TL;DR Do work.
Today I'm going to write about a specific pattern of thought and behavior (an ideology or a cultural convention, if I put my Ray-Bans on) I've noticed emergent in my classmates and colleagues at Berkeley. I noticed it when I was a freshman, but it's become more pronounced as I move into upper-division classes with smaller numbers of more specialized people.
The phenomenon, to put it succinctly, is something I've heard called "senioritis," although most of the people who appear to have it are not seniors in academic terms. I've also heard it described as "signature Millennial laziness" by older people who didn't know any better and "that super laid-back Berkeley atmospheeeere," by young people who didn't know anything, but I think you know what I'm referring to.
The way this pattern manifests itself is in how we think about our classes once we've stuck our toes in and seen if they get bitten off or not. Some classes are hard, and demand the fullest extent of our attention, and other classes are "well I'm just taking it for a breadth requirement, and it's super easy, so like, yknow." A big part of the culture at Berkeley, in my experience revolves around the dichotomy of trying extremely hard with extremely visible results or conspicuously not appearing to try at all. What did I get on the midterm? A 97. Did I study? Of course I didn't; I go to Berkeley, and therefore I must appear as though things are easy for me. It exists for the same reason one gym bro pulls the bar off another after a failed rep of bench and then tells the struggling bro "it was all you, dude, you could've gotten it."
I'm going to take up the issue of what "easy" actually means for a moment, in two different ways. First of all, the simple definition of what the word "easy" means on paper, which a quick dictionary inspection reveals as "achieved without great effort; presenting few difficulties" or "free from worries or problems."
I think this definition is sufficient, but the way we use the word (at Berkeley especially) is dangerously far off what "easy" is supposed to mean.
In my opinion, what an easy activity (be it a class, a lift, a puzzle, whatever) connotes is not an activity that explicitly demands less of your effort, but one that yields better results given the same effort. As I see it, there's no good reason to take a class as a GPA booster and then get a B, for example; if the class is truly that easy, the obvious question is why you didn't completely crush it.
The topic is classes, so I'll stick with it. My classes right now are two upper-division biology and two upper-division anthropology classes, which I thought would be a nice mix of scientific snobbery and humanities pretense mixed up together. I will be honest; this semester is not the most difficult academic experience I've ever encountered. I actually did get a 97 on my midterm, and nothing below a 90 on the others so far.
For the sake of clarity, I need to point out that the midterm I got a 97 on had a mean of 76, with a great many scores under 50, and so we see the problem: the class is easy, strictly speaking, as evidenced by all the people who got A's, and yet we have a great many people failing to conquer said easy class. At a place like Berkeley, with all its pomp and circumstance, I simply refuse to believe that I'm 21% above average, and certainly not reliably 20+% above average in multiple disciplines. I'm not being modest here, really; rest assured I think I'm as fan-damn-tastic as the next delusional millennial liberal, but what I'm not is perfect and uniformly superior across all fields. That's for business majors, who are dynamic team players who are thrilled and honored about things. We all know them.
So what's the issue? We have a room full of our generation's "smartest" people approaching the height of their intellectual powers, and well over half of them missed 40% or more of a test that relied essentially on a basic grasp of the course concepts and a bit of information retention (the test consisted of fill-ins, matching, and some essay questions). I mean, honestly speaking, the mean should have been about 80%, assuming everyone had been paying attention in lecture.
Oh. Oh. I see. This lecture room has half the desks empty during lecture, and during the exam we're at capacity.
This just serves to reiterate the point I made earlier; there's no sense asking me what my super-effective study tips and tricks are if you're not accomplishing the bare minimum of what it means to be a student in the first place. It's kind of like asking me for recommendations on hairstyling products when you're bald.
There's an old Family Circus cartoon where Billy is sitting at the table, talking to his parents about school. "My teacher's real tricky," he says. "She makes the quizzes real easy when I study and saves the hard ones for when I haven't studied at all."It's an obviously ludicrous statement, but I can't help it popping up in my mind when the equally ludicrous situation of a student protesting poor results in a class they've only shown up to for the first day.
I could go on with more examples, but I'll cut it off here, with this: Berkeley students are in many ways the cream of the intellectual crop, and we've spent a long time having things be easy for us. In my opinion, one of the most constructive things we could do for ourselves as people is, in addition to applying the basic effort to be in class and the simple intellectual work of understanding course content, to learn how to try again. No one who matters is going to judge you if you appear enthusiastic about learning and applying yourself, and no one who judges you for taking your education seriously matters.
