A Fable for Tomorrow By Rachel Carson

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings.

Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and build their barns.
Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzles by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among the children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs – the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.
The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died.

In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams.
.No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become the stark reality we all shall know.

What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain.

The Human Price

As the tide of chemicals born of the Industrial Age has arisen to engulf our environment, a drastic change has come about in the nature of the most serious public health problems. Only yesterday mankind lived in fear of the scourges of smallpox, cholera, and plague that once swept nations before them. Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease. Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment—a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.

The new environmental health problems are multiple—created by radiation in all its forms, born of the never-ending stream of chemicals of which pesticides are a part, chemicals now pervading the world in which we live, acting upon us directly and indirectly, separately and collectively. Their presence casts a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure, no less frightening because it is simply impossible to predict the effects of lifetime exposure to chemical and physical agents that are not part of the biological experience of man.

Where do pesticide fit into the picture of environmental disease? We have seen that they now contaminate soil, water, and food, that they have the power to make our streams fishless and our gardens and woodlands silent and birdless. Man, however much he may like to pretend the contrary, is part of nature. Can he escape a pollution that is now so thoroughly distributed throughout our world?

We know that even single exposures to these chemicals, if the amount is large enough, can precipitate acute poisoning. But this is not the major problem. The sudden illness or death of farmers, spraymen, pilots, and others exposed to appreciable quantities of pesticides are tragic and should not occur. For the population as a whole, we must be more concerned with the delayed effects of absorbing small amounts of pesticides that invisibly contaminate our world.

Responsible public health officials have pointed out that the biological effects of chemicals are cumulative over long periods of tie, and that the hazard to the individual may depends on the sum of the exposures received throughout his lifetime. For these very reasons the danger is easily ignored. It is human nature to shrug off what may seem to us a vague threat of future disaster.

Excerpted from Silent Spring, an environmental science book by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin on September 27, 1962

