科学的退化 Scientific Regress 作者:William A. Wilson @ 2016-05 译者:小聂(@PuppetMaster) 校对:龙泉 来源:First Things,https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress The problem with science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. 科学研究的问题在于，它们中的很大一部分其实根本不科学。去年夏天，开放科学合作组织（OSC）宣布他们曾试图重复100个选自三本行业权威杂志上的心理学实验。科学论断建基于这样一个观念：在几乎相同的条件下重复实验，其结果也应该相同。但是直到最近为止，此前几乎没有人系统性地验证是不是真的如此。 The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes. OSC小组的工作是迄今最大规模的对于心理学的验证，结果非常惊人。小组几乎采用了原初的实验材料，有些甚至在原来研究者的指导下进行实验。在所有结果阳性的研究中，竟然有65%在统计上不显著，剩下中也有很多的重复结果不如原先的显著。 Their findings made the news, and quickly became a club with which to bash the social sciences. But the problem isn’t just with psychology. There’s an unspoken rule in the pharmaceutical industry that half of all academic biomedical research will ultimately prove false, and in 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer decided to test it. Looking at sixty-seven recent drug discovery projects based on preclinical cancer biology research, they found that in more than 75 percent of cases the published data did not match up with their in-house attempts to replicate. 他们的发现上了新闻，并且很快成了用来攻击社会科学的大棒。但是问题不只是出在心理学领域。医药产业心照不宣的法则是，半数生物医学研究最终会被证明为假，而在2011年拜耳的一组研究者们决定试验一下。在研究了最近的67个基于临床前癌症生物学研究的新药计划之后，他们发现其中75%以上的实验发表的数据和他们内部重复实验的数据对不上。 These were not studies published in fly-by-night oncology journals, but blockbuster research featured in Science, Nature, Cell, and the like. The Bayer researchers were drowning in bad studies, and it was to this, in part, that they attributed the mysteriously declining yields of drug pipelines. Perhaps so many of these new drugs fail to have an effect because the basic research on which their development was based isn’t valid. 这些研究都不是那些发表在无足轻重的肿瘤学期刊上的研究，而是发表在《科学》、《自然》、《细胞》之类期刊上的大手笔。他们发现人们被垃圾研究淹没了，认为这就是临床药物试验离奇衰落的原因。或许如此多的新药研制失败是因为它们所基于的科学研究不靠谱。 When a study fails to replicate, there are two possible interpretations. The first is that, unbeknownst to the investigators, there was a real difference in experimental setup between the original investigation and the failed replication. These are colloquially referred to as “wallpaper effects,” the joke being that the experiment was affected by the color of the wallpaper in the room. This is the happiest possible explanation for failure to reproduce: It means that both experiments have revealed facts about the universe, and we now have the opportunity to learn what the difference was between them and to incorporate a new and subtler distinction into our theories. 当研究结果无法被重复时，有两种可能性。一种是，确实有某项研究者不知道的实验装置区别存在。这种情况俗称“墙纸效应”，戏谑的认为实验会被墙纸的颜色所影响。这是一个皆大欢喜的解释，表明这两个实验揭示了一些事实，现在我们有机会研究这些差异并将这个更微妙的新发现融入理论中。 The other interpretation is that the original finding was false. Unfortunately, an ingenious statistical argument shows that this second interpretation is far more likely. First articulated by John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, this argument proceeds by a simple application of Bayesian statistics. Suppose that there are a hundred and one stones in a certain field. One of them has a diamond inside it, and, luckily, you have a diamond-detecting device that advertises 99 percent accuracy. After an hour or so of moving the device around, examining each stone in turn, suddenly alarms flash and sirens wail while the device is pointed at a promising-looking stone. What is the probability that the stone contains a diamond? 而另一种可能是，原实验的结果为假。很不幸的是，一项设计巧妙的统计学论证显示出第二种解读更有可能。该论证最早由斯坦福医学院John Ioannidis教授提出，现在被一个简单的贝叶斯统计应用所取代。假设一块田里有101块石头，其中的一块里面有钻石，并且，你正好有个号称准确率99%的钻石探测器。在经过了近一个小时的来回，一个一个的检查石头之后，突然警报响起，探测器指向一个有可能的石头。该石头含钻石的可能性是多少？ Most would say that if the device advertises 99 percent accuracy, then there is a 99 percent chance that the device is correctly discerning a diamond, and a 1 percent chance that it has given a false positive reading. But consider: Of the one hundred and one stones in the field, only one is truly a diamond. Granted, our machine has a very high probability of correctly declaring it to be a diamond. But there are many more diamond-free stones, and while the machine only has a 1 percent chance of falsely declaring each of them to be a diamond, there are a hundred of them. So if we were to wave the detector over every stone in the field, it would, on average, sound twice—once for the real diamond, and once when a false reading was triggered by a stone. If we know only that the alarm has sounded, these two possibilities are roughly equally probable, giving us an approximately 50 percent chance that the stone really contains a diamond. 大多数人会说既然探测器的准确率是99%，那么就有99%的可能性该探测器正确的判断出了钻石的所在，和1%的可能性探测器给出了误报。但是请考虑这一点：101块石头中，只有一块有钻石。毋庸置疑，我们的探测器可以以很高的可能性正确判断一块石头里面是否有钻石。但是大多数石头里面是没有钻石的，所以尽管探测器仅有1%的可能性错误的判断出它们中的某一个有钻石，但是这样的石头有100个。于是如果我们在每一块石头上挥舞探测器，则它会报警的期望值是两次，一次为真正的钻石，一次为误报。如果我们仅仅只是听到报警而已，那么这两个情况出现的可能性是相等的，得出的结论就是石头里面有钻石的可能性是大约50%。 This is a simplified version of the argument that Ioannidis applies to the process of science itself. The stones in the field are the set of all possible testable hypotheses, the diamond is a hypothesized connection or effect that happens to be true, and the diamond-detecting device is the scientific method. A tremendous amount depends on the proportion of possible hypotheses which turn out to be true, and on the accuracy with which an experiment can discern truth from falsehood. Ioannidis shows that for a wide variety of scientific settings and fields, the values of these two parameters are not at all favorable. 这是Ioannidis教授关于科学研究过程的统计学论证的一个简化版本。田里的石头就是所有可验证的理论假设的集合，钻石就是那个恰好为真的假设，而探测器就是科学的方法。至关重要的两个参数是真假设占所有可行假设的比例，以及用实验来判断真假的准确性。Ioannidis教授向我们说明了在大部分科研情景和领域里面，这两个参数的值都不容乐观。 For instance, consider a team of molecular biologists investigating whether a mutation in one of the countless thousands of human genes is linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. The probability of a randomly selected mutation in a randomly selected gene having precisely that effect is quite low, so just as with the stones in the field, a positive finding is more likely than not to be spurious—unless the experiment is unbelievably successful at sorting the wheat from the chaff. Indeed, Ioannidis finds that in many cases, approaching even 50 percent true positives requires unimaginable accuracy. Hence the eye-catching title of his paper: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” 比如说，设想一个分子生物学研究小组想要决定人类无数基因中的某一个基因变异是否会增加阿尔兹海默症的风险。一个随机选择的基因里面产生的随机变异，正好产生一个给定的效果，这个可能性是很低的。所以就像田里的石头一样，阳性结果在大多数情况下都很有可能是假的，除非该实验有着令人难以置信的准确率。确实，Ioannidis教授发现在很多情况下，即使是接近50%的真阳性结果也需要惊人的准确率。正是因为这样，他才给他的论文起了个吸引眼球的标题：“为什么被发表的多数研究结论都是假的？” What about accuracy? Here, too, the news is not good. First, it is a de facto standard in many fields to use one in twenty as an acceptable cutoff for the rate of false positives. To the naive ear, that may sound promising: Surely it means that just 5 percent of scientific studies report a false positive? But this is precisely the same mistake as thinking that a stone has a 99 percent chance of containing a diamond just because the detector has sounded. What it really means is that for each of the countless false hypotheses that are contemplated by researchers, we accept a 5 percent chance that it will be falsely counted as true—a decision with a considerably more deleterious effect on the proportion of correct studies. 那准确率又如何呢？也不是太令人乐观。首先，许多研究领域实际上能接受的上限是20个结果里面有一个假阳性。对普通人来说，这个听起来很不错：这想必表明仅仅只有5%的科学研究结果是假阳性的吧？但这和那些认为诱发探测器报警的石头会有99%的可能性藏有钻石的人正好犯了同一个错误。这个数字真正的意义在于，对于研究者们考虑的无数种可行假设中的每一个错误理论，我们接受有5%的可能性它们会被当成是正确理论。这是一个可以显著减少结果正确科学研究的做法。 Paradoxically, the situation is actually made worse by the fact that a promising connection is often studied by several independent teams. To see why, suppose that three groups of researchers are studying a phenomenon, and when all the data are analyzed, one group announces that it has discovered a connection, but the other two find nothing of note. Assuming that all the tests involved have a high statistical power, the lone positive finding is almost certainly the spurious one. However, when it comes time to report these findings, what happens? The teams that found a negative result may not even bother to write up their non-discovery. After all, a report that a fanciful connection probably isn’t true is not the stuff of which scientific prizes, grant money, and tenure decisions are made. 吊诡的是，当数个独立研究小组对同一理论假设做研究的时候，情况反而更糟了。这里用一个例子来说明为什么。设想有三个小组在研究同一现象，在分析完了所有数据之后，一个小组宣布他们发现了现象之间的联系，但是其它两个小组没有发现任何值得一提的东西。假如所有的实验都具有很强的统计学判断力，那么这个孤立的阳性结果几乎一定是可疑的。尽管如此，当要对实验结果做报告发表的时候，会发生什么呢？得出阴性结论的小组甚至都不会去把他们的毫无建树的实验写成论文。毕竟，科研奖项、经费、或是终身教授是不会给一个对有前景的理论假说持否定结论的。 And even if they did write it up, it probably wouldn’t be accepted for publication. Journals are in competition with one another for attention and “impact factor,” and are always more eager to report a new, exciting finding than a killjoy failure to find an association. In fact, both of these effects can be quantified. Since the majority of all investigated hypotheses are false, if positive and negative evidence were written up and accepted for publication in equal proportions, then the majority of articles in scientific journals should report no findings. When tallies are actually made, though, the precise opposite turns out to be true: Nearly every published scientific article reports the presence of an association. There must be massive bias at work. 而且就算他们写成了论文，也很可能不会被发表。期刊之间会争夺学术界的注意力和“影响因子”，因此更乐意发表激动人心的新发现，而不是那些煞风景的阴性结果。事实上，这两个效应是可以被量化的。既然大多数被研究的理论假设应该为假，则如果阴性结果和阳性结果一样被写成论文发表的话，那么大多数期刊论文都应该报告说没有任何发现才对。可是事实上却恰好相反，几乎所有得以发表的论文都认为现象之间存在关联。这个过程中必有大量的偏差。 Ioannidis’s argument would be potent even if all scientists were angels motivated by the best of intentions, but when the human element is considered, the picture becomes truly dismal. Scientists have long been aware of something euphemistically called the “experimenter effect”: the curious fact that when a phenomenon is investigated by a researcher who happens to believe in the phenomenon, it is far more likely to be detected. 即便科学家都如同天使一般，不受任何恶意驱使，Ioannidis教授的论证也一样成立。但是在考虑到人为因素之后，情况就真的差到难以想象了。科学家很久以来都熟悉所谓“观察者期望效应”的委婉说法，即当研究者相信某些现象存在的时候，他们就更有可能在实验中发现这些现象。 Much of the effect can likely be explained by researchers unconsciously giving hints or suggestions to their human or animal subjects, perhaps in something as subtle as body language or tone of voice. Even those with the best of intentions have been caught fudging measurements, or making small errors in rounding or in statistical analysis that happen to give a more favorable result. Very often, this is just the result of an honest statistical error that leads to a desirable outcome, and therefore it isn’t checked as deliberately as it might have been had it pointed in the opposite direction. 这种效应很多源自于：研究者无意识的给他们的人类或动物被试的一些暗示建议，这些暗示可以微妙到肢体语言或是声调变化。就算是最自律的研究者也曾被发现捏造测量，或是在取整的时候犯些小错误，抑或是偏向于统计分析给出的好结果等。经常是一个无心的统计偏差造成了研究者想要的结果，因而就不会被刻意的复查。如果结果指向相反的结论，恐怕就不会被这么轻易的放过了。 But, and there is no putting it nicely, deliberate fraud is far more widespread than the scientific establishment is generally willing to admit. One way we know that there’s a great deal of fraud occurring is that if you phrase your question the right way, scientists will confess to it. In a survey of two thousand research psychologists conducted in 2011, over half of those surveyed admitted outright to selectively reporting those experiments which gave the result they were after. Then the investigators asked respondents anonymously to estimate how many of their fellow scientists had engaged in fraudulent behavior, and promised them that the more accurate their guesses, the larger a contribution would be made to the charity of their choice. 但难以粉饰的事实是，学术圈内造假的广泛程度已经远超学界主流共识所愿意承认的那些。有一种方式可以让我们知道大批的造假行为正在发生，那就是巧妙的使用问卷调查来让科学家们坦白。在2011年的一次涉及两千多位心理学家的问卷调查里，半数以上直接承认了自己有选择性的报告了想要的实验结果。调查者之后让他们匿名估算同事中有多少人从事学术不诚信行为，并许诺向他们指定的慈善机构捐款，额度和估算的准确程度正相关。 Through several rounds of anonymous guessing, refined using the number of scientists who would admit their own fraud and other indirect measurements, the investigators concluded that around 10 percent of research psychologists have engaged in outright falsification of data, and more than half have engaged in less brazen but still fraudulent behavior such as reporting that a result was statistically significant when it was not, or deciding between two different data analysis techniques after looking at the results of each and choosing the more favorable. 经过数轮匿名估算，辅以自我报告的学术不诚信行为数字以及其它的间接测量，调查者得出的结论是：大约有10%的心理学家曾经直接伪造数据，并且半数以上曾经有过相对不那么无耻的学术不端行为，例如将非统计显著的结果报告为统计显著，或是在比较了两种数据分析结果之后再选择对自己有利的分析方法等。 Many forms of statistical falsification are devilishly difficult to catch, or close enough to a genuine judgment call to provide plausible deniability. Data analysis is very much an art, and one that affords even its most scrupulous practitioners a wide degree of latitude. Which of these two statistical tests, both applicable to this situation, should be used? Should a subpopulation of the research sample with some common criterion be picked out and reanalyzed as if it were the totality? Which of the hundreds of coincident factors measured should be controlled for, and how? The same freedom that empowers a statistician to pick a true signal out of the noise also enables a dishonest scientist to manufacture nearly any result he or she wishes. 许多形式的统计造假极难被抓住，或是太过于接近真实的分析决断，从而可以充分拒绝造假的指控。数据分析更像是一门艺术，即使是最严谨的数据分析者也有相当多的自由度可供发挥。两个同样适用的统计检验方法，该用哪个？是否应该将样本中的符合公共准则的子样本挑出来代表整体重新分析？数百个里面，我应该控制哪个？如何控制？使统计学家可以从噪音中挑出信号的那种自由度，同时让不诚实的科学家可以炮制出他／她想要的任何结果。 Cajoling statistical significance where in reality there is none, a practice commonly known as “p-hacking,” is particularly easy to accomplish and difficult to detect on a case-by-case basis. And since the vast majority of studies still do not report their raw data along with their findings, there is often nothing to re-analyze and check even if there were volunteers with the time and inclination to do so. 通过不断诱导数据从而得出不存在的显著统计，是一种通常被称作“p值操纵”的作弊法。做起来很容易，但是要检验出其是否被使用，却是极难。【译注：p值操纵指研究者轮番使用不同的统计方法和数据，直到结果显著为止。与正常的数据分析所采用的提出假设之后用数据验证假设的流程相反，p值操纵旨在找到具有显著性的关联，并在此基础上建立假设，因此导致假阳性。】并且大部分研究结果的原始数据还是不公开的，就算有人肯花时间来检查，也没有资源。 One creative attempt to estimate how widespread such dishonesty really is involves comparisons between fields of varying “hardness.” The author, Daniele Fanelli, theorized that the farther from physics one gets, the more freedom creeps into one’s experimental methodology, and the fewer constraints there are on a scientist’s conscious and unconscious biases. If all scientists were constantly attempting to influence the results of their analyses, but had more opportunities to do so the “softer” the science, then we might expect that the social sciences have more papers that confirm a sought-after hypothesis than do the physical sciences, with medicine and biology somewhere in the middle. 在估算这种学术不端的广泛性方面，有一个有创意的尝试，涉及到比较各学科的“硬”度。始作俑者Daniele Fanelli认为，一个学科离（最硬的）物理学越远，在实验方法上就更具有自由度，对于科学家们有意无意的错误的约束也越少。假如所有的科学家都试图影响实验分析的结果，而较“软”的学科里这么做更加容易，结果就是我们可能会发现，相比于物理学，社会科学发表的文章中更多的证实了那些倍受青睐的假说，而医学和生物学处于这两个学科之间的某个位置。 This is exactly what the study discovered: A paper in psychology or psychiatry is about five times as likely to report a positive result as one in astrophysics. This is not necessarily evidence that psychologists are all consciously or unconsciously manipulating their data—it could also be evidence of massive publication bias—but either way, the result is disturbing. 这正是研究发现的结果：心理学或是精神病学研究论文报告阳性结果的可能性是天体力学的五倍左右。这并不必然表明心理学家们在有意无意的篡改数据，也可能是论文发表系统的大规模选择性偏见，但是无论如何，令人担忧。 Speaking of physics, how do things go with this hardest of all hard sciences? Better than elsewhere, it would appear, and it’s unsurprising that those who claim all is well in the world of science reach so reliably and so insistently for examples from physics, preferably of the most theoretical sort. Folk histories of physics combine borrowed mathematical luster and Whiggish triumphalism in a way that journalists seem powerless to resist. The outcomes of physics experiments and astronomical observations seem so matter-of-fact, so concretely and immediately connected to underlying reality, that they might let us gingerly sidestep all of these issues concerning motivated or sloppy analysis and interpretation. 说到物理学，对于这个最硬的学科，结果又如何呢？至少看起来比别的强。因而，不出意料的是，几乎所有认为科学世界安然无恙的那些人会放心的坚持从物理学里寻找例证，最好还是偏理论方向。民间物理学的历史以一种让记者们无法抵御的方式将数学的光泽和辉格式凯旋主义相结合。物理实验和天文观测的结果看上去如此注重事实，如此具体而又直接关联到其表象之下的现实世界，以至于可以让我们小心翼翼的绕开那些别有用心的或是不合格的分析和解读。 “E pur si muove,” Galileo is said to have remarked, and one can almost hear in his sigh the hopes of a hundred science journalists for whom it would be all too convenient if Nature were always willing to tell us whose theory is more correct. “不管你怎么想，它（地球）就是在动的”，这据说是伽利略的名言，而从他的这句感叹中我们几乎能听到一百个科学报道者的祈祷，因为对他们来说，大自然若是肯轻易透露谁的理论更正确，那简直就是太方便了。 And yet the flight to physics rather gives the game away, since measured any way you like—volume of papers, number of working researchers, total amount of funding—deductive, theory-building physics in the mold of Newton and Lagrange, Maxwell and Einstein, is a tiny fraction of modern science as a whole. In fact, it also makes up a tiny fraction of modern physics. Far more common is the delicate and subtle art of scouring inconceivably vast volumes of noise with advanced software and mathematical tools in search of the faintest signal of some hypothesized but never before observed phenomenon, whether an astrophysical event or the decay of a subatomic particle. 即使如此，向物理学寻求庇护也多少泄露一些信息。因为无论怎么看，不论是从发表文章数、研究员数量、还是研究经费方面来看，被牛顿、拉格朗日、麦克斯韦和爱因斯坦所铸造的基于演绎和理论构建的物理学，在整个现代科学界里面也仅仅只是一小撮。实际上，就算是在现代物理学里也是少数。更为普遍的情况则是那些精细微妙的艺术，能够使用先进的软件和数学工具，从难以想象的大规模数据中分离噪音，去找某种极其微弱的从未被观测到的理论信号。 This sort of work is difficult and beautiful in its own way, but it is not at all self-evident in the manner of a falling apple or an elliptical planetary orbit, and it is very sensitive to the same sorts of accidental contamination, deliberate fraud, and unconscious bias as the medical and social-scientific studies we have discussed. Two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years—the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border—have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published. 这类工作自有其难点和引人之处，但是绝不像落下的苹果或是椭圆的行星轨道那样不证自明，且和我们所讨论过的医学以及社会科学一样，非常容易受到意外污染、刻意造假和下意识的偏见所影响。过去几年里最饱受赞誉的两项物理学科研成果——北极BICEP2实验发现的宇宙暴涨和引力波，以及在瑞士-意大利边境发现的超光速中微子——现在已经被撤回，相应关注也比它们刚发表时少了许多。 Many defenders of the scientific establishment will admit to this problem, then offer hymns to the self-correcting nature of the scientific method. Yes, the path is rocky, they say, but peer review, competition between researchers, and the comforting fact that there is an objective reality out there whose test every theory must withstand or fail, all conspire to mean that sloppiness, bad luck, and even fraud are exposed and swept away by the advances of the field. 许多现有科研领域的辩护者承认这些问题，又称赞科学方法自有纠错能力。是的，道路是曲折的，他们说，但是同行评议、研究者之间的竞争、以及存在客观现实以检验理论这些令人舒心的事实，都会随着科学的进展潜移默化的将懒惰、倒霉、甚至欺诈等因素暴露并且驱逐出科研领域。 So the dogma goes. But these claims are rarely treated like hypotheses to be tested. Partisans of the new scientism are fond of recounting the “Sokal hoax”—physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper heavy on jargon but full of false and meaningless statements to the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text, which accepted and published it without quibble—but are unlikely to mention a similar experiment conducted on reviewers of the prestigious British Medical Journal. 教条就是这样口口相传。但是这些声明几乎从未被像科学假设那样检验过。新科学至上主义的支持者们乐于重复“Sokal恶作剧”（指物理学家Alan Sokal向后现代文化研究期刊《社会文本》递交了一篇充满着行话但却全是错误和无稽表述的论文，却被接受并且毫无异议的发表了），却不太可能提到一个类似的实验，对象是具有很高声望的英国医学期刊的评审者们。 The experimenters deliberately modified a paper to include eight different major errors in study design, methodology, data analysis, and interpretation of results, and not a single one of the 221 reviewers who participated caught all of the errors. On average, they caught fewer than two—and, unbelievably, these results held up even in the subset of reviewers who had been specifically warned that they were participating in a study and that there might be something a little odd in the paper that they were reviewing. In all, only 30 percent of reviewers recommended that the intentionally flawed paper be rejected. 实验者有意更改了一篇论文，使之包含八个不同的重大错误，分散于实验设计、方法论、数据分析、和结果解读方面。在221个评审者中，没有一个人挑出全部错误。他们平均抓到少于两个错误。并且，令人难以置信的是，当告诉一个分组的评审者们他们面对的论文有问题时，该结论也成立。总而言之，只有30%的评审者认为这篇有意制造的问题论文应该被拒绝发表。 If peer review is good at anything, it appears to be keeping unpopular ideas from being published. Consider the finding of another (yes, another) of these replicability studies, this time from a group of cancer researchers. In addition to reaching the now unsurprising conclusion that only a dismal 11 percent of the preclinical cancer research they examined could be validated after the fact, the authors identified another horrifying pattern: The “bad” papers that failed to replicate were, on average, cited far more often than the papers that did! As the authors put it, “some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis.” 如果有一件事情是同行评议机制所擅长的，那就是让不受欢迎的想法不被发表。来看看另一个可重复性研究吧（对，另一个），这次是来自于一些癌症研究人员的。在得出只有11%的癌症临床前研究可被事后验证的令人毫不惊讶的结论之外，研究者们发现了另一个恐怖的现象：那些结果难以被重复的“坏”的论文，平均引用次数大于结果能被重复的那些！正如研究者们所提到的那样：“一些不可重复的临床前实验论文创造了一整个研究领域，和基于原初观察结论所衍生出的数百篇论文，但却没有认真确证或是证伪其研究基础。” What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons. 可他们没有提到的是，当整个研究领域被创造出来，当事业、经费、职务和声望都和一个实验结论所绑定，这个结果是假造的，无论是出于有意欺骗还是仅仅只是运气不好，将事实捅出去看来不是很受欢迎的做法。由此，同行评审从纯粹无用变成了积极为害，它在为论文排除分析上的或方法论上的缺陷方面很没用，但是在压制对主流研究范式的批评方面却非常有效。就算批评者最终可以将他的作品发表，指出整个研究领域是空中楼阁这种行为也不会受到同事、甚至导师和赞助方的青睐。 Older scientists contribute to the propagation of scientific fields in ways that go beyond educating and mentoring a new generation. In many fields, it’s common for an established and respected researcher to serve as “senior author” on a bright young star’s first few publications, lending his prestige and credibility to the result, and signaling to reviewers that he stands behind it. In the natural sciences and medicine, senior scientists are frequently the controllers of laboratory resources—which these days include not just scientific instruments, but dedicated staffs of grant proposal writers and regulatory compliance experts—without which a young scientist has no hope of accomplishing significant research. Older scientists control access to scientific prestige by serving on the editorial boards of major journals and on university tenure-review committees. Finally, the government bodies that award the vast majority of scientific funding are either staffed or advised by distinguished practitioners in the field. 在科学领地的开拓上，有资历的科学家除了对新一代传道授业之外，还可以在其它方面施加很大影响。在很多学科领域，卓有建树且受人尊敬的老学者以论文通讯作者的方式为年轻有为的新学者站台，用自己的名声和信誉向论文评审者对实验结果做出担保，这是很常见的。在自然科学和医学领域，有资历的科学家往往也掌握重要的研究资源，这些资源如今已不仅仅是科学仪器，还包括专门的研究基金申请书写作小组和合规问题专家等。没有这些资源，资历浅的研究员很难做出有影响力的研究。前辈们还掌控着重要的学术声誉，他们往往在重要期刊和终身教职的评审委员会列席。最后，许多主要的科研经费来自于政府机构，而政府的研究理事会要么由行内卓越人士担任，要么向他们寻求建议。 All of which makes it rather more bothersome that older scientists are the most likely to be invested in the regnant research paradigm, whatever it is, even if it’s based on an old experiment that has never successfully been replicated. The quantum physicist Max Planck famously quipped: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” 而这一切都会使情况变的更麻烦，因为有资历的科学家更有可能站在主流的研究范式一边，无论该范式是什么，就算是建立在一个从未被成功重复的年代久远的实验结果之上。量子物理学家马克思·普朗克有句至理名言：“新的科学理论战胜旧理论，并非是论敌被说服了，而是论敌们最终都死掉了，新的一代成长起来并逐渐适应了新理论。” Planck may have been too optimistic. A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research studied what happens to scientific subfields when star researchers die suddenly and at the peak of their abilities, and finds that while there is considerable evidence that young researchers are reluctant to challenge scientific superstars, a sudden and unexpected death does not significantly improve the situation, particularly when “key collaborators of the star are in a position to channel resources (such as editorial goodwill or funding) to insiders.” 普朗克可能有些过于乐观了。最近一篇来自于国家经济研究办公室的报告，研究了当明星学者在他们最为高产的时候突然死亡所带来的影响，发现虽然有大量的证据表明年轻学者不愿意去挑战明星学者，但是明星学者的突然意外死亡并不能显著改变这个情境，特别是当“明星学者的重要合作者依然掌控着学科内资源（如论文评审时的青睐或是研究经费）的分配渠道”时。 In the idealized Popperian view of scientific progress, new theories are proposed to explain new evidence that contradicts the predictions of old theories. The heretical philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, on the other hand, claimed that new theories frequently contradict the best available evidence—at least at first. Often, the old observations were inaccurate or irrelevant, and it was the invention of a new theory that stimulated experimentalists to go hunting for new observational techniques to test it. 在理想化的波普尔式科学进步图景中，新理论应该能够解释新的证据，而这些证据是和旧理论所做出的预测是相悖的。与之相反，离经叛道的科学哲学家Paul Feyerabend认为，新理论常常和能够获得的最好证据相悖，至少在一开始是这样的。旧的观察方式往往不够精确或不是非常有关联，而正是新理论的发明促使实验者们去寻找新的观察技术来验证它们。 But the success of this “unofficial” process depends on a blithe disregard for evidence while the vulnerable young theory weathers an initial storm of skepticism. Yet if Feyerabend is correct, and an unpopular new theory can ignore or reject experimental data long enough to get its footing, how much longer can an old and creaky theory, buttressed by the reputations and influence and political power of hundreds of established practitioners, continue to hang in the air even when the results upon which it is premised are exposed as false? 但是这种“非正式”的过程能够成功的关键，取决于当脆弱的新理论一开始被怀疑的风暴包围时能否以一种天真乐观的方式来无视既有证据。尽管如此，就算Feyerabend是对的，且不受欢迎的新理论能够无视或拒绝实验数据以至于站稳脚跟，那些陈腐古板的旧理论，即便其所基于的实验结论已被证明是错的，背后有着数百名业内人士的名誉、影响力、和政治权力的支持，会继续滞留多久呢？ The hagiographies of science are full of paeans to the self-correcting, self-healing nature of the enterprise. But if raw results are so often false, the filtering mechanisms so ineffective, and the self-correcting mechanisms so compromised and slow, then science’s approach to truth may not even be monotonic. That is, past theories, now “refuted” by evidence and replaced with new approaches, may be closer to the truth than what we think now. 科学的圣传中充斥着凸显其自我纠正和自我治愈能力的光辉事迹。但如果原始结果是如此容易出错，筛选过程如此无效，且自我纠正机制如此迟缓且经常不被遵守的话，那么科学发掘事实真相的过程甚至不一定是单调的。即，过去的理论，现在已经被新证据“证伪”且被新方法取代的那些，可能比我们所想的更接近事实。 Such regress has happened before: In the nineteenth century, the (correct) vitamin C deficiency theory of scurvy was replaced by the false belief that scurvy was caused by proximity to spoiled foods. Many ancient astronomers believed the heliocentric model of the solar system before it was supplanted by the geocentric theory of Ptolemy. The Whiggish view of scientific history is so dominant today that this possibility is spoken of only in hushed whispers, but ours is a world in which things once known can be lost and buried. 这种倒退在以前也曾经发生过：在19世纪，对于坏血病的（正确的）维他命C缺乏理论被错误的理论取代，该理论认为是坏掉的食物导致了坏血病。许多古代天文学者相信日心说的太阳系模型，直到它被托勒密的地心说取代。以辉格史观看待科学发展的历程支配着当前主流看法，以至于倒退的可能性仅仅存在于窃窃私语中。但是在我们身处的世界里，知识是可以被掩埋和失传的。 And even if self-correction does occur and theories move strictly along a lifecycle from less to more accurate, what if the unremitting flood of new, mostly false, results pours in faster? Too fast for the sclerotic, compromised truth-discerning mechanisms of science to operate? The result could be a growing body of true theories completely overwhelmed by an ever-larger thicket of baseless theories, such that the proportion of true scientific beliefs shrinks even while the absolute number of them continues to rise. Borges’s Library of Babel contained every true book that could ever be written, but it was useless because it also contained every false book, and both true and false were lost within an ocean of nonsense. 而且就算自我纠正确实发生了，且理论的发展严格遵循从模糊到精确的周期，可是如果那些新的、大部分是错误的结果以更快的速度涌现呢？这速度如果快过让迟钝且不完善的科学真理判定机制来做出反应，情况又会怎样呢？结果可能是增长的正确理论被完全淹没在更快速增长的无稽理论中，以至于正确理论的绝对数量在增加，而同时它们所占的比例却逐渐减小。博尔赫斯的“巴别图书馆”里有每一本可能的包含真正知识书籍，但这毫无用处，因为它也收藏了每一本由错误知识构成的书【译注：“巴别图书馆”的藏书包含了25个书写符号任意排列组合组成的所有可能书籍】，结果就是正确和错误的知识都消散于无意义的海洋里。 Which brings us to the odd moment in which we live. At the same time as an ever more bloated scientific bureaucracy churns out masses of research results, the majority of which are likely outright false, scientists themselves are lauded as heroes and science is upheld as the only legitimate basis for policy-making. There’s reason to believe that these phenomena are linked. When a formerly ascetic discipline suddenly attains a measure of influence, it is bound to be flooded by opportunists and charlatans, whether it’s the National Academy of Science or the monastery of Cluny. 我想起生活中的怪事。一方面科学官僚们产生日渐臃肿的研究结果，其中大部分很可能是错误的，另一方面，科学家受到英雄般的尊崇，而科学被视为制定政策的唯一合理依据。我们有理由认为这些现象之间是有联系的。当一个曾经冷门的领域突然获得了一定的影响力的时候，必然遭到一批投机者和骗子的入侵，无论是国家科学院还是克吕尼修道院，都是一样的情况。【译注：克吕尼修道院，是公元910年在法国克吕尼建立的天主教修道院，以禁欲著称，是天主教改革运动克吕尼改革的发源地。】 This comparison is not as outrageous as it seems: Like monasticism, science is an enterprise with a superhuman aim whose achievement is forever beyond the capacities of the flawed humans who aspire toward it. The best scientists know that they must practice a sort of mortification of the ego and cultivate a dispassion that allows them to report their findings, even when those findings might mean the dashing of hopes, the drying up of financial resources, and the loss of professional prestige. 这个比较并不是那么的荒谬：就像修道主义，科学也拥有一个超人的目标，其成就远非有缺陷的人类能力所及。最好的科学家懂得要忍辱负重并培养出冷静的心境，以便他们能够忠实地公布科学发现，尽管有时候这些发现意味着希望的破灭，财政的干涸，以及职业声誉上的损失。 It should be no surprise that even after outgrowing the monasteries, the practice of science has attracted souls driven to seek the truth regardless of personal cost and despite, for most of its history, a distinct lack of financial or status reward. Now, however, science and especially science bureaucracy is a career, and one amenable to social climbing. Careers attract careerists, in Feyerabend’s words: “devoid of ideas, full of fear, intent on producing some paltry result so that they can add to the flood of inane papers that now constitutes ‘scientific progress’ in many areas.” 不必惊奇，尽管科学的实践超出了修道的范畴，它仍然能吸引到不顾自身利益而追求真理的人们，尽管在历史上的大部分时期，投身科学无财无名。而现在，科学，特别是科技官僚，是一项职业，顺应社会攀爬。它会吸引一心求名求利的人，用Feyerabend的话说，这些人“毫无创见，充满恐惧，只想制造出某些琐碎的结论以便加入构成很多领域里所谓的‘科学进步’的论文大军”。 If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science. The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism”; both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions. 如果说科学界对突然涌入的利益分子缺乏准备，那么面对爆发的科学教派就更是措手不及了。这个教派和被称为“科学至上主义”的现象有很大联系。二者都倾向于将科学知识视为圣经或是某种非宗教意义上的启示，认为它对于深刻的问题可以带来简单且具有决定意义的解答。 But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on Twitter for the hashtag “#sciencedancing” speaks volumes) and a penchant for profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a day without seeing a t-shirt reading “Science: It works, b—es!” The hero of the recent popular movie The Martian boasts that he will “science the sh— out of” a situation. 但是科学教在此之上又多了一点夸夸其谈和一点不知脸红的无知。在修辞上体现为一种强迫症式的狂热（在推特上搜一下“sciencedancing”的主题标签就知道了）和对脏话的嗜好。在我们硅谷，走在大街上经常看到有人的T恤上印着诸如“科学：贼好用，婊子们！”最近的热门电影《火星救援》里的主人公面对危机时的豪言壮语则是“用科学把它捅出屎”。 One of the largest groups on Facebook is titled “I f—ing love Science!” (a name which, combined with the group’s penchant for posting scarcely any actual scientific material but a lot of pictures of natural phenomena, has prompted more than one actual scientist of my acquaintance to mutter under her breath, “What you truly love is pictures”). Some of the Cult’s leaders like to play dress-up as scientists—Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are two particularly prominent examples— but hardly any of them have contributed any research results of note. Rather, Cult leadership trends heavily in the direction of educators, popularizers, and journalists. 脸书上最大的团体之一的名字是“我真他妈的爱科学！”（这个名字，加上该团体对于发表大量自然现象的图片而不是科学内容的爱好，已经让不止一个我认识的真正的科学家嘀咕“你们爱的其实是图片吧”）。某些科学教的领袖们喜欢装扮成科学家的样子——Bill Nye和Neil deGrasse Tyson是其中的两个典型——但他们几乎没有任何值得一提的研究贡献。与之相对的是，这些领袖们在教育者、科普者、和媒体从业者中非常受欢迎。 At its best, science is a human enterprise with a superhuman aim: the discovery of regularities in the order of nature, and the discerning of the consequences of those regularities. We’ve seen example after example of how the human element of this enterprise harms and damages its progress, through incompetence, fraud, selfishness, prejudice, or the simple combination of an honest oversight or slip with plain bad luck. These failings need not hobble the scientific enterprise broadly conceived, but only if scientists are hyper-aware of and endlessly vigilant about the errors of their colleagues . . . and of themselves. When cultural trends attempt to render science a sort of religion-less clericalism, scientists are apt to forget that they are made of the same crooked timber as the rest of humanity and will necessarily imperil the work that they do. The greatest friends of the Cult of Science are the worst enemies of science’s actual practice. 总之，科学在最好的时候，是具有非凡目标的人类事业：在自然的秩序中发现常理，并且用这些常理来推断事情的后果。我们看到了这项事业里的人类因素一个又一个危害进步的例子，有些出于无能、欺瞒、自私、偏见，有些只是出于某种诚实的忽视和一点坏运气。这些失败不能成为科学事业的羁绊，但这需要科学家对于同事们和自己的错误非常了解，并且保持高度警惕。当文化潮流试图将科学表述成某种区别于宗教的圣职专权时，科学家们非容易忘记他们是和其他人一样易于腐蚀的朽木，随时有可能危害从事的行业。最狂热的科学教徒是科学实践最大的敌人。 William A. Wilson is a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. 本文作者William A. Wilson 是旧金山湾区的一名软件工程师。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots of the Stabbing Intifada 捅刀起义的种族优越论根源，一种妄想症 作者:Jeffrey Goldbery @ 2015-10-16 译者:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy) 一校:Eartha(@王小贰_Eartha) 来源:The Atlantic,www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/the-roots-of-the-palestinian-uprising-against-israel/410944/ Knife attacks on Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere are not based on Palestinian frustration over settlements, but on something deeper. 耶路撒冷及其他地区发生的针对犹太人的持刀攻击，并非出于巴勒斯坦人因以色列定居活动而产生的挫败感，而是存在某些更深层次的原因。 In September of 1928, a group of Jewish residents of Jerusalem placed a bench in front of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, for the comfort of elderly worshipers. They also brought with them a wooden partition, to separate the sexes during prayer. Jerusalem’s Muslim leaders treated the introduction of furniture into the alleyway in front of the Wall as a provocation, part of a Jewish conspiracy to slowly take control of the entire Temple Mount. 1928年9月，耶路撒冷的一群犹太居民为了老年礼拜者的舒适着想，在圣殿山的哭墙前安放了一条长凳，还带去了一张木质隔板用来区隔异性祈祷者。耶路撒冷的穆斯林领袖认为，这种在过道安放家具的行为是挑衅，是犹太人缓图全面掌控圣殿山的阴谋的一部分。 Many of the leaders of Palestine’s Muslims believed—or claimed to believe—that Jews had manufactured a set of historical and theological connections to the Western Wall and to the Mount, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, in order to advance the Zionist project. 巴勒斯坦的许多穆斯林领袖曾相信——或曾宣称其相信——犹太人捏造了一整套其与哭墙及圣殿山这一阿克萨清真寺和圆顶清真寺所在地之间的历史和神学联系，目的是为了推进犹太复国主义计划。 This belief defied Muslim history—the Dome of the Rock was built by Jerusalem’s Arab conquerors on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in order to venerate its memory (the site had previously been defiled by Jerusalem’s Christian rulers as a kind of rebuke to Judaism, the despised mother religion of Christianity). Jews themselves consider the Mount itself to be the holiest site in their faith. The Western Wall, a large retaining wall from the Second Temple period, is sacred only by proxy. 这一观念完全不顾穆斯林历史——圆顶清真寺是征服耶路撒冷的阿拉伯人为追思先人而在犹太人第二圣殿的旧址上建造的（原址被耶路撒冷的基督教统治者破坏，以谴责犹太教这一遭到鄙视的基督教母宗教）。犹太人自己则视圣殿山为其信仰的至圣之地。哭墙作为第二圣殿时期留存下来的巨大护墙，只是因其象征性才变得神圣。 The spiritual leader of Palestine’s Muslims, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, incited Arabs in Palestine against their Jewish neighbors by arguing that Islam itself was under threat. (Husseini would later become one of Hitler’s most important Muslim allies.) Jews in British-occupied Palestine responded to Muslim invective by demanding more access to the Wall, sometimes holding demonstrations at the holy site. 巴勒斯坦穆斯林的精神领袖、耶路撒冷的“穆夫提”【译注：教法说明官】Amin al-Husseini认为是伊斯兰本身受到了威胁，以此来煽动巴勒斯坦的阿拉伯人反对他们的犹太邻居（Husseini后来成为希特勒最重要的穆斯林盟友之一）。英国治下的巴勒斯坦犹太人对穆斯林的谩骂进行了回应，要求提高哭墙对他们的开放程度，有时还会在这一圣地举行示威。 By the next year, violence directed against Jews by their neighbors had become more common: Arab rioters took the lives of 133 Jews that summer; British forces killed 116 Arabs in their attempt to subdue the riots. In Hebron, a devastating pogrom was launched against the city’s ancient Jewish community after Muslim officials distributed fabricated photographs of a damaged Dome of the Rock, and spread the rumor that Jews had attacked the shrine. 次年，由其近邻发动的、针对犹太人的暴力变得愈发常见：当年夏天阿拉伯暴徒就夺走了133条犹太人性命，而英国军队则在镇压暴乱的行动中杀死了116名阿拉伯人。在希布伦市，穆斯林官员四处传播圆顶清真寺遭到破坏的虚假照片，并散布谣言说犹太人攻击了这一神殿，随后该市最为古老的犹太人社区遭到了令人震惊的大屠杀。 The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel—a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives—is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews. 以色列当下正出现一种“刺杀起义”，巴勒斯坦年轻人试图用刀砍杀犹太人，并且偶尔能够成功。这一具有半暴动性质的行动，很大程度上被同一套人为操纵的情绪所推动，正是这种情绪在1920年代点燃了反犹暴乱——即巴勒斯坦人内心深处的想要“保护”圣殿山不被犹太人染指的强烈情感。 When Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem in June of 1967 in response to a Jordanian attack, the first impulse of some Israelis was to assert Jewish rights atop the Mount. Between 1948, the year Israel achieved independence, and 1967, Jordan, then the occupying power in Jerusalem, banned Jews not only from the 35-acre Mount—which is known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary—but also from the Western Wall below. 1967年6月，以色列占领了耶路撒冷古城区域以报复约旦的攻击，部分以色列人的第一反应就是主张犹太人在圣殿山上的权利。在1948年（此年以色列实现独立）至1967年间，耶路撒冷的占领国约旦不但禁止犹太人进入圣殿山周围35英亩范围内——这块区域在穆斯林中以Haram al-Sharif，即“高贵的避难所”著称，而且也禁止他们靠近山下的哭墙。 When paratroopers took the Old City, they raised the Israeli flag atop the Dome of the Rock, but the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan, ordered it taken down, and soon after promised leaders of the Muslim Waqf, the trust that controlled the mosque and the shrine, that Israel would not interfere in its activities. Since then, successive Israeli governments have maintained the status quo established by Dayan. 伞兵控制旧城以后，在圆顶清真寺顶上升起以色列国旗，但以色列国防部长Moshe Dayan命令降旗，随后很快就向穆斯林“瓦克夫”（受托控制清真寺和圣堂的组织）的领袖承诺，以色列不会干涉他们的活动。自此以后，历届以色列政府均对Dayan所立态势萧规曹随。 There is another status quo associated with the Temple Mount, however, that has been showing signs of weakening. This is a religious status quo. The mainstream rabbinical view for many years has been that Jews should not walk atop the Mount for fear of treading on the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Temple that, according to tradition, housed the Ark of the Covenant. The Holy of Holies is the room in which the Jewish high priest spoke the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God, on Yom Kippur. 但是，与圣殿山相关的另一态势则显现出弱化的迹象。这是种宗教态势。多年来，主流的拉比教义观认为犹太人不应该在圣殿山顶行走，以免踩踏了“至圣所”。这是圣殿中一直用于存放有约柜的内部圣所，是犹太大祭司在赎罪日讲述神圣而需避讳的上帝之名“Tetragrammaton”的地方。 The exact location of the Holy of Holies is not known, and Muslim authorities have prevented archeologists from conducting any excavations on the Mount, in part out of fear that such explorations will uncover further evidence of a pre-Islamic Jewish presence. This mainstream rabbinical view concerning the Mount—that it should be the direction of Jewish prayer, rather than a place of Jewish prayer—has made the lives of Jerusalem’s temporal authorities easier, by keeping Muslim and Jewish worshippers separated. “至圣所”的确切所在并不为人所知，而穆斯林当局一直阻止考古学家对圣殿山实施发掘，一部分也是担心此类勘探有可能会发现更多的证据，证明犹太人先于伊斯兰教存在于此。这种主流的拉比教义观认为圣殿山应是犹太信徒祷告时的朝向而非他们应该出现的地方。这让耶路撒冷的世俗政府由此轻松一些，因为穆斯林礼拜者和犹太礼拜者被泾渭分明的隔开了。 In recent years, however, small groups of radical religious innovators who oppose the mainstream rabbinical view have sought to make the Mount, once again, a site of Jewish prayer. (Here is a New York Times Magazine story I wrote about these radical groups.) These activists have gained sympathizers among some far-right political figures in Israel, though the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not altered the separation-of-religions status quo. 然而，近年来，一些反对主流拉比教义观的激进宗教改革者小团体已在寻求将圣殿山重新确定为犹太祷告之地。（我为《纽约时报》所写的一篇文章所论的正是这些激进团体。）这些积极分子已获得以色列某些极右政治人物的同情，尽管总理本杰明·内塔尼亚胡领导下的政府仍未改变两种宗教分离的现状。 One of the tragedies of the settlement movement is that it obscures what might be the actual root cause of the Middle East conflict. 定居行动的悲剧之一是它可能模糊了中东冲突的真正起因。 Convincing Palestinians that the Israeli government is not trying to alter the status quo on the Mount has been difficult because many of today’s Palestinian leaders, in the manner of the Palestinian leadership of the 1920s, actively market rumors that the Israeli government is seeking to establish atop the Mount a permanent Jewish presence. 要让巴勒斯坦人相信以色列政府无意改变圣殿山的现状，这一直很困难。因为巴勒斯坦当今的许多领袖采用了1920年代巴勒斯坦领导层的做法，积极地散布谣言，声称以色列政府想要在圣殿山顶建立永久性的犹太人驻地。 The comments of the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas—by general consensus the most moderate leader in the brief history of the Palestinian national movement—have been particularly harsh. Though Abbas has authorized Palestinian security services to work with their Israeli counterparts to combat extremist violence, his rhetoric has inflamed tensions. 巴勒斯坦民族权力机构（自治政府）总统马哈茂德·阿巴斯的评论尤其尖锐。在巴勒斯坦民族主义运动的简短历史中，他已是公认的最温和的领袖。尽管阿巴斯已下令巴勒斯坦安全部门配合以色列的相关部门打击极端主义暴行，他的说辞却是在火上浇油。 “Every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure, every martyr will reach paradise, and every injured person will be rewarded by God,” he said last month, as rumors about the Temple Mount swirled. He went on to say that Jews “have no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet.” 上个月，关于圣殿山的谣言甚嚣尘上之时，他说：“洒在耶路撒冷的每一滴血都是纯洁的，每一个殉难者都将上天堂，每个受伤的人都将得到上帝的奖赏。”他接着说，犹太人“无权用他们的脏脚玷污清真寺。” Taleb Abu Arrar, an Israeli Arab member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, argued publicly that Jews “desecrate” the Temple Mount by their presence. (Fourteen years ago, Yasser Arafat, then the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told me that “Jewish authorities are forging history by saying the Temple stood on the Haram al-Sharif. Their temple was somewhere else.”) 以色列议会中的一位阿拉伯议员，Taleb Abu Arrar，公开发表言论说，犹太人的出现就是对圣殿山的“玷污”。（14年前，巴勒斯坦解放组织时任领导人亚瑟·阿拉法特曾告诉我，“犹太当局说圣殿位于‘高贵的避难所’，这是伪造历史。他们的庙在别的地方。”） These sorts of comments, combined with the violence of the past two weeks—including the sacking and burning of a Jewish shrine outside Nablus—suggest a tragic continuity between the 1920s and today. For those who believe not only in the necessity, but in the practical possibility, of an equitable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and in particular, for those who believe that the post-1967 settlement project is the root cause of the conflict—recent events have been sobering. 诸如此类的言论，再结合过去两周发生的暴力活动——包括洗劫和焚烧纳布卢斯市外的一处犹太圣地——表明在1920年代与今日之间存在一种可悲的持续性。对于那些相信巴以冲突不仅必须、而且实践上也能够通过双方平等建国方案来解决的人来说，尤其是认为1967年后的定居点计划才是冲突根源的人，近期的事态发人深省。 One of the tragedies of the settlement movement is that it obscures what might be the actual root cause of the Middle East conflict: the unwillingness of many Muslim Palestinians to accept the notion that Jews are a people who are indigenous to the land Palestinians believe to be exclusively their own, and that the third-holiest site in Islam is also the holiest site of another religion, one whose adherents reject the notion of Muslim supersessionism. 定居行动的悲剧之一是它可能模糊了中东冲突根本原因：许多巴勒斯坦穆斯林不愿意接受一个观念：犹太人是巴勒斯坦人自信为其所独有的土地上的原住民族，且伊斯兰教的第三大圣地同样也是另外一个宗教的至圣之地，而该宗教的信徒拒斥伊斯兰教的取代论。【译注：又称替换神学，是探讨基督教与犹太教和犹太人民关系的一种基督教神学观点，认为基督教徒已取代以色列人成为上帝的子民、新约已取代旧约。（译自wiki词条）】 The status quo on the Temple Mount is prudent and must remain in place. It saves lives, lives fundamentalist Jewish radicals would risk in order to advance their millennial dreams. But it is the byproduct of the intolerance of Jerusalem’s Muslim leadership. 圣殿山的现状是明智的，且必须继续保持。它确实挽救了人命，那些原教旨主义犹太教激进分子为了推进其千禧年之梦而愿意牺牲的人命。但它也是耶路撒冷的穆斯林领导层不宽容政策的副产品。 When violence against Jews occurs inside Israel, or on the West Bank, a consensus tends to be reached quickly by outside analysts and political leaders, one that holds that such violence represents the inevitable consequence of Israel’s occupation and settlement of Palestinian territory. John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, said in an appearance earlier this week at Harvard that, “What’s happening is that unless we get going, a two-state solution could conceivably be stolen from everybody. And there’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years.” He went on to say, “Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing, and a frustration among Israelis who don’t see any movement.” 当针对犹太人的暴力发生在以色列内部或约旦河西岸时，外部的分析人士和政治领袖倾向于迅速达成一种共识，认为这些暴力行为是以色列占领并定居于巴勒斯坦领土的必然后果。美国国务卿约翰·克里在本周早些时候出席哈佛的一个公开活动时说：“现状是，除非我们开始采取行动，否则可以预见两国方案将再无可能。而在过去的几年中，定居点已经有了极大的增加。”他接着说：“这些暴力之所以出现是因为挫败感在弥漫，而看不到任何进展的以色列人也很失望。” (On Friday morning, speaking with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Kerry revised and extended his comments, criticizing Abbas—in a passive way — for the violence: “There's no excuse for the violence. ... And the Palestinians need to understand, and President Abbas has been committed to nonviolence. He needs to be condemning this, loudly and clearly. And he needs to not engage in some of the incitement that his voice has sometimes been heard to encourage.”) （周五早上，参加美国国家公共电台Steve Inskeep的节目时，克里对他的前述评论进行了修正和扩展，就发生的暴力活动（以一种消极方式）批评阿巴斯：“暴力没有任何借口……巴勒斯坦人需要明白，阿巴斯总统也承诺了非暴力，他需要就此高调且清楚地谴责这些暴力行为，并且应当避开使用有时被人当作鼓励的煽动言辞”。） Many Palestinians believe that “this is not a conflict between two national movements, but a conflict between one national movement and a colonial and imperialistic entity.” 许多巴勒斯坦人认为，“这并非两个民族运动之间的冲突，而是一个民族运动和另一个殖民和帝国主义实体之间的冲突。” It is sometimes difficult for policymakers such as Kerry, who has devoted so much time and energy to the search for a solution to the Israeli-Arab impasse, to acknowledge the power of a particular Palestinian narrative, one that obviates the possibility of a solution that allows Jews national and religious equality. 如克里这样的政策制定者，由于他们已经为解决以巴冲突僵局付出了太多时间和精力，有时候难以认识到一种特定的巴勒斯坦叙事的力量，这种叙事排除了允许犹太人获得民族和宗教平等的方案可能性。 Writing in Haaretz, the left-center political scientist Shlomo Avineri describes an important disconnect that often goes unnoticed, even in times like these: Many Palestinians believe that “this is not a conflict between two national movements but a conflict between one national movement (the Palestinian) and a colonial and imperialistic entity (Israel).” 在《国土报》上，中左翼的政治学家Shlomo Avineri描述了一个通常不被注意（即便是当下也是如此）的重要断裂。许多巴勒斯坦人相信，“这并非是两个民族运动之间的冲突，而是一个民族运动（巴勒斯坦）和一个殖民和帝国主义实体（以色列）之间的冲突。” He goes on to write, “According to this view, Israel will end like all colonial phenomena—it will perish and disappear. Moreover, according to the Palestinian view, the Jews are not a nation but a religious community, and as such not entitled to national self-determination which is, after all, a universal imperative.” 他接着写道，“根据这种观点，以色列会跟其他所有殖民现象一样，终将走向灭亡。而且，根据巴勒斯坦人的观点，犹太人不是一个民族，而是一个宗教共同体，因此没有民族自决的权利，毕竟这是一条普遍诫规。” Avineri, like most sensible analysts, understands the many and variegated reasons for the continued failure of the peace process: 跟绝大多数明智的分析家一样，Avineri认识到了和平进程不断失败的原因众多而繁杂：

