We’re being graced with an official visit from Bob Weinberg this week. One of the things he wanted to do was make an opportunity to meet a group of PhD students and other junior scientists. This strikes me as an excellent instinct because these vastly famous people doing their tours of honour will always have the chance to meet the other famous and important scientists at the host institution, and they will usually have a chance to be paraded for the general public, but it’s quite easy for them to miss the actual working researchers. So, I signed myself up to be on the waiting list if there were any spaces for post-docs after the opportunity had been offered to the PhD students, and there were some extra spaces, so I attended the meeting yesterday.

Someone asked me what exactly Weinberg is so famous for: basically he did the original work to prove that you can turn a normal cell into a cancer cell by blocking a couple of genes and injecting another couple, and what the minimum set of genes is. And he’s by no means a one-hit wonder, he’s been doing lots of exciting stuff in the quarter century since that landmark achievement. It’s actually quite surprising that this was the first time I’d heard him speak; I’d have expected to run across him at conferences by now.

His talk was mixed; I could clearly see why he is so respected both as a scientist and as a communicator, and indeed I’m writing this post because I’m excited about what he had to say. But at the same time he didn’t live up to his towering reputation. He talked down to the group quite badly; this may well be because his expectations of PhD students are based on the American system where a new PhD student has only had a science “major” and is still very much learning. So his talk was pitched at the wrong level for European PhD students who have completed an entire degree in their specialist subject, and are used to being treated as professional scientists albeit at an early stage of their training. He also admitted half way through the talk that he was sleep deprived and in a really horrible mood, and apologized for being unusually grumpy as a result (he was really thrown by some annoying computer problems at the beginning, when it took nearly 20 minutes to get the system set up to display his Powerpoint slides).

Both his grumpiness and his slight tendency to patronize caused me to behave rather abrasively, which I’m not particularly proud of. He started out by saying that he expected to be interrupted with lots of questions, so I took him at his word. But instead of asking questions which show how intelligent and engaged with his ideas I am, I found myself jumping on apparent flaws or omissions in his arguments and generally being a bit arsey. I doubt he was offended, but I also doubt I made a glowingly positive impression.

He started off by making what I thought was a really odd argument about cancer epidemiology. He showed some figures that point out that pretty much the only thing correlated with cancer incidence is access to screening and diagnosis. So ok, there’s huge reporting bias in how we track the prevalence of types of cancer in populations or over time. I didn’t find this as surprising or significant as he seemed think it was. I think the point was supposed to be that in spite of huge changes (usually alarming increases) in the reported incidence of various kinds of cancer, the (age-adjusted) death rates didn’t really change between 1930 and 1990, or between different countries studied. So he postulated that one way to read these figures is that human intervention basically has no effect on cancer mortality; a certain proportion of people with a given type of cancer die no matter what anyone does, and a certain proportion survive because they were destined to survive anyway, (though they are likely to attribute it to some kind of faith healing or quackery).

OK, 1990 to the present there has actually been a measurable decline in mortality from breast cancer and a couple of types of leukaemia. So it’s not all fatalism; medical advances are making a really profound difference here. He said that part of the decline in breast cancer mortality is explained by awareness of the risks of HRT so that it is no longer pushed at women as it was a generation ago. I wasn’t convinced by that, because it is really only in the US that every middle aged woman took HRT, and then everyone stopped because of the breast cancer scare. According to Weinberg screening programmes and knowledge of some of the major genetic factors haven’t made much difference, but he didn’t really justify dismissing those factors. Breast cancer does also benefit from two of the only three new drugs that unquestionably outperform any therapy attempted since the 30s: tamoxifen and its friends, and the antibody-based therapy herceptin. The third unquestionably successful drug is Gleevec for a certain type of leukaemia. That gives really stunning results, like improving the 5 year survival rate from about 20% to about 95%, but it is only useful in one particular relatively rare type of leukaemia, so it doesn’t register as a blip in overall population statistics.

If the glass is half-empty, it’s depressing that humanity spent 60 years and unimaginable sums of money without making any measurable progress. If the glass is half-full, there have been three genuine breakthroughs in the past 15 years, so it could be that we’re finally on the right track. (Also, no measurable progress might mean that the survival rate is improved from 5% to 10%, meaning thousands of people are alive who otherwise wouldn’t be, or it might mean that patients get a year of decent quality of life rather than 6 months of misery, but of course would still count as mortality statistics.) FWIW, my old boss, who is not as famous as Weinberg but pretty famous, reckons that cancer will be a curable disease in our lifetime.

This stuff is more or less what all famous cancer researchers say. Some of you probably don’t get as many chances to hear famous cancer researchers giving their spiel as I do, so I’m writing it here because I think it might be of interest. The really exciting bit was the second part of the talk though:

One of the most exciting results in cancer biology recently is that the only cells that are capable of giving rise to tumours are adult stem cells. This means that cells that normally don’t grow don’t suddenly turn rogue and start growing all over the place, as used to be believed (recently enough that I was taught this model at university in the late 90s). But in fact, cancer happens when cells that normally do grow, ie stem cells, start making tumours instead of healthy tissues.

If you generalize from this, you start to wonder how far cancer cells are really normal cells in the wrong situations, rather than total aberrations. Bear in mind that all cells in the body contain exactly the same genes, but use a subset of them to perform their correct functions. Cancer cells probably have, oh, half a dozen mutations, genetic changes. But that might mean they have six altered letters out of three billion which are identical to those of normal cells. How do such tiny changes alter the whole function of the body, even fatally in many cases? What if these altered cells aren’t something entirely new, they’re just switching to the wrong sort of program.

