#DueProcessMatters -- Start by being rational!

In their latest show, the Honey Badger Brigade is amplifying the alert by Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) concerning the Justice Department's support for the "Start by Believing" campaign. You can read a detailed explanation here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/25519538

I encourage everyone who cares about civil liberties to follow the links there and tell Justice that starting with a presumption of guilt isn't what they're supposed to be about. Here's the text of the comment I submitted:

The Constitution, which the Attorney General is pledged to uphold, mandates the principles of due process, including the presumption of innocence. It is therefore unacceptable that DOJ is currently supporting groups like End Violence Against Women International and their "Start by Believing" campaign. DOJ should immediately stop funding and "celebrating" this attack on our basic liberties.

I also encourage everyone who can to support SAVE in all their important work, as well as the Honey Badgers who help so much in getting the word out!

I've just started re-reading, for the first time since childhood, A Wrinkle in Time, a book (not) best known for popularizing an incorrect usage of the word tesseract. (Its actual definition is the four-dimensional analogue of a cube.)

A New Window on Myself

A week ago yesterday (2/21/19), in the last of three interviews at the Center for Autism, I was informed that I place on that spectrum, albeit very close to the cusp.

I'd suspected for some years that this might be, but also thought that those aspects of my experience that suggested it could be symptoms of something else instead, such as social anxiety disorder, with which I already had been diagnosed. But the psychologist who assessed me said I showed too many other signs that aren't characteristic of social anxiety but are consistent with ASD. I still could (and, I think, do) have SAD, but I have this as well.

But this was still a rather abstract understanding. I accepted her expertise, but didn't feel strongly convinced -- until today.

She'd informed me a conference on autism was coming up and, at her recommendation, I was offered a scholarship to attend as a "self-advocate." So I went, and it was, almost literally, eye-opening.

I refer to an epiphany near the beginning of the first session. The presenter was talking about differences in attention patterns between young children who are neurotypical and those on the autism spectrum. He then remarked on how our ability to study these things has been improved by the development of eye-tracking technology.

Despite this lead-in, I still wasn't prepared for the revelation that came next. He showed a video of a woman researcher demonstrating for a child (not seen in the video) a novel way of removing a bottle from a plastic bin and then taking its cap off. The bin was one of a row of them of different colors. He repeated the video while verbally emphasizing the novel aspects of her behavior that were intended to engage the child's interest.

And now he showed the video a couple more times, but with a difference: there was also a red dot on the screen that moved around, showing where the observing child's eyes went while the woman was demonstrating the procedure. So I got to follow the eye movements of the neurotypical child, and then those of the child on the spectrum. And so, after the unusual bottle-removing-and-opening procedure itself, I had a second novel experience: the eye movements of the neurotypical child.

At the start of the video the child's eyes were grazing over the varicolored bins, until the researcher started doing something with her hands. Then his eyes shifted -- toward her face (hmm, that was unexpected!). Then to her hands, back to her face, etc., for the duration of the procedure.

In the last video the ASD child likewise is initially looking at the bins, until the woman starts demonstrating the procedure. Then he starts watching her hands, and stays focused on them for the rest of the video. Same as I had done! And it would never even have occurred to me that someone else might do otherwise.

The presenter then explained that this illustrated the difference between social learning -- focused on looking to another person for cues about their intention -- and instrumental learning -- focused only on the physical action itself. These two styles had been exhibited by the neurotypical child and the ASD child, respectively, in the eye-tracking videos. And the latter also by me.

There were some other revelations at the conference that were pretty striking too, but that was enough to convince me that I'd been diagnosed correctly.

I'm Now on Dissenter, "the Comment Section of the Internet"

I just started using the Dissenter app, called "the comment section of the Internet," which lets you comment on any Web page even if it has no comment section of its own. I used it to post a comment on an NPR "Week in Politics" segment which I previously published on this blog under the title "Conservative Social Engineering." https://dissenter.com/discussion/begin?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2019%2F02%2F22%2F697152839https://dissenter.com/discussion/begin?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2019%2F02%2F22%2F697152839%2Fweek-in-politics-new-n-c-election-and-emergency-border-declaration&fbclid=IwAR3XTGlfHn5t_mAAtBKfKBDkx-btxzqFzEchIo6tPH9Nc5TqqFkuIsn12lw%2Fweek-in-politics-new-n-c-election-and-emergency-border-declaration&fbclid=IwAR3XTGlfHn5t_mAAtBKfKBDkx-btxzqFzEchIo6tPH9Nc5TqqFkuIsn12lw

Does natural medicine actually work? Or is it all just placebo?

Here's how I answered this question on Quora:

“Natural” medicine just means medicine derived from living things rather than synthesized in a lab. Until the 19th century, no one knew how to synthesize organic compounds, so “natural” medicine was the the only kind there was. This knowledge had accumulated over millennia largely by trial and error, so a lot of it was valid, but also a lot of it wasn’t. Even when it was, there usually was no accurate idea of why it worked.

