NOW REPORTING FROM BALTIMORE. An eclectic, iconoclastic, independent, private, non-commercial blog begun in 2010 in support of the federal Meaningful Use REC initiative, and Health IT and Heathcare improvement more broadly. Moving now toward important broader STEM and societal/ethics topics. Formerly known as "The REC Blog."
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Been thinking a lot today in the wake of finishing Theo Baker's exhilarating book. Ran into this Michael Pollan series on NetFlix tonight. apropos, see "Untying the knot of self."
As I've alluded to before, I arrived in the SF Bay Area at the age of 21, settling in in North Beach (Broadway & Columbus). Took my first acid trip in early 1968 in Chinatown at night ("Window Pane"). It was like being in the "Roger Rabbit" movie.
While the music played, you worked by candlelight Those San Francisco nights You were the best in town Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl You turned it on the world That's when you turned the world around Did you realize That you were a champion in their eyes?
On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene But yours was kitchen-clean Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home Every A-Frame had your number on the wall You must have had it all You'd go to L.A. on a dare and you'd go it alone Could you see the day? Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away?
Get along, get along, Kid Charlemagne Get along, Kid Charlemagne
Now your patrons have all left you in the red Your low-rent friends are dead This life can be very strange All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint the face They've joined the human race Some things will never change You are obsolete Look at all the white men on the street
Get along, get along, Kid Charlemagne Get along, Kid Charlemagne
Clean this mess up else we'll all end up in jail Those test tubes and the scale Just get it all out of here Is there gas in the car? Yes, there's gas in the car I think the people down the hall know who you are 'Cause the man is wise You are still an outlaw in their eyes
Get along (get along), get along, Kid Charlemagne (get along) Get along, Kid Charlemagne...
Susan B. Glasser (New Yorker) and her husband Peter Baker (NY Times) have long been two of my favorite people. I knew nothing of their personal lives. After seeing Amna's PBS interview, I hit 1-click. I've subsequently spent all day reading their son's book. Deep into it.
Finished the book overnight. Yeah, just wow. Current issue of Science Magazine has reviewed it already.
Shortly after joining the staff of Stanford University’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, in 2022, freshman Theo Baker received a tip that there were potential problems with research published by the university’s president, neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker followed up, and his subsequent reporting prompted a formal inquiry that eventually led to Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation in 2023 and to the retraction of several high-profile research papers, including two published in Science. In his new book—How to Rule the World—Baker shares the experience of working on this story and reflects, more broadly, on Stanford itself, where powerful stakeholders—from tech industry leaders to academic entrepreneurs—train promising students to join the next generation of Silicon Valley elites…
What makes Stanford so different from other universities? I showed up here as a coder. I was one of a handful of freshmen to jump through the first intro sequence of coding classes, and as a consequence, I saw inside this secret world that exists for the most promising students who are identified as the next trillion dollar startup founders. As a freshman, I was just close enough to peer into this world and to know that there were these slush funds and yacht parties and all of these extraordinary perks lavished on a very select few.
Stanford has really become this bleeding edge for a trend that you see across higher education right now, which is this sort of corporatization and monetization of students. So adults [interested in capitalizing on students’ ideas] are hunting relentlessly for a meal ticket. And the school, in turn, benefits from it because the more you have kids dropping out to start billion dollar companies—whether or not they’re actually going to be successful in the long run—the more that they’ll kick back their proceeds to the university and reflect that this place is the cradle of innovation that it claims to be.
Early on, you learned about an unofficial class called “How to Rule the World.” What was it about and how did it fit in with other ideas and attitudes you were encountering on campus? There’s a secret class that takes place every week on the Stanford campus with 12 students who are selected through this cloak-and-dagger admissions process. It’s not an actual class. It is more like a secret club for the aspiring tech elite. This guy [the instructor] is playing the same game that everyone else around here is, which is, how do you get in with the next generation of future oligarchs early? And he has done this brilliant maneuver and effectively made them come to him.
The way that they’re learning to behave is exactly the reason why you see these cut corners pop up again and again in Silicon Valley. They are being taught that you have to get ahead at any cost. You have to move as quickly as you can. And it doesn’t matter if there are consequences, because if you win out in the long run, all bad behavior can be excused.
