Alcohol: the undiscussed carcinogen?

I’ve changed the title of this post to bring out something that seemed to me striking.  It seems to various agencies devoted to studying, curing and preventing cancer are saying that alcohol is a carcinogen when consumed in amounts that in fact many people do consume it.  Maybe everyone else has gotten this, but it isn’t showing up in, for example, discussions about whether to raise the estimates of the healthy intake of alcohol in the UK.

Of course, there are lots of possibilities here about who is right or wrong, and it would be great if anyone has any insight here.

 

So here are some facts about recommendations and guidelines regarding the consumption of alcohol. 

• In the States, the Center for Disease Control recommends at most one drink a day for women and two for men.  More than this is heavy drinking, which has a lot of health risks.
• The attitude in the UK, which appears to be on the verge of increasing its recommended maximum, is different.  According to the Independent, “The existing advice is based on recommendations from a committee of doctors in 1987 which set the weekly limits of 21 units for men, and 14 units for women. But the review comes as one of the members of the original Royal College of Physicians’ working party on the subject admitted that the figures were “plucked out of the air” in the absence of clear evidence about how much alcohol poses a health risk.”  (My Stress.) 

Now  in fact the difference here from the US is not that great.  2 units of spirits for the UK appear to be about 1.7 ounces, which one unit for the US is 1.5.  Still, the UK is going to increase theirs, it seems.

• And other countries appear even more permissive.  Again according to the  Independent, “MPs will also look at how UK guidelines compare with those provided in other countries. Italy’s guidelines allow the equivalent of an extra bottle of wine a week compared with the UK’s advice. France, Portugal, New Zealand and Japan allow more than half a bottle extra a week and limits in Spain and Ireland allow almost two glasses more.”

Now, one can certainly get one’s head around all this.  Americans disapprove of drinking, and Europeans and the Japanese do not.  Roughly speaking.

But here’s the reveal.  According to the American Cancer Society, research shows that consuming alcohol is connected to getting cancer.  Limiting alcohol may lessen one’s risk for cancer.  The limits are these:  women one drink and two for men.

OK, that’s just puritannical American, I said to myself.  What will the UK health service say about alsohol and cancer?  Well, here’s what Cancer Research UK says:

There is no doubt that alcohol can cause seven types of cancer.

• The more you cut down on alcohol, the more you reduce your risk of cancer.
• There is limited risk if you only drink a little – such as one small drink a day for women or two for men.
• You don’t need to be drunk to increase your risk.
• Drinking and smoking together are even worse for you.

The consequences of drinking too much alcohol go well beyond the evening’s embarrassing antics or the morning’s hangover. Scientific studies have confirmed that alcohol can also cause cancer.

Tracking down the percentages for one form of cancern, breast cancer, it looks as the the American Cancer Society is prepared to say that drinking 2-5 units of alcohol a day increases one’s risk by a full 6%.   That is, women who drink no more than one drink a day have a 12 percent change of getting breast cancer; more than that and you are at 18%

There is, it seems to me, a shocking disconnect in some of these figures.

Leading Change

Many people writing and reading this blog are interested in change.  We think both on smaller and on larger scales, from the injustices in our profession to those in our society and onto those afffecting subordinated people around the world.

I am wondering how many of us look to the business management literature for some ideas about what can be done, and what we are not doing yet.  When I offered to head up a scientific research group, and later when I was heading of the faculty organization, I reckoned I had better read a lot to get some ideas of what worked and what didn’t work.

I think I got a lot of help.  For example, one model of leadership – you pick your favorite group and meet behind closed doors to decide on initiatives which you present to the others – is ubiquitous in academia.  It is, however, not a good model for changing a culture.  John Kotter, at Harvard, was one of the leaders in enabling people to see how one should not do that, to put it roughly, and he drew up alternative models of change effective leadership styles.

I was thinking of this today since a newsletter from a management consultancy firm came into my mailbox.  It was selling a book, of course.  But the book was about the difficulty of change, how there is always great resistence to change, and about how to work with that, how to absorb the resisters into partnerships.  Sounds like what we want to do.

One other figure in the business management field I want to mention is Rosabeth Kantor.  I first encountered her as someone to read when I took a summer course for feminism for faculty at Rutgers in the 1980’s.  One of her leading thoughts, it seemed to me then, was how being outsiders in organizations (e.g., the token person of color, disabled person, etc) could get your head screwed up and turn you into someone you didn’t really want to be.  (That’s my take on her take, and not exactly what she said.)

One thing that I used to read regularly was the Harvard Business School Newsletter.  It’s fun to come to understand more fully why things your university is doing are pointless or counterproductive.  Looking for it today I found two interesting things.  One is an interview with Kantor:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6295.html

and the other I found when I googled “Harvard Business School letter.”  I discovered a lot of templates for letters of recommendation.  Not bad ones at all.

So, should we all rush out and get some management books?  If not, why not in some way look through the literature?

Have a look at the Kantor interview.  What do you think?