[M]utual distrust between the two populations, internal pressures from the rejectionists on both sides, Yasser Arafat’s repeated deceptions, the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the electoral victories of Likud in Israeli elections, Palestinian terrorism, continuing Israeli settlement activities in the territories, the bloody rift between Fatah and Hamas, American presidents who did too little (George W. Bush) or too much and in a wrong way (Barack Obama), the political weakness of Mahmoud Abbas, governments headed by Netanyahu that did everything possible to undermine effective negotiations. All this is true, and everyone picks and chooses what fits their views and interests—but beyond all these lies a fundamental difference in the terms in which each side views the conflict, a difference many tend or choose to overlook. “两个群体之间的互不信任，双方抵制派所造成的内部压力，亚瑟·阿拉法特反复无常的欺诈，对伊扎克·拉宾总理的谋杀，利库德集团在以色利选举中的胜利，巴勒斯坦恐怖主义，以色列在该地区持续不断的定居活动，法塔赫和哈马斯之间的血腥纷争，美国总统的无所作为（乔治·W·布什）抑或在错误的方向上做得太多（巴拉克·奥巴马），马哈茂德·阿巴斯的政治软弱，内塔尼亚胡为首的政府干尽了一切有可能破坏有效和谈的事。这些都是对的，每个人都能从中挑选出与合于自身观点和利益的原因——但在此之外，还存在一个易被人忽略的因素，即双方看待这一冲突的角度存在根本性的差别。”