As always, show this to people if you'd like, or tell me if you didn't like, and so on. I like conversation and debate, despite all evidence to the contrary. :)
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Sunday, March 27, 2016
March of the Hipsters: GMOs
TL;DR: GMOs are your friends. Embrace our new overlords.
First of all, happy Easter, everybody! It's joyous day for everybody, from Christians of all varieties to the pagans we appropriated the festival from to the merry atheists who just wanna eat Peeps.
The post today, however, is about a group of people who are not happy, and about the thing that makes them so. The post today is about Berkeley-ans, and (if we're totally honest about it) other generally upper-middle-class white people who are at war with all things GMO.
For those not in the know (or not in the care), GMO is a handy acronym for Genetically Modified Organism. Note that this acronym is distinct from both NGO, which is an organization created to bother a government, and OMG, which is what people in Berkeley type when they find out their food is genetically modified.
The issue people have with genetically-modified food, to be succinct, is based in a belief that these food items are heavily engineered by spooky scientists (like me) to be larger, easier to grow, sweeter, and generally better food, by whatever other criteria are applicable. To call it a "belief" is a gross inaccuracy on my part, really; it's just a matter of fact that a great many plants these days have been muddled with in some way or another. One of the more common GM corn crops, for example, is engineered to build little crystals of a protein creatively called Bt, from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. These little crystals are in the categories "whatever" if you're a human and "Please God no" if you're an insect, and the theory behind these is to minimize the use of artificial pesticides in the growing of corn. Everybody's pretty happy so far; we're putting less nasty chemicals on our food, and making more of it at that (~10% or so in this case, actually).
The second and more problematic part of the anti-GMO mindset derives from a deep conviction that all things artificial are by their nature unnatural and harmful, and the engineering done by the aforementioned spooky scientists is, indeed, spooky. The resultant belief, obviously, is that we should get rid of all such products, probably through boycotts, litigation, or legislation, whatever works best.
I pride myself on being, wherever I go, one of the goofiest people around, but this, ladies and gentlemen, is dumb.
So first off, as a biologist, I'm going to tell you that the whole premise of a "genetically modified organism" as a modern construction is a farce. The greatest engine of genetic modification in Earth's history is nature itself, which is why Darwin came up with that spiffy idea of natural selection as "descent with modification," to put it in his own words. Beyond a simple quibble of terminology, however, even unmistakably artificial engineering by humans is not an unambiguously bad thing. I can tell you this because corn is now corn, and not a horrible inedible bush called teosinte. Linked is a diagram comparing modern corn and teosinte, which are loosely the same plant and still crossable, but obviously, glaringly different due to humans selecting tasty corn to domesticate. Don't try to eat teosinte. https://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/corn-and-teosinte_f.jpg
This frame of mind goes back to the same logic as the anti-vaccine rhetoric, and is in my experience largely parroted by shockingly overlapping groups of people; that is, people who don't do the reading. For example, people who rave about the dangers of vaccination usually posit the claim espoused by mainstream news outlets that vaccines contain "toxins." Again, speaking as a biologist, they do not. What vaccines have in them (in the overwhelming majority of cases) is something called a toxoid, which is a rendered-down, inactivated piece of a toxin chewed up into a form that your immune system can be taught to recognize and react to in the event of a later infection.
For GM foods, the same basic sort of sentence surfaces over and over in the oppositional discourse: "the foods have been TREATED with CHEMICALS for the purpose of GENETIC ENGINEERING, which is HARMFUL to the CHILDREN!" (The Children are always mentioned, for some reason.) Y'know, I've been periodically sprinkling the plants in my garden with a solution that oxidizes in the presence of sunlight to reduce photosystem II, and later reduce plastoquinone and other components of the cascading photosynthetic electron transport chain. That sentence is big and scary and full of lots of words, and the solution to which I refer is a rare and dangerous chemical colloquially referred to as water. The message, in short, is that everything is a "chemical" and can be described in extremely menacing terms if the writer so desires, so do a quick Google search before asking me about THE TOXICITIES IN OUR CHILDREN(???).