What was the initial allegation made about the president’s research that made you think, I have to pursue this story? There had been these comments that began springing up on PubPeer around 2015 on a handful of papers that Tessier-Lavigne had been involved in. These commenters were pointing out places where there appeared to be anomalies, or irregularities, in some of the figures, particularly some of the Western blots. And there had not been any response from Tessier-Lavigne or the journals. This had all been happening right around the time when Tessier- Lavigne was first being considered for the Stanford presidency. And so I really didn’t think that there was going to be all that much to it. It seemed impossible to imagine that he would’ve gone through the whole vetting process and this wouldn’t have come up.
But that’s where I started. I began looking into these allegations that had been made on PubPeer. I worked with forensic image analysts, including the incredible Elisabeth Bik, to begin [investigating] that initial suite of concerns and then work from there progressively...
Did you learn anything that surprised you about the scientific process? I learned a ton from this, some of which reflected very well on the scientific community. I think there are a lot of people who take issues of misconduct very seriously and see the integrity of data as paramount to the integrity of the scientific process. But I also learned things that reflect very poorly on the scientific community, which has been really reticent to confront some of these issues that have been allowed to fester for a number of years. And I think there’s some wider recognition of that problem now and of the complicity that journals and institutions have had historically in allowing flawed studies to remain in the scientific record and to allow credible allegations of misconduct to go without inquiry or a serious investigation. In a few weeks, you’ll be a Stanford graduate. What’s next? My focus right now is just trying to get this book out and hopefully starting some productive conversations. If you want to understand how Elizabeth Holmes happens, or how Sam Bankman-Fried happens, or how this whole “move fast and break things” philosophy works, you have to understand how the next generation of tech oligarchs are being trained.
This isn’t normal. None of this is normal. We’re investing huge amounts of power and authority in a system that does not have the guardrails to catch or ward off bad behavior. You see teenagers learning this philosophy from the beginning. And you also see how hard the fight for accountability is when reporting on this leader whose behavior was not fully confronted until it became public years later.
One riveting book.
California was once the site of the great gold rush that transformed America. “It was that population,” wrote Mark Twain, “that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day.”
He termed his own era of American excess the Gilded Age.
Yet the fortune generated by Silicon Valley in the past few decades has exceeded the value of all gold discovered during the first California boom two hundred times over, even adjusted for inflation, and concentrated the lucre in still fewer hands. Even the richest men of Twain’s time would find Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar pay package remarkable.
Once a bucolic region dominated by farmland and horse trails, this little stretch of Northern California now sets the agenda for the planet. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Every aspect of modern life is dependent on technology, and technology flows through here. The value of public companies based in the area is $14.3 trillion—greater than the GDPs of the United Kingdom, Germany, and India combined, with enough left over to cover the assets of every major bank in Africa. Private companies add at least another trillion.
Silicon Valley gave birth to the chips and computers and internet that we all rely on in the twenty-first century. Technology became king. As Bob Martin, an influential software pioneer, put it a decade ago, “We rule the world. The world doesn’t know this yet.” Martin explained that “other people believe that they rule the world,” yet “we write the rules that go into the machines that execute everything that happens on this planet nowadays. No law can be enacted without software. No law can be enforced without software. No government can act without software. We rule the world.”
Ten years later, the world may have taken notice. After all, the top tech CEOs in the world were the ones standing directly behind President Donald Trump at his inauguration while political leaders were shunted to the overflow room.
Today’s tech tycoons are not dissimilar to the robber barons of Twain’s time. Wealth inequality is by some metrics greater in Silicon Valley than in any other region in the world; just eight households in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties hold more wealth than the entire bottom 50 percent of the population of these counties combined, more than half a million people. Together, the top 1 percent in Silicon Valley control forty-eight times more wealth than the bottom 50 percent.
Palantir, the data defense tech company cofounded by Stanford stars like Peter Thiel, is a Silicon Valley darling hoovering up many bright young engineers. Currently, its CEO, Alex Karp, makes more in a year than the entire company earns in gross revenue. This is possible because the company trades at well over five hundred times its earnings, thanks to Silicon Valley’s unshakable belief in exponential future growth.
