Seen this morning on a walk down Rock Creek and the Potomac. DC is closer to nature than most people imagine.
After dissecting the minutiae from the ongoing battle of the bozos [Note: To save you a click: it is about the Musk-Altman trial. ] , Andrew Sharp’s weekly column ends with this paragraph:
The reality is knottier. Had the OpenAI founders not launched with a nonprofit structure in 2015, they probably never recruit the talent required to compete with Google. And had they done anything else other than exactly what they did in 2018 and 2019, all of computing would be less interesting today, and the company probably wouldn’t exist eight years later. Musk’s trial has been clarifying on that point, at least for me.
The AI side of technology is one of those rare occasions where biotech may indeed be like tech: people with knowledge, skills and ambition to make the early steps towards creating something new generally don’t do it for the money. Accolades, titles, a few more increments on their h-indices sure, but unless they are seriously delusional a lab postdoc coming in on a weekend to split the cell culture generally has no hope of getting into the top percentile in income. Up until a few years ago AI research was much like that, until it wasn’t.
Sharp writes that OpenAI had to flip the switch if it were to survive in these shark Google-infested waters once they smelled blood profit an opportunity to tell a new story to investors. Same can be said about any biotech: become successful enough, and there will come a time when the academic founders are asked to step away and let someone with different motivations run the show, lest they be lost in a sea of copycats, smoke-peddlers and competitive intelligence officers. The whole business has just become too expensive for some Jonas Salk-wannabe to dabble in.
A person of bad intent may propose that the adults coming to run the show once it becomes too expensive are the ones making it expensive in the first place to justify their existence, contributing the health care cost ouroboros on the way. But that is of course nonsense. The proof is in the pudding, what with famously efficient drug development pipelines, low health care costs and improving lifespans.
So let’s do what a genuine financial scion once proposed: invert. Instead of asking ourselves how to make drug development more efficient and cost-effective, let’s see how we could make it more expensive. Number one thing to do would making it all about the money: let’s portray people who don’t capitalize on their inventions as losers not heroes, make Nobel Prize winners notable only if they are billionaires (who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last year, again?), measure success of drugs in dollars earned not lives improved, extended or saved, have everyone skim a percent or five of the money swishing around in the ecosystem as their primary source of income without any penalty for ultimate failure [Note: For more on this, do read Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game, which is about much more than the titular phrase which has become — much like his The Black Swan — a phrase people throw around without having any idea of the underlying concepts. ] guaranteeing that they will have every incentive possible to grow the pie, and I think you see where this is going because the system functions as designed so why should you complain? After all, there is no alternative.
Except that, of course, there is. It would be a big lift, to remove incentives of skimmers to inflate the balloon, stop various influencer platforms from inducing FOMO in everyone and anyone, recalibrate the median science journalist’s value system from Mr. Market to something more reality-based. Big, but not impossible, provided there is a will.
Therein lies the problem: that kind of thinking is somewhat at odds with the shared American culture, at least as recently described by Chris Arnade, that “you can live how you want, eat what you want, live (up to a point) how you want at a thin level, as long as you ultimately believe in making big money through hard work and playing by the rules.” Determining if the other two legs of the three-legged money/work/rules American stool are performing as intended I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
Though I agree with his stance on smartphones in schools and social networks in general, I fear that Jonathan Haidt of The Anxious Generation is now the useful fool for every US state senator with autocratic tendencies; Rindala Alajaji of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good write-up of how that came to be. Has parental guidance ever been successfully legislated?
Glenn Fleishman is singlehandedly keeping me interested in Kickstarter. Just this week he has set up another campaign: the proposed book title is “That One Matt Bors Comic” and it is a book about a meme which was supposedly viral but I don’t remember seeing until two days ago. Still, the concept is interesting and I would like to learn more.
And just as I finished backing Fleishman’s, I noticed that Cory Doctorow also a campaign. It is for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, a book based on a similarly-named essay about “reverse centaurs” — people whose job it is to augment AI instead the other way around — i.e., potentially, all of us proles. Yes, even doctors. Particularly doctors.