There are two circumstances where cells are “supposed” to grow rapidly and relatively independently. One is when the embryo is developing, when it has only a few months to grow from a single cell one tenth of a mm wide, to a baby-sized baby 50 cm long (there are very few tumours that grow that fast!). The other is when a person is injured, and needs to rapidly make new tissue to repair the damage. Weinberg suggested that both these situations are relevant in a tumour.

So, we can argue that a tumour acts like a wound site when there is no wound. It rapidly makes new blood vessels, which act to provide oxygen and nutrients to the centre of the tumour mass, but the blood vessels don’t “know” that that is their “goal”. The blood vessels start to grow because the body somehow “thinks” there is a wound there that needs to be repaired. The parts of the immune system which usually deal with wounds are all present at the sites of tumours; it was previously thought that this was a response to the presence of the “foreign” tumour, but in fact this doesn’t make sense because the tumour isn’t really foreign in the way that bacteria or other parasites are. So another way of looking at it is that the immune system, triggered inappropriately, actually causes the tumour. The immune cells are responding to a wound that isn’t there, so they send out chemicals which signal the tumour cells to grow, as they would normally signal new tissue to develop and repair an actual wound.

Weinberg also pointed out that this may mean that surgery is a really problematic way of dealing with cancer. You cut out the tumour, which obviously does need to happen. But. It’s impossible to eliminate absolutely every cell, and even a single stem cell left behind can regenerate the whole tumour, because that’s what stem cells do. Even worse, surgery causes an actual wound, so all the immune system gubbins which is around will go into hyperdrive, making a really ideal environment for those stem cells to get going and grow like anything.

If this were the whole story, most cancers wouldn’t be fatal. A tumour that does nothing except grow inexorably bigger is usually referred to as benign (this is a relative term, of course!) A malignant tumour is much more dangerous, for two reasons. Firstly, it actively invades the surrounding tissue, breaking down healthy tissue to make room for the tumour to grow. And secondly, pieces called metastases can break off and be carried round the body in the blood stream and lymph system, and cause new tumours all over the place. These metastatic tumours often can’t be removed by surgery as there are too many of them, and it’s often only a matter of time before they get into vital organs and cause a total system failure, otherwise known as death.

But there are some normal cells that are meant to invade the surrounding tissue, and meant to be able to move around the body and start growth at new sites. Namely, the cells of the early embryo. Weinberg’s theory is that malignant cells turn on genes that are normally turned on at the moment when the blastocyst, the ball of frog-spawn like cells, starts to turn into an actual embryo with recognizable features. These genes help the cells to move around to position themselves in the right places to form specialized tissues, and also to invade other parts of the embryo and mother’s uterus as necessary. So if these genes get turned on in an adult, you can get metastatic cells.

This feels like it could be a really productive novel way of looking at cancer. And I think it’s cool!

Further reading:
1. Stem cells: the real culprits in cancer?. Rather impressive Scientific American article on cancer stem cells, aimed for a popular audience.
2. Reya et al, Stem cells, cancer, and cancer stem cells is a decent review of stem cells and cancer, if you have access to Nature and want to read something at a more advanced level than SciAm.
3. Campbell & Polyak, Breast Tumor Heterogeneity: Cancer Stem Cells or Clonal Evolution? is a less good review, also written by people who are skeptical of the cancer stem cells model, but has the advantage of being free.
4. Yang et al, Exploring a New Twist on Tumor Metastasis is a recent review by Weinberg himself of some of this connection between embryo development and metastasis.

There was a meme a while ago where people had to take a list and bold the “privileges” they experienced growing up. I know I’ve left it too late to address this, but I think it leads to some interesting ideas in general, so I’m going to babble a bit.

To deal with the meme itself: it originated from a teaching exercise developed at Indiana State University. Most people who filled in the meme commented that it isn’t terribly well thought out. Some of the criticisms are a bit off-target; yes, it is US-centric and yes, it concentrates on class to the exclusion of other kinds of privilege, but that’s because it was designed to teach American college students about class, not to be used as a meme in the rather international and highly varied context of the blogosphere, or to make a profound statement about privilege in general. Several people argued that it fails even to address even American class privilege in a sensible way; I don’t know enough about that to be able to comment. My reading of it is that somebody who bolded most of it would have the following advantages: a financially stable background; guardians who were committed to education; to some extent, though the list doesn’t cover this as well as it might, a culture which is socially valued. Those are definitely advantages which some people have and others lack, which is not to say that everyone who has them must have a wonderful and perfect life and everyone else must be living in misery!

But I think the reaction to this meme is a good example of why those privilege lists don’t really make the point they are trying to make very well. I believe the original “privilege list” was Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay Unpacking the invisible knapsack. It’s worth reading her original article to see what she was trying to say before her meme (in the literal sense) started being used all over the place to make vaguely related points. I must admit I find the article rather annoying, albeit intelligently written. It very obviously comes out of second wave feminist ideas about male privilege, and McIntosh has come to the realization that the experience of black people in a white-dominated society is somewhat analogous to the experience of women in a male-dominated society. There are some immediate glaring problems with this, most notably the fact that, um, black women exist! And I would probably like the list a lot better had it been written by a black person, because it’s hard not to find it smug and patronizing as it stands. It’s also assuming that there are two races, “black” and “white”, and making what I think are rather dangerous analogies between gender and race. On a structural level I think a lot of her examples are pretty much repetitions of the same thing.

Basically, what she’s saying is that white people get treated as individuals, black people as representatives of their race, and this can cause real problems even in the absence of overt, deliberate racism. This is a useful point to make; I assume the list leaves out all the other disadvantages that POC may have to negotiate due to historical or current active racism because its audience can reasonably be expected to know about those. I’m just not sure that privilege lists are a good way to make this or related points.

