"Continuous discursive tinnitus"

An excellent New Yorker long-read. Totally timely.

The person who should have been best able to explain how we got here was the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who illuminated how a feisty, principled public sphere is integral to democracy. But Habermas died in March, at the age of ninety-six, and, although he remained active until his final months, commenting on Ukraine, Gaza, and Eurobonds, he struggled to understand the turn history had taken. As a teen-ager in 1945, he had witnessed American soldiers enter his home town of Gummersbach, near Cologne, carrying messages of freedom and openness. Eight decades later, he watched American voters choose a leader who had advertised his fascistic bent in blood-and-soil rhetoric, fantasies of punitive violence, and a taste for bombastic architectural kitsch. The far right was making inroads across Europe, including in Germany. The print-based media culture that once anchored Habermas’s public sphere had devolved into a digital sludgefest that proved better at circulating racist memes than at fostering morality and dignity. A couple of years before his death, in a conversation with the historian Philipp Felsch, Habermas said that his world was being dismantled “step by step.”...
____ 

...The medieval philosopher al-Farabi, who considered democracy the least imperfect of imperfect governments, is mentioned only in passing. A similar Western bias contributed to one of Habermas’s last, and least effective, public interventions. In November, 2023, after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis and the onset of Israel’s brutal counterstrike on Gaza, Habermas signed a statement that reasserted solidarity between Germany and Israel. After a glancing mention of Palestinian suffering, the authors write, “The standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” It’s one thing to deny that genocide has taken place in Gaza; it’s another to imply more broadly that the topic is out of bounds. At a crucial moment, Habermas’s cherished pluralism failed him.

“If no dread remains, the monsters return,” Habermas wrote early in his career. They’re back, on several continents. Earlier this year, in Germany, the Sachsen-Anhalt branch of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party released a platform containing such demands as “Think German!,” “Promote patriotism—no state money for anti-German art and culture!,” and “Build more beautifully!” This dumbed-down Goebbels gobbledygook revived talking points that Habermas had tried to quash during the Historikerstreit. Not surprisingly, AfD representatives could barely contain their glee over the philosopher’s death. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, one of the Party’s nastier voices, posted a YouTube video in which he said, “Habermas is dangerous. He is one of the greatest enemies of the German nation.” Tillschneider’s inability to put Habermas into the past tense was somehow reassuring.

An equally obnoxious obituary came from the billionaire pen of Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies. Before Karp turned to hawking surveillance systems that have assisted ice in its murderous roundups of immigrants, he studied philosophy under Habermas in Frankfurt. In an article for Politico, Karp recounted how Habermas provided fierce but fair criticism of his papers: “It was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.” Alas, the losses that Karp has in mind don’t seem to involve learning, rigor, or reason. Waving away Habermas’s cosmopolitan ideals, he says that discourse “must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional—and indeed national and cultural—source.” This is the language of maga and the AfD, not to mention Heidegger circa 1935. Karp’s ideological atavism is all too typical of the current bent of Silicon Valley...

 

When the A.I. chatbots march in, the “colonization of the lifeworld,” to use another ungainly but apt Habermas phrase, enters a terminal stage. Horkheimer and Adorno had concluded that advanced capitalism, far from being a technocratic monolith, had an inherent tendency toward chaos and madness. A.I. is at once a consummation of technological control and a new level of cultish delirium. The designers themselves are often incapable of explaining what their systems are doing. Habermas’s entire world view was premised on the idea of people learning from one another; A.I. annihilates communicative action in the name of hallucinatory conversations with sycophantic machines. The social effects have proved instantly disastrous: rampant disinformation, mass student cheating, cases of users becoming addicted to A.I. or killing themselves with its help. Meanwhile, to the joy of investors, untold thousands of jobs have vanished. As an added coup, A.I. managed to deliver a personal affront to Habermas a year before his death. In 2024, Google DeepMind unveiled a “Habermas Machine,” which has been described as a “scaffolded pair of LLMs designed to find consensus among people who disagree.” The philosopher had not given Google permission to use his name, and he was horrified when he heard about the scheme...

