I am a hypocrite and so are you...
I thought why not go first. We are all complex self-serving humans with most of us doing the best we can. We don’t need permission to walk the world in the way that suits us if we aren’t harming anyone. Since observing the world from a geospatial perspective there isn’t any other way to explain persistent barriers in our built environments and this has remained my focus in tackling topics like social and structural determinants of health, climate change, and data visualization.
This year I am celebrating a milestone birthday. Over the last few years I have made decisions about my professional life that I no longer need to necessarily characterize or explain but when I start hearing similar voices I feel agency to encourage conversation.
This newsletter will explore some of this in more detail. Let’s be frank. I am often asked to create courses or tutorials. I may do one now and then but solely for the purpose of generating income—no thanks.
When I have something to say, I say it.
I am most interested in deeper dives or resource sharing around important topics ignored in the media when the insights would have the most impact.
We live in a world of false proxies.
I was listening to a Seth Godin interview this morning on the Tim Ferriss podcast. I was running at the time so I returned to the transcript to recapture the part that really resonated with me. Seth talks about false proxies.
At work we develop proxies because we have to hire people for a 20-, 30-, 40-year career before they work for us. So one proxy is, “Did you go to a famous college?” One proxy is, “Are there any typos on your resume?” One proxy is, “Are you good at interviewing?” But of course, unless you’re hiring someone to be an interviewer, being good at interviewing is a false proxy. And yeah, the thing about false proxies is they lead to caste systems, to social stratification, to prejudice, to misogyny, because we are quickly making decisions on who to swipe left or right based on clues that aren’t actually related to whether the person can do the job or not.
I was invited to dinner by a pretty well-known gastroenterologist on the speaking bureau of a big pharma company. He had listened to me facilitate a meeting by presenting a field guide on translating the statistical jargon in clinical manuscripts to actionable insights at the point of care. He assumed that I was a medical doctor and was gobsmacked to find out that I had a doctorate in chiropractic and not medicine. He could not understand why my way of observing the world and technical information was so clear. I realized that we could dismantle false proxies by telling better stories.
Here is an example…
The less thinking among us on the wrong side of gender research, science, and the human condition think that a big glittery bus pulled up and now everyone can “pretend” to be whatever they want to be. Luckily, The Human Genome Project revealed how culture interpretations of gender align or misalign with the science of sex. The SRY gene, for example, determines sex in a rather small part of the Y protein on the Y chromosome. We are not binary my friends.
You would not be alive without an X chromosome. Why do we call it a sex chromosome? Especially when we realize that from the ~1100 genes on the X chromosome, only 4% are involved with sex and reproduction.
I think culture and science need to do a better job. Here are a few fantastic places to begin.
What it means to be intersex
Did you know that x and y were simply placeholder names for the ‘23rd’ chromosome pair?
The weird history of the "sex chromosomes"
I love how Karissa Sanbonmatsu describes the brain cells basically dissolving overnight and being rebuilt by our DNA blueprint. She compares it to a traveling carnival so I had a little fun with an a.i. image. Especially when you see the errors in transcription in the little picture.
The biology of gender, from DNA to the brain
The hypocrite in me would keep jumping on the ride. The curated narrative about a client’s drug, intervention, or great idea for generating more profit eventually stopped being enough for me. I had a choice to make so I stopped client work entirely.
More on this later but for now, I want to use my love of technology, science, and passion for the environment to share stories from our big beautiful, messy world.
More from Carl Sagan.