Privilege is a really loaded word. I have a hard time seeing it as a problem that (some) white people can go shopping without getting harassed; it’s a problem that some POC can’t. But calling that a privilege makes it sound like white people are oppressing POC just by going shopping, which is a bit ridiculous. As pointed out (I can’t find the reference now, sorry), going through your life without being assumed to be a criminal or subject to violence or excluded from jobs and institutions is not a privilege, it’s a basic minimum that everyone should have. Redbird said something really intelligent distinguishing privileges that can only exist at the expense of the unprivileged from general unfairness. If everything from arguments to job interviews favours white people at the expense of POC, then making things fairer would at least in the short term disadvantage white people.

A big problem with the privilege list way of looking at things is that it can only really look at one axis at a time, and in fact most people are probably members of less favoured groups in some respects and more favoured groups in others. Lots of people looked at the class privilege meme and complained because it assumed middle-class people to have loads of advantages, without considering things like health, appearance, race, good versus bad (or even abusive) parenting, sexual orientation, gender identity, social ability and so on, which obviously have a big effect on whether someone has a good or bad childhood. I also don’t think it’s wise to make facile analogies between the different ways that some groups may be at a disadvantage; sexism is not the same thing as racism is not the same thing as ableism is not the same thing as fat-hatred. I also don’t think it’s wise to discuss as if all these things can readily be separated.

The original privilege list didn’t do this explicitly, but it is often used in this way, and I think it’s not surprising given the choice of term and the whole political context of this sort of list: someone who “has privilege” is automatically assumed to be deliberately wielding that privilege to hurt people who “lack privilege”. It’s common in a certain type of identity politics to talk about “the oppressor class” and “the oppressed class”. Yes, there is a very important difference between a white person making a racist remark to a black person and a black person saying something disparaging about honkies or whiteys. That doesn’t mean that all white people are racists and all black people are saints.

What happens when privilege gets brought up in (online) discussions? Sometimes it’s used to make people considered to be privileged shut up; their opinion isn’t valid at all because they have too much privilege or “entitlement” or “internalized whatever-ism”. In some cases this is a feature; if members of a minority feel that they are always being shouted down by members of a majority, and they want to create a community where that dynamic is reversed, fine, good for them. It may well be more important to hear the views of members of a (hopefully relevant!) minority. But in other cases the members of the minority are actually trying to have a discussion with the members of the majority, and appealing to privilege tends to spoil this. I think the main reason is that couching things in those sorts of terms just makes the people from a dominant background defensive. People are generally willing to accept that they have advantages compared to others, but to call those advantages privileges makes lots of people upset. Emotionally, an extremely likely reaction is to point out that your life isn’t that great after all, and I’ve seen far too many discussions derailed into hopeless shouting matches. The activists in favour of some oppressed group are accusing everybody in sight of exercising privilege (the activists who do this are as likely as not to belong to the culturally favoured group themselves, mind you), and the members of the dominant group enumerate all the disadvantages in their life and protest that they are not whatever-ist.

The thing about privilege is it’s an unanswerable argument. Anyone who criticizes it is open to the accusation that they’re just acting out of privilege which lets them deny their privilege so that they can contribute to the oppression of the unprivileged. Undoubtedly, this is sometimes the case. But assuming that it always is leads to a lot of really unproductive and circular discussions.

They don’t have Remembrance Day in Sweden. This makes perfect sense, since Sweden wasn’t involved in either of the World Wars. But it’s odd to come into November and not see any poppies.

Just like it’s odd to go to villages with no war memorial in the centre, and it’s odd to have to consciously break the assumption that people of my grandparents’ generation will have service experiences. The phrase “in the war” has almost no referent here. I’m living in a society that didn’t lose huge swathes of the entire male population in two successive generations. There was no baby boom here, but rather an economic boom when the rest of Europe was crippled in the post-war period and Sweden wasn’t (that was the time when Sweden became a nation of immigrants, because the sudden expansion of industry created a huge labour shortage).

The Jewish community remember the war, WW2 at least, but for them the war is tangled with Nazism and the Holocaust. This week we marked the anniversary of Kristallnacht; there are proportionally more people here who were personally affected than in England, I think. Those who were already in Sweden by the 30s remember what it was like with Occupied Norway on one border, and Axis Finland on the other, and Occupied Denmark just across the water. And the Swedish government allowing the German trains to travel through their supposedly neutral country, and the general atmosphere of relative sympathy for the Nazis (did anti-Communism or anti-Semitism come first? It’s hard to say.) But none of that is the stuff I’m accustomed to remembering on this date.

Facebook and LJ reminded me of the date, and having been reminded, made me feel I wasn’t remembering on my own. So I am adding my post to what seems like a kind of virtual ceremony.

A human is built from dust and their fate is dust. They spend their life earning a living. A life like a breakable cup, like withering grass, like a fading flower, like a passing shadow, like a melting cloud, like a fleeting wind, like scattering dust, like a fading dream…

High Holy Days liturgy, R Amnon of Mainz, c 1100

Cities and Thrones and Powers,
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

This season’s Daffodil,
She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year’s;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days’ continuance,
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o’er-kind,
To all that be,
Ordains us e’en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
“See how our works endure!”

Rudyard Kipling, 1906

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:2-9, c 250 BCE

Consider the following pair of statements:

A] God created the world.
B] A combination of random mutation and natural selection gives rise to new species.

There seems to be a persistent assumption that A implies not B. Even worse, there is a minor industry based on the false corollary that B implies not A, which really has no logical basis at all. This annoys me, because a lot of energy is being expended on debates which are logically stupid, but which also have harmful effects.

A is of course commonly known as creationism, and B is commonly referred to as the theory of evolution. I would argue that the two statements are almost independent. Without violating logic, a person could easily assent to both statements, or hold that both statements are false, as well as the more typical configuration of assenting to A and not B (the stereotypical fundamentalist Christian creationist), or not A and B (the stereotypical strictly materialist atheist).

