"ocracies," "archies," and "isms"

Not too long ago, AAAS' Science Magazine published an article entitled "The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation." 

That there are more opportunities than ever for citizens to express their views may be, counterintuitively, a problem facing democracy—the sheer quantitative overabundance overloads policymakers and citizens, making it difficult to detect the signal amid the noise. This overload has been accompanied by marked decline in civility and argumentative complexity. Uncivil behavior by elites and pathological mass communication reinforce each other. How do we break this vicious cycle? Asking elites to behave better is futile so long as there is a public ripe to be polarized and exploited by demagogues and media manipulators. Thus, any response has to involve ordinary citizens; but are they up to the task? Social science on “deliberative democracy” offers reasons for optimism about citizens' capacity to avoid polarization and manipulation and to make sound decisions. The real world of democratic politics is currently far from the deliberative ideal, but empirical evidence shows that the gap can be closed...

My initial reactions were [1] "is there really a 'science' of deliberation?"* and [2] the sanguine assumption of the continuing global 1st-place socioeconomic-political preferability of "democracy" might just be a bit shaky.

* how about "The Science of Compassion?" The "Science of Success?" etc.

"ocracies," "archies," and "isms"


Think of a large, multi- (large and small) category Venn Diagram, in no particular order (and comprised of significant conceptual / semantic overlaps). e.g.,

Democracy
Meritocracy
Epistocracy
Technocracy
Plutocracy
Aristocracy
Kleptocracy
Kakistocracy
Autocracy
Theocracy
Patriarchy
Monarchy
Oligarchy
Republicanism
Capitalism
Mercantilism
Colonialism
Classic Liberalism
Neoliberalism
Conservatism
Egalitarianism
Libertarianism
Secularism
Socialism
Populism
Nationalism
Multiculturalism
Authoritarianism
Imperialism
Totalitarianism
Fascism
Despotism
Communism
Anarchism

You get the idea. I'm sure I missed some. And, many of the foregoing obviously coexist contemporaneously. This was just off the top of my head.

Moreover, we know that many, if not most, of the foregoing terms get cavalierly tossed around as political epithets.

I am always reminded of my cite of Frase's "Four Futures." Add another "ism?"--"Exterminism."

Notwithstanding the post-Citizens United U.S. regime of "one-dollar-one-vote," count me firmly in the actual "democracy" camp (with an egalitarian bias). Count me also a believer in the proposition that science is crucial to democracy. to wit, citing my current read in progress "Why Trust Science"--

[Dr. Oreskes] provides a fascinating discussion of the difficult question—vital to the role of science in a democracy—of non-expert opinion and how scientists should respond to it. Non-scientists—from nurses and midwives to farmers and fishermen—often have information or evidence relevant to science-based decisions. Patients have vital information about their symptoms. Yet, “Just because someone is close to an issue does not mean he or she understands it; conventional notions of objectivity assume distance for just this reason.” The cases help illustrate and sharpen the distinction between reliable scientific authority and the interest and ideology-based pseudoscientific dissent we witness surrounding climate change, evolution, and vaccines. [pg 6]

Scientists are supposed to be authorities, but the concern here is that this can slide into arrogance and dogmatism. It can slide into intellectual authoritarianism; Termier’s authoritarian status could make it difficult for others to question his theory. The spirit of critical inquiry would be suppressed and scientific progress would be impeded, because no one would feel free to challenge or improve upon the idea.

The American preference for inductive methodology was thus linked by its advocates to American political ideals of pluralism, egalitarianism, open-mindedness, and democracy. They believed that Termier’s approach was typically European—that European science, like European culture, tended toward the anti-democratic. American geologists thus explicitly linked their inductive methodology to American democracy and culture, arguing that the inductive method was the appropriate one for America because it refused to grant a privileged position to any theory and therefore any theorist. Deduction was consistent with autocratic European ways of thinking and acting; induction was consistent with democratic American ways of thinking and acting. Their methodological preferences were grounded in their political ideals. [pg 84]

[W]ith the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the international scientific community began a sustained philosophical construction of free scientific inquiry as a guarantee of healthy democracy, a uniquely pure endeavor. [pg 167]

With the current rise of Trumpism, the stakes have become rather existential.