 Grain Brain

Can you imagine that I have been so bold as to claim that lifestyle factors over which we have control may play a role in determining whether or not we develop Alzheimer’s disease? To be sure, I read the criticism from the skeptics and have elected not to fan the flames by commenting on their blog sites. There are those who cling to the idea that our choices in terms of what we eat, how much exercise we get, whether we sleep enough and even whether we put ourselves in stressful situations matter little in terms of the fate of our brain function.
This ideology is flawed on at least two counts. First, it relinquishes your cognitive fate to a prescription for an as yet nonexistent drug. And second, it is not in line with our most current and well-respected scientific journals. Nonetheless, some people tend to be “down on what they are not up on.”
Let’s take a look at what our thought leaders are telling us. Dr. Deborah Barnes is a neuroscientist in San Francisco. Her work gets published in some of our most highly regarded journals. She recently published some really great science in Lancet Neurology in which she concluded that factors like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure dramatically increase a person’s risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease.
“Over half of all Alzheimer’s disease cases could potentially be prevented through lifestyle changes and treatment or prevention of chronic medical conditions”, she concluded. Analyzing data from studies around the world involving hundreds of thousands of participants, Barnes concluded that worldwide, the biggest modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease are, in descending order of magnitude, low education, smoking, physical inactivity, depression, mid-life hypertension, diabetes and mid-life obesity. Together, these risk factors are associated with up to 51 percent of Alzheimer’s cases worldwide (17.2 million cases) and up to 54 percent of Alzheimer’s cases in the United States (2.9 million cases), according to Barnes.
This is powerfully important information. Fifty-four percent of Alzheimer’s patients in America didn’t have to get this devastating diagnosis—if they had only known. And yet, somehow we are supposed to buy in to the notion that we can live our lives however we choose and that soon there will be a cure for whatever malady befalls us.
As of this writing, there is no meaningful treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Several months ago, to great fanfare, federal monies to the tune of $33 million were allocated to help pharmaceutical companies develop a drug to prevent Alzheimer’s, a disease affecting more than 5.4 million Americans.
In my commentary in MindBodyGreen I wrote, “While the idea of creating a drug to prevent Alzheimer’s seems honorable, it’s important to consider that the development of such a drug means big business beyond measure. Deutsche Bank estimates that the development of an efficacious drug treatment for the disease once it has taken hold could generate $20 billion in annual sales. But the value of a drug employed to treat people before there is any evidence of dementia—a far larger treatment group compared to those already afflicted—would be staggering.
New York Times writer, Pam Belluck reported that the goal of this grant would be to develop a preventive treatment using a strategy much like the one for heart disease. Belluck quoted Laurie Ryan, program director for the Alzheimer’s clinical trials at the National Institute on Aging, who said, “We’re going to look at people at risk, just like we do with people who have high cholesterol and are at risk for cardiovascular disease.”
Is this really what we should be doing? We already know that modifiable lifestyle factors profoundly influence Alzheimer’s risk, but, as I recently wrote for The Daily Beast, “The fundamental operating system underlying the practice of medicine in America today seems myopically focused on treating our ills with highly profitable remedies directed at symptom management while causality is ignored. Preventing disease is derogated, and relegated to the province of alternative modalities. Watching our elected leaders debate the merits of funding the ever-changing iterations of a health-care plan designed to treat illnesses presents a poignant irony, as it has little to do with health and everything to do with illness. But it has become clear that both sides of the aisle enthusiastically agree that Americans must have access to their pills, and lots of them.”
Just the simple act of getting regular exercise can dramatically lower Alzheimer’s risk, and this isn’t new information. In fact, just the simple act of exercising regularly has been demonstrated to actually improve memory in adults with memory impairment. Where would such an iconoclastic report have been published? It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association way back in 2008!
So it’s time we accept the idea, with gratitude, that how we live our lives matters a whole lot in determining how we will be functioning in the future from a cognitive perspective. Dietary choices determine blood sugar levels and even mild elevation of blood sugar levels translates to a dramatic increased risk for dementia as recently reported in The New England Journal of Medicine. And keep in mind that this study showed a marked increased risk for dementia even in individuals without diabetes or even pre-diabetes.
In fact, there is a direct relationship between fasting blood sugar and the rate of shrinkage of the hippocampus (the brain’s memory center) as demonstrated in a recent issue of the state of the art journal Neurology. When it comes to your brain’s memory center, size does matter.
As the authors of this study stated in their conclusion: “High plasma glucose levels within the normal range were associated with greater atrophy of structures relevant to aging and neurodegenerative processes, the hippocampus and amygdala. These findings suggest that even in the subclinical range and in the absence of diabetes, monitoring and management of plasma glucose levels could have an impact on cerebral health.
And what should your first choice be in terms of “management of plasma glucose”? Dramatically reduce carbohydrate intake while increasing your consumption of healthful fats. This is a central theme of the Grain Brain program and is fundamentally supported by a recent publication by researchers at the Mayo Clinic in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease in which they found that elderly individuals favoring a high carbohydrate diet experienced an increased risk for developing dementia of close to 90% while the dementia risk was decreased by 44% in those consuming the most fat.
There is no question that what I’m suggesting runs counter to the status quo underlying the practice of medicine in America. Keep in mind that President Ronald Reagan defined “status quo” as “the mess we’re in.”  No one would deny the fact that health care in the United States is less than satisfactory when evaluated from a number of perspectives. According to the World Health Report as published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the U.S ranks 37th out of 191 countries in terms of overall performance. Included in this overall composite ranking are our dismal rankings in more specific categories. We were ranked 39th for infant mortality, 43rd for adult female mortality, 42nd for adult male mortality and an astounding 36th for life expectancy.  And what’s really alarming is the research showing that year to year we are slipping further and further behind despite the fact that we spend significantly more per capita on health care than any country on the planet.
As it is with brain health, our total health is vitally dependent on our lifestyle choices like the very foods we choose to eat. We are breaking the bank these days in trying to develop monetizable solutions for so many chronic health issues that may well have their genesis in factors that are virtually ignored.
As a practicing neurologist and a child of an Alzheimer’s patient, recognizing how the misguided attention as it relates to dealing with as opposed to prevention of brain degenerative disorders is well beyond frustrating—it is downright painful.
Each and every one of us needs to fully embrace the notion that yes, the choices we make in terms of what we eat, the sleep we do or don’t get, the exercise we pursue, all have both an immediate as well as long term effect on not only the destiny of our brains, but our total state of health as well.