Consider, for example, a Buddhist who does not believe statement A, because he holds that the world has always existed, and that there is no supreme being who could reasonably described by the English word God. I don’t think we can predict anything about what this person believes about whether or not new species evolve by mutation and natural selection. Consider also a positivist materialist type who is absolutely convinced that no such thing as a deity could possibly exist (not A). There is no reason to assume that this person believes in Darwinian evolution (B); she could for example be a strict neutralist, who believes that the persistence of some variants in a population is totally stochastic and natural selection has no significant effect. As for someone who assents to both A and B, I don’t have to make up an example; I myself hold both statements to be true (though my attitude towards the two statements is not at all identical).

Clearly the root of the problem is not in fact poor logic, it’s the existence of a very vocal group of people who say that they believe A, when in fact they also believe α, namely that the creation account in the book of Genesis is “literally” true. α can reasonably be said to imply not B, because if all the species were there at the moment of creation, then there is no speciation and no evolution. In fact, it’s not totally unreasonable to say that α and B are fully mutually exclusive; B doesn’t strictly imply not α (because Genesis could be literally true, but the standard interpretation of its literal truth could be wrong), but it’s close enough.

The people who are putting serious effort into convincing everybody of α and not B are, I believe, rather dangerous. Let’s call them political Creationists (to distinguish them from the much larger group of everybody in the world who believes A; that distinction is going to be important for the development of this argument). I don’t think that ultimately, political Creationists really care whether the account in Genesis is literally true. The originators of this philosophy are American fundamentalist Christians, and they have two rather unsavoury aims. The first is to force their brand of Christianity into a position of direct political influence, including in public schools. That means they’re working to undermine the US Constitution whose First Amendment prohibits establishment of any religion. In one way that’s kind of a local issue, but American politics does tend to spill over into the rest of the world.

The second aim is to undermine the credibility of science in general. In order to increase the powerbase of a fundamentalist religion, political Creationists are trying to make critical thinking more difficult. That’s what makes it really scary for those of us who are not Americans. It also explains why people who are not at all American fundamentalist Christians are getting involved in this, including a growing minority of Muslims and a few rather wacky Jews, as well as some other Christian groups. It seems like these other groups want a slice of the power that fundamentalists in the US are accumulating, and political Creationism looks like a way to achieve that.

It’s understandable that people are worried about this phenomenon. But I find there’s a big problem with the measures being taken to combat it. I think the people who are writing books and making TV programmes in which they eagerly try to convince people that evolution really does happen, claiming that this shows all religion is false, are actually allowing the unpleasant element to frame the debate. I am not saying that arguing with them gives them legitimacy, exactly, but more that arguing with them on their terms is already giving them a significant advantage, even if their arguments are weaker. (There’s also the fact that the militant atheist crowd annoy me because of the lack of logic mentioned at the start of this post; there’s no good reason to assume that all people with any religious views at all necessarily believe α, and it’s entirely fallacious to claim that evidence in favour of evolution is evidence in favour of atheism.) But more seriously, arguing as if verifying the Darwinian view somehow “proves” that God doesn’t exist (B implies not A), is only encouraging people who don’t understand or don’t find the theory of evolution satisfying towards the theist, creationist view (not B implies A). For one thing the theory of evolution is hard to understand and not at all intuitive. For a second thing, Darwin himself said some things that were wrong, and other evolutionary biologists have also occasionally said wrong things. Nobody sensible is claiming that scientists are infallible. But the way the debate is being framed by the political Creationists, and the way that framing is accepted by the militant atheists, make it tempting to infer that if Darwin was wrong, then fundamentalist Christians must be right.

In order to “win”, all the political Creationists need to do is to convince people that there’s a legitimate controversy about the theory of evolution. They don’t have to convince people that their version of the origins of life is correct, simply that the standard scientific model is “just a theory”, and it’s a matter of pure personal preference whether you decide to “believe” in evolution or in literal-according-to-the-fundamentalist-interpretation-of-Genesis Creationism. That’s enough to challenge the scientific edifice. Once this false controversy is legitimized, it’s easy to promote other similar false controversies, because you’ve encouraged an atmosphere where the scientific method is worthless, and it’s all just a matter of what view seems most appealing. There are similar bits of propaganda about climate change, with a false controversy about whether human activity is altering the global environment or whether God promised there would never be another flood so no person of faith needs to worry about sea levels rising. And about the effectiveness of various kinds of contraception and exactly how certain medical procedures work. If there’s believed to be a controversy, most people’s sense of fairness means that they want to give equal consideration to the two “sides”, even if in fact one side is utterly disingenuous and will say anything until they come up with something that sounds plausible, while the other is based on empirical evidence and entirely open to legitimate challenges.

Let me make a note about the different values of belief for the two statements. A is clearly a statement of religious belief. You can try to challenge it on logical or empirical grounds if you really want to, but you’re probably just going to end up annoying the people who hold the belief. I would venture that the vast majority of people who hold religious beliefs do not hold them because they are completely convinced by some practical evidence or some irrefutable logic. They hold the beliefs because they find them emotionally appealing, or perhaps because they come from a community where those beliefs are common currency. That goes for a lot of atheism too, I would argue. People who hold a particular philosophical or religious belief may try to rationalize it by presenting arguments and evidence, but in the end the justification is primarily a way to make them feel better about themselves, it’s not the reason for believing a certain way. (My personal opinion is that anyone who claims they can “prove” God’s existence is believing in something that isn’t God, and anyone who claims they can prove God’s non-existence has misunderstood the nature of religion.)