The violence of the past two weeks, encouraged by purveyors of rumors who now have both Israeli and Palestinian blood on their hands, is rooted not in Israeli settlement policy, but in a worldview that dismisses the national and religious rights of Jews. There will not be peace between Israelis and Palestinians so long as parties on both sides of the conflict continue to deny the national and religious rights of the other. 过去两周发生的暴力活动受到了谣言散布者的鼓动，他们的手上现已沾满了以色列人还有巴勒斯坦人的鲜血。这种暴力并非根源于以色列的定居政策，而是源于一种拒绝承认犹太人享有民族和宗教权利的世界观。只要冲突双方继续否定彼此的民族和宗教权利，以色列人和巴勒斯坦人之间就不会出现和平。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

【2016-10-24】 在文明化进程中，温带族群相比热带族群有着更佳表现——这一观察大概是成立的，虽然对此所提出的解释多属无稽之谈。 ​​​​ 我能想到的最明显的理由是，温带季节周期波动强烈，俗话说四季分明，这带来几个后果： 1）食物来源的产出量季节性波动，对储存提出了要求，而库存对掠夺和保护构成激励，刺激了各种社会结构与组织发展， 2）食物产出的季节性，促成了延迟满足和审慎计划这两方面的能力发展， 3）季节周期及其与食物产出的关系，促成了天文、计时、立法、气象等知识的积累发展，而这些正是早期文明社会最初发展出的几个复杂知识系统（复杂到需要由专业阶层维护和传承） 等明天早上我再看看评论里是否已集齐了我听过的各种无稽之谈，晚安～  

澳洲真是食肉者的天堂，是不是素食者的地狱还有待考察:) 我常吃的几种肉类，价格由低到高依次是：鸡-羊-牛-猪，后三种的次序和上海/北京比正好颠倒，而羊肉恰好是我最喜欢的，消费者剩余满满。 牛奶AU$1/升，比上海便宜，但酸奶贵，约为牛奶的4-5倍，打算自己做，鸡蛋便宜的$3一打，略贵。 超市里最多见的鱼是三文鱼，不贵。 多数蔬菜很贵，较便宜的有芦笋、胡萝卜、大白菜、卷心菜，其中芦笋是我见到唯一比上海便宜的蔬菜，可惜没人替你削皮。 相比之下，加工过的冷冻包装蔬菜更合算，也更方便，是做熟后冷冻的，微波炉加热即可，另外，罐头蔬菜也便宜，但口味差些。 番茄酱特别便宜。 经过一番尝试之后，我将食谱调整为： 早饭：5个鸡蛋+1小根胡萝卜+100ml酸奶或牛奶；晚饭：450克牛排或羊排+1小根胡萝卜+100多克蔬菜。 看起来非常简单粗暴，不过执行几天之后，体重已明显下降（之前因为搬家前后食谱失控，体重反弹了两公斤）。 最重大改变是，以我的食谱，在家吃饭变得方便很多，一旦我把烤箱摸透，参数调准，生肉往里一扔，中途翻个面，烤熟，撒盐，开吃，胡萝卜生嚼即可，包装蔬菜微波炉加热，盘子攒上一堆送进洗碗机，现在还没解决的问题是：烤肉时垫点什么才能不用洗烤盘。 烤箱是个好东西。 洗碗机还没摸透，经常效果不好，可能跟碗碟的表面特性有关，以后换成宜家Dinera那种试试。  

The Atlantic: Denmark Isn't Magic 《大西洋月刊》：丹麦并不神奇 作者:DEREK THOMPSON @ 2016-08-02 译者:明珠(@老茄爱天一爱亨亨更爱楚楚) 校对:Drunkplane(@Drunkplane-zny) 来源:The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-american-dream-isnt-alive-in-denmark/494141/ New research suggests that the American dream isn’t alive in Scandinavia—but generous redistribution of wealth isn’t a terrible consolation prize. 新的研究表明，美国梦在斯堪的纳维亚没市场，但慷慨大方的财富再分配并非糟糕的安慰奖。 Danophilia is alive and well in America. Bernie Sanders and other liberals have lauded Denmark’s social democratic dream state, with its free college tuition, nearly universal pre-K, and plentiful child care. 倒是丹麦迷在美国大受欢迎且很滋润。伯尼·桑德斯和其他自由派盛赞丹麦是社会民主主义的梦想国度，因其免费的大学教育，几乎无所不包的学前教育和对孩童的充分关照。 While Republicans and Democrats both praise the virtues of what economists call “intergenerational mobility”—the chance for a poor young child to become at least a middle-class adult—America doesn’t lead the world in the pursuit of the American Dream. 共和党和民主党都赞美经济学家所谓的“代际流动性”——一个贫穷孩子长大至少成为中产阶级的机会——的优点，而在这一点上，美国并未在对美国梦的追求中身先士卒。 The standard social mobility statistic measures how much each generation's income is determined by its parents' income. By that measure, northern Europe and Scandinavia have the highest social mobility in the advanced world, and Denmark tops the list. 标准的社会流动性统计衡量一代人的收入多大程度上由其父母收入所决定。按照这种衡量方式，欧洲北部和斯堪的纳维亚的社会流动性在发达世界排名最高，其中丹麦名列第一。 But this Danish Dream is a “Scandinavian Fantasy,” according to a new paper by Rasmus Landersø at the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit in Copenhagen and James J. Heckman at the University of Chicago. Low-income Danish kids are not much more likely to earn a middle-class wage than their American counterparts. What’s more, the children of non-college graduates in Denmark are about as unlikely to attend college as their American counterparts. 但是，哥本哈根的Rockwool基金会研究部Rasmus Landersø和芝加哥大学James J. Heckman的一项新研究指出，丹麦梦是一个“斯堪的纳维亚空想”。相较于美国的低收入家庭的孩子，丹麦低收入家庭的孩子不会更有可能挣到中产阶级的工资。甚至相较于美国的情况，丹麦无大学文凭者的孩子上大学的希望同样渺茫。 If that’s true, how does Denmark rank number-one among all rich countries in social mobility? It’s all about what happens after wages: The country’s high taxes on the rich and income transfers to the poor “compress” economic inequality within each generation: When the rungs on the economic ladder are closer together, it’s easier to move a little bit up (or down) over the course of a generation. 如果真是这样，为何丹麦的社会流动性在所有富裕国家排名第一？这都源于工资背后的事：国家把从富人和收入里征收的高额税款转移给穷人的做法，“压缩”了代际之间的经济不平等：当社会上升阶梯的横档靠得更近时，代际之间向上（或下）移动就更容易一点。 “The Scandinavian Fantasy” is a rich, complex paper that is already making waves in the newly popular subject of intergenerational mobility. It makes three major points. “斯堪的纳维亚空想”是一篇丰富而复杂的论文，它推波助澜了代际流动性这一新近的流行主题。论文提出三个主要观点。 The first big idea is that Denmark is not a nation of Horatio Algersens. Its high social mobility is not the result of an economy that is uniquely good at helping poor children earn middle-class salaries. Instead, it is a country much like the U.S., where the children of poor parents who don’t go to college are also unlikely to attend college or earn a high wage. Social mobility in Denmark and the U.S. seem to be remarkably similar when looking exclusively at wages—that is, before including taxes and transfers. 第一个是，丹麦不是Horatio Algersens的国家。其高社会流动性并非来自利于贫穷孩子挣到中产薪水的经济。相反它很像美国，在那里没上大学的穷父母的孩子也不大可能上大学或赚取高薪。只看工资——在不考虑税收和财富转移时——丹麦和美国的社会流动性非常相似。【译注：Horatio Alger，1832年1月13日出生，是19世纪一位多产的美国作家，以少年小说而闻名。阿尔杰小说的风格大多一致，均描述一个贫穷少年如何通过其正直、努力、少许运气以及坚持不懈最终取得成功。历史学家认为，阿尔杰的作品绝不仅局限于其有趣的故事本身，小说中描述的通过自身努力获得成功的主人公，给予了大量当时美国穷人力量、信心及动力，更加刻苦工作换取成功。】 It is only after accounting for Denmark’s high taxes on the rich and large transfers to the poor that its social mobility looks so much better than the U.S.’s. America’s (relatively conservative) economic philosophy is that, with low taxes and little regulation, the market is an open savannah where the most talent will win out. But Denmark’s economic philosophy seems to be that the market is an unfortunate socioeconomic lottery system, and so the country compensates the poor with generous transfers paid by high taxes on the rich. 只有平衡了丹麦对富人征高税收和向穷人大量转移财富的因素以后，其社会流动性看上去比美国好很多。美国（相对保守的）的经济哲学是低税收和少管制，市场如同一片开放的大草原，大多数天才自然脱颖而出。而丹麦的经济理念则是，市场是一个不怎么靠谱的社会经济彩票投注系统，所以需要政府通过多征富人税并以慷慨的转移支付补偿穷人。 The second big idea in the paper is that Denmark’s large investment in public education pays off in higher cognitive skills among low-income children, but not in higher-education mobility—i.e., the odds that a child of a non-college grad will go on to finish college. 论文第二个重要观点是，丹麦公共教育的大量投资，在提高低收入家庭孩子的认知技能方面有所斩获，但未增加高等教育的流动性，比如，非大学毕业生子女完成大学学业的几率并未提高。 Overall, Denmark spends much more than the U.S. on all levels of education. In particular, a much higher share of its poor young children is enrolled in daycare and preschool than the United States. This large public investment in kids seems to increase cognitive skills among poor Danish children compared to their American peers. In international math and reading scores, for example, the poorest quartile in Denmark far outperforms their counterparts in the U.S. 总体而言，丹麦在各级教育上的花费比美国多得多。特别是贫困孩子上幼儿园和学前班的比例远高于美国。比起美国的同龄孩子，丹麦对孩子的大量公共投资提高了贫困儿童的认知能力。以国际数学和阅读考试为例，丹麦的最低四分位数的成绩值远优于美国。 But despite this far greater investment in young children and public colleges, Danish children of high-school graduates are still extremely unlikely to go onto college. Put slightly differently, a tiny share of Denmark’s college graduate population comes from homes where neither parent finished high school. The children of college-grads almost always go to college; the children of non-grads often don’t—even in Denmark. 但是，尽管在儿童和公立大学的投资大了很多，丹麦高中毕业生进入大学的可能性仍然非常低。稍有一点不同，极小一部分丹麦大学毕业生来自父母都没读完高中的家庭。大学生的孩子上大学；没上大学的父母，孩子往往也不上大学——即使在丹麦也是这样。 The third big idea is that Denmark’s welfare policies might reduce its citizens’ incentives to go to college. In the early 1990s, when Denmark raised the minimum age of eligibility for social assistance, college enrollment among Danish twenty somethings fell below its trajectory. Based on this finding, the researchers conclude that welfare policies may reduce college enrollment. Denmark makes it more comfortable to be poor and less lucrative to be rich, so many young people decide to end their education after high school. 第三个重要观点是，丹麦的福利政策可能降低了公民上大学的激励。1990年代初，丹麦提高了获得社会援助资格的最低年龄，大学在二十多岁青年人中的招生数随即跌入下行轨迹。基于这项发现，研究人员得出结论，福利政策会减少高校招生。丹麦让穷人更舒适，富人更无利可图，故而很多年轻人决定高中毕业后不再接受教育。 This final idea may be the most controversial. After all, it’s not clear how to frame this finding. Democrats can say: Despite conservative arguments that a welfare state could destroy poor young people’s ambition, Denmark’s educational mobility is no worse than the U.S. But Republicans can say: Despite liberal arguments that Denmark is so much better than the U.S. at social mobility, its poor kids are no more likely to go to college. “There is something here for the Republicans and for the Democrats,” Heckman told me. 最后这个观点可能最具争议。毕竟，目前还不清楚如何解释这个发现。民主党人可以说：尽管保守派观点认为福利国家可能毁掉贫穷年轻人的雄心壮志，可是丹麦的教育流动性并不比美国差。而共和党人可以说：尽管自由派认为丹麦的社会流动性比美国更好，可是其贫穷孩子们同样不太可能进入大学。“这些就是共和党和民主党的说辞”，Heckman告诉我。 The most significant implication of this paper is not a happy one: Equality of opportunity is a fantasy. It does not exist in the U.S., it does not exist in Denmark, and it probably doesn’t exist anywhere. The children of rich college graduates are far more likely to grow up to become rich college graduates, even in the world's social-democratic fantasyland. That is because, everywhere, parents matter. 本文最有意义的推论并不让人开心：机会平等是一种幻想。它在美国不存在，在丹麦不存在，可能在任何地方都不存在。富有的大学毕业生的孩子更有可能成长为富有的大学毕业生，即使在这世界的社会民主乐园——丹麦也是这样。这是因为，任何地方，父母都很重要。 And it’s probably a good thing that parents matter. For the government to make equality of opportunity its singular and absolute policy goal would probably mean breaking up neighborhoods, forcing arranged marriages, enrolling all children in a unified curriculum, and having them all taught by a mass-produced robot; that would eliminate neighborhood effects, assortative mating, peer effects, curricular differences, and the problem of unequal teaching quality. It is unclear that there is a constituency for this policy, even among the most radical of Bernie bros. 当然，父母很重要可能是件好事。对想要实现机会平等的政府来说，其单一而绝对的政策目标，将可能意味着打破邻里关系，强行安排婚姻，统一所有孩子的学习课程，让大批量生产的机器人教授所有孩子；那样将消除邻里影响、选择性的婚配关系【编注：即人们从与自己地位、收入、教育等方面背景相似的人群中选择配偶的倾向】、同侪效应、课程差异和不同教学质量的问题。不知道是否有选区支持这种政策，即使是最激进的桑德斯支持者。 But just as Denmark’s policy may have its own unintended consequences, the American philosophy of opportunity has its own dark side. For example, high income inequality in the U.S. makes a college degree more valuable in America than in similar countries. This may encourage more poor Americans to enroll in college. 但是，正如丹麦政策有自己意想不到的后果，美国式的自我奋斗争取机会的哲学也有自己的暗面。例如，美国显著的收入不平等使美国大学学位比在同类国家更值钱。这会鼓励更多美国穷人上大学。 For many, college pays off. But the recent rise in college attainment in the U.S. has come at a terrible cost for some. Student debt has exploded, particularly at for-profit colleges serving older, poorer students, the majority of whom drop out with student loans that aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy. 对于很多人来说，上大学是值得的。但是对于一些人，近期大学费用已经上涨到了糟糕的程度。学生债务激增，特别是上营利性院校的年纪较大的穷学生，他们中的大多数辍学时仍带着就算破产也必须偿还的学生贷款。 So the social siren of American inequality—join the rich! go to college!—lures many first-generation students to put tens of thousands of dollars toward a degree that they never get. If they default on their student loans, they won’t be able to get a loan to buy a house. Which means the housing market is constrained by student debt defaults. Which means other industries that rely on a healthy housing market—furniture, cars, plants, kitchen appliances, apparel—are also affected. 因此，美国社会不公平的刺耳警报——成为富人！考上大学！——诱使许多第一代学生花费上万美元以期获得一张他们得不到的文凭。如果他们拖欠学生贷款，将无法获得贷款买房子。这意味着学生债务违约限制了房地产市场发展。也意味着依赖良好运行的房地产市场的其他工业，如家具、汽车、种植、厨房电器和服装都会受到影响。 Denmark doesn’t have all the answers, and apparently its leaders know it—that’s why they have such a strong public assistance system in the first place. But the U.S. mythology of social mobility is also self-defeating, in ways that are exceptionally American. 丹麦没有给出所有的答案，显然其领导人知道这一点，这就是为什么他们首先建立了一套强有力的公共援助制度。但是，美国社会流动性的神话，以非常美国的方式，也打了自己的脸。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Yuri Kochiyama, today’s Google Doodle, fought for civil rights — and praised Osama bin Laden 今天的谷歌Doodle：为民权作斗争并歌颂本拉登的河内山百合 作者:Dylan Matthews @ 2016-05-19 译者:bear 校对:Tiff 来源:VOX,http://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713686/yuri-kochiyama Thursday, May 19, this year would've been the 95th birthday of Yuri Kochiyama, a prominent Japanese-American activist who passed away at 93 two years ago. Google is marking the occasion with one of its trademark doodles. 今年五月十九日的这个周四是河内山百合的95岁诞辰，这位生前著名的日裔美国激进分子，于两年前93岁时去世。谷歌把这一天标记为一个Google doodle。【译注：Google doodle是谷歌为了庆祝节日、纪念伟人以及其它伟大成就的临时主页标志。】 Some of Kochiyama's work was deeply, clearly admirable. As an associate of Malcolm X, she was an important nonblack ally to the more militant end of the civil rights movement. She endured forced internment during World War II, and was an outspoken advocate for reparations to internees, which would eventually be passed in 1988. She was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and advocate for inmates she viewed as political prisoners. 河内山的一些工作是值得被深刻地、清晰地赞颂的。作为马尔科姆·艾克斯【译注：马尔科姆·艾克斯与马丁·路德·金并称为20世纪中期美国历史上最著名的两位黑人领导人，但他反对后者的“非暴力”的策略，主张通过以暴力革命的方式获取黑人的权利。】的伙伴，她是民权运动中战斗在第一线的重要的非黑人同盟。她在二战时期被强制收容【译注：由于二战时日本是美国的敌对国，日裔美国人被强制收容】，并且成为“被收容者赔偿”法案的积极倡导者，而这项政策最终在1988年通过。她也为反越战发声，并且支持那些她视为政治犯的囚犯。 But other commitments of hers were more ambiguous. She was an outspoken admirer of Mao Zedong even after the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. She praised Malcolm X for his "admiration for Mao and Ho Chi Minh," and worked closely with the Revolutionary Action Movement, an "urban guerrilla warfare" organization based on "a synthesis of the thought of Malcolm X, Marx and Lenin, and Mao Zedong." The activist Robert Williams gifted her with a copy of the Little Red Book, and she later thanked him for "the gift of Mao's philosophy." 但是她其他的追求则更为暧昧一些。她是毛的直言不讳的崇拜者，即便是在大跃进和文革之后。她因为马尔科姆·艾克斯对毛和胡志明的赞赏而赞扬他，并且和“革命行动运动”组织亲密合作—这是一个基于马尔科姆·艾克斯思想、马克思列宁思想以及毛思综合体的“城市游击战”组织。【译注：Revolutionary Action Movement是马尔科姆·艾克斯的伙伴Max Stanford建立的半秘密组织，制定了用马克思列宁主义建立黑人国家主义的运动纲领】社会活动家罗伯特·威廉姆斯送了她一本红宝书作为礼物，对此她以这是“一份毛思的礼物”为由表示了感谢。 Yuri Kochiyama was a supporter of the terrorist group Shining Path 河内山百合是恐怖组织光明之路的支持者 Two positions of Kochiyama's stand out as particularly alarming. First, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the Peruvian terrorist group Shining Path, a Maoist organization that has conducted a brutal insurgency killing tens of thousands of people since 1980.Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that Shining Path personally killed or disappeared at least 30,000. 河内山有两个立场尤其让人警觉。第一，她是秘鲁恐怖组织光辉道路的狂热拥护者——这是一个毛派组织，从1980年开始发起了一场导致数万人死亡的血腥叛乱。秘鲁真相与和解委员会认为至少三万人遭到了光辉道路的亲自杀害或导致失踪。 "Its tactics include the burning of ballot boxes and the public 'executions' of moderate local leaders and others, including nuns and priests, who are seen as rivals for the allegiance of the poor," according to a 1992 New York Times report. "In wildly exaggerated demonstrations of Maoist precepts, children have been killed for political 'crimes.' Amnesty International says the guerrillas routinely torture, mutilate and murder captives. 纽约时报在1992年的一则报道中提到：“它的策略包括烧毁投票箱和公开处决温和的本地领袖和其他人，包括修女和神父——他们被视为无产阶级的敌人”，“在疯狂的毛派戒律夸张示范中，孩子由于政治犯罪被杀害。大赦国际组织说这个游击队经常折磨，残害和杀害俘虏。” "We reject and condemn human rights because they are reactionary, counter-revolutionary, bourgeois rights," founder Abimael Guzmán declared in one document. "Rather than concentrate its attacks on the armed forces or police, Shining Path has predominantly singled out civilians," Human Rights Watch noted in 1997. "The Shining Path has pragmatically avoided taking captives unless it intends to execute them … Shining Path has been reported to torture captured civilians before executing them." Shining Path also used rape as a weapon of war. 创始人阿维马埃尔·古斯曼在一份文件中声称:“我们拒绝并谴责人权因为它是反动的，反革命的，资产阶级法权的。”“针对军队和警察的攻击还是次要的，光辉道路主要是甄选平民”人权观察组织在1997年写道，“光辉道路实用主义地避免抓俘虏，除非它打算处决他们……有报道称光辉道路在处决被抓的平民前会折磨他们。”光辉道路还把强奸作为一种战争武器。 This did not appear to bother Kochiyama, who joined a delegation to Peru organized by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, which defends the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. She read, in her words, "the kind of reading materials that I could become 'educated' on the real situation in Peru; not the slanted reports of corporate America. The more I read, the more I came to completely support the revolution in Peru." In other words, she read, and believed, Maoist propaganda denying Shining Path's war crimes. 这似乎并没有对河内山造成困扰，她曾加入过一个由支持大跃进和文革的毛派共产主义革命党组织的代表团去秘鲁。她读道——她的原话：“这类读物能让我知晓秘鲁真实的现状；有别于美国企业的那些带有偏见的报道。我越读越觉得我在变得更加支持在秘鲁进行的这场革命。”换句话说，她阅读并且相信毛派的宣传，并且否认光辉道路的战争罪行。 After her return from Peru, she declared, "What has been taking place in both Peru and the US is a serious campaign to discredit Guzmán and the Shining Path movement, tainting them as terrorists, undermining their struggle with lies, isolating them, and intimidating anyone who might support them." 在她从秘鲁回来后，她声称：“在秘鲁和美国正在发生的是一场严重的运动——抹黑古斯曼和光辉道路运动，污蔑他们是恐怖分子，用谎言破坏他们的斗争，孤立他们，并且恐吓任何可能支持他们的人。” Yuri Kochiyama declared Osama bin Laden "one of the people that I admire" 河内山百合声明本拉登是“我尊敬的人之一” Kochiyama was a thorough-going opponent of what she viewed as American imperialism, and like some radical anti-imperialists this occasionally led her to admiring truly loathsome figures, because she thought they were effective at combating American empire. Abimael Guzmán was one. Osama bin Laden was another. 河内山是所有被她视作美帝主义事物的死对头，并且，就像一些激进的反帝国主义斗士一样，这偶尔使她仰慕一些真正令人讨厌的人物，因为她认为他们在有效地和美帝战斗。阿维马埃尔·古斯曼是一个，本拉登是另一个。 In a 2003 interview for the Objector: A Magazine of Conscience and Resistance, Kochiyama explained: 2003年，在《反对者：一份良心和抵抗的杂志》的采访中，河内山解释道：

I’m glad that you are curious why I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire. To me, he is in the category of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, all leaders that I admire. They had much in common. Besides being strong leaders who brought consciousness to their people, they all had severe dislike for the US government and those who held power in the US. 我非常高兴你对我将本拉登视为我尊敬的人之一的理由感到好奇。对我而言，他在我心中的位置和马尔科姆·艾克斯、切·格瓦拉、帕特里斯·卢蒙巴（译注：刚果民主共和国首任总理）、菲德尔·卡斯特罗，以及所有我尊敬的领袖是一样的。他们有很多共同点。除了以强大的思想领导他们的人民之外，他们都对美国政府和那些在美国掌权的人有着强烈的厌恶。 bin Laden may have come from a very wealthy family, but by the time he was twenty, he came to loathe the eliteness and class conduct of his family… 本拉登可能是来自非常富裕的家庭，但在20岁之时，他开始憎恨精英阶级和他家人所在阶级的做法…… …You asked, "Should freedom fighters support him?" Freedom fighters all over the world, and not just in the Muslim world, don’t just support him; they revere him; they join him in battle. ……你问：“自由斗士应该支持他吗？”全世界的自由斗士，不仅在穆斯林世界，不但支持他；他们尊敬他；他们在战斗中加入他。 …You stated that some freedom fighters responded that bin Laden’s agenda is more reactionary and does not speak to the needs of the masses of people who exist under US dominance. bin Laden has been primarily fighting US dominance even when he received money from the US when he was fighting in Afghanistan. He was fighting for Islam and all people who believe in Islam, against westerners, especially the US--even when he was fighting against the Russians. ……你提到一些自由斗士回应说本拉登的事业是更加反动的，并且没有为生活在美国主导下的人民群众的需求发声。即便是在他接受美国资金在阿富汗战斗的时期，本拉登的主要精力就已经放在和美国主导做斗争上了。他在为伊斯兰和所有信仰伊斯兰的人民和西方势力斗争，特别是美国——即便是在他和俄罗斯战斗的情况下。