 

Philosophy is a discipline of abstractions, yet it raises achingly elemental questions. The august Kant asks, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” The answers are seldom simple or bright. The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level. But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress.

This was Habermas’s core conviction; he was an incrementalist, though a radical one. On the other hand, in his almost manic drive toward consensus, he blunted the edge of his critical inheritance. If we are to say no to the monstrosities that we have unleashed, we need the uncompromising fury that the Frankfurt School writers invested in their work. We need Adorno to tell us that the confusion of truth and lies “makes it a Sisyphean labor to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge.” In the end, we need both voices: the critical and the reconstructive, the savage and the sage. The dialectic moves between crashing despair and hovering hope.

That's just a tad.

 

The "Mistakes Were Made" thing.

Kara Swisher interviews Theo Baker.

   

Mom and Dad and Theo.

Mom and Dad and Theo

Below, no DNA assay necessary. Hel-LO?

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.

 

Just wow. One scary 22 yr old.

 

Ahhh... Stanford. 

 

UPDATE

 

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.

Some random Rip Currents from Jacob Ward

Jacob Ward

"Other Currents"

1. Meta logged its employees’ keystrokes, then announced their layoffs. The Model Capability Initiative — Meta’s new tool for capturing employee keystrokes and mouse clicks, framed as AI training data — was announced this week with no opt-out option. Two days later, 8,000 layoffs. The sequence is the story: document what the workers do, then eliminate them.

2. Palantir published a manifesto. Anthropic went to court. Two companies drew opposite lines in the same week. Palantir’s 22-point public document calls AI weapons inevitable, some cultures “dysfunctional and regressive,” and pluralism a failure. Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins noted the obvious: these aren’t abstract ideas floating in space — they’re the stated ideology of a company that sells targeting software to militaries and immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, Anthropic has been in federal court since March fighting a Pentagon designation that labeled it a national security supply-chain risk — because it refused to remove safeguards against autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. One company announced what it believes. The other is paying lawyers to defend it.

3. The Joint Chiefs said autonomous weapons are coming. Nobody asked whether they work. Yesterday the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs called autonomous weapons a “key and essential part of everything we do.” Anthropic’s actual position — that frontier AI is not reliable enough to kill people without a human in the loop — has not been rebutted. It has been bypassed.

4. 96,000 tech layoffs this year, all attributed to AI. Nobody has to prove it. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Snap, Salesforce, Block — every announcement uses the same language: efficiency, AI investment, right-sizing. No company is required to document whether AI replaced a single role. The NLRB has no jurisdiction over the framing. Nobody does.

5. Amazon’s Ring can now identify your neighbors by face. Familiar Faces rolls out facial recognition to Ring doorbells — identifying family, friends, delivery drivers — processed in Amazon’s cloud, opt-out by default. EFF and Senator Markey are pushing back. Three states have already blocked it. “Optional and disabled by default” is how every ambient surveillance feature starts.

6. OpenAI lost three senior executives in a single day and is projecting $14 billion in losses. The CPO, the head of Sora, and the enterprise CTO all departed the same Friday. Multiple cited the DOD contract and the cultural shift from research to commercial operations. The company generating $25 billion in annual revenue is simultaneously losing the people who built the products and spending $14 billion more than it earns.

7. Anthropic just passed OpenAI in revenue. The gap matters because of what each company agreed to. Anthropic hit $30 billion in annualized revenue this month, passing OpenAI’s $25 billion. Enterprise customers — not consumers — drove it. Worth noting alongside item 2: Anthropic is the company currently in court over autonomous weapons restrictions. OpenAI signed a DOD contract that removed equivalent restrictions weeks after Anthropic was blacklisted.