UPDATE

From the always excellent Naked Capitalism:

Dude, where’s my democracy?

Democracy is unwell, so it is said. In America and other leading democracies citizens are apparently increasingly critical of the concept of liberal democracy. We argue this is a misdiagnosis; citizens are not critical of liberal democracy – it is the lack of democracy which is the problem.

Citizens are attracted to strong leaders (so-called “populists”) which are prepared to challenge the prevailing system, not because they distrust democracy, but because they perceive the prevailing system is fundamentally undemocratic.

The solution is not further to limit democracy for fear of popular leaders, but rather to increase democratic accountability, and therefore legitimacy...

Always read the comments there under the posts. Also excellent.

TANGENTIALLY

"The danger of science denial."

I LOL'd at this at 10:25

“We hate Big Pharma. We hate Big Government. We don’t trust The Man, and we shouldn’t. Our healthcare system sucks. It’s cruel to millions of people. It’s absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-deadening to those of us who can even afford it. So we run away from it, and where do we run? We LEAP into the arms of Big Placebo.”

Watch all of it. Time well spent.

ERRATUM

Just bought and downloaded a new book:

Dr. Makary is an advocate for health care innovation, writing in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He has written extensively on organizational culture, the science of measuring quality in medicine, and health care reform. Dr. Makary is principle investigator of a Robert Wood Foundation Grant to lower health care costs in the U.S. by creating physician-endorsed measures of appropriate medical care and directs the national “Improving Wisely” project to reduce waste in medicine. He speaks nationally on disruptive innovation in health care.

I'd cited his prior book "Unaccountable" back in 2012. My wife just saw him on CSPAN and alerted me to his new book.

 

apropos, see my prior post "Can Medicine Be Cured?"
_____________

More to come...

The Juul of Denial

From The Atlantic:

Vaping Falls in Trump’s Crosshairs
A national ban on flavored e-cigarettes is coming.

After a year of regulatory pressure from the Food and Drug Administration and weeks of alarming news about Americans hospitalized with a sometimes lethal illness linked to vaporizers, the Trump administration and FDA officials are poised to take unprecedented action on e-cigarettes. In remarks delivered in the Oval Office earlier today, Donald Trump announced that his administration is working on “very strong recommendations” for the vaping market, including a total ban on flavored e-cigarettes.

“We can’t allow people to get sick, and we can’t have our youth be so affected,” Trump said. His concerns echo those of many public-health advocates in the United States, who say that e-cigarettes’ kid-friendly flavors like mango and mint have stoked sharp increases in American adolescent vaping in the past five years. In a 2018 survey by the National Institute of Health, almost 21 percent of U.S. high-school students reported using a nicotine vape in the past 30 days, a rate nearly double that of the same period in 2017.

The popularity of vaping has helped erase the gradual decline in youth tobacco use that the country has seen in the past 20 years, worrying parents and forcing educators to take desperate measures, like removing doors from school restrooms—a popular location for surreptitious use of e-cigarettes…

 And, well, of course, there's an "American Vaping Association" lobbyist group out there now having a policy aneurism over stringent regulatory prospects.

"Wherever there is a battle that will impact consumer choice and the ability of businesses to sell reduced harm products, the American Vaping Association (AVA) is there to help.

Since beginning operations in early-2014, the AVA has emerged as one of the most vocal voices arguing for fair and sensible policy towards vapor products and electronic cigarettes. The AVA has not been shy to identify and criticize those trying to destroy the growing vaping industry, whether they be governmental agencies or health activist groups…"

How noble. From their Twitter account: "#Vaping Saves Lives."

From the AVA Facebook page:

Yeah, sure.

Just for grins, I logged in to my Guidestar account and looked up their most recently available (2017) IRS-990. A chump change outfit as lobby orgs go; $322k gross revenue, all execs reportedly working gratis.

All "zero hours." What does that tell you? Need I really explain? (One clue is in their IRS-990 "Schedule O.")

BTW, they're a 501(c)(4), a "social welfare organization." Lordy. SMH.

On Instagram:

Right. Wonder what Dr. Oreskes would have to say about this issue?

