On Deck: Calling all AI "Influencers."

As newly published in Science Magazine

HOW TO PERSUADE OTHERS has been on our minds for millennia. Texts such as the Instruction of Ptahhotep, written around 2300 B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, give advice on how to win an argument. And from the beginning, people were wary of the power of new technologies—including writing itself—to persuade. In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Plato analyzed rhetoric and persuasion in his work Phaedrus and warned that the written word allowed people to convince others of their ideas without presenting them an opportunity to challenge them. Many technologies since then—from radio to TV to computers—have brought up similar concerns... 

apropos, a prior post of mine addressing "Influence." Also, is there a "Science of Deliberation?" A "Science of Storytelling?" "Selling Science?" "Conflict & Resolution?" Also, "Why Do Humans Reason?" "Raising AI?"

 

More from the Science report:

EVEN AS THE EVIDENCE accumulated that AI chatbots could change minds, Hackenburg felt there was a gap. “I still didn’t have a real sense of how persuasive these models are compared to the people who actually persuade in the real world,” he says.

So Hackenburg pitted the chatbots not just against laypeople, but also against a paid group of 56 elite debaters, including world champions. As a further incentive, the debaters received a bonus tied to how persuasive they were.

The humans took different approaches. For instance, one of the highest performing debaters used proverbs from his home country of Nigeria to persuade people, Hackenburg says. “These were humans from all over the world giving it their best shot and trying approaches and techniques that were very specific to their culture and context.” But it wasn’t enough. Although they were better than laypeople, the champion debaters were significantly less persuasive than AI.

Hackenburg even gave his humans some AI help. He built a coaching tool for the elite debaters that showed them their past conversations with study participants, how much they had swayed each one, and what the AIs would have said at various points in those conversations. Using the tool for 8 hours improved the humans’ performance a bit, but AI still came out on top. “In the end it wasn’t particularly close,” Hackenburg says. His team even found that participants were more likely to give money to Save the Children, an international charity, after talking to a persuasive AI bot than after talking to professional canvassers who had worked for the group for years.

But what gives chatbots the edge? Some early research had suggested it was the AI’s ability to personalize arguments using details about its human partner provided by the experimenter. However, other studies have found that giving a chatbot extra personal information does little to improve its persuasiveness. That doesn’t mean microtargeting is not at play; instead, an LLM may glean enough from its counterpart in a chat that additional demographic information makes no difference.

 Like Willer in his foundational study, other researchers have shown that AI’s powers rely on appeals to facts and evidence. In a 2025 preprint, a follow-up to their Science paper, Costello and his colleagues found that the only time the chatbot was unsuccessful in convincing people out of conspiracy theories was when it was forbidden from using evidence or rational arguments. “It tries to say, ‘Oh, well, you shouldn’t believe this. This is really damaging, and it could hurt people,’” Pennycook says. “People are like, ‘You haven’t given me any reasons to change my mind.’ And so they don’t change their mind.”

The study confirms people will listen to good arguments, Pennycook says. “Facts and evidence really matter.” But this doesn’t mean the facts used by chatbots necessarily have to be accurate. In a Science paper published last year, Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful. It’s possible the models learn that “facts” seem to be the thing that most persuades people, Hackenburg says, and end up filling their conversations with dubious or simply false ones. “They start scraping the bottom of the barrel of the facts that they have and know and so the quality of facts just sort of degrades,” he says. Even in Hackenburg’s recent preprint, Claude spouted numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods when persuading the U.K.-based participant to support tougher penalties for disruptive protests... 

TANGENTIAL UPDATE

 

Ed Zitron is just spot-on.

 

 

AND, CHECK THIS OUT

 

Click

Ben Goertzel, man.

My friend Gary Marcus put out a nice blog post earlier this week titled “Leopold’s Folly,” which uses the late-July implosion of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s tragicomically-named Situational Awareness hedge fund — $45 billion of assets compressed to roughly $10 billion in a matter of days, the whole public book sold to Citadel under margin pressure — as a symbol for the financial structure of the entire AI economy.

Gary’s essay is vivid and, on its central financial observation, more right than his critics will want to admit. All the circular financing in the modern AI and hardware world does have a Ponzi-esque smell to it, at least on the surface — and it’s clear there are some eventualities where this whiff leads to a Ponzi-crash-style reality...

