hoaxes, opinions, but not many facts on nutrition

Non-vegetarians like to point out, that the vegetarian or vegan lifestyle isn't that great for the environment either. For example, I heard several people cite to me "rain forests are being destroyed to make space for soy farming". And vegans/vegetarians eat a lot of soy products, so they part of the destruction.
Now, my readers are probably aware that most of the world's soy production is actually for animal feed, not for human consumption. (Incidentally, the US produces much more soy beans than China, although China is has the largest human consumption of soy products because Tofu, Topi, Soymilk, and many other soy products already have a century-old tradition there.)

So the cited argument is blatantly irrational and obviously self-serving. It doesn't make any sense as an argument other than giving non-vegetarians something to say when they have "an argument" with a vegetarian person.

Now, I certainly don't want to say that non-vegetarian people are stupid. To the contrary I have heard this or similarly stupid arguments even from people who I otherwise respect for their opinion (in fields where they actually have expertise). What actually bothers me is that all kinds of people often carelessly come up with spurious arguments when defending their own position. Being smart to me, doesn't mean that I know better than other people. Being really smart actually means knowing that

Sometimes (as in this case) those arguments can quickly be dismissed, but at other times, they are making claims which just can't be directly verified. When it comes to my own well-being I can make simple experiments (like eating completely vegan for six weeks in a row) to find out my personal truth. But when it comes to issues of like the effects of diets on life-expectancy and cancer-risk, or the heated topic of pregnant mothers and the diet of their unborn babies, self-run experiments can't be the solution.

One question which is actually of practical importance to me is whether a purely vegan diet actually requires supplementing vitamins (B12 in particular). But a similar question is relevant for non-vegetarians, too: do humans in northern countries get enough vitamin D in winter? For both questions I have found all kinds of answers on the internet: yes, no, yesbut, nobut, and of course the always-valid answer: "it depends". (As a friend jokingly said: it depends on whether you want to rationally optimize your health and life-expectancy or just want to confirm to a certain lifestyle, for example, by eating no "artificial supplements".)

I find that people tend to trust other people who they know more than they trust other sources of information. (After all, the internet can confirm or deny any claim depending what search terms you use. For instance, the query "soy healthy" actually gives pros and cons alike in a way that left me more puzzling than I was before. But on second look on, for example, this article, it seems that a lot of actual definitive health benefits are quickly listed, followed by a much longer list of potential problems, but which are all prefixed by some "might" (harm) or "could" (have negative impact). It seems that in the desire to paint a complete and balanced picture, the actual benefits are all too liberally compared to the potential risks.)

But as the stupid rain-forest-meme above has shown, people in your social circles (even if they are otherwise smart and reasonable) can't be trusted either. So how can I really know things?

Let me leave this question open for you and instead conclude with a Zen-spirited motto: Often it is better to know that we don't know, than to have a wrong belief.

TV-incited violence vs. Gross National Happiness (must-read for anybody with a social conscience!)

Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan's first crime wave - murder, fraud, drug offences. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report from a country crash-landing in the 21st century

Here are some excerpts from a 2003 Guardian article about the effects of TV in the country of Bhutan. It is impossible to imagine how a modern Western country would be without TV. Bhutan, however, was without TV until 1999 – it's introduction to the country provides an unprecedented and unique opportunity for study.
The article "Fast forward into trouble" is much longer and here are only some of the most interesting pieces.

April 2002 was a turbulent month for the people of Bhutan. One of the remotest nations in the world, perched high in the snowlines of the Himalayas, suffered a crime wave. The 700,000 inhabitants of a kingdom that calls itself the Land of the Thunder Dragon had never experienced serious law-breaking before. Yet now there were reports from many towns and villages of fraud, violence and even murder.
The Bhutanese had always been proud of their incorruptible officials - until Parop Tshering, the 42-year-old chief accountant of the State Trading Corporation, was charged on April 5 with embezzling 4.5m ngultrums (£70,000). Every aspect of Bhutanese life is steeped in Himalayan Buddhism, and yet on April 13 the Royal Bhutan police began searching the provincial town of Mongar for thieves who had vandalised and robbed three of the country's most ancient stupas. Three days later in Thimphu, Bhutan's sedate capital, where overindulgence in rice wine had been the only social vice, Dorje, a 37-year-old truck driver, bludgeoned his wife to death after she discovered he was addicted to heroin. In Bhutan, family welfare has always come first; then, on April 28, Sonam, a 42-year-old farmer, drove his terrified in-laws off a cliff in a drunken rage, killing his niece and injuring his sister.