As it so happened, the knowledge of how to synthesize organic compounds developed around the same time as an understanding of how to apply scientific method to medicine with placebo-controlled double-blind trials (which someone has called “the most important medical invention of all time”). And, in a capitalist context, most funding for such systematic research has gone into synthetic treatments because these can typically be patented, whereas natural ones can’t be.

As a result of this coincidence, many people conflate the question of whether a treatment is synthetic and whether it’s scientifically validated. And some commercial interests demagogue this by appealing to people’s suspicion of “experts” to promote things that aren’t scientifically validated, seeking to turn this deficiency into a virtue by labeling them “natural.”

But if you’ll reflect on it, even mainstream doctors often give advice that doesn’t involve anything synthetic. For a cold they’ll tell you to get plenty of rest and fluids. They’ll tell you to increase the fiber and reduce the sugar in your diet. Etc.

You can’t make any sweeping generalizations; you simply have to investigate what actual research exists on any given treatment. For this you need to have some familiarity with scientific method and conventions. Consider subscribing to responsible scientific publications oriented toward the general public, such as Science News, not just reading them when you want to investigate a particular claim but regularly, to develop this familiarity.

As a counterexample, one time a co-worker who was desperate to find a treatment for something affecting a friend showed me an article he’d copied about a supposed miracle cure. One “red flag” in the article was the “citations” at the end. It was a long list of journal titles — and that was it. They were all the titles of real medical journals, and were obviously intended to impress a naive reader that this was serious stuff. But if you actually had some familiarity with scientific publications, you would recognize that this was nonsense. Each of these journals might have several issues in any given year, with hundreds of pages in each issue and dozens of articles whose titles would mean nothing to a non-expert. Without even the year of publication being given in any of these “citations” — let alone volume, issue, and page number or article title — it was totally impracticable to verify that they contained anything to substantiate the claims in the article. But that wasn’t their purpose, of course — it was just to make it look “scientific.”

For Child Care That's Parent-Centered!

Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed a national program for affordable child care. But what her proposal overlooks (at least, judging from the discussion on NPR's All Things Considered) is that, rather than being counterposed to paid work, parental care of children deserves to be publicly recognized as socially necessary labor and compensated accordingly. This could be either by an individual stay-at-home parent or by a collective or cooperative enabling parents to balance child rearing with participation in the institutional work force. This would allow parents to have real engagement with their children's development in "on" time while still pursuing other careers.

Conservative Social Engineering

In the "Week in Politics" segment of yesterday's All Things Considered, the Washington Examiner's Tiana Lowe says, "women bear 100 percent of the economic burden [sic] of all paid parental leave programs because disproportionately women are the ones to take time off,” and that “a lot of these programs disincentivize [sic] women from staying in the workplace.”

What convoluted reasoning! Paid leave isn’t a “burden”; it relieves a burden and, by doing so, removes a coercive incentive to stay in the institutional workplace when someone would rather prioritize caring for her children. So what if women more often make this choice than men? Isn’t that their individual choice, whatever the reason -- be it cultural, biological, or a combination of the two? What gives Lowe the right to try to force women to make a different choice? And how ironic is it that this advocacy of “social engineering” comes from someone calling herself conservative!

Let's Stop Trial by Public Opinion!

Thanks to Ceara McCord @GyakutennoMeg for bringing this to my attention:

Vic Kicks Back!

https://www.gofundme.com/vic-kicks-back

Talking to Strangers

Today I was telling my therapist about how I recently started a conversation Friday before last with someone I didn't know at a meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and, a few days later, with the worker at the station next to me on a temporary job. For most of my life I've had no habit whatever of making small talk -- even saw it as pointless and stupid, not comprehending (or being willing to acknowledge) its importance for making social connections -- yet in this second case, knowing of nothing we had in common, I simply opened by turning to her and asking, "So, what do you do for fun?" And we had a reasonably interesting exchange for the next couple minutes, even though our only common interest was singing.

But a couple hours after the appointment, I did myself a little better yet by saying "Good afternoon" to someone with whom all I had in common was that we were crossing the same street in the direction of the same bus stop. And it turned out that, once prompted by this greeting, she had things she felt like sharing. In fact, even though she wasn't going where I was (PRO-ACT), she'd just been receiving one of the same kinds of training that they plug people into. So that conversation was quite interesting too.

But most rewarding for me was the simple fact that I was able to take these initiatives at all, when for decades I virtually never thought of doing so, and when I did was usually too inhibited by anxiety to actually try it.

Quote of the Month

"Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected — unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic [i.e., Marxist] point of view and no other." -- V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement

With Sherrie Cohen at W/N W/N

Wednesday before last, progressive activist attorney Sherrie Cohen officially kicked off for her campaign for City Council at-Large at W/N W/N Coffee Bar, a worker-owned co-op in Northern Liberties, where I helped sign people in. The new issue of the Philadelphia Public Record features a picture taken of her with her supporters there. (Sorry the screenshot came out a little fuzzy.)