By David Perlmutter MD

ALGORITHMS  of   OPPRESSION    How Search Engines Reinforce Racism  by Safiya Umoja Noble

This book is about the power of algorithms in the age of neoliberalism and the ways those digital decisions reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling, which I have termed technological redlining. By making visible the ways that capital, race, and gender are factors in creating unequal conditions, I am bringing light to various forms of technological redlining that are on the rise. The near-ubiquitous use of algorithmically driven software, both visible and invisible to everyday people, demands a closer inspection of what values are prioritized in such automated decision-making systems. Typically, the practice of redlining has been most often used in real estate and banking circles, creating and deepening inequalities by race, such that, for example, people of color are more likely to pay higher interest rates or premiums just because they are Black or Latino, especially if they live in low-income neighborhoods. On the Internet and in our everyday uses of technology, discrimination is also embedded in computer code and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not. I believe that artificial intelligence will become a major human rights issue in the twenty-first century. We are only beginning to understand the long-term consequences of these decision-making tools in both masking and deepening social inequality. This book is just the start of trying to make these consequences visible. There will be many more, by myself and others, who will try to make sense of the consequences of automated decision making through algorithms in society.

Part of the challenge of understanding algorithmic oppression is to understand that mathematical formulations to drive automated decisions are made by human beings. While we often think of terms such as “big data” and “algorithms” as being benign, neutral, or objective, they are anything but. The people who make these decisions hold all types ofvalues, many of which openly promote racism, sexism, and false notions of meritocracy, which is well documented in studies of Silicon Valley and other tech corridors.

For example, in the midst of a federal investigation of Google’s alleged persistent wage gap, where women are systematically paid less than men in the company’s workforce, an “antidiversity” manifesto authored by James Damore went viral in August 2017,1 supported by many Google employees, arguing that women are psychologically inferior and inca- pable of being as good at software engineering as men, among other patently false and sexist assertions. As this book was moving into press, many Google executives and employees were actively rebuking the assertions of this engineer, who reportedly works on Google search infrastructure. Legal cases have been filed, boycotts of Google from the political far right in the United States have been invoked, and calls for greater expressed commitments to gender and racial equity at Google and in Silicon Valley writ large are under way. What this antidiversity screed has underscored for me as I write this book is that some of the very people who are developing search algorithms and architecture are willing to promote sexist and racist attitudes openly at work and beyond, while we are supposed to believe that these same employees are developing “neutral” or “objective” decision-making tools. Human beings are developing the digital platforms we use, and as I present evidence of the recklessness and lack of regard that is often shown to women and people of color in some of the output of these systems, it will become increasingly difficult for technology companies to separate their systematic and inequitable employment practices, and the far-right ideological bents of some of their employees, from the products they make for the public.

My goal in this book is to further an exploration into some of these digital sense-making processes and how they have come to be so fundamental to the classification and organization of information and at what cost. As a result, this book is largely concerned with examining the commercial co-optation of Black identities, experiences, and commu- nities in the largest and most powerful technology companies to date, namely, Google. I closely read a few distinct cases of algorithmic oppression for the depth of their social meaning to raise a public discussion of the broader implications of how privately managed, black-boxed information-sorting tools have become essential to many data-driven decisions. I want us to have broader public conversations about the implications of the artificial intelligentsia for people who are already systematically marginalized and oppressed. I will also provide evidence and argue, ultimately, that large technology monopolies such as Google need to be broken up and regulated, because their consolidated power and cultural influence make competition largely impossible. This monopoly in the information sector is a threat to democracy, as is currently coming to the fore as we make sense of information flows through digital media such as Google and Facebook in the wake of the 2016 United States presidential election.