"Vaping industry panics..."

 Try to imagine my lack of sympathy.

A BIT OF HISTORY: WHO SAID THIS?

"I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive..."

Wait for it,

Gutfreund placed a call to one of Salomon‘s most influential directors, Warren Buffett. Buffett was renowned as one of Wall Street’s most intelligent investors. His prognostications could move markets, and often did. He wasn’t a quick buck Artist – no raiding for Warren Buffett. Buffett invested the old fashioned way: buy and hold. He had bought a 12% holding in Salomon the previous fall, rescuing Gutfreund from the hostile overtures of Ron Perlman. 

When Buffett came on the line, Gutfreund put him on speakerphone and laid out the situation in detail. What should they do?

Go for it, Buffett advised. Once one of RJR‘s largest shareholders, he knew tobacco and liked it. “I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business,“ he said. “It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty.” [Barbarians at the Gates, 1990, page 218]

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More to come...

18 years ago today

BREAKING: U.S. healthcare has been SOLVED!

I recently saw this on Facebook, so it must be true.

Meet the man who is disrupting the $8 TRILLION healthcare industry.

For years, health professionals have been doing their best to help people improve their health. Sadly, working “within the system” doesn’t pan out for many of them.

Insurance issues. Overwhelming amounts of admin. And some clients not willing to truly do what’s needed to improve their condition.

All of that, combined with little to no business or marketing education makes it tough for many health professionals to build thriving practices (online or offline).

But one man is changing this.

By equipping health professionals with a simple business model to predictably attract their ideal clients and serve them at a higher level without sacrificing their OWN time, happiness, or health in the process…

...Yuri Elkaim, founder of Healthpreneur®, is revolutionizing how health professionals are using the internet to grow their businesses.

After spending more than 7 years (and a lot of ups and downs) building his own health and fitness business to great heights - including helping more than 500,000 people to better health, writing a #2 New York Times bestselling book, building a Youtube channel to more than 284,000 subscribers, and a blog that gets close to 1 MILLION unique visitors per month…

Yuri quickly realized that following “common” advice for building a business - online or offline - simply doesn’t work as promised for health professionals.

The blogging, vlogging, endless social media, creating courses, word of mouth, and even writing books to get one’s “name out there” is a path to despair for many practitioners who would rather spend more of their time coaching and serving their clients rather than becoming internet marketers.

As a result, Yuri experimented with and eventually perfected a smarter, simpler, and faster way of getting more clients and building a leaner, more systemized coaching practice.

In fact, there are only 4 steps.

There’s no fancy tech, you don’t need a website, and you don’t even need an online following.

But you do need to have expertise and confidence to transform someone’s health.

And this week, Yuri is hosting a free online workshop where he’ll show you everything you need to know to put this simple 4-step blueprint to work to grow your business (without burning out in the process) within the next few months.

Grab your spot here right now: healthpreneurgroup.com/practitioners

Okeee-dokeee, then.

Go to that link, and this is all you see.

And, this is the concomitant URL that appears:

marketing.healthpreneurgroup.com/7fighbb-practitioners-go

OK, back this part out:

7fighbb-practitioners-go

And click the remaining marketing.healthpreneurgroup.com

And you end up forthwith here, at ClickFunnel.com

Spend some time watching their videos. Quality entertainment, that stuff. The jokes just write themselves.

Hmmm... OK, "healthpreneurgroup.com"

Let's go there.

What is Healthpreneur and How Can It Help You?

Healthpreneur® is the industry-leading coaching and training company for health professionals who want to get more clients and scale their practices and coaching businesses, while deeply impacting their clients and providing the income and freedom to live an amazing life.

We do so by helping you implement and master 3 key areas – ATTRACT, CONVERT, and DELIVER (and the 9 “accelerators” within them) that allow you to build a “legacy”, not just a business.

Sign up today! Healthcare has been solved! Is this a great country or what?

(BTW, bro' it's closer to FOUR trillion $ this year, not "eight.")

 CLICKFUNNELS.COM

The direct, transformative core relevance to the healthcare space could not be more obvious, right?

OF NOTE

Wonder if "Yuri" and his peeps will be presenting at Heakth2con next week? A primo audience, I would think.

