Later On

I got to thinking more about groups and how we see ourselves as members of various groups. Groups, save for “groups” based purely on physical proximity, are really defined by memes: Americans, Boy Scouts, surfer, Raiders fan, whatever: groups are defined by certain memes.

I was thinking about how organic, natural processes are “wasteful” in a sense: do “a lot, because most will mess up, but some will make it, and that’s enough to continue” sort of thing: semen, mayflies and mayfly eggs, and so on and on. And at every level this pattern—a core of healthy survivors surrounded by an extensive fringe of specimens with a various range of defects.

On the physical level, we have natural athletes (very few), most of us, and people with severe physical problems/deformities (very few): the well-known Bell curve. But save for a very few, people have some degree of physical imperfection, ranging from minor to serious.

Same thing with our brains/minds: some few spectacularly successful, some going wrong one way or another (dull, evil, crazy, neurotic, whatever).

And the same way with memes—let’s assume, just to keep going, that memes and groups are equivalent: every meme defines a group, every “group” exists because of a (set of) memes. But some groups (i.e., memes) go bad, are unhealthy, get sick/deformed. I was thinking of the coterie of crooks and frauds polluting the global food supply with poisonous adulterants (I’m thinking of the olive oil book I’m reading, but think of the Chinese, the American meatpackers, the…  well, you know what’s going on), when I suddenly recalled the sick, damaging, and ultimately deadly hazing rituals of the Florida A&M Marching Band. Now there’s a group that has gone terribly bad.

Well, of course: won’t groups follow the same pattern as our physical selves and our mental selves: some few that are excellent, the rest all flawed, most of them moderately, but some seriously bad. That’s just the way reality works.

So I started watching Carrier, a documentary series about a six-month deployment of the carrier Nimitz to the Persian Gulf. The documentary opens at the beginning of the crew, with some talks to the new crew. The differences between the reality and as depicted in movies is interesting: for example, most people seem terribly miscast, and it’s hard to spot the protagonist(s), and without background music to guide you, it’s easy to miss significant things, and the talks are more straightforward, down-to-earth, and practical/sensible than talks in most movies I’ve seen.

I realized that I was watching the deliberate (and practiced) formation of a healthy group: setting in place the structures/expectations/worldviews/assumptions to form and guide the group so it would be functional. And everyone buys in: they all want the group to succeed, and they know their lives may depend on the group being a healthy group. Some of the talk is directed to forming healthy subgroups so that the overall group will be healthy.

It shows what is possible, though of course a carrier is smaller than a city, much less a country. But when people pull together—and know what they’re doing—healthy groups can form quickly. And of course the military has had a lot of practice doing this, knows quite well that their lives may depend on a group’s being healthy (not to say that all military groups are: think Abu Ghraib), and has procedures in place to build groups and good group consciousness in terms of the effects on and from groups of things like “command presence” and the like.

So we have lots of groups, some few healthy, some very sick, most to some extent dysfunctional. How does one fix a group?

In talking with The Wife, I mentioned gangs as groups gone wrong, and she told me of hearing how individual gang members do things that they personally disagree with or even abhor, simply in order to maintain credibility as a member of the group. Even when every single member of the gang privately believes (for example) that killing a random member of another gang for retaliation or reputation is wrong, they will do it any way because the group meme includes that: “We are members of Gang X, and Gang X always takes revenge—that’s part of who we are,” and indeed, remembering how people derive identity from a group, that indeed is part of who they are and in fact controls their action, more so than their “private” identity: the group meme says to kill a member of Gang Y, so the member of Gang X does that even though his or her inner thought is that it is wrong. But the meme is in control, not the individual. This is an example of the meme totally controlling the group, so that each member is forced to do things against his or her individual will because the meme is in control.

That, The Wife said, is an example of cult-like behavior: doing something you consciously do not want to do because the group meme requires it—in particular if no single member of the group wants to do it.

So how do you fix it? It’s now clearer to me why it’s so difficult to remove a person from such a group: the group is who s/he is. The group decides what s/he will do. The group is in charge, and the person is but a member of the group. So leaving the group feels to the ego (sucked up into the group) like dying, ceasing to exist. No wonder they fight it.

Of course, many such groups do indeed die out: they can’t hold together because of the problems. But some, like gangs and the military, are skilled at finding and indoctrinating new members and also have strong enforcement mechanisms.

So one way groups change is by mutation, as it were: a person from within the group and is recognized as part of the group, gains power and gets the group to change direction. Charlemagne is an obvious example. This works because the changer is accepted by the group and also understands the group.

Changing a group from the outside, like the Italian government’s hopeless (and hopelessly compromised) attempt to regulate the olive oil industry, is practically impossible: you can wound the group, but it recovers and recruits new members—grows new arms and legs—and continues: the meme defining the group is strongly reinforced by multiple other memes and thus difficult to dislodge.

It would be nice if I knew precise and defined terminology for talking about group mechanisms, structures, and processes. I suppose I should read up on small-group sociology just to get vocabulary and concepts.

From Livestrong.com:

When the National Sleep Foundation announced that Americans were sleeping less with each passing year—and spiking in 2011—it ignited an immediate red flag. For one, it made me focus more on my own sleep struggles. (yes, I’m guilty too) But more importantly, it highlighted a strong potential underlying cause of the obesity battle in adults. Sleep isn’t just important for creating mental clarity, reducing the risk of diabetes and heart problems, and fighting off depression. The amount of sleep you get is directly linked to the ease with which you lose weight and build muscle.