When the talented artificial intelligence researcher Ilya Sutskever started Safe Superintelligence, he launched with nine employees, a two-hundred-word placeholder statement, and zero articulation of a product, much less any revenue. The company was valued at $32 billion. Higher than the National Bank of Canada, the cosmetics giant Estée Lauder, and even the third-largest auto manufacturer in the world, Hyundai, which produces more than four million cars a year. SSI, meanwhile, has produced nothing.
Thinking Machines, another AI company, raised $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation in 2025, although the pitch to investors “offered no information about a product or financial plans,” according to the Financial Times. Five months later, the startup was seeking more funding at a valuation of $50 billion or even $60 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Silicon Valley runs on the assumption of potential. It runs on the notion that heights are limitless and hurdles along the way will inevitably be smoothed by the exercise of brute will. It runs on the idea that the people in these startups will eventually produce untold riches.
So if this is a modern-day gold rush, the resource to mine is talent. And nowhere can you find more of it than Stanford University.
Baker, Theo. How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University (pp. 3-5). (Function). Kindle Edition.
As I was finishing the book...
Theo is a hot media property this week. Deservedly so.
I have long had great love for the SF Bay Area (and California broadly). I first arrived in SF at the age of 21 in 1967. Lived in North Beach for a couple of years prior to moving to Seattle in the wake of the birth of my daughter Sissy. Subsequently lived in Birmingham AL, Tuscaloosa, Knoxville TN, Las Vegas, and then back to the SF Bay Area (Walnut Creek, Antioch). Moved to Baltimore in 2019.
During my last day gig (NV/UT Medicare QIO), I did a side hustle covering the digital health IT startup space as a "photojournalist." (I applied for a press pass to the HIMSS Conference on a lark, and, to my surprise, they approved it. I ran with it from there.) Spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley covering a wide variety of Health Tech conferences. So, I totally resonate with Theo's book.
Dana Bush: Given this thought experiment that you put in this book, what do you think the meaning of life is?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think people search for meaning of life as though it's under a rock or behind a tree. But we have the power to create meaning in life. And for me, I want to learn something today that I didn't know yesterday and spend each day lessening, lessening the suffering of others. There's something that we all have the power to do, and maybe aliens want to do that too. We always make them evil. And I think it's because we're projecting our own evil ways onto them, knowing that's how we behave when we encounter cultures of lower civilization, lesser technology than ourselves. So yeah, I, I, meaning we can find it. And if we find aliens and they help us get more meaning out of the universe, more power to us.
Indeed.
"...PREVENT US FROM IMAGINING A UNIVERSE NOT TEEMING WITH LIFE?"
Let's rewind 50 years. Doris & David Jonas:
Chapter 1, Where Speculation Begins, pp 7-9
One
of these days, our descendants, near or distant, are going to find life
in some form on other planets, either in the solar system, in other
parts of our galaxy, or in other galaxies.
The very fact that
life has arisen on our earth is evidence enough that it must exist in
other parts of the universe, for the elements of which the entire
universe is composed are remarkably uniform. If some of these elements
have combined in ways that produce life here in our solar system, they
must, by the laws of chance and probability, have combined in an
analogous ways elsewhere. Even in our galaxy, there must be some
thousands of other planets, sustaining life, in some form, and all the
forces of reason would suggest that it cannot be otherwise in other
galaxies.
What miracles of chance and combinations of chances made it possible for life to evolve here on earth?
For
life to arise on any planet, certain factors have to be present in
certain combinations. The solar system of which the planet is part must
have formed in a way that some or one of its evolving planets takes
shape at a suitable distance from the blazing inferno of its central sun
– neither so near that its surface temperatures inhibit life by intense
heat, nor so far that life cannot arise because of insufficient solar
radiation. The masses into which the swirling gases originally solidify
must be within the range that permits a force of gravity, sufficient to
hold and retain an atmosphere, since without a protective atmosphere,
solar radiation would be too intense for life forms to be sustained,
even if all the other elements of life were present.
The chance
that these two factors alone – distance from the center, and the degree
of mass that governs gravity occur together in just the right
circumstance, puts a preliminary limitation on the possibility for life.
