📺 Widow’s Bay is the best thing I have seen on TV all year, with good comedy, moments that are genuinely scary, callouts to many horror classics and a stellar cast. Will watch again.
The more I read about “Dialog” — a Peter Thiel-adjacent semi-secret society — from the likes of Andrew Gelman and Cory Doctorow, the firmer my belief is that America has zipped through its oligarchy phase to become a full-blown kakistocracy. These people are morons.
A quarterly update to my Now page is in. For more like it, check out Derek Sivers’ nownownow.com.
Yesterday, I received the strangest of emails. It was nominally from the founder of a physician services company, one of those that will, for an undisclosed “signature membership” fee, help doctors with contract negotiation, financial planning, estate management and such. Fine. Stylistically I doubt that the founder, or indeed any human, has had much input on the contents, which were this: sign up for a free 3-day online course and your host, an “expert on lead generation and trust-building” will teach you how to increase revenue and influence in order to get more patients to your clinic. He once, and I am quoting directly from the email here, “helped a little-known surgeon go viral, [Note: This is most likely a reference to John P. Williams, a breast cancer surgeon and the creator of the YouTube channel Breast Cancer School for Patients. He was the chair for two and a half years. ] fill his waiting room, and become the White House–appointed chairman of the President’s Cancer Panel.”
Crikey.
This gave me flashbacks from October 2023 when the annual meeting of a medical society which looked more like a TED talk than a serious clinical conference shook me so much that I wrote about it. Yes, of course doctors should learn to become influencers, as well as entrepreneurs and art critics, and also counselors on the matters of faith, car safety and gun violence, everything — everything! — but experts in medicine, which up until 1986 encompassed “the science and practice of caring for patients and [various aspects of] their injury or disease”, but then in the 1970s and 80s, all diseases apparently eradicated and injuries no longer needing treatment, started to include health promotion. And who can possibly be against promoting health?
Something else lamentable happened a half-century ago: in 1975, “the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused the profession of ‘restraint of trade’ and legally persuaded doctors to permit advertising amongst their clan”, as noted in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Yes, you have read that right: under threat of legal action, doctors were persuaded to advertise. Up until then, the Code of Ethics of the American Medical Association explicitly forbade it, those 19th century idiots not knowing what was good for them. Or their business. Is there a difference?
Let me postulate that, prior to that faithful — or was it faithless? — decade, the medical profession was defined as sharply as a scalpel and doctors had a notably different status from other professions. Justifiably so, was it not, for people who asked you about bowel movements and sexual habits, and poked and prodded various bodily orifices. [Note: Ah, but I wrote this sentence in the past tense, for both probing questions and the actual probing are done less and less in doctor’s offices, unless it is probing with an intravenous needle to inject that expensive drug, or to insert a medical device. Note how more of the former probing would have led to less of the latter. ] With an increase in scope, the equation of medicine to a business like any other, and one grave of an old physician at a time, the profession has slowly been getting blurrier. So blurry, in fact, that one can exclaim how “there is nothing wrong with healthcare that getting rid of doctors won’t fix” at a tech summit keynoted by Tony Blair [Note: ↬John Naughton ] and get applause instead of jeers. So blurry, are they not, that they are just asking to be rubbed out!
Was there a master plan to eliminate a profession and make it into an ordinary trade? I doubt it. It was, as ever with Americans, a pinch of short-term gain and a dash of performance artistry in the stew of unintended consequences. But how oh how to unstew it now?
After ten… eventful years in DC, our family — which doubled in size since 2016 (and more than doubled if you include the cat, and why wouldn’t you) — is moving to Denver, Colorado! Next month. Less than three weeks from now. Gulp.
So anyway, here is a recent storm over Washington to set the mood.
As seen in the official email communication from the American Society of Hematology:
Milos, if you’re sitting for the hematology boards this November, you don’t just need more resources — you need a structured plan that fits alongside your fellowship and life.
AI slop is the clipart of our age. This too shall pass, one would hope.
A new pop up just opened in DC on 7th Street NW, between G and H. You love to see it.
To state the obvious: I have been following blogs for much longer than I’ve had one. A version of what now goes under “Infinite Regress” first started in October 2010, shortly after I moved to the US. Most of it was in Serbian and now available elsewhere but in 2012 I started blogging in English and, well, here we are.
There is only a handful of blogs which I have been following from before that time. The list does not include Marginal Revolution, which I didn’t know about until around 2015, when a hematology attending at NHLBI mentioned it during rounds. [Note: Here is the too much information part, and not particularly relevant to the topic at hand: the attending was Neal Young, who also introduced me to Edward Tufte; it was during the post-Tuesday clinic roundup of patients with aplastic anemia, which were always fun; and it was him showing a video of a bear which Tyler Cowen linked to the day before. Why I can remember those facts but not to pick up ricotta cheese at the store as instructed to by my wife is one of those small mysteries of life. I do also remember being somewhat surprised that the super-smart and erudite Young was impressed by a stupid bear video. ] Andrew Gelman’s “Statistical Modeling…” also wouldn’t make the cut: even though he started blogging in 2004, around the time I discovered Bloglines, I wouldn’t become a subscriber until some time during covid lockdowns during a brief period when I thought I had enough time to read much more than I actually could and ultimately and inevitably overcommitted. Yet I try to model their regularity (consciously) and irreverence (not as consciously, more as a permission), if not Cowen’s positions as of late.
Then there are the blogs which are now dead, defunct, or a shadow of themselves. Many of those productivity-adjacent. Stuff like Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Kevin MD. These I couldn’t say were explicit current influences in format or style, but I do still have a GTD and a medicine tag and I update both fairly frequently.
There are only three blogs I can think of that I have been following pre-blogging and still do, with some interruptions in between. Two of them should not be a surprise to even a casual recent reader: John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and Dave Winer’s Scripting News. [Note: I fought hard against finshing the title of this post with a (the last one may surpirse you) because this is one of those cases where the clickbaity headline may actually have fit. ] The third, though, fell off my radar during the last great feed reader reshuffle as it has several more times over the last 22 or so years I have been a not-so-faithful follower: Dubious Quality by Bill Harris, which has gone from being predominantly about gaming to game developing to, well, something that is less focused than even what you are reading here so I would not exaggerate if I called DQ the ur-influence of “Infinite Regress”.
And a few decades before @jtr’s push to write more emails I was a fairly regular emailer to Harris. In fact, my very first email to him, my Gmail archive tells me, was dated August 24, 2004 and had the subject line of “RSS feed, please”. I haven’t changed much, have I?