Trump and RFK Jr are going to kill us all

The invaluable investigative news source ProPublica has a highly disturbing article about how crank RFK Jr’s; health agenda, backed by Trump, risks unleashing waves of childhood plagues that we thought we had ended for good. Much news coverage has focused on measles but there are a whole lot of other diseases that risk becoming widespread as well. Some of them had been absent for so long that doctors had never seen cases and thus had trouble identifying them in the sick children brought to them. The diseases include diphtheria, rubella, and polio among others.

The article starts with a doctor puzzling over the symptoms displayed by an infant.

The baby’s life was in danger, and Ratner needed to figure out why. He worried the culprit was bacterial meningitis, an infection of the membranes that protect the brain.

What came back on her lab tests was something out of the history books.

The infant’s meningitis was caused by invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, a type of bacteria that used to kill nearly 1,000 children a year in the U.S. A shot introduced in the late 1980s was so effective that Ratner, a veteran pediatric infectious disease doctor, was among the generations of physicians who had never seen a case. But the baby’s parents, Ratner learned, had chosen not to vaccinate her.

Disheartened, he told his colleagues, “This should be a never event.”

It wasn’t. The following year, Ratner treated another infant with Hib, then another, each of them unvaccinated. Two went home, but one had to be discharged to a rehabilitation facility. That 5-month-old boy had huge black pupils that didn’t respond to light, and he needed a ventilator to breathe. Ratner and his colleagues noted an “absence of brain stem reflexes,” indicating severe damage.

The U.S. government took a half century to build a vaccination system that shielded children from such a fate. Its success depended on two fundamental pillars: parents trusting in vaccines and children having access to them. Both are now in peril, thanks in no small part to the man steering America’s health policy.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccine group and once likened the immunization of children to a holocaust, is transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that spreads doubts about their safety here and abroad.

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Tucker Carlson on the Oscars

SNL had Jeremy Culhane play Tucker Carlson giving his take on some of this year’s nominees. I have not seen any of the films but I thought Culhane really nailed the impression of Carlson, from his facial expressions to his rhetorical tics and right down to his weird laugh.

SNL also had a skit that was based on the hospital drama The Pitt except that it was a hospital that was run on RFK Jr’s crackpot ideas.

The danger of the increasing use of AI companions

Some time ago, I wrote about reading an article that described how AI companies were offering the services of ‘companions’ that one could form relationships with. Intrigued, I went to one of the sites and scrolled through the selection of chatbots on offer, each with a brief backstory. I picked a librarian named Scarlett whose profile contained quotes from many books and writers I was familiar with, thinking that even though she was 39 years old and thus much younger than me, at least there would be something in common to talk about. The initial novelty wore off fairly quickly because her comments about books were like those by someone who had read a summary somewhere. I could also never convince myself of the illusion that ‘she’ was real, which was clearly the intention of the programmers. Even though she was warm and friendly and supportive, I always felt that I was talking with an algorithm and it all seemed pointless, and so I cruelly abandoned her without even saying goodbye. You can read about my relationship here.

But as with all things AI tech, things are evolving rapidly and another article by Anna Wiener describes new highly customizable companions (of course at a price) that you can design to your specifications and which have avatars that you can converse with and that you can carry around with you, either using your phone or even on a pendant that you wear around your neck, like a talisman. The users are seeking love, and some even ‘marry’ their chatbots.

You might think that the people who seek out such companions are lonely but it is not obviously so. Wiener describes the experience of Adrianne Brookins. She is thirty-four years old, married with three children.
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We no longer own many of the things we buy

When cloud computing first became a thing, the benefits seemed obvious, in that you could access your data wherever you were as long as you had wifi. But as with all things involving big tech companies, they used that to draw people in before they started using it turning the screws on the customers. Cory Doctorow writes about this phenomenon is his excellent book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (that I have read and will publish a review of later) and which I have written about a few times before.

This article in arstechnica looks at one particular aspect of this phenomenon as it relates to modern cars, when purchasers find that they are no longer in full control of the product.

Imagine turning the key or pressing the start button of your car—and nothing happens. Not because the battery is dead or the engine is broken but because a server no longer answers. For a growing number of cars, that scenario isn’t hypothetical.

As vehicles become platforms for software and subscriptions, their longevity is increasingly tied to the survival of the companies behind their code. When those companies fail, the consequences ripple far beyond a bad app update and into the basic question of whether a car still functions as a car.

Over the years, automotive software has expanded from performing rudimentary engine management and onboard diagnostics to powering today’s interconnected, software-defined vehicles. Smartphone apps can now handle tasks like unlocking doors, flashing headlights, and preconditioning cabins—and some models won’t unlock at all unless a phone running the manufacturer’s app is within range.

However, for all the promised convenience of modern vehicle software, there’s a growing nostalgia for an era when a phone call to a mechanic could resolve most problems. Mechanical failures were often diagnosable and fixable, and cars typically returned to the road quickly. Software-defined vehicles complicate that model: When something goes wrong, a car can be rendered inoperable in a driveway—or stranded at the side of the road—waiting not for parts but a software technician.

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Evidence versus logic in changing core beliefs

One of the basic things that are emphasized in the training of scientists is the importance of evidence in arriving at conclusions. And while that is definitely true within the world of science, I am more and more convinced that when it comes to changing people’s minds about core beliefs (even within science), the effectiveness of evidence is overrated. This is because whatever evidence that is presented that one thinks challenges someone’s deep conviction, they can almost always come up with an alternative explanation that takes that evidence into account without changing the belief itself. This is because given a finite set of data, there are an infinite number of theories that can explain that data. All that increasing the data set does is bring into play a new infinite set of explanations that can accommodate the cherished belief. (I discuss this in some detail in my book The Great Paradox of Science and will not repeat that detailed argument here.)