I situate my work against the backdrop of a twelve-year professional career in multicultural marketing and advertising, where I was invested in building corporate brands and selling products to African Americans and Latinos (before I became a university professor). Back then, I believed, like many urban marketing professionals, that companies must pay attention to the needs of people of color and demonstrate respect for consumers by offering services to communities of color, just as is done for most everyone else. After all, to be responsive and responsible to marginalized consumers was to create more market opportunity. I spent an equal amount of time doing risk management and public relations to insulate companies from any adverse risk to sales that they might experience from inadvertent or deliberate snubs to consumers of color who might perceive a brand as racist or insensitive. Protecting my former clients from enacting racial and gender insensitivity and helping them bolster their brands by creating deep emotional and psychological attachments to their products among communities of color was my professional concern for many years, which made an experience I had in fall 2010 deeply impactful. In just a few minutes while searching on the web, I experienced the perfect storm of insult and injury that I could not turn away from. While Googling things on the Internet that might be interesting to my stepdaughter and nieces, I was overtaken by the results. My search on the keywords “black girls” yielded HotBlackPussy. com as the first hit.

Hit indeed.

Since that time, I have spent innumerable hours teaching and re-searching all the ways in which it could be that Google could completely fail when it came to providing reliable or credible information about women and people of color yet experience seemingly no repercussions whatsoever. Two years after this incident, I collected searches again, only to find similar results,

In 2012, I wrote an article for Bitch magazine about how women and feminism are marginalized in search results. By August 2012, Panda (an update to Google’s search algorithm) had been released, and pornography was no longer the first series of results for “black girls”; but other girls and women of color, such as Latinas and Asians, were still pornified. By August of that year, the algorithm changed, and porn was suppressed in the case of a search on “black girls.” I often wonder what kind of pressures account for the changing of search results over time. It is impossible to know when and what influences proprietary algorithmic design, other than that human beings are designing them and that they are not up for public discussion, except as we engage in critique and protest.

This book was born to highlight cases of such algorithmically driven data failures that are specific to people of color and women and to underscore the structural ways that racism and sexism are fundamental to what I have coined algorithmic oppression. I am writing in the spirit of other critical women of color, such as Latoya Peterson, cofounder of the blog Racialicious, who has opined that racism is the fundamental application program interface (API) of the Internet. Peterson has argued that anti-Blackness is the foundation on which all racism toward other groups is predicated. Racism is a standard protocol for organizing behavior on the web. As she has said, so perfectly, “The idea of a n*gger API makes me think of a racism API, which is one of our core arguments all along—oppression operates in the same formats, runs the same scripts over and over. It is tweaked to be context specific, but it’s all the same source code. And the key to its undoing is recognizing how many of us are ensnared in these same basic patterns and modifying our own actions. Peterson’s allegation is consistent with what many people feel about the hostility of the web toward people of color, particularly in its anti-Blackness, which any perusal of YouTube comments or other message boards will serve up. On one level, the everyday racism and commentary on the web is an abhorrent thing in itself, which has been detailed by others; but it is entirely different with the corporate platform vis-à-vis an algorithmically crafted web search that offers up racism and sexism as the first results. This process reflects a corporate logic of either willful neglect or a profit imperative that makes money from racism and sexism. This inquiry is the basis of this book.

In the following pages, I discuss how “hot,” “sugary,” or any other kind of “black pussy” can surface as the primary representation of Black girls and women on the first page of a Google search, and I suggest that something other than the best, most credible, or most reliable information output is driving Google. Of course, Google Search is an advertising company, not a reliable information company. At the very least, we must ask when we find these kinds of results, Is this the best information? For whom? We must ask ourselves who the intended audience is for a variety of things we find, and question the legitimacy of being in a “filter bubble, when we do not want racism and sexism, yet they still find their way to us. The implications of algorithmic decision making of this sort extend to other types of queries in digital media platforms, and they are the beginning of a much-needed reassessment of information as a public good. We need a full-on reevaluation of the implications of our information resources being governed by corporate- controlled advertising companies. I am adding my voice to a number of scholars such as Helen Nissenbaum and Lucas Introna, Siva Vaid- hyanathan, Alex Halavais, Christian Fuchs, Frank Pasquale, Kate Craw- ford, Tarleton Gillespie, Sarah T. Roberts, Jaron Lanier, and Elad Segev, to name a few, who are raising critiques of other forms of corporate information control (including artificial intelligence) in hopes that more people will consider alternatives.