 

 

Homeless woman “steals education” for her son

Tanya McDowell is homeless, but wanted to enroll her son in kindergarten. (The nerve!) Now she’s being charged with “stealing education” for him, because in order to enroll him she claimed an address that she didn’t have (because, being homeless, she had no address). For more, go here. To sign a petition in support of her, go here.

(Thanks, Synaesthetik!)

What Kate “must” now do.

The bad news: 

According to a recent Guardian article, Kate Middleton set a high standard with her wedding dress that she must now meet.  If she fails, she will find her love affair with the British press is at an end.  She will also sorely disappoint the British fashion industry which apparently expect her to be a live advertisement for British style.  Even worse:

Kate’s success and contribution to the British monarchy will now be measured not simply by what she does or says, but on what she wears.

The value of a life depends on the clothes one wears?  A thought or fear too many women can understand, one expects.

The good news comes from the comments on the article.  Many people thought it rubbish.  For example:

– The shallow making vapid comments on the uninteresting and the banal clothes they wear is of no remote interest to any respectable human being capable of any level of coherent logical thought.

–  It’s up to the Duchess. Giving a nod to the fashion industry, wonderful, if she chooses. But we should realize, she isn’t a Barbie doll that we can dress up.

Its not exactly unusual to wear a dress a step up from your usual rags if its, I don’t know, the most important day in your life. Especially if that day is being watched by a third of the human race. Given the couple plan to return to a quiet northen town instead of Paris, I’m guessing ‘Jigsaw frocks and Monsoon jewellery’ [the article’s characterization of her standard style]  might be making a come back.

The people are not buying it.

Kimberle Crenshaw on AA and “women and people of color”

 

**This clip is from a debate about ending AA; her reference to the “radical agenda” is to ending it.**

I love what she does to the metaphor of an even race track.

 

Many of us try, at least since Bell Hooks pointed out its flaws many years ago, to avoid the phrase “women and people of color.”  Indeed, Crenshaw has been cited on this blog as showing how important it is to use less troublesome alternatives.  Nonetheless, she actually also uses the phrase in the opening of her talk here. 

I’m sure there are a number of lessons to be learned from that, one of which is that one should be careful about criticizing other people and other blogs.  Perhaps you can suggest some others.

Intuitions and Ideology

Is it a common intuition among philosophers that human beings are naturally self-centered.?  We don’t, such a story could go, actually give a damn about others’ survival, but for various reasons – largely for our own good – we need to act otherwise.   My sense is that this is a wide-spread belief in the profession, and indeed when it surfaces, I end up feeling I should find another field, despite the empirical and transcental arguments I have heard for “the impossibility of altruism.”  Are such intuitions, if they do exist, the product of rational reflection or do they more often mirror deeply popular ways of regarding ourselves?  That is, are they more a matter of ideologies?

In any case, it now  seems that such intuitions  may well be quite wrong.  There has already been  interesting evidence that reciprocity is a deep seated need for the human psyche.  And theorists  such as Sarah Hrdy have argued that female groups formed to raise infants are not inherently selfish agents.  But  the NY Times reports empirical backing for an even more stunning idea.  What distinguished human beings from chimps in the earliest stages of our split from them is the difference in cooperating with and learning from others:

Anthropologists studying living hunter-gatherers have radically revised their view of how early human societies were structured, a shift that yields new insights into how humans evolved away from apes.

Early human groups, according to the new view, would have been more cooperative and willing to learn from one another than the chimpanzees from which human ancestors split about five million years ago. The advantages of cooperation and social learning then propelled the incipient human groups along a different evolutionary path. …  Group selection could possibly act at the level of the tribe, Dr. Hill said, meaning that tribes with highly cooperative members would prevail over those that were less cohesive, thus promoting genes for cooperation.

And what is part of all this?  Pair bonding:

The finding corroborates an influential new view of early human origins advanced by Bernard Chapais, a primatologist at the University of Montreal, in his book “Primeval Kinship” (2008). Dr. Chapais showed how a simple development, the emergence of a pair bond between male and female, would have allowed people to recognize their relatives, something chimps can do only to a limited extent. When family members dispersed to other bands, they would be recognized and neighboring bands would cooperate instead of fighting to the death as chimp groups do.

I’m left wondering about philosophical intuitions.  Is it right that many people have found “foundational selfishness” an intuitively attractive view?  If so, does that tell us that books such as The Selfish Gene are just internalized?  Are intuitions, despite many people’s claims for their source in reason, too often a reflection of wide-spread academic beliefs?

Mombies!!!!!!

From here. (Thanks, J-Bro!)

Angry Birds: Philosophical reflections on a video game

“Angry Birds” is an exceptionally successful video game.  Both the free, lite version and the paid one are among Apple’s top apps.  It has a story line of sorts; pigs steal the birds’ eggs and the birds try to punish the pigs (aka ‘kill them’); the pigs try to protect themselves.  Kids apparently love it, and Amazon.com sells a blue Angry-birds t-shirt for girls/women. 

