Weekend Reads, July 1, 2022

Insane pathogens, A Canticle for Leibowitz, developing the virtues, justice, gossip, and quantitative tightening

Hello all -

As we go into this long holiday weekend, I thought I’d shoot over yet another Weekend Reads issue — with reads, listens, and a few videos. This issue touches on pathogens & “epistemic anarchy,” technology & eternal horizons, virtue, macroeconomics, and company policy.

Feel free to send me what you’ve been reading or enjoying, as well — I always enjoy hearing from people following the newsletter.

Best -

Zak

Articles:

“Endemic Pathogens are Making You Crazy and then Killing You,” by Riva Tez @ Return —

File under, “We really, really do not understand the human body well, exhibit #83028495,” Riva’s piece takes a look at the curious evidence that a lot of the mental health and psychiatric issues we see today may actually be caused by pathogens like bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

An over reliance on dogmatic truths within the realm of infectious disease research has led researchers and medical professionals to assume that infection by pathogens is only at the root of historically-accepted “infectious diseases,” and could not be the cause behind cancers, schizophrenia, anxiety, and any number of other conditions.

A few quick examples:

Do you suffer from anxiety? Maybe it comes from a previous exposure to cytomegalovirus. Mostly asymptomatic, cytomegalovirus is a beta-herpes virus which once it has infected you, again stays for life. Infection is associated with increased serum concentrations of cytokines (especially TNFalpha and IL-6) which are also related to mood and wellbeing. Individuals with higher CMV-specific antibody loads were more likely to be depressed, anxious, and suffer more overall psychological morbidity.

Have attachment-anxiety issues in relationships? In this study, individuals with attachment-anxiety issues had higher levels of antibodies to Epstein-Barr. Another study of college students showed those with EBV antibodies had more defensiveness and anxiety overall. EBV exposure even seems to correlate with how emotionally repressed you are as a writer. If you’ve never had EBV, perhaps your anxiety and depression comes from exposure to Helicobacter Pylori, or toxoplasmosis. There is a strong correlation between gastrointestinal issues and psychiatric disorders, yet psychiatrists rarely work with gastroenterologists to identify the root of the problem.

Have a child with autism in the family? Perhaps they got it from their mother’s immune response to a pathogen during pregnancy. Women with high levels of antibodies to Herpes simplex 2 midway through their pregnancies were twice as likely to have a child later diagnosed with autism. A 2013 study found that women who had flu while they were pregnant were also twice as likely to have a child later diagnosed with autism.  According to this study of more than 95,000 women, pregnant women who had a fever lasting a week or longer – perhaps caused by influenza or another pathogen – were three times as likely to have an autistic child. The link is strongest in the second trimester, when a single fever is associated with a 40% increase in autism risk. Three or more fevers after the first trimester triples the risk of having a child with autism and yet, we rarely hear about it. It’s likely that inflammatory chemicals such as cytokines are crossing the placenta and affecting the developing brain of the fetus, causing birth defects, chronic illnesses, and delayed psychiatric issues.

Experience manic episodes that are classified as a bipolar disorder? Maybe you got it from a Borna virus exposure. This relatively overlooked disease, also amusingly known as sad horse disease, is an infectious neurological syndrome of warm-blooded animals. Borna disease research came largely to a halt because most human studies do not focus on examining brain tissue (as samples are rarely available), but rather, blood samples, where viral loads are much lower. Luckily, research is beginning to kick back off again.

As an aside, Return.life is a new publication running long-form, thoughtful content generally on man’s relationship to technology and how to build a future that is neither anti-tech nor anti-human flourishing. The first quarterly print issue went out last week and I found myself so, so impressed with it.

Books:

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

This sci-fi classic has been recommended to me for years when I’d quip that I think technology preservation and research should once again be the domain of monasteries. “Oh, so you mean like A Canticle for Leibowitz?” Apparently I did. This post-apocalyptic novel takes place in an alternate timeline after the Cold War goes hot and destroys most of the planet. Those who aren’t killed in the “Fire Deluge” are then subject to rule by the paganized masses who revolt against technology, blaming researchers and those advancing technology for the Deluge.

The little bits and scraps of technology and research that survive are kept in the library of a Cistercian monastery in Utah called the Leibowitz Abbey, whose founder, Isaac Leibowitz, joined the order after his wife is killed in the Deluge.

At times dark, but a fun and engaging book that I find more relevant than ever. Given that we have numerous examples of lost or near-lost technologies from the past century, and many before, and that we’re at the closest point of nuclear annihilation since the Cuban Missile Crisis, this seems relevant. Nobody, to my knowledge, preserves knowledge for generations in the case of collapse, catastrophic war, or natural disaster.