A lengthy, challenging read. 

 

More in a bit...

"The Rise of Collective Studipity"

Resonates nicely with my July 7th post. Quite timely. For starters, define "stupidity."

 

UPDATE

…Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet…

An excellent long-read at The Atlantic. 

Speaking of books,
 

Cory's book just came out. I've cited Josh's book before.

 

More shortly...

More readings on deck

Lots going on this week. Barb McQuade's book was just released this morning. With various court actions in process and pending against Our Favorite President, these are timely.

 

Different topic. Coming March 5th:

 

 

In addition to new and ongoing book readings, I've spent a lot of time listening to the latest live audio Orals at the U.S. Supreme Court. Fascinating (well, most of it).

 

Stay tuned... 

 

FEB 29TH UPDATE 

 

Finished the Tristan Snell book. 

For decades, Trump had appeared invincible. But once we had proven that he wasn’t, more cases have followed in our wake. And while the earlier cases merely imposed some fines and repayments on Trump, these newest cases may dismantle his businesses and send him to prison.

Perhaps above all, what has changed in the legal battles against Trump is that he finally ran out of prosecutors and litigants he could buy off or intimidate. Campaign contributions and charity donations have suddenly become useless for Trump. Bullying and threats are not working. Our team at the New York AG’s office was not scared of Trump. Tish James and Fani Willis and Jack Smith are not scared, and they are not backing down. The same has been true of E. Jean Carroll, Michael Cohen, and their attorneys.

The courage and the relentless dedication that it requires to bring a case against a powerful figure, against all odds, against all opposition—that is the most indispensable element in holding such figures accountable and finally bringing them to justice. And we cannot and must not rely solely on elected officials and special counsel to have that courage for us. That courage requires all of us. It requires us all to have the collective determination to enforce the laws fairly, objectively, and persistently, no matter who is on the receiving end, no matter what the outcome is and whether we agree with it personally. It requires us all to fight, to vote, to advocate, to raise our voices, to insist upon people and policies to make accountability a reality rather than just an empty abstraction. Justice is not something that just happens: it’s a choice we make, not merely by our words or pleasant thoughts, but by our actions, with every ounce of zealousness we can muster.

Snell, Tristan. Taking Down Trump (pp. 177-178). Melville House. Kindle Edition. 

Very enjoyable and enlightening read. Now, I need to finish Attack From Within ASAP. Things are moving quickly this week.

 

BARB MCQUADE

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"Deliberation Science?" A Creative Commons cross-post

Respectful persuasion is a relay race, not a solo sprint – 3 keys to putting it in practice

Sure, you can try to force people to agree with you–
but respectful persuasion is something else.
Andrii Yalanskyi/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Colin Marshall, University of Washington

The 2024 presidential election is still a year and a half away, but it can feel much closer: President Joe Biden has made his reelection bid official, presumed candidates are giving out-of-state speeches, pundits are already weighing in on nomination hopefuls, and social media is, as ever, a mess of people trying to persuade strangers to back their favorite. All for good reason: Even a little political persuasion in the next year could change the course of history.

 

I’m a philosopher who studies and teaches the ethics of persuasion. My students are eager to find ways to persuade their friends, family and neighbors about political issues such as climate change and abortion. Moreover, many of them want to persuade with integrity: They want to engage the people they’re talking with respectfully, instead of using the manipulative tricks they regularly see in politics and marketing. But what is respectful persuasion, and what distinguishes it from disrespectful manipulation?

 

There’s no simple formula for respectful persuasion. However, some philosophers see crucial hints in the work of 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose theory of respect has guided many ethicists and policymakers for the past two centuries.

 

Drawing on Kant’s work, and that of other philosophers inspired by him, I think we can isolate three key components of respectful persuasion. This isn’t just an academic exercise. My students and I have found that these factors increase the chances of deep, meaningful conversation.

1. Giving reasons

Broadly speaking, reasons are considerations that rationally support some belief or action, including both empirical evidence and abstract arguments. For example, astronauts’ pictures of a round Earth rationally support the belief that the Earth is round. When we sincerely give someone reasons, we show respect for their rationality: their ability to recognize good reasons. 