Even after this has occurred, there must be a further series of chances
following and working upon chances – and again interlocking with other
chance happenings – so that atmosphere, water, rocks, and some soil come
into being in states that conform a basis for the evolution of life. Of
course there is a possibility, remote as it seems, that some form of
life might arise on a lightless planet. should that planet be capable of
generating heat of its own within a life sustaining range.
The
information we have been able to gather from our own solar system
suggests that ours is the only planet around our sun that sustained
life. It could be that other suns, even thousands or tens of thousands
of other suns, sustain no life at all on the planets that circle them.
Given the myriad suns in our galaxy and the multiple myriads in the
universe, it is impossible to believe that chances similar to those that
occurred on earth have not also occurred on many other planets.
Once
these miraculous chances have come about, however, the prerequisites
for life are rather minimal: An element capable of forming
self-replicating chains, like carbon, and another capable of combustion,
like oxygen these, together with hydrogen and nitrogen, form and matrix
that may merge with other elements to create all the varied, complex,
and wonderful forms of life on earth – from amoeba and bacteria to
plants and spiders and fishes and man.
What shapes may life have
taken in other worlds? Have they developed into intelligent creatures,
and, if they have, what sort of intelligences have evolved? Have other
kinds of life developed high orders of intelligence capable of
developing technologies, and, if so, what sort of technology has arisen
from their special kinds of being? Shall we ever be able to communicate
with these beings, if they exist, in any meaningful way?
One
thing is certain: we have no reason to assume that evolutionary forces
on other planets will produce forms or intelligence that are the same as
ours, even though the basic raw materials must be similar. Whatever
chance factors combined to produce any form of life, infinitely more,
must combine to produce an advanced form.
Genetic inheritance is
only a beginning. Two offspring of the same parents by chance born in
different environments will produce eventual descendants so markedly
different that after many generations, it will hardly be possible to
realize that the ancestors of each line had parents in common.
The
variables of habitat, the chance of availability of mates, natural
selection, and sexual selection among the offspring will all have
combined and recombined to produce members of the same species as buried
as a pygmy, a Watusi, a Swede, a Chinese, or a magnesian, and
eventually to divide into species, such as man, apes, and monkeys have
separately descended from the same stem.
Our own earth provides
an illustration of the almost incredible number of living forms that can
possibly be derived from a single celled organisms that were once the
triumph of evolution on our planet. All the species now extinct, and all
those still flourishing form only apart of the total possibilities, for
who knows how many new species will yet take shape?
Ch 11, Beyond Human Intelligence, pp 212-217 Intelligence
begins with the sensitivity of a single cell, and by a process of
biological accumulation and selection, transmitted genetically, reaches a
current culmination in the complexity of the human brain. In the same
way, the first chipped flint, by a process of cultural accumulation of
knowledge passed on verbally and subjected to the selection of
experience, reaches a current combination in spacecraft, cyclotron, and
satellite relayed television. At the same time, the natural and
necessary playfulness of the young mammalian as it explores its
environment and learns how to live in it, overtime, and also by a
cultural process of imitation, memory, and the transmission of knowledge
and skills from generation to generation, reaches another apotheosis in
the high cultures and great arts.
For the comparatively weak
creature who must cope with an environment and rise to any situation or
perish, the resources of mental equipment are applied first to the most
urgent exigencies. The earliest application of intelligence is devoted
to devising tools as weapons; those that follow aid the amenities of
life; finally, religion, philosophy, and the arts make their appearance.
The
kind of tools that are made will depend on the material that happens to
be available, be they leaves, branches, stones, clay, or the presents
or absence of minerals. Thus an interaction exists between the
environment and creatures that affects the development of tools and
cultures, as well as of census and intelligence.
In ancient
Egypt, for example, the presence of the papyrus plant led to the
fabrication of ropes, mats, sandals, and eventually paper; the presence
of flax made possible the eventual perfecting of supremely fine linens.
