I previously linked to a lecture by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, on how human brains kind of suck when it comes to modern decision making. It was a good lecture, and provided an interesting hypothesis, based on evolutionary and functional reasoning that suggested why humans repeatedly make stupid decisions. Well, now he's written an editorial for the LATimes explaining how we'll never react to global warming because it's not as immediately threatening to us as gay sex. That will make more sense after you read the article. Anyway, here are the four reasons he cites people will never be able to wrap their brains around the problem of global warming.

First, global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to - what they know and want, what they are doing and planning - has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. We think about people and their intentions; talk about them; look for and remember them.

That's why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.
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The second reason why global warming doesn't put our brains on orange alert is that it doesn't violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn't cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn't force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain's call to action.
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The third reason why global warming doesn't trigger our concern is that we see it as a threat to our futures - not our afternoons. Like all animals, people are quick to respond to clear and present danger, which is why it takes us just a few milliseconds to duck when a wayward baseball comes speeding toward our eyes.
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We haven't quite gotten the knack of treating the future like the present it will soon become because we've only been practicing for a few million years. If global warming took out an eye every now and then, OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence.

There is a fourth reason why we just can't seem to get worked up about global warming. The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser.

Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly. The density of Los Angeles traffic has increased dramatically in the last few decades, and citizens have tolerated it with only the obligatory grumbling. Had that change happened on a single day last summer, Angelenos would have shut down the city, called in the National Guard and lynched every politician they could get their hands on.

Environmentalists despair that global warming is happening so fast. In fact, it isn't happening fast enough. If President Bush could jump in a time machine and experience a single day in 2056, he'd return to the present shocked and awed, prepared to do anything it took to solve the problem..

I think he has a point, and it fits in nicely with his lecture we discussed before.

The second thinker I'd like to get peoples' opinions on is Daniel Easterly, a critic of international aid distribution from whom I've now read a few good articles. His thesis is pretty simple, and imminently reasonable to someone who likes the current structure of the NIH and the investigator-driven RO1 grant as the engine of science. I summarize as follows:

1. Aid distribution to foreign countries is ineffective a majority of the time
   
2. It is ineffective because the countries most in need are usually run by crooks and thieves who essentially steal everything from their people.
   
3. We do not require assessments of performance from our donations, therefore, little follow-up or adjustment of aid occurs when it all get stolen by these assholes. (assessments do come but usually from middle management types in the NGOs and UN who don't have high expectations to start with)
   
4. Even if the money isn't stolen, it is administered ineffectively from a top-down approach that often doesn't adequately address the needs of the recipient (see our current idiotic anti-HIV abstinence program)
   
5. The net result is a decrease in interest in foreign aid and donation because it is seen as fruitless.

I think he has a point, and I really like his solution. Basically, stop the top down initiatives (the equivalent to Elias Zerhouni's NIH roadmap) and get back to basics. He says, down with Utopianism, a word that appropriately connotates the mixture of naivete and failure that infects our current policies. Develop a system (as I see it) more like the NIH, that funds proposals, assessed results, then decides to continue to fund, or halt funding based on success. He cites numerous examples of effective programs that should be expanded and funded that instead disappear as the general funding is cut from generalized failure of aid. Overall, we are capable of helping and improving the lives of the world's poor, we're just going about it all wrong. Anyway, he comes across as a bit of a market fanatic, and you can even smell a stink of libertarianism in there, but I don't think he should be dismissed as such, because what I see most importantly in his ideas is that of an emphasis on empirical testing. Fund what works, cut what doesn't. Don't decrease aid, just demand more from it. Is that too simplistic as others have suggested? Or could it be the basis for a new system of distributing charity?

Finally, in what might be excellent news for the poor, especially in Malaria-infested areas of the world, some Johns Hopkins researchers may have found a new treatment in astemizole a cheap, off-patent antihistamine.