The 007s — Week 10

I took a pause from the 007s, to give myself a long-due break and to travel to the real-rural-realms of the country (very proud of being able to come up with an alliteration). This piece is a collation of the multiple trivia that I collected through the people I met and places I witnessed, all with lessons galore. Also currently reading: X and Why, Zero to One!

• Gender Dysphoria: refers to psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity. Though gender dysphoria often begins in childhood, some people may not experience it until after puberty or much later. Many people with gender dysphoria have a strong, lasting desire to live a life that “matches” or expresses their gender identity. The term focuses on discomfort as the problem, rather than identity.
  The diagnosis of gender dysphoria is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a manual published by the American Psychiatric Association. The diagnosis was created to help people with gender dysphoria get access to necessary health care and effective treatment.

• Parental Investment Theory: Parental investment theory, a term coined by Robert Trivers in 1972, predicts that the sex that invests more in its offspring will be more selective when choosing a mate (will be warier of a mating error), and the less-investing sex will have intra-sexual competition for access to mates. It enables evolutionary psychologists to formulate hypotheses and make predictions regarding sex differences in mating strategy. In other words, it is in the reproductive interest of the higher-investing sex to avoid mating with low-quality mates (referring to their genes). In the vast majority of mammals, females are physiologically required to invest more heavily in their offspring; thus, they have evolved to be the choosier sex.
• Eroom’s Law: Reverse of Moore’s Law, Eroom’s Law indicates that powerful forces have outweighed scientific, technical, and managerial improvements over the past 60 years, and/or that some of the improvements have been less ‘improving’ than commonly thought. The more positive anyone is about the past several decades of progress, the more negative they should be about the strength of countervailing forces. The observation is that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology (such as high-throughput screening, biotechnology, combinatorial chemistry, and computational drug design), a trend first observed in the 1980s.

• Batemans Principle: In 1948, Angus J. Bateman reported a stronger relationship between mating and reproductive success in male fruit flies compared with females, and concluded that selection should universally favour ‘an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females’ to obtain mates. In biology, Bateman’s principle is the theory that females almost always invest more energy into producing offspring than males, and therefore in most species, females are a limiting resource over which the other sex will compete.

• Carbon Trading: Carbon trade is the buying and selling of credits that permit a company or other entity to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. The carbon credits and the carbon trade are authorized by governments with the goal of gradually reducing overall carbon emissions and mitigating their contribution to climate change. Carbon trading is also referred to as carbon emissions trading. Carbon trading is based on the cap and trade regulations that successfully reduced sulfur pollution during the 1990s. This regulation introduced market-based incentives to reduce pollution: rather than mandating specific measures, the policy rewarded companies that cut their emissions and imposed financial costs on those that could not. The idea of applying a cap-and-trade solution to carbon emissions originated with the Kyoto Protocol, a United Nations treaty to mitigate climate change that took effect in 2005.

• Chekhov’s Gun: Chekhov’s gun is a dramatic principle that suggests that details within a story or play will contribute to the overall narrative. This encourages writers to not make false promises in their narrative by including extemporaneous details that will not ultimately pay off by the last act, chapter, or conclusion. It comes from Anton Chekhov’s famous book writing advice: ‘If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.’ meaning that each part should contribute to the whole in a way that makes sense. This does not mean that every single plot point of the story must be hugely significant. Some story elements function to create a mood or describe the setting. Yet events or objects you infer are significant, should have this implied significance revealed.

• The Tenth Man Rule: The 10th Man discipline is one where the group intentionally appoints at least one person to serve as the loyal dissenter. The 10th Man Rule is a means of countering our human nature that prefers harmony within our inner circle. When that default bias for consensus is combined with an important decision, as the Israelis experience demonstrates, the result can be painful. In 1973, both the Israeli and US intelligence communities had assumed that the Egyptians would not attack, or at least not in the short term. Parts shortages and a lack of training in the Egyptian army, according to their sources were the main reasoning. It was also Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, which was also considered another reason that there would be no activity to worry about. Plus, just six years prior, they (the Israelis) had thrashed their adversaries in the Six-Day War. However, they were proven wrong. The Arab countries’ subsequent Yom Kippur war against Israel was a humiliating setback. Hence the birth of the 10th Man Rule was coined to address these and subsequent issues by looking at the strategy currently undertaken and litmus testing it.