To be clear, this is Kochiyama defending bin Laden — who, besides being a mass murderer, was a vicious misogynist and hardly the brave anti-imperial class traitor Kochiyama fancies him as — against other leftists who correctly noted that you can oppose American imperialism without allying or supporting violent jihadism. 需要明确的是，这是河内山为本拉登所作的辩护，而另一些左派人士正确地指出，在不支持暴力圣战主义或不与之结盟的情况下，也可以反对美帝国主义，对此她持反对意见。而本拉登，除了是一个大规模的杀人凶手外，还是一个恶毒的厌恶女性的人，并且他不可能像河内山赞许的那样是一个勇敢的反帝国主义的阶级反叛者。 Kochiyama's praise for Che Guevara and Fidel Castro is also controversial, and, I think wrong, but is at least somewhat common on the left. Sympathy for Shining Path and bin Laden, by contrast, is not a common left position basically anywhere. 河内山对切格瓦拉和卡斯特罗的赞美同样是有争议的。我认为这是错的，但至少在左派中还算常见。相比之下，对光辉道路和本拉登的同情在任何的左派阵营都不寻常。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

RECKONING WITH THE PAST 和过去做个了结 作者:MICHAEL INZLICHT @ 2016-02-29 译者:龟海海(@龟海海) 校对:混乱阈值(@混乱阈值) 来源:MICHAEL INZLICHT的博客,http://michaelinzlicht.com/getting-better/2016/2/29/reckoning-with-the-past Sometimes I wonder if I should be fixing myself more to drink. 有时候我辗转反侧，不知是否该借酒消愁。 No, this is not going to be an optimistic post. 没错，这不是一篇鸡汤文。 If you want bubbles and sunshine, please see my friend Simine Vazire’s post on why she is feeling optimistic about things. If you want nuance and balance, see my co-moderator Alison Ledgerwood’s new blog*. Instead, if you will allow me, I want to wallow. 如果你想要泡沫和阳光，我朋友Simine Vazire的文章会告诉你为什么她如此积极乐观。如果你想要情绪间的微妙平衡，看我同僚Alison Ledgerwood的新博客。而我，只想好好吐槽一番。 I have so many feelings about the situation we’re in, and sometimes the weight of it all breaks my heart. I know I’m being intemperate, not thinking clearly, but I feel that it is only when we feel badly, when we acknowledge and, yes, grieve for yesterday, that we can allow for a better tomorrow. I want a better tomorrow, I want social psychology to change. But, the only way we can really change is if we reckon with our past, coming clean that we erred; and erred badly. 我对我们现在的处境有太多的感触，这有时沉重得让我心力交瘁。我知道我失去了自控，头脑不清楚。但我觉得只有当我们直面昨日，为昨日沉痛伤感，才能拥有美好的明天。我渴望美好的明天，我希望社会心理学能改变。但是，唯一能使我们真正改变的是和过去做个了结，坦白过去所犯的严重错误。 To be clear: I am in love with social psychology. I am writing here because I am still in love with social psychology. Yet, I am dismayed that so many of us are dismissing or justifying all those small (and not so small) signs that things are just not right, that things are not what they seem. “Carry-on, folks, nothing to see here,” is what some of us seem to be saying. 首先声明：我热爱社会心理学。我在这儿码字就是因为我依然爱它。然而，让我感到泄气的是，尽管很多微小（其实并非如此微小）的迹象表明情况不妙且另有隐情，我们之中许多人却对所有这些迹象视而不见或想出种种理由开脱。“继续，伙计，这儿没啥好看的，”我们中有些人似乎在这么说着。 Our problems are not small and they will not be remedied by small fixes. Our problems are systemic and they are at the core of how we conduct our science. My eyes were first opened to this possibility when I read Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn’s paper during what seems like a different, more innocent time. 我们的问题不小，想轻易补救谈何容易。我们的问题是系统性的，而且密切关系到我们如何进行科研。我起初发现有可能出了问题是在我读了 Simmons, Nelson, 和Simonsohn合著的论文之后，那时情况看起来和如今还有所不同，还是一个更纯真的年代。【编注：该论文发表于2011年】 This paper details how small, seemingly innocuous, and previously encouraged data-analysis decisions could allow for anything to be presented as statistically significant. That is, flexibility in data collection and analysis could make even impossible effects seem possible and significant. 这篇论文详细阐述了那些之前受鼓励的微小且看似无害的数据分析是如何让事物呈现出统计意义的。那就是，灵活的数据收集和分析可以让那些实际不可能的作用变得可能并且显著。 What is worse, Andrew Gelman made clear that a researcher need not actively p-hack their data to reach erroneous conclusions. It turns out such biases in data analyses might not be conscious, that researchers might not even be aware of how their data-contingent decisions are warping the conclusions they reach. This is flat-out scary: Even honest researchers with the highest of integrity might be reaching erroneous conclusions at an alarming rate. 更糟的是，研究者无需主动挖掘数据就能得到错误的结论，这点被Andrew Gelman解释得很清楚。事实是，研究者在数据分析中的偏见可能不是有意识的，他们甚至没有意识到自己依据数据做出的决定正在歪曲他们最终得到的结论。这可怕至极：即使最诚实，最正直的研究者也有可能以高得吓人的几率得出错误的结论。 Third, is the problem of publication bias. As a field, we tend only to publish significant results. This could be because as authors we choose to focus on these; or, more likely, because reviewers, editors, and journals force us to focus on these and to ignore nulls. 接下来还有发表过程中的偏见。在特定领域中，我们只倾向于发表具有显著意义的结果。这可能是由于作为作者我们选择把注意力放在这些结果上；或者，更可能的是，因为审稿人，编辑和期刊迫使我们把注意力放在具有显著意义的结果上，而忽略那些零结果的研究。 This creates the infamous file drawer that altogether warps the research landscape. Because it is unclear how large the file drawer is for any research literature, it is hard to determine how large or small any effect is, if it exists at all. 这就导致了臭名昭著的＂文件抽屉＂问题（即发表偏见问题），最终歪曲了整个研究领域的形态。由于对任何研究文献我们无法知道其中的“文件抽屉”有多大，我们很难确定该问题所产生的某种影响有多大，假如该影响确实存在的话。 I think these three ideas—that data flexibility can lead to a raft of false positives, that this process might occur without researchers themselves being aware, and the unknown size of the file drawer—explains why so many of our cherished results can’t replicate. These three ideas suggest we might have been fooling ourselves into thinking we were chasing things that are real and robust, when we were pursuing neither. 我认为以上三点——数据的灵活性可能导致大量错误结论，且这一过程可能在研究人员不经意间发生，以及“文件抽屉”尺寸大小的不明——很好地解释了为什么众多我们所珍视的研究成果无法被重复。这三点表明我们可能一直以来自欺欺人以为自己在探求真实且坚实的结果，而事实上我们所追求的既不真实也不坚实。 As someone who has been doing research for nearly twenty years, I now can’t help but wonder if the topics I chose to study are in fact real and robust. Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years? 作为一个做了近20年研究的人，我忍不住怀疑过往研究的课题是否有确凿的依据立论。这些年来我致力探求的是否只是海市蜃楼？ I have spent nearly a decade working on the concept of ego depletion, including work that is critical of the model used to explain the phenomenon. I have been rewarded for this work, and I am convinced that the main reason I get any invitations to speak at colloquia and brown-bags these days is because of this work. 我曾用将近十年的时间来研究“自我耗尽”的概念，包括对解释该现象的模型至关重要的一些工作。我因此项研究获奖，同时我确信现在我之所以能受邀在众多学术讨论会发言并白吃白喝都是因为此项研究。 The problem is that ego depletion might not even be a thing. By now, many people are aware that a massive replication attempt of the basic ego depletion effect involving over 2,000 participants found nothing, nada, zip. Only three of the 24 participating labs found a significant effect, but even then, one of these found a significant result in the wrong direction! 问题在于，“自我耗尽”这个概念可能根本就不存在。时至今日，许多人都知道一项由两千余人参加的试图重复“自我耗尽”效应的大规模研究最终什么都没发现，一片空白。二十四个参与研究的实验室中只有三个发现显著的效应，但即使这样，其中一个发现的显著效应竟然是反向的！ There is a lot more to this registered replication than the main headline, and there is still so much evidence indicating fatigue is a real phenomenon. I promise to get to these thoughts in a later post, once the paper is finally published. But for now, we are left with a sobering question: If a large sample pre-registered study found absolutely nothing, how has the ego depletion effect been replicated and extended hundreds and hundreds of times? More sobering still: What other phenomena, which we now consider obviously real and true, will be revealed to be just as fragile? 此次记录在案的重复性研究留下的不仅仅是一个标题，同时，还有大量的证据表明“疲劳”是真实存在的现象。我承诺一旦我的论文最终发表，我会在之后的博客文章中加以阐述。但现在，令人警醒的问题则是：如果此前大量的研究毫无斩获，那么“自我耗尽”的效应是如何成千上万次地被复制并延伸的呢？更令人警醒的：其它那些我们认为真实无疑的现象，又会不会同样经不起检验呢？ As I said, I’m in a dark place. I feel like the ground is moving from underneath me and I no longer know what is real and what is not. 如我所说，我身处黑暗之地。我感觉似乎脚下的土地都在移动，而我已经辨不清真实和虚假了。 I edited an entire book on stereotype threat, I have signed my name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States citing stereotype threat, yet now I am not as certain as I once was about the robustness of the effect. I feel like a traitor for having just written that; like, I’ve disrespected my parents, a no no according to Commandment number 5. 之前我编辑了《刻板印象的威胁》一书，我还签署了一份美国最高法院的法庭陈述并引用了《刻板印象的威胁》，但如今我对该效应的确凿程度却不如过去那样坚定。写下这些文字，让我觉得自己像个叛徒。这感觉如同我对父母大不敬，触犯了十戒第五条。 But, a meta-analysis published just last year suggests that stereotype threat, at least for some populations and under some conditions, might not be so robust after all. P-curving some of the original papers is also not comforting. 但是，去年一项“元分析”（对以往的研究结果进行系统的定量分析）的研究表明，”刻板印象威胁”在一些特定条件下对于一些特定人群可能并不适用，此外对一些原始论文作p值统计曲线的结果同样不让人放心。 Now, stereotype threat is a politically charged topic and there is a lot of evidence supporting it. That said, I think a lot more pain-staking work needs to be done on basic replications, and until then, I would be lying if I said that doubts have not crept in. Rumor has it that a RRR of stereotype threat is in the works. 如今，“刻板印象威胁”是一个政治上受攻击的话题，也受很多有力证据的支持。在这样的情况下，我认为在基础的重复性研究上还有更多艰苦的工作需要做，在这之前，我若说对该效应没有疑问那肯定是在撒谎。有传言称，在之前的很多关于“刻板印象的威胁”的工作中存在着危险信号。 To be fair, this is not social psychology’s problem alone. Many other allied areas in psychology might be similarly fraught and I look forward to these other areas scrutinizing their own work—areas like developmental, clinical, industrial/organizational, consumer behavior, organizational behavior, and so on, need an RPP project or Many Labs of their own. Other areas of science face similar problems too. 公正地说，不止是社会心理学领域存在此问题。心理学中的许多其它类似领域可能同样受影响，我希望这些领域中的研究工作被仔细检验，如进化的、临床的、产业的/组织的、消费行为的、组织行为的心理学等等，都需要一个研究参与池项目【译注：RPP，Research Participation Pool，是一个协调管理研究参与对象的项目】或者“多重实验室”项目【译注：多重实验室项目，Many Labs Project是一个旨在对心理科学多种效应进行可重复性验证的项目】。其他领域的科学研究同样面临类似问题。 During my dark moments, I feel like social psychology needs a redo, a fresh start. Where to begin, though? What am I mostly certain about and where can my skepticism end? I feel like there are legitimate things we have learned, but how do we separate wheat from chaff? Do we need to go back and meticulously replicate everything in the past? Or do we use those bias tests Joe Hilgard is so sick and tired of to point us in the right direction? What should I stop teaching to my undergraduates? I don’t have answers to any of these questions. 在我消沉的这段时间，我觉着社会心理学需要推倒重建，从头来过。那么，从哪儿开始？对于哪些事我能确信不疑？在哪里我能平息我的疑惑？我认为我们学到了一些合理的东西，但如何区分成果和糟粕呢？我们是否需要回去并且一丝不苟地重复过去所有的事情呢？或者我们是否该使用Joe Hilgard厌恶至极的偏见测试来指明方向？哪些东西是我不该教授给本科生的？对所有这些问题我都没有答案。 This blogpost is not going to end on a sunny note. Our problems are real and they run deep. Okay, I do have some hope: I legitimately think our problems are solvable. I think the calls for more statistical power, greater transparency surrounding null results, and more confirmatory studies can save us. What is not helping is the lack of acknowledgement about the severity of our problems. What is not helping is a reluctance to dig into our past and ask what needs revisiting. 本篇博文注定不会有个阳光的结局。我们的问题是真切的，而且深入。好吧，我确实有几点期望：我有理由相信我们的问题是有解的。我认为更多数据支撑，对零结果研究更透明的运作，更多证实性的研究，这些可以解救我们于目前的困境。而帮倒忙的则是：缺乏对问题严重性的认知，不愿意挖掘探究我们的过去并且不愿拷问哪里出了问题。 Time is nigh to reckon with our past. Our future just might depend on it. 时候不早了，是该和我们的过去做个了结了。或许，我们的未来还指望着它呢。

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*In case you haven’t heard, Alison started a wonderful Facebook discussion group that I have the privilege of co-moderating. If you’re tired of bickering and incivility, but still want a place to discuss ideas, PsychMAP just might be for for you. 再次安利一下，Alison开了一个非常不错的脸书讨论组，我也有幸在其中参与共同主持。如果你厌倦了互撕，但仍想找个地方抒发讨论，PsychMAP可能恰好就适合你。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

花AU$3500买了部2005年的Ford Falcon BA，27万公里，没过中介，直接与卖家联系，通过电话后感觉人挺实诚，所在社区看起来也不错，就跑过去买了，这种买法可能为我省了一笔钱。 原本期望很低，结果发现车况相当好，出乎意料，也许车主很会保养（家里有位机械师老爹），也可能这车底子好，半个月开下来，只发现些小毛病（一扇后面的锁和一个远光灯泡怀了，一扇窗玻璃升降略有阻碍），没大毛病，油耗有点大，高速大概12-14升/百公里，市区16升以上，好在我跑动少，这边油价也不贵，油耗对我不是大问题。 适应右舵左行大概花了四五天时间（每天开一两次），最多出问题的地方是：1）误将雨刮作转向，最初两天反复犯错，而且很消耗注意力；2）在车道上的位置感不准了，往左偏，经过刻意练习才纠正。 右转比较困难，这边的交规将右转车的优先级放的很低，在没有专门右转灯的路口，留给右转的时间窗口很短，在特定情形下该让还是该走的决定，其中尺度也不容易把握。 路牌字小，很近才看得见，而且路口角度很直，所以小路口特别隐蔽，容易错过。 前方路名提示较少见，而且实线分道较早，不熟悉路线容易错过变道时机。 除超车和堵车外不许用右车道的规定好像没人理睬，这条规定确实不合理，无端制造大量不必要变道，尤其在限速低、几乎所有车都以接近限速开时，就更没一点好处了。 这边的公路修建者似乎特别偏爱环岛，郊区尤多，单车道环岛很方便，双车道环岛的规则有点特别，昨天刚弄懂，回想起来之前犯过几次错，好在邻车非常友好，让了我。 离CBD十公里以内的地区，堵车（以等待两个或更多红灯为准）情况比预料的多，之前听十年前离开澳洲的朋友说他从未遇到堵车，看来最近十几年车流增长了不少，不过，堵车程度与上下班高峰的相关度没有北京上海那么强，下午三点也常小堵，五六点也不是大堵。 收费公路不多，大墨尔本总共两条（我猜整个维州也只有这两条），估计我用到的机会不会多，不过还是办了张Breeze卡，反正没有年费或最低消费。 油价不高，波动频繁且幅度较大，最便宜的E10汽油，我加过三次，每升分别是$0.99, $1.24, $1.17。 7-Eleven的便利店兼加油站都有轮胎充气泵，很体贴，用过两次了。 洗车店不多见，我觉得也没必要，雨水多，灰尘少，唯一需要清洗的是前挡风下面那条沟里的树枝、落叶和鸟粪，打算买个手持吸尘器，便无须考虑洗车问题了。 半年内需要当地驾照，据说考试不容易过，我得多练练。  