8. S&P 500 boards are disclosing AI risk while knowing almost nothing about AI. 83% of S&P 500 companies now list AI as a material risk in disclosures — up from 12% in 2023. Board directors with AI expertise: 2.7%. The people with the legal authority to set limits have mostly opted not to understand the thing they’re supposed to be limiting. This is the governance gap that makes every other story in this section possible.

 I added my own random @BobbyGvegas Current:

Another random “current" from a subscriber: The other day, I posted a story to my Facebook page, and was shortly thereafter notified by Facebook that, unless I opted out, henceforth all of my story postings would be given an AI generated “headline." Supposedly to help gain better visibility for my stories. Read “content monetizing assistance." I replied in testy ALL CAPS. (Use your imagination.) Something along the lines of  NO.MUTHA.ZUCKING.WAY…

RIP CURRENT UPDATE

Jacob is definitely worth a paid subscription.

Bohemian Grove? That is SO yesterday.

 

Very interesting Atlantic article, excerpted.

...In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach…

Each morning, we gathered in a lecture hall to hear presentations. If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk, you understand the format. The year I went, a sitting Supreme Court justice was interviewed, and a neurologist talked about technological advances in prosthetics. In the afternoons and evenings, we were encouraged to exchange ideas over drinks and four-course meals, with no set purpose—to network, in other words, with some of the most rarefied talent on Earth. The most common question I heard was “Why am I here?”

“Why am I here?” asked the 1980s hair-metal singer. “Why am I here?” asked the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, the famous anthropologist, the presidential historian. Only the movie stars and the billionaires didn’t ask: They had done this kind of thing before. It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history...

At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.

Sitting in the lecture hall, pencils out, listening to a famous chef explain his humanitarian work, it was easy to feel like the solution to the world’s problems lay within our grasp. And yet, looking around at faces I had only ever seen in a magazine or on-screen, I had an unsettling revelation: This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything…

Here we were, 80 individuals with a combined net worth that was greater than a small city’s yet infinitesimal compared with the wealth and dominion of our host. How did he view this exercise—as a first step toward changing the world, or as a performative display of his reach and influence?

Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of this impossible wealth...

Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.

The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything…

This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life…

Great piece. Read all of it.

 

My dear Las Vegas friend Jerry Lopez (below leading his killer band) once got to do a hang and performance at The Bohemian Grove in the SF Bay Area.

 

 

Similar kind of juiced-up heavy hitters thing at the Bohemian, but these current-day techbiz cats like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman et al are order(s) of magnitude wealthier and aggressive. This stuff struck me when I read the Atlantic article, given its publication concurrent with the airing of Kara Swisher's awesome new CNN docuseries.

 

SPEAKING OF CNN

    

I'm  not yet sure what to make of this. Really like Jake Ward.

 

More shortly... 

Kara Swisher Wants To Live Forever

 

I have long LUVED me some Kara. I read her stuff devotedly when I was covering the Silicon Valley Digital Health IT startup conferences turf (nationwide, actually) as part of my HHS HIT "Meaningful Use" initiative gig based out of Las Vegas. Kara's tagline at the time was "The Grumpy Lady of Tech."

 

Major Fanboy here kept hoping (to no avail) that Kara would show up at one of the Health 2.0 / WinterTech events. That woulda been way cool. Sigh...

 

My Bay Area history goes back to 1967. Arriving from the eastern U.S., I took up residence in North Beach (bar band musician at the time). I quickly became one of those "Summer of Love" hippies. I still have great life-long friends there.

 

BTW: Also relevant to Kara's topic, "The Good Death." 

 

FAST FORWARD TO KARA SWISHER 2026

 

 

Rahm Emanuel. What a dynamite podcast segment this was.

 

Speaking of Emanuel, how about equally brilliant brother Dr. Zeke? Last night while awaiting Kara's documentary debut I watched Real Time with Bill Maher. One of his guests? Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD.

 

 

Bought his book (of course):

 

Yeah. Yes indeed. Just getting started on this book.

