The KHIT Blog: recursive self improvement

Showing posts with label recursive self improvement. Show all posts

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Pace yourselves?

Full essay here.

Sorry for not pacing my Snark Reflex. Will the autonomous Pace Car be a Tesla or a Waymo? (Or, a BYD?)

Dunno, man...

So, I was channel-surfing just a bit ago, looking for a football game ('Bama), and ran across Smerconish.

Richard A. Clarke (@about 5:05)? Haven't heard his name in a while. Nice.

Good Harbor Consulting.

Look, I'm just an addled 80 yr-old smartass long out to pasture (now wrassling wth Parkinson's), but, back before indoor plumbing I was an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer, risk mgmt analyst (digital industrial maintenance diagnostics, credit risk, healthcare), wrote 3GL/4GL code and SOPs in a forensic-level environmental radiation lab in Oak Ridge, did a Master's in Applied Ethics, and was blessed to do a fun 5 yr adjunct stint teaching collegiate Critical Thinking. My Sheet is credible. Not interested adding more noise (unless I get too deep into the Bourdeaux).

I've done a first pass through Dario's essay. Lots to consider. It's getting a ton of "ink" today.

More shortly. Gotta Roll Tide...

UPDATE

KARA IS NOT AMUSED

JACOB WARD

Dario Amodei Wants a Time Out

Jacob concludes:

…I think one of the broader critiques I have for this whole category of principle-writing and letter-signing is that it’s being done by people like Amodei who, in spite of advice from some of the top ethical and political minds in the nation, somehow seem to believe that we can pre-program ethics into these systems, and also seem to believe the arbiter should be an AI company plus a nonprofit evaluator the AI company chose. As my guests John Patty and Elizabeth Penn explained in my interview with them, you can’t find two people on Earth who would agree on what those ethics should be. So claiming you’re going to handle that for everyone is bonkers

It may be that we get to the end of this wild, unchecked period in AI development and discover that we do have the restraint, the intellectual curiosity, and the philosophical rigor to pilot this stuff in a way that amplifies the best parts of being human. But if industry cooperation alone is how we pull that off, it’ll be the first time in history that’s the case. It’s going to take lawsuits, injunctions, trade deals, horrific poll numbers, and presidential campaigns to put AI in its rightful place as a useful tool that doesn’t make us into the worst version of ourselves, much less wipe us all out.

'eh?

BTW: keyword search "Ben Goertzel." Dude is way above my (now old coot part-time Walmart Greeter) pay grade. I hope he will soon weigh in on this AI "Pace" stuff.

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
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Saturday, September 12, 2026

Pace yourselves?