When Democracy Meets the Ghost of Evolution: Why Short Presidents Have Vanished 当民主遭遇进化的幽灵：矮个总统为何不再有 作者:Lixing Sun @ 2016-03-02 译者:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy) 校对:明珠(@老茄爱天一爱亨亨更爱楚楚) 来源:The Evolution Institute,https://evolution-institute.org/article/when-democracy-meets-the-ghost-of-evolution-why-short-presidents-have-vanished/ Size matters in politics: America hasn’t seen a president shorter than 5’7” since William McKinley. A main culprit, unbeknownst to many, comes from voters’ cognitive biases—the work of evolution. And the conundrum took a theatrical turn early this year when Marco Rubio, a Republican presidential hopeful, was spotted wearing a pair of new boots. 身高在政治中很重要。自威廉·麦金利以后，美国已经没有出现过身高低于5英尺7英寸的总统了。一个不为许多人所知的主要原因是选民的认知偏差——这是进化的产物。本年初，这个谜案出现了一个戏剧性转变：来自共和党的总统强力候选人马克·卢比奥穿出了一双新靴子。 “Marco Rubio’s Republican rivals literally are hot on his heels,” opened a New York Post news article on January 6. Speculations followed as to how expensive the boots were. The Rubio camp wasted no time to clarify that they were nothing more than Men’s Florsheim, costing about $100. “卢比奥的党内对手的热情名副其实地只落后他一个脚跟”，1月6日的《纽约邮报》新闻报道如此开头。随后就有人开始猜测这双靴子有多贵。卢比奥的竞选团队即刻澄清说那只是一双富乐绅男款鞋，价格约100美元。 But the core of Rubio’s “bootgate” brouhaha wasn’t about luxury; it was about the heels—a whole two inches high. “A vote for Marco Rubio” tweeted Rick Tyler, Ted Cruz’s commuatsnications director, “is a vote for Men’s High-Heeled Booties.” 但卢比奥“靴子门”事件喧闹的核心不在于它是不是奢侈品，而在于它的鞋跟——厚达2英寸。“投票支持卢比奥”，泰德·克鲁兹的公关联络主管Rick Tyler在Twitter上说，“就是投票支持男式高跟靴子。” Why would Rubio sport a pair of, as Rand Paul teased, “cute new boots”? As far as we know, tall men have scores of advantages in life, work, and romance. Among CEOs, for example, 90% are taller than the average man, and only 3% are below 5’7”. In fact, for every inch added to their height, men can get an extra 1.8% (about $800) in wages, an amount duly dubbed by economists as a“height premium.” 为什么卢比奥会穿着一双如兰德·保罗所戏称的“可爱小靴靴”出来卖弄呢？据我们所知，高个子男人在生活、工作和爱情方面都有优势。比如，CEO中90%身高高于男性平均水平，只有3%身高不到5英尺7英寸。事实上，身高每增加1英寸，男性可以多拿1.8%的工资（约800美元），经济学家恰如其分地把这个增加额称为“身高溢价”。 Rubio may be aware that since the beginning of the last century, nearly 70% of the presidential campaigns between the two major parties have been won by the taller candidate. This wasn’t always the case, though. In fact, of the presidents elected before 1900, eleven were shorter than 5’9”, and only nine were taller (see the chart). 卢比奥可能意识到，自上个世纪初以来，两大党之间70%的总统竞选最终是身材更高的候选人获胜。但是，情况并非从来如此。实际上，在1900年以前获选的总统中，11人身高低于5英尺9英寸，只有9人身材比这高（见下图）。   After that, however, all short candidates have lost to their tall rivals—James M. Cox (5’6”) to Warren G. Harding (6’0”) in 1920, Thomas Dewey (5’8”) to FDR (6’2”) in 1944, then to Harry S. Truman (5’9”) in 1948, and Michael Dukakis (5’8”) to George H. W. Bush (6’2”) in 1988. 但是，自那以后，所有矮个候选人都输给了他们的高个子对手：1920年，詹姆斯·M·考克斯（5英尺6英寸）输给了沃伦·G·哈丁（6英尺）；1944年，托马斯·杜威（5英尺8英寸）输给了F·D·罗斯福（6英尺2英寸），1948年他又输给了哈里·S·杜鲁门（5英尺9英寸）；1988年，迈克尔·杜卡基斯（5英尺8英寸）输给了老布什（6英尺2英寸）。 At 5’10”, Rubio is taller than the average American man. Still, he is 5” shorter than the front-runner Donald Trump, a difference you can easily see on the screen during Republican primary debates. By adding two inches to his stature, he hoped to up his chance—if only his rivals weren’t paying attention. 卢比奥身高5英尺10英寸，高于美国男性平均水平。但是，他还是比领跑者唐纳德·特朗普矮5英寸。这一差别在共和党初选辩论的屏幕上看得很清楚。他想通过给自己身高增加2英寸来提高机会——只盼对手不要注意。 Do tall men make good leaders—presidents in particular? I pulled out data from Wikipedia.com and did some statistics (such as the Mann-Whitney U test and Spearman’s rank correlation analysis). And I found no relationship whatsoever between height and performance ranking for all elected presidents before 1900. (Obviously, I can’t do so for the period after 1900 because no short presidents have been elected.) 高个子就能当好领袖吗？特别是，高个子就能当好总统吗？我从维基百科上找数据做了一些统计工作 （比如曼—惠特尼U检验、斯皮尔曼等级相关分析）。我发现，1900年前获选上任的所有总统的身高和他们的任职表现排名之间找不出任何关系。（1900年以后显然无法做这种分析，因为这段时间没有矮个总统获选。） Why have short American presidents suddenly vanished since 1900? 为什么美国在1900年后突然就没有矮个总统了呢？ The answer, apparently, lies in the use of images in the media. In fact, the advent of the televised debate in 1960 has ushered in even more public scrutiny on candidates’ looks. As a result, no short or bald candidates have made it into the White House since Dwight Eisenhower. (Perhaps, that’s why Trump is careful about his hair—in case people think he is bald.) 答案显然在于媒体对照片的大量使用。实际上，1960年出现的电视辩论使公众对候选人的外貌审查进一步增加。于是，自艾森豪威尔以来，再没有任何矮个或秃顶候选人入主白宫了。（这也许就是特朗普特别在意发型的缘故，他担心人们以为他秃顶。） How can a candidate’s physical appearance hold such a strong sway on voters’ choices? Psychologists and behavioral economists will point to the halo effect, where a perceived strength—here, the height of a candidate—eclipses all weaknesses. Why, then, are our cognitive systems so naïve as to swoon for something utterly irrelevant (namely, the body size) of a potential leader? 为什么候选人的身体外形如此强烈地左右选民的选择呢？心理学家和行为经济学家可能会说这是因为存在光环效应：人们感知到的某一力量（此处就是候选人的身高）会遮蔽所有弱点。那么，我们的认知系统为什么如此幼稚，竟会被准领导人完全无关的某些特征（即体型大小）迷住心神呢？ The answer lies in our evolutionary past. Research shows that in a vast number of animals, from insects to mammals, body size can robustly predict winners when resources and mates are at stake. In primates, alpha males are usually large and assuming. (That’s why, even for a novice, it often takes just a glance to spot them in a bunch.) Not only do they win more fights, but females also fall for them. 答案就是我们的进化史。研究表明，对于从昆虫到哺乳类的大量动物而言，在资源和配偶成问题的情况下，体型大小能牢靠的预测谁会胜出。灵长类的雄性领袖通常都高大专横。（因此即便是新手也能从一群动物中一眼认出它们。）它们不但能赢取更多战斗，而且能收获雌性的喜爱。 This process favoring large body size is known as sexual selection, and apparently, it also worked for our Stone-Age ancestors. Even in modern tribal societies, from the Amazons to Papua New Guinea, tall, husky men are still widely preferred as chiefs—or “Big Men,” in Polynesia and other Pacific islands. No wonder our cognitive systems are tuned to looking for tall guys as leaders or mates—the hunks, in our colloquial lingo. 这一偏爱大块头体格的进程叫作性选择，我们石器时代的祖先们显然也受到了影响。即便在现存的部落社会中，从亚马逊丛林到巴布亚新几内亚，人们依然普遍更喜欢接受高大魁梧的男性当首领——或者“大人”，波利尼西亚和其他太平洋岛屿上就用这种称呼。因此，我们的认知系统会调整到找高个男人（——就是俗话说的hunk）做领袖或配偶，这毫不奇怪。 Since 1900, apparently, our liking for hunks hadn’t hit a major hitch until Harding was elected. In appearance, Harding was tall, virile, and gracious with thick eyebrows, wide shoulders, and a deep voice—features that can provoke a feeling of being macho, resolute, and competent. 显然自1900年以来，我们对大个头肌肉男的喜爱直到哈丁当选都没有遭遇什么大挫败。哈丁眉毛浓密、肩膀宽阔、声音低沉，身材高大雄壮且和蔼可亲。这些特征让人觉得他富于男性气概、做事果断干练。 Indeed, he rose from being a small town newspaper editor to an Ohio state senator, a US senator, and finally the president. But just after two years in the Oval Office, Harding’s impressive suite of manly features turned out to be all fake. They did nothing but make him a womanizer. 实际上，他最早只是一个小镇的报纸编辑，后来当上俄亥俄州参议员，然后是国会参议员，最后成为总统。但入主白宫椭圆办公室才2年，哈丁那些令人印象深刻的全套男性气质完全变成了假相。它们没有什么用处，只是让他风流成性而已。 He is called, according to the U.S. News, “an ineffectual leader who played poker while his friends plundered the U.S. treasury.” Even Harding himself confessed, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” When he died, rumors had it that his wife had poisoned him, not out of jealousy but to salvage his reputation from the charges of corruption in his administration. 据《美国新闻杂志》，他被称为“当同伙们洗劫美国国库时还在玩扑克牌的无能领袖。”连哈丁本人都承认，“我不适合这个职位，一开始就不应该到这来。”他死后，有传言说他是被妻子毒害的，原因不是嫉妒，而是为了补救他被控任内腐败的名声。 As the ghost of our evolutionary past lingers on, there is no reason why hunks with Harding’s physique won’t be elected again. If you have any doubt, think about Arnold Schwarzenegger. How much of a halo did he draw from his muscles as a body builder and his fame as an action movie star to win the Californian gubernatorial race in 2002? 进化史的幽灵一直在徘徊，因此没有理由认为拥有哈丁那种体格的大个头肌肉男不会再次被选上。如果你有任何疑虑，想想阿诺德·施瓦辛格。他那身健身运动员的肌肉和作为动作电影巨星的名气到底为他赢得2002年加州州长竞选贡献了多少光环？ It’s disconcerting for all concerned citizens to realize that in our age of television and the Internet, presidential elections share much with pageants for Mr. America. If our guts are all we rely on in the process, even the 5’7” John Adams or the 5’4” James Madison may not stand a chance to be elected today. 在电视和互联网时代，总统选举和美国先生选美有很多共同点。所有关心公共事务的公民因意识到这一点而心神不安。如果我们只依赖本能的话，那么5英尺7英寸的约翰·亚当斯或者5英尺4英寸的詹姆斯·麦迪逊今天若参选可能就没有机会胜出。 By forgoing a vast pool of talents from women, short men, and minority citizens (except Obama), how can we find the most capable person to lead our nation? In this sense, putting a woman in the White House will mark a new milestone in American democracy: it can break the entrenched spell—our cognitive biases for hunks—imposed by the ghost of evolution. 把妇女、矮个子、少数族裔（奥巴马除外）中的大量天才排除在考虑之外，我们怎么找出最有能力领导我们国家的人呢？从这个角度来说，选出一位女性入主白宫将成为美国民主新的里程碑：它将破除进化幽灵加在我们身上根深蒂固的魔咒，即我们钟情大个头肌肉男的认知偏差。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Warning: Labels 警示：此处有警示标签！ 作者:John Stossel @ 2016-06-22 译者:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy) 校对:明珠(@老茄爱天一爱亨亨更爱楚楚) 来源:Reason,http://reason.com/archives/2016/06/22/warning-labels Warning labels are a product of a litigious society that drive prices up. 警示标签是全社会热衷诉讼的产物，它们抬高了商品价格。 When you use a coffeepot, do you need a warning label to tell you: "Do not hold over people"? 使用一只咖啡壶时，你是否觉得它有必要附上一个警示标签，告诉你“不要端到别人头上去”？ Must a bicycle bell be sold with the warning: "Should be installed and serviced by a professional mechanic"? Of course not. Yet that bell also carries the warning: "Failure to heed any of these warnings may result in serious injury or death." 出售单车铃铛时，是否必须附带一个警示：“须由专业技工安装维修”？当然不会。可实际上，这只铃铛上不光有这条警示，还附带这样一条：“不听从上述警示可能会导致严重受伤或死亡。” This is nuts. It's a bell. 神经病。那不过是只铃铛！ The blizzard of warning labels means we often won't read ones we should, like the Clorox label that warns, do not use bleach "with other product... hazardous gasses may result." No kidding. Mixing bleach and ammonia creates gasses that can kill people. 警示标签狂轰滥炸的后果是，那些真正需要我们阅读的内容，我们倒经常不去读了。比如“高乐氏”的标签上说，不要将漂白剂“和其他产品”混用，“以免产生危险气体”。这不是开玩笑。漂白剂和氨混合会产生能够致命的气体。 But I rarely bother to read warning labels anymore, because manufacturers put them on everything. 但我现在很少阅读任何警示标签了，因为制造商已经在任何东西上面贴满了标签。 A utility knife bears the warning: "Blades are sharp." 比如，工具刀被贴的标签是，“刀刃锋利”。 I know about such dumb labels because Bob Dorigo Jones, author of Remove Child Before Folding, asks his readers and radio listeners to send in ridiculous labels for his "Wacky Warning Label" contest. 我之所以知道这些愚蠢标签的故事，是因为《折叠童车前请抱出孩子》一书作者Bob Dorigo Jones向读者和广播听众征集荒唐标签，参加他搞的“最雷人警示标签”竞赛。 "We do this to point out how the rules that legislatures and Congress make favor litigation," says Dorigo Jones. "We are the most litigious society on Earth. If the level of litigation in the United States was simply at the level of countries that we compete with for jobs in Asia and in Europe, we could save $589 billion a year." “我们这样做是想指出，立法机关和国会制定的法规会如何刺激诉讼，”Dorigo Jones说，“我们是全球最爱打官司的国家。只要美国的年诉讼量跟那些和我们争夺工作岗位的亚欧国家持平，我们每年就能节省5890亿美元。” America has more silly warnings mainly because, unlike the rest of the world, we don't have the "loser pays" rule in courts. That rule means that whoever wins a court battle is compensated by the loser. It creates an incentive not to bring frivolous cases. 美国的傻帽警示尤其多，主要是因为，与世界其他国家不同，我们的法院不实行“败诉者付费”这一规则，也就是说，不管谁赢了官司，都能得到败诉一方的补偿。它会鼓励人们不要为鸡毛蒜皮的事打官司。 In the U.S., the incentive is to try even dubious legal arguments and hope you'll hit the jackpot. Or maybe your enemy will pay you to avoid the bigger cost of hiring lawyers to continue the fight. 而在美国鼓励的则是，就算法律论证把握不大也要尝试一下，并指望中个头奖。要不然就是，你的对手也许因为不想花更多钱雇律师跟你长期纠缠而给你一笔钱了事。 More lawsuits mean more frightened corporate lawyers smearing labels on everything, just in case "lack of warning" is an issue in a lawsuit. 官司越多，意味着公司的律师们愈发胆战心惊，给万事万物都贴上标签，以免“没有警示”成为诉讼的一个争论点。 That's probably why a toy Star Wars lightsaber comes with the label, "Not to Be Used as a Battle Device." Why would they bother to say that? Did someone sue, claiming they thought a lightsaber would do what it does in Star Wars movies? I don't know. The company never responded to our questions. 这大概就是为何星战玩具光剑被贴上“不能用作战斗工具”标签的原因了。他们为什么自找麻烦说这些？是不是有人以为光剑玩具应该有电影《星球大战》里的效果，并（在期望落空后）起诉过他们呢？我不知道。我们问过他们，但该公司没有回应。 Some dumb labels are brought to us by dumb politicians. California requires warnings that something may be "toxic" or cause cancer on everything from foods to theme parks: "Disneyland Resort contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm." Gee thanks, California, but it would probably be better to warn kids about alligators over in Florida. 某些愚蠢标签是愚蠢政客导致的。加州要求从食品到主题乐园的所有东西都贴上标签，明确其是否“有毒”或是否致癌。比如，“加州政府了解，迪士尼乐园有导致癌症、出生缺陷或其他生殖系统损害的化学品，”。谢了，加州，如果佛罗里达能提醒孩子们小心鳄鱼，那也许更好。 Dorigo Jones offers a prize to whomever submits the wackiest label. The lightsaber label won this year, earning Susannah Peat of Carmel, Indiana, a thousand dollars. You can submit your choices to try to win next year's prize. Dorigo Jones设立了一个奖项征集最雷人标签。本年度获奖的就是光剑玩具上的标签，来自印第安纳州卡梅尔市的Susannah Peat获得了1000美元奖金。你可以提交你的选择，去竞争来年的奖励。 Please do. It's important to make fun of lawyer-driven stupidity that distracts us from more important risks. 请务必提交噢。由律师们搞出来的这种蠢事让我们忽视了更为重大的风险，有必要嘲笑一下他们。 I suppose I shouldn't really blame companies. They've been sued successfully so many times for not having labels that they feel they must try to protect themselves. Injuries aren't the real danger here. Lawyers and politicians are. 我觉得我真不应该谴责这类公司。他们因为没贴标签已经被多次起诉成功，以至于认为必须自保。在这类问题上，伤害并非真正的危险，律师和政客才是。 When companies get sued, they end up charging higher prices to cover the cost of the lawyers. So those warning labels not only distract us but also are part of a process that makes us all poorer. 公司一旦被起诉，最终会通过抬高商品价格弥补雇佣律师的成本。所以，这类警示标签不但扰乱了我们的注意力，而且是造成我们变穷的部分原因。 I worry that they also make us stupider. 我担心它们还使我们变蠢。 Economists say that when people assume that government protects us from all possible harm, we acquire a false sense of security. We stop looking out for ourselves. 经济学家说，如果假定政府能保护我们免受任何可能的伤害，那么我们就会获得一种虚假的安全感，便不再自己小心留神。 Those warning labels give us the impression that the law has assessed every possible risk—if something were seriously dangerous, government wouldn't allow it. 这类警示标签给我们一种印象，以为法律评估过所有可能的风险——如果某件事物很危险，政府不会放过它。 Lawyers and legislators' insistence that most every action be bound by written rules makes many of us forget to use own own brains. 律师和立法者坚持要求几乎所有的事都必须受到成文规则的约束，这让许多人忘记了自己还会动脑子。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Why smart people are better off with fewer friends 为什么聪明人最好少交朋友 作者:Christopher Ingraham @ 2016-03-18 翻译:小聂(@PuppetMaster) 校对:小册子(@昵称被抢的小册子) 来源:The Washington Post,https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/18/why-smart-people-are-better-off-with-fewer-friends/ Hell might actually be other people — at least if you're really smart. 他人没准还真是地狱——至少对一个真正聪明的人来说是这样的。 That's the implication of fascinating new research published last month in the British Journal of Psychology. Evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Norman Li of Singapore Management University dig in to the question of what makes a life well-lived. While traditionally the domain of priests, philosophers and novelists, in recent years survey researchers, economists, biologists and scientists have been tackling that question. 这是上个月在《英国心理学杂志》发表的一篇有趣的新研究中说的。两位进化心理学家，伦敦政治经济学院的Satoshi Kanazawa和新加坡管理大学的Norman Li，对于如何活出幸福人生进行了深入的研究。这个传统上被神父、哲学家和小说家把控的议题，近年来却被问卷调查者、经济学家、生物学家和科学家所关注。 Kanazawa and Li theorize that the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of our ancient ancestors form the foundation for what make us happy now. "Situations and circumstances that would have increased our ancestors’ life satisfaction in the ancestral environment may still increase our life satisfaction today," they write. Kanazawa和Li提出的理论是，我们祖先的狩猎采集生活方式决定了我们感受幸福的底层机制。他们认为，“在原始环境中能够使我们祖先得到满足的情境，或许在今天仍然可以提升我们的满足感。” They use what they call "the savanna theory of happiness" to explain two main findings from an analysis of a large national survey (15,000 respondents) of adults aged 18 to 28. 他们使用了这个所谓的“关于幸福的热带草原理论”来解释两个主要的研究发现，被研究对象是一项涵盖了15,000个18到28岁成年人的大型全国调查。 First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness. 第一个发现是，在高人口密度地区生活的人们对他们的生活总体上更缺乏满足感。被调查者回应说“周围人口密度越大，就越感觉不幸福”。第二个发现是，和亲密朋友的更多交往伴随着更多的幸福感。 But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed. 但是有一个明显的例外，对于高智商人群，上述相关性会变弱，甚至反转。 "The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals," they found. And "more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently." “所以，对于低智商人群来说，人口密度对于生活满足度的影响会比对于高智商人群大一倍以上”他们还发现，“高智商人群的生活满意度甚至会因为和朋友交往过多而下降。” Let me repeat that last one: When smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy. 容我重复一下后一个发现：如果聪明人在与朋友交往上花更多的时间，他们反倒会感觉不开心。 Now, the broad contours of both findings are largely uncontroversial. A large body of previous research, for instance, has outlined what some have called an "urban-rural happiness gradient." Kanazawa and Li explain: "Residents of rural areas and small towns are happier than those in suburbs, who in turn are happier than those in small central cities, who in turn are happier than those in large central cities." 现在，两个研究发现的粗线条概要大体是无争议的。例如，曾有一大批研究项目概括出被有些人称为“市区-郊区幸福梯度”的东西。Kanazawa和Li解释说：“乡村和小镇的居民比近郊居民更幸福，后者又比生活在小型中心城市的居民幸福，而小型中心城市的居民又比生活在大城市的人幸福。” Why would high population density cause a person to be less happy? There's a whole body of sociological research addressing this question. But for the most visceral demonstration of the effect, simply take a 45-minute ride on a crowded rush-hour Red Line train and tell me how you feel afterward. 为什么高人口密度会使一个人不开心呢？现在已有大量的社会学研究瞄准了这个问题。但是如果要最感同身受地体现这种影响，莫过于在高峰期搭乘45分钟的拥挤地铁，然后告诉我你的心情如何。 Kanazawa and Li's second finding is a little more interesting. It's no surprise that friend and family connections are generally seen as a foundational component of happiness and well-being. But why would this relationship get turned on its head for really smart people? Kanazawa和Li的第二个发现则更有意思一些。毫无疑问，亲情和友情往往是构成个人生活幸福快乐的基础之一。但是为什么对于聪明人来说，这种关系会被反过来呢？ I posed this question to Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness. "The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it ... are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective," she said. 我就此问题请教了在布鲁金斯学会研究幸福经济学的Carol Graham。“这个发现（毫不奇怪地）表明具有高智商并且能将其驾驭自如的人……较不愿意将大量时间花费在与人交往上面，因为他们专注于其他更长期的目标，”她解释道。 Think of the really smart people you know. They may include a doctor trying to cure cancer or a writer working on the great American novel or a human rights lawyer working to protect the most vulnerable people in society. To the extent that frequent social interaction detracts from the pursuit of these goals, it may negatively affect their overall satisfaction with life. 想想你认识的真正聪明人。他们也许是一个试图治愈癌症的医生，一个想要写出一部杰出的美国小说的作者，或是一个关注保护社会弱势群体的人权律师。如果社交活动过于频繁，以至妨碍他们追求这些远大目标，就会降低他们整体的生活满意度。 But Kanazawa and Li's savanna theory of happiness offers a different explanation. The idea starts with the premise that the human brain evolved to meet the demands of our ancestral environment on the African savanna, where the population density was akin to what you'd find today in, say, rural Alaska (less than one person per square kilometer). Take a brain evolved for that environment, plop it into today's Manhattan (population density: 27,685 people per square kilometer), and you can see how you'd get some evolutionary friction. 但是Kanazawa和Li的热带草原幸福理论提供了一个不一样的解释。该理论始于一个前提，即人类大脑进化是为了适应我们祖先在非洲大草原上的生存环境。在这种环境下的人口密度近似于如今的阿拉斯加荒野（每平方公里不到一人）。从这种环境下进化出的大脑，被丢进当今的曼哈顿（人口密度每平方公里27,685人），这种进化上的摩擦可想而知。 Similarly with friendship: "Our ancestors lived as hunter–gatherers in small bands of about 150 individuals," Kanazawa and Li explain. "In such settings, having frequent contact with lifelong friends and allies was likely necessary for survival and reproduction for both sexes." We remain social creatures today, a reflection of that early reliance on tight-knit social groups. 对友情来说也近似：“我们祖先作为狩猎采集者，生活在一个个约为150人的小集体里，”Kanazawa和Li解释说。“在这样的环境中，和终生朋友以及盟友的频繁接触对于生存和繁衍 很可能是必要的，无论是男性还是女性。”我们至今仍是社会性的物种，这反映了我们早期对于被社会关系纽带紧密编织起来的小集体的依赖。 The typical human life has changed rapidly since then — back on the savanna we didn't have cars or iPhones or processed food or "Celebrity Apprentice" — and it's quite possible that our biology hasn't been able to evolve fast enough to keep up. As such, there may be a "mismatch" between what our brains and bodies are designed for, and the world most of us live in now. 从那时起，人类生活有了极大改变——在热带草原时期我们可没有汽车、iPhone、加工食品或是“明星学徒”【译注：电视真人秀节目】——而我们生理特性的进化极可能赶不上这些改变。因此，在我们的身心设定与我们生存的世界之间，可能会存在着“错配”。 To sum it all up: You've heard of the paleo-diet. But are you ready for paleo-happiness? 简而言之，你知道有旧石器食谱，但是你想不想试试旧石器幸福感？ There's a twist, though, at least as Kanazawa and Li see it. Smarter people may be better equipped to deal with the new (at least from an evolutionary perspective) challenges present-day life throws at us. "More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionarily novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations," they write. 但是剧情到这里有个反转，至少Kanazawa和Li这么觉得。聪明人可能更擅长处理现代生活中的新（至少从进化的观点看）挑战。“那些更有智慧，更具有高等的通用智能从而可以更好的解决新进化问题的个体，可能会较易于理解和应对进化上的新实体或是新问题，”他们写道。 If you're smarter and more able to adapt to things, you may have an easier time reconciling your evolutionary predispositions with the modern world. So living in a high-population area may have a smaller effect on your overall well-being — that's what Kanazawa and Li found in their survey analysis. Similarly, smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they're pursuing some loftier ambition. 如果你更聪明，并且更有能力适应环境，你应能更容易处理好先天进化不足和现代社会生活的错配。所以住在高人口密度地区可能对你的总体生活舒适程度影响很小——这就是Kanazawa和Li的调查研究发现。同样的，聪明人更有能力能力人更有可能完全放应对进化上的新实体或是情景说有些人称为“市中舍弃那套狩猎采集式的社交网络——特别是当他们有远大目标的时候。 It's important to remember that this is an argument Kanazawa and Li are proposing and that it's not settled science. "Paleo-" theories — the idea that our bodies are best adapted to the environment of our earliest ancestors — have come under fire in recent years, especially as food companies and some researchers over-hyped the alleged benefits of the paleo-diet fad. 值得注意的是，这只是Kanazawa和Li提出的论点，绝非科学定论。以“旧石器”开头的理论——基于我们的身体仍与我们最早期的祖先所处环境相适应之假设——在近年来饱受争议，特别是由于食品公司和某些学者过于推崇当下流行的旧石器食谱所带来的可能好处。 Kanazawa and Li's main findings about population density, social interaction and happiness are relatively uncontroversial. But Brookings's Carol Graham says one potential flaw in their research is that it defines happiness in terms of self-reported life satisfaction ("How satisfied are you with your life as a whole?"), and doesn't consider experienced well-being ("How many times did you laugh yesterday? How many times were you angry?" etc.). Survey researchers know that these two types of questions can lead to very different assessments of well-being. Kanazawa和Li对于人口密度，社会交往以及幸福感的主要观点相对来说并没有太大的争议。但是布鲁金斯学会的Carol Graham认为他们的研究有个潜在的缺陷，即用受访者自我报告的生活满意程度来定义幸福（“整体上来说，你对自己的生活满意么？”），而不考虑受访者关于舒适生活的实际体验（“你昨天笑了几次？生气了几次？”等等）。问卷调查者都知道这两类问题对于幸福生活的衡量可以得出完全不同的结果。 For their part, Kanazawa and Li maintain that that distinction doesn't matter too much for their savanna theory. "Even though our empirical analyses ... used a measure of global life satisfaction, the savanna theory of happiness is not committed to any particular definition and is compatible with any reasonable conception of happiness, subjective well-being, and life satisfaction," they write. Kanazawa和Li则认为这一区别对他们的热带草原理论影响不大。“虽然我们的实证研究……使用了总体的生活满意度，关于幸福的热带草原理论并不局限于任何一种定义，并且适用于任何对于幸福、主观幸福感和生活满意度的合理的概念化处理，”他们写道。 Kanazawa himself is no stranger to controversy. In 2011 he wrote a blog post for Psychology Today entitled "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" The post ignited a firestorm of criticism and was swiftly taken down. Kanazawa本人也经常处于争议之中。2011年他给《今日心理学》写了一篇名为“为什么黑人女性在生理上不如其他女性具有吸引力？”的博客文章。该文引发了猛烈的批评，并且被迅速撤下了。 His current research on well-being is not likely to generate as much criticism as that blog post. But the evolutionary perspective on happiness and intelligence is likely to prompt some heated discussion in the field. 他现在关于幸福的研究不大可能引发类似的抨击。但从进化角度解读幸福和智力很可能会在该领域引发一些热烈的讨论。 In an email, Kanazawa said that his approach to understanding happiness is fundamentally different than the arguments about, say, the benefits of a paleo-diet. "Blindly introducing our ancestors’ diet when we do not have other aspects of the ancestral life seems like a dangerous and nonsensical prescription to me," he said. 在一封电子邮件里， Kanazawa认为他理解幸福的方式和关于比如说旧石器食谱的好处的论证有着本质的区别。“盲目的引入我们祖先的食谱，而不考虑到我们生活的其他方面与祖先有异，在我看来是危险且毫无道理的，”他说。 "I only explain nature; I do not tell people what to do or not to do," he added. “我只是解释自然现象；我并不是告诉人们去做什么或是不做什么，”他补充道。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Political Animals by Rick Shenkman: why we shoot our democracies in the foot Rick Shenkman新书《政治动物》：为什么我们会搬起石头砸民主的脚 作者:Olivia Archdeacon @ 2016-01-22 译者:babyface_claire(@许你疯不许你傻) 校对:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy) 来源:CapX,http://capx.co/political-animals/ Best-selling historian and Emmy award-winning investigative reporter Rick Shenkman is back. He explains in the latest of his seven books, Political Animals – How our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics, that despite our species’ pride of rational thinking, our world is anything but rational. 畅销历史书作家和艾美奖调查记者获得者Rick Shenkman回来了。他在最新的第七本书《政治动物：石器时代的大脑如何妨碍政治精明》里解释到，尽管我们人类以理性思考为傲，但是世界却一点也不合理。 Like economists, political scientists base their models on rational choice, and do not want to think that a one off event like a shark attack can have a significant effect on voting. Yet it has been proven time and again that when times are bad, people vote against the incumbents. If a meteor hit Arizona, they’d vote against the incumbents. Extraneous forces have political consequences. Unfortunately for politicians, this is especially the case when the effect is negative. 像经济学者一样，政治学者以理性选择为基础建构其模型，并且不愿意认为一件像鲨鱼攻击这样的一次性事件可以对投票结果产生重大影响。然而事实一次又一次证明，一旦碰上光景不好，人们就会投票反对当权者。如果有陨石击中亚利桑那州，他们会投票反对当权者。外来力量能够造成政治后果。 不幸的是，对政治家而言，如果这种影响是负面的，情况更是如此。 Readers of Shenkman’s previous book, ‘Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the truth about the American voter’ may be reluctant to pick up another anthology of painfully embarrassing truths about the general public of the world’s most powerful economy. But they should be reassured that Political Animals is a forgiving, empathetic and motivational read. 读过Shenkman上本书《我们是多么愚蠢？正视美国选民的真相》的人，可能不愿再读一本关于世界最大经济体的一般公众的痛苦尴尬真相的汇编。但是我可以向他们保证，《政治动物》是一本宽容、体贴且激励人心的读物。 It is tough love, however. Shenkman points out that despite the human brain being packed with eighty-six billion neurons – making human beings smarter than the smartest computer that ever existed (yet) – when it comes to politics, the public is very easily fooled. What is more alarming is that we’re fooling ourselves. We cannot blame the politicians or the Illuminati. 然而，这是严厉的爱。Shenkman指出，尽管人类的大脑挤满了860亿个神经细胞（使人类比迄今为止最聪明的电脑更加聪明），可是一旦涉及政治，公众却非常容易被欺骗。更令人担忧的是，是我们自己在欺骗自己。我们不能把责任推给政治家或“光照派”。 “We often lie about out reasons for doing what we do in politics. We don’t just lie to others, we lie to ourselves. Therefore we can only detect what people are thinking when we study patterns of behaviour in groups.” “我们经常会在我们政治行为的缘由方面撒谎。我们不止对别人撒谎，我们对自己也撒谎。因此，我们只能通过研究群体的行为模式来检测人们在想什么。” Shenkman’s genuine passion for his subject matter shines through. As much as we rationalise our actions in hindsight, we’re not in a position to truly know ourselves seeing as so much of what happens in our brain happens outside of conscious awareness. So attempting to understand why people vote the way they do simply by asking them will get us nowhere. We need science. Shenkman 对他的研究主题闪耀着真正的热情。我们会在事后尽力合理化自己的行为，鉴于大脑中发生的大量事情处于我们的自觉意识之外，我们就处在一个不能真正了解自己的境地。所以，只是追问人们为什么如此这般投票，对我们理解这一问题毫无益处。我们需要科学。 Political Animals does this. It uses breakthroughs in neuroscience, genetics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, behavioural economics, political science, political psychology and game theory to give new insights into political behaviour. 《政治动物》要做的就是这件事。它利用了神经科学、遗传学、进化心理学、人类学、行为经济学、政治科学、政治心理学和博弈论等学科的新突破，寻求对于政治行为的新见解。 The basic premise of the book is that our brain evolved roughly 1.8 million years ago and so the instincts that were baked into human DNA then are now often not the most appropriate or efficient response to our environment: “In politics, [instincts] often don’t work: they malfunction, misfire and lead us astray.” Shenkman even goes as far as to argue that “when it comes to politics, the times when we can unquestioningly go with our instincts is almost nil.” 这本书的基本前提是：我们的大脑大约在180万年前进化形成，因此那些整合到人类DNA中的本能通常并非我们对环境所能做出的最合适或最有效反应。“在政治中，[直觉]通常不可行，他们会失灵，无法奏效，还会带我们误入歧途。” Shenkman走得很远，他甚至认为，“当谈到政治时，我们可以毫无疑问的跟随直觉走的时候基本为零”。 In essence: we frequently sabotage ourselves, upending democracy in ways none of us intended. 从本质上说，我们经常会在没有人刻意如此的情况下伤害自己、颠覆民主。 Shenkman focuses on four problems that we continually make: political apathy; failure to correctly size up our political leaders; a habit of punishing politicians who tell us the hard truths we don’t want to hear; and our failure to show empathy in situations that clearly demand it. Shenkman关注我们经常犯的四个错误：政治冷漠，不能正确地认识政治领袖，习惯性地惩罚跟我们讲述我们不愿意听的残酷事实的政治家，在明确需要的情况下不能表示同情。 Hearing all of this, it is sorely tempting to conclude that democracy is hopeless. But all is not lost. 听到这一切，让人很容易得出结论，民主是无望的。但这并不意味着一切。 Throughout the book we are reminded that the way our brain is constructed does not mean we are fated to behave as cavemen, even though we might be inclined to think that based on the morning’s headlines. He shows us with numerous thought experiments (that readers can conduct on themselves) that is better to think of our brains as being pre-wired rather than hard-wired. We have certain innate traits but whether they determine how we behave in a particular situation depends on a range of factors. This shouldn’t be so surprising – think how easily and dramatically our energy levels can affect our decision making and self-control. 这本书从头到尾一直在提醒我们，我们的大脑如此构造，并不意味着我们注定要像穴居人那样行动，尽管根据早上的头条新闻我们可能倾向于这样认为。他通过许多思想实验（读者可以自己进行）向我们表明，我们最好将大脑看作是预设的而并非是固设的。我们有某些天生的特质, 但这些特质是否会决定我们在特定情况下的行为则取决于一系列因素。这并不应该让人感到惊讶——想想我们的精力水平能如何容易、如何显著地影响我们的决策和自控能力吧。 What is more controversial is Shenkman’s challenge to the convention that the main political problem society faces is a lack of information: “Modern Platos raise a huge cry over the problem ignorance poses to democracy, turning alarmism about ignorance into a virtual cottage industry” 更有争议的是Shenkman对社会面临的主要政治问题乃是缺乏信息这一传统观念的挑战，“现代柏拉图们大声疾呼，宣称无知威胁民主。他们已经把对无知的担忧警惕几乎变成了一种祖传家酿。” And he’s right – critics have been beating the same horse for generations, crying ‘mass man is ignorant!’ After the Second World War and the rise of Nazism, university professors became consumed with the problem of public ignorance. It is not that simple, unfortunately. Proving that unknowledgeable voters can be turned into knowledgeable ones doesn’t prove much we didn’t already know. We send children to school because we believe they can learn. The truth is more unsettling: it is not an intelligence or information problem. It’s a motivation, environment, social and, above all else, a human being problem. The problem is that voters on their own don’t try to learn. 他是对的——评论家们世世代代都在鞭打同一具尸体，喊叫“大众是无知的！”第二次世界大战和纳粹主义兴起之后，大学教授们开始全心关注公众无知的问题。不幸的是，这不是那么简单。证明了无知的选民可以转变为有知的选民，这并不能证明多少我们事先就不知道的事情。我们送孩子去学校是因为我们相信他们有学习的能力。真相是更让人不安的：这不是一个智力或者信息问题。这是激励、环境、社会的问题，最重要的是，这是人性问题。问题在于选民们自己不尝试去学习。 Perhaps voters need to be motivated, probably financially. But no government has tried this (directly) because voters would find it insulting – anyone who dared suggest that voters need to be paid because they are citizen delinquents would instantly be branded as elitist. 或许选民需要刺激，比如经济刺激。但是没有任何政府（直接地）试图这么做，因为选民们会感到这是侮辱——任何人若胆敢建议给选民支付费用【编注：从上下文看，意思好像是付费让选民接受公民培训，但也可能是指为投票行为付费。】，而且给出的理由是因为他们是公民群氓，那他立马就会被贴上“精英主义”的标签。 Equally, the Scandinavian experience shows culture can be just as effective (75% of Swedes participate in adult civics-study circles at some point in their lives having retained an interest in politics from school-age). But why should it take either money or culture to get people to perform their civic responsibilities? Shouldn’t people want to be involved? 同样的，北欧的经验表明文化同样奏效 （瑞典人中凡是曾在生活中某一时间参与过成人公民学习圈的，有75%都保留了从学生时代起培养出的政治兴趣）。但是为什么需要钱或者文化的驱使才能让人们履行公民责任呢？难道人们不想参与吗？ So this is not a guidebook for how to be the perfect citizen. Shenkman is far from being an idealist. Instead, he offers un-patronising, concrete steps to ‘do politics’ better: don’t place a lot of confidence in your natural curiosity; don’t delude yourself into believing you can read politics; whenever possible, try to put yourself in a position where you can experience politics directly. 所以这不是一本怎样成为完美公民的指南。Shenkman远非一个理想主义者。相反，他提出的是并不高高在上的、具体的步骤，来更好地“做政治”：不要过分信赖你天生的好奇心上；不要欺骗自己说你可以读懂政治；有可能的话，尝试坐到某个位置上，直接体验政治。 In this engaging, illuminating and often humourous portrait of our political culture, Shenkman probes the depths of the human mind to reveal what we must do to fix our floundering democracy, and to become more political, less animal. 在这幅引人入胜、发人深省且常常带些幽默的政治文化肖像中, Shenkman窥探到人类心灵的深处，告诉我们必须做什么来修复我们挣扎的民主，多一些政治性, 少一些动物性。 Political Animals was first published on the 21st January 2016 by Basic Books, £17.99 RRP, hardback. 《政治动物》由基本图书公司在2016年1月21日首次出版，精装版标价£17.99 。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