Consider the following facts:

Just three consecutive nights of bad sleep can increase insulin resistance, says researchers. Translation: you’re more likely to store fat.

People who sleep less than 6 hours per night also eat an ADDITIONAL 220 calories per day.

Sleeping less alters your hormones, forcing you to experience great and more intense feelings of hunger.

See the trend? Sleep might be the most under-rated aspect of living a healthy life. And that’s exactly why we should all make it a bigger priority in the upcoming year. No excuses.

Other tips at the link.

I suspect we’ll see more and more of the sort of thing described in this article as more and more data are readily accessible in digital form, and as pattern recognition algorithms become more varied and powerful. Rachel Ehrenberg reports in Science News:

Two extraordinarily large trading days for Citigroup shares in the fall of 2007 hint that someone may have been manipulating the stock, say analysts who mine financial data using powerful computers and mathematical algorithms.

Researchers from the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass., were examining stock trading data for the period January 2007 to January 2009 when they noticed two unusually large spikes in volume and other measures related to Citigroup shares. On November 1, 2007, the team noted, the number of borrowed Citigroup shares jumped by 100 million, reaching a value of almost $6 billion. Six days later, a similar number of borrowed shares were returned on a single day, the team reports online December 14 at arXiv.org. The estimated gain for the investors who made the transactions was at least $640 million.

Such extreme events would be expected only once in a few hundred years, says Yaneer Bar-Yam, coauthor of the work. The likelihood of seeing those events six days apart is once in 4 billion years, the researchers’ calculations show. This suggests to Bar-Yam and his colleagues that the stock was being manipulated to artificially drive down Citigroup’s stock price.

The researchers were investigating short selling, whereby an investor borrows shares and sells them immediately, with the promise to buy them back at a later date to repay the loan. If the stock’s price drops between the transactions, the borrower will make a profit.

Selling short can benefit the market by providing a check on overvalued stocks. But traders can also conspire to sell short with the intent of forcing a stock price down artificially. Such a move, known as a bear raid, is considered market manipulation. . .

Continue reading.

More on harmful effects of BPA, a common accidental ingredient in many foods stored in plastic or in cans with special lines (as with canned tomato products). Janet Raloff reports in Science News:

Bisphenol A toys with the female heart, a new study finds. And under the right conditions, its authors worry, this near-ubiquitous pollutant might even prove deadly.

BPA is a building block of clear hard plastics, dental sealants and the resins lining food cans. Studies have shown that throughout the industrial world, nearly everyone regularly encounters the compound, albeit at trace concentrations.

That’s small consolation, says Laura Vandenberg of Tufts University in Medford, Mass.: In the new BPA study, “the most effective dose was very close to — if not completely overlapping — what’s been reported in humans,” she says.

Parts-per-trillion concentrations of BPA triggered heart-muscle cells to begin beating to their own internal drummers. These cells should instead hold off beating until they receive signals from a central pacemaker, explains Hong-Sheng Wang of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, whose team conducted the new study. The resulting arrhythmia, known as fibrillation, caused by unsynchronized beating can trigger sudden cardiac death, Wang says.

BPA mimics the hormone estrogen in the body. In 2009, the Cincinnati team showed that both estrogen and BPA could alter contraction rates in heart cells — but only those from female animals. The researchers recently linked this finding to estrogen’s effect on calcium, which plays a pivotal role in heart-cell contractions. Both estrogen and BPA — especially together — fostered a leakiness of calcium within female heart cells, the team reported in the Sept. 27 PLoS ONE.

Those researchers have now linked this gender-specific effect to . . .

Continue reading. The FDA currently has no problems with BPA, but under pressure they are beginning to investigate. I believe that the EU has long since taken action on this.

A question was raised about the relative merits of the Frank Shaving brushes and Lijun shaving brushes, so I used both in this mornings shave.

I also tried a puck of A Wild Soap Bar’s Sassafras shaving soap. Ingredients:

Premium saponified organic extra virgin olive, organic palm, organic coconut, organic cocoa butter & organic castor oils, organic aloe, essential oils (orange, lavandin, cinnamon, patchouli, clove, bay), calcium bentonite clay, wild sassafras root bark, organic cinnamon, vegetable glycerin, sea salt

The presence of olive oil in a shaving soap is a red flag, in general, and this soap exhibited why: dying lather. The third pass was made with scanty lather because olive-oil based shaving soaps seem unable to create a lather that will last for more than one or two passes.

OTOH, the shave worked out well, and I discovered that the Frank brush seemed softer and denser than the Lijun, which was more resilient. Both were perfectly adequate and both worked well, but the Frank was somewhat more luxurious feeling.

I came across the l’Occitane Cade shaving oil in doing some rearranging and used it today afer the third pass, for an Oil Pass—mainly because I like the fragrance.

My Edwin Jagger razor did its usual excellent job. I’m somewhat surprised at the popularity of the Merkur 180 when an Edwin Jagger DE8x is available at the same price with a better head. So it goes.

Geo. F. Trumper Coral Skin Food to end a fine shave.