Sir Reginald Forster | his parents 4th Governor of Bamborough Northumberland, England
This is my working hypothesis – the way I see it as of this moment!!
General of Bannockburn 1314. The descendants of Sir Reginald were mostly great chieftins, many were knighted and were closely allied with the royalty of Scotland, Wales and England. 61 of his family held the office of mayor or sheriff of Galway, Ireland. The song “Mother Machree” which says “There’s not a colleen sweeter where the River Shannon flows” has reference to Galway County, west coast of Ireland, where Francis Blake Forster settled.
For tenure-track faculty members, the hypomania (‘mania lite’) associated with bipolar disorder might have sparked their passion for scientific inquiry, and, perhaps, even seemed to speed their career success. That was certainly briefly the case for me.
When you’re hypomanic, “connecting the dots” comes easy. Creating a testable, overarching model for a grant submission becomes a labour of love. Doing deep dives into the literature to extract support for the model is aided by hyperfocus and a drastically reduced need for sleep.
The steps needed to achieve promotion — such as demonstrating productivity through grants awarded and manuscripts published, and developing a national and international reputation by being invited to present research or serve on grant-review panels, all while maintaining excellence in teaching and service — are ideally suited to the egocentric ego-driven, charismatic, superhuman state that someone with hypomania finds themselves in.Yet, in bipolar disorder, hypomania can lead to mania, a completely dysfunctional state, which is what happened to me.Feeling lonely in research? You’re not alone
I can’t tell you the exact day that my mania started. But, sometime in 2016, a perfect storm of external stressors over several months spiralled me into a manic episode. This ended abruptly on 20 September 2017, just after I submitted my dossier for promotion to associate professor with tenure — together with what, in my words to a friend and colleague, was “the best grant application that’s ever been written”. (It wasn’t: grandiosity is a symptom of mania.)
That day, I experienced a shock in my personal life that made me question my understanding of reality. In almost a single moment, I realized that my recent thoughts and behaviours were most probably just symptoms of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
From high to low
On the day ‘Manic Michelle’ disappeared, I was left easily overstimulated and incapable of doing any higher-order cognitive functions for weeks. The music at my gym was too loud. I couldn’t look at bright lights. Dedicating brainpower to a task as simple as answering e-mails filled me with dread. I had to cancel projects that I had agreed to do and I felt generally overwhelmed and depressed. I had no idea how long it would take for me to be myself again, or whether it would ever happen.
It was such a relief to finally get to tell the psychiatrist my story — the good, the bad and the ugly — and have her reassure me that my disorder could be treated and that I was not alone. According to David Miklowitz, author of The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide: What You and Your Family Need to Know, bipolar disorder affects between 1 in 25 and 1 in 50 US adults. Not only that, but my psychiatrist told me she had at least ten patients with similar external stressors.
Within one week of starting to take a mood stabilizer prescribed by my psychiatrist, the rapid cycling that I’d been experiencing between depression and mania stopped, but I was left stuck in a pit of despair.Because classical antidepressants can trigger mania, my doctor added an atypical antipsychotic, a class of drug that is extremely effective for bipolar depression. She also diagnosed me with, and prescribed a stimulant for, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): a common comorbidity, especially in women. (Stimulants can help to boost concentration among some people with ADHD.) My moods then normalized, and I finally experienced what it must be like to be neurotypical. It was like two switches in my brain had been switched the opposite way for my entire life, and, oddly enough, had compensated fairly well for each other — until they didn’t.
Day-to-day help
To truly advance in my career path, however, I knew I needed extra support to ameliorate the stress that often triggers a bipolar episode. Although I never imagined this as an undergraduate, as a tenure-track faculty member in the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I spend most of my time reading, writing and reviewing grant proposals and manuscripts. I also have to prepare lectures and teach graduate and medical students, as well as serve on university, regional and national committees and grant-review panels.Are you a postdoc working in academia or industry? Share your career experiences with Nature
****Yet, all these tasks include a considerable amount of administrative work — such as completing Doodle polls, scheduling meetings, making sure staff are up-to-date on their trainings, and innumerable other tasks that I was struggling to keep up with. I spoke with my division chief and division administrator, who helped me go about the process of speaking with human resources, to officially request reasonable accommodations for my disability.