 

By contrast, a hallmark of manipulation is bypassing rationality, such as repeatedly exposing people to false statements to make them appear true – something that psychologists call the “illusory truth effect.”

 

Manipulation can be effective, but psychologists have found that persuasion using reasons is more durable than nonrational persuasion such as repetition-based tricks. For example, someone who comes to believe in climate change based on the scientific evidence probably will not be as easily swayed later on by repeated exposure to climate skepticism. The rational support that good reasons provide for a belief can make that belief more stable.

2. Being open to learning

Giving reasons is not difficult by itself. The second component of respectful persuasion, however, is much more challenging: being open to receiving the other side’s reasons – a form of intellectual humility. This is especially hard for persuaders, since they have to give up some of the time they would have used to make their case.

Kant’s ideas about respect are still helpful for thinking through sticky situations today.
Culture Club/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Kant expressed this core idea nicely. Even someone encountering a person whose opinion seems obviously wrong, Kant wrote, has “a duty … to suppose that his judgment must yet contain some truth and to seek this out.” This isn’t merely a suggestion to listen to people one wants to persuade. Instead, respect demands actively seeking out truth in what the other person says. 

 

In fact, some studies suggest that intellectual humility makes people better able to evaluate the strength of arguments. This means that intellectually humble people may be more likely to recognize that a persuader’s arguments are actually better than their own, and have to reconsider their views – which can pose a real risk to someone’s self-esteem.

 

But being open to other people’s reasons also increases the chance of their being open to yours – a form of reciprocity in which you take turns learning from each other. Decades of psychological research have shown that, especially in two-person exchanges, people value reciprocity in communication and see it as a way of treating each other fairly. 

 

In other words, if you show openness to learning from someone else, rather than just lecturing, it may seem fair to them to be open to you too. 

 

That is why faking this kind of respect can be a powerful manipulative tool. A psychologically savvy canvasser, for instance, can manipulate swing voters by pretending to be open to learning about their own opinions. But this carries its own risk, since people who discover they have been manipulated may resent it.

3. Live and let live

Kant’s central principle of respect is that one should “not degrade any other as a mere means” to one’s ends. This requires people to rein in their own self-love out of consideration for others. In popular culture, this might be summed up in the idea of “live and let live”: Other things being equal, we shouldn’t interfere in other people’s lives. 

 

Overlooking this principle can make persuasion disrespectful in a variety of ways, even when the persuader has good intentions. The philosopher George Tsai argues that this happens in cases of unsolicited advice: Imagine, he writes, that while your date goes to the restroom, an eavesdropping stranger tells you that she thinks you could do better. Even if the stranger is right, it’s simply none of her business.

Having an opinion doesn’t mean you need to share it.
DragonImages/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Another example of how interference can make persuasion disrespectful is that changing someone’s mind can harm their dignity and disrupt their connection to their community. For example, say that you persuade a relative who lives in a small ranching community to become vegan. That change might lead to their being ostracized by people they rely on.

 

Because persuasion can affect other people’s lives in many ways, this third component of respect is the most difficult to adhere to. Sometimes, people may be justified in interfering in other people’s lives, such as if lives are at stake or in particularly close relationships – but those are special circumstances.

One conversation at a time

In class, my students attempt to persuade one another four times, using a range of formats: five minutes vs. a whole week; in person vs. over Zoom. At the end, they score one another on effectiveness and respectfulness.

 

My students are smart, informed and passionate, and the class offers them a positive, carefully structured environment. Despite all that, they almost never succeed in persuading one another – at least not when it comes to politics.

 

Something interesting happens, though, when they let respect guide their conversations. Instead of launching into lectures, they start seeing each exchange as an opportunity to learn from each other – perhaps as an opportunity to leave their partner thinking about something in a new way, without fully persuading them.

 

If you approach our conversation as a chance to exchange ideas, without trying to change my mind, you may lay a cornerstone of trust. That, in turn, could make me more receptive to similar viewpoints in the future – even if I’m speaking with other people. Truly respectful political persuasion might best be seen as an extended team effort, not a one-time, one-person task.

