Altruism

On this beautiful, sunshiney Sunday, I was listening to an episode of Radio Lab on my roof while waiting for my clothes to dry. The show was on the science of doing good: for all of Charles Darwin's bleak, formulaic 'survival of the fittest' theories, how could science explain why people risk their lives for others? It was a good episode to take in with a healthy dose of vitamin D. It seems absurd and sterile to break down our altruistic instincts to science, but hey, that's science. Sometimes, after all, we just want to know why.

A scientist in the 70s created a formula relating why we're willing to risk our own survival for others. It breaks down, essentially, to Darwin's same theory: I'll risk my life for my sister because she's carrying 50 percent of my same genes. If she survives but I don't, 50 percent of my genes will still be carried on. So I'm four times more likely to help my sister than my cousin, and so fourth. It really all comes down to us trying to help ourselves out. Obviously that doesn't explain a lot of actions -- why strangers risk their lives for people they don't know. But it does give us a nice, clean answer. I guess that's what science is. And, along with my extreme distrust of bunsen burners, one of the reasons why I was never too interested in science. I love the magic of not knowing. Chalking it all up to goodness, or faith, or magic. I'm fairly certain magic is the only way to explain the Shazam app and microwave ovens.

I do think there have been a lot of dramatized, or even sitcomitized (stick with me) stories around whether all good deeds are truly selfish. I, for one, am not sure I think it matters. Does it matter if the only "real" reason I would do anything to protect my little sister is because of some deep desire to pass on my superawesome genes? Or if the reason I help a stranger with their luggage is so I feel better about myself? I mean, karma is a pretty selfish way of looking at things, in some ways, but its net result is a good one. Just because it all comes down to selfishness and science, doesn't mean it's any less valuable. Love, sex and family might all be about passing on my genes for future generations, but they're also what make this life worth living.

140 Characters

"I think the modern journalism today has made a bet economically on very quick, very short and very fast. And I think what we'll see over time is that people will realize the economics of that are not so good. if everyone tries to be short, quick and fastest ultimately the reader goes someplace else." Pro-Publica's Steve Engelberg



I just listened to an amazing interview discussing longform journalism on WNYC, which I'm including above.

In the interview, they talk about our shortened attention spans -- a result of the Internet: status updates and 140-character tweets. Is this the end of longform journalism? the interviewer inquires. It's amazing how much this question relates to something I wrote a couple of years ago on here (and this was the days before Twitter was as ubiquitous as it is now). I am by no means anti-blogging -- wouldn't that be an ironic stance to make in a blog? Nor am I anti Twitter, Facebook, Gawker, Huffington Post, nor any other aggregator or blog out there. At least not officially. I think a lot of blogs, reporting in real time as events occur, are doing important, amazing work. And it's not easy work, either. But the bottom line for me is my heart belongs to longform. To the in-depth, literary-style pieces you find in the New Yorker. The articles written by Atul Gawande or Susan Orlean or Joan Didion or Jon Krakauer... those are the pieces I'm drawn to. And they're important. A lot has been written about the 24-hour news cycle and its impact on the future of journalism. But what if this "what's next. what's next. what's next"-style causes journalism to lose all analysis? All reflection? What if it's all reduced to a tweet: "Statement of Event. Snarky reaction. #Categorizing hashtag." in 140 characters.

After the revolution in Egypt, I saw several blog posts (several is an understatement here) giving themselves a big old pat on the back for their great work. This was the great victory of the Internet! While newspapers still had the stale front page headline that Mubarak was refusing to resign, Twitter and the blogosphere knew he'd stepped down. All hail the great Internet.

But while this was true - while the bloggers hashed out every last breaking detail - I saw very little analysis in any blog pieces written. And how could they? These are writers who are being paid for each click and page view and to pump out as many stories as they can (at least in most cases). They are working so quickly and so diligently to cover the news as it happens that they can't reflect on what it means. There are also blogs that are all analysis and editorial -- the aggregators. But to invest in both the extensive reporting and analysis of an indepth piece is an entirely different beast. Longform journalism is expensive. In the interview, they talk about some articles costing a half a million dollars. Research and time are real investments, and someone has to pay for them. Otherwise I believe the loss of longform journalism will come at a real cost to our society. Or at least to me at the 40 other luddites out there.

The Hot Spotters: Thesis

"The critical flaw in our healthcare system...is that it was never designed for the kind of patients who incur the highest costs. Medicine's primary mechanism of service is the doctor visit and the E.R. visit. (Americans make more than a billion such visits each year according to the Centers for Disease Control.) For a thirty-year-old with a fever, a twenty minute visit to the doctor's office may be just the thing. For a pedestrian hit by a minivan, there's nowhere better than an emergency room. But these institutions are vastly inadequate for people with complex problems: the forty-year-old with drug and alcohol addiction; the eighty-four-year-old with advanced Alzheimer's disease and pneumonia; the sixty-year-old with heart failure, obesity, gout, a bad memory for his eleven medications, and half a dozen specialists recommending different tests and procedures. It's like arriving at a major construction project with nothing but a screwdriver and a crane."

- From Atul Gawande's "The Hot Spotters", The New Yorker 1-24-11