Mary Chernyshenko's Shortform

Personalized medicine doesn't start with knowing your genetic polymorphisms. It doesn't even get there for a while or maybe ever.

PM starts with admitting you're a piece of meat with benefits. For example, test your bacteria for resistance to specific antibiotics; your bacteria are a part of "you" and have a say in what "your immune system" ends outputting. And so on. I have my own meat quirks, so I won't get into other examples. I just wanted to point out that "everybody has some Xs" doesn't mean "starting with Xs is not-personalized". It might be not-personalized enough, yes.

(The link to the FB post which made me think about it: https://www.facebook.com/1083787039/posts/10221476648680647/ it's in Russian. Basically, a girl came to a doctor to ask why is she fat despite there being no genetic polymorphisms pointing that way. The doctor starts to think the fashion to be less harmless than he used to.)

Those brilliant guys made a plane from mud and sticks. It could not fly. It just stood there.

But even a man who could not understand a word of their language; who knew nothing of their way of life; who would never come to visit, - even such a man could see this thing out of his cockpit and know what it meant. And he would translate it, this only thing ever, into his own words and tell others.

Because the plane that never flies is a sign.

We have them polished in museums and rusting in abandoned hangars. There, we imbue them with meaning which is allowed to be personal.

...But you make one life-size model with one single possible interpretation, and suddenly it's cargo cult.

Some other people who play to win

It's a crowd I'd come into contact with as a manager of an online bookshop (and most of the reason I quitted). Usually, I can pretend they don't exist, but... we all know how it goes... and now that they don't make my blood boil every weekend, I can afford to speak about them.

"Some other people" will play to win - say, a facebook lottery with a book for a prize, and they will mean it. If they don't win, they will say the lottery was rigged. Public righteous indignation on every player's behalf is a weapon (and for the manager, a potent vaccine against righteously indignant polemics of many other kinds). Private appeals to the manager's pity; commenting the rules' exploitable/exploited loopholes - after the winner is announced; repeating actions which have already been answered elsewhere in the thread. I don't include 'filing a complaint' here, because it's frankly too straightforward for most of them, most of the time; the bookshop would likely send them a book with an eloquent blessing/apology, just to get them to shut up and earn good PR points for "owning up to mistakes". But in practice, it still matters too much to be the actual winner, and the brain of the trophy-gatherer works like other brains don't. At least not for a while.

I'm not unusually out-of-touch with customers; I was recommended for the job after two years in an offline shop. And this was... entirely different. I'd never encountered people with whole profiles dedicated to reposting online lotteries - living people I had to call on the phone. It is another world.

When I read about (simple) "pure" game theoretical problems, in which the players "care only about winning", I cannot reconcile the image of Worthy Rivals the author has in mind with the actual Really-Want-This-Whatever Whiners who seek out such contests. Get it, not the passively allowing themselves to be drawn into a strategic game kind of players, but the self-sorting to exploit as many offers as possible kind. They will be few, yes. Nobody of them might force their way through every single time.

But they will define the meaning of the rules you think you write.

The unshareable evidence.

I have a friend, a fellow biologist. A much more focused person, in terms of "gotta do this today", with lower barriers for action (e.g., I help her with simple English, but she is the one to tutor kids in it, and so on.) I have known her for about ten years.

And over time, I learned that her cousin died at seventeen. It was the time when atypical pneumonia was around, and he died in a hospital a week after he fell ill with typical symptoms, but his certificate had another kind of pneumonia in it. Officially, there was no AP in the area. And his death changed the familial structure so that it is still unbalanced, in a way, years later. Her sister has recently lost half a finger, after an accident with a saw, when there was a good chance of saving it. Both her children (one 14, the other 3 years old) usually get horrifying allergic swellings and fever from even the common bugs, and then only slowly get better. In the city region where she lives, there is one neurologist for ten thousand people, and she can't get an appointment. I keep hearing about such things when I visit her.

Her kids are unvaccinated.

We have talked about it, and she said all the usual things about vaccines causing autism, and the mercury, and the questionable quality etc. The Kitchen Argument uniting people all over the world.

Of course, the link between vaccines and autism was disproved, but this means that somebody did take it seriously. It's not one woman's struggle or suspicions, its The Statistics. You can discuss it much like weather - you're being polite! It gives me an ugly feeling, that a friend of mine should hide behind common and expected and false - she knows it's false - lore because she knows the script and to know that it was I who forced her to it. I and people like me gave her this shield.

But the pneumonia, the finger and the swellings, the life which she builds her thoughts around, never get mentioned. We've had the same education, we both know this has no relation to the narrow question of having some shots, but - there's shareable evidence, and then there's unshareable evidence. And in this setting, people don't have to update on evidence, even when they exchange some of it. With obvious goodwill all around.

We Need a Taboo Theory (or I need to get out from under a stone and read about what we already have)

In practice, the word 'taboo' can mean two different things: 'you must not do it' or 'you must not have your own opinion about it, are you even listening'. Could be both at once. (Are there more?)

The second meaning allows to direct attention to things which otherwise, perhaps, would not be considered so interesting, and to force an agreement. It doesn't have to be some agreement about what is the right attitude towards something; it is enough if people agree that they should have some attitude at all. Who knows what they would have thought about otherwise.