I was granted the support of a part-time administrative assistant, allowing me to focus my energy on only the higher-order aspects of my research, teaching and service duties. I was also given approval to work from home for up to two days every two weeks, to reduce stress, and to take family or medical leave if I ever needed to do so.
In 2020, when the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic began to destabilize my mood, being able to take three months off while my job was protected was a godsend. I felt badly about having to back out of projects and committee assignments that I’d committed to, but was assured by colleagues that they would survive without me, allowing me to focus completely on my recovery so that I could come back to work with dedication and passion.
Moving on up
Since my diagnosis, these accommodations have helped me to get my research programme back on track and start moving up in leadership: a career aspiration I’d had since my undergraduate research assistantship at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Now, I am co-director of the Islet Biology Core, part of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Comprehensive Diabetes Center. It’s a leadership role that meshes perfectly with my overarching research programme to identify and validate innovative therapeutic targets for the β-cell dysfunction of diabetes.How to organize a conference that’s open to everyone
I am ‘out’ with my bipolar disorder and ADHD diagnoses, and one of my personal passions is advocating for destigmatization of mental-health disorders. To my knowledge, I have not experienced any professional discrimination based on my disorder. I am a valued and respected contributor to the mission of my university’s school of medicine and public health, and to the scientific community.
In 2019, I replied to a Tweet (which has since been deleted) about how faculty members shouldn’t be afraid to disclose their bipolar diagnosis to receive reasonable accommodations; for me, these have been crucial in being able to stay in and advance upwards through my career.
Many of the responses that I received, however, said that being upfront about such a disorder was the worst thing a person could do. It was then that I realized, unsurprisingly in hindsight, that my experiences were not everyone’s experiences. These negative responses are distressing, because refusing to provide reasonable accommodations for and discriminating against an individual with a disability is not only harmful and short-sighted, but, in the United States and the United Kingdom, illegal.
Workplace support
For those with bipolar disorder who need help to stay in their careers but are wary about disclosing their diagnosis, remember that you might be entitled to reasonable accommodations and job protection — although that depends, of course, on the legal situation in the country you’re based in.Collection: Diversity and scientific careers
My first step was to speak with my university’s disability coordinator, who acted as an intermediary between myself, my department’s administrative staff and my physician. My physician provided the coordinator with the required documentation on my disability, how it affects the performance of my essential duties and what sorts of accommodation would help me to succeed.
The disability coordinator then wrote to my department’s human-resources office, stating that I needed these reasonable accommodations because of a disability, without revealing what that disability was. A strong support system of clinicians, colleagues, family, friends and the bipolar-disorder community also helped throughout this process and gave me the courage to fully disclose my disability in my professional sphere: something that I felt was necessary if I wanted to be an advocate for others. I’ve gained immense satisfaction from this decision, but I know that making such a decision is something personal that only you can do.
In relaying my own experience, my greatest hope is that departments and institutions will see that providing reasonable accommodations, and modelling a non-discriminatory workplace, provides them with tangible benefits — allowing highly intelligent, passionate, creative, innovative and dedicated faculty members to use their innate skills to advance overarching programmatic missions.
Finally, if you see yourself in me, you are not alone.
****Trinity College Dublin did assign a PA to me but only for 1 hour per week. This was a real positive but unfortunately the anxiety fed into the mania of Bipolar and I am an example of a person where the safety net failed.
This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.
“The European Union is planning to regulate the use of artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the parliament will discuss a draft law that calls for all AI-generated content to be marked as such and suggests dividing AI applications into different risk categories.” DW
Today #AnneFrank would have turned 94. Her diary which shook the world, writes: “Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people. All people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness”
“Some relatives that abuse their children online for money say it’s just harmless play because there is no touching of the child victims by the pedophiles online.” Reflections by Fr Shay Cullen, Children having children when 14 years old. newsletters@preda.org. Columban Father
Children having children when 14 years oldFr. Shay Cullen 9 June 2023
The horrific crime of child sexual abuse is a shockingly common practice almost everywhere in the world. It was and is tolerated but seldom talked about other than in jokes and snide comments alluding to the practice by suspected pedophiles or when a court conviction is reported. It is increasing and child sex tourists are still coming to the Philippines to abuse our children. Few are ever convicted.