Zeke Emanual was materially involved with the authoring of the PPACA—"Obamacare." I followed those developments closely, writing about them on another of my blogs. e.g., see "Public Optional." Prior to those days, I'd written my first grad school paper ("argument analysis & evaluation") on the PNHP "Single Payor" argument published in JAMA in 1994.

_____

 

I have a bit of tangential personal experience related to these topics. to wit, excerpt from my memoir about my late elder daughter Sissy.

The search for survival and healing 
Should you or a loved one be beset by advanced and life-threatening cancer, gird yourself for an overwhelming onslaught of information, much of it in conflict, all of it ostensibly requiring your immediate consideration and action lest you accede to fatal delay.

My empirical triage effort began within days of Sissy's admission to County. While we were still struggling to come to grips with everything coming fast and furious from the doctors and medical administration, well-meaning friends and acquaintances began peppering us with unsolicited advice and literature, some of it conveying a bizarre ignorance that would leave me floundering for the politic response that would not demean and offend. Pejorative retort suppression would become an ongoing emotional exercise (repeatedly aided by the quiet and gentle reproach of my saintly wife).

It commenced with a reprint of an"article" hawking a book wherein it would be recounted in further detail just why "all cancers" were caused by intestinal flatworms! (The author ended nearly every sentence with one or more exclamation marks!) The curative regimen would simply involve purging the gastrointestinal tract of these carcinogenic parasites through a regimen including colonics and herbal mixtures. The boyfriend delivering this wonderful news was utterly sold on its merit: Salvation was at hand!

Mercifully, Dr. Wren got me off the hook on this one with a diplomacy worthy of a Secretary of State.

Next would come the "Hoxsey" video, a slick production exuding first-class "documentary" production values-- sinister in tone-- detailing the history of the miraculous herbal anti-cancer "formula" purportedly discovered by one uneducated Harry Hoxsey decades ago while treating horse hide lesions on his father's farm. The video-- replete with ominous background music and newsreel headline cutaways-- recounts the foul banishment of this alleged "savior" to Mexico by the greedy and venal American Medical Association. The Hoxsey clinic in Tijuana today still attracts innumerable desperate cancer sufferers bereft of more conventional clinical options and ready with cash.

After close consideration, I had no choice but to count myself in the company of those regarding this stuff as the worst sort of quackery.

Essiac tea (brand name: Fluoressence). The story is told that a Canadian nurse-- one Rene Caisse-- was the recipient of a mysterious healing herbal recipe used by an Ojibwa tribal medicine man that caused all manner of malignancies to disappear in short order. It is predictably alleged that the Canadian counterpart to our A.M.A. in concert with Ottawa would see to the suppression of this wondrous substance.

Proponents of this beverage invariably mention that "Essiac" is "Caisse" spelled in reverse. In my case, no particular epiphany would be forthcoming in the wake of this "Sgt.-Pepper-Played-Backwards" intimation, and, after much digging concerning the ingredients and their asserted efficacy, I could find nothing clinically interesting in Essiac.

"Resonance" machines? What? Another phone number slipped to me at the hospital had me listening to a sales pitch extolling a $1,500"radionics therapy" device used to destroy tumors by resonating with the electro-biological "cancer frequency" of malignant tissues.

Right.

Not flatworms! No, it was "bacteria in the blood," the result of diet, specifically consumption of items such as chicken, that was the source of all cancer, another "doctor" explained to me over the phone from his Tijuana clinic. "We can't get the docs in the States to understand this," he intoned with weary resignation. His methodology: purge the blood through a revised diet that, among other things, eschewed chicken and mandated the consumption of lamb. Why? A devotee of this practitioner had a ready retort: "Y'ever watch chickens eat? They peck at the ground, picking up all kinds of bacteria." Oh.
 
Lamb, on the other hand, came from "root-eating" livestock that, while foraging through the subterrain, ingested the beneficent, supposedly cancer-curing below-ground nutrients central to this serum antiseptic "therapy." We could come down to the Tijuana clinic for an initial two-week stay for blood assessment and initiation of therapy. $2,500 per week. But, according to our locally referred contact-- 'he'll work it out with you if money is a problem; he's a very compassionate man. He really cares for his patients, he takes the time to listen to their concerns.'
 