Over the years, I have concentrated my research on unveiling the many ways that African American people have been contained and constrained in classification systems, from Google’s commercial search engine to library databases. The development of this concentration was born of my research training in library and information science. I think of these issues through the lenses of critical information studies and crit- ical race and gender studies. As marketing and advertising have directly shaped the ways that marginalized people have come to be represented by digital records such as search results or social network activities, I have studied why it is that digital media platforms are resoundingly characterized as “neutral technologies” in the public domain and often, unfortunately, in academia. Stories of “glitches” found in systems do not suggest that the organizing logics of the web could be broken but, rather, that these are occasional one-off moments when something goes terribly wrong with near-perfect systems. With the exception of the many scholars whom I reference throughout this work and the journalists, bloggers, and whistleblowers whom I will be remiss in not naming, very few people are taking notice.

We need all the voices to come to the fore and impact public policy on the most unregulated social experiment of our times: the Internet.

excerpted from Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble   Published by New York University Press, Washington Sq. NY NY 10003 in 2018

]]> https://archive.newyorkmoves.com/?feed=rss2&p=9516 0 https://archive.newyorkmoves.com/?p=9458 https://archive.newyorkmoves.com/?p=9458#comments Mon, 25 Nov 2019 22:37:36 +0000 http://archive.newyorkmoves.com/?p=9458

“…There is a traditional optimistic story that runs as follows. Our hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king, but gains a reprieve by promising to teach the king’s favorite horse to talk within a year. That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain. He replies, ‘A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might talk!’…”

by Professor David Deutsch FRS, University of Oxford

All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time. But optimism is also a stance towards the future, because nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come. Optimism follows from the explicability of the physical world, as I explained in Chapter 3. If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how. Optimism also assumes that none of the prohibitions imposed by the laws of physics are necessarily evils. So, for instance, the lack of the impossible knowledge of prophecy is not an insuperable obstacle to progress.

That means that in the long run t here are no insuperable evils, and in the short run the only insuperable evils are parochial ones. There can be no such thing as a disease for which it is impossible to discover a cure, other than certain types of brain damage—those that have dissipated the knowledge that constitutes the patient’s personality. For a sick person is a physical object, and the task of transforming this object into the same person in good health is one that no law of physics rules out. Hence there is a way of achieving such a transformation—that is to say, a cure. It is only a matter of knowing how. If we do not, for the moment, know how to eliminate a particular evil, or we know in theory but do not yet have enough time or resources (i.e. wealth), then, even so, it is universally true that either the laws of physics forbid eliminating it in a given time with the available resources or there is a way of eliminating it in the time and with those resources.

The same must hold, equally trivially, for the evil of death—that is to say, the deaths of human beings from disease or old age. This problem has a tremendous resonance in every culture—in its literature, its values, its objectives great and small. It also has an almost unmatched reputation for insolubility (except among believers in the supernatural): it is taken to be the epitome of an insuperable obstacle. But there is no rational basis for that reputation. It is absurdly parochial to read some deep significance into this particular failure, among so many, of the biosphere to support human life—or of medical science throughout the ages to cure ageing. The problem of ageing is one of the same general type as that of disease. Although it is a complex problem by present day standards, the complexity is finite and confined to a relatively narrow arena whose basic principles are already fairly well understood. Meanwhile, knowledge in the relevant fields is increasing exponentially.

Sometimes ‘immortality’ (in this sense) is even regarded as undesirable. For instance, there are arguments from overpopulation; but those are examples of the Malthusian prophetic fallacy: what each additional surviving person would need to survive at present-day standards of living is easily calculated; what knowledge of the person would contribute to the solution of the resulting problems is unknowable. There are also arguments about the stultification of society caused by the entrenchment of old people in positions of power; but the traditions of criticism in our society are already well adapted to solving that sort of problem. Even today, it is common in Western countries for powerful politicians or business executives to be removed from the office while still in good health.