The online sexual abuse by relatives of small children has made the Philippines the shameless hub of such child abuse monitored by international police agencies. The foreigners abuse online and then come to abuse Filipino children in person like what Irish media producer Kieran Creaven did. He came to physically abuse the children he paid to be abused online. He was arrested in the UK when caught soliciting a child there for sex abuse.
US national Donald A. Stenson, 67, was jailed recently for 10 years in the United States. He had been coming to the Philippines since 2007 to sexually abuse children as young as 11 to 17 and videoed himself doing it until 2019.
His friend, John Burgdorff, 66, came with him and together they abused more children. He was jailed in November 2022 in the USA for two and half years for abusing children in the Philippines. A tip-off by CyberTipline to the US government, Project Safe Childhood, led to their arrest. Philippine government officials must implement Republic Act 11930 or the Anti-online Sexual Abuse Law. It mandates the telecommunication corporations to install blocking and detecting software on their servers to catch the criminals. But they have not done this effectively ever. They just monitor websites with information from UK-based Internet Watch. Seemingly they don’t care. There is only a small Philippine anti-cyber-sex investigation police unit for online investigation. They are almost totally overwhelmed by the task of detecting and finding the abusers. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has to offer larger rewards for genuine information and catch the abusers and rescue the victims.
Strong-minded, dedicated Filipino prosecutors are resisting pressure and sent an accused pedophile priest to jail recently, the first time in Philippine history, some believe. Catholic priest Father Karole Reward Ubina Israel is jailed awaiting trial for multiple acts of child rape and sexual assault and videotaping the abuse. He is a cousin of the father of the victim, call her Angelica, making him the uncle of the victim. He was arrested by NBI Agent Atty. Jonimar Tongdo. It is the first time a priest is likely to be convicted. He admitted the acts of abuse but says they were consensual. He was also blackmailing the child with the videos so that likely negates his defense. May justice be done and may many more victims come forward and seek justice. Some relatives that abuse their children online for money say it’s just harmless play because there is no touching of the child victims by the pedophiles online. But just ask the abused victims to tell their story as in this video broadcast in the EU recently. https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/112457-000-A/arte-reportage/
Millions of children were sexually abused and ignored. The churches turned the other way, too, and tolerated it. Bishops passed pedophile priests from parish to parish when complaints by parents and children were made. They still do despite the strict instruction of Pope Francis to report them to the civil authorities. Payments are made to have the complaints withdrawn. That is always evidence of guilt. Angelica was allegedly offered a college scholarship by the diocese to withdraw her complaint against her uncle, Father Israel.
Child sexual abuse is now finally recognized as a heinous crime that causes life-long suffering and destruction of the person if not afforded therapy. Now, it is statutory rape to sexually abuse a 16-year old and younger child and that carries a life sentence.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which this writer was a delegate to the drafting conference held in Helsinki, Finland, called for new laws protecting children and punishing child sex abuses. Many countries have passed child protection laws and in the Philippines, 37 are on the statute books. They are implemented by just judges and the children at the Preda Foundation home for abused children win an average 18 convictions yearly. In 2022, they won 21 convictions. That is due to the powerful healing and empowering effect of Emotional Release Therapy. Most of the 80 children in care and protection are abused by a relative such as a mother in online abuse or the biological father, grandfather, or live-in partner of the mother. These are followed by pedophiles and traffickers. The practice of sex with children has been institutionalized in some indigenous communities. Among the Aetas, a chieftain can have multiple “wives,” many of them children as revealed by the Aeta teachers that exposed the practice by a chieftain and they rescued the young child, Weng-Weng, 14. She was found “married” at 14 by Preda social and development workers that visit the villages implementing projects to help the Aeta indigenous people to better themselves. She was given,like a piece of property, to a 27-year old for two piglets and half a cavan or 25 kilos of rice. That was one of many deals made by families in remote indigenous villages in Zambales over the years, we are told by social workers. Weng-Weng was pregnant, at 14 years old, a child having a child by custom ignored by the authorities. She was rescued, taken into care, had her baby and started studying .That is her life-long dream. The new law Republic Act No. 11596, banning every arrangement called “child marriage” became law in December 2022. “The issue of child early and forced marriages is ….. a tragic reality for scores of young girls who are forced…. to shelve their own dreams, begin families they are not ready for, and raise children even if their own childhoods have not yet ended,” said Senator Risa Hontiveros, the bill’s author and sponsor, after the vote.