In central America, the presence of lava led to cutting edge tools of
obsidian. Once a cultural habit becomes established, however, it remains
impossible to predict either the route it will follow or its ultimate
outcome. Who could have told that the sweet-potato washing habit
established among the members of the famous Japanese Macau colony, and
the subsequent shifting of sand from the grain in the sea, would so
accustomed these forest animals playing in the water that they would
eventually begin to swim? And in the face of this unlikely outcome of a
recently established behavior pattern, who would dare to predict to what
the newfound ability to swim might lead?
Yet strangely enough—or
perhaps, not so surprisingly, in view of the basic uniformity of
mankind’s cerebral mechanisms—no matter where, geographically, nor when,
over the entire span of human history, local cultures have developed
into advanced civilization, we find that man’s greatest thoughts, as
epitomized in the writings of philosophers, show remarkable similarity.
Some views on the nature and value of knowledge, intellect, and
intelligence propounded by the wise men of China, so distant from us in
place in time, are stunning in their modernities and still current
validity.
In the misty beginnings of China’s long, cultural
history, Lao the, expanding his concept of Tao, the way (of nature and
wise living), is reported to have insisted that knowledge is not virtue,
and neither is it wisdom, for nothing is so far from it a sage as in
“intellectual.“ The worst government would be one of philosophers, he
has said to have averred, they botch every natural process with theory;
their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign
of their in capacity for action!
At a later period the
philosopher, Chuang the, who lived about 370 BC, showed the
sophistication of thinking that we find difficult to credit to those in
early times. He wrote that problems are due less to the nature of things
than to the limits of our thought; that is not to be wondered at that
the effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which
they are such minute particles should end in contradiction.
He
spoke of the limits of intellect; the attempt to explain the whole in
terms of the part has become gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the
grounds of the amusement it has caused, for humor, like philosophy, is a
view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without
the other. The intellect, said Chuang tze, can never avail to
understand, ultimate things, for any profound thing, such as the growth
of a child. In order to understand the Tao, one must “sternly suppress
one’s knowledge“: we have to suppress our theories and feel fact.
Education is of no help towards such an understanding: submission in the
flow of nature is all important.
And Wang Yang Ming, who lived
from 1472 to 1528, practically summarized our present thesis when he
wrote: “the mind itself is the embodiment of natural law. Is there
anything in the universe that exists independent of mind? Is there any
law apart from the mind?“
Experts feel certain that the human
brain has not undergone any significant biological change since the time
of the Neanderthals, as evidenced in the excavations at the Shandiar
caves high in the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, built fires,
cared for their sick, conducted funeral rights, and put flowers with the
bodies of their dead. In the last 20 to 30,000 years, we know from
archaeological findings of both historic and prehistoric periods, a high
degree of intellectual accomplishment that has been formally present in
all the branches of our species throughout his existence. The brief
excerpts we have given of an ancient Chinese thought about thought would
certainly seem to bear out this opinion.
There is, however, an
outcome of the cumulative nature of culture that we must not overlook.
Increasingly, as intelligence adapt a living creature to its environment
by the use of artifacts, and through the cultural transmission of
knowledge, the creature and the environment, modify each other at an
exponential rate. Perfect adaptation, of the order of the ants for the
termites, which has existed in a balance between being and have
unchanged over hundreds of millions of years, is not possible for
mankind. The rapidity of change in our cultural habitat, presents a
perpetual and continuing stimulus to bodily and, above all, to mental
adaptation, which of necessity increases the demands on the new brain to
device accommodation, and then the process speeds both the rate of
change and the need for new changes.
And so, although we
recognize that we have been mistaken in thinking that the technological
advances of western men might indicate new departures from the human
brains’ capacities, yet we have also to recognize that the technology is
rapidly creating a totally new environment for our species this new
Environment may well ultimately affect our species future development;
precisely this technology may prove to be the turning point through
which, in negotiating it, we may find ourselves in a process of
extinction as Homo sapiens and in a stage of transition toward homo
neocorticus
There are, of course, far too many imponderables
Involved to feel confident in predicting the future course of our
species. Among these are the course of technology itself, and how far
from natural processes it can carry us before it becomes subject to its
own limitations. There is the matter of human population density, and
whether it will be adjusted by natural means or can be adapted to the
biosphere that is our habitat by cultural or social means. There is the
question of the medical preservation of the “unfit“ and whether we can
remain viable at all as a species with the increasing maladaptive
dilution of our gene pools. And there is the possibility that ecological
interference may ultimately make mankind’s existence untenable.
