Those Disagreeable Inventors

Inventors don't play much of a role on the public stage these days compared to the glory days of Marconi and Edison.  But they are nonetheless vital to modern civilization, as technical progress is the main economic engine that drives advanced industrial societies.  Martin L. Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute think tank, says in a recent issue of National Review that we ought to be careful how we treat present and future inventors, even if they prove to be rather disagreeable.  And he makes a good case that many of the best ones are just that, and their disagreeability is intrinsic to what makes them good inventors.

Citing several books about psychology, innovation, and DNA, Tupy says successful inventors tend not to care what other people think, and may even take delight in discomfiting their more powerful peers.  It's ancient history now, but the legendary 1984 Apple commercial shown during the Superbowl portrayed a young—woman—wearing bright colors—running freely—as she charges through a gray crowd of drones hypnotized by Big Brother's face on a telescreen, throws a sledgehammer into the screen, and literally busts up everything.  It has Steve Jobs' fingerprints all over it.  Numerous sources show that Jobs, who is probably the leading candidate for the most famous inventor of the latter 20th century, was not an agreeable person.

So why can't inventors just get along with people like the rest of us do?  Tupy contends that those who successfully seek innovative technical solutions to problems also tend to be loners, somewhat socially awkward, and not terribly concerned about fitting in and getting other people to help them with problems.  Rather, they prefer to work with things and ideas on their own to solve problems.  The umbrella phrase for this type of personality is autism-spectrum disorder, which of course can be crippling in its severer forms, although inventors such as Temple Grandin prove that even clinical-grade autism can be overcome.

Over my career, I have met several, and gotten to know a few, inventors who actually profited from their patents, or at least saw the companies or organizations they were associated with profit from them.  Few of them meet the classic description of an autistic personality:  intense aversion to social interaction, preference for solitude, etc.  I would say that while the autism-spectrum observation is true as far as it goes, and it may be close to necessary to some degree, it is by no means sufficient.  And for this I will turn to some history I'm very familiar with:  my own.

 When I got to college, I was surprised to see that someone had made a poster that showed me as a classic nerd.  It wasn't really mea, but it might as well have been:  plastic-framed glasses, button-down sweater, shirt pocket bulging with pens, slide-rule case hung on belt, etc.  I had spent most of my spare time growing up playing with electronics rather than football or socializing.  I never dated in high school.  And I went to college at what was then probably the West Coast's capital of nerd-dom:  Caltech.  If being on the autism spectrum was all it took to be a successful inventor, I should have done fine.

But I think most successful inventors have a drive that I mostly lacked:  a desire to show up the established order and make it look foolish, not by words, but by actions, hardware, and (nowadays) software.  That part of the successful inventor's personality is missing from my makeup.  On the contrary, I tend to revere established institutions and procedures, not delight in their ruination, even if such ruination works to my benefit.  This attitude of reverence toward existing structues is exactly what you don't want if your job is to convince others that your idea is better than theirs.  It's that simple.

My name is on a couple of patents, one of which (obtained with my Ph. D. supervisor at U. T. Austin in the 1980s) could conceivably have become quite valuable, as it anticipated the future growth of what is known as RFID technology—the little tags that set off alarms if you try to shoplift a pair of sneakers from Walmart.  But as it happened, the university that paid for the patent didn't do anything with it, and neither my supervisor nor I had the time or inclination to do the hard work of convincing people that this was the coming thing.  It would have involved starting a company, and that was not on my scope screen at the time, nor has it ever been since.

The reason Tupy wrote what he did was to make the point that societies which discourage disagreeableness of the type in question may be shortchanging themselves when it comes to innovation.  Nobody knows how to create inventive people.  It's like farming:  the farmer doesn't really grow anything.  He or she just creates conditions under which growth of desirable plants can occur.

So cultures that allow people to do things differently, to play around with ideas without having to worry about getting in trouble with their peers or the government, tend to be cultures in which innovation and invention thrive.  A good contrast here is between the U. S. in the 1950s and the old USSR (Soviet Union), where everyone had to be constantly on guard lest they be heard to say something even slightly negative about the government, at which point their neighbors might rat on them and they'd end up in the Gulag for twenty years.  The USSR was not a hotbed of technical innovation then, although it supported scientists who aided its nuclear-weapons program.  But as far as economically profitable inventions go, it was no contest, as the U. S. was far and away the best place to be for that kind of thing, even in the allegedly conformist and repressive 1950s.

By all means, let's preserve what freedoms we have, to allow those cranky inventors among us to be by their lonely selves, cooking up ideas and gizmos that will make them and others millionaires and benefit the rest of us in the bargain.  But being a nerd isn't all it takes—you have to want to make fools of the complacent powers that be, and succeed at it, too.

Sources:  Martin L. Tupy's article "Disagreeability, Mother of Invention," appeared on pp. 18-20 of the Nov. 16, 2020 print edition of National Review.  The 1984 Apple commercial, which everyone ought to see at least once, can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I.