How the Brain Is Computing the Mind 大脑是如何计算意识的 作者:Ed Boyden @ 2016-02-12 译者:Veidt(@Veidt) 校对:混乱阈值(@混乱阈值) 来源:Edge,http://edge.org/conversation/ed_boyden-how-the-brain-is-computing-the-mind The history of science has shown us that you need the tools first. Then you get the data. Then you can make the theory. Then you can achieve understanding. 科学的历史告诉我们，首先你需要合适的工具，然后去收集数据，之后你就可以创造理论了，最终你才能获得对事物的理解。 Ed Boyden is a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group. Ed Boyden是MIT媒体实验室和MIT麦戈文研究院的一名生物工程和大脑与认知科学方向的教授。他领导着MIT合成神经生物学研究小组。 HOW THE BRAIN IS COMPUTING THE MIND 大脑是如何计算意识的 How can we truly understand how the brain is computing the mind? Over the last 100 years, neuroscience has made a lot of progress. We have learned that there are neurons in the brain, we have learned a lot about psychology, but connecting those two worlds, understanding how these computational circuits in the brain in coordinated fashion are generating decisions and thoughts and feelings and sensations, that link remains very elusive. And so, over the last decade, my group at MIT has been working on technology, ways of seeing the brain, ways of controlling brain circuits, ways of trying to map the molecules of the brain. 我们如何才能真正地认识到大脑是如何计算着意识的？在过去百年中，神经科学研究在这方面获得了长足进步。我们已经了解到大脑中有着巨量的神经元，也对心理学有了许多认识，但想要把这两个领域联系起来，去理解这些大脑中的计算电路是如何通过合作来产生决策、思想、感觉和情感，则并非易事，人们目前对其中的关联仍知之甚少。正因此，在过去十年中，我在MIT领导的研究小组一直致力于研究相关方面的技术，以期找到观测大脑，控制脑内回路，以及在大脑内部定位分子的方法。 At this point, what I’m trying to figure out is what to do next. How do we start to use these maps, use these dynamical observations and perturbations to link the computations that these circuits make, and things like thoughts and feelings and maybe even consciousness? 目前，我正在试图弄清我们下一步应该做些什么。我们能够如何利用这些分子定位图——也就是一些动态的观测和扰动——来将脑内电路的计算过程与思想，感觉，甚至是意识这些东西联系在一起？ There are a couple of things that we can do. One idea is simply to go get the data. A lot of people have the opposite point of view. You want to have an idea about how the brain computes, the concept of how the mind is generating thoughts and feelings and so forth. Marvin Minsky, for example, is very fond of thinking about how intelligence and artificial intelligence can be arrived at through sheer thinking about it. 的确有一些我们能做的事情。其中的一个主意就只是从这些分子定位图中获取数据。但有很多人持有相反的意见。他们希望获得关于大脑是如何进行计算的，意识是如何产生出思想和感觉的，以及诸如此类的一些观点和概念。例如，Marvin Minsky（译者注：马文·明斯基，计算机科学家，人工智能领域的奠基人之一）就非常热衷于通过纯粹的思考来解决智能和人工智能是如何实现的这个问题。【编注：这句原文的字面意思是『Marvin Minsky就非常热衷于思考如何能够通过纯粹的思考来解决智能和人工智能是如何实现的这个问题』，Minsky的工作重点好像不是这种二阶思考，疑似作者笔误。】 On the other hand, and it’s always dangerous to make analogies and metaphors like this, but if you look at other problems in biology like, what is life? how do species evolve? and so forth, people forget that there are huge amounts, centuries sometimes but at least decades of data that was collected before those theories emerged. 但另一方面，做出这样的类比和隐喻总是十分危险的。如果你去看看生物学中的其它一些问题，例如“什么是生命？”“物种是如何进化的？”以及类似的种种，人们在提这些问题的时候忘记了一个事实：那就是在理论出现之前，研究者们已经收集了大量的数据，数据的时间跨度有时长达数个世纪，至少也有几十年。 Darwin roamed the Earth looking at species, looking at all sorts of stuff until he wrote the giant tome, On the Origins of Species. Before people started to try to hone in on what life is, there was the tool development phase: people invented the microscope. 达尔文在他的环球旅行中观察了许多物种，他仔细观察着关于这些物种的一切，最终写出伟大的巨著《物种起源》。在人们开始尝试研究“生命是什么”这个问题之前，必经的一步是工具的发展：有人发明了显微镜。 People started looking at cells and watching them divide and so forth, and without those data, it would be very hard to know that there were cells at all, that there were these tiny building blocks, each of which was a self-compartmentalized, autonomous building block of life. 在那之后人们才开始观察细胞，观察它们的分裂和其它种种行为，如果没有这些数据，人们甚至很难发现细胞的存在，而生命正是由这些微小的，独立自治的“小积木”搭建而来的。 The approach I would like to take is to go get the data. Let’s see how the cells in the brain can communicate with each other. Let’s see how these networks take sensation and combine that information with feelings and memories and so forth to generate the outputs, decisions and thoughts and movements. And then, one of two possibilities will emerge. 在这里，我想采用的方法是从其中获取数据。让我们来看看大脑中的细胞是如何彼此交流信息的，看看这些细胞构成的网络如何获得感觉，并将这种信息与感情，记忆，还有其它类似的东西组合在一起来生成输出信号，决策，思想和动作。之后，我们将会看到两种可能性之一的出现。 One will be that patterns can be found, motifs can be mined, you can start to see sense in this morass of data. The second might be that it’s incomprehensible, that the brain is this enormous bag of tricks and while you can simulate it brute force in a computer, it’s very hard to extract simpler representations from those datasets. 一种可能性是，我们可以从中发现一些模式，挖掘出一些主旨，并开始从这堆乱糟糟的数据中寻找一些理论了。另一种可能性则是，我们仍然无法理解其中的奥妙，由于大脑中所包含的复杂机制是如此之多，虽然我们可以简单粗暴地在计算机中进行模拟，但想要从这些数据集中抽取出一些相对简单一点的模型仍然是非常困难的。 In some ways, it has to be the former because it’s strange that we can predict our behaviors. People walk through a city, they communicate, they see things, there are commonalities in the human experience. So that’s a clue; that’s a clue that it’s not an arbitrary morass of complexity that we’re not going to ever make sense of. 从某种角度说，第一种可能性应该是对的，虽然很奇怪，但人们的确已经获得了预测自身行为的能力。人们会在城市中穿行，会相互交流，会看到形形色色的事物，在人类的生存体验中存在诸多这样的共同之处。所以现在我们至少有了点线索，我们知道自己所面临的并不是一堆混乱到我们完全无法搞清楚其中意义的随机复杂性。 Of course, being a pessimist, we should still always hold open the possibility that it will be incomprehensible. But the fact that we can talk in language, that we see and design shapes and that people can experience pleasure in common, that suggests that there is some convergence that it’s not going to be infinitely complex and that we will be able to make sense of it. 当然，从悲观主义者的视角来看，我们仍然需要对第二种可能性抱以开放的态度，也就是我们的确可能无法理解这个问题。但人们能够使用语言交谈，能够辨别并设计不同形状，还能够获得共同的愉悦体验，这些事实都表明我们所要研究的对象是存在一些收敛性质的，至少我们所面对的不是无穷无尽的复杂性，而我们也的确能够从中找到一些规律。 Biology and brain science are not fundamental sciences in the sense that physics is. In physics, there are particles and there are forces, and you could write down a very short list of those things. But if you’re thinking about the brain and the brain is going to have these cells called neurons, and the neurons have all these molecules that generate their electrical functions and their chemical exchanges of information, those are encoded for by the genome. 生物学和脑科学并不是像物理一样的基础科学。在物理学中有质点和各种力的概念，你可以很容易地将所有这些概念列在一张很短的清单上。但想想大脑吧，大脑中有一些被称为神经元的细胞，这些神经元又是由许多不同的分子构成的，神经元正是靠这些分子来产生电信号并通过化学递质交流信息，而所有这些分子则都被编码在了基因组中。 In the genome, we have, depending on who you ask, 20,000- to 30,000-odd genes, and those genes produce gene products like proteins, and those proteins generate the electrical potentials of neurons and they specify at least some parts of the wiring. The way that I look at it is we’re going to want to understand the brain in terms of these fundamental building blocks, and we can always try to ignore some detail, this concept of the abstraction layer. 基因组中大约有2万到3万个基因（研究者们在基因的具体数目这个问题上存在一些分歧），这些基因能够生产出像蛋白质这样的基因产物，而其中一些蛋白质又生成了神经元中的高低电位，因而它们也指定了神经电路中至少某些部分的构成方式。关于大脑，我认为目前我们所要了解的是这些基础的组成部件，而我们总是可以尝试去忽略掉一些细节，从抽象层上去理解其中的概念。 Can we ignore everything below a certain level of description and just focus on the higher level concepts? But modern neuroscience is now almost 130 years old, since the neuron was discovered, and so far, the attempts to ignore below certain levels of description have not yielded universally accepted and explanatory theories of how our brains are computing our thoughts or feelings or movements. 我们真的能够忽略掉某个特定描述层次之下的一切，而仅仅把注意力集中在更高层次的概念上吗？自从神经元被发现至今，现代神经科学的发展已经有近130年历史了，但那些尝试忽略掉某些特定描述层次以下的微观机制的努力，至今还没能产生出能够被广泛接受并具有解释力的理论，来回答大脑是如何计算出我们的思想、感受或是动作的这些问题。 The way that we approach things is pretty radically different from the past. The premise that I launched my research group at MIT on was that we needed new technology. The reason people are shying away from these very, very detailed measurements of brain function, getting the deep data, was because we didn’t have the tools. The history of science has shown us that you need the tools first. Then you get the data. Then you can make the theory. Then you can achieve understanding. No theory with no technology. It’s very difficult to know that you’ve solved it. 而我们团队目前处理问题的方式与之前的则有着非常明显的区别。我在MIT成立这个研究小组所基于的一个前提就是我意识到我们需要新的技术。人们之所以会回避这些对于大脑功能非常细节化的测量，原因在于我们并没有获得合适的工具。科学的历史告诉我们，首先你需要合适的工具，然后才能去收集数据，之后你就可以创造理论了，而最终你将获得对事物的理解。没有合适的技术就无法创造出好的理论。因为你很难确定自己的理论是否真的解决了问题。 Before Newton’s Laws, there were lots of people like Kepler and Galileo who were watching the planets, and they had decades and decades of data. Why don’t we have that for the brain? We need tools for the brain like the telescope and the microscope, and now, we need to collect the data, ground truth data, if you will, where we can see all those cells and molecules in action, and then, we’re going to see a renaissance in our ability to think of and learn about the brain at a very detailed level, but to extract true insight from these datasets. 在牛顿定律之前，很多人都曾经观察过行星的运动（例如开普勒和伽利略），而他们已经积累了数十年的数据。在针对大脑的研究中，我们为什么不做相同的事情呢？在对大脑的研究中，我们首先需要找到像天文学中的望远镜和生物学中的显微镜一样的有效工具，之后我们所要做的就是收集真实的基础数据，如果你愿意的话，我们现在已经能从数据中看到所有的那些细胞和分子的运动，之后，我们将能够欣喜地看到自己获得了从非常细节的层次上思考和学习大脑的能力，同时也能够从那些收集到的数据集中获得一些真正的洞见。 Let’s think for a second about the hypothesis that biology is not a fundamental science. If you think about books like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this and other attempts to explain the path of science, we often have these models: here’s my hypothesis, somebody comes along and disproves it, and if it’s a big enough disproof, you get a revolution. 让我们花点时间想想“生物学不是一门基础科学”这个假说。想象一下托马斯·库恩的《科学革命的结构》这本书，还有其他一些试图解释科学发展之路径的著作，在这些书中我们通常会看到这样的模式：首先我提出了一个假说，然后有人出来对这个假说提出反对意见，如果这个反对意见足够重大，那么这就可以被称之为一项“革命”。 But let’s think about biology: suppose I want to figure out how a gene in the genome relates to an emergent property like intelligence or behavior or a disease like Alzheimer's. There are so many genes in the genome, most hypotheses are probably wrong just by chance. What are the chances that you got the exact gene that’s most important for something? And even if you did, how do you know what other genes modulate it? It’s an incredibly complicated network. 但让我们想想生物学吧：假设我想要找到基因组中的某个基因是如何与某个重要属性（例如智力、行为或者是阿尔茨海默症这样的疾病）发生关联的。基因组中的基因数量如此之多，从概率上看，大多数假说大概都是错误的。对于某种属性，你能准确地找到对它而言最重要的那个基因的概率有多大？而即使你找到了这个基因，你又如何知道有哪些其它的基因会对它发挥调控作用？这个网络的复杂程度简直令人难以置信。 If you started thinking of how different genes of the genome, how their products interact to generate functions in cells or in neurons or networks, it’s a huge combinatorial explosion. Most hypotheses about what a gene is doing, or especially what a network of genes is doing, much less a network of cells in the brain, they’re going to be incorrect. That’s why it’s so important to get these ground truth descriptions of the brain. 而如果你开始思考基因组中的不同基因所生产出的基因产物之间是如何通过互动在细胞中，或者神经元和神经网络中，产生不同的功能的，那么你将面临一个组合大爆炸了。关于某个基因的功能是什么，尤其是某个基因网络的功能是什么，人们所提出的绝大多数假说都将被证明是错误的，更不用提大脑中的某个细胞网络的功能是什么了。这就是为什么我们需要获得真实的关于大脑的基础性描述的原因。 Why can't we map the circuits and see how the molecules are configured, and turn on or off different cells in the brain and see how they interact? Once you have those maps, we can make much better hypotheses. I don’t think the maps of the brain equal the understanding of the brain, but the maps of the brain can help us make hypotheses and make them less assumption-prone, make them less likely to be wrong. 为什么我们不能绘制出大脑中的神经电路并看看其中的分子是如何装配的，然后通过打开或者关闭大脑中的不同细胞来看看它们是如何交互的呢？一旦你能够绘制出这些电路图，我们就能够提出比现在好得多的假说了。我认为这种将大脑比作一张神经电路图的观点并不等于对大脑的正确理解，但将大脑比作神经电路图的做法的确能够帮助我们提出更好的假说，并让这些假说变得不那么依赖于前提假设，同时也降低它们的错误概率。 One thing that I hope a circuit description of the brain will help us understand about humanity is, as we know from psychology, there are countless unconscious processes that happen. One of the most famous such experiments is you can find regions of the brain or even single cells in the brain that will be active even seconds before people feel like they’re making a consciously-willed decision. That leads to what you might maybe slightly jokingly say, we have free will but we’re not conscious of it. Our brains are computing what we’re going to do, and that we’re conscious after the fact is one interpretation of these studies. 我希望这种关于大脑的神经电路式描述能够帮助我们理解人性，而其中一个方面就是我们已经从心理学中所了解到的无数无意识过程的发生。在这方面最著名的实验之一就是人们发现大脑中的某些区域或者甚至是某些细胞会在人们感受到自己正在做出一个意识清醒的决定的数秒之前就开始变得活跃。这让我们能够半开玩笑地说，人们的确拥有自由意志，只是自己还没意识到而已。对这些研究结果的一种解读方式是，大脑已经计算出了我们会在接下来做什么，而我们是在之后才意识到这一点。 What I suggest though is that if we peek under the hood, if we look at what the brain is computing, we might find evidence for the implementation or the mechanisms of feelings and thoughts and decisions that are completely inaccessible if we only look at behavior, or if we only look at the kinds of things that people do, whereas if you find evidence that something you’re about to do, something you’re about to consciously decide, your brain already has that information in advance. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what’s generating that information? Maybe there are free will circuits, quote, unquote, in the brain that are generating these decisions. 但我想要建议的是，如果我们试着去一窥面纱之下的风景，去看看大脑到底在计算些什么的话，我们也许能够找到一些关于感受、思想和决策的实现方法或机制的证据，而仅仅通过观察人们的行为或是人们会做哪些事情是完全无法获得这些证据的，因为当你意识到你将会做某件事情，或者是清醒地做出某个决定的时候，你的大脑已经提前获得了这些信息。了解是什么产生了这些信息难道不是一件很有趣的事情吗？也许在大脑中存在着生成“ 自由意志”的神经电路来负责产生这些决策呢。 We know all sorts of other things that occur, feelings that our brains are generating, and we have no idea about what’s causing them. There are very famous examples where somebody who has an injury to a part of their brain that is responsible for conscious vision, but you tell them when you see something, I want you to have a certain feeling, or when you see something, I want you to imagine a certain kind of outcome, and people will have that occur even though they’re not consciously aware of what they’re seeing. 我们还知道很多大脑中会发生的其它事情，例如大脑会产生感受，但我们完全不知道是什么导致了这些事情的发生。在这些方面有些著名的例子，例如有些人大脑中负责有意识的视力的部分受到了损伤，但如果你告诉他们“当你看见某种东西的时候，我希望你能产生某种特定的感受”，或者“当你看见某种东西的时候，我希望你能够想象某种特定的结果”，那么他们就真的会产生这种感受或是想象出这种特定的结果，即使他们并不能清醒地意识到自己看见了什么。 There is so much processing that we have no access to, and yet, it’s so essential to the human condition for and decisions and thoughts, and if we can get access to the circuits that generate them, that might be the fastest route to understanding those aspects of the human condition. 至今我们仍然没有任何途径去研究大脑中很大一部分处理过程，然而它们对于人类的决策和思维至关重要，一旦我们能够找到办法去研究那些生成它们的神经电路，那么这也许将成为理解人类状态中的这些方面最快捷的途径。 I’ve been thinking a lot over the last decade primarily about the technology that helped us figure out what we need to understand about the brain in terms of circuits and how they work together. But now that those tools are maturing, I’m thinking a lot about how we use these tools to understand what we all care about. 在过去十年中，我花了很多时间去思考如何发展那些能够帮助我们从神经电路和它们共同工作的机制方面去理解大脑的技术。现在这些工具开始慢慢成熟了，我会花更多时间去思考我们能够如何利用这些工具去理解我们共同关心的那些问题。 Up until now, we mostly have been giving our tools out to other neuroscientists to use. We’ve been focusing very much on technology invention, and other groups have been discovering profound things about the brain. I’ll just give you a couple of examples. 目前为止，我们主要还是在将这些工具提供给其他的一些神经科学家使用。我们主要关注的是技术的研发，而其它一些研究小组则致力于探索关于大脑的一些意义重大的事情。这里我将举两个例子。 There’s a group at Caltech and they use one of our technologies, a technology that makes neurons activatable by pulses of light. They put these molecules into neurons deep, deep in the brain, and when you shine light, those neurons are electrically active, just like when they’re normally being used. They found that there are neurons deep in the brain that trigger aggression or violence in mice, so they would activate these neurons and the mice would attack whatever was next to them, even if it was just a rubber glove. 加州理工大学的一个研究小组使用了我们的一种技术，这种技术能够通过光脉冲让神经元处于可激活状态。他们将这些分子放置在大脑非常深处的神经元中，当你发出光信号时，这些神经元就会处于电活跃状态，就像它们平时发挥作用时一样。他们发现大脑深处的某些神经元会触发小白鼠的攻击性或暴力倾向，于是他们就激活了这些神经元，而之后小白鼠就会攻击它们身旁的一切东西，即使是一只橡胶手套。 I find it fascinating to think about something as ethically charged, as essential to the human condition, as involved with our justice system and all sorts of stuff, as violence. You can find a very small cluster of neurons that, when they’re activated, are sufficient to trigger an act of aggression or violence. So of course, now, the big question is what neurons connect to those? Are they violence detectors? Oh, here is the set of stimuli that makes us now decide, oh, I should go attack this thing next to me even if it’s just a glove. 我发现思考诸如暴力之类概念是一件非常令人着迷的事情，它们在道德上受到谴责，但对人类具有重要影响，并且被包含在我们的司法系统中。你能够找到一小簇神经元，当它们被激活时，就足以触发攻击性或是暴力行为。那么当然，现在最大的问题就是哪些神经元是与它们相关的？这些神经元能够用于探测暴力行为的发生吗？“噢，这儿有一组让我们马上作出决定的刺激信号，噢，我应该去攻击我身边的这个东西了，即使它是一只手套。” And then, of course, where do these neurons project? What are they driving? Are they driving an emotion, and downstream of that emotion comes the violent act? Or are they just driving a motor command: go attack the glove next to you? For the first time, you can start to activate very specific sets of cells deep in the brain and have them trigger an observable behavior, but you can also ask, what are these cells getting, what are these cells sending messages to, and looking at the entire flow of information. 然后，理所当然的问题就是这些神经元是在哪里得到表现的？它们驱动的又是什么？是它们驱动了某种情感，然后这种情感顺流而下的发展导致了暴力行为的发生吗？或者说它们只是驱动了某种机械指令：攻击你身边的那只手套！？有史以来第一次，你能够去激活大脑深处的那些特定的细胞组，并且触发它们的某种可观测的行为，但同时你还可以发问，这些细胞获得了什么，它们在向哪些对象发送消息，而你能够看到这其中完整的信息流。 I’ll give you another example that is fascinating. One of my colleagues at MIT, Susumu Tonegawa, trained mice on a learning task, so that certain neurons in the brain become activatable by light. They used some genetic tricks to do that. 还有另一个令人着迷的例子。我在MIT的一位同事，利根川进（译者注：日本生物学家，因“发现抗体多样性的遗传学原理”获1987年诺贝尔生理学或医学奖）用一个学习任务来训练小白鼠，使小白鼠脑内的某些特定神经元处于可被光信号激活的状态。他们使用了一些基因技巧来进行这个实验。 Now, what happens is those mice can be doing something else much later, they shine light on the brain, and those neurons, the ones that had been activated earlier when they were learning, they get reactivated and the mice make a memory recall. It’s like they were there in the earlier place and time. 而之后所发生的事情是，那些小白鼠在神经元处于该状态很久之后可能正在做着某些别的事情，但一旦研究者们在小白鼠的脑内点亮光信号，那些之前在它们进行学习任务时就已经被激活的神经元会被重新激活，而那些小白鼠则经历了一次记忆唤醒的过程，就像它们还处在之前的时间和地点一样。 That’s interesting because for the first time, they can show that you can cause the recall of a specific memory, and now they are doing all sorts of interesting things. For example, you can activate those cells again, and let’s say that’s a happy memory; let’s say it’s associated with pleasure or a reward. 这个例子的有趣之处在于，这些研究者们第一次证明了人们的确可以唤醒某段特定的记忆，而现在他们仍然在做着各种有趣的事情。例如，你能够再一次激活那些神经元，我们假设那代表着一段快乐的回忆，或者说它与愉悦感或是奖励是联系在一起的。 They have shown that that can have antidepressant effects, that you can have an animal recall, a memory when you shine light on certain neurons, now the memory that is recalled triggers happy emotions; this is how they interpreted it. And that can counteract other stressors or other things that make the animal normally feel not so good. 这些研究者们已经证明了这种记忆唤醒能够产生抗抑郁的效果，他们对此的解释是，你能够通过用光信号照射某些特定的神经元来唤醒动物的某段记忆，这段被唤醒的记忆会触发动物的一些欢快的情感，这些情感能够抵抗某些压力源或其它一些通常会让动物产生不良感受的东西。 Literally, hundreds and hundreds of groups are using this technology that we developed for activating neurons by light to trigger things that are of clinical and maybe even sometimes philosophical interest. 毫不夸张地说，现在已经有数以百计的研究小组采用了我们开发的这种通过光信号来激活神经元的技术，他们使用这种技术来触发一些具有临床意义，有时甚至具有哲学意义的东西。