Our
evolutionary development may be reaching the end of a line for
biological, if not for cultural reasons, but we ourselves are inclined
to discount this. We believe subtle biological factors to be operating
that are not yet clearly discernible, but which may be recognizable in
retrospect. Another factor as simple and probable as the advent of
another Ice Age, for instance, would effectively alter and recalibrate
the balance between men and nature, and must also be kept in mind as a
possibility.
We believe that the possibility, and even the
likelihood remain for a true evolutionary progression in the anatomical
and physiological configuration of the brain, much like the progression
that occurred between apes and man. In that case, the departure would be
just as radical, and it would have as a consequence new behavioral
response patterns that at this point we cannot visualize and about which
we can only speculate.
To assume that this new superintelligence
would occupy itself with creating a new, weird, and wonderful
technology is a naïve exercise in human fantasy. Ultimately technology
exists to serve the greater comfort of individuals, and a
superintelligence may well find other means of achieving this end. Thus,
were such a superintelligence to be found in some other planetary
systems, we might be confronted with something totally alien to our
understanding, and even to our imagination…
'eh?
This book has been out of print for 37 years. It has aged extremely well.
UPDATES
Back to Dr. Tyson.
Interesting. I would take this Masterclass. I bet it'd be great fun, and no doubt humbling. More Neil:
“One of the great challenges in this world is to know enough about a subject to think you’re right, but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.”
In the early 1980s my wife worked in private aviation. Her company operated a flight school. A favorite joke: "The most dangerous person in the cockpit is the 100 hour pilot."
I subsequently spent many years as a health care analyst. A favorite physician joke: "The three most dangerous words in medicine are 'in MY experience'."
I was fortunate to get to do collegiate evening school adjunct faculty teaching back a quarter century ago. "Critical Thinking." One of my syllabus opening riffs:
An attorney of my acquaintance once remarked that "we spend $100,000 to go to law school for three years to try to learn the meaning of the word 'reasonable'."
Indeed, what does it mean to reason well, i.e., what must we do to arrive at sound conclusions enabling us to make correct (or "best") decisions? In this course, we will learn the basic principles and acquire the intellectual tools that will leave us much better equipped to deal effectively with the endless onslaught of information we will have to evaluate throughout our lives. We will examine the sometimes sly techniques that partisans of every stripe employ to persuade us to their viewpoints. We will learn how to strip away the rhetorical clutter that often obscures the underlying intent and logic of arguments. We will examine the ways in which numerical data—"statistics"—are frequently misused or misinterpreted by those advocating one position or another on social, political, economic, or legal issues.
In short we will learn how to think, write, and speak more clearly in defense of our positions and decisions regarding important issues, and we will learn how to fully and honestly evaluate the claims of others. Our goals are to become honest and thoughtful communicators and skillful decisionmakers. They are most important goals.
Why? There are several basic reasons. First, while perhaps as much as 80% of the technical knowledge you acquire during your college years may become obsolete with a decade, solid reasoning and communications skills will serve you well for a lifetime. Second, the world is a dangerous place. There is an endless supply of risks to be evaluated and dealt with, and society unfortunately remains full of people working tirelessly and deceptively to deprive you of both your resources and your liberty by getting you to buy into weak or false arguments shrewdly packaged with persuasive nonsense and/or irrelevance. Finally—and most immediately—, effective and efficient reasoning skills cannot but help you get better grades. A to-the-point, well-constructed, and well-stated argument is a breath of fresh air to your instructors.
My goal is to permanently sharpen the way you think and reason and make decisions.
Once you commit to a decision on a given issue (e.g., that x is good/bad, right/wrong, safe/harmful, etc), the psychological investment is difficult to discard. The tools you will acquire through active study and participation in a course such as this will pay life-long dividends by arming you with the means to get at the core truths and constructive resolutions of important issues you will face throughout your days.
MORE NEIL:
“It’s not good enough to be right. You also have to be effective.”