In contrast to the "arrogant, narrow-minded, greedy, and indifferent" American clinicians who controlled medical practice in The States (the oft-repeated mantra of the more strident segment of the "alternative healing" movement) clearly implicit in this appeal.

The foregoing comprise a more or less representative sampling of our experience thus far with the quackery end of the alternative therapy spectrum, a distribution of propositions whose opposite terminus abuts the breadth of mainstream clinical research and practice, where methods as yet"unproven" but more logically reasonable and promising vie for acceptance by the medical establishment. In the middle lie tougher calls: does shark cartilage really shrink tumors, functioning as an angiogenesis inhibitor? (one skeptical journal article called it "the laetrile of the 90's") Hydrazine sulfate? (also reported on extensively in the mainstream clinical literature and generally-- though not uniformly-- dismissed as 'ineffective.') Nucleotide Reductase? Plant oils? Blue-green algae?

All of these unconventional therapeutic assertions-- many of which would prove to be merely unproductive, outlandish, maddening distractions-- would have to be checked out while also slogging through the vast archives of mainstream clinical literature, a quest that would take me through the most recent three years of month-by-month National Cancer Institute (NCI) hepatoma citations. Also, I began-- and continue to this day-- keyword-searching the Medline indices for anything related to Sissy's condition that might prove useful…

I used to joke to Sissy about us getting "some Healing Burgers."

 

Again, Kara Swisher Fanboy exhorts you. 

 

I set up my Xfinity box to record this 1st episode, but CNN went from Bill Maher to an hour-long "breaking news" special on the JD Vance talks on Iran that had just concluded (in failure) after 21 hours in a meeting in Pakistan. So, my Kara recording didn't take. Frustrated and irritated, I signed up for the CNN Premium Subscription ($69.99 annual) so I could watch the segment. CNN is gradually going tiered "Freemium" like a lot of network / cable / streaming news media these days.

 

I have to say, this first Kara Live Forever episode was well worth the entire annual fee. It is that good. There are reportedly to be five more, in what they now tout as "Season One."

 

UPDATE

Link here.

UPDATE: OK, I just finished listening. I feel measurably better, both physically and in terms of being better at connecting a number of important dots. Kara rocks.

 

ERRATUM

 

Is Kara "NSFW?" 

______

 

ZEKE UPDATE

 

Dr. Emanuel sums things up.

 

 

A glorious read.

 

CODA

 

Kara Swisher has the Pedal to the Metal these days

 

 

I hope y'all find all of this stuff interesting and useful.

The Apocaloptimist?

This morning I read an excellent lengthy New Yorker article (see below) prior to heading out to a noon dental appointment.

 

Interesting. Recall my prior post feauturing Laurie Segall interviewing Sam Altman. In the wake of her interview, I felt a little bit better about Altman. Then comes the NY'er piece.

 

Then, this afternoon after I got back home I ran across Kara Swisher's podcast featuring Tristan Harris. (I cited Tristan last year, BTW.)

 

Some preparatory reading: "The Intelligence Curse."

More tomorrow. I'm tired, my mouth hurts, and I'm just gonna sip some red, watch the NCAA Div I Men's Hoops Final and crash.

 

UPDATE

 

 

Watch / listen carefully.

 

AND, OF COURSE, TODAY WE AWAKE TO THIS SHIT

BACK ON TASK. THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

 

 

OK, turns out that this documentary is up on my NetFlix (run time ~91 min). I'm well into it. Excellent. I was already quite aware of many of the issues set forth, but this film is proving well worth my time.

 

And likely yours. 

 

More to come...

Where are things now in the AI market?

 Can we even know?

 

 

Hmmm...

 

 

AI Bubble-burst drawing nigh?