There are also several features that could inspire, in succession, reflection from a philosopher. No doubt there are more, and if you can think of some, I’d love to hear about them.

1.  If you think about conditions for perceiving objects and tracking them through space, you might have asked whether you need stability or some sort of sortal.  The birds particularly have different causal properties and odd kinds of stability.  If there are sortals, they are odd, hybrid ones.

2.  Practice makes you better, but I don’t think it is possible to articulate what you are learning, at least not in any informative way.  One learns to be more accurate in hitting a target, but it is very difficult to say what that consisted in.  Thus one gets a nice case of knowing-how to think about if one works ones way through the growing literature of the knowing how/knowing that distinction Ryle drew.  If you are particular to resisting intellectualizing human capabilities, you might want to look at the recent Noe article on this in Analysis.

AND THEN, the feminist reflection.  We are told that all sorts of things, such as stereotype threat, can degrade one’s performance.  It’s often presented a bit mysteriously.  You start off on an exam, the threat is triggered, and your score is lowered.  In a game like Angry Bird, the effects of fleeting negative thoughts can be dramatic and immediate.  Think “O I can’t do this,” and you won’t be able to.  “I can’t figure out a strategy for this,” is going to quickly incapacitate you.

Finally, it can get hard to put down.  One is quickly inundated with rewards (points and celebrating birds) or punishments (failing scores and the grunts of self-satisfied pigs).  What is going on as one finds oneself caught up in it?

And, believe it or not, it is actually fun.  Solitaire is my normal game.

Beating Implicit Bias

As a teacher of philosophy I’ve been eagerly awaiting some research on how to compensate for (or if possible eliminate) the negative effects of implicit gender and other biases in the classroom. I’ll be teaching introductory logic next semester, so the timing of this potentially exciting piece of research from University of Colorado at Boulder could hardly be better. The claim is bold and striking – that it is possible completely to close the gender gap in the physics classroom by setting simple 15-minute writing exercises. From Discover magazine’s helpful summary:

Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences aboutwhy they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes. It could change your life.

This simple writing exercise may not seem like anything ground-breaking, but its effects speak for themselves. In a university physics class, Akira Miyake from the University of Colorado used it to close the gap between male and female performance. In the university’s physics course, men typically do better than women but Miyake’s study shows that this has nothing to do with innate ability. With nothing but his fifteen-minute exercise, performed twice at the beginning of the year, he virtually abolished the gender divide and allowed the female physicists to challenge their male peers.

In a piece on EurkAlert! the authors sound a slightly more cautious note:

Steven Pollock, professor of physics and a CU President’s Teaching Scholar, noted that the study funded by the National Science Foundation is a “small piece” of a large puzzle, and he and his colleagues stressed that the results are no silver bullet in STEM education.

While concurring, Noah Finkelstein, a co-author and associate professor in physics, added, “This is a really exciting finding. It bears further exploration. These results hold significant promise for addressing differential performance and the significant disparity of recruitment and retention of women in STEM disciplines.”

I’d love to hear what readers think of the research. Would an exercise like this be as effective in the philosophy classroom? Are people tempted to try it out? (Thanks to Rob)

UPDATE: Thanks also to Mark who sent a link to a podcast on the study from Scientific American.

Petition to make philosophy part of UK national curriculum

We believe that the too-restrictive National Curriculum needs to be significantly expanded to allow more creativity and innovation in the teaching of core cognitive skills.

To that end, we believe introducing Philosophy lessons in the classroom from a very early age would have immense benefits in terms of boosting British school kids’ reasoning and conceptual skills, better equipping them for the complexities of life in the 21st century where ubiquitous technology and rapid social change will be the order of the day.

There is a growing body of evidence that Philosophy can be of huge importance in opening up young minds. Reasoning skills and habits improve learning in other subjects on the curriculum and do not require purchasing expensive equipment and classroom resources.

The petition reads:

We petition the Government to give a formal place to Philosophy at all levels of education, not just at University and postgraduate level, so that all young people in the UK can benefit from it at all stages in their educational journey. To so do, we call for:

— The recruitment, training and placement of specialist Philosophy teachers (i.e. holders of at least a first degree in the subject, on the model of The Philosophy Shop or Teach First to help graduates without PGCEs etc be deployed in classrooms) in the most challenged primary and secondary schools throughout the UK

— Increase the number of new Philosophy graduates and defend all funding for this subject across universities

— The long-term imperative must be to recruit more specialist Philosophy teachers and to increase the number of Philosophy graduates. However, with an average of only around 2,000 UK Philosophy graduates each year, in the short to medium term it will be necessary to train existing and prospective teachers to teach some elements of the subject. Therefore we also call for the introduction of a new specialist teacher training diploma for qualifying teachers and for existing teachers that provides the subject knowledge and pedagogy skills needed to teach elements of Philosophy effectively, a move that could support learning in other subject areas

It is our opinion that this will make sure children from all backgrounds get the advantages Philosophy at a young age can bring in terms of intellectual development.

To sign it, go here.