Digitizing knowledge is great to preserve it in case of a Library of Alexandria-type fire but how does digitization deal with or guard against massive solar flares or nuclear war or Kessler syndrome?

Less dramatically, who preserves schematics, blueprints, and research papers that would otherwise only be held by government agencies and research institutions, institutions which have very little incentive to save and preserve these documents in case of budget cuts or mission shift?

When I quip that we need to start/bring back techno-monestaries, this isn’t some kind of techno-trad LARPing. It’s a very serious suggestion. Existing institutions, even universities (which hypothetically have an infinite time horizon but in practice react more like an amalgam of government agencies or corporate departments ), have neither a time horizon long enough nor the proper incentives to preserve and advance knowledge across generations.

Monasteries are the obvious candidates. Monastic orders have preserved and promulgated knowledge before (and here) and there is no inherent reason why they, institutions with eternal time horizons and motivated by non-monetary incentives, can’t reclaim this call. The most obvious challenge to me, quite frankly, is the dismissiveness the modern mind has towards sincere religious belief. That neuters these institutions and risks turning them into little more than museums or NGOs.

Successful Fathers: The Subtle but Powerful Ways Fathers Mold Their Children’s Characters by James B. Stenson

On a retreat with some friends recently, one asked how, exactly, the fathers in the room planned on molding their children’s characters. What activities do they do or plan to do? How will they teach them the virtues — ideally all of them but at the very least the cardinal natural virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude? If you fail to teach these, he asserts, you are in for a load of pain down the line (IOW, who cares if their son gets a full ride to their dream school if they’re an intemperate, imprudent, unjust, coward?).

Then a few weeks later, two different friends of mine, one with young children, recommended James Stenson’s work. Stenson ran two boys’ schools and interviewed hundreds of parents in his career about how they molded, or failed to mold, their children’s characters.

This is essentially a pamphlet presenting his core ideas: character is crafted, not preserved; good character is the necessary condition for success in life; parents ought to focus on developing this character; contemporary American society takes this all for granted.

Podcasts

“What is Justice? With Marcel Guarnizo” on the Moral Imagination Podcast

Michael Matheson Miller has my friend Marcel Guarnizo on his podcast to discuss the concept of justice. Marcel is one of the sharpest thinkers I know and one of the best people at finding dislocations and errors in reasoning, rhetoric, and argumentation.

From MMM’s description of the episode:

In this episode I speak with Marcel Gaurnizo about the nature of justice. We discuss the definition of justice — giving each what is due.  We discuss how justice is not simply a social or political condition but a human virtue that requires a consistent act of the will.

Marcel explains how the shift from metaphysical view of justice to political justice opens the door to the dictatorship and tyranny of the majority or injustice through procedural methods. We discuss the Plato’s story of the ring of Gyges which makes the wearer invisible just like Bilbo and Frodo in the Lord of the Rings — and thus free from any punishment. Would we have strength to do the right thing even if we would never get in trouble for doing what is wrong? As Marcel notes, the ring of Gyges is all around us.  There are many things that are legal—that we will not be punished for — but which are evil and unjust.

Marcel also walks us through different species of justice — commutative (exchange) and distributive.  He explains how many of the errors we make about legal, economic, and social justice —both on the right and the left — often come from a misunderstanding of the difference between commutative and distributive justice, e.g. we apply commutative justice to the family.

Marcel argues that one of the problems we have today on the right and left is that we are not formed in correct thinking about justice is that In this conversation there are some detailed discussions, but in a time where there the word “justice” is used so frequently and where there is so much confusion, I think it is very worthwhile.

Videos

“Quantiative Tightening Explained” at The Plain Bagel

Some friends have asked me over the past few weeks what raising interest rates and tightening the money supply really looks like. This video puts it well and briefly for the layperson:

If you want to go significantly deeper, I’d recommend Mark Meldrum’s Market Outlook videos.

“Is Gossip Killing Your Company?” by Dave Ramsey

If I had to wager what the most common evil that the average person falls into, especially somebody in a white collar job and/or somebody who spends too much time online (like myself), it would probably be some form of gossip. Setting aside the ethical discussion about gossip, from a practical perspective, it is one of the worst possible cultural elements to have on a team, especially when the subjects of gossip are coworkers, colleagues, bosses, managers, and customers.

I’ve had to have this conversation with a few friends recently about gossip in their own teams and how it may have adversely effected the culture — and how to get out of it. I send them this talk by Dave Ramsey about his gossip policy at his own companies: don’t do it; if you do it, you’re fired after one warning.