Impaired Decision Making, Indian Nationalist Pseudoscience, Embracing Averageness - Dinner Table Digest № 60
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While it might seem like I have an obsession with Elon Musk, I promise you, I don’t. It’s just that he is a very powerful man, and there have been some really good feature pieces written about him recently. Veering away from The World According to Elon, this Digest also features an interesting piece by philosopher Eric Mathison on the decision making abilities of individuals with mental disorders. The 60th Digest also includes a piece on how Hindu Nationalist pseudoscience is being incorporated into all public education levels in India, including higher education, followed by a piece from a psychologist on how to accept and embrace one’s averageness. The musical interlude is brought to you by Deep Purple.
Sections: The Power of Elon Musk / Mentally Impaired Decision Making / Hindu Nationalist Pseudoscience / Deep Purple Live in 1972 / Embracing Averageness
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule - Ronan Farrow - The New Yorker
I know I featured a piece on Elon Musk last time, but the world's richest man holds a lot of power. A lot more than many of us realize. This feature piece by award-winning journalist Ronan Farrow digs into the psyche of a man that is as equally reviled as he is loved. Fascinatingly, Musk has a long-time obsession with the letter X that goes way, way back:
After Musk left Zip2, he poured some twelve million dollars, a majority of his wealth, into another startup, an online bank called X.com. It was the first instance of his obsession with the letter “X,” which has now appeared in the names of his companies, his products, and his son with the artist Grimes: X Æ A-12. The bank also marked the beginning of a long and so far unfulfilled quest—recently revived in his effort to reinvent Twitter—to create an “everything app,” incorporating a payment system. In 2000, X.com merged with a competing online-payments startup, Confinity, co-founded by the entrepreneur Peter Thiel. In events that have since become Silicon Valley lore, Musk and Thiel battled for control of the company. Various accounts apportion blame differently. Hoffman told me, citing the story as an example of Musk’s disingenuousness, that Musk had pushed for the merger by highlighting the leadership of his company’s seasoned executive, only to force out the executive and place himself in the top role. “A merger like this, you’re doing a marriage,” Hoffman said. “And it’s, like, ‘I was lying to you intensely while we were dating. Now that we’re married, let me tell you about the herpes.’ ” People who have worked with Musk often describe him as controlling. One said, “In the areas he wants to compete in, he has a very hard time sharing the spotlight, or not being the center of attention.” In the fall of 2000, another coup, executed while Musk was on a long-delayed honeymoon with Justine, overthrew Musk and installed Thiel as the company’s head. Two years later, eBay acquired the company, by then called PayPal, for $1.5 billion, making Musk, who remained the largest shareholder, fabulously wealthy.
Mental Disorders and Decision Making - Eric Mathison
This piece looks at the complex nuances that undergird the concept of ‘capacity for decision-making,’ especially as it pertains to people with mental health issues who are considering pursuing medical aid in dying. Mathison takes himself to task for a mistake he made in a previous post, in which he claimed that once the relevant information is provided to a patient, that patient always retains the right to make a decision. Of course, that's not true - there are lots of situations where someone may have all the information but still lack the capacity to make a decision. Mathison takes this as his starting point in his evaluation of capacity:
Capacity is a hugely important concept in medicine. If you have capacity, you can consent to or refuse any intervention that’s offered to you. If you lack capacity, someone else should decide for you. Respecting autonomy for those who have it is essential, but so is protecting vulnerable people who are incapable. It would be a serious violation of someone’s rights to override his decision if he was capable of making it himself; it would also be bad to rely on a person’s decisions when she is incapable of making valid, informed ones. …
[Capacity isn't like a disease our condition, something that exists out there in the upworld.] It’s a cluster of abilities, the most commonly accepted ones being understanding, appreciation, reasoning, and expression of a choice. But each of these comes in degrees, so there’s no clear threshold that distinguishes having capacity from lacking it. Some people clearly have it, others clearly don’t, and hard cases exist between. Further, even if we could precisely measure each ability, reasonable people could disagree over where to set the line.
Mathison continues,
My misleading blunder notwithstanding, I can clarify that my actual view is just that some people with a mental disorder are capable of making appropriate judgments according to their all-things-considered values. There are lots of types of mental illness that present in many different ways and to different degrees. There are certainly people who lack capacity due to their mental disorder, and it’s appropriate to assign them a substitute decision maker instead of letting them make decisions they can’t understand. People who lack the capacity to decide about MAID shouldn’t be allowed to consent to MAID.
The question is whether the presence of a mental disorder guarantees incapacity. There have been studies on this, and the answer is no. Depression is especially relevant, since that’s the one people often worry about for MAID.
He concludes,
My view is that, given the variety of mental disorders and their severity, the best approach is to rigorously assess each person’s capacity instead of making everyone with a mental disorder ineligible for MAID. This is already the case in Canada, where having a mental illness doesn’t disqualify a person from MAID, though it can if the mental illness interferes with capacity. Next year, Canada will begin allowing MAID based solely on mental illness, so long as the person meets all the criteria, including having capacity.