B is a scientific theory. I happen to think the evidence for it is pretty solid at this point, and it does seem to make good predictions about how biology works. Rationalists defending the theory of evolution often make pious (sic) pronouncements about how scientific theory can always be challenged by new evidence or a better interpretation of current evidence. In principle that’s true, but really, how many people have personally examined all the evidence in favour of Darwinian evolution and found it satisfactory? I know I haven’t, and I’m a professional biologist! So to some extent people believe B as a matter of trust; we believe in the scientific method, with its empiricism, its peer review, its assumption of induction. And we believe in the scientific establishment as people who are true to the principles of the scientific method, and who genuinely are willing to revise their models when new evidence appears. We accept things as being true because scientists have come to a consensus on them, which is essentially an argument from authority, when it comes down to it.

Now, I do happen to think that science is about the best method we have of understanding the world. But I also think that we shouldn’t go too far in assuming that “Science” has access to the Ultimate Truth, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is an element of trust and assumptions involved. This situation also implies that scientists have a responsibility to communicate their results clearly and honestly to the non-scientific world, and people who are not scientists have a responsibility to be educated enough to maintain a reasonable level of skepticism.

Anyway, the main conclusion is that statements A and B are independent because they are different kinds of statements. If people want to argue for or against one, they shouldn’t muddy the waters by trying to talk about the other. The secondary conclusion is that there are some extremely unpleasant people who have a vested interest in convincing people of not B, and that decent people should be very careful in how they argue against such unpleasant elements, to avoid accidentally playing to their hidden aims.

I posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek essay to my OKCupid journal recently, on the topic of men who whine that women on OKCupid are rude to them. I give several possible reasons why women might be rude in an online dating context like OKCupid:

1. The major one: most women have the experience of being pestered and hassled by men who won’t take no for an answer. Polite friendliness is taken as a definite come-on, mere polite refusal may be ignored or used as an excuse to try to persuade, so many women jump straight into blunt refusal, or simply ignoring unwanted overtures altogether.
2. In person, women are afraid (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the person and the situation) of violence. Often, women try to turn men down as gently and politely as possible, not because they really care about hurting the guy’s feelings, but because they are afraid things will turn ugly if they are too direct. It’s a balance between making it unambiguously clear that you’re not interested, and causing offence which might put you in danger. I personally hate having to judge this balance, but it is a fact of life.

   However, online the threat of violence is much less, and even verbal violence can be avoided by blocking messages from a harasser. Men who (without realizing it) are used to a certain degree of deference from women they approach in person, find it shocking when women online are free to say what they really think.

3. In an online dating context, women have quite a significant advantage over men; simply being female means you are in demand to a certain extent. That means women can afford to be picky, and in fact probably need to be picky, if they don’t want to spend their entire life managing their social network on dating sites.
4. Some women are just rude, superficial, etc. The online context allows the worst of women to behave like the worst of men, whether it’s rudeness, impossibly high standards, pursuing sex aggressively or whatever. It’s dangerous for women to do this kind of thing in real life, so few do.

Basically, my suspicion is that men have the upper hand in in person dating contexts, because of their social position and to a minor extent greater physical strength. When they lose these advantages in online dating, they are distressed. Some of them are distressed because they are genuinely decent people who are utterly unaware how a certain proportion of jerks behave towards women, and don’t understand how that benefits them in person (because they get let down gently when they approach a woman who isn’t interested), but disadvantages them online (because women are on the defensive and expect to be hassled). Some of them are distressed because they are sad cases who enjoy having power over women and can’t deal with any diminishing of that power.

The version I posted on OKCupid was a lot less harsh than this. I filled it with disclaimers about how I’m sure all the men doing the complaining are basically decent people, and how I understand that it’s really upsetting if a woman is rude to you because of other men being jerks to her in the past. Even so, within minutes I got a comment from a guy whining that I was expecting men to be omniscient, and how unfair it is that women are so mean to him. (I suspect this is partly a ploy, he wants me to come back to him and try to prove that I’m not like those mean horrible women that he’s complaining about.)

I’m also reminded of this long and tangled discussion on Making Light. There was a thread that was vaguely about feminism, and a commenter showed up with an anecdote about an incident of fairly standard harrassment of a woman by men. The reaction to it was kind of amazing. Many women started talking about how she might have been in physical danger, and ways to assess the probability of and hopefully avoid really extreme things like gang rape in that sort of situation. Many men started talking about how the guy sounded like he was a bit clueless but he didn’t mean any harm, and there was no need for her to overreact so much, she should have been more polite. (Her supposed rudeness, by the way, consisted of: So I take off the headphones, look him dead in the eye, and say, “I would like to be left alone. I thought by now that would be obvious. Good night.” And I put the headphones back on.)

Now, the discussion wasn’t divided purely along gender lines, but the gulf was definitely significant. The thread unfortunately devolves into people yelling at eachother, with some trying to frame the whole discussion with standard feminist theory and others not understanding the asusmptions of said feminist theory, and I don’t think any of that is helpful. But I think it’s part of the same phenomenon I’m talking about in this post. Men just don’t know what it’s like to go through the world being female, and don’t understand why a lot of women make an assumption of malice when an unknown man approaches them. Also, they don’t see malice when it actually exists; the guy in Nicole’s story wasn’t just socially inept, he was getting off on having power over her, but he was keeping his threats deniable.

I’ve never been offended by a man chatting me up or expressing interest in me, if it’s genuine. I am offended by men being sleazy and lechy because they can get away with it. I really don’t like having to be wary of men; by nature I’m very friendly and will chat to pretty much anybody who approaches.

I’m in that annoying stage where I don’t quite have time to write about the things I want to write about. This is partly because I’ve been spending my free time following links around and reading other people’s writing, instead of posting.

So I might as well share some of the gems. The internet is full of instant gratification, but this year I’m starting to find myself drawn to full-length, properly though out essays much more than in the past, and the fact they’re online rather than in foreign newspapers I wouldn’t otherwise read is just a matter of convenience.