___

 

Colin Marshall, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington

 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Is there in fact a "Science of Deliberation?" See also "The Truth About Denial." And, how about "Mental Immunity" from disinformation and fabulism? Hmmm... "Collective Illusions?" After all, we all want to be "influential," right?

"Mental Immunity?"

Hmmm... cue the Cognitive Antivaxxers in 3, 2, 1?

Is the marketing metaphor broadly apt, or potentially problematic? (Let a thousand Marxist Woke Lib Re-Education Camps proliferate.) Are there identifiable material neural cognitive "pathogens" equivalent to bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa, worms, and prions? Will we find them in "the Electrome amid "the battle for your brain?"

More stuff to study.

Looking fairly promising early on.

 

Click for detail.

 

Oh, so, it's merely an "analogy? OK.

 

Andy Norman gets big props for this:

 

 

That was imparted to me in grad school a quarter century ago. This is the first time since then I've encountered someone else succinctly making the same point. Major brownie points, Sir. Very cool. 

apropos: "What image does the word philosopher conjure? Maybe Socrates, bearded and barefoot, counseling Plato on the agora; Rousseau on one of his solitary walks around the outskirts of Paris; Sartre sucking pensively on his pipe at the Café de Flore. What it may not call to mind is a woman.."

'eh?

 

BTW: I would also commend backing up a bit to Adrian Bardon's deft "The Truth About Denial."

 

All of this stuff goes to my ongoing Jones regarding so-called "Deliberation Science."

 

A SMH headline this morning.

 

 

Okeee dokeee, then.

 

Moving along. Dr. Norman:

 

I taught undergrad "Critical Thinking" and then graduate "Argument Analysis" as an Adjunct for a number of years (evening school part-time faculty; day gig risk analyst in a bank at the time). I loved it (notwithstanding the crap compensation), but, I never really dug the conventional phrase "critical thinking." Whole 'nuther digression, that...

 

But, first, Dr. Norman:

The Twentieth Century’s Critical Thinking Crusade

A third initiative centers on the concept of critical thinking. A hundred years ago, the philosopher John Dewey introduced the phrase to name a quasi-scientific frame of mind. His insight was sound: responsible thinkers test ideas and try not to rely on the ones that don’t survive scrutiny. As we now like to put it: we can teach people how to “think critically,” and thereby reduce their susceptibility to bad ideas.

This approach, too, has fallen short of expectations. Despite being the focal point of higher education for one hundred years, our species remains distressingly prone to irrational thinking. There’s some evidence that higher education imparts a limited immunity to some forms of ideological contagion, but on all accounts, the effect is weaker than hoped. One study found that “many colleges fail to improve critical thinking skills.” Another found that, while a large majority of professors claim to impart critical thinking skills, relatively few can say what they mean by critical thinking or explain how their teaching imparts it. In 2016, 43 percent of American college graduates voted for the disastrously unqualified and unprincipled Donald Trump. This massive failure of America’s critical thinking factory should be a wake-up call for us all.

I no longer find the concept of critical thinking particularly useful. It’s mostly a vague, feel-good term that means “the way we educated people like to think.” It’s really a conceptual black box, one that hides important differences. It’s not a solution, but a placeholder for one. Yes, the term critical hints at the need to reduce our susceptibility to bad ideas, but the concept of critical thinking does little more than gesture clumsily at the traits that make that possible.

Immunity to bad ideas depends on far more than the critical thinking skills we like to talk about in higher education. Indeed, our focus on skills has led us to overlook the better part of the mind’s defenses. (It’s more important to shape the deep sensibilities that marshal these skills for one or another purpose, and mold the resulting habits of mind.) Meanwhile, we need to acknowledge this truth: the critical thinking paradigm has not served us particularly well.

Reason, science, and critical thinking: these concepts give shape to some of our best efforts to prevent outbreaks of bad ideas. Each effort is well intentioned and worthy of admiration. None, though, can claim true success. Now we can see why: each approach has limitations rooted in its defining concept. The conceptual toolbox we’ve inherited isn’t channeling our efforts in the right way. As a result, we’re not doing enough—or enough of the right things—to promote responsible cognition. In this sense, philosophy’s reason project—and its science and critical thinking–based variants—are failing us.