Yeah. As Ibram X. Kendi has observed, "you can't legitimately call yourself an 'activist' unless you are effective."
If, when it's all said and done, your logic is impeccable, and your facts and evidence are bulletproof, yet you remain unpersuasive, what have you really accomplished?''
Another classroom staple of mine. That one was "exceeding my brief" as it were, but my Sups never noticed or cared. Anyway, my overall teach-to-the-text priority focus as a piddly Adjunct necessarily had to be"OK, here's how this stuff works. Take it or leave it."
Today we have myriad these (mostly onlne social media) "influencers." I would paraphrase Neil: "It doesn't suffice to be efffective. You also hsve to be right."
The Justice Department said it is creating a nearly $1.8 billion fund that could compensate Trump supporters who say they were wrongly investigated or prosecuted by previous administrations. The announcement came as part of a settlement with President Trump to drop a $10 billion lawsuit he filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns in 2019. Justice correspondent Ali Rogin reports.
I'm gonna have to file a claim.
MAY 19th UPDATE
Acting AG Todd Blanche today issued a 1-pg addendum to the Trump IRS lawsuit "Settlement." It henceforth indemnifies Donald Trump, his family, his businesses, and Trusts ("Plaintiffs") from any future investigations or IRS audits. Section C below.
Well, that's pretty unequivocal. That graphic is from a BigThink Youtube video. The speaker is neuroscientist Dr. Heather Berlin.
First time I saw that graphic, I had a fleeting reflexive reaction of "oh, yeah, the 'Subjectivism Fallacy'," stemming from my 1999-2004 Adjunct days teaching collegiate "critical thinking" classes. i.e., "there ARE NO 'objective truths,' everything is subjectively perceived in response to sensory stimuli." "So, (BobbyG retorts) if this assertion is 'false' (illusory), it deductively follows that it must also be TRUE."
Pedant.
Yeah, Heather. It's just a 4-word (albeit clickbait-ish) headline.
The broader point is taken, Doc. Succintly put in 6:21.
OF PARTICULAR RELEVANCE THESE DAYS
"The provided sources examine the complex intersection of anthropomorphism, trust, and power within the field of artificial intelligence. One study investigates how linguistic cues, such as voice-based interfaces and the use of first-person pronouns, lead users to perceive large language models as more human-like and accurate. Complementary research explores the "Silicon Valley Effect", arguing that Big Tech companies strategically shape regulatory discourse to protect their commercial interests while potentially obscuring the human harms caused by their products. Further analysis focuses on the visual self-representations of ChatGPT, identifying recurring themes of futurism and social intelligence that promote the image of a "friendly assistant." Collectively, these texts highlight how human-like traits in AI can manipulate public perception, set unrealistic expectations of capability, and complicate the legal and ethical oversight of generative technologies." [Sounds a bit like it was written by AI, no?]
AI as applied to social media (and "influence" industries broadly) is all about shaping your perceptions in ways that benefit them. "AI for Good?"
I'll fill in a bunch of multi-vector applicability ASAP...
My intent today had been to begin on continuing another topic (AI, evolution, exobiology, sentience/cognition stuff), but then tonight I watched CNN Anderson Cooper 360. Most of the hour was devoted to an interview of former Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll—(a decorated 27 yr career FBI veteran). He was summarily fired by Trump's FBI Director Kashyap Pramod Patel (better known lately as K.Edgar.Boozer) in August 2025 in a blatantly illegal act of political vengeance at the behest of Donald Trump.
I got onto this via an Atlantic excerpt. Bought it and read it overnight. I totally get it, and I have learned a ton in 2 days. Thank you, Danielle and David.
Pending book release. Pre-pub excerpt from The Atlantic.
The Secret to Understanding AI “Imagine the tech without the tech companies.” By Josh Tyrangiel
In the before times—before machines could hallucinate, before compute was a noun—it was not uncommon to go several weeks without someone telling me the world was about to end. Similarly, a whole season might pass without anyone assuring me that it was also, simultaneously, about to become perfect.