Amid Indian Nationalism, Pseudoscience Seeps Into Academia - Arbab Ali & Nadeem Sarwar - Undark
The Hindu nationalist government of India, through their adherence to Hindutva - literally ‘Hinduness’ - has made changes to its education systems at all levels that elevate ancient Hindu texts to a place on par with peer-reviewed scientific discovery.
In April, the exclusion of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution from high school textbooks became national news in India. More than 1,800 scientists, educators, and community members signed a letter condemning the move, calling it a “travesty of education.”
But while some students and academics have been vocal in speaking out against the rise of pseudoscience and Hindu nationalism, experts noted that many are quiet, whether it be out of fear of retaliation — including denying funding and promotional opportunities — or simple opportunism.
According to Banerjee, higher-ups at Indian scientific institutes have tried to stymie anti-pseudoscience protests since they are nearing retirement. “These people have aspirations or ambitions of being vice chancellors somewhere,” Banerjee added.
In an email to Undark, G.L. Krishna, an Ayurvedic physician and a visiting scholar at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, wrote that dissenting voices are often “unnecessarily scared.” But according to Sule, the professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, even though those who actually believe in pseudoscience are a minority, such public statements can impact careers.
In universities and institutions “where promotions are in the hands of top authorities, there this political favoritism is happening a lot,” said Sule. He, along with other faculty members interviewed by Undark, said that political affiliations dictate progress in academic careers, so people often choose to stay silent.
Worrisome to me is the fact that Ayurvedic ‘physicians’ are apparently being patched over to work in the medical system, something that puts hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people in unnecessary risk.
… a group of scientists and researchers criticized the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine — the regulatory body governing public medical institutions’ policies — for introducing medical astrology as an elective in the Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery program, which is offered at hundreds of institutions in India. The course material offers remedies in the form of mantras, amulets with protective powers, rituals, and counseling based on astrological calculations.
Ayurveda is a traditional system of Indian medicine that takes a natural approach to healing. Practitioners believe that diseases happen due to an imbalance in a person’s consciousness, and therefore, rely on a healing system that involves herbs, exercises, and meditation.
But Ayurveda is a topic of contention, and its claims can be at odds with modern medical science. Cyriac Abby Philips, an Indian liver doctor based in Kerala who regularly debunks pseudoscientific claims on social media, said the alternative Ayurvedic medical system is based on pseudoscientific principles.
Ayurveda has no basis in science, “but the whole aspect is that it has deep links to culture, tradition, and religion in India,” Philips told Undark. Yet, he said, the government is promoting Ayurvedic practices. A few years ago, for example, the National Health Mission, a government program that aims to improve access to health care, introduced a bridge course — designed to help students transition from one academic level to another — to allow Ayurveda doctors to prescribe treatments based on western medical sciences despite never studying it as part of their degree course. The move, according to the government, was to address the lack of doctors in rural areas, but the president of the Indian Medical Association has said there is no shortage. While the bridge course was ultimately dropped, some states have allowed Ayurveda doctors to prescribe and dispense medicines.
Deep Purple, Live, 1972
Enjoy!
Embracing Averageness - Timothy Carey
One of the most enduring thorns in my side has always been the fact that I am usually very good at what I do, so good, in fact, as to come in second third or fourth place in many of my pursuits. (Except for wrestling. We don’t talk about those three years on the high school wrestling team…) I have never, however, come in first place. At anything. This has bothered me ever since I was a kid, stuck with me through University when I was clearly pretty good at philosophy but not great at it, got into my backup grad school on the backup list, and passed my graduate level philosophy classes with mediocre grades. While I protest that I would have done better had my classes being in social and political philosophy and not logic, I still ran into trouble with my Master's thesis.
Timothy Cleary suggests that rather than fighting one’s averageness, one should instead embrace it, striving instead for adequacy and competency:
Sometime recently, I stumbled upon the idea that the world might be a fairer and kinder neighbourhood if we placed greater value on competence and adequacy. Why aren’t we encouraged to be satisfied with being competent? Why don’t we collectively commit to each of us accumulating adequate rather than preposterously extravagant savings?
Of course, we can acknowledge that our own individual standards for competence or adequacy will differ but competent doesn't have to mean excellent, and adequate is never surplus. And striving for excellence should not be demeaned if that’s what some people want to do, but perhaps we could learn to value competence just as highly. In fact, perhaps we could come to understand adequate and excellent as different notes of the same tune.
From a certain perspective, we were already excellent even before we drew our first breath. We arrived when our first cells got together and started their human-building tango. The process that is life itself is perhaps nature’s most astonishing and outstandingly excellent achievement. The accomplishments that individuals amass during this process are mere trinkets in comparison to the process itself.
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