board at Google, was also, for a long time, on the New America board and then for a period of time served as the chair of our board.

Eric Schmidt, who was C.E.O. of Google for 10 years, has also given New America a lot of money, both personally and through his family foundation. So did Google itself. Between Schmidt and Google, New America had received roughly $20 million since its founding in 1999.

LYNN: There was a relationship between our two organizations. This is a relationship goes back to the very early days at New America and actually had never seemed to result in any problems at New America up to this point.

But now, it seemed, there was a problem. Were Schmidt and/or Google leaning on New America as Lynn’s critique of the company grew more intense? A year after the New America conference where Senator Warren spoke against Google’s domination, European antitrust regulators hit Google with a huge fine, $2.7 billion, for allegedly tilting search results in its own favor. Barry Lynn posted a statement on the New America website. It congratulated European regulators for giving Google such a good spanking, and it urged American regulators to do the same.

LYNN: We released this statement in support of the decision in Europe. That was on June 27th. And on June 29th, I was told that my entire team had to leave. We had two months to leave.

One natural conclusion to draw was that Google had stepped in and asked New America to do something about Barry Lynn. Indeed, that’s how it was portrayed in The New York Times. Their headline read: “Google Critic Ousted from Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant.”

LYNN: At that point I asked for this decision to be reconsidered, and if it could not be reconsidered, I asked for more time. I was told that neither of those was possible.

The writer Franklin Foer, who happens to sit on the board of Barry Lynn’s Open Markets Institute, told us a similar version of events. He made it clear that Lynn’s statement about the European regulators’ decision—

FOER: This was something that was a bit too far for Google. New America was very generous in supporting me, and they never did anything to interfere with my own work. But I was fairly outraged by their treatment of Barry. I can’t resign from New America because I’m not affiliated with them. I’m not taking any money from them now, but I’m extremely disappointed.

But Anne-Marie Slaughter offered a substantially different portrayal. First of all, she says—

SLAUGHTER: No funder at New America has ever influenced New America content in any way.

And, this:

SLAUGHTER: New America has a set of principles on our website that makes very clear that no funding can affect the integrity of our research and/or shape the research in any way. We do not pay to play. We take funding and we do our work. Those two things are separate.

But the timing of Lynn’s firing certainly gave the appearance that Google and/or Eric Schmidt had asked Slaughter and/or the New America Foundation to get rid of Barry Lynn and Open Markets. And Slaughter found herself on the defensive.

SLAUGHTER: At no point did Google or any funder tell me to fire Barry Lynn, and at no point did Google or any funder try to influence the work of anybody here. If any funder ever did tell me that, I’d tell them to take a hike!

That’s Slaughter at a New America event a few weeks ago called “Is Big Tech an Existential Threat?” The event was actually in support of Franklin Foer’s book.

SLAUGHTER: I did not part ways with Barry Lynn for anything to do with Google. I decided that Barry Lynn and I had to part ways because he could not work respectfully, honestly, and cooperatively with his colleagues.

So Slaughter says she got rid of Lynn, not because of a funding conflict of interest, but because he was a difficult employee. That said, she acknowledges a real and long-standing tension between the people who fund research and the people who do research.

SLAUGHTER: I don’t actually think this is just a think-tank issue. I worked at three universities, and universities have private funders for centers and for different bodies of research. Even newspapers have constant tensions between advertisers and reporters that reporters don’t have to navigate, but the management does. There is a general tension wherever you need to protect the integrity of research and you also need to fund that research.

New America says all its major funders are listed on its website. We asked Slaughter for a breakdown:

SLAUGHTER: Only 12 percent comes from corporations. By far, the largest amount comes from foundations and then from private individuals.

LYNN: Taking corporate money does not mean necessarily that the work of the entire institution is suspect—

Barry Lynn again.

LYNN: —but it definitely can create a slippery slope that will lead to pressures being brought to bear on those people who are questioning concentrations of power or the use of corporate power in other ways.

REICH: People are right to have a skeptical, maybe cynical, orientation to corporate lobbying or corporate philanthropy.