Moving off the snobbish issues of science and terminology, the other problem with this belief is a more complicated moral one. First off, the real issue with GMO foods has little to do with the crops themselves and a great deal more to do with the people producing them, which we all like to dress up as a moralistic human crusade on behalf of nature, and whatever. Monsanto is the corporation that springs immediately to mind, being the business that does a great deal of this genetic engineering and so on and so forth. This is not the post wherein I eulogize Monsanto, because God knows they've made enough Agent Orange for quite a few civilizations. What I want to do is point to you, dear reader, out the distinction between what a Monsanto lab technician does with plants and what a Monsanto executive does with business practice. Monsanto's habits of stealing people's land, using patent law on their seeds to screw over smaller farmers, charging exploitative prices for quality seeds, and generally being unpleasant to other people are not in question. I would ask, however, that you express your distaste for these business practices without demonizing the legitimate science behind genetically modified crops and the generally well-intentioned people who enact it.
I would ask that you avoid demonizing this area of science because of the second moral point: as it stands right now, regardless of what you think of them, we absolutely have to have genetically-modified crops. This is because, at the present moment, we have entirely too damn many people, to put it succinctly. More importantly, placing a global ban of some kind on GM crops would be disproportionately bad for a specific subgrouping of those too damn many people, that is, the third world. Africa, for example, is in a bad spot to say the very least; something like half the soil is too heavily degraded to support conventional farming, which I see as a pretty black-and-white signal to employ non-conventional farming.
I could go on at great length about other impoverished areas in similar situations, but I'll summarize for the sake of clarity and concision: an injunction against genetically modified crops would have disproportionate effects on the world's developing and economically disadvantaged nations. Add in the fact that these areas coincidentally happen to be overwhelmingly inhabited by people who are not white, and sprinkle in a dash of "the people advocating such a thing predominantly are," and you have yourself a privilege smoothie with a swirl of colonial ignorance for added flavor.
So, to summarize, I think the anti-GMO movement is slightly more valid in its motivation than the anti-vaccine movement; that is, the anti-GMO movement has a measurable validity that isn't zero. That said, I believe the many anti-GMO advocates could stand to undergo a clarifying contemplation to distinguish the finer fractal points of their issues (science vs. business, for instance) and obtain a little more knowledge of the science behind GMOs and the current state of the globe. I know we live in the United States and have the option to breathe rarified bottled air from Whole Foods if we so choose, but we need to remember that a) any change in a market as vast and diverse as agriculture will take extended periods of time and b) not everyone is so fortunate as to have the option.
Thanks for reading! This is just a big diatribe of my thoughts on the matter. As always, show people if you liked it, or send me an angry letter if you didn't. Bloop!
First of all, happy Easter, everybody! It's joyous day for everybody, from Christians of all varieties to the pagans we appropriated the festival from to the merry atheists who just wanna eat Peeps.
The post today, however, is about a group of people who are not happy, and about the thing that makes them so. The post today is about Berkeley-ans, and (if we're totally honest about it) other generally upper-middle-class white people who are at war with all things GMO.
For those not in the know (or not in the care), GMO is a handy acronym for Genetically Modified Organism. Note that this acronym is distinct from both NGO, which is an organization created to bother a government, and OMG, which is what people in Berkeley type when they find out their food is genetically modified.
The issue people have with genetically-modified food, to be succinct, is based in a belief that these food items are heavily engineered by spooky scientists (like me) to be larger, easier to grow, sweeter, and generally better food, by whatever other criteria are applicable. To call it a "belief" is a gross inaccuracy on my part, really; it's just a matter of fact that a great many plants these days have been muddled with in some way or another. One of the more common GM corn crops, for example, is engineered to build little crystals of a protein creatively called Bt, from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. These little crystals are in the categories "whatever" if you're a human and "Please God no" if you're an insect, and the theory behind these is to minimize the use of artificial pesticides in the growing of corn. Everybody's pretty happy so far; we're putting less nasty chemicals on our food, and making more of it at that (~10% or so in this case, actually).
The second and more problematic part of the anti-GMO mindset derives from a deep conviction that all things artificial are by their nature unnatural and harmful, and the engineering done by the aforementioned spooky scientists is, indeed, spooky. The resultant belief, obviously, is that we should get rid of all such products, probably through boycotts, litigation, or legislation, whatever works best.
I pride myself on being, wherever I go, one of the goofiest people around, but this, ladies and gentlemen, is dumb.