Ignoring the Experts: Autism and Vaccinations

By necessity, engineers are experts in their professional field compared to the public at large.  And as we've discussed many times before, expertise confers both privileges and responsibilities.  Most of the time, engineers and other experts who inform the general public about questions of interest find that the public at least listens to them, and usually takes what they say seriously.  But not always.  And when expert advice and information is ignored, we have to go beyond strict logic and rational thought and deal with a wider range of human behavior.

All that is to preface an issue that on the surface, seems to fly in the face of logic and even common sense:  the question of whether autism is caused by the routine measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine that, until recently, was a non-controversial part of every baby's medical care in industrialized countries. 

Then in 1998, one Dr. Andrew Wakefield published an article claiming that he'd found a link between the unexplained rise in incidence of autism and something about the MMR vaccine, possibly the tiny amount of mercury present in it used as a preservative. 

To parents of autistic children searching for a reason why their son or daughter has such a debilitating disease, Dr. Wakefield seemed like a godsend.  Here at last was something to blame.  At the time, his report made huge headlines and spawned parents' groups who took up the cause of delaying or abstaining altogether from MMR vaccines. 

Trouble was, according to the vast majority of medical experts, Dr. Wakefield's paper was deeply flawed.  Of course, other labs and researchers got onto the bandwagon and started investigating the alleged link.  From what I have read and from a recent report in the Annals of Internal Medicine on a Danish study of over 600,000 children for eleven years, there is no statistical link between MMR vaccine and autism.  None.  It just doesn't happen, according to the best and most judicious scientific knowledge we have today.  And this is not new news.  In 2010, Wakefield was found by the British General Medical Council to be guilty of dishonesty in connection with his paper, which was retracted by Lancet, the journal that published it.  Wakefield is as discredited as a professional can get. 

But none of this seems to matter to a persistent group of people who keep sharing and encouraging the idea that vaccines cause autism.  In the latest attempt to stifle this misinformation, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Kyle Yasuda, wrote letters to Google, Facebook, and Pinterest, asking them to do more about the vaccine misinformation that is spread through YouTube, Instagram, and Google's search engine. 

Dr. Yasuda cites the danger of increased measles outbreaks, such as the one that occurred in connection with Disneyland in the winter of 2014-2015.  Over a hundred cases were identified in this outbreak, and four out of five of the victims were either unvaccinated or could not show proof that they had been vaccinated for measles.  One out of five of the victims had to be hospitalized.

While in my long-ago youth, measles was just part of growing up, it wasn't a necessary rite of passage.  It can lead to complications involving many bodily systems and can even kill you.  A world without measles is unquestionably a better world than one with the disease.  And until Dr. Wakefield started meddling with his fraudulent paper, we were well on the way to eradicating measles much as smallpox has been eradicated—through systematic vaccinations and the hunting down of outbreaks with treatment, isolation, and more vaccinations.

But something has changed in the way U. S. society (and societies in many other Western countries) view experts and their opinions.  Maybe it started in the general 1960s rebellion against authority.  Granted, the 1950s were a little too conformist for many peoples' taste.  But most of what everybody knows is known by authority.  If we all had to learn our physics, chemistry, and mathematics from experience, most of us would never finish and we would be continually reinventing the wheel.  In case you hadn't noticed, one of the big differences between what G. K. Chesterton called "civilization versus savagery" is that civilization accumulates knowledge (and sometimes even wisdom), thus saving succeeding generations from the trouble and expense of figuring the world out all over again. 

With the advent of the Internet, this process became much easier.  Instead of shipping piles of paper around, we ship bits, which are much lighter.  So light, in fact, that any yahoo with a computer and Internet connection can set himself up as an authority and, once he finds the key phrases that trigger fears or anxieties enough to get his message to go viral, he can get more attention than those who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of expertise and truly know what they are talking about. 

I am sure that some of the parents of autistic children are entirely sincere in their belief that autism is caused by vaccinations.  But sincerity of belief on the part of individuals makes absolutely no difference to objective truth, which is true for everybody all the time.  That's what objective truth means.  Part of the problem is that for many people in advanced countries, the worst thing that's happened to them is not that bad compared to routine life occurrences that were common fifty or a hundred years ago.  I am old enough to recall the fear that every summer brought when a few kids in town would come down with polio.  That was banished with the polio vaccine, at least in the U. S.  But people who grow up protected by things that ward off terrible diseases, sometimes do not appreciate what the protection is doing for them, and are liable to throw it away if persuaded that along with the great but invisible good it does, the protection (e. g. MMR vaccines) is even suspected of doing some harm—especially if it is mysterious harm such as having a baby born with autism.

Engineers tend to think that logic reigns supreme, and if you just explain a thing to someone and make them see the logic in it, they'll automatically agree with you.  The ongoing controversy about autism and vaccines shows that this assumption is a bad one.  And wise engineers should be prepared to deal with the emotionality and, yes, even irrationality, of the public whenever their activities get into controversial areas.

Sources:  An online version of the article "New study finds no autism, vaccine link" by Nicole Villalpando of the Austin American-Statesman appeared on Mar. 5, 2019 at https://www.austin360.com/entertainmentlife/20190305/doctors-urge-tech-companies-to-stop-misinformation-as-new-study-finds-no-autism-vaccine-link.  I also referred to the CDC summary of the California measles outbreak at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6406a5.htm and the Wikipedia article on Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

Obama’s Brain Project: A Hall of Mirrors?