And that’s Robert Reich, a political scientist at Stanford.

REICH: My research interests these days focus a great deal on philanthropy and the role philanthropy plays in democratic societies.

And that philanthropy increasingly comes in the form of foundations.

REICH: There are lots of foundations.

DUBNER: What is the median size of assets? It’s really small, right? A million or so dollars—

REICH: Oh yeah, it’s not much. It may be a couple of million dollars. But there’s an enormous growth in the number of foundations, and that’s just a logical consequence of the growing inequality in the United States.

DUBNER: Just talk about your thesis essentially — the role, the influence, and the complications around modern philanthropies.

REICH: I’d start by saying most people’s attitude about philanthropists and about foundations is that we should be grateful that people are trying to do good with their own money. That’s the attitude I want to try to sweep away. I don’t think philanthropists deserve that amount of charity, if you will. Why is that? Because philanthropy, especially large philanthropy, in the form of a foundation or especially wealthy person represents the exercise of power in which they attempt to use their own private wealth to affect public outcomes or to produce public benefits or make social change. Power deserves scrutiny in a democratic society, not gratitude. I’d add on top of that that a foundation, in particular — which is a legal form that allows a wealthy person to create a donor-directed, unaccountable, barely transparent, perpetual, and tax-subsidized corporate form in order to use their private assets to affect the public — is an especially interesting and potentially worrisome form of power.

DUBNER: Let’s talk about think tanks, per se. Is there such a thing as a truly nonpartisan think tank, or is it just too hard because of where the money is coming from?

REICH: Well, I’d say that you’re more likely to make the case that there are nonpartisan universities, universities which are funded in not entirely dissimilar ways from think tanks. Officially, they have to be nonpartisan, so do think tanks. In other words they can’t declare themselves in favor of particular political candidates. But think tanks have become far more popular in the United States as a result of the polarization and inequality in the United States. Idea generation that happens in think tanks — the policy frameworks and proposals that get disseminated from think tanks — flow from philanthropic interests with particular policy positions in mind.

DUBNER: Tell me what you know about Google’s history of philanthropic, foundation, or think-tank giving and especially the timeline because I understand it’s accelerated quite a bit recently.

REICH: Google, like lots of other tech firms, has gotten much more aggressive in its formal lobbying efforts. I think it’s now the case that the top five Silicon Valley companies are amongst the largest sources of lobbying, greater even than the five top Wall Street firms in New York. There’s been a parallel ramping up of the philanthropy that’s associated with the tech firms. That philanthropy comes in a variety of different forms.

DUBNER: Rob, knowing what you know about the situation with the New America Foundation and the Google money and the controversy, what would your advice be for them, for the New America Foundation?

REICH: The New America Foundation needs to be aware of the soft power, the agenda-setting influence that donors can have to the think tank even in the absence of calling someone up and saying “we disagree” or “we object to the work that someone does.” When Anne-Marie Slaughter — whose job is chiefly to ensure the existence of the New America Foundation into the future, which involves fund-raising — does her work, she needs to be cautious that she hasn’t internalized the policy preferences of the donors such that she shapes the work of the foundation around the donor interests. The idea is you’re worried about the conversation you’ll have with your donor in the future. You orient the work that you do to please the donor, rather than to displease the donor. That has, functionally, the same outcome from the donor’s perspective, without even having to say anything.

DUBNER: Now, your own fine university, Stanford, benefited, was founded from the private largesse of a man, Leland Stanford. Most of history paints him as a classic robber baron — a railroad man who did all kinds of stuff that we would frown upon today. Talk to me about that and whether that’s a conversation that takes place regularly at Stanford. Or is it avoided?

REICH: I’d say people here are aware of the history of the university and the deep connection between philanthropy and the well-being of especially wealthy universities. People here, I think, know something about the history of Leland Stanford. There is an effort on campus to unearth the sordid history of the university’s initial benefactor.

DUBNER: Has there been any movement of any magnitude to rename the university?

