fire fighters
cohort studies for exposure to Chemical carcinogens.
____________________________________
(2.2) industries were able to successfully push back, delay, and slow down any significance changed in light of the scout mindset (accuracy-motivated reasoning) assessment on the situation:
(2.21) Tobacco & cigarrete with cancer [United States][interesting because of UK healthcare system, they did not have this problem],
(2.22) Petroleum & Fossil fuel industry with global warming, and
(2.23) Chemical company with a insecticide [European union], the Industry can delay change for over two decades, stay in business, maintain the revenue stream, and accumulate the body count; ...
(2.24) Automobile industry was able to successfully lobby and delay California air resource board adoption, implementation and mandate to switch over from Internal Combusion Engine (ICE) vehicle to Electrical-powered Vehicle (EV) for ... .
(2.25) 3M and Du Pont on PFOA PFOA/C-8 FC-143 product line
for 40 years DuPont knew C-8 was poison
(2.26) pp.208-209
Eric Schaeffer, chief of EPA's office of regulatory enforcement
but they've dragged it out for thirty years.”
In his resignation letter, Schaeffer said the nine companies he sued “emit an incredible 5 million tons of sulfer dioxide every year (a quarter of the emission in the entire country) as well as 2 million tons of nitrogen oxide.” The agency's uncontested scientific data showed that 10,800 died prematurely each year because of that pollution. The White House, he said, had snatched “defeat from the jaws of victory” because most of the plant owners had been ready to settle. Two of them withdrew from consent decrees.
As the second Bush-Cheney term neared an end, final rules had yet to be written or enforced.
“Every day you can postpone saves them a lot of money”, Schaeffer said in an interview, speaking of plant owners. “It's a lot of money. In the long run, finally, finally, most of these power plants will have scrubbers, but they've dragged it out for thirty years.”
(Angler: the Cheney vice presidency, Barton Gellman, 2008, pp.208-209, )
____________________________________
Donella H. Meadows, Edited by Diana Wright, Thinking in systems [ ]
p.104
Changing the length of a delay may utterly change behaviour. Delays are often sensitive leverage points for policy, if they can be made shorter or longer. You can see why that is. If a decision point in a system (or a person working in that part of the system) is responding to delayed information, or responding with a delay, the decisions will be off target.
p.105
On the other hand, if action is taken too fast, it may nervously amplify short-term variation and create unnecessary instability. Delays determine how fast systems can react, how accurately they hit their targets, and how timely is the information passed around a system. Overshoots, oscillations, and collapses are always caused by delays.
p.107
In your new position, you experience the information flows, the incentives and disincentives, the goals and discrepancies, the pressures──the bounded rationality──that goes with that position.
p.108
Change comes first from stepping outside the limited information that can be seen from any single place in the system and getting an overview. ...
p.108
It's amazing how quickly and easily behaviour changes can come, with even slight enlargement of bounded rationality, by providing better, more complete, timelier information.
(Thinking in systems : a primer, Donella H. Meadows, Edited by Diana Wright, sustainability institute, 2008, QA 402 .M425 2008, )
____________________________________
Soldiers and Scouts: Why our minds weren't built for truth | Julia Galef
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfRC8ZgBXZw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfRC8ZgBXZw
Long Now Foundation
Oct 18, 2019
soldier mindset : (directionally motivated reasoning)
cling to a single worldview (course of action) and
look for evidences to support that worldview
So, it's reasoning that is unconscious, usually.
So, we're hunting for arguments in favor of something that we want to believe or that we already believe.
scout mindset : (accuracy-motivated reasoning)
get as accurate as possible the landscape
figuring out what is actually true.
their role is not to attack or defend, but it's to go out, see what's really there and form as accurate a map of an issue or a situation as possible, including all of the uncertainties and unknowns.
