Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

Weekend thoughts: not everything that evolved is acted on by evolution

So I understand biology, I’ve researched biology for most of my adult life, and one of the fundamental tenets of biology is the Theory of Evolution.  I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that evolution is as central to modern biology as Quantum Theory is to modern physics, almost everything we do and study ties back to it in some way.  But like all scientific theories, evolution is widely misunderstood on the internet, and not just by dogmatic creationists but even by the science journalists and appreciators who we would expect to understand it.  It often comes back to a simple statement:

Not everything evolved to be the way is it today

Evolution is a process where certain traits are selected for or against, but not all traits undergo this selection pressure at all times.  Some traits are relatively “silent” in that mutations affecting them don’t give significant advantages or disadvantages so there is no selection pressure.  And some traits are downstream of the selection pressure, in that while they are affected by a trait which is being selected for or against, they themselves are not under selection pressure and so don’t get acted upon.  And some traits are just the best of a bad bunch, evolution does not make things perfect, it makes things good enough to thrive within their niche.

Let me give a few examples.  I occasionally see or hear a discussion about “why would humans evolve to get cancer?”  The misunderstanding here is thinking that cancer is just a phenotype that can be selected for or against, like height or hair color.  Most cancer is somatic in nature, meaning it does not come directly from the inherited genes but from mutations upon those genes.  These mutations were not inherited nor will they be passed down (unless they occur in the sex cells) so it isn’t true that evolution is even acting upon these mutations.  OK but why did the human body evolve to allow these mutation to happen?  That’s just the best of a bad bunch, the human DNA repair and replication machinery aren’t perfect and there are big tradeoffs that would have to be made for our DNA to not allow mutations whatsoever (if that were even possible).  The human DNA machinery does a very good job at what it evolved to do, replicating and repairing DNA with high fidelity, and just because it fails sometimes doesn’t mean that it evolved to fail, but instead means that there was no mutation that created machinery which never failed.

Likewise there isn’t always an evolutionary reason behind every other weird aspect of our bodies.  Why do wisdom teeth cause us pain?  Or our spines?  These things evolved during times when we lived differently to today, so trying to understand them in the evolutionary context of 2022 just doesn’t help.  Clickbait article writers like to point to these as “why evolution is not always helpful.” But they’re simply examples of the author misunderstanding evolution more than anything else.  So if you ever find yourself thinking “why did we evolve to be weird like this,” first ask yourself if the question even makes sense.

الكتبة بالعربية صعب جداً

امس كتبتُ بالصينية عن اشيأ، واليوم اريد ان اكتب بالعربية قليل. لكن الكتابة بالعربية صعب جداً. عندما اكتب بالصينية, اكتب حروف إنجليزي والكومبيوتور يعطيني الكلمات الصينية. لكن لا افعل هذا بالعربية. فالحقيقة ما في العربية اَي حروف إنجليزي مثل فالصينية. بسبب ذلك لا أستطيع ان اشوف الى مفاتيحي واستخدمها. من اللازم عن استخدم مفاتيح عربي أو أعرف اين كل الحروف بدون اقراء اليها. 

فكيف أنا اكتب هذا؟ بايفون. ايفوني عنده المفاتيح العربي فأستطيع ان أشوفها. لكن ما في أندرويد (Android) هذا المفاتيح. فلازم استخدم ايفون اذا اود ان افعل هذا. 

اكتب بالعربية بطيء جداً. ايداً مهارتي بالعربية ليس كثير  وأنا خطأ إملائي كثيراً. بس اود ان احاول هذا فلن ازال هن هذا في المستقبل. 