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I studied chemistry and electrical engineering and physics in college, and decided that I cared about understanding the brain. To me, that was the big unknown. This will seem kind of cheesy, but I started thinking about how our brains understand the universe, and the universe, of course, gives us things like the laws of physics upon which are built chemistry and biology, upon which is built our brain. It’s kind of a loop. I was trying to think about what to do in a career; I thought, what’s the weak point in the loop? And it seemed like the brain was very unknown. 我曾在大学里学过化学，电气工程和物理学，而我最终认定自己最牵挂的是对于大脑的理解。对我来说，那是一个大大的未知领域。下面这段话可能看起来有点肉麻，但当时我开始思考我们的大脑是如何去理解宇宙的，正是宇宙给了我们物理定律，而化学和生物又是建立在这些物理定律的基础上的。这某种程度上构成了一个环。而我试图去思考在我的职业生涯中应该做些什么，我当时所想的是，在这些环节中最弱的一个是什么？看起来大脑是存在最多未知的地方。 I was very impressed by people who would go build technology to tackle big problems, sometimes very simple technology. All the chemists in the 1700s and 1800s who built ways of looking at pressure and volume and stoichiometry, without that, it’s inconceivable that we would have things like the Periodic Table of the Elements and quantum mechanics and so forth. 那些愿意去创造技术以解决重大问题的人们给我留下了深刻的印象，而有时那些技术其实非常简单。例如所有在18世纪和19世纪尝试用各种方法测量压力、体积和其他化学量的科学家们，没有他们的工作，难以想象我们今天能够拥有元素周期表，量子力学和其它的一些科学工具。 What stuck out in my mind was you need to have that technological era, and that then gives you the data that you want, that then yields the most parsimonious and elegant representations of knowledge. And for neuroscience, it seemed like we had never gone through that technological era. There were bits and pieces, don’t get me wrong, like electrodes and the MRI scanner, but never a concerted effort to be able to map everything, record all the dynamics, and to control everything. And that’s what I wanted to do. 当时我脑子里一个挥之不去的念头就是，你只有经历过一个那样的技术时代，才能获得自己想要的数据，然后才能从中产生出最精细最优雅的知识。对于神经科学来说，看起来我们还从未经历过一个那样的技术时代。别误会我的意思，当然我们已经拥有了一些零散的技术手段，例如电极技术和核磁共振扫描仪，但我们从未同心协力去努力获得定位大脑内部发生的一切，记录脑内的所有动态过程，并控制大脑的所有活动的能力。而那正是我想要做的事情。 At the time I started graduate school at Stanford, I went around telling everybody I wanted to build technologies for the brain and to bring the physical sciences into neuroscience. A lot of people thought it was a bad idea, frankly, and I think the reason why was at the time, many people who are physicists and inventors were trying to build tools for studying the brain. But they were thinking forwards from what was fun for them to do, and not backwards from the deep mysteries of the brain. 当时我刚开始在斯坦福大学的研究生生涯，我告诉身边的所有人我希望为探索大脑开发技术手段并将神经科学变成一门自然科学。老实说，当时有很多人都不认为这是个好主意，我觉得他们这么想的原因是，在当时，有许多物理学家和发明家都在试图为研究大脑创造工具，但是他们所想的都是向前看，去研究那些对他们而言有趣的事情，而并没有回过头去探索那些埋藏在大脑深处的谜题。 The key insight that I got during graduate school was if you don’t think backwards from the big mysteries of the brain, and you only think forwards from what you find fun in physics, the technologies you built might not be that important. They might not solve a big problem. What I learned was we have to take the brain at face value. We have to accept its complexity, work backwards from that, and survey all the areas of science and engineering in order to build those tools. 我在研究生阶段所获得的最重要的洞见就是，如果你不能回过头去思考那些关于大脑的谜题，而只是向前去思考那些让你在物理学中觉得有趣的东西，那么你所创造出来的技术可能就不那么重要，它们可能无法被用来解决大的问题。我所学到的是我们需要直面大脑本来的面目，要想创造出那些真正有用的工具，我们就需要接受大脑的复杂性，回过头来以此为目的去调研所有的科学和工程领域。 During the first decade that I’ve been a Professor at MIT, we have mostly been building tools. We built tools for controlling the brain, tools for mapping the detailed molecular and circuit structure of the brain, and tools for watching the brain in action. 在我成为MIT的一名教授之后的首个十年中，我们的主要精力都放在创造工具上。我们创造了用于控制大脑的工具，能够绘制大脑中具体的分子和神经电路结构的工具，还有用于观测大脑活动的工具。 Right now, we’re at a turning point; we’re ready to start deploying these tools systematically and at scale. Don’t get me wrong, the tools still need improvements to be equal to the challenge of studying the brain, but for small organisms like worms and flies and fish, or for small parts of mammalian brains, we’re ready to start mapping them and trying to understand how they’re computing. 现在我们来到了一个重要的转折点上，我们已经做好准备去系统化地大规模部署这些工具来研究大脑了。但请不要误解我的意思，这些工具目前仍然需要得到改进才能足以胜任研究人类大脑这一巨大的挑战性任务，但对于一些较小的有机体，例如蠕虫，蝇类和鱼类，以及哺乳类动物大脑中的一些较小部分，我们已经做好准备去绘制它们的结构并尝试去理解它们是如何进行计算的了。 The work progresses through primarily philanthropic as well as government grant funding. We have been very lucky that there has been a bit of an increase in people interested in funding high risk, high reward things. That’s one reason why I’m at the MIT Media Lab, and you might ask why is a neuroscience Professor in the School of Architecture at MIT? 这些工作的推进主要由慈善基金和政府资助基金提供资金上的支持。我们非常幸运，越来越多的人开始对资助这类高风险，高回报的研究项目感兴趣。而那也是我在MIT媒体实验室工作的原因之一，可能你想问为什么一个神经科学教授会在MIT的建筑学院任职。 As we were discussing earlier, neuroscientists long had a deep distrust of technology, that technologies often didn’t work, the brain was so complicated that the tools could only solve toy problems. When I was looking for a professor job, the search was hit-or-miss. 正如我们之前所讨论过的，神经科学家们长久以来都对技术怀有一种深深的不信任感，他们认为技术通常都起不了什么作用，而大脑是如此复杂，那些被创造出来的工具只能解决一些玩具般的小问题。当我在寻求教职的时候，找工作的过程不确定性很高。 My collaborator, Karl Deisseroth and I had already published a paper showing we could activate neurons with light, a technology that we’ve called ever since “optogenetics,” “opto” for light and “genetics” because it’s a gene that we borrow from a plant to make the neurons light-sensitive. 我和我的合作者Karl Deisseroth当时已经发表了一篇论文表明我们能够通过光信号来激活神经元，这项技术后来一直被我们称作“光基因”（optogenetics），”opto”代表“光”，而”genetics”则代表这是我们从一种植物中提取出的能够让神经元对于光信号敏感的基因。 But a lot of people at the time were still deeply skeptical: is this the real deal or is this yet more not-quite working technology that will be a footnote? I went to the Media Lab to complain about how political and complicated academia was, and I was very lucky; they were wrapping up a failed job search and they said, "Why don’t you come here?" And so I went, and we’ve been incubating a lot of neurotechnology there since then. 但当时很多人仍然对这项技术抱着深深的怀疑态度：这真的是一项重大的技术突破，还是又一种没什么用的仅仅会在将来成为一项脚注的技术？我去MIT的媒体实验室向他们抱怨学术圈的政治和勾心斗角，而这时我的运气来了，当时他们正在总结一次并不成功的求职，于是他们对我说，“要么你到我们这儿来吧？”于是我就去了他们实验室，从那以后我们就开始在这个实验室里培育一大堆的神经技术。 When I first got to Media Lab, a lot of people were deeply puzzled about what I would do there. Was I going to switch into, "classical publicly-perceived Media Lab technology," like would I have developed ways of having cell phones diagnose mental illness or other things like that? I wanted to get to the ground truth of the brain. 当我刚到MIT媒体实验室的时候，很多人都完全搞不清楚我会在那里做些什么。他们怀疑我会不会转向开发一些“经典的受到公众认可的‘媒体实验室技术’”，比如开发一些方法通过手机来诊断精神疾病，或者诸如此类的一些东西。而我所想做的是获得关于大脑的一些基础事实。 In some ways, the Media Lab was a perfect place to start. We could incubate these ideas, these tools out of the cold light of day until they were good enough that neuroscientists could see their value. And that took several years. 从某些角度上看，媒体实验室对我来说的确是一个完美的起点。我们可以避开人们的冷眼，专注于培育创意和技术，直到它们变得足够好，能够让那些神经科学家们看到它们的价值。而这一过程持续了好几年。 It was about a three-year period until this started to get mainstream acceptance, and then, there was another three-year period where people said, wow, how do we get more technology, and that led to initiatives like the Obama BRAIN Initiative, which is an attempt to get widespread technology development throughout neuroscience. 让我们的这些技术受到学界主流的认可花了大约三年时间，而又过了三年时间后有人开始问，哇，太棒了，我们怎么才能获得更多的这类技术？而这导致了之后的一些诸如奥巴马总统的BRAIN计划之类的项目，该计划试图在整个神经科学领域发展一些能够被广泛应用的技术。 The BRAIN Initiative started at the instigation of the Kavli Foundation. They were hosting a series of brainstorms about what nanoscientists and neuroscientists could do together, and Paul Alivisatos and George Church and Rafael Yuste and many people at that border were at these early sessions. BRAIN始于Kayli基金会的大力推动。他们举办了一系列的头脑风暴式的会议以讨论纳米科学家们能够和神经科学家们一同做些什么，Paul Aliyisatos，George Church， Refael Yuste还有其他一些相关领域的科学家们参加了这些早期的会议。 And in late 2012, I was invited to one of these sessions where many inventors were invited and we started talking about maybe brain activity mapping is great and all, but the technologies might be much more broad than that; you might need more than just maps. 2012年末，我应邀参加其中的一次会议。这次会议邀请了许多技术的发明者，我们开始谈论也许绘制出大脑活动的电路图是个伟大的主意之类的话题，但涉及其中的技术范围可能会更宽，因为我们需要的可能不仅仅是一些电路图。 You might need ways to control the brain, ways to rewire the brain. 我们可能需要一些能够控制大脑的方法，还有重连大脑电路的方法。 That was an interesting turning point because it went from activity mapping to broadly technology, and four or five months later, Obama announced this BRAIN initiative which, somewhat recursively, stands for Brain Research for Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, and they are now devoting tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, depending upon which year, to try to get more technology made to help understand the brain. 那次会议是一个很有趣的转折点，因为从此之后，我们的工作从绘制大脑的电路图拓展到了更宽的技术领域，又过了四五个月，奥巴马总统宣布了他的BRAIN计划，这个计划的首字母缩写看起来像个递归——致力于推动创新神经科技的大脑研究（Brain Research for Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies），目前人们在这项计划中每年投入高达数千万甚至数亿美元的资金以获得更多能够帮助我们理解大脑的技术。 The BRAIN initiative now is run by different government agencies. They have their own priorities, so, for example, DARPA is very interested in short-term human prosthetics, for example, no surprise there. The National Science Foundation is interested in more basic science, and so forth. The different agencies have their own agendas now. 整个BRAIN计划目前由多个不同的政府机构负责运营。这些机构都有着自己的优先任务，例如，DARPA【编注：全称Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency，美国国防部所辖研究机构】最感兴趣的是短期的人类大脑修复技术（这一点毫不令人惊讶），而国家科学基金会则对于更基础的科学课题更感兴趣，如此种种。而不同的机构现在也都有了他们自己的日程表。 IARPA is involved. They are trying to do a hard push for short-term mammalian brain circuit mapping based upon existing technology, and sort of a small part of that more on the technology development side. Most of the money is on the application side. But we have some new tools that we think can be very, very helpful. IARPA【编注：全称Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity，是美国国家情报总监辖下一个研究部门】也同样参与了进来。他们正在努力推进一个通过使用已有的技术绘制哺乳类动物大脑神经电路图的短期计划，其中的一小部分主要是关于技术开发的，而主要的资金则投入到了技术应用上。我觉得我们开发的一些新工具能够在其中派上很大用场。

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Companies are great if you can work hard and be smart and solve the problem. But if you’re tackling something like the brain, or the biggest challenges in biology in general, a lot of it’s serendipity. A lot of it is the chance connections when you bring multiple fields together, when you connect the dots, when you kind of engineer the serendipity and make something truly unpredictable, and that’s hard to do if you have closed doors. That’s hard to do if you don’t allow open, free collaboration. 如果你工作足够努力并且有足够的聪明才智去解决问题，那么企业对你来说会是个不错的去处。但如果你的研究对象是大脑，则可以说是生物学史上最大的挑战，要想获得成功就必须依赖于一些意外的收获了。当你试图将多个领域的知识结合在一起，将点连成线，当你试图去驾驭偶然性并且做出一些真正不可预测的成果时，联系和接触的机会非常重要，如果你关起门来闭门造车，如果你不能允许开放而自由的合作，要想获得成功就太难了。 Our group is very big; I think we’re the second biggest research group at all of MIT. But we work with probably about 100 groups, people who are genomics experts and chemistry experts and people making nanodiamonds and all sorts of stuff. The reason is that the brain is such a mess and it’s so complicated, we don’t know for sure which technologies and which strategies and which ideas are going to be the very best. And so, we need to combinatorially collaborate in order to guarantee, or at least maximize the probability that we’re going to solve the problem. 我们的研究团队规模很大，我想它应该是整个MIT第二大的研究团队了。但我们还与大约100个其它的研究小组进行合作，这些小组中有染色体方面的专家，有化学专家，还有些人的工作是制造纳米金刚石，可以说研究什么的都有。这么做的原因在于，大脑是如此混乱而复杂的一个系统，我们并不能肯定哪些技术，哪些研究策略，哪些主意是最好的。所以，我们需要组合式的合作模式来保证问题被解决，或者至少是将解决问题的概率最大化。 You want to have academia for that serendipitous ability to connect dots and collaborate, and you want companies when it’s time to push hard and just get the thing done and scale up and get it out the door. What I would hope to engineer in the coming maybe decade or so are hybrid institutions where we can have people go back and forth because you might need to have an idea that would go back and forth a bit until it matures. 当你需要一些驾驭偶然性的能力以连点成线并推进合作时，学术圈的氛围是最合适的；但当你需要施加压力来搞定某件事情，并将技术推广以得到广泛应用时，企业又成了最合适的地方。在未来的也许十年中我希望能够做到的是建立起一个混合型的研究机构，这样我们就能够让研究者们在学术和企业的氛围之间迅速地切换，因为我们未来的研究思路可能也需要在两种模式间切换直到它变得足够成熟。 I’ll give you an example. We’re building new kinds of microscopes and new kinds of nanotechnologies to record huge amounts of data from the brain. One of our collaborators was estimating that soon some of these devices we’re making might need some significant fraction of the bandwidth of the entire internet in order to record all the brain data that we might be getting at some point. Now, we need some electronics, right? We need electronics to store all the data and computers to analyze the data. But that’s an industrial thing. 让我给你举个例子。我们正在制造一些新型的显微镜和一些新型的纳米技术以记录大脑中的海量数据。我们的一位合作者曾估计，我们正在制造的这些仪器可能很快就需要整个因特网带宽中不小的一部分以记录我们在某些关于大脑的研究过程中获得的所有数据。现在我们需要电子技术了，对吧？我们需要电子技术以记录所有这些数据，同时还需要足够强大的计算机来对这些数据进行分析。但这就是一个更适合让企业来解决的问题了。 It’s much easier to get that done in a company than in academia because people in industry can turn the crank and make incredible computers, so we started a collaboration. A small startup here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, does these computers with us. Now we’re working on the nanotechnologies, and that fusion of two different institutional designs allows us to rapidly move faster than companies alone or academics alone. These new hybrid models are going to be essential to balance the need for luck and the need for skill and ability. 在企业中搞定这类事情要比在学术界容易得多，因为在企业中人们能够开足马力制造出拥有令人难以置信的计算能力的电脑，所以我们启动了意向合作。在马萨诸塞州剑桥市的一家创业公司和我们合作开发了这些电脑。现在我们又开始研发纳米技术了，将企业和学术这两种类型的机构融合在一起则让我们的研究进程推进得比单独依靠企业或是单独依靠学术界要快得多。在对运气的需求与对技术和能力的需求间取得平衡来说，这类混合型机制将是必不可少的。 The thing that I’m excited about also is how do we get rid of the risk in biology and medicine? Most medicines, most strategies for treating patients, they are found in large part by luck. How do we get rid of the risk? We talked a bit about how there are fundamental sciences like physics, and then, you have higher order sciences like biology. Medicine also might have different scientific methods for different kinds of disease. We have made huge inroads against bacteria and viruses because of antibiotics, because of vaccines. 现在让我感到兴奋的是我们如何能够消除一些生物学和医学研究中的风险。目前多数的药物和治疗策略的发现，在很大程度上都是依靠运气。我们能够如何消除风险？我们之前曾经谈论过一点关于物理这样的基础科学的话题，而之后，我们又有了更高阶的科学领域，例如生物学。医学也同样可能在对待不同类型的疾病时使用不同类型的科学方法。由于有了抗生素和疫苗，我们在对抗细菌和病毒的战斗中获得了巨大的进展。 Why have these been so successful? It’s because we’re trying to help our body fight a foreign invader, right? But if you look at the big diseases, the ones that nobody has anybody clue what to do about, there are brain disorders, a lot of cancers, autoimmune conditions, these are diseases where it’s our body fighting ourselves, and that’s much harder because you can’t just give a drug that wipes out the foreign invader because the foreign invader is you. 为什么我们在这方面做得如此成功？这是因为我们在尝试帮助我们的身体对抗某种来自外界的入侵者，对吧？但其它的一些重大疾病，那些没人知道该怎么对付的疾病，例如大脑的功能紊乱，各种类型的癌症，还有自体免疫病，这些疾病实质上都是我们的身体在与自身进行对抗，要解决这些疾病就困难多了，因为如果入侵者就是你自身的话，你就无法为身体提供一种药物去清除这个入侵者。 How do we understand how to de-risk the tough parts of medicine? We have to think about drug development and therapeutic development from a different point of view. The models that give us new antibiotics and new vaccines and so forth might not be quite right for subtly shifting the activity levels of certain circuits in the brain, for subtly tuning the immune system to fight off a cancer but not so much that you’re going to cause an autoimmune attack, right? 我们该如何化解这些医学难点所蕴含的风险？我们必须从另外一个角度去思考药物和治疗方法的开发。那些引导我们研发出新的抗生素，疫苗和其它一些药物的模型也许在精细地切换大脑中的某些特定神经电路的活跃程度方面并不适用。它们或许也无法既精细地调整免疫系统以击败特定癌症，同时又避免引发对自身免疫系统的攻击，对吧？ One thought is, well, if it’s your body fighting yourself, what you want is very deep knowledge about the building blocks of those cells and how they’re configured in the body. The basic premises behind ground truthing the understanding of the brain might be also right what we need in order to de-risk medicine, in order to understand how cells and organs and systems go awry in these intractable disorders. That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently as well: how do we de-risk the goal and methodology and path towards curing diseases? 有一种想法是：如果身体在和自身作战，那就需要深入了解关于那些细胞的基础构成单元以及它们是如何在身体中配置成形的。对大脑的基础事实真正理解的一些基本前提也许在我们降低医学方面的风险，以及理解细胞，器官和组织是如何在顽疾中功能失调方面同样适用。这同样是我最近经常思考的一个问题：我们如何在治疗疾病方面降低那些蕴藏在目标，方法和实现路径之中的风险？ There was just a study released about how taking a drug from idea to market can cost $2.5 billion now. And if you look at the really tough diseases like brain diseases, like cancers and so forth, the failure rate to be approved for human use is over 90 percent. 最近发表的一项研究成果显示现在研发一种药物从最初的想法开始到最终被推向市场可能需要花掉25亿美元。而如果你看看那些真正严重的疾病，例如大脑疾病和癌症等，治疗这类疾病的药物最终无法被批准投入使用的概率超过了90%。 This got me thinking that maybe this is the same kind of intellectual problem as why we don’t understand how brain circuits compute thoughts and feelings. We have these large 3D systems, whether it’s a brain circuit or a cancer or the immune system, and knowing how to tweak those cells, make them do the right thing, means finding the subtle differences that make those cells different from the normal cells in our body. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can try to take these tools that we’ve been developing for mapping the brain, for controlling the brain, for watching the brain in action and applying it to the rest of medicine. 这些事实让我想到也许这与为什么我们无法理解大脑的神经电路是如何计算出思想和感受是同一类的问题。我们现在已经拥有了这些大型的3D系统，不论是大脑电路，癌症或是免疫系统，我们都能得到它们的3D图像，而了解如何通过牵引这些细胞让它们去做正确的事情则意味着找到这些细胞区别于正常细胞的细微不同之处。我花了很多时间思考如何使用这些我们开发的工具，将它们用于绘制大脑神经电路图，控制大脑，观察大脑的活动的工具，并将它们应用在其它医学领域。