One of the famous line drawings of the artist M. C. Escher portrays a realistically drawn hand holding a pencil.  The line drawn by the pen turns out to be the cuff of a shirt sleeve, from which emerges a second hand. . . which grows out of the paper somehow and holds a pencil, whose line is the cuff of a shirt sleeve, from which emerges the first hand.  Escher’s “Drawing Hands” came to mind when I read of a planned initiative by the Obama administration to promote a decade-long project to map the human brain.

Officially, the project is still under wraps until the President announces his budget priorities later this month.  But according to a New York Times report by John Markoff, plans include increased federal funding for neurological research directed at mapping increasingly complex brains, ranging from those of a fruit fly up to the world’s smallest mammal, a type of shrew.  But the ultimate goal is to learn how essentially every neuron in the human brain is connected, and how the whole thing works:  a wiring diagram of the brain, if you will.  Hopes are that such knowledge could lead to new therapies for presently incurable brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

Inevitably, this project has been compared to the Human Genome Project, which was completed about a decade ago at a cost of under $4 billion.  Some estimates say that the information gained from that project has returned up to $140 for every dollar spent.  Aside from the purely economic results, the mapping of the human genome was a landmark scientific achievement in its own right, which has led to further questions and discoveries in an already burgeoning field.

Does the human-brain mapping project hold the same amount of promise, either economically or scientifically?  The first question that should be asked is, “Can it work?”  And some scientists are already voicing doubts.

Markoff quotes neuroscientist Donald G. Stein as saying, “I believe the scientific paradigm underlying this mapping project is, at best, out of date and at worst, simply wrong.”  Apparently, the old analogies of the brain as a massive kind of telephone switchboard, or even a “wet computer,” fail to capture essential aspects of an organism which can develop new neurons in response to external stimuli, and has recently proved to be much more plastic than earlier theories supposed.  To the extent that the project imposes an outdated brain model on researchers, it will not succeed.  But every researcher knows that what you say you are going to do in order to get research money, is not necessarily the thing you actually end up doing, so this concern is probably not as great as you might think.

What is of greater concern now is the question of basic feasibility.  When Dr. Rafael Yuste of Columbia University was asked at a September 2011 conference about what he would really like to be able to do with the brain, he replied, “I want to be able to record from every neuron in the brain at the same time.”  Simply storing the data that would result from such an instrument is a brain-boggling proposition.  One estimate is that you would need the data-storage equivalent of about 600 million hard drives the size of the one on my personal computer (500 gigabytes) to store all the neurological activity that goes on in only one brain for a year.  The next time you say “nothing’s on your mind,” think about that.

Of course, data storage has been getting more efficient for decades, and it will probably continue to do so for a while.  But storing the data is nowhere near as hard as obtaining it in the first place.  Right now, the only way to monitor individual brain neurons is to connect wires to them, which requires opening the skull.  There are various means to monitor the brain non-invasively, but at present they have a fairly poor resolution, on the order of a millimeter at best.  And there are thousands of neurons in each cubic millimeter of brain.  Futuristic plans to send molecule-size data recorders into the brain and record the results on DNA are still purely drawing-board notions, and it is not clear they will ever work.

When the Human Genome Project began, we knew that DNA sequencing was possible—it was just very slow and tedious.  Rapid advances in technology enabled the project to finish ahead of schedule.  It is by no means clear that massive monitoring of individual brain neurons is even theoretically possible.  And unmentioned so far is the question brought up by the Escher drawing:  can the brain really understand itself?  In particular, what would happen if Dr. Yuste gets his wish and one day he sits down at a computer monitor that shows him the output of his own brain in some meaningful way.  If you’ve ever pointed a TV camera at a monitor showing the camera’s own field of view, you have seen some weird patterns show up.  It’s not pleasant to contemplate what it might mean for your own brain to watch itself in action.

As with any great leap in scientific knowledge these days, the rationale for it is that it may lead to practical benefits such as cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s and autism.  While we can’t discount these possibilities, neither can we discount the notion that once it’s possible to exhaustively monitor the activity of the human brain, it may be possible to read thoughts in a way that would amount to the ultimate invasion of privacy.  At the very least, this possibility raises concerns that should be taken seriously.  So far, everyone whose brain has been monitored has given consent to the process, we hope.  But the molecule-size brain monitors could be delivered without the patient’s knowledge or consent. 

So far, this kind of thing is in the realm of science fiction rather than fact.  But before it becomes fact, let’s hope that we have a full public discussion of the potential downsides as well as the benefits of a map of the human brain, assuming such a thing is even possible.

Sources:  John Markoff’s article “Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain,” appeared in the online edition of the New York Times on Feb. 17, 2013, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/science/project-seeks-to-build-map-of-human-brain.html.  He followed it with an analysis piece on the same subject on Feb. 24 at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/science/proposed-brain-mapping-project-faces-significant-hurdles.html.  I relied on both of these pieces for this article.  The M. C. Escher work “Drawing Hands” can be viewed at http://kafee.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/drawing_hands.jpg