Note that the anti-enshittification (anti-platform?) crusader Doctorow used Kickstarter. The company is indeed a “public benefit corporation” of around 60 employees and an interesting history of unionization. A dissenting opinion from senior staff that forming a union would be “misappropriation of unions for use by privileged workers” is a delightful example of cognitive dissonance in people who tell themselves that they are good but also want to run a successful business.
Oh but we do, at least superficially: “of 130,000 men who became new fathers between 2017 and 2022, almost 800 died during that same 5-year period, and 60 percent of those deaths were from potentially preventable causes like homicide, accidental injury, and suicide” which is about what you would expect for a group of men that skews younger. The authors of the paper make a comparison between fathers who died and those that survived but a more interesting one would have been a demographically matched of childless men. Alas, all we have is all the men in Georgia and lo, for each age range the new fathers have a lower mortality and the discussion appropriately leads with “Fatherhood appeared to be associated with reduced mortality.“ [Note: Another reason to have more children. Though, if you are going to do it solely because of a misguided belief that you yourself would live longer, then perhaps don’t? ] Methinks French — or her headline writer — were fooled by randomness.
Vepdegestrant for breast cancer seems to be another entry in the annals of approved drugs being considered failures by Mr. Market. Let it be noted that a chemist (Lowe) writing for a prestigious peer-reviewed journal (Science) dunks on a drug while citing millions and billions of dollars exchanged or promised to various stakeholders while barely mentioning, and wrongly at that, the actual trial results. “It did not really demonstrate any advantage versus the comparison in the trial, fulvestrant” is factually incorrect: median progression free survival was 5 versus 2.1 months, which, fine, is tiny and may have been the result of statistical shenanigans; but it may also be a true and meaningful incremental improvement and if we are going to dismiss it out of hand then what are we even doing here? The rot runs deep.
It is a genuine mystery of why a mostly agrarian functional democracy with no separatist movements, demographic catastrophes, curses of resource wealth and the other usual suspects of stalled growth should completely flatline their GDP. Mousa shows compelling data and many hypotheses, though I wonder whether there is something that isn’t and can’t be measured which is keeping the country where it is. And if you are thinking that oh, GDP can’t measure happiness, I bet that at least they are happy, think again: it was the 4th least happy country last year. But then the “Happiness Report” methodology takes GDP into account (!?) so it is almost impossible for a GDP-poor country to break through in the rankings.
This is about slides shared via email, never meant to be presented, but rather serving as a landscape-oriented picture book for adults. I don’t know what is behind communication-by-slide, and as a seminar-attending Tufte acolyte I abhor it. Management consultants spreading them around like a viral respiratory disease — which is the thesis of the blog post — certainly has something to do with it, but the syndrome is now bottom-up as well. My third-grader asked me just this morning why they were forced to watch and make (!?) slides at school.
The good: How an ‘Impossible’ Idea Led to a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough by Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins for The New York Times. The breakthrough discussed is the real deal, and they manage to do it in a measured tone which correctly identifies daraxonrasib as a stepping stone and not a miracle cure. It has this important note up top and not buried down at the end:
The pills, three taken daily, are not a cure — eventually, daraxonrasib stops working. Many patients do not respond. And it has side effects that can be harsh, including rash, diarrhea, fatigue, nausea and raw, split fingertips.
How refreshing — I hope Derek Thompson takes note.
The bad: The Human Body’s Hidden Pathways by Dr. Avraham Z. Cooper, who is a pulmonary/critical care physician at the Ohio State University, for The New York Times Magazine. For the life of me I can not figure out the point of this post-modern journalistic exercise.
Nominally it is about a peer-reviewed research article which came out in 2021 under the title “Evidence for continuity of interstitial spaces across tissue and organ boundaries in humans”. The NYT Magazine staff did not deem it worthy of being linked to, but here it is in its entirety. In it, the authors showed small fragments of tattoo pigment migrating into tissues — skin and colon — deeper than they expected. We are not talking about ink being injected into a bicep and showing up in someone’s rectum here, but rather a series of biopsies of tattooed skin or the lining of the colon where there is a lot of pigment up top, and much less and in smaller pieces down at the bottom of the slide, deeper in the tissue.
