Optimist prime

– In which Dorn loses THE argument with Kathleen.

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One of the things I like to feel smug about is my enlightened skeptical view toward my own beliefs. I have even started accumulating notes for a blog post on healthy self-doubt. I’ve already got a cool quote to use by Oliver Wendall Holmes, “Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not true” (from a Wash Post review of Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas by Stephen Budiansky). I’m debating whether to include in that blog post the concept of confirmation bias, where we reinforce our own beliefs by hungrily ingesting supporting evidence, but ignoring, to the extent we can, any contrary evidence.

I’m also an optimist. Some might say smugly so, certainly intentionally so. I work hard at it. Many’s the time when Kathleen and I have debated philosophical points that she’s said, “You’re such an optimist!”. “No, you’re just a pessimist!”, I might reply. “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.” “No, I’m the realist.” “Are not” “Am too” “Am not” “Are too” and so forth.

My smugnitude was tested recently. I was poking a stick into the internets to see what I might pry out, and I found a scholarly review article, “Costs and benefits of realism and optimism” (Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2015 Mar; 28(2): 194–198.) In it, I found that “unrealistic optimism”, also referred to as “optimism bias”, is “a robust phenomenon across a variety of tasks and domains” that is accepted widely enough to be the topic of multiple papers in psychiatry and philosophy. Uh-oh, I don’t like where this is going!

Apparently, the question of whether unrealistic optimism exists has long been settled (“yes”), and now thinkers are pondering whether it actually does any good. There is a theory, which the paper didn’t really embrace, that unrealistic optimism, while making one’s view of the world and his or her place in it less accurate, nevertheless conveys some sort of benefit to the optimist.

The notion of “benefit” was picked apart. Does unrealistic optimism make you feel better, psychologically or maybe even biologically? Or does it make your situation (in society, for example) objectively better? Philosopher types talked of “epistemic” benefits, which as near as I can understand means it gets you closer to evidence-based truth. 

It is well-known in clinical circles that people experiencing depression tend to have a more realistic understanding of some situations, such as their own present and probable future well-being, than people, including optimists, without the condition. Most people, and especially optimists, apparently underestimate with alarming predictability the chances that something bad will ever happen to them.

This put me in a real spot. Do I stand up against confirmation bias, and accept that I have optimism bias? Or do I give in to it, and continue to tell myself that my optimism is real realism, and just ignore any evidence to the contrary?

Well, I did what any thinker would do in such a situation: I scoured (well, I browsed) the internet for more evidence that supported the conclusion that I wanted to believe. Okay, so “unrealistic optimism” is a thing. It will take me a while to un-learn that, but maybe it’s counterbalanced by “unrealistic pessimism”? If I can’t win my philosophical debate with Kathleen, maybe I can at least tie?

Turns out there’s a lot less discussion of unrealistic pessimism out there. It exists, apparently, but only in extreme situations. I found the abstract to an article, “Unrealistic Pessimism”, from the Journal of Social Psychology, Jul 1, 2010: 511-516. Here’s the abstract in its damning entirety:

Various data suggest that individuals tend to be unrealistically optimistic about the future. People believe that negative events are less likely to happen to them than to others. The present study examined if the optimistic bias could be demonstrated if a threat is not (as it has been researched up to the present) potential, incidental, and familiar, but real, common, and unfamiliar. The present research was conducted after the explosion at the atomic power station in Chernobyl, and it was concerned with the perception of threat to one’s own and to others’ health due to consequences of radiation. The female subjects believed that their own chance of experiencing such health problems were better than the chances of others. Thus, in these specific conditions, unrealistic optimism was not only reduced but the reverse effect was obtained: unrealistic pessimism.

So it would take a Chernobyl-scale event for me to even score a draw in the philosophical debate with Kathleen I mentioned earlier. I’m sunk. The only thing I can think of to do is to drop my smug superiority of my mastery over confirmation bias, ignore the facts and try to retain some shred of my optimism bias so I don’t get trounced too badly by Kathleen. And I’ll either fail, and be able once again to feel smug about my optimism, or I’ll succeed, and be able to feel smug about conquering my former smugness about my optimism. It’s a win-win! (It’s working already!).

Here’s a funny comic about confirmation bias from a funny online strip, Wondermark.

Thanks,
Dorn
9/22/2019

PS. On reviewing this post, Kathleen points out that her arguments wouldn’t seem so pessimistic if she didn’t have to spend so much time injecting reality into my optimism. How can I answer that, now that Science has confirmed it?

Here’s a joke from Kathleen:
Socrates about to drink the hemlock, saying 'Is this glass half empty or half full?'

A High Wind in Jamaica

– In which Dorn reads a seafaring yarn.

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he Bookshop was on TV this week. It’s a nice little movie about a British widow in the 1950’s who opens a bookshop and runs afoul of the local Powers That Be. At one point she befriends and hires precocious young Christine to help out in the store. While she is trying to interest the rest of the town in Lolita, she gives Christine A High Wind in Jamaica, saying it’s a book about “good pirates and evil children”.