 

Trump's Iran debacle certainly is not helping matters. 

 

TWO NEW READS UNDERWAY

 

 

 

SEBASTIAN MALLABY

This book is about intelligence. On the one hand, it’s a portrait of a remarkable human, a chess prodigy, a Nobel laureate, a polymathic thinker. On the other hand, it tells the story of his quest to build remarkable machines: systems that are intuitive, creative, and even original. At some point in the not-so-distant future, artificial intelligence will beat human intelligence at almost every mental task, and to say this marks a watershed would be a parody of understatement. Artificial intelligence heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought, some seventy thousand years ago. 

I first met Demis Hassabis, the remarkable human, in the mid-2010s: an elfin figure with dark hair falling forward toward angular eyebrows, his face framed by standard-issue spectacles. Already a star technologist and the possessor of a comfortable fortune, he seemed much younger than his thirty-eight years. Smooth-skinned, slight of build, he came across as a phenomenally articulate youth rather than a staid adult. He would appear onstage at conferences dressed in a boyish crewneck and loose slacks. “AI is the technology of making machines smart,” he began one typical performance in 2015, stating his premise in the plainest form possible. 

What he said next was what got your attention. Hassabis embarked on an explanation of his life’s purpose: the pursuit of machine superintelligence. Growing up in North London, he had decided that two fields of inquiry stood out: physics and neuroscience. Physics explains the external world, from the behavior of particles to the functioning of the universe. Neuroscience explains the internal world—the neurons and synapses and electrical pulses that constitute intelligence. Later, at some point in his twenties, Hassabis had concluded that neuroscience was the more important of the two: The internal trumped the external. Intelligence is fundamental; it is the root of all else. It is the mechanism through which humans perceive reality. 

Still speaking plainly, as though he were saying that he’d wash the dishes after lunch, Hassabis invoked the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. 

“The mind interprets the world,” Kant had declared. 

“It’s the mind that creates our reality around us,” Hassabis now said, by way of emphasis. 

The question was how to comprehend intelligence. Here Hassabis pivoted to a second intellectual giant, the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. “What I cannot build, I do not understand,” Feynman famously remarked, and Hassabis clicked on a controller in his hand to display a slide of the great physicist. Following Feynman’s dictum, in order to grasp human intelligence, scientists would have to build an artificial analog: a machine that mimicked human thinking. AI’s practical or profit-making potential was a secondary concern. The youthful figure on the stage wanted “to understand our own minds better.”…

Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (pp. xiii-xiv). (Function). Kindle Edition.

MATT KAPLAN 

Just as Galileo endured because of the kindness of Ferdinando II de’ Medici, so too did Mary because of the kindness (and ferocity) of Jack, and Carl Woese because of the support of Ralph Wolfe. Just as Lister’s students helped him to survive, so too did David help Kati when times were tough. Just as Michaelis bravely tested Semmelweis’s ideas when he was being attacked, so too has Prasenjit Dey tested Betsy’s findings in his own lab and made remarkable discoveries. 

That might all sound very poetic and idealistic. To a certain extent, it is. There is no getting around the fact that the systems within science need to be altered in a manner that reduces competition and nurtures creativity. Reform must happen. With that said, we are creatures with a love of stories. Since the first tales were told around fires, we have loved our heroes and fondly dreamed of stepping into their shoes. Those instincts have not changed. This is something that we must take advantage of. 

Science journalists, myself included, have a long history of reporting the latest scientific discoveries. This is important, but it is no longer enough. If we want to change the way scientists behave, we need to talk more about heroes both in the pages of books like this one and within the science sections of newspapers like The Economist. We need to be shouting the stories of scientists who are doing the right thing from the rooftops. When they call out fraud, refuse to be manipulated by perverse incentives, and support those with unorthodox ideas in their communities, we need to celebrate their actions. We have done a good job with Kati, but there are so many more people out there whose heroics remain unknown. We need to find them. We need to prioritize telling their tales. We need to do this. Now.