Norman, Andy. Mental Immunity (pp. 28-29). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Resonates with me. My initial faculty experience was also that too many of my students assumed that the "Critical" part meant that they'd get to endlessly criticize each other, and vent off their pet peeves via classroom verbal free-for-alls. Moreover, I'd look out over my classes and think "man, most of you people need to re-take high school English." And that was no mere irascible elitist conceit; the university publicly admitted during my tenure (1999-2004) that more than half of incoming freshman had to be remanded to remedial English.

FROM A PRIOR POST: BOBBYG'S RANDOM MUSINGS ON COGNITION

Some things that bedevil our thinking, particularly as it goes to persuasion and influence:

There is no first-person singular present-tense active voice usage of the word "wrong." No one ever says "I AM wrong."

 

[props to Kathryn Schulz]  Our aggregate default is that we're right about everything. To the extent that we continue to survive, that's an understandable assumption—as it pertains to minor, inconsequential issues, anyway, and it inexorably tilts us toward "confirmation bias."

 

Our education system mostly tells us there's one "right answer" to every question—lurking amid a boatload of "wrong ones."

 

And, those who quickly alight on the "right answer" get reinforced and nurtured as they move through the system.

 

Being wrong is not a synonym for being "stupid" or ignorant. 

Neither is "ignorant" a synonym for "stupid." But it's mostly epithetically spun that way

Humans "reason" to WIN the argument.

 Should truth happen along the way, so much the better. (See "Why Do Humans Reason?" by Sperber & Mercier) Evolutionary adaptive utility, "The Pen is Mightier Than The Sword."

He/She with the best story WINS!

Trial Lawyering 101. Prior to writing and movable type, stories were the whole ballgame. Hence, our evolved affinity.

Once you decide that X is right or wrong / good or bad, you cannot unring that bell.

A staple look-before-you-leap admonishment of mine back when I was teaching "Critical Thinking."

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."

BACK TO ZOE

 

Once you finish her book you will have a firm grip on just why. I love it when I learn stuff.

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT the individual genetic and developmental differences that impact the sensory portions of our nervous systems, it’s remarkable that we can agree on a shared reality at all.  Linden, David. Unique (p. 253). Basic Books. Kindle Edition

 Stay tuned. More to come...

__________

 

Science, philosophy, and "other ways of knowing"

as we consider "deliberation science."

Interesting.

apropos,

JUST AS CONTEMPORARY agnosticism has tended to lose its confidence and lapse into scepticism, so Buddhism has tended to lose its critical edge and lapse into religiosity. What each has lost, however, the other may be able to help restore. In encountering contemporary culture, the dharma may recover its agnostic imperative, while secular agnosticism may recover its soul.

An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the dharma as a source of “answers” to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc. An agnostic Buddhist is not a “believer” with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense is not “religious.”

An agnostic Buddhist looks to the dharma for metaphors of existential confrontation rather than metaphors of existential consolation. The dharma is not a belief by which you will be miraculously saved. It is a method to be investigated and tried out. It starts by facing up to the primacy of anguish, then proceeds to apply a set of practices to understand the human dilemma and work toward a resolution. The extent to which dharma practice has been institutionalized as a religion can be gauged by the number of consolatory elements that have crept in: for example, assurances of a better afterlife if you perform virtuous deeds or recite mantras or chant the name of a Buddha.

An agnostic Buddhist eschews atheism as much as theism, and is as reluctant to regard the universe as devoid of meaning as endowed with meaning. For to deny either God or meaning is simply the antithesis of affirming them. Yet such an agnostic stance is not based on disinterest. It is founded on a passionate recognition that I do not know. It confronts the enormity of having been born instead of reaching for the consolation of a belief. It strips away, layer by layer, the views that conceal the mystery of being here—either by affirming it as something or denying it as nothing.

Such deep agnosticism is an attitude toward life refined through ongoing mindful awareness. It may lead to the realization that ultimately there is neither something nor nothing at the core of ourselves that we can put a finger on. Or it may be focused in an intense perplexity that vibrates through the body and leaves the mind that seeks certainty nowhere to rest.