هذا كان فسير جذاً. مذا اخر اريد ان أقول؟ أنا عم العب لعبة فيديو عن اشيأ في الوقت تصنيع. هي “التاريخ المغاير” وفيها العب عن المصر بعد احرب مع “اوتوماني” (Ottomans) وأنا اتحدت كل المصري والبدوي والمشرقي (هل “مشرقي” كالمة الخقيقة؟) وأتحداهم في بلد العربي وحاربتُ البلدين الأوروبي.  كان كثير من الحرب في الوقت التصنيع. ابي يقول هو لا احب لعباتي لان كلها عن الحرب لكن هو كل وقت يشاهد الفيلم عن أو في الحرب العالمية في ١٩٤٠ أو تلك وقت. فالخقيقة هو لا يحب اللعبة الفيديو وهذا اوكي بس هذا ليس عن حرب أو لا حرب. 

فهذا كان مرح واعرف كثير معه ليس سحيح بالعربي بس اود ان افعل هذا مرة أخرى!

我在想用中文写一个报

我觉得报的意思是“report”所以因为我不知到怎么说”post”用中文所以我说报。

我现在必须写一个工作的报告，可是我告诉我的自己我会每一个天在我的blog写一个报。所这是我的报。我想在工作找得到新朋友，可是这是特别难的。每一个工人我们都工作以后回家，不做好玩的东西。所以我跟同工不花时间，所以我跟同工不当朋友。

我也不知道什么我想用中文说。不知道怎么关于科学用中文写。我的工作用蛋白质，我可以说那。我们学病毒，我可以说那。可是怎么说别的东西？

这个包是不太条可是我没昨天晚上写，我今天在写。所以我应该做工作，所以不太条不太错。

Google will have a fully self-driving car on road by 2020

In 2015, Google claimed they would have a fully self-driving car within 5 years, completely removing humans from the equation.

Lol. Lmao even.

I’ve at times thought myself too much a pessimist, but self-driving cars is a technology where I feel that several companies and hype machines are knowingly barking up the wrong tree. Self-driving cars aren’t a technological problem, they are truly a political and legal problem. Let me explain.

We have had for many years the technology capable of making a fully autonomous car using sensors and automatic feedback for controls, and it only took a few years of Google engineering before they were able to make a program which could drive with greater fidelity than most any human. Fidelity in this case means ability to get there and back in a reasonable amount of time while adhering to road safety. Obviously a car doesn’t have an ego, so it can be programmed not to speed, to drive defensively, to obey traffic laws etc. And the split second reaction times required when zooming down the freeway are more easily handled by a computer than a human anyway. But that isn’t the barrier to self-driving cars in my view, the barrier is what happens when things go wrong.

If a self-driving car is responsible for a crash, who is held responsible? In the real world, responsibility in crashes is assigned in order to pay restitution and prevent future harm. Someone has to pay for the victim’s hospital bills, and it might be necessary to prevent future harm by prohibiting unsafe drivers from driving. Under pretty much every imaginable circumstance, the driver of the car is presumed solely at fault if their car is responsible for a crash, but under a few specific circumstances the manufacturer of the car or even the person who last worked on it can be held at fault if the driver acted correctly and the car did not respond to their inputs.

But who is at fault if a self-driving Google Lexus crashes? Let’s cut to the chase, Lexus will not be at fault in any sense, and in Google’s visionary world there would be no peddles or steering wheel in the self-driving Google car, so no “driver” as such. The only answer then is that Google itself must be at fault as the writer of the self-driving algorithm. This isn’t an open question, someone must be at fault to pay restitution, and there is very little possibility that the passenger of a car with no way to influence it could be held liable. But is Google, or any company for that matter, willing to take on the burden of fault for every possible crash their cars could get into? Google has handily sidestepped this problem by pointing out that so far their cars have never been in an at-fault crash, but that really isn’t an answer. All software fails eventually, that is an iron law of nature no matter what the programmers say. There will always be a bug in the code, an unexpected edge case, or an update pushed out without proper oversight. And so eventually Google’s car will cause a crash and someone must be held responsible. This isn’t just one person’s hospital bills either, if Google’s car causes a crash and there’s no peddles or steering wheel, they would be responsible for the harm to people in both cars. I surmise that Google is unwilling to take on that responsibility.