YET ANOTHER BOOK ON DECK

My latest Science Magazine issue just came in the mail. This book is therein reviewed. From the Amazon blurb: 

Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don't? In this landmark book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength—and the greatest reason we can trust it...

Ahhh... "science." Add another book to the pile.

"WHY TRUST SCIENCE?" UPDATE

Naomi's book will not be released until October 22nd. That is gonna make me crazy.

A bit more info:

“Naomi Oreskes’ research focuses on the Earth and environmental sciences, with a particular interest in understanding scientific consensus and dissent.”

to wit:

Link.

apropos, see my prior "Baltimore Code Red" post.

Indeed. And, is there in fact a "Science of deliberation?"

Well, I have a ton of other books to study 'til Naomi's book comes out, but, [bleep].

UPDATE

First, I asked Princeton University Press for a comp pre-pub review galley of Why Trust Science? and they gave me one. Extremely grateful. Stay tuned.

…As extreme weather events become more common, sea levels rise, and climate-induced migrations flow across borders, nations around the world confront mounting costs and humanitarian crises. Yet so-called experts do not always agree. A local television meteorologist may report that it is merely “some speculation from scientists” that global warming is contributing to extreme weather events, such as the “polar vortex” that hit the Upper Midwest and Northeast of the United States in late January 2019. On another channel, a scientist at a well-regarded research center insists that “we know why . . . . It’s all because of human activities increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that trap a lot more heat down by the surface.”…

In Why Trust Science? Professor Naomi Oreskes provides clear and compelling answers to the questions of when and why scientific findings are reliable. She explains the basis for trust in science in highly readable prose, and illustrates her argument with vivid examples of science working as it should, and as it should not, on matters central to our lives. Readers will find here a vigorous defense of the trustworthiness of scientific consensus based not on any particular method or on the qualities of scientists, but on science’s character as a collective enterprise.

A distinguished scientist and historian of science, Professor Naomi Oreskes has also emerged as one of the world’s clearest and most influential voices on the role of science in society and the reality of man-made climate change… [pp. 1-2]

Second, Dr. Oreskes is an author of a very interesting prior book:

"Now a powerful documentary from the acclaimed director of Food Inc., Merchants of Doubt was one of the most talked-about climate change books of recent years, for reasons easy to understand: It tells the controversial story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. The same individuals who claim the science of global warming is "not settled" have also denied the truth about studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it."

Next,  NBC News has announced the establishment of a "Climate Unit," and will run a "Climate in Crisis" series next week.

NBC News has created a new Climate Unit dedicated to covering the most important issues affecting the environment globally. As part of the Climate Unit's debut, NBC News, MSNBC, Telemundo and NBC News Digital will kick off "Climate in Crisis," a week-long series focused on climate issues, beginning Sunday, September 15.

For the series, Al Roker traveled to Kulusuk, Greenland where he flew with NASA on a first-of-its-kind Oceans Melting Greenland mission, which examined the role the ocean plays in melting glaciers. Roker spent days studying the climate's effect on Greenland's coastline. His reports will air throughout the week on TODAY.

Additionally, Lester Holt will travel to Alaska, where he lived as a child when his father served in the U.S. Air Force, to cover the impact of climate on the region's landscape. He will take an in-depth look at the effect of climate on Alaska's natural wonders, including the Portage Glacier, and he'll also explore the thawing Alaskan permafrost threatening communities. Holt's special segment will air on Nightly News Monday, September 16...

_____________

More to come...

Baltimore Code Red: climate change, public health, and environmental justice

Interesting reporting by NPR, Capital News Service, and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Great job.

Below, on the right side, the green-shaded "income" map, upper midline scraggly "L" shaped area in the darkest green. That's where Cheryl and I now live (point of the red arrow, just west of York Road) in the "Homeland District," north of nearby Johns Hopkins University and south of equally nearby Towson University.

I can attest to the stultifying heat this summer in Baltimore. There were days I never went outside at all, it was just too hot. And our affluent neighborhood is a heavily wooded, bucolic, relatively cooler "shire."

"Relatively."

