The KHIT Blog: The Inherently Dangerous Instrumentality

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

The Inherently Dangerous Instrumentality

February 18th, 2026: Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is appearing in a Los Angeles courtroom today to testify in defense of his company regarding litigation asserting that his social media applications pose significant risk of harms (inclusive of suicide) to many users, from pre- and teenagers to psychologically vulnerable adults across all ages. The financial liability stakes could scarcely be higher (not only for Zuck's companies). Reporting has it that some 1,500 liability lawsuits are awaiting trial, with more in the wings.

The legal liability principle that finally caught up with Big Tobacco (in the wake of some 80 years of litigative and regulatory effort) was that of the 'Inherently Dangerous Instrumentality." In short, the product, used as intended and directed, inexorably leads to excessive customer harms—up to lethal outcomes. Social media companies' ad-based revenue/profitability models require maximization of user engagement. The impolite word is "addiction."

I would Quixotically favor expanding the analogy to firearms, notwithstanding it being admittedly a bit of a stretch (particularly in light of our 2nd Amendment**).

** Which, according to the most fervent "gun enthusiasts," also connects inseparably to the 1st Amendment, i.e., in that prancing around open-carry, dressed in Army-Navy surplus store cosplay coture is constitutional "free speech" emblematic of one's fealty to the shall-not-be-infringed 2nd.

The very purpose of a firearm is to launch metal projectiles at high speed in order to damage or destroy objects of users' focus—from paper targets to beer bottles or soup cans, to squirrels, rabbits, deer, birds, elephants, etc, to other humans.

And, yes, they can be used lawfully and "safely." C'mon.

Interesting legal times draw nigh in the digital space. That's for sure.

WHAT ABOUT OTHER ONLINE ADDICTIONS?

Casino Capitalism...

Polymarket? Online sports gambling?

UPDATE

Just added a 3rd Sean Carroll book to my stash. A Series of Fortunate Events. Awesome writer and thinker.

…I have shown how we know that we are all here, both collectively and individually, through a series of accidents—cosmological, geological, and biological accidents. I have also shown how and why some of us will depart via accident.

Our chance-driven world is a profound revelation. It is astonishing that blind chance is the source of all novelty, diversity, and beauty in the biosphere. I hope that you are wonderstruck at what an asteroid, sliding tectonic plates, and a fibrillating polymer of just four bases have wrought.

But our chance-driven existence also poses the unsettling quandary that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but a world as novelist Christian Jungerson put it of “unmerciful randomness, immense chaos, and constant biological vulnerability.” This view, of course, shatters traditional beliefs about humanity’s place in the larger scheme.

As Monod’s critics decried, chance puts God out of a job, or at least many of the jobs we have traditionally assigned to Him or Her. God is not in the conception business choosing the winning sperm and egg, nor the genetic engineering business designing creatures’ DNA and traits, nor the weather-making business, nor the cancer business, nor the pandemic business.

One recourse in the face of such claims is simply to deny chance. But should we have the courage to accept the pervasive role of chance, some challenging questions arise about the meaning and purpose of our lives: If we are here by accident, not by Design, what are we supposed to do? How might we live in the face of this knowledge?

My first impulse is to pull a Dr. McCoy (“Bones” from Star Trek) and plead, “Dammit, Jim, I’m a scientist, not a philosopher.” I think that these questions are for each of us to decide for ourselves…

Carroll, Sean B.. A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (pp. 164-165). (Function). Kindle Edition.

BACK TO THE HEADLINE TOPIC

Two veteran tech journalists. One hour. No easy answers.
Jacob Ward (The Rip Current, NBC News, Al Jazeera) and Taylor Lorenz (User Mag, The New York Times, The Washington Post) go head-to-head on the biggest question in tech policy right now: Is the social media addiction crisis a genuine public health emergency — or is it a moral panic being weaponized by the same reactionary forces that came for rock and roll, comic books, and the telephone?

They agree on more than you'd expect. They disagree where it counts.

Topics covered:
The 2012 collapse in adolescent mental health — correlation or causation?
Jonathan Haidt's data and its critics
Section 230, FOSTA-SESTA, and who really wins when tech gets "regulated"
Why Meta is quietly funding the groups suing Meta
Social casino games, behavioral harm, and the limits of US regulation
What data privacy law could actually fix — and why we're not doing it
The authoritarian endgame nobody's talking about

CODA

This came in the mail today. 80th birthday gift from my dear sister. I did not know til last weekend that she was a Scott Galloway fangirl. Cool.

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Wednesday, February 18, 2026

The Inherently Dangerous Instrumentality

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