That piqued my curiosity, so I looked around for the book. Not in the local library, and not available in the digital library either (a frequent occurrence with books published before e-books were commonplace). Richard Hughes wrote it in 1929, so it was old enough that it might be available in one of the free digital resources. It wasn’t in Project Gutenburg, but there was a legible copy from the digital library of India in the Internet Archive.

It was a great short summer read, and over too soon. The story is of children sent to England after a hurricane destroys their Jamaica home, who on the voyage are captured by pirates. It’s brimming with playful insights into the minds of children, parents, and pirates. There are a few shocking moments, a few brushes with darker themes, and some casual racism of the kind apparently allowed in the early parts of the 1900’s.

The central theme of the book was the amorality of children, which didn’t really make them evil, just innocent of the whole concept of good and evil. Several of the reviews on Goodreads suggested the story was a mix of Peter Pan and The Lord of the Flies, with perhaps a bit of Heart of Darkness thrown in.

But I found it much lighter reading than that–to me it seemed like a mixture of the satire of Mark Twain with The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place (one of my all-time favorite stories), with a dash of Bonfire of the Vanities sprinkled on top.

In its time, A High Wind in Jamaica was a best-seller, and considered quite controversial and ground-breaking for its unsentimental portrayal of children’s psyches. It made some “best 20th century literature” lists, but I had never heard of it. I’m glad I stumbled on it, though, and I commend it to you. You can get a PDF of it off of the Internet Archive.

Thanks,
Dorn
9/19/2019

A Sense of Place

In this painting I’m returning to a theme I explored once before, many years ago, with my nieces as subjects. The current painting has my grandkids waiting at the Ice Cream Window at B&Js Carryout.

One reason I have painted B&J Carryout in Accokeek many times is that, to me, it seems the one location in “downtown” Accokeek where there is a genuine “sense of place”.

A “sense of place” is a characteristic that some geographic places have and some do not. The term is often used in relation to those characteristics that make a place special or unique, as well as to those that foster a sense of authentic human attachment and belonging. It is hard to fake and too often planned development fails to take it into account. Right now, Royal Farms is proposing a chain gas station/convenience store across Livingston Road from B&Js. Besides being out of scale with our little center (the project has 58 parking places!) and its likelihood to interfere with the ability of the Accokeek Volunteer Fire Department to aid the community with fast responses to emergencies, I think the real reason I oppose the project is that it will be detrimental to our sense of place. Once a sense of place is destroyed, it doesn’t really come back.

Supercalligraphic

– In which Dorn misinterprets an Art Show.

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 didn’t expect to be writing about art again so soon, but yesterday evening we went to an art show of one of Kathleen’s old friends from her days teaching at GWU, that turned out to be a lot of fun for me, and worth remarking about. 

It’s a two-person show called “Umbra” by Kathleen’s friend Becky Bafford and fellow sculptor Kini Collins, at the Horowitz Center at Howard County Community College.

As the title suggests, the show is about shadows, and every piece is created and displayed in a way that allowed its shadow to be part of the art. The pieces themselves are sculpture, so you have a nice three-dimensional foreground and two-dimensional light-dark background going on.

The show is also about “fossils, relics, and memories”, according to the brochure, and I thought it did a good job of evoking things past and gone. Many of the pieces are representative (or partly so) of objects found in nature, as the wall of chrysalis shapes above.

What I liked best were some shapes by Becky Bafford that triggered my delight response at two things I enjoy contemplating–(1) art that I don’t quite understand at a rational level, and (2) written languages that I don’t know. There were a series of shapes there that to me felt like they were three-dimensional calligraphy, spelling out a message I couldn’t quite grasp.

Looking at these shapes, it was possible to imagine the pushes, pulls, and gestures that went into forming each one. It was like watching one of those TV documentaries with a closeup of a Chinese national treasure slowly composing text in freehand chinese characters with a sumi brush, only with the added complexity that the character strokes all had depth, as well as width and height.

What a rich language that would be, that it had to be written in three dimensions! It was a conceit that really appealed to me, despite my suspicion that I had probably missed what the artist was envisioning when she created them.

The works by the two artists complement each other extremely well, both in mood and in the skill and subtlety of the use of surface and shadow. Moving from Ms Bafford’s room to Ms Collins’s, I was delighted to see another piece that reinforced my interpretation–there was a wall devoted to what looked the world to me like three-dimensional Babylonic cuneiform! (My photo doesn’t really do it justice.) The title of this piece was “Letters”, which makes me optimistic that maybe here I was even thinking along similar lines to the artist.

Even setting aside my personal twist on the work here, the show was a treat to see–the works are well made and artfully displayed, and evoked strong emotional reactions in the audience there. An evening well spent! Here’s the show info, if you find yourself near there with a few minutes to spend. The show runs until Sept 22.

Thanks,
Dorn
9/13/2019

A tale of four emergency rooms (conclusion)

– In which Dorn’s Mystery Illness is revealed. Sort of.

(This concludes the story started in Part 1, here).

ER VISIT 3.