Let me pull out my rarely used master’s degree in histology and note that this is hardly surprising. Connections between cells are not exactly air-tight — other than maybe in the brain and the testes — so of course there is some gel-like fluid circulating in the space. Or did the original article’s authors not realize why people tend to rub their feet when they get swollen?
But that is only the introduction. The meat of the article is Dr. Cooper’s theoretizing that this has something to do with — drumroll, please — acupuncture. With no evidence, mind you, but a tingling sensation in the back of his neck or somesuch. By the time the 30th single-sentence screen scrolls by we are firmly in bullshit territory, in the formal sense of the word. Caveat lector.
The ugly: Longevity Medicine - An evidence based guide by Dr. Vinay Prasad who is out of the FDA and back making YouTube videos. And oh my, the contrast between the most recent thumbnail and the one posted just before he joined the FDA is striking. Has it only been a year? No wonder that his first topic back as an influencer is about longevity.
A sidenote here which I will put at the end: the increased interest of Silicon Valley types with longevity, and I am not thinking only about Bryan Johnson’s delusions here, reminds me of the recently quoted speech Charlie Chaplin gave at the end of The Great Dictator, the relevant quote being that “so long as men die, liberty will never perish.” Good for us that snake oil salesmen are still the longevity field’s most prevalent phenotype.
Seen this morning on a walk down Rock Creek and the Potomac. DC is closer to nature than most people imagine.
Dave Winer posted an important piece of text yesterday under the title Transcript of AOC’s answer. This is the American politician and congresswoman from New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to an interviewer’s question of whether she would run for president in 2028. [Note: Not yet being a US citizen I will refrain from commenting on her politics. Though, provided the federal government is still functioning, 2028 may be the year I actually get to vote! ] It is short and to the point and you should read or listen to the whole thing, but here is the meat of it:
So the elite think: if you want this job, you just stepped out of line. And we want you to know where the real power is. And it’s in the modern-day barons who own the Post and own the algorithms. And we’re gonna — we’ll make an example out of you.
And what’s funny about that is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. But my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.
“Positional ambition” is the perfect way to describe much of the American — and indeed the world’s — malaise. Many heads of various institutions, from state to corporate, are there because they imagined themselves at some point sitting in the chair, or being in the room, or having some letters next to their name, without much thought of what they would do once they reached the position except whatever it took to keep it. In fact, I can think of only a single US president in living memory whose ambition wasn’t primarily positional — and he was kicked out after 4 years in a landslide. But of course that is by design: the system is made to produce the exact results that it does (see also: the American business).
So that is an important lesson for any young person, to think in terms of actions not positions. It is a spectrum, sure, and you cannot completely separate what you want to do from what it would take to do it and how to get there, but you shouldn’t dream about having a rock star lifestyle unless you also want to make music. And if we dialed down our collective positional ambition I suspect there wouldn’t be as many aspiring influencers around, most “influencers” being all about the position and without even a pretense of substance.
Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate! This is what we’re watching tonight.
Another Mother’s Day treat: a 40-minute video essay about “The Giving Tree”. Before watching, “The Giving Tree” was one of my least favorite children’s books — hate may not be too strong of a word to describe how I felt about it — but it is in fact nuanced, intentionally sad, and perfect starting material for some serious conversations.
The author, Shel Silverstein, seems to have been quite the character and I would now very much like to get his book of children’s poetry which has some fascinating illustrations. He also wrote the words for “A Boy Named Sue” and was an accomplished musician himself, though from the brief soundbite I heard his voice is an acquired taste.
JTR gave me a kick in the rear I needed to update my Blogroll page. There has been way too much cruft accumulated, with some recommendations not having posted in years. It is still a work in progress — only the first two lists are done — but better than nothing! For a (nearly) up-to-date list of every feed I follow, check out Feedland.