Alternative Medicine and Cancer

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I didn't really follow Steve Jobs' illness, so when I was reading some articles the other day on him an his death in an attempt to catch up on what I missed (rather late, I know), I was surprised to learn that he actually delayed surgery on the tumor in his pancreas in favor of alternative medicine.
Now, I should probably warn you that I think alternative medicine is really stupid. I am fully aware of the fact that many of our medicines are derived from plants, and that some plants do have some ability to help with medical ailments - but when it comes to cancer or other major diseases I find it highly unlikely that plants are going to do anything. No vitamin or plant is going to get a defective p53 working again.

But regardless, the article in question (from the NY Times) considered Jobs' decision to delay surgery in a fairly positive light. The author at one point comments that "in theory, Mr. Jobs’s tumor could already have spread invisibly to his liver by the time it was first diagnosed. If it had, operating earlier probably would not have made a difference." This is, however, is not an actual reason to not have surgery. It seems to me to be more the author's attempt to justify Jobs' decision. Jobs had no way whatsoever of knowing whether or not it spread, and it still seems to me like he should have gone for the surgery. What did he have to lose?

The author then delves in to issues of people accidentally discovering tumors after CT scans for unrelated issues and how they are often reluctant to get surgery. While that's all very nice, I'm not sure why the author completely avoided discussing why one of the most innovative men in the world thought that being vegan would make his cancerous tumor go away. Because that really doesn't make any sense to me. At all. Maybe if he decided to use acupuncture, or herbs, or any of the other things the article mentioned to treat headaches, or allergies, or even mild asthma I could begin to understand, but cancer, really? Really?

The author's complete avoidance of the subject leads me to believe that she shares the same opinion. What do you think?

Strange Sort of Immunity

Bishop Robert Finn

 The subject of how child abuse in the Catholic Church is dealt with was brought up briefly in class the other day, and so when I noticed an article regarding it on the front page of the New York Times, I was immediately interested.

The article concerns the recent indictment of a bishop, Robert Finn, and his diocese over failing to report abuse in Kansas City, Missouri. Bishop Finn acknowledged that he knew of pornographic photographs taken of a young girl by a priest in December but did not turn them over to police until May. While he waited to turn over the photographs, the priest was allowed to continue attending church events with children, spend weekends at the homes of parish families and even took photographs of another girl.

This marks the first time the leader of an American diocese has been charged over the behavior of a priest he supervised.

Although American bishops pledged to report cases of abuse to authorities a decade ago, this promise is obviously not being kept. Bishop Finn himself had to make such a promise three years ago as part of a settlement with abuse victims. This is rather concerning, to say the least.

What is rather confusing is that no other bishop has been charged over mishandling cases of sexual abuse, despite the fact that I'm sure this has happened many times before. In fact, Michael Hunter, the president of an organizations for victims of abuse by priests,  said "We’re very pleased with the prosecuting attorney here to have the guts to do it." The guts to do what? Charge someone over the negligent failure to report child abuse to authorities?

Clearly, hesitation to charge church officials in these cases exists, but I don't understand why. What strange sort of immunity do bishops have that law enforcement can be considered courageous for charging them with crimes related to one of the most hated crimes in our society, pedophilia?

Never Tell Your Children They're Smart

The other day in class, someone brought up that there was a study that showed praising children made them lazy. Sadly, I don't actually remember the circumstances of the comment, I think it might have been concerning a discussion about success following our watching Grizzly Man. I do remember some people expressing incredulity about the study, but it does exist.

Now, it doesn't actually say praising children is bad - only a specific type of praising. The studies were conducted by Carol Dweck while working at colleges such as Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard on hundreds of kids over thirty years. So these are not to be taken lightly. This is not to say they are definitely true, but the diversity of samples, size of the samples, and time the studies were done over lends them significant weight.