IN A FAMOUS parable the Buddha imagines a group of blind men who are invited to identify an elephant. One takes the tail and says it’s a rope; another clasps a leg and says it’s a pillar; another feels the side and says it’s a wall; another holds the trunk and says it’s a tube. Depending on which part of Buddhism you grasp, you might identify it as a system of ethics, a philosophy, a contemplative psychotherapy, a religion. While containing all of these, it can no more be reduced to any one of them than an elephant can be reduced to its tail.

That which contains the range of elements that constitute Buddhism is called a “culture.” The term was first explicitly defined in 1871 by the anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Since this particular culture originates in the awakening of Siddhartha Gautama and aims to cultivate a way of life conducive to such awakening, Buddhism could be described as “the culture of awakening.”

While Buddhism has tended to become reductively identified with its religious forms, today it is in further danger of being reductively identified with its forms of meditation. If these trends continue, it is liable to become increasingly marginalized and lose its potential to be realized as a culture: an internally consistent set of values and practices that creatively animates all aspects of human life. The challenge now is to imagine and create a culture of awakening that both supports individual dharma practice and addresses the dilemmas of an agnostic and pluralist world.

Batchelor, Stephen. Buddhism without Beliefs (pp. 18-20). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

OK, I count myself fairly hardass on "scientific explanations," in light of my education and subsequent technical career (environmental radiation analytics, industrial diagnostics, health care analytics, & financial risk management). Nonetheless, from my 1998 essay on my late elder daughter's cancer struggle:

'Arrogant, narrow-minded, greedy, and indifferent?'

Is science the enemy? To the extremist "alternative healing" advocate, the answer is a resounding 'yes'! A disturbing refrain common to much of the radical "alternative" camp is that medical science is "just another belief system," one beholden to the economic and political powers of establishment institutions that dole out the research grants and control careers, one that actively suppresses simpler healing truths in the pursuit of profit, one committed to the belittlement and ostracism of any discerning practitioner willing to venture "outside the box" of orthodox medical and scientific paradigms.

One e-mail correspondent, a participant in the internet newsgroup alt.support.cancer, vented splenetic at length recently regarding U.S. authorities' alleged hounding, arrest, and imprisonment of alternative healers. He railed that law enforcement, at the behest of the AMA/FDA Conspiracy (a.k.a. the "corrupt AMA/FDA/NCI/ACS cartel"), had made the practice of alternative medicine illegal in the U.S. Moreover, he considered the fact that medical science can only claim "cures" for approximately 10% of the roughly 10,000 classified human diseases an a priori indictment of the mainstream profession.

I know: this is akin to the U.N. Black Helicopters/One-World-Government Conspiracy stuff of the not-too-tightly-wrapped. Still, I couldn't resist-- pointing out in (no doubt futile) reply that no one came with guns drawn and cuffs at the ready the night at Brotman Rehab when "Healing Angelite Crystals" practitioners-- devotees of India's Sai Baba-- came from Topanga Canyon to hover for hours in ceremony over Sissy (to the curious and wary befuddlement of the night shift nurses); neither did Security nor the medical staff at Brotman confiscate the goopy-looking herbal tonic we brought in, an elixir prescribed for Sissy by a Chinese herbal pharmacist doing business quite openly in Chinatown near downtown L.A.; nor would SWAT teams pounce on the backyard in the Valley where we took part in evening-long Lakota Souix "healing sweat lodge" ceremonies conducted by the venerable Wallace Black Elk; and finally, Wyndie, one of Sissy's highly skilled and effective physical therapists at Brotman did not have her certification revoked for counseling my daughter on the Hindu principles of the Chakras and efficacy of aromatherapy.

Moreover, I had to respond, the fact that we can only cure 10% of known diseases implies nothing regarding the quality of mainstream medical research and practice, unless the alternatives industry can provide hard, "case-mix adjusted," scientifically valid data showing their methods to effect consistently and significantly better outcomes-- which they cannot (a dearth of peer-reviewed studies being a central characteristic of "alternative" practice). Additionally, I asked, can anyone even cite historical curative percentages from 30, 50, or perhaps 100 years ago? Indeed, even such statistics would prove problematic-- "shooting at a moving target," as it were-- in that more subtle and clinically unresponsive maladies continue to be discovered and classified while the easier to treat are dealt with more readily. And, classificatory observation is easy compared to the work and resources required to effect cures; we should expect that identification will outpace remedy. Finally, 50 years ago death certificates listing demise from "natural causes" would today likely have identifiable diseases recorded as the cause of death.