Taboos degrade with time, but you can still use them. First, you have a must-not-do taboo. It gradually fails. Now, you can have a great revelation about what it meant for you and your culture. You can demilitarize, for example; you learn about informed consent. You move forward, towards the must-not-have-your-own-opinion-about-exactly-this-thing taboo.

And it never occurs to you that you just don't have to do that.

If a question merits an answer, ask it twice. The first time, to screen for the people capable of generating an answer, the second time, to adjust the query.

I was already doing something like this, more more or less. But I think I should do it in a more formalized way than before. Here "capable" includes "able to get over it after thinking it over", and it's a commitment to drop a topic the other person finds painful... but take it up again with someone else, too.

I am not sure I can be consistent about it. But at least I might notice when I am not, and tell people outright "I acknowledge it's important, but you should ask N instead" without feeling too much guilt for not meeting their expectations.

Pre-covid, quite a few customers seemed to want to be validated by personal communication with shop workers. (I mean e.g. customers who would tell the consultants about their wonderfully clever children instead of asking for the thing they want to buy. Or even describing the thing.) I kind of wonder how they manage now. On one hand, the shops are fighting for clientele, and on the other, they are online.

Joke, take photos, and invent stories.

Once upon a time I bought a camera and started taking pictures. And I compounded it by making up meanings for the objects on the other side of the lense.

I kinda played at science.

People see... some sciencey thing, like a bacterial culture or an ionogram, and they make up meanings for it. It's so much easier to do for an ionogram! You understand at once that it's an abstraction (a number), and so has to be deciphered in a specific way. You may play around with different sets of them, with different software settings, but in the end, the knowledge you derive from it all has to obey a convention of understanding.

A bacterial culture is not an abstraction. It is a physical object, free from conventions. There are many ways to take abstractions out of it, and every one of them requires that a story be invented first (a causal structure). There are also many ways to make it a different physical object; for example, it can be overgrown by a fungus. Dr. Fleming saw it happen. He refused to invent that it had been spoiled (although he could not very well deny it), and that's how we got antibiotics. After Dr. Fleming went with his outrageous new story instead, and got some abstractions out of it, and fitted to them some specific analytical tools.

I mostly can't invent new stories. I like to do... what I like to do, a subset of that which I already know. And those new things aren't here yet, to know them.

But my preferences are. I like to laugh. To not have to defend myself. To get awed. To be proved right. To meet friends as friends.

...Which was how I ended up taking pictures of our geese. But it started with a name.

Or rather, with two. Two very special characters, who had been "them big white birds" a day before. But now, they became photographable, and then, suddenly, visible.

I saw their shapes and colors. Ways they move. Things they do. Foods they love. I heard the sounds they make. All of it had been there before, we had "seen" it, we had to have observed it on some level to even come up with the names... but it had been big white birds'.

Not theirs. Not mine.

And now it was. After I had aimed my camera at them, and my husband aimed his.

Of course, we immediately antropomorphized them to hell and back. They had Views, like Granny Weatherwax. Fears. Mannerisms. Tropes. They started grumbling. Writing songs. Wishing people happy birthdays. Going through their old photo albums!

Other geese wanted in on the fun, which is how they behave anyway. They told stories about the cat, the ducks (including the Lady Duck, a wild bird who brought her babies to swim in our pond), the chickens, the dog, and the goats. We had a young rooster who used to fly over to the neighbors; it did not bode well for his life expectancy, at the hands of my father-in-law. But we named him Columbus, and suddenly, he was opening the New World. Twice a day. (He is now in his prime and a very fine chicken man).

...All of this would not let me discover antibiotics.

But I learned something from it.

To tell a story, you can start with taking a picture

...of something you might have named but not yet seen.

I would like there to be something a thread type like A Journal of Not Understanding. As in, a thread where people could just write what they don't understand about books, movies, children, whatever. It would be different from the Stupid Questions thread in that there wouldn't be questions; not-understanding things doesn't mean that one can ask something about them and they would "make sense" after the specific answer is obtained.

Thus, for example, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer used to be an impenetrable book for me at eleven years old. (Perhaps it's still true.) I didn't have any reference points to "get it". Tom was omnipotent when unobserved; Sid simply existed, for whatever reason; and so on. I would not be able to explain what it was that I couldn't get from the book, but the fact remained.

I keep reading about "credit where credit is due". As in, some people used to do something bad / suboptimal and then stopped / began to do less of it, and so we should recognize this improvement and, well, move on. This seems not nuanced enough.

The case I'm thinking about is a Ukrainian highschool chemistry textbook so awful it advertised caustic soda as a treatment for cancer. (And other comparable horrors.) 40.000 copies were printed and sent to schools, and for five years nobody had had a problem with it. I mean, some teachers might have told their students to Not Believe, on the quiet side. But out loud, no.

Time passed. According to sanitary norms, schools have to receive new textbook editions every five years. There was a change of power, and the Ministry of education people who were in charge last time had proudly gone over to the Opposition. And suddenly, everybody was talking about caustic soda (because the Opposition pointed it out). We need better books! Corruption! The education reform is not moving in the right direction!

And we the customers are grateful for there being an Opposition. (Like, at all.) Credit where credit is due. But almost nobody mentions that this whole thing is their fault.