The KHIT Blog: voting

Showing posts with label voting. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Vote early if you can.

We just did.

We dropped them off ni person this afternoon.

SEPT 26TH UPDATE

40 days to the November 5th elections. Will we have one of more significant "October Surprise(s)?"

Putin hits UKR nuke plants?
Israel and Hezbollah throw down all the way, perhaps dragging us in?
Jack Smith J6 revelations that move the needle?

And so forth. My anxiety will only grow.

Two new Kindle edition resources I just downloaded:

I have long had both in print. Have gotten much use out of the Oxford Dictionary.

But, the 78+ yr old eyes are getting increasingly bad. I've increasingly purchased Kindle editions of hardcopy books I already have.

More in a bit. Gotta go run and pick up Calvin...

I'M BACK

apropos of the prior post—in particular the Ari Berman book Minority Rule—it became clear that my end-to-end familiarity with The Federalist Papers was significantly lacking. Consequently, I will slog attentively through all 544 pages / 85 Volumes of them. I've repeatedly studied the entirety of the U.S. Constitution with great care. Aspects of it were central to my 1998 Ethics & Policy Studies Graduate Thesis (large PDF: judge my cred for yourselves).

Can't say the same about the Federalist Papers. If you're gonna thrust & parry with "originalist" advocates, being well-read in the FP seems warranted. I am remiss in that regard.

Similiarly, I will study every page of the 433 pgs of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

Also, re: the prior post, I can see that the "AI Artificial Arguments to Combat Conspiracy Thinking" is gonna require a good bit more close evaluation prior to proffering any conclusions (however tentative). With less than a month and a half to election day, this kind of thing will have no impac anyway. Other exigencies elevate, 'eh?

Off-topic: Just watched S4-E4 of "Slow Horses" on Apple TV+. Wow.

Fixin' to go to bed.

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

"Owning one puts you in a very exclusive Club."

Lordy, Mercy.

ALSO, FOR YOU LADIES

xoxoxo

More to come...

_________

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

The 2022 U.S. midterm elections

My wife and I have voted early, hand-delivering our early voting ballots Sunday evening at a secure downtown election location. Use it or lose, folks.

___

NEW BOOK RECOMMENDATION

Saw this touted on Science-Based Medicine.

Tomasz Witkowski is a Polish psychologist and skeptic (founder of the Polish Skeptics Club) who is well known for pointing out the lack of scientific evidence behind most of what psychologists do. I have reviewed three of his previous books Psychology Gone Wrong: The Dark Sides of Science and Therapy, Psychology Led Astray: Cargo Cult in Science and Therapy, and Shaping Psychology: Perspectives on Legacy, Controversy and the Future of the Field. He has done it again, and this time he extends his myth busting to topics outside psychology. His new book Fads, Fakes, and Frauds, fulfills the promise of its subtitle, exploding myths in culture, science, and psychology. He shows that many of our popular beliefs are false and explains how they are biased by history and evolution. Amazon offers the book in two formats, Kindle and paperback.

We too readily accept whatever we are taught. Not Tomasz Witkowski! He sets an example that we all should follow: he questions everything! His questions lead him to discover that much of psychology, culture, and even science itself are not supported by credible evidence. This book will challenge you to reconsider some of your most cherished beliefs, to realize that much of what you thought you knew is wrong. Prepare to be discombobulated by his revelations…

Looks very interesting. I'm already buried several books on the law at the moment. The pile never diminishes. Gonna have to ramp up.

Finished the Wehle, Cross, and Trachtman books. All of this goes to my recurrent "Deliberation Science" riff. Add that stash, my priors reads going to jury "deliberations."

Not too long ago, my son Matt served on a Baltimore criminal trial jury.

Prior post of "deliberation" relevance? "Who wouldn't want to be influential? Seriously?"

__________

Thursday, October 13, 2022

Less than a month to the US midterm elections

My 2022 midterm ballot, iPhone shot

My wife and I will continue to spend hours vetting everything and everyone presented on our ballots. Do likewise. Our democracy itself is at stake this time. That is not hyperbole.

__________

Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

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

Quotes

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

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

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

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

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

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

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

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

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

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

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

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

- Dara O’Briain

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

- Richard Reece, MD

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

- Michael L. Millenson

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

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

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

- Al Lewis

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

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

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

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

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

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

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

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

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

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

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

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

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

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

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

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

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

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

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

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

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

Search the KHIT Blog