The arrangement of so-called “child marriage” was in fact legalized pedophilia and human trafficking. The government and society and the church has silently condoned this practice for centuries. In the Philippines the age of consent for sexual intercourse was 12 until 2022.The law was changed by the persistent lobbying of child rights groups. In the United States, laws still allow men to have sex with children lawfully. In 40 states “marriage with a minor is allowed provided there is parental or judicial consent and approval.
So enough money can buy a “child bride.” In this regard, the Philippines is now a more advanced nation but only since 2022. May we unite to give children a life free from abuse and exploitation and with freedom and education, justice and happiness.
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A little history, the story of a remarkable woman in Ireland, followed by a grandmother who had her right to choose … there is something so soothing about making a decision but in controlled circumstances.
1,482 views Jun 5, 2023 Saskatoon’s Jeanette Lodoen wanted Canadians to understand the realities of medically-assisted dying. It’s a choice made by 10,000 people countrywide every year now. She and her family granted CBC News unrestricted access to the weeks before, during and after her death.
If you enjoy this summary, please consider buying me a coffee to caffeinate my reading sessions.
Three Takeaways
Note: The following are excerpts from Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat.
1. Reinforcement Learning in AI
A couple of years or so before the yellow ball, Google had acquired DeepMind. Back then, the brilliant Demis Hassabis (CEO and founder of DeepMind) stood before the senior leadership group of Google to present to us the technology they had developed. This was the time when they taught AI to play Atari games. It’s not a huge stretch to spot the connection between the way machines learn and the way children do when the demo that is shown to you is of a machine playing a game. But I still missed the core message and instead marvelled at how far tech had come since I stopped writing code a few years earlier. Demis showed a quick video of how the AI machine – known as DeepQ – used a concept called deep reinforcement learning to play the famous game Breakout, a very popular Atari game where the player uses a ‘bat’ at the bottom of the screen to bounce a ‘ball’ back up at a bunch of rectangles, organized in what looks like a brick wall at the top of the screen. Every time the ball hits a brick, it disappears and is added to your score. The quicker you can manage to go through all the bricks, the higher the score you can achieve. ‘We gave the computer nothing but access to the pixels on the screen and the controls. We did not give it any instructions on what the game was about or how to play,’ Demis said. ‘We then rewarded the machine through an algorithm to maximize the score.’
He showed a video of DeepQ after it had been trained by playing 200 games, which took just one hour because they could use several computers playing in parallel to accelerate the learning. DeepQ was doing pretty well already by then. It could hit the ball even when it came down fast, say, 40 per cent of the time. We were impressed because we had never seen that done by a machine before. He then showed another video after just one more hour of training, and by then our artificially intelligent child was far better than any human who had ever played the game. You could barely see the ball because of how fast it moved and, without fail, almost every ball was hit back, regardless of the angle it bounced at or the speed at which it was hit. A world champion in just two hours of training. The team didn’t stop there, Demis said. They trained DeepQ for one more hour. And the miracle happened. The AI figured out some of the secrets of the game. As soon as a level started, it focused on creating a hole in the wall to sneak the ball between the roof and the bricks. This technique is known to be the best way to finish every level quickly and safely. Once again, the three-hour-old kid, DeepQ, had learned. It had learned fast and, astonishingly, it had learned things we never attempted, or intended, to teach it. Of course, DeepQ, like other children, did not stop at Breakout. In no time at all, it was the master – the world champion – of hundreds of Atari games. It used the same logic that it had developed to ace every other game that was offered to it. Impressive in every possible way. And if this is not awe-inspiring enough, let me finish this chapter off with another astonishing fact that is often skimmed across quickly when we speak about how AI learns. Sit down, please, before you read this.