Having lived in Las Vegas for 21 years (1992-2013), I am hardly a stranger to blistering heat, but this is way different. And, it's only likely to get worse across a breadth of climate parameters.

I could not recommend the Code Red reporting more highly. Kudos to the Howard Center, CSN, and NPR.

URBAN HEAT ISLANDS VIVIDLY ILLUSTRATE the price humans will pay in the world’s growing climate crisis. With an abundance of concrete and little shade, they get hotter faster and stay hotter longer. And the people who live there are often sicker, poorer and less able to protect themselves.

Rising temperatures in these neighborhoods will mean more trips to the hospital for heart, kidney and lung ailments. Drugs to treat mental illness and diabetes won’t work as well. Pregnant women will give birth to children with more medical problems.

Solutions exist. But growing more trees, repairing the frayed social fabric of a neighborhood or rebuilding streets and sidewalks to reflect heat are expensive — and take time. For cities like Baltimore, the clock is ticking…

Speaking of "investigative journalism," recall my prior citing of this fine book (scroll down in the linked post):

I will have to email James (he gave me that book). He is surely aware of the Howard Center (he's at Stanford).

apropos of our climate issues, from one of my current reads:

...[P]eople with low consumptions want to enjoy the high consumption lifestyle themselves. They have two ways of achieving it. First, governments of developing countries consider an increase in living standards, including consumption rates, as a prime goal of national policy. Second, tens of millions of people in the developing world are unwilling to wait to see whether their government can deliver high living standards within their lifetime. Instead, they seek the first world lifestyle now, by emigrating to the first world, with or without permission: especially by emigrating to Western Europe and the US, and also to Australia; and especially from Africa and parts of Asia, and also from Central and South America. It's proving impossible to keep out the immigrants. Each such transfer of a person from a low consumption to a high consumption country raises world consumption rates, even though most immigrants don't succeed immediately and increasing their consumption by the entire factor of 32.

Is everybody's dream of achieving a first world lifestyle possible? Consider the numbers. Multiply current national numbers of people by national per capita consumption rates (the oil, metals, water etc.) for each country, and add up those products over the whole world. The resulting sum is the current world consumption rate of that resource. Now repeat this calculation, but with all developing countries achieving a first world consumption rate of up to 32 times higher than their current ones, and no change in national populations or in anything else about the world. The result is that world consumption rates will increase by 11 fold. That's equivalent to a world population of about 80 billion people with the present distribution of per capita consumption rates.

There are some optimists who claim that we can support a world with 9.5 billion people. But I haven't met any optimist mad enough to claim that we can support a world with the equivalent of 80 billion people. Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free market economies, they too can become like the first world today. That promise is utterly impossible, a cruel hoax. We are already having difficulty supporting a first world lifestyle even now, when only 1 billion people out of the world's 7.5 billion people enjoy it.

We Americans often refer to growing consumption in China and other developing countries as "a problem," and we wish that the "problem" didn't exist. Well, of course the so-called problem will continue: the Chinese and the people of other developing countries are just trying to enjoy the consumption rates that we already enjoy. They wouldn't listen if we were so silly as to tell them not to try to do what we are already doing. The only sustainable outcome for our globalized world that China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, African countries, and other developing countries will accept is one in which consumption rates and living standards are more nearly equal around the world. But the world doesn't have enough resources to sustainably support the current first world, yet alone the developing world, at current first world levels. Does that mean that we are guaranteed to end up in disaster?
Note: we could have a stable outcome in which first world and other countries converged on consumption rates considerably below current first world rates. Most Americans would object: there is no way that we will sacrifice our living standards just for the benefit of those people out there in the rest of the world! As Dick Cheney said, "the American way of life is non-negotiable." But the cruel realities of world resource levels guaranteed that the American way of life will change; those realities of world resources cannot be negotiated out of existence. We Americans certainly will sacrifice our consumption rates, whether we decide to do so or not, because the world can't sustain our current rates... [Jarrod Diamond, Upheaval, pages 413 – 415]

More; I just finished this book yesterday.

In the past the pace of change was slow and incremental, but over the last century it has become fast and furious. Global temperature is rising, along with unusual weather patterns. Forests are burning. Deserts are expanding. The seas are rising. The rate of species extinction is accelerating.