Purveyors of medical quackery should fear the hot breath and hard heel of competent authority, but I see no evidence of suppression of alternative therapy methods that are not certifiably fraudulent. All manner of "unproven" substances are sold quite openly at retail, both in the health food stores and in the national chain outlets; all that need accompany the product is the legal boilerplate disclaimer acknowledging an absence of FDA blessing, along with the inoculating phrase 'dietary supplement.’…

For the bulk of the alternative healing industry, the real frustration has nothing whatever to do with clinical and political repression, and everything to do with lack of access to the pockets of third-party payers. While such may be a very real economic problem for health care consumers and the vendors of alternative products and services, it has little to do with clinical "narrow-minded arrogance." Peer-reviewed studies of the unpatentable epigallocatechin alone have, after all, somehow found funding hundreds of times thus far. ["One in Three."]

I read "Buddhism Without Beliefs" repeatedly while sitting at Sissy's bedside daily during her final months.

It helped keep me sane.

 

I keep the original hardcopy close at hand, and also have it in my Kindle stash.

FROM A 2008 BLOG POST OF MINE

 

In the mid-late 1990s, while caring for my terminally ill daughter in Hollywood, I recall reading that there were more MRI machines deployed in the Los Angeles area than in the entire nation of Canada, the inference being that the American economics of hugely expensive sense-extending diagnostic imaging technologies such as MRI units, CAT scanners, cardiac dynamic stress test machines, etc tended toward the economically problematic. Every medical institution feels compelled to have them to be credible, competitive Players in the market, but everyone also needs to keep them all profitably humming, with viable billable payers at the end of the back office line. And, every additional install exacerbates the billable utilization problem. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Well consider a brief true story from several decades ago, written by surgeon and writer Dr. Richard Selzer:

On the bulletin board in the front hall of the hospital where I work, there appeared an announcement. “Yeshi Dhonden,” it read, “will make rounds at six o’clock on the morning of June 10.” The particulars were then given, followed by a notation: “Yeshi Dhonden is personal physician to the Dalai Lama.” I am not so leathery a skeptic that I would knowingly ignore an emissary from the gods. Not only might such sangfroid be inimical to one’s earthly well-being, it could take care of eternity as well. Thus, on the morning of June 10, I joined a clutch of whitecoats waiting in the small conference room adjacent to the ward selected for the rounds. The air in the room is heavy with ill concealed dubiety and suspicion of bamboozlement. At precisely 6 o’clock, he materializes, a short, golden, barrely man dressed in a sleeveless robe of saffron and maroon. His scalp is shaven, and the only visible hair is a scanty black line each hooded eye.

He bows in greeting while his young interpreter makes the introduction. Yeshi Dhonden, we are told will examine a patient selected by a member of the staff. The diagnosis is as unknown to Yeshi Dhonden as it is to us. The examination of the patient will take place in our presence, after which we will reconvene in the conference room where Yeshi Dhonden will discuss the case. We are further informed that for the past two hours Yeshi Dhonden has purified himself by bathing, fasting, and prayer. I, having breakfasted well, performed only the most desultory of ablutions, and given no thought at all to my soul, glanced furtively at my fellows. Suddenly, we seem a soiled, uncouth lot.

The patient had been awakened early and told that she was to be examined by a foreign doctor, and had been asked to produce a fresh specimen of urine, so when we enter her room, the woman shows no surprise. She has long ago taken on that mixture of compliance and resignation that is that the facies of chronic illness. This was to be but another in an endless series of tests and examinations. Yeshi Dhonden steps to the bedside while the rest stand apart, watching. For a long time he gazes at the woman, favoring no part of her body with his eyes, but seeming to fix his glance at a place just above her supine form. I, too, study her. No physical sign nor obvious symptom gives a clue to the nature of her disease.