There is a traditional optimistic story that runs as follows. Our hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king, but gains a reprieve by promising to teach the king’s favorite horse to talk within a year. That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain. He replies, ‘A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might talk!’ the prisoner understands that, while his immediate problems have to do with prison bars and the king and his horse, ultimately the evil he faces is caused by insufficient knowledge. That makes him an optimist. He knows that, if progress is to be made, some of the opportunities and some of the discoveries will be inconceivable in advance. Progress cannot take place at all unless someone is open to, and prepares for, those inconceivable possibilities. The prisoner may or may not discover a way of teaching the horse to talk. But he may discover something else. He may persuade the king to repeal the law that he had broken; he may learn a convincing conjuring tick in which the horse would seem to talk; he may escape; he may think of an achievable task that would please the king even more than making the horse talk. The list is infinite. Even if every such possibility is unlikely, it takes only one of them to be realized for the whole problem to be solved. But if our prisoner is going to escape by creating a new idea, he cannot possibly know that idea today, and therefore he cannot let the assumption that it will never exist condition his planning.

Optimism implies all the other necessary conditions for knowledge to grow, and for knowledge-creating civilizations to last, and hence for the beginning of infinity. We have, as Popper put it, a duty to be optimistic—in general, and about civilization in particular. One can argue that saving civilization will be difficult. That does not mean that there is a low probability of solving the associated problems. When we say that a mathematical problem is hard to solve, we do not mean that it is unlikely to be solved. All sorts of factors determine whether mathematicians even address a problem, and with what effort. If an easy problem is not deemed to be interesting or useful, they might leave it unsolved indefinitely, while hard problems are solved all the time.

Usually the hardness of a problem is one of the very factors that cause it to be solved. Thus President John F. Kennedy said in 1962, in a celebrated example of an optimistic approach to the unknown, ‘We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because but because they are hard.’ Kennedy did not mean that the moon project, being hard, was unlikely to succeed. On the contrary, he believed that it would. What he meant by a hard task was one that depends on facing the unknown. And the intuitive fact to which he was appealing was that although such hardness is always negative factor when choosing among means to pursue an objective, when choosing the objective itself it can be a positive one, because we want to engage with projects that will involve creating new knowledge. And an optimist expects the creation of knowledge to constitute progress—including its unforeseeable consequences.

Thus Kennedy remarked that the moon project would require a vehicle ‘made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival’. Those were the known problems, which would require as-yet-unknown knowledge. That this was ‘on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body’ referred to the unknown problems that made the probabilities, and the outcomes, profoundly unknowable. Yet none of that prevented rational people from forming the expectation that the mission could succeed. This expectation was not a judgment of probability: until far into the project, no one could predict that, because it depended on solutions not yet discovered to problems not yet known. When people were being persuaded to work on the project—and to vote for it, and so on – they were being persuaded that our being confined to one planet was an evil, that exploring the universe was good, that the Earth’s gravitational field was not a barrier but merely a problem, and that overcoming it and all the other problems involved in the project was only a matter of knowing how, and the nature of the problems made that moment the right one to try to solve them. Probabilities and prophecies were not needed in that argument.

Pessimism has been endemic in almost every society throughout history. It has taken the form of t he precautionary principle, and of ‘who should rule?’ political philosophies and all sorts of other demands for prophecy, and of despair in the power of creativity, and of the misinterpretation of problems as insuperable barriers. Yet there have always been a few individuals who see obstacles as problems, and see problems as soluble. And so, very occasionally, there have been places and moments when there was, briefly, an end to pessimism. As far as I know, no historian has investigated the history of optimism, but my guess is that whenever it has emerged in a civilization there has been a mini-enlightenment: a tradition of criticism resulting in an efflorescence of many of the patterns of human progress with which we are familiar, such as art, literature, philosophy, science, technology and the institutions of an open society. The end of pessimism is potentially as beginning of infinity. Yet I also guess that in every case—with the single, tremendous exception (so far) of our own enlightenment—this process was soon brought to an end and the reign of pessimism was restored.