Many alarmed observers have called for efforts to “save the planet” by reversing, or at least slowing, the changes we have wrought. Others, though, have been swayed by the belief system of climate change deniers who insist that the relevant research is a hoax.

The astrophysicist Adam Frank believes that those concerned with our current situation are right to worry. Human actions, he says, are indeed having adverse consequences, and, he argues, are on target to drastically modify the physical and biological constitution of the Earth. But we won’t destroy it. Quoting Lynn Margulis, originator of the endosymbiotic theory of multicellular life, Frank says: “Gaia is a tough bitch.” Our planet, Frank reminds us, has survived significant geophysical disasters and mass extinctions in the past and will persist. But if we don’t make corrections soon, it may not persist in a way that will support the current configuration of organisms, including us.

Bacteria and archaea, the ultimate survivors, will surely make it. Large multicellular organisms with voracious energy appetites may have a harder time. We know from past mass extinctions that opportunities arise for those who survive. The biological experiments that result will likely create a very different profile of life on Earth. And without us mucking around the way we do, the natural order of things might reach a more stable equilibrium. The philosopher Todd May, pondering such issues, recently asked, “Would human extinction be a tragedy?” He concluded that the world might well be better off without us. But his key question was, Would a world without our kind be a tragedy, given that we have achieved such remarkable things as a species?

Autonoetic consciousness is ultimately personal and selfish, and at its worst moments, narcissistic. Self-consciousness, according to Christophe Menant, is also the root of evil. At the same time it may be our sole hope for a future.

With our autonoetically conscious minds, we have constructed conceptual guidelines, such as morality and ethics, to help make difficult decisions, for example, about our way of life. Only self-conscious minds can come to the realization, as Todd May’s mind did, that we have an obligation to confront our selfish nature for the good of humankind as a whole. But in the end, this is a value judgment, one based on the assumption that our achievements are special.

Autonoesis allows us to care about our differences, and bemoan their possible demise. There’s nothing wrong with that. But perhaps we can sustain some version of our way of life without asking too much from other organisms. Doing so might well avert drastic changes in the configuration of life—the balance of biological power—that climactic change can bring. Remember, small mammals with low energy needs rose to the top of the food chain when conditions became less favorable for larger, energy-demanding, reptilian predators that had dominated with abandon.

We persist as individuals only if we persist as a species. We don’t have time for biological evolution to come to the rescue—it’s too slow a process. We have to depend on the more rapid avenues of change—cognitive and cultural evolution, which, in turn, depend on our autonoetic brains and their choices. In the end, it is indeed consciousness in which we must place our trust.

LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves (pp. 377-380). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

'eh?

I am soon to again be a grandfather. What kind of world will my grandson inherit?

One specific area of journalism I hope takes root at The Howard Center is that of credible and effective "Science Journalism." In a time of rampant aggressive denialism, the need is increasingly acute. The Code Red effort is a nice step in that direction.

BTW, see my February post "Selling Science."

UPDATE

Baltimore inner harbor: What's in the water?

ANOTHER UPDATE: IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT INCREASING HEAT

The world is getting hotter, but climate change doesn’t mean bitter cold weather will disappear.

Cold weather causes serious, life-altering problems for people with chronic health conditions.

In Baltimore, low-income people struggling to pay heating bills in drafty homes are most at risk, and the government is struggling to protect them.

Read all of it here.

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More to come... #CoveringClimateNow

Indu Subaiyah speaks on the digital health IT space

Indu rocks!
___

UPDATE: Rx DTC ADS

I have never liked them. From STATnews:

I continue to wonder what percentage of our NHE goes to direct-to-consumer Rx?
_____________

Transformative information technology?

The other day I saw some quick TV news in passing about this German VC-funded start-up:

Basically, non-fiction reading summaries for those lacking time to get through all of the books on their reading lists. A first fleeting reaction came to mind--digital Cliffs Notes:

Some TechCrunch news from 2018"

We are living in the information age, but that doesn’t mean that we have all the time in the world to ingest everything that we want. A startup that is aiming to help with that has raised a round of funding to grow its business. Blinkist, a Berlin-based startup that presents condensed versions of non-fiction literature — each title can be read or listened to in about 15 minutes — has raised $18.8 million in funding led by Insight Venture Partners...