So this truly is a question that cannot be sidestepped, and I think that is why even though the tech is “there” for self-driving cars, none have come to the mass market. You can make a car navigate through 99.99% of all driving problems with ease, but no one is willing to be responsible for the 0.01% of times their car will fail. So even though humans might only navigate 99% of driving problems with ease, and thus even though self-driving cars are already “better” than us, we take on the burden of responsibility when we fail, as defined by laws and legally mandated insurance. In exchange for this burden we get the privilege of going place to place much faster than we would otherwise. Google would only get the privilege of our money in exchange for taking on that burden, and I suspect the economics of the exchange don’t yet work for them.

The stock market is not the economy, so what is it?

With the stock market down almost 25% year-to-date, it’s always necessary to remind people that the stock market is not the economy. The market can go way up in a “bad” economy (as we saw during the COVID lockdowns) and likewise can go way down in a “good” economy. But if the market is not the economy, then what is it?

Well in some ways that is a question with multiple answers. As stated in a previous post, for companies the stock market is a source of money, what professionals call “liquidity.” The ability to get more money when you need it just by selling stock, or to purchase assets with stock or borrow against stock, these are all ways that a company can treat stock like it is money and use it to grow their business. So when the stock market is down companies could have a harder time raising the money they need in order to grow and expand their business. In this way it can be argued that the stock market does affect the wider economy significantly by determining how easy it is for companies to grow and expand their business off the money from stock investors. If this source of money/liquidity is hard to come by (because of a bust stock market) then growth will suffer.

From an outside perspective however, the stock market can be seen as the expected near future of all the companies in the market. In a different post I explained that one mechanism that gives a stock value is the expectation of all future dividends (accounting for inflation and uncertainty). Dividends require profits in order to be sustainable, so if in the near future one expects most companies to turn unprofitable, then one would expect many companies to be forced to cut their dividend, and thus one would value stocks less and other investments (like bonds) more. Thus many people have argued that the stock market is a leading indicator for the economy as a whole, if the market is down then that probably says something about the near future of the companies in the market ie that they would be expected to be entering rough straights. In the same way the stock market can be the first thing to rebound out of a recession as investors look to the near future and expect profits and dividends to make a comeback.

So no, the stock market is not the economy. But this the stock market may tell us about the future of the economy, either directly causing that future (companies grow more slowly because it’s harder to raise money) or being an effect of that future (economic storm clouds cause the stock market to tank before the real economy). Either way, we should be prepared for whatever future it holds for us.

No one likes a scientific buzzkill

When doing science, you’ll often come upon mysteries you didn’t expect.  Some of these are exciting and will lead to new discoveries, but some of them are depressing because they mean you did the experiment wrong.  Take a common example: you do an experiment and find a result you didn’t expect.  You obviously want to know why you got the result you did, and so you spend a lot of time and effort looking into what part of the experiment could have been causing the unexpected result.  Eventually the answer could have been caused by contamination of your samples or misuse of your experimental design, either way you didn’t find something new and exciting, you just made more work for yourself since you spent a lot of time chasing down an answer only to find out you just needed to do the experiment all over.

But for those first few days or even weeks you can feel constantly like you’re on the precipice of some new discovery, something grand and publishable that everyone will see and be enlightened by.  I have had feelings like that, and it’s always been a let down to realize that there was nothing cool and exciting about my unexpected results, they simply came from not doing things correctly.  The danger is of course getting too into it, spending a lot of time and money chasing rabbit holes wondering why your data looks weird when the quick and simple answer is “do the experiment again and it will look right,” you can spend many years and millions of dollars just to learn that sometimes.  I thus usually try to look at results with a very pessimistic eye: it’s unlikely I just discovered something literally earth shattering because if it was this easy to discover then someone else would have already done so.  This can at times seem like the joke about the two economists who see 20$ on the sidewalk, but it’s a mindset that promotes healthy skepticism.