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I can tell you about a collaboration that we have with George Church. George’s group for about fifteen years now has been trying to work on a technology called in situ sequencing, and what that means is can you sequence the genetic code and also the expressed genes, the recipes of cells, right there inside the cells? 我可以向你描述一下我们和George Church之间的一项合作。George的团队已经在一项名为“就地排序”的技术研究上花了大约十五年的时间，这项技术意味着你能够直接在细胞内部对遗传序列和那些被表达出来的基因——也就是细胞自身的配方——进行测序。 Now, why is that important? It’s important because if you just sequence the genome, or you sequence the gene expression patterns after grinding up all the cells, you don’t know where the cells are in three-dimensional space. If you’re studying that brain circuit and here is how information is flowing from sensation into memory regions towards motor areas, you’ve lost all the three-dimensionality of the circuit. You just have ground up the brain into a soup, right? 为什么这项技术如此重要？因为如果你只是对基因组进行测序，或者在破坏了细胞结构之后再将这些基因表达的模式进行测序，你就无法知道这些细胞在三维空间中的位置。如果你正在研究某个大脑神经电路，而恰好感觉中的信息正是经由这些细胞流入记忆区进而流向运动区，那么你就丢失了这一神经电路中的所有三维信息，因为你已经把大脑搅成了一锅粥。 Or for a tumor, we know that there are cells that are by the blood vessels, there are stem cells, there are metastasizing cells; if you just grind up the tumor and sequence the nucleic acids, you again have lost the three-dimensional picture. A couple years ago, George’s group published a paper where they could take cells in a dish and sequence the expressed genes. 或者举个肿瘤的例子，我们知道有些肿瘤细胞分布在血管附近，有些是肿瘤干细胞，还有些肿瘤细胞能够转移，如果你将肿瘤打碎并且将其中的核酸进行排序，你同样会丢失它的三维图像。几年前，George的研究团队发表了一篇论文表明他们能够在保持细胞完整性的同时对已经表达的基因进行测序。 That is, you have DNA in the nucleus, that expresses in terms of RNA, which is the recipe of that cell, and the RNA then drives all the downstream production of proteins and other biomolecules. The RNA is sort of in-between the genome and the mature phenotype of the cell. It's kind of the recipe. George’s group was sequencing the RNA. I thought that was amazing: you could read out the recipe of a cell. 也就是说，细胞核中有DNA，DNA通过转录会生成RNA，而RNA则是细胞的配方，在之后它会驱动下游的蛋白质和其它生物分子的生产过程。RNA可以看作某种基因组和细胞的成熟表现型之间的中间产物，它也是一种配方。当George的团队对RNA进行测序时，我觉得这有些不可思议，因为现在我们居然已经能够读懂细胞的配方了！ Now, there was a tricky part: it didn’t work well in large 3D structures like brain circuits or tumors. Our group had been developing a way of taking brain circuits and tumors and other complex tissues and physically expanding them to make them bigger. What we do to make the brain or a tumor bigger is we take a piece of brain tissue and we chemically synthesize throughout the cells, in-between the molecules, around the molecules, in that piece of brain, a web of a polymer that’s very similar to the stuff in baby diapers. And then, when we add water, the polymer swells and pushes all the molecules apart, so it becomes big enough that you can see it even using cheap optics. 现在棘手的问题来了：这种技术在大脑神经电路和肿瘤这样的大型3D结构上的表现并不好。我们团队已经在研发了一种能在物理上将大脑神经电路，肿瘤和其它此类复杂组织进行放大的方法。我们用来放大大脑神经电路（或是肿瘤）的方法是获取其中的一小块脑组织，然后通过化学方法在这块脑组织的细胞内部分子之间和分子外部进行合成，最终得到一块像婴儿的纸尿裤一样的网状聚合物。然后我们在其中加入水，这块聚合物会膨胀，并将所有的分子推散，这样它就变得足够大了，即使用一些便宜的光学设备也能看清楚其中的结构。 One of my dreams is you could take a bacterium or a virus and expand it until you can take a picture on a cell phone. Imagine how that could help with diagnostics, right? You could find out what infection somebody has just by making it bigger, take a picture and you’re done. 我的梦想之一就是有一天我们可以将一个细菌或是病毒放大到你能够用手机给它拍照的程度。想想这能在多大程度上帮助人们进行诊断吧，在判断某个病人到底是被什么感染了这个问题时，你只需要将感染物不断地放大，然后给它拍张照片就搞定了。 We started talking with George: what if we can take our sample and expand it and then run their in situ sequencing method—because sequencing, of course, is really complicated. You need room around the molecules to sequence them. This is very exciting to me, if we can take stuff and expand it and then use George’s technology to read out the recipes of the cells, we could map the structure of life in a way. 于是我们去和George谈了这件事情：如果我们能够将我们所采集的样本放大，然后再对放大后的样本使用“就地测序”的方法——测序这项工作本身真的非常复杂，因为分子之间要有足够的空间。这对我来说是件令人兴奋的事情，如果我们能够将这些组织进行采样，然后将它们放大，再使用George发明的技术去读取这些细胞的“配方”，那么我们就能以某种方式绘制出生命的结构。 We can see how all the cells look in a complex brain circuit, or in a tumor, or in an organ that’s undergoing autoimmune attack like in type 1 diabetes. That’s one of the things that excites me most is this in situ sequencing concept. If we can apply it to large 3D structures and tissues, we might be able to map the fundamental building blocks of life. 我们可以看看在一个复杂的大脑神经电路中所有细胞到底是什么样子的，对于一个肿瘤或是一个正在遭受类似I型糖尿病这类自免疫攻击的器官，我们也可以做到同样的事情。这就是“就地测序”这一概念所能做到的最令我激动的事情之一。如果我们能够将这项技术应用到大型的3D结构和组织中，也许就能绘制出生命基本单元的样子。 Our current collaboration with George’s group has been focused very much on small pieces of tissue that we have: mouse brains probably, other model organisms in use in neuroscience. But we know that if they work in those systems, they’ll probably work in human tissues as well. 在目前与George的团队的合作当中，我们的关注点还主要集中在一些比较小的组织切片上：例如老鼠的大脑和其它一些在神经科学中常用的模式生物。但我们知道如果他们的技术在这样的系统中是有效的，那么这些技术大概在人体组织中也同样能发挥作用。 Imagine we get a cancer biopsy from somebody, we use our group’s technology to expand it physically, making everything big enough to see, and then, we can go in and use George’s in situ sequencing technology to read out the molecular composition. 想像一下，假如我们从某位患者身上获得了一块活体癌症组织，然后使用我们小组开发的技术将它在物理上进行放大，让其中所有东西都大到能够被观测到，那么我们就可以进入组织内部，使用George的“原地测序”技术读取其中的分子构成。 When we first published the idea of expanding something, a lot of people were very skeptical about it. It’s a very unconventional way of doing things. To convince people that it works, we went down [the following] line of reasoning: a design method. 当我们首次公开发表这项在物理上将某个活体组织进行放大的技术思路时，很多人都对此深表怀疑。因为这是一种非常不合传统的做法。为了让人们相信这种技术是可行的，我们采用了如下的论证路线，它是一种设计方法。 When we synthesized the baby diaper-like polymers inside the cells, we would anchor through molecular bonds specific molecules to the polymer, and then we would wipe up all the rest. We can use enzymes and so forth to chop up the rest. 当我们在细胞内部合成出那些像婴儿纸尿裤一样的网状聚合物时，我们会将整个分子键结构中的一些特定分子保留在聚合物的网状结构上，而去除掉其它的分子。我们可以使用一些酶和类似的化合物将其它的分子切掉。 That way, when we expand the polymer, our molecules that we care about are anchored and move apart, but the rest of the structure has been destroyed or chopped up so that it does not impede the expansion. That’s a key design element. 通过这种方式，当我们在放大网状聚合物时，我们所关心的那些分子都被原封不动地单独保留了下来，但剩下的那些结构则会被销毁或切除，这样它们就不会妨碍放大的过程。这就是其中关键的设计元素之一。 One way to think of this is—chemistry is a way of doing fabrication massively in parallel. So suppose that I want to see two things that are close together, like my two hands here. But of course, lenses cannot see very, very small things, right, thanks to diffraction. So what if we took my two hands and anchored them to these expandable polymers and then destroyed everything else? There might be a lot of junk here we don’t care about. 可以这样看——化学技术是一种并行地进行大规模制造的方法。假设我想要看清两件紧紧贴在一起的东西，就像我的两只放在一起的手。当然，由于衍射现象的存在，普通的镜头是无法看清非常非常小的东西的。但如果我把两只手都固定在这些可放大的网状聚合物上，然后将其它所有的东西都毁掉呢？因为其中可能包含了一大堆我们完全不关心的垃圾。 We add water and the polymer swells, moving my hands along with it until they’re far apart enough that we can see the gap between them. That’s the core idea of what we call expansion microscopy where we take the molecules in a cell or the molecules in a tissue, a brain circuit or a tumor, and we anchor those molecules to a swellable polymer. When we add water, the molecules we care about, the ones we’ve anchored—that we’ve nailed to the polymer, as it were, have moved apart until they’re far apart enough that we can see them using cheap, scalable, and easily deployed optics like you could find on an inexpensive microscope or even a webcam. 我们向网状聚合物中加水，然后它会膨胀，我的两只手也会随着它的膨胀发生移动，一直到它们的距离远到我们能够看清其中的缝隙。这就是被这项我们称为“放大显微术”的核心思路，我们从一个细胞或者一块组织——比如大脑的神经电路或者肿瘤——中选定一些分子，然后将它们固定在一块可膨胀的网状聚合物上，当我们向其中加水，那些我们所关心的被固定在聚合物上的原本贴在一起的分子就会互相分离，直到我们可以通过使用一些廉价的，可扩展并且容易部署的光学仪器——比如低端的显微镜，甚至是网络摄像头——将它们看清。 After we published our paper on expanding tissues, a lot of people started to apply them. For example, suppose you wanted to figure out how the cells are configured in a cancer biopsy. You can take the sample and if you look at it under a microscope, you can’t see the fine structures, but if you blow it up and make it bigger, maybe you could see the shape of the genome; maybe you could see that one cell is extending a tiny tendril, too tiny to see through other means, and maybe that’s the beginning of metastasis. 在我们发表了关于这项放大生物组织技术的论文之后，有许多人都开始将这项技术投入应用。举个例子，假如你想知道在一块活体癌症组织中细胞是如何构成的，你可以取下一块样本，如果你用一架显微镜去观察它，你根本无法看清其中的精细结构，但如果你能够将它放得更大，也许你就能看清其中基因组的形状了，也许你还能看见某个细胞在扩张一个细小的卷须状结构，但这个结构实在太小了，通过其它的任何方法你都无法看清它，而那可能正是一次癌细胞转移过程的开始。 A lot of people are trying to use our technology now for seeing things that you just can’t see any other way, and we’re finding a lot of interest not just from brain scientists because now you have a way of mapping brain circuits with nanoscale precision in 3D, but also from other brain-like problems: tumors and organs and development and so forth where you want to look at a 3D structure but with nanoscale precision. 现在有很多人在尝试使用我们的技术来看清那些他们无法通过其它方式看清的结构，而我们发现不仅仅只有脑科学家对它感兴趣——这项技术为脑科学家们提供了一种在纳米级精度上绘制3D大脑神经电路图的方法，而其它一些研究与大脑问题具有共性的课题的科学家们也对此感兴趣：在肿瘤和某些器官的发展过程和其它一些类似的课题中，人们也希望能够在纳米级的精度上看清3D结构。 We’ve spun out a small company to try to make kits and maybe provide this as a service so that people can use this widely. Of course, we’ve also put all the recipes on the Internet so people can download them, and hundreds and hundreds of groups have already started to play with these kinds of tools. 我们成立了一家小公司来尝试为这项技术制作一些工具套件，甚至是将它作为一项服务提供给需要的人以让这项技术能够被广泛地使用。当然，我们同样也在因特网上公开了这项技术的所有“配方”，人们可以下载它们。已经有数以百计的研究小组开始在他们的工作中使用这些工具。 We want to make the invisible visible, and it’s hard to see a 3D structure like a circuit that might store a memory or a circuit in the brain that might be processing an emotion, with the nanoscale resolution that you need to see neural connections and the molecules that make neurons do what they do. 我们希望能让那些原来看不到的结构被看清，要清晰地看到大脑中某个可能存储了记忆或是正在处理某种感情的神经电路的3D结构是非常困难的，你需要在纳米级的分辨率下才能看到神经元之间的连接和那些促使神经元发挥作用的分子结构。 The fundamental limit on how fine we can see things is related to a technical parameter called the mesh size; that is basically the spacing between the polymer chains. We think that the spacing between the polymer chains is about a couple nanometers; that is, around the same size as a biomolecule. If we can push all the molecules away from each other very evenly, it’s like drawing a picture on a balloon and blowing it up: you might be able to see all the individual particles and building blocks of life, but you know what? 决定我们能够在多高的清晰度下看清东西的基础限制是与一项被称为“网格尺寸”的技术参数相关的，这个参数的含义其实就是网状聚合物构成的链式结构之间的孔隙大小。我们认为这个空隙的大小大约是几纳米，也就是说，这和一个生物分子的大小差不多。如果我们能够将所有的分子按照非常接近的比例彼此推开，这就有点像在一个气球上画了一幅画，然后再将气球吹大，之后你就有可能看清所有的那些颗粒和组成生命的基础成分了。 We have to validate the technology down to that level of resolution. So far, we have validated it down to about a factor of ten bigger than that, in order of magnitude. But if we can get down to single molecule resolution, you could try to map the building blocks of living systems. We haven’t gotten there yet. 但你需要知道的是，我们还需要在生物分子级的分辨率上对这项技术进行验证，到目前为止，我们已经在比这高一个数量级的分辨率上成功地验证了这项技术。如果我们能够在单个分子的分辨率上验证这项技术，我们就能够绘制出活系统中的那些基础成分了，但目前我们还没能做到这一点。 I’ve been amazed at how fast neurotechnology has started to move. Ten years ago, we had relatively few tools for looking at and controlling the brain, and now, ten years later, we have our optogenetic tools for controlling brain circuits, this expansion method for mapping the fine circuitry, and also, we have developed 3D imagining methods that basically work the way that our eyes work to reconstruct 3D images of brain high speed electrical dynamics. 我对近来神经技术的发展速度感到吃惊。十年前，我们只有相对很有限的工具来控制大脑，而十年后的今天，我们已经拥有了像“光基因”这样的工具来控制大脑的神经电路，还有这种通过放大技术来绘制精细的神经电路的方法。此外，我们还开发了3D成像的方法来观测大脑内部的高速电子动态，其工作原理和我们的眼睛重建3D图像的方法是相同的。 In the coming fifteen years, two things are going to happen and a third thing, might happen. One thing that will happen is that our ability to map the fine details of neural circuits and see high speed dynamics and control it will probably be perfected; that might happen as soon as five years from now but definitely within fifteen years, I would predict that. 在接下来的十五年中，我认为会发生两件重大的事情，另外还有第三件事情也可能会发生。第一件事情是，我们绘制神经电路的精确细节，观测其中的高速动态，以及对它进行控制的能力将会得到完善，这些也许最快在今后的五年中就会发生，并且在十五年内几乎一定会发生，我可以肯定地这样预测。 The second thing is that we’re going to have some detailed-enough maps of small neural circuits that maybe we could even make computational models of their operation. For example, there is a small worm called C. elegans that has 302 neurons; maybe we can map all of them and their molecules and their dynamics and perhaps we can make a computational model of that worm. Or maybe a slightly larger brain: the larval zebrafish has 100,000 neurons, mice have 100 million—ballpark—and humans have 100 billion. You can see there are some multistage logarithmic jumps there that we have to make. 第二件事情是我们将绘制出一些细节足够丰富的小型神经电路图像，也许我们甚至可以据此开发出一些有关它们工作方式的计算模型。例如，有一种叫做秀丽隐杆线虫的蠕虫拥有302个神经元，也许我们能够绘制出它的所有神经电路图，以及其中的分子结构和电子动态，那么我们也许可以建立这种蠕虫的计算模型。如果扩展到大一点的大脑，斑马鱼拥有大约十万个神经元，而老鼠则拥有大约1亿个神经元，人类的神经元数目大约是一千亿。你可以从这里看出，在大脑规模从小到大的过程中，我们需要做很多次多级的对数跳跃。 The speculative thing is that we might have some tools that might let us look at human brain functions much, much more accurately. Right now, we have so few tools for looking at the human brain, there is functional MRI which lets you look at blood flow that is downstream of brain activity, but it’s very indirect and it’s very crude. The time resolution is thousands of times slower than in brain activity, and the spatial resolution, each little block that you see in these brain scans contains tens to hundreds of thousands of neurons, and we know that even nearby neurons can be doing completely different things. 而那件不太确定的事情则是我们也许会拥有一些能够让我们以远高于当前的精确程度观察人类大脑功能的工具。现在，能用来观察人类大脑的工具实在太少了，我们有一些功能性的核磁共振（MRI）设备能让我们观察某种大脑活动所引发的血液流动，但这种方式太间接了，同时也太不精确。这种工具的时间分辨率比大脑活动要慢上数千倍，从空间分辨率上说，你从MRI的扫描图像上看到的每个小方格都包含了数以百万计的神经元，而我们知道，即使是相邻的神经元也可能正在做着完全不同的事情。 What we most need right now, I would say, is a method for imaging and controlling human brain circuits with single cell, single electrical pulse precision, and the jury is out on how that could happen. There’s lots of brainstorming. I haven’t seen any technology generated so far that can probably do it although there’s lots of interesting speculation. That’s something I would love to see happen and we have started to work on some ideas that might allow you to do it. 我想说，我们当前最需要的，是一种能够在单个细胞，单个电子脉冲的精度上对大脑电路进行控制和成像的方法，而不确定的是这将会如何发生。我们已经进行过了很多次头脑风暴，但至今为止，虽然有许多有趣的可能性，我却并没有看出任何一种现有的技术能有很大的可能性做到这一点。我希望能够看到这件事情在不远的将来发生，而且我们已经开始将一些有前景的想法付诸实践了。 There’s a lot of speculation about whether there are quantum effects that are necessary for brain computations. At body temperature, it’s very likely that quantum effects, if any, are going to be very, very short-lived, maybe much shorter than the kinds of computations that are happening in the brain. It’s quite possible that if such effects are important, we would need far more powerful tools to see them, or perhaps you can explain all of the biophysics of neurons known to date, for the most part, with completely classical models. 关于大脑的计算过程中是否会用到量子效应这一问题有很多猜测。在人的体温之下，似乎量子效应即便存在也会非常非常短暂，其存续时间相对于发生在大脑之内的计算过程要短得多。如果此类效应的确是重要的，那么我们很可能就需要比当前强大得多的工具来观测它们。但实际上我们也可能完全能够通过一些经典模型来解释目前我们所知的绝大部分关于神经元的生物物理现象。 The thing that I loved about working on the quantum computation project, this was with Neil Gershenfeld back in the day, was this greater philosophy of how information and physics are linked. There are many theories of fundamental physical principles of computation; there is even the phrase, “it from bit,” where people talk about the fundamental thermodynamic limits of how information processing occurs in physical systems. 我之所以愿意投入时间在量子计算研究项目上，主要是早先在与Neil Gershenfeld一起工作的时候，受到了关于信息和物理学是如何紧密联系在一起的这一伟大哲学思想的影响。在计算的基础物理原则方面已经有了很多理论。当人们会谈论在物理学系统中发生的信息处理过程所受到的基础热力学限制时甚至有这样的谚语：“万物皆比特（it from bit）”。 For example, there are so many bits associated with a black hole, there is, based upon temperature, a fundamental amount of information that might be encoded in a specific transition. The brain for the most part is operating, because it’s at body temperature and all that, far above those physical fundamental limits in terms of information processing. 例如，与一个黑洞相关的比特数非常之多，在给定的温度下，一个基础量的信息可能会被编码到某个特定的转换过程中。而大脑在大多数情况下都在工作，因为它处于人体体温的环境下，而在这种温度下的信息处理则远远超过了那些物理上的基础限制。 On one level, the most parsimonious models of the brain are analogue because we know that there are different amounts of transmitters being released at synapses, we know that the electrical pulses that neurons compute can vary in their height and in their duration. 从某个层面上说，那些关于大脑的最简化模型都是模拟的（而非数字的），因为我们知道，大脑中的各突触所释放出的传导物质是不同的，我们也知道神经元所计算的不同电脉冲的强度和持续时间区别很大。 Of course, if you dig deep enough, you could say, well, you could just count the neurotransmitters, you could count the ions, and it becomes digital again, but that’s a much more detailed level of description that might not be the most parsimonious level because you had to count and localize every single sodium ion and potassium ion and chloride ion. Hopefully, we don’t have to go that far. But if we need to, we would probably have to build new technologies to do that. 当然，如果你功课做得够深，那你可以去数一下那些神经递质的数目，还有电脉冲中离子的数目，那么这个问题就又成为了数字的（而非模拟的）了，但那是一个细致得多的描述水平，而并不处在最简化层次上，因为你需要计数和定位每一个钠离子，钾离子和氯离子。希望我们不需要走得那么远，但如果真的有必要，我们还是很可能去创造一些新的技术来做到这些事情。 My co-inventor, Karl Deisseroth, and I both won Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences for our work together on optogenetics, this technology where we put molecules that are light sensitive into neurons and then we can make them activatable or silence-able with pulses of light. 我和我的合作者Karl Deisseroth由于我们在“光基因”技术上的合作成果共同获得了《生命科学》杂志所颁发的突破奖，在这项技术中，我们将一些光敏分子植入神经元中，然后我们就可以通过光脉冲来让它们在可激活状态和静息状态之间切换。 Our groups have sent these molecules out to literally thousands of basic as well as clinically interested neuroscientists, and people are studying very basic science questions like how is a smell represented in the brain? But they’re also trying to answer clinically relevant questions like where should you deactivate brain cells to shut down an epileptic seizure? I’ll give you an example of the latter since there is a lot of disease interest. 我们的小组已经将这样的分子提供给数千名基础神经科学家和临床神经科学家，其中有些科学家研究的是非常基础的科学问题，例如气味是如何在大脑中被表达出来的。还有一些科学家则试图回答一些临床相关的问题，例如应该在什么地方让大脑细胞停止活动以停止一次癫痫病的发作。下面我会给你举一个后者的例子，因为有很多人都对我们的技术在疾病研究方面的应用感兴趣。 People have been trying to shut down the over excitable cells during seizures for literally decades, but it’s so difficult because which part of the brain and which cells and which projections? It’s such a big mess, right, the brain? So a group at UC Irvine has been using our technologies to try to turn off different brain cells or even to turn on different brain cells, and what they’re finding is that some cells, if you activate them, can shut down a seizure in a mouse model. But still, who would have thought that activating a certain kind of cell would be enough to terminate a seizure? There is no other way to test that, right, because how do you turn on just one kind of cell? 人们在过去数十年中一直在尝试去关闭那些在癫痫病发作时过度活跃的细胞，这非常困难，因为很难弄清大脑中究竟是哪个部分的哪些细胞的哪些投射过于活跃了。要知道大脑看起来就是一团乱麻。一个来自加州大学尔湾分校的研究小组使用我们的技术试图关闭和激活大脑内部的不同细胞，而他们的研究成果表明的确存在某些细胞，通过激活它们可以在一个鼠脑模型中停止癫痫的发作。 What they did was there are certain classes of cell called interneurons, and they tend to shut down other cell types in the brain. What this group did is they took a molecule that we had first put into neurons about a decade ago, a molecule that, kind of like a solar panel, when you shine light on it, will drive electricity into the neuron. They delivered the gene for this molecule so that it would only be on in those interneurons, none of the other cells nearby, just the interneurons. And then, when they shine light, these interneurons will shut down their neighboring cells, and they showed you could terminate a seizure in a mouse model of epilepsy. 某些类型的细胞被称为中间神经元，它们所做的事情是尝试去关闭大脑内部其它类型的细胞。这个小组采用了我们十年前第一次植入神经元时所使用的一种分子，这种分子有点像一块太阳能电池板，当你将它置于光照下，它就会驱动神经元内部的电信号。他们将这种分子的基因植入了那些中间神经元，并保证除了这些中间神经元之外，附近的其它细胞内部都不存在这种分子。然后当他们点亮光线，这些中间神经元就会关闭它们相邻的细胞，他们的工作成果表明你能够在一只老鼠癫痫病发作时通过这种方法停止病症的发作。 That’s interesting because now, if you could build a drug that would drive those cells, maybe that would be a new way of treating seizures, or you could try to directly use light to activate those cells and build a sort of prosthetic that would be implanted in the brain and activate those cells near a seizure focus, for example. 这一结果十分有趣，因为现在你可以制造一种药物来驱动那些细胞，也许这会成为一种治疗癫痫病的新途径，或者你也可以尝试直接使用光来激活那些细胞，并制造出某种能够被植入大脑的假体，并通过它来激活癫痫病发作的核心区附近的那些细胞。 People are exploring both ideas. Could you use our optogenetic tools to turn on and off different cell types in the brain to find better targets, but then, treat those targets with drugs? Or could you use light to activate cells and directly sculpt their activity in real-time in a human patient? The latter, of course, is much higher risk, but it’s fun to think about for sure. And there are a couple companies that are trying to do that now. 以上两种思路都正处于人们的探索之中。人们是否能够使用我们的“光基因”工具来打开和关闭大脑内部不同类型的细胞功能以更好地发现目标，然后再使用药物对这些目标有的放矢呢？或者是否能够使用光来激活病人大脑中的某些细胞并且直接实时控制它们的行为呢？第二种做法无疑会带来很高的风险，但考虑这种可能性确实非常有趣。目前的确有一些公司在尝试这么做。 When we were talking about the Breakthrough Prize, I thought about the little speech I gave—they give you thirty seconds, but I thought about it for several weeks because I feel like there is such a push to cure things, a push to find treatments, but in some ways, by forcing it to go too fast, we might miss the serendipitous insights that are much more powerful. 谈到《生命科学》杂志的突破奖，我想到了我在获奖时所发表的一段简短讲话——他们只给了我三十秒，但我却考虑了几个星期，因为我觉得人们太过于急着去治疗疾病，找到好的疗法，但在某种情况下，如果我们强行地迅速推进这些事情，就很可能错过一些实际上要强大得多的只有通过机缘巧合才能发现的深刻洞见。 I’ll give you an example: in 1927, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to this guy who came up with a treatment for dementia. What this person did is, he would take people with dementia and he would deliberately give them malaria. Remember this is the greatest idea of its time, right? 让我来举个例子：1927年的诺贝尔医学奖颁发给了一位发现了一种痴呆症疗法的科学家。而他所做的事情则是故意让那些患有痴呆症的病人感染疟疾。记住，这可是那个时代最伟大的点子。 Now, why did it work? Well, malaria causes a very high fever. At that time, dementia was often caused by syphilis, and so, the high fever of malaria would kill the parasite that causes syphilis. Now, in 1928, one year later, antibiotics started to come online, and of course, antibiotics have been a huge hit and syphilis-related dementia is almost unheard of nowadays. 那么问题来了，为什么这种做法能够起效？其实是因为疟疾会导致非常严重的发热。而在当时，痴呆症则通常是由梅毒引起的，通过这种方法，疟疾所带来的高烧就能够杀死那些引起梅毒的寄生虫。而在一年后的1928年，抗生素开始得到普及，当然，抗生素所带来的影响的确非常深远，由梅毒所引起的痴呆症在最近几乎完全销声匿迹了。 The rush to get a short-term treatment, I worry, can sometimes cause people to misdirect their attention from getting down to the ground truth mechanisms of knowing what’s going on. It’s almost like people often talk about we’re doing all this incremental stuff, we should do more moon shots, right? I worry that medicine does too many moon shots. Almost everything we do in medicine is a moon shot because we don’t know for sure if it’s going to work. 我所担心的是，人们急于在短期内去寻求某种疗法的风潮有时会错误地将人们的注意力从脚踏实地去研究基础事实并弄清其中的机制上转移开。这就像人们所经常谈论的，我们总是做着这些循序渐进的事情，我们难道不应该把更多的精力花在探月这样的事情上吗？我担心医学界会关注太多这类“探月”式的大目标。我们目前在医学上所做的所有事情都是一次“探月”，因为我们并不能肯定我们所做的事情能够见效。 People forget. When they landed on the moon, they already had several hundred years of calculus so they have the math; physics, so they know Newton’s Laws; aerodynamics, you know how to fly; rocketry, people were launching rockets for many decades before the moon landing. When Kennedy gave the moon landing speech, he wasn’t saying, let’s do this impossible task; he was saying, look, we can do it. We’ve launched rockets; if we don’t do this, somebody else will get there first. 人们都是健忘的。当人类第一次踏上月球时，微积分已经发明了几百年了，所以他们拥有足够好的数学工具；而在物理上，人类也已经知道了牛顿定律；在空气动力学上，人们已经知道了如何飞行；在火箭技术上，登月前人们已经积累了数十年的发射火箭的经验。当肯尼迪发表登月演说时，他并不是在说，让我们来完成这项不可能完成的任务吧，他所说的是，看吧，我们能做到这件事情。美国人发射了登月火箭，如果我们不做这件事情，将会有别人捷足先登。 Moon shot has gone almost into the opposite parlance; rather than saying here is something big we can do and we know how to do it, it’s here is some crazy thing, let’s throw a lot of resources at it and let’s hope for the best. I worry that that’s not how “moon shot” should be used. I think we should do anti-moon shots! “探月”这个字眼现在的意思已经和当初完全颠倒过来了，现在它的意思已不再是“这是件大事，而且我们知道如何将它完成”，而变成了“这件事情很疯狂，让我们多投入些资源然后祈祷吧”。我所担心的正是对探月精神的这种误用，我觉得我们现在应该做的是反对这种“探月精神”，脚踏实地做更多的基础研究! （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

【2016-09-14】 @whigzhou: 有些历史学家（特别是历史决定论者）喜欢用个体生命周期类比文明和国家的兴衰存亡，类似的，组织理论里也有『制度疲劳』的说法，对这种拟人化说辞总是要严加警惕，不过有些类比也并非毫无道理，比如『年轻』『成熟』『衰老』这组概念，确可运用于政权，至少适用于我们见过的政权类型中的大多数。 ​​​​ @whigzhou: 容易想到的几种导致政体衰老的机制：1）委托代理关系中的军备竞赛，多层级组织总是面临委托代理问题，层级越多越严重，一个成功的新政权必定找出了某些办法控制这个问题不严重到拖垮整个体制，问题是，委托代理双方的营私/反营私斗争是一场逐步升级的军备竞赛，新制度起初运行良好，但针对它的营私策略逐渐被开发出来之后，便日益朽坏，一个显著的例子是官僚系统的腐败 @whigzhou: 2）激励资源耗尽，新政权的领导者手里有着大量资源用于奖励下属和盟友，但这些资源通常两代之内就耗尽了，要维持最初激励效果，要么持续扩张，要么定期清洗 @whigzhou: 3）禀赋稀释，第一代掌权者总是有某些过人之处，否则就不会上台了，这些禀赋随着代际更替会逐渐稀释，无论何种更替制度，这种稀释总会发生，世袭制下，强人的儿子未必是强人，指定继任制，蒙择的可能是马屁精，考试选拔制，胜出的可能是无能学霸，竞争制，上位的是赢不了外敌的内斗高手…… @whigzhou: 4）团队松散化，这是代际更替导致的另一个问题，统治团队的前几代成员之间往往有很近的血缘、姻亲、战友、恩荫关系，除非定期清洗，否则这些关系必定岁代际更替逐渐疏远，从而弱化团队合作 @whigzhou: 5）和平化，长期和平化无论在个体还是组织层面，都将削弱战斗禀赋和战争能力，最终无法抵御外敌 @whigzhou: 6）人口压力，社会剩余率降低，政权可支配资源减少，  

【2016-09-14】 @海德沙龙: 《战争如何推动社会合作》 是什么让人类建立起了如今这样的复杂社会，让我们发展出如此高度的合作与组织能力，得以从事需要数十万人共同参与的大型活动？[[Peter Turchin]]在其新书《超级社会》中提出，众多人类共同体之间的竞争与冲突，特别是战争，是推动这一发展进程的基本动力。 ​​​​ @海德沙龙：乍一看，这似乎只是群选择理论的又一次复活，但Turchin的理论建立在全新的方法论基础之上，他将进化生物学的思想扩展运用于文化进化，为各种社会/文化指标给出了度量方法，并大量采用数量模型和统计工具，使得其理论在经验上变得可验证，由此，Turchin及其同道开创了一个自称为历史动力学的新学派。 @whigzhou: 说到群选择，早先我也曾被道金斯带进过坑里，五年前围观威尔逊帮和道金斯帮那场大争吵时重新思考了这个问题，见旧帖。 @whigzhou: 简单说，只要说清楚群体解决搭便车/损公肥私问题的组织/控制机制（因而回答了反对者的核心质疑），群选择是可以成立的，其余争论只是词汇之争