Michael Pollan’s NYT essay Unhappy meals was getting mocked a bit when it came out. People pounced on the comment about not eating what your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, which out of context is a ludicrous remark. But actually now I’ve read the whole essay it makes a lot of sense to me. I think it may well be important that food is food, not a formula of a certain number of calories plus a certain set of chemicals that we define as “nutrients” or “vitamins”.

There simply isn’t a short-cut to eating healthily, you just have to eat healthily. However, even if you can get away from the mindset of looking for a magic supplement to add or a demon ingredient to avoid, it’s easy to get carried away with the idea of eating “healthily”. The attitude to health I discussed in my Health and Virtue post last year is totally pernicious, and it’s something that really frequently comes up when the issue at hand is food and diet. (Also, eating healthily has a reasonable chance of making you healthier, but there’s no guarantee at all it will make you thinner. There is essentially no reliable way of losing weight long-term through dieting.) The worst extreme of making a moral issue out of healthy eating (whether that’s environmentally healthy or healthy for you or both) has been defined as orthorexia, a mental unbalance which I think is rather prevalent in our society.

There’s also the issue that eating well is more effort than eating badly; in some cases, it’s the healthier eater who is making the extra effort, and that’s fine. But that’s not always so, and very often the extra work falls to the poorest sectors of society, and disproportionately on women. Chris Clarke’s essay on unpaid labour is well worth reading. It’s wide-ranging, not only discussing food, but it does underline the point that it is very well worth questioning where the extra labour is coming from in preparing real food from fresh, locally grown, organic ingredients. (Yes, it is often possible to spend extra money instead of extra work, but that just means that someone else unseen is doing the extra work instead of you. And sometimes they’re getting the extra money in return, but sometimes they’re not. It’s good to be aware of these things.)

On a completely different matter, try Charlie Stross’ essay on a future without privacy. His premise is interesting one and he’s a persuasive writer, though I think he’s over-estimating the technology and under-estimating the complexity of human society. Myself, I’m leaning more and more towards the view that rather than trying to keep my various online identities separate and private (ultimately a futile task), I should just make everything open and take care never to post anything that I could be ashamed or embarrassed about. One point of Stross’ that is applicable to our current technology, let alone his projected future, is that you can’t protect your own privacy online because you don’t have control over the people who interact with you and what they publish.

Hm, so much for not having time to post so I’ll just put up a few links! That turned into a long essay after all. Let’s see if I can harness that verbal energy into writing the review I’m working on.

I’ve been doing various bits and pieces of running services in the last few months, both the egalitarian traditional service with Ploni bat Ploni, and on my own, and I want to talk about my reactions to this.

I should make it clear that in Judaism, any competent adult can lead the service. It doesn’t mean that you’re especially holy, and it’s somewhat prestigious but less so than some other ritual roles which work out as rather less effort in practice. It’s preferred to choose someone of high moral character, given the option, but I don’t know many communities where they turn people down for not being moral enough! So when I talk about leading services, it’s just a minor skill I happen to have, I’m not showing off about some amazing accomplishment or high office.

The thing that started off this train of thought is that people were being appreciative when I led the Progressive service back in March. I found this slightly awkward for two reasons. The people who congratulated me on my lovely speaking voice and my interesting explanations and so on made me feel awkward because it’s not meant to be a performance, it’s meant to be prayer. But even so, it’s undeniably true that there are some elements of stagecraft involved, and the service is likely to be more enjoyable if the leader does have talents in that direction rather than not. And yes, I am good at it on a purely pragmatic level. (Well, apart from the bit where I’m totally unmusical, but in recent months I’ve been working in tandem with people who make up for that deficiency.) Compilerbitch pointed out to me a while ago that I have in fact been doing this sort of thing since I was eight (from 8 to 12 it was children’s services and fragments that don’t have ritual import, because being an adult is in fact a necessary qualification). So it’s not surprising that I know what I’m doing, and she’s right too that this kind of skill does overlap with other kinds of public speaking such as presenting my work at scientific conferences.

Even more awkward were the people who gushed about what an amazing spiritual experience it was and how I made them feel closer to God and so on. I suppose that is the aim, but it’s a very weird thing to be appreciated for. And that too is partly a matter of technique. Lowering my voice at the right moment, using my expressions and body language to underline the emotional import, judiciously picking music and texts that will evoke a reaction, making lots of eye contact to give the impression that I’m speaking personally to each member of the congregation, even crying a little if it seems apt. Stagecraft, in short, but intentionally manipulating my audience’s emotions is more acceptable in a secular context. A generous interpretation is that I’m using these techniques to help people to relate to their own spiritual feelings, and certainly it’s the case that what you get out of a service depends ultimately on your own emotional context, however skillful the leader may be.

The thing is, I don’t find it possible to be sincerely religious and lead a service at the same time, so I have to fake it a bit. It takes a lot of concentration to hold an audience like this, watching the body language of several dozen people to make sure everyone is with you, and worrying about the logistics and the timing and putting in order what I want to say and reading the Hebrew correctly at the same time. Even if it is partly acting, when it’s going well I am making a genuine emotional connection with people I don’t know very well, and that takes effort. I am certainly not praying while I’m holding all this stuff together. I usually find I’m exhausted by the end of the service, and it’s a real ordeal to be all smiley and friendly afterwards when people come to commend me on a successful service.

And to be honest, I’m not in a very religious phase of my life at the moment. I am doing lots of Jewish stuff, but I’m connecting to the community rather than to anything metaphysical. I do think that sort of commitment to the community is at least as important as personal spiritual ecstasy, mind you. When I lead a service I start with the kavannah, the statement of intention: Behold, I am ready to perform the positive commandment of loving one’s neighbour, and that definitely represents what is most meaningful about the process for me. I have this talent, and it’s something the community needs, so it’s a good fit, a good opportunity to contribute.