Why do we have sex? To get something, whether it’s to get attention, to get off, to get even and on that rare occasion, to get a baby. You know, human things…

After years and years of mixed messages from the media, women are still trying to figure out exactly what it is they want to get out of sex.  But why this idea that we need to get something at all, rather than just pure enjoyment?

Guys can seem to do that just fine.  Is it possible for a woman to only have sex because she enjoys it?  When you think of a woman that is “sexual,” one of two images pop up: either a glamorous vixen reclining on a bed with her silk dress hugging her curves and her blonde hair perfectly done or an oversexed, trashy, cheaply-clad young and reckless girl.

Why such different images of a woman when given the same “characteristics”? One is iconocized as a sex symbol, while another is punished for being “too” sexually experienced.

These mixed messages are seriously affecting our sex lives. Society doesn’t encourage women to be assertive and direct in their sexual needs so sex can take a manipulative and promiscuous style. I have girlfriends that are in their twenties, have had several partners and still have no idea what an orgasm feels like. They don’t speak up in order to make the experience more pleasurable and thus continue the boring old cycle. The notion that guys enjoy sex more than girls is confirmed over and over. Women are made to think they have to be submissive when it comes to sex, rather than actually have a desire for it. If a woman does not see herself as being sexual, she is not likely to feel comfortable having sexual thoughts and fantasies. Men’s moms, their creators, couldn’t possibility have been freaks in the bedroom.

Here is when the manipulating and games come in to play. But really we’re not even she-devils that like to torment guys and their blue balls.  We’ve just adopted the idea that we can’t purely crave sex and therefore we must get something else out of this process.

We wield sex as a weapon. We’re doing a favor, but we make sure to make it known that this favor will sure as hell be repaid. Oh we would never say that you better take me out if I blow you, we do it in a more passive/aggressive manner that constantly keeps them on their toes. Haven’t gone out to dinner in awhile? Haven’t gotten flowers or a back rub in some time? Well then we start feeling used and once that happens the well dries up. Yup, as simple as that.

No more.

It’s funny too because my boyfriend knows damn well that I enjoy sex but he buys the “I’m not in the mood” routine hook, line and sinker. And we continue to play this game because we can’t get over the fact that we are only having sex to have sex. That’s what sluts do and I’m not nearly a slut.

A notion that began in order to de-power women ironically gives them an upper hand in a relationship. Or as a desperate attempt for control.  Women are assumed to depend on men for shelter, money and status but sex makes men have to depend on women for satisfaction or risk their sanity. The same is true for women not in relationships. It’s true that a woman in her 20’s and 30’s who hasn’t met the right guy is going to get well into the double digits. We’re not in high school anymore where you date someone for five months before seeing any below the belt action. As skill levels increase so does our pace. And then you get to know the person and things don’t work out, then on to the next. But what does all this sex do to a woman. How does she justify falling into bed? She gets the glory of a sex kitten, teasing guys until they have to have her. It’s empowering to feel so desired, yet ironically they’re depending on the guy to feel this way.

We’re a country that uses sex to sell practically anything yet we can’t get to seem to get over the fact that we have it, let alone enjoy it. Women are made to procreate, and doing so requires having sex.  We’re meant to be sexual beings.  So stop worrying about what’s right or wrong… listening to people how to have sex and just stop being afraid to have it. The enjoying it part will come along with the help of a patient boyfriend or battery-operated device.

Point is we shouldn’t feel like we’re compromising something (giving up something) by having sex.

We can play the game that sex is a reward because the notion has been ingrained that women don’t like sex as much. I would never make the first move. I like sex too much to give in to the stereotype.

Sexual pleasure derives from the way we feel about the way we look. It’s pretty funny that we can fake an orgasm, and we only know the truth.

And if we have been taught to be emotional and sensitive how can we remain so detached when it comes to sex?