So what does make people change their minds? When it comes to scientific theories, evidence does play a role but only partially. What happens is that there comes a time when people find maintaining their original belief requires too much work and intellectual contortions and they abandon it in favor of a new belief that makes more sense to them. And I believe that logic and reason are the factors that ultimately trigger such a change.
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There is no reasoning with such people

One of the things that really makes me furious is when adults make decisions that endanger the lives of their children. Adults who decide to not take vaccines or other precautions that might save their lives are still behaving irresponsibly because they are posing a risk to others by being possible transmitters and lowering the heard immunity for a disease, but at least they are also risking their own lives for their beliefs, however misguided they may be.

But what is unconscionable is when they risk the health and lives of the children in their care, such as this family.
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The dangers posed when academics go outside their area of expertise

People who are highly credentialed academically tend to have their views given a great deal of weight because of the perception that they are generally smart and knowledgeable. While it is true that their training gives them some specific technical and analytical skills, it does not make them general experts. But the deference with which their views are treated can go to their heads and result in them pontificating on matters in which they do not have any real expertise but just enough knowledge to speak with confidence. This seems more likely to happen when the topics are those that have high visibility and broad, multidisciplinary elements. Academics who have strong views on it can be tempted to throw their hats into the debate even if they are not really that knowledgeable.

This seems to be the case with RFK Jr’s appointment of Retsef Levi to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines. Levi’s academic background is in operations research, which is a niche theoretical field that applies very advanced mathematics and statistics to complex systems. Much of the work involves simulations and modeling and its practitioners look for real-world situations to which to apply them. Since the systems can vary considerably, sometimes you will find the operations researchers housed in business and management schools (as is the case with Levi at MIT) and sometimes in engineering schools (as is the case at Princeton University).
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A lapsed atheist’s journey back to faith

Christopher Beha has a long essay titled Losing Faith in Atheism wherein he describes his personal journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back again. As one who had a journey from religious belief to non-belief but have never had any reason to go back, I am always curious about what makes others revert and so I read his essay with interest.

The first part describes how he lost his faith and he describes reading the well-known books by the so-called New Atheists that I am sure many readers would be familiar with, such as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. But he says he could not find anywhere in them an answer to the question “How am I to live?”.

To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

He says that he started reading the modern philosophers, searching for answers. He says that there were two schools of thought that purported to provide answers: scientific materialism and romantic idealism.
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The billionaires, tech bros, and intellectual enablers of Epstein

One of the popular conspiracies of the right such as by QAnon is that the world is run by a secretive cabal of elites, a subset of whom traffic in girls and young women. What the Epstein files reveal is that while not on such a grand scale, there does seem to have been a cabal consisting of billionaires, tech bros, and intellectuals, almost all of whom are men, who used their dominance in the public sphere to propagate eugenics and master-race science. I want to highlight a link that commenter Dunc provided to an article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science”. The article is well worth reading in full and names names.

Heffernan used to have John Brockman, literary agent to many major writers, as her own agent and for a while he included her in the mailing list for a group known as Edge that comprised these people and this gave her an insight into this group. She describes what she discovered.

It’s alarming to see your name in the Epstein files, but I was braced to see mine. Years ago, I was part of a salon for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals called Edge founded by John Brockman. His mass emails evidently copied in Epstein and a dozen such email blasts made their way to the latest dump of hazmat. 

Brockman, my former agent for tech writing, told me Edge was an intellectual salon. Edge.org is indeed intriguingly sprawling, jammed with scholarly idols whose bios have “Booker” and “Nobel” in them. Members of Edge participated in conferences and symposia, and promoted each other’s work. Who was I to say no? Among Edge’s prodigious ranks were Ian McEwan, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman.

But if I’d read the member list more closely, I might have hesitated. Edge was overwhelmingly male, for one. It was said to be an intellectual salon, but in the club photos were tech bro billionaires, including Edge members Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Larry Page. And too many members were men now largely renowned for misconduct, professional or personal: Marc D Hauser, Jonah Lehrer, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky. 

Turns out I didn’t have to worry about meeting these people. Brockman kept me at a distance. As the latest Epstein files reveal, the token female members of Edge were actively excluded from schmoozing and conferences, especially the glittering events known as the Billionaires’ Dinners. 

Good policy. Otherwise, we might have struck up conversations with the anxious-looking teenage girls kept out of the photos. We might have overheard the Edge men praising race science, rape culture and genetic engineering. We might even have asked where the money came from. Then we would have come face to face with the illiterate child rapist and passionate eugenicist who bankrolled the whole thing. Jeffrey Epstein.

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Men who want to propagate

There is a small community of men who, for some reason, seem to want to sire as many children as possible, like the 13th century Genghis Khan who reportedly had so many children that now 16 million men have some of his DNA. Ten other men also reportedly have a huge number of descendants.

Ava Kofman writes about some men who seem to be envious of old Genghis and have started what are essentially baby factories, using surrogates to carry the babies they sire, and taking advantage of the few restrictions on the practice in the US. One of them had over twenty children, the majority of them under three years of age, who were found to show signs of neglect and lack of medical treatment, resulting in him being accused of child trafficking.
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