Not that the reaction is universally positive. The Progressive group has the usual problem of trying to be all things to all people, and there are people who are annoyed because the service is too traditional and might as well be Orthodox, and other people who are annoyed because I change what they consider immutable. Those criticisms don’t really bother me, because they’re basically inevitable in this sort of situation. We have a very new Progressive community that doesn’t have a strong sense of positive identity yet, and almost all the members are either dissatisfied ex-Orthodox people or seeking formerly secular people. Also, we’re somewhat a breakaway group from the main, Conservative community and there inevitably going to be some people who feel threatened by that and don’t approve of the Progressive concept anyway.

But I’ve had a couple of more personal and somewhat upsetting confrontations. One woman backed me into a corner and harangued me for not doing enough. She meant well, she was trying to say that my services are wonderful and she wants more, but it came across as really harsh. Never mind that I’m taking charge of at least some part of the liturgy more than once a month, and doing the bar mitzvah teaching, and taking on a good proportion of the adult education in the Progressive group, and doing a bunch of behind the scenes stuff such as being a member of the board. She made it all my fault that we don’t have enough depth of knowledge in the Progressive group, and one service a month isn’t enough to create a strong sense of community, and we should be running a comprehensive educational programme for all levels.

Then today a older man from the main community came and had a go at me for dividing the community and stealing congregants away from the main service. He said that he feels empty and spiritually hurt when the congregation is depleted because lots of the regulars come to my service instead. And since the Conservative community have voted to become egalitarian, why do we need to create discord by having an alternative service? (He would have more of a point if he were talking about the egal minyan rather than the Progressive group, because Progressive Judaism is very different from even the most feminist Orthodox-style liturgy.) I have just about enough Swedish now to say vaguely placatory things but this tirade really wanted a detailed discussion of some quite abstract ideas and I couldn’t manage that.

*Shrug* This kind of thing is pretty much an expected hazard of the job. Some of the positive enthusiastic people were trying to convince me I should become a rabbi, and I gave my usual flip response that I really don’t need to move into one of the few careers that is worse paid and less secure than academia! At this point, though, I think I could make a tolerable job of being a rabbi. It requires a lot more than just being able to lead services, mind you, but it no longer seems like quite such a ridiculous suggestion as it has in the past.

Another good thing about leading services is that it gets me noticed. Now pretty much everyone in the community greets me by name and I’ve had several invitations to meals as a result of doing the job. For example, last night I ended up going out for a meal with some of the Americans who attended the service. (Foodwise it was nothing special, just mediocre generic Euro-Asian, but it was a nice occasion.) So there’s some material reward as well as the satisfaction of using my talents in a way that benefits the community.

I’ve been annoyed for a long time about the MMR autism scare. Well, annoyed is an understatement; I’m between furious and thoroughly discouraged about humanity at the combination of scientific ignorance and sensationalism which has created a “controversy” where none should exist. The artificial controversy is not just a matter of academic interest, it has serious medical consequences. It has led to an epidemiologically significant proportion of parents refusing to let their children be vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella, which means these diseases are becoming prevalent again. That means children are at risk of permanent disability and death from a cause which is almost completely preventable.

I can’t do anything about this, not even on the small scale where my actions would have any effect anyway. Because the story has been presented as a controversy, anything I might say about the topic is taken as taking one side in a polarized debate. There are plenty of people who feel equally passionately that MMR might cause autism, so people can pick either view based on who has the strongest arguments or the most emotive rhetoric. But the prevalence of the wrong view here is lethal.

Just this week, I was following links from blogs to news stories, and I learned that the whole idea of link between the triple vaccine and autism was invented by unscrupulous lawyers. It’s not only that the original study which showed possible evidence of a link was over-hyped to a ridiculous point, because people don’t understand about sample sizes. It’s that the original study was fabricated, because the charlatan calling himself a scientist was paid to generate data that would be favourable to the legal case so people could make money by suing health providers.

I’d heard rumours about the payments before, but I’d interpreted it charitably as someone who had a particular pet theory and was willing to take money from whomever would provide it to pursue an unpopular hypothesis. But now it seems the unspeakable scum who “funded” the original “study” even went as far as paying the referees to accept a weak paper. So, not just one person but quite a number of people were willing to pervert legal justice, and scientific integrity, and expose the whole population, especially children, to unnecessary and potentially lethal risk. In effect, they were willing to kill. And for what? Not for career advancement, not for self-aggrandisement, not even because of getting overly attached to the first interpretation of preliminary data (though I think the prime culprit probably had those bad motivations as well), but for money.

I suppose one advantage of this thoroughly nasty business is that it might be obvious enough to make people belatedly wake up and realize they have no reason to be scared of the MMR vaccine. If the causing autism thing was obviously faked, and the people behind the fake are obviously, melodramatically evil, that’s perhaps easier to grasp than the idea that the original data possibly suggested a link but later, more detailed analysis showed that the evidence doesn’t stand up. With all the controversy and its wide-ranging legal and medical rammifications, the absence of a measurable link between the vaccine and autism has been demonstrated more thoroughly than just about any other attempt to prove a negative in all of scientific history. It’s a pity that so much research effort has gone into refuting something which should never have seen the light of day in the first place, but it is absolutely and convincingly refuted.

One part of the problem is that detailed scientific evidence against the original shock story isn’t headline-grabbing. It’s much more romantic to believe in a few brave souls fighting against the evil medical establishment to protect children from the nasty vaccine, than to appreciate that the original data doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. But if it was all fabricated in the first place, by vile scum who care more about financial gain than human life, it’s understandable and not at all surprising that subsequent work showed it was baseless.