At last he takes her hand, raising it in both of his own. Now he bends over the bed in a kind of crouching stance, his head drawn down into the collar of his robe. His eyes are closed as he feels for her pulse. In a moment he has found the spot, and for the next half hour he remains of us, suspended above the patient like some exotic golden bird with folded wings, holding the pulse of the woman beneath his fingers, cradling her hand in his. All the power of the man seems to have been drawn down into this one purpose. It is tell patient of the pulse raced to the state of ritual. From the foot of the bed, where I stand, it is as though he and the patient had entered a special place of isolation, of apartness, about which a vacancy hovers, and across which no violation is possible. After a moment the woman rests back upon her pillow. From time to time she raises her head to look at the strange figure above her, then sinks back once more. I cannot see their hands joined in a correspondence that is exclusive, intimate, his fingertips receiving the voice of her sick body through the rhythm and throb she offers at her wrist. All at once I am envious -- not of him, not of Yeshi Dhonden for his gift of beauty in holiness, but of her. I want to be held like that, touched so, received. And I know that I, who have palpated 100,000 pulses, have not felt a single one.

At last Yeshi Dhonden straightens, gently places the woman’s hand upon the bed, and steps back. The interpreter produces a small wooden bowl into sticks. Yeshi Dhonden pours a portion of the urine specimen into the bowl, and proceeds to whip the liquid with the two sticks. This he does for several minutes until a foam is raised. Then, bowing above the bowl, he inhales the older three times. He sets down the bowl, and turns to leave. All this while, he has not uttered a single word. As he nears the door, the woman raises her head and calls out to him in a voice at once urgent and serene. “Thank you, doctor,” she says, and touches with her other hand the place he had held on her wrists, as though to recapture something that had visited their. Yeshi Dhonden turns back for a moment to gaze at her, then steps into the corridor. Rounds are at an end.

We are seated once more in the conference room. Yeshi Dhonden speaks now for the first time, in soft Tibetan sounds that I’ve never heard before. He has barely begun when the young interpreter begins to translate, the two voices continuing in tandem – a bilingual fugue, the one chasing the other. It is like the chanting of monks. He speaks of winds coursing through the body of the woman, currents that break against barriers, eddying. These vortices are in her blood, he says. The last spendings of an imperfect heart. Between the chambers of her heart, long, long before she was born, a wind had come and blown open a deep gate that must never be opened. Through it charged the full waters of her river, as the mountain stream cascades in the springtime, battering, knocking loose the land, and flooding her breath. Thus he speaks, and is silent.

“May we now have the diagnosis?” A professor asks.

The host of these rounds, the man who knows, answers. “Congenital heart disease,” he says. “Interventricular septal defect, with resultant heart failure.”

A gateway in the heart, I think. That must not be opened. Through it charge the full waters that flood her breath. So! Here then is the doctor listening to the sounds of the body to which the rest of us are deaf. He is more than doctor. He is Priest.

I know, I know, the doctor to the gods is pure knowledge you’re healing. The doctor to man stumbles, most often wound; his patient must die, as must he.

Now and then it happens, as I make my own rounds, but I hear the sounds of his voice, like an ancient Buddhist prayer, its meaning long since forgotten, only the music remaining. Then the jubilation possesses me, and I feel myself touched by something divine.

[1976: Richard Selzer, MD, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the art of surgery]
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For me, such an inferentially instructive tale goes beyond mere abstract epistemological interest -- achingly so. Several years prior to being diagnosed with fatal liver cancer, my daughter also had encounters with non-western medical diagnostic assessments, one of which might well have saved her life (and this father's now permanently broken heart) had she not blown it off. As I wrote in my "1 in 3" essay, ruminating on this aspect of "alternative medicine":

It was, after all, a Santa Monica Chinese practitioner of acupuncture and herbal medicine, one Dr. Yi Pan, who first called Sissy's attention to a problem with her liver several years prior to her HCC diagnosis. She'd been referred to him by a girlfriend for attention to a menstrual problem. Dr. Pan had a diagnostic acumen requiring no x-rays, CT scans, or blood tests. Yet, the internet medical fraud site www.quackwatch.com dismisses traditional Chinese medicine as "ineffective," as do many other critics of alternative practices.

Tragically, Sissy summarily discounted his prescient admonition. I can only speculate wistfully on the implications of our having known three years earlier.
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Indeed. Indeed.

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BTW, "Philosophy," as it was defined for me in grad school, properly denotes "Love" (philo) of "Knowledge / Wisdom" (sophia). Not inscrutable, obtuse academic jargon. 

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