So first off, as a biologist, I'm going to tell you that the whole premise of a "genetically modified organism" as a modern construction is a farce. The greatest engine of genetic modification in Earth's history is nature itself, which is why Darwin came up with that spiffy idea of natural selection as "descent with modification," to put it in his own words. Beyond a simple quibble of terminology, however, even unmistakably artificial engineering by humans is not an unambiguously bad thing. I can tell you this because corn is now corn, and not a horrible inedible bush called teosinte. Linked is a diagram comparing modern corn and teosinte, which are loosely the same plant and still crossable, but obviously, glaringly different due to humans selecting tasty corn to domesticate. Don't try to eat teosinte. https://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/corn-and-teosinte_f.jpg
This frame of mind goes back to the same logic as the anti-vaccine rhetoric, and is in my experience largely parroted by shockingly overlapping groups of people; that is, people who don't do the reading. For example, people who rave about the dangers of vaccination usually posit the claim espoused by mainstream news outlets that vaccines contain "toxins." Again, speaking as a biologist, they do not. What vaccines have in them (in the overwhelming majority of cases) is something called a toxoid, which is a rendered-down, inactivated piece of a toxin chewed up into a form that your immune system can be taught to recognize and react to in the event of a later infection.
For GM foods, the same basic sort of sentence surfaces over and over in the oppositional discourse: "the foods have been TREATED with CHEMICALS for the purpose of GENETIC ENGINEERING, which is HARMFUL to the CHILDREN!" (The Children are always mentioned, for some reason.) Y'know, I've been periodically sprinkling the plants in my garden with a solution that oxidizes in the presence of sunlight to reduce photosystem II, and later reduce plastoquinone and other components of the cascading photosynthetic electron transport chain. That sentence is big and scary and full of lots of words, and the solution to which I refer is a rare and dangerous chemical colloquially referred to as water. The message, in short, is that everything is a "chemical" and can be described in extremely menacing terms if the writer so desires, so do a quick Google search before asking me about THE TOXICITIES IN OUR CHILDREN(???).
Moving off the snobbish issues of science and terminology, the other problem with this belief is a more complicated moral one. First off, the real issue with GMO foods has little to do with the crops themselves and a great deal more to do with the people producing them, which we all like to dress up as a moralistic human crusade on behalf of nature, and whatever. Monsanto is the corporation that springs immediately to mind, being the business that does a great deal of this genetic engineering and so on and so forth. This is not the post wherein I eulogize Monsanto, because God knows they've made enough Agent Orange for quite a few civilizations. What I want to do is point to you, dear reader, out the distinction between what a Monsanto lab technician does with plants and what a Monsanto executive does with business practice. Monsanto's habits of stealing people's land, using patent law on their seeds to screw over smaller farmers, charging exploitative prices for quality seeds, and generally being unpleasant to other people are not in question. I would ask, however, that you express your distaste for these business practices without demonizing the legitimate science behind genetically modified crops and the generally well-intentioned people who enact it.
I would ask that you avoid demonizing this area of science because of the second moral point: as it stands right now, regardless of what you think of them, we absolutely have to have genetically-modified crops. This is because, at the present moment, we have entirely too damn many people, to put it succinctly. More importantly, placing a global ban of some kind on GM crops would be disproportionately bad for a specific subgrouping of those too damn many people, that is, the third world. Africa, for example, is in a bad spot to say the very least; something like half the soil is too heavily degraded to support conventional farming, which I see as a pretty black-and-white signal to employ non-conventional farming.
I could go on at great length about other impoverished areas in similar situations, but I'll summarize for the sake of clarity and concision: an injunction against genetically modified crops would have disproportionate effects on the world's developing and economically disadvantaged nations. Add in the fact that these areas coincidentally happen to be overwhelmingly inhabited by people who are not white, and sprinkle in a dash of "the people advocating such a thing predominantly are," and you have yourself a privilege smoothie with a swirl of colonial ignorance for added flavor.
So, to summarize, I think the anti-GMO movement is slightly more valid in its motivation than the anti-vaccine movement; that is, the anti-GMO movement has a measurable validity that isn't zero. That said, I believe the many anti-GMO advocates could stand to undergo a clarifying contemplation to distinguish the finer fractal points of their issues (science vs. business, for instance) and obtain a little more knowledge of the science behind GMOs and the current state of the globe. I know we live in the United States and have the option to breathe rarified bottled air from Whole Foods if we so choose, but we need to remember that a) any change in a market as vast and diverse as agriculture will take extended periods of time and b) not everyone is so fortunate as to have the option.
Thanks for reading! This is just a big diatribe of my thoughts on the matter. As always, show people if you liked it, or send me an angry letter if you didn't. Bloop!
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