Rishon Rishon

The Spice of Life

Diversity is the spice of life, I really feel that way - I enjoy diversity. But it's also useful. Diversity is the enabler of creativity, and creativity is the long-term insurance policy not just for our progress, but even for our continued existence as a species. Without diversity, eventually some circumstance will arise that will wipe us out entirely. With enough diversity, at least some will always survive.

Whenever I think of the benefits of diversity, I always think of the revolutionary discovery that 90% of stomach ulcers are NOT caused by stress, but by infection:

In 1983, Marshall presented his hypothesis to an international meeting of distinguished specialists in infectious disease. Many of the scientists and physicians attending the meeting were shocked by the notion that bacteria cause gastritis and stomach ulcers. Marshall's ideas seemed to be the reckless notions of a scientific upstart. Attributing gastritis or ulcers to a bacterial infection seemed outlandish. Martin Blaser of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee–a leading American researcher in infectious disease–called Marshall's ideas "preposterous."

The result - Marshall was ostracized, and driven to extreme action:

The reluctance of his colleagues to accept the idea that H. pylori causes ulcers provoked Marshall to act. Intent on proving his point, he made himself the guinea pig. Marshall prepared a broth of active H. pylori and drank it.

"Those were frustrating times for me," Marshall recalled in a recent interview. "Most of the experts believed that the presence of H.pylori in those who turned up with ulcer problems was just a coincidence. I planned to give myself an ulcer, then treat myself, to prove that H. pylori can be a pathogen in normal people. I thought about it for a few weeks, then decided to just do it. Luckily, I only developed a temporary infection."

That "temporary infection" gave Marshall stomach pain, nausea, and vomiting–classic symptoms of gastritis or the early signs of an ulcer. While he was ill, he underwent an endoscopy, a procedure in which a doctor uses a flexible fiber-optic tube with a tiny video camera on the end to examine the inside of the digestive tract.

Within a week after ingesting the H. pylori, Marshall's stomach showed marked inflammation, with crowds of the distinctive spiral bacteria hovering around the areas of inflammation.

And what if Marshall had been wrong? Does that mean that we shouldn't have funded his projects?

Amritas has been poking fun lately at some wacky educational institutions. While I don't disagree with his opinions of them, I take a somewhat more benevolent point of view: If this is the price of diversity, I'm for it. Of course, the problem is that educational institutions are NOT diverse. What we see is what happens when the government, or any small clique, gets to decide what kinds of diversity are legitimate. It reminds me of this disgusting work of "art" - courtesy of a Swedish government-funded art museum.

What the article linked above doesn't say is that Sweden has an anti-hate-speech law! So what is hate speech? Evidently glorifying Jew-killers, smiling while floating in a pool of blood, is not. In 1986 Sweden's prime minister was assassinated. I wonder what Swedes would think if an Israeli museum exhibited a similar work of "art" - but with Olof Palme's killer floating in the middle of a pool of blood? The fact that Sweden has anti-hate-speech laws effectively puts Sweden's stamp of approval on speech that it doesn't outlaw.

Not that I have any easy solutions to the problem, in the case of academia. (I have one for hate-speech laws: get rid of them.) Of course, a libertarian would advocate ending public funding of education and research altogether. But in addition to equity issues, I think these things have positive externalities, meaning that they benefit the general public in a way which doesn't automatically result (in a totally free economy) in rewards to the participants. I wonder what would happen if there were a voucher-system for university funding, and anyone could open a new university with a minimum of bureaucratic red-tape? In such a case students themselves would decide who gets funded by voting with their feet. Certainly there would be a lot more institutions of the kind that Amritas ridicules, but probably there would be a lot more quality institutions too. If so, I think it's worth it.

And sometimes, wacky ideas turn out to be right.