REICH: Not that I know of. They’re starting with lower-hanging fruit — monuments and places on campus named for people with no obvious connection to the university and whose historical records are not so appealing.

DUBNER: Let’s say I have some money, Rob. I want to set up a foundation. I come to you and I say, “I’m a big believer in bringing critics into the inner circle. I know that you’ve been critical of how foundations behave, and that it’s undemocratic, and so on. But Rob, I’d like to make you the executive of my foundation.” Let’s say I made my money in ammonia fertilizer. How would you go about setting it up in a way that takes advantage of my largesse to try to accomplish something that we could all agree is some public good without falling into all the traps that you’ve been describing to us?

REICH: First, I’d say, despite the fact that laws don’t require me to be especially transparent about what the foundation is doing, I pledge to make completely available to the public all of the grant-making we do, the evaluations of the grants that we make. I’d want to invite in outside experts as well. I would want to find ways in which to organize the foundation’s efforts to seek out the most severe critics of what we were doing in order to try to learn the most in order to give grants away to greater effect.

DUBNER: Let’s say I also make you chairman of the board. Tell me about that board, how you’d set it up. What would the elections look like? What would the terms be like? Who’s on it?

REICH: Well, “elections” already reveal that you don’t know much about how foundations are operating. There are no elections on the boards of foundations. The boards are hand-picked by the initial donor. You can create the governing board of a foundation in such a way as you guarantee that only family members and heirs ever serve on the board. There’s no public representation necessary. The Gates Foundation, with something in the neighborhood of $40 to $80 billion devoted to philanthropy, has as its governing trustees Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, and, I believe, Bill Gates Sr. I’d like to see possibly experimentation with a form of foundation peer review in which an effort analogous to what happens in academia happens within the foundation world. It would be surprising if the philanthropic efforts of corporations were purely altruistic. Corporations seek to advance their own interest especially in their lobbying — quite possibly often in their philanthropy. I’m trying to stimulate people to be morally awake and in the same moment, to get people to consider what types of public policies or frameworks ought to govern and structure our collective lives, which is a moral and philosophical question.

That was the Stanford political scientist Robert Reich. We also heard today from Anne-Marie Slaughter, Barry Lynn, Swati Bhatt, and Franklin Foer. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio: my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt drops by to answer your FREAK-quently Asked Questions:

Steven LEVITT: That is one of the weirdest definitions of social good I’ve ever heard in my entire life—

LEVITT: The thing you want to do, from a public policy perspective, is not put people’s identity and their morality in conflict with efficiency—

LEVITT: As you take the knife and think about whether you’re going to stab the person with it, you’re not thinking about what’s going to happen 15 years later when I apply for a job and I have to check the box—

That’s next time, on Freakonomics Radio.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Brian Gutierrez. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern and Harry Huggins; the music throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected].

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Swati Bhatt, professor of economics at Princeton University.

Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute.

Robert Reich, professor of political science at the Stanford University.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and C.E.O. of New America.

RESOURCES

“America’s Monopoly Problem: What Should the Next President Do?” Elizabeth Warren, New America (June 29, 2016).

“Antitrust: Commission Fines Google €2.42 Billion for Abusing Dominance as Search Engine by Giving Illegal Advantage to own Comparison Shopping Service,” European Commission (June 27, 2017).

How Digital Communication Technology Shapes Markets: Redefining Competition, Building Cooperation by Swati Bhatt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

“Is Big Tech an Existential Threat?” Anne-Marie Slaughter, New America (October 5, 2017).

“Repugnant to the Whole Idea of Democracy? On the Role of Foundations in Democratic Societies,” Rob Reich (July, 2016).

“What Are Foundations For?” Rob Reich, Boston Review (March 1, 2013).

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer (Penguin Press, 2017).

EXTRA

“Is the Internet Being Ruined?” Freakonomics Radio (July 14, 2016).

“Who Runs the Internet?” Freakonomics Radio (November 14, 2013).

The post Thinking Is Expensive. Who’s Supposed to Pay for It? appeared first on Freakonomics.

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