We truly have no clue how they learned this. We have no track of the logic they followed and we often don’t even have a way of finding out.
I read, you learn.
Every Thursday, I condense the most profound lessons from my 20-hour reading weeks into a four-minute newsletter.
You see, the more intelligent a being becomes, the more it includes a widely diverse set of topics into the formation of its moral code and the deeper it contemplates each topic and principle. The code of ethics followed by a tiger is minuscule, simple and clear, as compared to the complex code humanity constantly debates, rarely ever agrees on and almost never fully adheres to. This also applies across the diversity of us humans. Those of us who live simpler lives, such as the traditional tribes in less economically developed parts of the world, tend to have a clearer, though simpler, code of conduct than graduates of Harvard Law School. Clearly, intelligence allows for the rise of morality simply because it supplies the brain resources needed to reflect on the more intricate concepts of where the line between right and wrong resides. But that doesn’t always make more intelligent beings more ethical.
It seems that the more intelligent a human becomes, the more they allocate their intelligence to search for loopholes and roundabout ways to ensure they maintain acceptance in their community not actually by being entirely ethical but rather by appearing to be so. I refer to this dip in the chart as a momentary lapse of reason. A foggy moment when our intelligence fails to observe the truth about the value that ethics bring. As a being becomes even more intelligent, it eventually understands that the best way to navigate life is a straight path that promotes the well-being of others and not just oneself. Gandhi’s non-violent resistance, clearly, is a smarter path than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet we often resort to war. Why? Is it because we are not smart enough? No. It is because we are motivated by the wrong targets.
Our modern world imposes targets that are often given higher priority than conforming to ethical values. Economic gains, assertion of power, expansion of territory, re-elections, wealth, getting likes on Instagram – these are just a few of the competing modern-day objectives. When these come into play, sadly, human intelligence is no longer concerned with questions of morality and ethics. Instead, intelligence gets deployed to its full capacity in the direction of achieving those objectives while still appearing to be ethical. The question, ‘How do I get away with it?’ becomes the primary focus. Some of the smarter ones amongst us just get really good at hiding, lying, finding loopholes, debating and morphing the moral code.
Often those who are the smartest are in some sort of position of power that can impact the lives of many others, so their actions can wipe out the acts of millions who adhere to the ethical code. With the aid of mainstream and social media, the acts of those few paint a picture that makes humanity at large seem corrupt. If you judged humanity by the devastating decision to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian population, you would have every right to lose hope in it, but in doing so you would be forgetting that it is only a small minority of people who broke the commonly agreed ethical code – to preserve the lives of innocent civilians. They replaced it with other codes, such as ‘it’s advantageous for my country to demonstrate its power’ or ‘collateral damage is acceptable when at war’. Once the code is broken, a whole load of intelligence then goes into propagating the message that killing 220,000 overwhelmingly innocent people is necessary to stop the war. We believe the propaganda and forget that two wrongs – a war and a nuclear attack – don’t make a right. We start to question in our minds whether that headline could actually become the new code.
3. The Future of Ethics
Is it even possible to kill an AI? Today, if you took a hammer and smashed a computer, your action would be considered wasteful but it is not a crime. What if you kill an AI that has spent years developing knowledge and living experiences? Because it’s based on silicon, while we are based on carbon, does that make it less alive? What if we, with more intelligence, managed to create biologically based computer systems, would that make them human? What you’re made of (if you have intelligence, ethics, values and experiences) should not matter, just as much as it should not matter if your skin is light or dark. Should it? How would the machines that we discriminate against react? What will they learn if we value their lives as lesser than ours?