With all that said, the hardest part of this for me is making sure other people are healthy skeptics.  We’re all scientists in a lab and we all have that part of our brain that wants to solve a mystery and will spend way too much time and effort trying to do so.  It’s easy all the while to convince yourself that the answer to the mystery is big and groundbreaking enough to justify all the time spent, but so often it just isn’t.  I’ve been dancing around the point for a while but essentially: some people in my lab are looking at data which they think reveals amazing undiscovered insights into a disease we are researching.  I see the data and assume it’s some unknown contaminant causing it and that we should just redo the experiment.  We could spend our time trying to look more at the data or spend our time redoing the experiment, and I fear that if we spend too much time on the former we’ll all be really bummed out when it is a contaminant and we have to go back and spend more time on the latter.  But I can’t stop people from getting excited, just like the X-Files we all want to believe.

The American Challenge Finale: Eurofederalism for the future?

I know I haven’t written much about the American Challenge for a while, but as I read through the book I realized most all of my critiques would be retreads of what I had already said.  In the end, Jean-Jacque Servan-Schreiber’s thesis was made clear from the outset: Europe was falling behind in technology and economics and his preferred cure was Eurofederalism.  As an aside, some of my American readers might not know what Eurofederalism is, it’s basically the idea that Europe (the EU to be more specific) should continue forming an ever closer union between the states, such that political and economic power rests more and more with the supranational EU rather than the nations themselves.  Exactly what the end goal of Eurofederalism is varies from person to person, some people envision a United States of Europe, some want more federalism, some want less, but most would agree that the current amount of cooperation is not enough.  

With Servan-Schreiber’s thesis laid before us, it’s tempting to look back and try to judge how right he was.  On the one hand, I can see all his arguments from 1968 being made today in 2022: Europe still falls behind in certain sectors to American multinational corporations, and many Europeans still think the cure is Eurofederalism, so it’s tempting to call him a true visionary who noticed these things well before others did.  On the other hand, many of the problems he identified from 1968 were solved by Europe without the kind of Eurofederalism he envisioned.  University graduation steadily climbed in Europe to reach the same highs it did in America, Europe’s growth rate climbed so that America never outpaced it to the extent he though they would, and although Europe does not control many of the tech companies of today, they still have not missed out on the productivity gains that tech has brought because buying a computer is still as good as building in yourself.  Perhaps the Four Freedoms on the EU have helped Europe reach this point, but it’s clear that a common, EU-wide industrial policy was not necessary to maintain Europe’s economic growth in the face of American corporations.In the final tally, I do believe Servan-Schreiber was prescient for his day, identifying key weaknesses in the European economies and key strengths in the American one.  But in other ways he was wide of the mark, many industries he wanted to throw money at are not the ones building the future, and his preferred answer was not necessary for Europe to “catch up” in many ways to America’s standard of living.  Overall though, a very enjoyable read: 8/10.

Weekend thoughts: Technical Analysis seems like Exegesis

The stock market has been moving lately.  Up,  down, side-to-side, every movement can launch a thousand stories, but lately I’ve seen a lot of stories pop up of how someone should invest in this market and where they should put their money.  I’m not going to say I have the answers to this question, or even the knowledge of how to find the answers, but I’ll lay out the facts of where I think you will not find the answers.

As an overview, the market is down somewhere between 20% and 25% since January.  If you think the market is going to keep going down, you’d be advised to sell your stocks and hold them as cash until the market reaches a bottom and starts going back up.  If you think we’ve reached the bottom you’d be advised to buy more stocks and rake in the profits as the market goes back up.  There’s arguments for both, but some arguments that feel unsatisfactory are those based on technical analysis.  I don’t mean to be unkind, I know many people swear by TA, perhaps even some of my readers, but TA reminds me of something else I know too much about: exegesis.