That particular luxury died on November 30, 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. What followed was less a news cycle than a weather event—a tropical depression that would not budge. Within weeks, millions of people had their first experience with generative AI. Within months, every major technology company had announced its own version of a large language model, or a partnership, or a pivot. Venture capital arrived drooling. Most people in tech think about money, but AI-profit projections are different—like CFO fan fiction, written in Excel. In 2023, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that $4.4 trillion in annual corporate profits could be up for grabs from generative AI alone. Morgan Stanley estimated $40 trillion more in operational efficiencies. The words artificial intelligence went from obscurity to a constant hum, present in every earnings call, every school-board meeting, and far too many arguments at dinner tables.
Yet for all of the noise, a simple question stayed unanswered: What exactly was this new technology going to do for people? Not for corporations or the billionaires who aspired to become trillionaires, but for people with mortgages and sick parents and children struggling to learn things…
May 12th release date.
AMAZON BLURB In contrast to the wave of noisy polemics around AI, AI For Good explores how, in practice, it can actually improve our lives and tells the stories of everyday citizens at the forefront of this new “AI entrepreneurship.”
AI is often framed as a force of radical transformation, either catapulting us into a utopian future or dragging us toward existential ruin. But this book tells a different story. It’s not about high-profile tech CEOs who want to use AI to “break shit,” but about a bunch of smart pragmatists using AI to make the world better.
Josh Tyrangiel’s journey into AI began with a late-night YouTube video featuring General Gustave Perna, the retired four-star general who orchestrated the distribution of Covid vaccines during Operation Warp Speed. Perna’s success—and the end of the pandemic—depended on AI’s practical ability to synthesize and standardize vast amounts of logistical data. AI wasn’t the hero of the story—it was the tool that helped real people get things done.
This book follows those people, who make up a kind of AI counterculture. It explores AI’s quiet revolution in government services, medicine, education, and human connection—places where it’s being used to amplify human judgment rather than replace it. It tells the stories of teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats who often stumbled into AI as a means to solve specific, tangible problems, often with no prior software expertise.
While the loudest voices in AI debate doomsday scenarios and trillion-dollar market opportunities, this book focuses on those working in the messy, incremental, but deeply impactful space of AI practice. However, there is one big caveat—success is not guaranteed. Change is hard. Institutions move slowly. But even in failure there are lessons for everyone who’s interested in using AI—carefully, thoughtfully—to build a better world today.
I have too many books in play at the moment (about 8), but I'll be adding this to the list when it's released.
The greatest pitfall in the search for extraterrestrial life—according to science fiction, anyway—is foolhardy researchers somehow bringing aliens to Earth to wreak havoc.
But after decades of exploring our seemingly sterile solar system, real-world scientists today are much more concerned with the opposite problem: The possibility that Earth’s life will escape our planet to contaminate other worlds, sabotaging the quest to find any genuine “second genesis” of biology around the sun. Imagine that a multibillion-dollar robotic mission found wriggling microbes on Mars and that follow-up studies then revealing those “aliens” had DNA and other biomolecular machinery that showed they were emigrants from Earth.
Astrobiologically speaking, we would have met the enemy—and it would be us. Taking a cue from sci-fi, you might call such life-forms “Klingons,” for their presumptive hitchhike to the Red Planet as stowaways in spacecraft sent from Earth.
“Planetary protection” is the term scientists use for efforts to prevent otherworldly invasions of all sorts; to date, most of it has focused on Mars, but the practice applies to all potentially habitable environments within reach of our spacecraft. In the 1970s, for example, NASA did its best to keep its twin Viking landers Klingon-free before launching them to Mars. And if the NASA-led international Mars Sample Return effort ever manages to bring its precious payload back to Earth, the agency will be tasked with quarantining those specimens as if they contain extreme biohazards rather than lifeless bits of rock and soil…
The under-the-hood details slog will surely be "bring a Snickers, you gonna be a while."
The NYT tally comprises an A thru Z Trump-spleen-target breakout setting forth every diss by Trump. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Obama alone consume screen page after screen page of crass Twitter jibes.
There's probably a book here. The crudities spanning the 59 years of Donald's "adult" life would surely fill volumes.
Anyone recall "Bushisms?" Quaint by comparison. SMH chronic lexical incoherence, to be sure, but nil venom.