____________________________________
https://summate.it/?v2
https://summate.it/https://thedecisionlab.com/podcasts/soldiers-and-scouts-with-julia-galef
Soldiers and Scouts with Julia Galef - The Decision Lab
So, there are all sorts of reasons why soldier mindset might be a really good thing for us. But it's not always a good thing, and it's not always rational. And that's where scout mindset comes in. Scout mindset is the antidote to soldier mindset. It's the mindset in which we try to be honest with ourselves and to be objective about what's actually true. And that's important because it allows us to make better decisions, to see the world in a more accurate way, and to act more effectively in our personal and professional lives.
BROOKE: That was great. So, what is the difference between perseverance, adaptation, and rational perseverance?
JULIA: So, perseverance is basically trying to keep doing something even when it's not going well. So, it's persevering in the face of difficulty or adversity. Adaptation is basically trying to change or adjust to the changing situation. And rational perseverance is basically trying to do the best that you can with the information that you have, and the constraints that you have.
So, it's trying to make the best use of the information that you have to try to achieve your goals. And I think that's really important to remember, because a lot of the time, when we're stuck, or when we're struggling, or when we're not feeling very good about ourselves, a lot of the time what we might want to do is give up. We might want to stop trying.
And the thing that I think is really important to remember is that there is always hope. Even when things are tough, even when we're facing difficulty, there is always hope. We can always try to adjust and to persevere, even if we don't feel like we're doing very well. And in the end, I think that that's really what matters.
BROOKE: That
____________________________________
https://thedecisionlab.com/podcasts/soldiers-and-scouts-with-julia-galef
────────────────────────────────────
Julia: Right. And so, Tetlock dubbed them the superforecasters and wrote this book with Dan Gardner about what they were doing right. Like what was the secret sauce to Superforecasting? It's really interesting and I think unusually rigorous for a social science study. And so, there's a bunch of things in there and you should read it yourself. But one of the things that he notices superforecasters doing a lot more than other people is adjusting their beliefs incrementally.
So, a lot of people will either never update their view at all, or they'll do a... Oh, sorry, just knocked over my mic. A lot of people will never update their view at all or they'll do a 180 where they're like, "Well, all right, I guess I'll give up on that idea because of counter evidence. And the superforecasters did a much more subtle thing where they'd have this view and then they'd read some more news articles and they'd go, "Hmm, that makes me a little less confident."
• adjusting their beliefs incrementally.
• one of the things that he notices superforecasters doing a lot more than other people is adjusting their beliefs incrementally.
• A lot of people will never update their view at all or they'll do a 180 where they're like, "Well, all right, I guess I'll give up on that idea because of counter evidence. And the superforecasters did a much more subtle thing where they'd have this view and then they'd read some more news articles and they'd go, "Hmm, that makes me a little less confident."
• Or some new development would happen and they'd go, "Actually, this makes war more likely." And so, they'd adjust their confidence upwards from 65 to 75 or something like that. So, it was this very careful, delicate process. And by the end of it, the percentage they eventually landed on was much more accurate than the norm.
source:
https://thedecisionlab.com/podcasts/soldiers-and-scouts-with-julia-galef
Julia Galef is a the co-founder and president of the Center for Applied Rationality and host of the podcast Rationally Speaking. Her work on rationality has been featured in publications such as Scientific American, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and TED. Julia is also an acclaimed YouTuber and writer - The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Other's Don't is her first book.
____________________________________
(4.4) on measurement
p.296
W. Edwards Deming, he said that 97 percent of what matters in an organization can't be measured.
the result of conventional measurement was “tampering”: manipulating without genuine understanding.
p.296
Deming wrestled with this issue regularly; when he heard people talk about measuring results, he often asked:
“How do you know?” In other word, how can you possibly assess success or failure based on the few miniscule elements tracked by your “measurement machine”?
How do you know your have chosen the right elements, and weighted them effectively?
If the assumptions put into the measurement model are false, how do you come to recognize the problem?
(Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, George Roth, Bryan Smith, The dance of change : the challenge of sustaining momentus in learning organizations, (a fifth discipline resource), 1999)
([ in general, some measurement is better than no measurement; the more basic the measurement, in general, provide the bigger picture; data is dynamic (like system dynamics) ])
____________________________________
Today I learned that after decades of breathing polluted air, my immune system would very likely be compromised; ...
Decades of Air Pollution Undermine the Immune System
November 21, 2022
The diminished power of the immune system in older adults is usually blamed on the aging process. But a new study by Columbia immunologists shows that decades of particulate air pollution also take a toll.
The study found that inhaled particles from environmental pollutants accumulate over decades inside immune cells in lymph nodes associated with the lung, eventually weakening the cells’ ability to fight respiratory infections.
The findings—published Nov. 21 in Nature Medicine(link is external and opens in a new window)—offer a new reason why individuals become more susceptible to respiratory diseases with age.
Elderly people are especially vulnerable to respiratory infections, a fact brought into stark relief by the COVID pandemic. The death rate from COVID is 80 times greater in people over age 75 than in younger adults, and the elderly are also more vulnerable to influenza and other infections of the lung.
The Columbia researchers weren’t initially looking at air pollution’s influence on the immune system. More than ten years ago, they began to collect tissues from deceased organ donors to study immune cells in multiple mucosal and lymphoid tissues. Such cells have been largely inaccessible to researchers studying the immune system where sampling is limited to peripheral blood.
“When we looked at people’s lymph nodes, we were struck by how many of the nodes in the lung appeared black in color, while those in the GI tract and other areas of the body were the typical beige color,” says Donna Farber, PhD, the George H. Humphreys II Professor of Surgical Sciences (in Surgery) and professor of microbiology & immunology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, who led the study.
And as the researchers collected more tissue from younger donors, they also noticed an age difference in the appearance of the lung’s lymph nodes: Those from children and teenagers were largely beige while those from donors over age 30 looked were tinged with black and got darker with increasing age.
lymph nodes from the lungs get darker with increasing age
Lung lymph nodes from six non-smokers between the ages of 20 and 62. Particles of air pollution darken the lymph nodes and impair immune cells within the nodes. Images: Donna Farber / Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
“When we imaged the lung’s blackened lymph nodes and found they were clogged with particles from airborne pollutants, we started to think about their impact on the lung’s ability to fight infection as people age,” Farber says.
In the new study, she and her colleagues examined tissues from 84 deceased human organ donors ranging in age from 11 to 93, all nonsmokers.
They found that the pollutant particles in the lung’s lymph nodes were located inside macrophages, immune cells that engulf and destroy bacteria, viruses, cellular debris, and other potentially dangerous substances.
The macrophages containing particulates were significantly impaired: they were much less capable of ingesting other particles and producing cytokines—chemical “help” signals—that activate other parts of the immune system. Macrophages in those same lymph nodes that did not contain particulates were unimpaired.
“These immune cells are simply choked with particulates and could not perform essential functions that help defend us against pathogens,” Farber says.
“We do not know yet the full impact pollution has on the immune system in the lung,” Farber adds, “but pollution undoubtedly plays a role in creating more dangerous respiratory infections in elderly individuals and is another reason to continue the work in improving air quality.”
James P. Kiley, PhD, director of the Division of Lung Diseases at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, agrees. “This is an interesting study that suggests air pollution may contribute to why older people become more susceptible to respiratory infections,” says Kiley, who was not a part of the study. “In addition to supporting ongoing efforts to control air pollution, these findings underscore the importance of additional research to better understand the lung effects of inhaled particulates and the interactions between air pollution and chronic lung diseases.”