Exegesis of the bible or any other holy book is supposed to mean explaining the passages so that your target audience will better understand and act upon them.  The problem is you can make exegesis say whatever you want, because ultimately your explanation is entirely up to you.  When Jesus said “a rich man cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven anymore than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle” what did he mean?  An exegete can claim that this is a metaphor, that the eye of a needle is a metaphor for a very narrow gate which a camel overloaded with goods would not be able to pass through, so a rich man needs to give away some of his wealth to charity and then he can enter the Kingdom.  Another exegete would say that this isn’t a metaphor, it’s a plain statement emphasized with sarcasm.  A camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle, that’s just dumb, and so Jesus is saying a rich man cannot enter the Kingdom no matter how much he gives to charity.  We can’t know exactly what Jesus meant by this because we can’t call Him up and ask Him.  And there are hundreds of passages in the bible that an exegete can claim to mean whatever they want them to mean, as long as you define enough things as being metaphors or sarcasm or straight facts in order to defend your argument.  Exegesis is a way of creating whatever meaning you want out of Scripture.

Technical Analysis seems to do the same thing with stock market trendlines.  The line is going down, are we “testing support” and will soon break through to go even lower?  Or are we “finding support” and will bounce off to go higher?  You can draw the future trendline however you want, and I’ve honestly never heard of a cogent argument proving that some form of TA is true more often than any other form, or is true more often than a random coin flip.  I’ve seen both bulls and bears quote their TA studies to support their points, and yet I’ve never seen the kind of scientific analysis that can prove the methods to be useful.  The counterargument is that many people, some of them very wealthy and successful stock traders, use TA to build their portfolios and so TA must be useful otherwise those people wouldn’t keep doing it.  My response would be that TA is no more accurate than random chance, and since the market is not zero-sum and rises on average ~7% per year, many people can become supremely wealthy based on this random chance while believing they are beating the market.  I don’t know, it all just seems like wishful thinking, and I’d love to be directed towards some studies discussing the efficacy of TA as a strategy.

The log in your own eye?

There’s someone I love who really needs help but doesn’t want it. There’s an old saying about removing the log in your own eye before criticizing the speck in someone else’s eye. But at the same time, if someone just doesn’t see their problem, isn’t if your duty to try to help them? I can’t fix everything about myself, especially not all at once, but I can at least try to help someone fix themselves while also trying to fix myself. I don’t know what to do though, it’s hard to see someone not get the help they need especially if you love them, but it can destroy a relationship to try to help someone who doesn’t want it. I really hope I can help

Friday feelings: the importance of communication

I don’t want to get into too many specifics here, but this week was a lesson in the importance of communication.  Science is a collaborative process, the days of one person making discoveries have long since passed, and everything we do these days requires not just a team but multiple teams working in tandem.  With that comes a requirement for all teams to be on the same page so they can work together instead of going in circles.  My team recently received a sample to test but has no idea what the sample is or how it was produced.  Without this knowledge, how can we know what is in the sample?  If I see something odd in the sample, how can I know whether it’s important and must be removed or whether it’s a normal and expected part of the process?  And importantly, how can we replicate this work in our own lab if we don’t know how it was produced in the other lab?

Collaboration is of course difficult, we all have our own things to do any communicating to our collaborators sometimes only helps them and not us, so we don’t want to spend energy on it.  Still it’s necessary if a collaboration is going to work and collaboration is a thing that helps all of us. 

Just as important to collaborative communication is scientific communication to the wider community, usually through papers.  I’ve recently thought that scientific journals should also increase the standards to which they hold paper writers, too many will publish inscriptible images and vague methods that cannot be replicated at all, with your best bet in this case is usually the arduous process of calling the original scientist on the phone and asking him or her what the hell they did.  It’s like if you read a recipe and all it said was “cook it until it’s finished.”  What the hell does that even mean?  If you read a paper and you don’t know how the method was done, how can you ever build off that paper?  I’m not trying to accuse people of scientific misconduct or anything, I’m just trying to say that if I have no idea what you did, I’m not going to cite your paper or use it for my own research.  Good communication is important.