Kaplan, Matt. I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right (pp. 232-233). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Sebastion came to me via an Atlantic article. Matt via a new book review in Science Magazine. The Infinity Machine goes to current digitech issue, as explored by Laurie Segal above with Sam Altman.I Told You So is predominantly a work of science history focused in particular on the overlapping socioeconomic / cultural-political ramifications of the science domain across millenia.

 

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

    

The Paddington Road Greycare Center is fully staffed and fully attended today. Meee-mo & Pop on duty. Baltimore city schools are closed today in observance of Passover, so Calvin has an off day. He’s assisting with little brother Arlo. 

apropos, 

 

"Pop, can I use your iPhone?"—Calvin

 

'eh?

 

See Science Magazine:

Digital child safety at the frontier: From evidence to action

Easy Money + Gilded Rage = Stealing the Future

 

Eyeball deep in David Z. Morris at the moment, in the wake of Messrs McKenzie & Silverman. Badasses, all of them. Individually and topically in concert.

 

 

Got onto David here: Artifice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Sam Bankman Fried ("SBF")? Yeah. Lordy. Been there, done that.

DAVID BEGINS:

I spent almost every weekday in October of 2023 in a courtroom in Lower Manhattan, listening to experts, lawyers, and first-hand witnesses recount the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and prove Sam Bankman-Fried’s responsibility for it to a jury. 

 

But while this book recounts Bankman-Fried’s crimes in detail, it is ultimately focused on his ideas. Bankman-Fried, for a time known affectionately as “SBF,” was deeply tied to concepts and movements with names like Effective Altruism, determinism, utilitarianism, extinction risk, Rationalism, and longtermism. 

 

These buzzwords have been developed into increasingly formal systems by professional philosophers and ethicists at elite universities, and further amplified through a network of institutions well-funded by technology billionaires. But they stand for much deeper, much older structures of thought: a historical teleology that I here call “techno-utopianism.” 

 

The superficial optimism of Effective Altruism was fundamental to the public fascination with Bankman-Fried that helped fuel his lightning-fast ascent. But its deeper biases — to which he was perhaps uniquely vulnerable — also helped Bankman-Fried rationalize his crimes, and its superficial logics created the blind spots that led to his downfall. 

 

This book is not a work of journalism, but of forensic philosophy. It asks how techno-utopian ideas, so loudly declaring their intent to do good, instead led to one of the largest financial frauds in American history — and whether their broader sway in twenty-first-century politics and society may lead to similar results, on a much larger scale.

Morris, David. Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia (pp. 8-9). (Function). Kindle Edition.
  

 

UPDATE

 

Sam Bankman-Fried's mother has recently submitted a 64-page appeal brief on her son's behalf:

I am a law professor at Stanford, where I have taught for close to forty years. Before that, I was a practicing lawyer in New York and clerked on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. I am also Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother. Because of my professional life, I have witnessed the events of the past three years through two very different sets of eyes. Someday I may write about what it has been like to live through this experience as a parent. Today I write as a lawyer, about the government’s legal case against Sam and the other FTX defendants. I would have much preferred to leave this task to others. But the spectacle that has surrounded the FTX case since day one has not been conducive to serious, independent thought or attention to facts. It has also imposed a very high cost on anyone who publicly expressed doubts about whether justice has been done in this case. I hope this will change in time, and others will come forward to supplement or amend what I have written here. Most of what I say below is documented in the trial transcript and public records posted on the official court docket. I have provided cites for those who would like to follow up on their own… 

Many observers see a fairly obvious Trump pardon effort ploy here. The further along I get in David's book, the more I tend to agree.

____

 

More broadly with respect to FinSec / crypto fraud, we must not forget our Sorkin. Andrew interviewed SBF remotely via Zoom for his "Dealbook" program in the wake of the FTX crash. David's analytic recounting of that conversation is riveting.

 

 

Also, we also ought revisit some Adam Becker.

 

More shortly...