LINKS - February 23rd, 2022
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Separate Fidelities
“Earlier, when Kevin had replied to my email for this job, I had lied and said I had ‘some experience.’ How hard could interpreting be? I was perfectly capable of speaking both languages. Yet half an hour in, I felt my mind exploding inside. Years later, when I heard about an interpreter at the United Nations collapsing out of exhaustion during a long speech given by a foreign government official, my amusement was tinged with deep sympathy. What was it about the practice of interpretation that makes the brain so tired and tense? Paying so much attention to other people’s words so you can memorize and articulate their words in another language with precision? I had always thought that the strenuous part was the translation, switching the hearing and speaking channels back and forth and correlating our thinking and talking in a short amount of time. But now, when no one expected me to interpret simultaneously nor with absolute accuracy, my anxiety came from elsewhere—not only did I interpret Mr. Chen and Joan’s conversations, I tried to create conversations for them. The circumstances made my role more than a language interpreter: I was a mediator.”
How to support a struggling friend
“Research shows that many people don’t really know what works best to help their friends effectively. Moreover, the support we do provide, such as giving advice, is often ineffective. Part of the challenge is that there are just so many possible ways to intervene. A survey of the methods that people used to manage their friends’ emotions identified 378 distinct strategies, including allowing the other person to vent their emotions, acting silly to make the other person laugh, and helping to rationalise the other person’s decisions. Given this large variety of strategies, it’s no wonder that deciding what to do when you have a friend in tears can be a little overwhelming.”
How the brain curbs overeating
By Diana Kwon, Scientific American
“People with a rare genetic disorder known as Prader-Willi syndrome never feel full, and this insatiable hunger can lead to life-threatening obesity. Scientists studying the problem have now found that the fist-shaped structure known as the cerebellum—which had not previously been linked to hunger—is key to regulating satiation in those with this condition.”
Could ancient viruses from melting permafrost cause the next pandemic?
By Michael Marshall, New Scientist
“During the meeting, Alexander Volkovitskiy from the Russian Academy of Sciences recounted an alarming incident. It took place in 2016 on the Yamal peninsula on Russia’s northern coast where local people herd hundreds of thousands of reindeer. That summer, temperatures were unseasonably warm and some of the permafrost thawed. The bacterium that causes anthrax – which had been present on the peninsula for over a century – emerged from the soil and spread like wildfire. Before the outbreak was brought under control, more than 2000 reindeer had perished. Dozens of people also caught the disease, including an unnamed boy who died.
The Altruistic Killer
By Sam Atis, All That Is Solid
“Suppose that there is a person who enjoys finding homeless people on the streets without friends or family and murdering them. But then imagine that this serial killer feels guilty about his actions, and decides to offset his killings by donating so much money to charity so to save as many people as he killed (if you think there are large negative consequences of murdering people as such that an equal number of lives saved is not a full offset, imagine that he saves the lives of many more people than he killed so as to make the sum of his actions utility-neutral). It doesn’t seem like many people would argue that these offsets make the Altruistic Killer’s life morally comparable to the life of someone who neither kills nor donates.”