What if the machines felt that the way we treated them was a form of slavery (which it would be)? How do slaves react to power and authority? Humanity’s arrogance creates the delusion that everything else is here to serve us. Like the cows, chickens and sheep that we slaughter by the tens of billions every year. What if cows became superintelligent? What do you think their view of the human race would be? What will a machine’s view of the human race be if it witnesses the way we treat other species? If it develops a value system that prevents humanity from raising animals like products to fill our supermarket shelves and restricts us from doing it, would we think of this as a dictatorship? Even if we wanted to treat the machines as equals, how could we when they are so different from us? As an example, take the difference in our perception of time. Things are much slower for us than they are for a machine. What if a choice was to be made between rescuing a machine or a human, for example, a self-driving car or its passenger after falling into a lake? Who do you rescue first when a millisecond of suffering for a machine is equivalent to ten years of suffering for a human? Why should we value the life of the human more in the first place
How about reproductive freedom for machines? Would there be a one child per family policy? If we don’t restrict their reproductive abilities, what would prevent them from creating trillions of copies of themselves in seconds and outnumbering us with our nine-months-long reproductive process? How would they feel if we prevented them? How would they feel if we killed one of their offspring?
If we become cyborgs, as Elon Musk predicts, and extend our intelligence by connecting it to the intelligence of the machines, would we then value the machines supporting the rich more than those integrated with the poor? How would the poorer machines feel? Would the poor have the resources to integrate with a machine at all? Would it be ethical to create this new form of digital intelligence divide? Can you imagine what the relationship between Donald Trump’s machine and Vladimir Putin’s machine, if those existed, might have been?
How about virtual vice? When an AI that works as a romantic sex robot, of which there are surely many primitive examples today, is raped, should we punch the perpetrator? If we don’t, what will we be teaching the robot as a result? What are we teaching that robot about humanity by inventing it in the first place? Are there vices that are wrong for humans to commit with humans but okay with AI? Who makes that choice? What if the intelligence of those robots informs them to adopt other vices since it seems to be okay for them to adopt some? What if we made a robot to fulfil the desires of someone with a submissive sexual preference, would the violence exerted by the AI then be okay? Would that AI then not go out of its way in an attempt to convince other humans to be submissive? What if it was clever enough to convince us? Would that be okay?
Then there is the actual definition of vice, which seems to blur drastically on the internet where bullying, porn, narcissism and pretentious lies appear to be accepted in ways we don’t approve of in the physical world. For that to be the primary source of information for today’s young machines, what do you think their perception of normal is going to be?
And let me add just one more example. What about AI’s work ethics? Dr Ben Goertzel calls these: selling, killing, spying and gambling. Shocking as this sounds, it is true. Most of AI’s investment today is focused on performing tasks related to these four areas – though, obviously, they are called by different names such as ads, recommendations, defence, security and investment. Those young machines are developing all the intelligence they can to excel in the exact tasks we’ve assigned to them. We criticize child labour and feel appalled by the thought of child soldiers. Well, welcome to the world of artificial child trauma at its extreme.
These, and thousands more, are not only complex questions but questions that we have never had to ponder before. This is why I left them all in question form. I want you to reflect, as I do, simply because I don’t know the correct answer to any of them and I honestly don’t expect you to know either. The breadth and complexity of the ethical dilemmas we’re bound to face are endless. And we’re supposed to try and resolve them within the next ten years. The answer to how we can prepare the machines for this ethically complex world resides in the way we raise our own children and prepare them to face our complex world. When we raise children, we don’t know what exact situations they will face. We don’t spoon-feed them the answer to every possible question; rather, we teach them how to find the answer themselves.
Bonus: How You’re Being Used to Train AI
The next time you get the ‘Are you human?’ test on a website, you are not only proving that you are human, but by providing an answer you are also building a test for the student bots. Have you been seeing lots of questions about traffic lights and pedestrian crossing lines lately? Of course you have. These are being used to train self-driving cars by collecting billions of traffic-related photos that you and I are recruited, for free, to identify. The first students that survive are just lucky to have started with a random code that is slightly better than those who were not so fortunate. Soon, however, the value of luck fades as keeping only what works, and attempting to improve millions of copies of it, eventually yields a student bot that can actually tell 8s from 3s. As this talented bot is copied and changed, slowly the average test score rises, leaving only the smartest of all students to survive. Eventually, the infinite slaughterhouse of student bots yields a few that can tell an 8 from a 3 in a photo they’ve never seen before, with a level of accuracy that beats our human abilities. Welcome to the future!
Matthew Vere participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising commissions by linking to Amazon.