I

t was a record-setting year for rain in 2018, and by summer our yard was saturated. Living right on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, with the hills that in other places make up Calvert Cliffs right behind us, we were seeing a torrent coming down onto or property every time it rained, with more precipitation in the forecast. I was busy trying to divert some of this wash off of our back yard by digging a berm and supplementing that with sand bags. It was heavy work, and by the time I was done I was aching all over.

Big doses of Motrin helped.

I slept hard that night, but woke up in the middle of the night feeling funny. I was dizzy with cold sweats, faint-headed and a bit disoriented. I’ve never had a heart attack, but I didn’t want my first to be my last, so we high-tailed it to the emergency room again!

It wasn’t a heart attack, but the illness I was suffering from did seem to somehow involve a lot of bleeding into my GI tract. So they sent me home from the ER, with instructions to check in with my gastro­­enterologist (and my cardiologist, just in case).

The next day, I got an appointment with my GP, Dr B—. I told him I had already scheduled a colonoscopy in a couple of days, and a visit with my cardiologist a couple of days after that. He hit the roof! “You can’t go around getting a colonoscopy, or any other invasive procedure, until you get your heart checked out! Even if it wasn’t a heart attack, you still need to clear that first!!” When he wasn’t convinced that he was making his point strongly enough to me, he interrupted my consult to call my gastro­enterologist himself, and tell him not to poke me with anything until I’d gotten a clean bill from my cardiologist.

That’s what I like about Dr B—: he cares enough to get worked up if something’s going on that puts me at risk. The laconic country life is great for most things, but I had already learned (in part 1) that I like a little nervous tension in my medical relationships. I also like that if Dr B— doesn’t know something, he’ll tell me rather than pretend that he does. (What I don’t like so much is that there are things I wish he knew that he doesn’t. Like what was wrong with me.)

Anyway, I got a bunch of tests and scans (in the right order, with the cardiogram first), but nothing showed what was causing the GI bleeding. Over the next few months as these tests progressed, I slowly recovered, until finally my doctors and I concluded that the original culprit was probably the Motrin I took, so let’s cut that out of my diet completely, and hope that this Mystery Illness was a one-time thing that won’t plague me again.

That strategy worked–for about six months.

ER VISIT 4. When Kathleen and I retired this last winter, we had planned on taking a road trip up the coast and into Canada as soon as we could. I had some knee damage from an old injury that made driving longer than an hour or two painful, so I scheduled an arthroscopy to fix the internal damage.

I had the outpatient procedure in July, almost exactly one year after the onset of what I referred to as “the Motrin incident”. The work seemed to proceed without complications, and I was assured I’d be walking by the end of the week. That night, though, I went into shock–I suddenly felt extremely cold, and couldn’t stop shaking. Kathleen said it looked like a seizure. So, back to the ER we went!

There they found that my blood pressure was so low that they had to strap me to a bed upsidedown-ish, with my head lower than my feet. I had had extensive bleeding into my GI tract again. Well, so much for the swear-off-Motrin-and-hope-it-doesn’t-recur strategy of medical management. It was time to start the care and diagnostic cycle all over again, and this time, I wasn’t stopping until I knew exactly what was causing the Mystery Illness (and then fixing it)!

I had my trusty GP Dr. B—, a GI specialist, and a blood specialist all working the issue. We did all the standard and some not-so-standard tests and scans. Again. A pattern developed: see the doctor, suggest a test that might inform us, wait for the scheduled test appointment, wait a few days for the results, make a new appointment with the doctor, find out that test didn’t tell us anything useful, repeat.

Meantime, the bleeding had stopped, and my anemia, which had plummeted to about half of minimum “normal” blood count values, slowly started improving again. I was glad to start feeling better, but worried that the longer the investigation failed to find the cause of my illness, the more healed I would be, and the less likely that future digging would spot it.

Until the next incident, that is, which I was now reasonably confident would occur, sometime when my body was stressed. What frightened me was, what if the stress that triggers the bleed is something that has already put my body into a weakened state? Like a car accident, or emergency heart surgery?

I started to despair that, despite our best efforts, this incident might also end like the first, without knowing what caused it and so not being able to prevent it or keep me safe when it happened again. It was time to abandon my attachment to the laid back ways of country medicine, and go find some hot-shot city slicker doctor with some new ideas.

I found Dr G— at Johns Hopkins Depart­ment of Gastro­enterology and Hepa­tology, and presented all my symptoms, test results, specialist notes and speculations to her. You can picture my relief when she said, “Oh, it looks like you have   *   . I see that all the time. Let’s set you up with this specialized test to confirm, and if that’s it, we can fix it.”

This test is still several weeks away, and if her prediction is confirmed, there will be treatment procedures to undergo after that. But if the Illness isn’t banished yet, at least I have hope that the Mystery is. Maybe now I can think about something other than the next scanning or scoping (like planning that road trip!).

So that’s my story, at least to this point. Thank you, as always, for listening.

*(I intentionally didn’t say what the mystery illness was, as this story turned out not really to be about the illness, as much as about my experience of navigating it and the medical community here. If you’re really curious what Dr G— thinks I have, it’s the same thing the guy in this case study has.)

Thanks!
Dorn
9/10/2019