This studies suggest that children who are often told that they are smart, or otherwise praised for their innate abilities, develop a "fixed" view of intelligence - believing that it is a quality that they were born with and that cannot be improved upon. They therefore avoid challenging academic situations, because they do not see striving to learn or working hard as valuable. Instead, this belief makes challenges, mistakes and the need to work hard threats to their ego, and thus the avoidance of them becomes almost inevitable. However, children congratulated for working hard develop a "growth" mindset, in which failures or challenges are opportunities to get better. That's not to say that they like them, because who does, but they don't stop trying completely. So don't not praise your children, just don't praise them for innate abilities.

Why are we (or at least some of us) praising these innate abilities more than hard work? Hard work is an American value, right?

Perhaps not anymore, at least in some communities. In areas like ours, where achievement in academics, sports, music, ect is the most important thing talent is valued above hard work. I'm not sure if anyone has had this experience, but multiple times in math class I've had one or two kids who seem to automatically understand all the concepts and can do all the classwork with their eyes closed, but never do the homework and often don't do well on tests because they haven't bothered to learn formulae or something - and people are jealous of them. Even if they aren't working or trying or even succeeding, their innate abilities are considered more valuable.

Has anyone else experienced this? Are we coming to value those who succeed because they are just born smart more than those who work their way to the top?

The Ultimate Form of Storytelling

So, my previous post was on the book Incognito, which I talked about in relation to criminal justice and the death penalty, but I realize now that I probably wasn't making all that much sense. I also realized that I missed what might not be a particularly shocking proposal to someone fairly well-versed in neuroscience, but is a very interesting claim:

Consciousness is  a story we tell ourselves.

Now, that's not to say that we don't have consciousness - obviously we do, but, as Eagleman puts it "we are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood." Alien processes is a term he uses to refer to the many, many, many functions of the brain that run almost entirely without our knowledge, until we are fed the end product. Our consciousness then works to create a coherent story for us about all the input we're getting, that sometimes might contradict or otherwise require some explanation. 
One of Eagleman's best examples of this is in the case of split-brain patients (click the link if you don't know what that is). In one set of experiments, different pictures or commands were shown to the different hemispheres using some weird device. If, using this device, you flash the word "walk" to the right hemisphere, which is the now unconcscious part of the brain, the patient will get up and start to walk. However, they do not know they've been given this command, so their left brain, realizing that they are walking and don't know why, will quickly come up with a reason, such as "I was going to get a drink." This can also be seen in the excuses of anosognosia patients, of which Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas is a particularly famous case.
There are myriad other examples of this storytelling in perfectly healthy people as well, and we are probably doing it constantly, without any idea. If we ourselves are just stories constructed by the tiny fraction of our brain that is conscious to explain the working of the rest of our brain, then what does that say about our ability to accurately perceive the world and construct stories about that?

Free Will, Criminal Justice, and Rick Perry

Governor Rick Perry, in a recent presidential debate, was asked a question about how his state, Texas, has executed 234 death row inmates - and this statement led to applause from the crowd - before Perry even answered the question.

Meanwhile, I just finished the book Incognito by David Eagleman, which, according to its cover, is a national bestseller, whatever that means, and is a book about neuroscience and consciousness. A lot of it is the typical, "wow isn't this cool" and brain injury stuff you normally get from neuroscience books, but the second half delves into the more interesting conclusions that neuroscience leads to - either a deterministic or probabilistic worldview that leaves no room for some alternate entity with "free will" not grounded in the physical brain. And of course, this has huge ramifications for a legal system that assumes culpability is a measure of blameworthyness, and that choice is key in this matter (this is shown in that we do not punish scizophrenics or sleepwalkers for crimes as harshly or at all). He argues, that our legal system should therefore be not designed to punish, but to reprogram the brains of offenders to have better impulse control (which typically very poor in criminals) or otherwise fix the problem.

Of course, all the evidence he uses to reach this point is quite long and drawn out, and I won't get into it here. And there's also the whole issue of people being forced to be reprogrammed. But even if we just assume he is right, do you think that the American population will ever be able to give up their precious assumption of free will? And, based on the very interesting reaction of the crowd at the debate, will we ever want to part with a punitive legal system, of which execution is the most severe form?

I would say no, at least not for a long time.