Before 1999, Bhutan's society and politics was much different from every other country in the world:

"We wanted a goal different from the material concept of maximizing gross national product pursued by western governments," [Bhutan's foreign minister] says with a beatific smile. "His Majesty decided that, as a spiritual society, happiness was the most important thing for us - something that had never been discussed before as a policy goal or pronounced as the responsibility of the state." And so, in 1998, the Dragon King defined his nation's guiding principle as Gross National Happiness.

The marijuana that flourishes like a weed in every Bhutanese hedgerow was only ever used to feed pigs before the advent of TV, but police have arrested hundreds for smoking it in recent years. Six employees of the Bank of Bhutan have been sentenced for siphoning off 2.4m ngultrums (£40,000). Six weeks before we arrived, 18 people were jailed after a gang of drunken boys broke into houses to steal foreign currency and a 21-inch television set. During the holy Bishwa Karma Puja celebrations, a man was stabbed in the stomach in a fight over alcohol. A middle-class Thimphu boy is serving a sentence after putting on a bandanna and shooting up the ceiling of a local bar with his dad's new gun. Police can barely control the fights at the new hip-hop night on Saturdays.

While the government delays, an independent group of Bhutanese academics has carried out its own impact study and found that cable television has caused "dramatic changes" to society, being responsible for increasing crime, corruption, an uncontrolled desire for western products, and changing attitudes to love and relationships. Dorji Penjore, one of the researchers involved in the study, says: "Even my children are changing. They are fighting in the playground, imitating techniques they see on World Wrestling Federation. Some have already been injured, as they do not understand that what they see is not real. When I was growing up, WWF meant World Wide Fund for Nature."

It is so early in the morning that the birds are still asleep. But Sangay Ngedup, minister for health and education, has been on the path for hours. His gho is bunched beneath his backpack, and a badge with the king's smiling face is pinned on to his baseball hat. In the past 15 days, he has climbed and scrambled over some of the world's most extreme terrain, from sea level to a rarefied 13,500ft in the Bhutanese Himalayas. Is there anywhere else in the world where a cabinet minister would trek 560km to warn people against becoming a nation of couch potatoes? "We used to think nothing of walking three days to see our in-laws," he says. "Now we can't even be bothered to walk to the end of Norzin Lam high street."

For the first time, he says, children are confiding in their teachers of feeling manic, envious and stressed. Boys have been caught mugging for cash. A girl was discovered prostituting herself for pocket money in a hotel in the southern town of Phuents-holing. "We have had to send teachers to Canada to be trained as professional counsellors," says Sangay Ngedup. This march is not just against a sedentary lifestyle; it is a protest against the values of the cable channels. One child's placard proclaims, "Use dope, no hope." "Breast is best," a girl shouts. "Enjoy the gift of sex with condoms," reads a toddler's T-shirt.

Bhutan's isolation has made the impact of television all the clearer, even if the government chooses to ignore it. Consider the results of the unofficial impact study. One third of girls now want to look more American (whiter skin, blond hair). A similar proportion have new approaches to relationships (boyfriends not husbands, sex not marriage). More than 35% of parents prefer to watch TV than talk to their children. Almost 50% of the children watch for up to 12 hours a day. Is this how we came to live in our Big Brother society, mesmerized by the fate of minor celebrities fighting in the jungle?
Everyone is as yet too polite to say it, but, like all of us, the Dragon King underestimated the power of TV, perceiving it as a benign and controllable force, allowing it free rein, believing that his kingdom's culture was strong enough to resist its messages. But television is a portal, and in Bhutan it is systematically replacing one culture with another, skewing the notion of Gross National Happiness, persuading a nation of novice Buddhist consumers to become preoccupied with themselves, rather than searching for their self.