So, a combination of scientific forgery and unscrupulous media reporting led to a lot of people believing that being vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella simultaneously would cause autism. As a result, about 1 in 5 of the children who would otherwise have been vaccinated in the last ten years have not been vaccinated. This means that the population immunity is below the critical threshold; unfortunately, this means that even those who are vaccinated are at increased risk because no vaccine is perfect, so you need a big enough proportion of the population to be vaccinated so that the disease can’t spread. At least one child has died of measles in that time; maybe he would have died anyway, but no child in the UK died of measles in the decade before the controversy broke.

I think the problem goes deeper than just people holding false beliefs about the vaccine, though. Part of the issue is that people think that measles, mumps and rubella are just minor ailments that lead to nothing worse than feeling miserable for a few days, whereas autism is this big horrible scary thing. I think it’s important to emphasize that autism is neither infectious nor lethal, unlike measles and mumps. And that in turn is part of the stigma against mental illness and intellectual disability, which leads to horrors like this.

I’ve been intending to write this post for ages, cos I want to babble about learning Swedish. I found out today that I passed my second level Swedish course, and that seems as good a motivation as any to actually get on and post this.

(In theory, the European A2 level of language competence means that I am supposed to be able to manage simple shopping conversations and ordering food in a restaurant; discuss hobbies, interests and jobs using simple questions and answers; understand the gist of written texts if I’m familiar with the subject matter; understand simple statements spoken at normal pace if I know the context; write simple notes and texts though not without errors. So it’s probably a bit below GCSE level, I’d estimate. In practice my comprehension of both speech and writing is quite a bit ahead of this, but my active Swedish lags rather a way behind as yet.)

Anyway, yeah, Swedish is a great language for me, because it has lots of elongated vowels! It sounds slightly comical until you get used to it, something like if an Italian learnt English from a really plummy-voiced Etonian. In fact, it’s more “lilting” than the languages that are traditionally described as such, because it has intrinsic tone. Apparently proto-IE had it, but I’ve never come across that feature in any modern day Germanic languages. Apart from that and a few other unique features, it’s somewhere between English and German, but closer to English, particularly archaic and regional forms. So relatively easy for a native speaker of English with a smattering of German and an even smaller smattering of Yiddish. And lots of words that don’t have obvious cognates in standard English do have them in Scots: barn -> bairn; grata -> greet [to cry].

Lethargic Man described Swedish as looking like a conlang made up by a naive English speaker. And really, everything that makes Swedish hard to learn is either the same as English or worse in English. Lots of strong verbs and a few that are actually irregular, as well as a rather large number of options for plurals. Evil phrasal verbs, which however work mostly the same as in English. Mildly inflected pronouns but not most of the rest of the language. Unpredictable and non-phonetic spelling, though nothing like on the scale that English has it. If English is notorious for following other languages up dark alleys and mugging them for spare vocabulary, Swedish is at least the Artful Dodger. There’s a lot more Romance-originating stuff than I expected, and no consistency at all in how far these imported words get Swedish-ized. There’s even some of the same tendency to have both a Romance / Latinate and a Germanic word for the same thing.

Other cool stuff: lots of German style compound words. Nouns can be, and frequently are, verbed. Verbs themselves don’t distinguish person, number or aspect, only tense, which certainly makes dealing with all the vowel changes and irregular conjugations a lot easier! Though unlike English there actually is a passive voice rather than just using the past participle for the passive. Ending a sentence with a preposition is actually grammatically correct, so you can see how the despised but in fact natural construction got into English. In general, relative clauses are more intuitive if less strictly logical; you can’t always say exactly what the pronouns point to, but that allows less convoluted constructions.

Just about my favourite thing about Swedish is that it has a special word for saying “yes” to a negative question. My second favourite is that word for why is varför. Lots of precise words for describing family relationships, such as four separate words for the four grandparents. One of my Swedish classes early on fell apart completely when we learned the word barnbarn, grandchild, because a Chinese guy in the class speculated that the reduplicated word might mean “two children”. The hilarity was only increased when the teacher pointed out that barnbarnsbarn means not three children, but great-grandchild. There are also separate words for his-referring-to-the-subject and his-referring-to-someone-else, which must make writing slash easier in Swedish.

Things that confuse me: the intrinsic tone stuff, which means that two words which differ only in stress can mean completely different things. I suppose that’s no worse than English, really, but it also makes it hard for me to speak correctly, because tone is not something I’m used to including when I learn new vocabulary. Also it’s harder to guess what someone is saying from tone of voice when you don’t know the vocabulary, because some of it is just part of the pronunciation of the word itself. Adjectives hurt my brain, because they sometimes decline and sometimes don’t and sometimes just use the plural form for no obviously plural reason. The tendency to combine letters across word boundaries is a bit hard to get my head round, too. R, for example, is not rhotic, but modifies the preceding vowel, which I can cope with from English, and also softens following ss. This is ok, but it still carries on doing that when one word ends in r and the following word begins with s, which I find weird. Alphabetical order is slightly strange too; å and ä are separate letters from a, coming after z, and ö comes after that rather than mixed in with o as I would expect. But w (in foreign-imported words) is counted as if it were exactly the same letter as v. There is only really one sound I can’t pronounce, but unfortunately it is in my age and the name of the district where I live.

Another weird thing is that it’s common, though not obligatory, to breathe in while saying “yes”. To me, someone speaking through an indrawn breath has immediate connotations of shock or fear. I would have thought that sort of thing was at a more basic level than language, and without really thinking about it, expected it to be essentially universal. Here, though, a gasp means “I agree” or “That’s so”.

Not too many false friends, though slut means finished and it’s a slightly odd thing to see in big letters all over the place!

Anyway, yes, Swedish is cool. I’m having a lot of fun learning it, and I think I’ve got over the initial hump and know enough of the basic structure that I’m picking up new vocab, and feeling more natural with the grammar, as I go along just by being immersed. My accent still sucks, but I can make myself understood if people are prepared to overlook that.