source:
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/decades-air-pollution-undermine-immune-system
____________________________________
04.2021
April 2021
National Geographic
the fight for clean air
Beth Gardiner
Choked : life and death in the age of air pollution
Air pollution causes 7 million premature deaths a year
p.40
pp.40-67
p.66
PM2.5 (fine-particulate matter)
average annual particle pollution (micrograms/m^3)
PM2.5 (particulate matter with diameter 2.5 micrometers or smaller)
PM2.5 air pollution by U.S. Air Quality Index
health category
0 good
51 moderate
101 unhealthy for sensitive groups
151 unhealthy
201 very unhealthy
301+ hazardous
Beth Gardiner
Choked : life and breath in the age of air pollution
p.63
pollution gets far less attention, though it kills far more people
p.43
Francesa Dominici, biostatistics professor
air pollution
dirty air
chronic illnesses
weaken the immune system
inflame the airways
leaving the body less able to fight off a respiratory virus
Havard T. H. Chan school of public health
60 million older Americans enrolled in Medi Care
- age, gender, race, zip code
- the dates and diagnostic codes for all deaths and hospitalizations
Joel Schwartz, Havard epidemiologist
daily pollutant levels, over 17 years
p.48
In a 2017 study they found that even in places where air met national standards, pollution was linked to higher death rates
That means “the standard is not safe”
p.48
- That means “the standard is not safe”
- viral death rates were higher in places with more PM2.5
- dirty air ends far more lives, and with far greater regularity than the novel coronavirus.
- outdoor air pollution
- smoke from indoor cookstoves
- Pollution is a hidden killer
- It [pollution] doesn't get listed on death certificate.
p.49
- 1993 landmark project known as the “six cities” study
- Pollution is harmful at much lower levels than once thought, and in many more ways.
- Douglas Dockery, lead author
- 1993 landmark project
- “six cities” study
p.49
Dean Schraufnagel, a pulmonary medicine professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, when he led a panel in 2018 that reviewed and summarized decades of research [on air pollution]
p.49
Dirty air affects nearly all the body's essential systems triggering heart attacks and arrhythmias,
p.49
everybody has bronchitis
- dirty air [pollution] is harmful at much lower level than once thought
- Dirty air, his committee reported, affects nearly all the body's essential systems.
─“”‘’•
p.49
toxic fuel: diesel
Paris, Barcelona, Rome, Frankfurt
p.50
nitrogen dioxide emissions
p.50
diesel and coal
p.50
Valentina Bosetti and
Massimo Tavoni
agriculture
Modern industrial farming is a major polluter
manure, chemical fertilizers,
ammonia, which reacts with other pollutants
p.57
medical waste incinerator, a chemical plant, a landfill
p.56
Jyoti Pande Lavakare, book
Breathing Here Is Injurious to Your Health
p.56
But economic growth quickly outpaced all antipollution measures.
p.54
India's urban poor, who work or even live on streets, breathe far worse air.
p.57
[Air pollution] is a pandemic in slow motion
____________________________________
Dave Oliver, USN (Ret.), Against the Tide: Rickover's Leadership Principles and the Rise of the Nuclear Navy
p.21
The Navy had not yet invented equipment that could adequately control the atmosphere inside the submarine, so everyone breathed air containing carbon dioxide, as well as other nasty contaminants, at about thirty times normal levels. We understood that our atmosphere wasn't exactly the same as the one that grew corn and soybeans back in Indiana, although doctors weren't sure of the long-term effects. Without reading the New England Journal of Medicine, we could tell excess carbon dioxide affected the bodies' platelets, as our blood took a long time clotting until we had been off the submarine for a couple weeks. We assumed the air was also the reason for the low-level pounding ache in the back of our brains.
([ chronic exposure to polluted air ])
([ continuous exposure to polluted air ])
([ symptoms from continuous exposure to polluted air ])
(Against the tide : Rickover's leadership principles and the rise of the nuclear Navy / Rear Admiral Dave Oliver, USN (Ret.)., 1. Rickover, Hyman George., 2. admirals--united states--biography., 3. united states. navy--officers--biography., 4. nuclear submarines--united states--history--20th century., 5. nuclear warships--united states--safety measures--history., 6. marine nuclear reactor plants--united states--safety measures--history., 7. united states. navy--management., 8. leadership--united states., 2014, )
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
────────────────────────────────────
____________________________________
··<────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────>
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
No comments:
Post a Comment