In our Western culture it is only a recent trend introduced by a small elite to see happiness, not material wealth, as society's goal. Here are some of my earlier posts on happiness:

• happiness and new year's resolution (quoting psychologist Martin Seligman)
• on the fate of humanity (quoting economist Richard Layard)

I have no opinion in the climate debate

Having no opinion in the climate debate means that I can be friends with people from either side of the fence. And if Armageddon comes, maybe friends are something good to have!
But it since climate and energy are a hot topic today anyways, I'll read a bit about it, and when I read, then I prefer numbers to adjectives.

on the future of China

I have always thought that the peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe in the 1990s was a result of the good and free education systems in the countries of the communist block. Marxian theory states that a dictatorship is necessary in order to prepare a nation for a completely free communist social order. The idea is that the dictatorship provides the political stability to allow for economic and social progress. Once the people are well educated enough, a peaceful, free (and communist) state will emerge. As ironic as it sounds, Marx was right about the freedom and peace, but he was wrong about the communism. It turned out that the people of Eastern Europe were smart enough to start peaceful revolutions and take government into their own hands, but the system adopted was social capitalism, not communism.

When we apply this logic to China, what will our predictions be? Does China have an education system which will give all citizens a fair start and thereby prepare an eventual liberalization?

The Taipei Times writes what Scott Rozelle of Stanford University has to say about this:

China has the entrepreneurs and the money to make this happen, Rozelle said, but it remains critically weak in one respect — education. While in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan education from kindergarten to grade 12 was almost universal by 1978, in China today, less than 2 percent of Chinese in rural areas receive higher education and only 8 percent of junior high graduates go to senior high.

Education at a rural high school costs US$160 a year, which, in US terms, is the equivalent of sending a child to an Ivy League university. Adjusted for purchasing power, putting a child in high school represents decades of work for an ordinary worker in rural China, he said.

Look at this: even High School in China is capitalistic and therefore unaffordable for most. This looks like the country is bound for a couple more decades of evil dictatorship! (And even if they were to change the education system now, it would take at least one generation of people growing up for the changes to take effect... )

It's true that China has some very good universities and probably a lot of educated people, too. But what is this compared to hundreds of millions who lack proper education? And a government who relies un manipulating those uneducated masses in order to remain in power? Also China seems to have a general mentality of the "right of the stronger" as opposed to at least some spirit of community that was present in the communist regimes of the Eastern Block. But let's see what the future brings...

science-non-fiction

Driving home from work, stephen's car rolled slowly over the pavement. red lights, stop and go, rush hour downtown. the sidewalk full of people. some hurrying by from work to home, some from errand to errand, others dipping into the shop windows without slowing their pace. there, a book shop. stephen remembered the poem which was on his mind this morning... while his thoughts slipped away, the car stopped. stephen got out, put the car on the sidewalk and entered the shop.
How confused he was after a day of work! this shop only carried non-fiction. but there should be others nearby, stephen thought, pushing his car along while walking past more shop windows. he now remembered the entire first stanza. the cars on the street were so slow, they weren't even noisy. stephen crossed a little park and lifted his car up a few steps to "the downtown book shoppe". by now the entire poem had come back to him. he bought the book anyway.

Interpretation aid: this is common reality for people who commute by bike.

Dedicated to Justin Ward.

corollary from the last post

Adam Smith teaches that individuals behaving egoistically also benefit everybody else. Now we have to realise that individuals being benevolent towards others (everybody except the most ungrateful) will first and foremost benefit themselves! Directly by the satisfaction that blesses the benefactors. And indirectly when some of their actions some day lead to more benevolent behaviour of others.(*)

Smith's law might still be a valid principle of economics, but it's inverse is a principle of human nature that's ever-more important in our era-of-plenty. The social matters more than the economic! (Remember, Obama's campaign was won with grass-roots participation, not with high-valued donations.)

(*) I write "some of their actions lead to an indirect pay-off sometimes" because if there was a guaranteed result, the action would not be benevolent, but just an egoistic calculation. Feedback of benevolence works only on average and in the long term (and it's rewards are positive surprises as opposed to the expected outcomes from calculated action). But the direct satisfaction of doing something good always works.