For at least the past six years, since I retired from the REC/QIO, I have averaged about two non-fiction books a week, in addition to my many periodicals and online reading. I read fairly quickly, but, still, I probably require 6-8 hours per book (I am not given to fluff stuff). Potentially cutting that time burden by roughly a factor of seven or so is, at first blush, an intriguing idea.

From an interview with one of the founders:

What can we look forward to in the years to come? What can we expect from you in the coming years?
New formats! We are currently playing around with the length of the titles because many customers are interested in more detailed formats. This summer, we are also introducing a new algorithm to the app which makes title suggestions even more intelligent and individualized. With currently more than 3,000 titles, this inconspicuous change will have a big influence on how our customers use Blinkist.

What is your vision: Where do you see your company in 5 years time and what is your ultimate goal?
Our long-term goal is to establish Blinkist as the leading global brand for lifelong learning. In five years, we will offer our customers even more content – thematically as well as in formats & scope – to meet various needs along the lifelong path of learning…

"Lifelong learning." Yeah, count me in there (though, since getting my Ethics & Policy Studies Master's in 1998 at the age of 52, I characterize myself more as a "lifelong unlearner"). I am so backed up with great reading at the moment, I can hardly see straight, and my queue is not getting any shorter.

Their "vetting" / summarization process is rather ("SME?") labor-intensive.

How does this summarizing of the books work? Freelancers? Journalists? Editors?
The books are summarized in several steps by freelance authors, then by editorial experts who check them for language and facts, finally, they are recorded and produced by professional speakers and our own audio team. Blinkist takes about 10 days from the abridged text to the audio version. An average of seven people are involved in the production of a title.

At this point my Dubiety Meter is in the yellow zone. What's the durable knowledge acquisition-retention tradeoff here? Who vets the vetters? Imagine trying to do a credibly scientific "subject vs control group" relative reading comprehension / knowledge transfer efficacy study of this tech.

You couldn't do it, as a practical matter. So, all you're likely to end up with is anecdotal marketing testimonials.

Which may be all that matters for the VC funders.

Another potential problem I see is circumscribed "scalability" in light of the relatively pricey labor-intensive summarization process. Room there for "NLP/Natural Language Processing" AI assistance? The Blinkist peeps might want to look into that, even if just for the outset tech "cache" while experimenting with its utility.

SEPT 3 UPDATE: BOOK REVIEW EXAMPLE

One of my many routine book review sources is Science Based Medicine. to wit:

I read the reviews and the comments and then typically look the book up on Amazon, etc (where I read the "look inside" sample and reader assessments, particularly the negative ones). If I find it interesting and relevant, I buy it and read it myself. There is no way I would farm it out for synopsis.

The main tactical time-saving shortcut I sometimes employ, mainly with books advancing an argument (rather than just some chronology), is based on the frequent "Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, and then tell 'em what you just told them" layout of writing progression. If I trust my initial reviews and the authors have presumptive cred, I sometimes scan the table of contents, read the (preface, introduction and) opening chapter, then go to the concluding chapter (and epilogue)--figuring that everything in between comprises supporting evidence, which I can eventually get to. Depends on the book; some you have to read linearly, others can be consumed effectively by other means.

I also make extensive use of eBook "search" features to zone in on keywords and phrases of interest (quicker than hitting the indexes in hardcopy books, which I do as well).

OTHERS WEIGH IN

L.A. Times:

Op-Ed: Speed-reading with Blinkist isn’t reading at all
 
When I was young and cynical, a friend and I came up with a plan to make reading easy. We called it litzak — Muzak for literature — and the idea was to boil down great books to a sentence each. “Moby-Dick,” for instance, was reduced to: “A whale of a tale about the one that got away.”

We knew it was ridiculous. That was the intent. How could a single sentence capture the essence of a book? But as it turns out, the joke was on us. Blinkist, a website and an app, now summarizes nonfiction titles in the form of quick takes labeled “blinks.” The end result is more than one sentence, but not by much. Sarah Bakewell’s philosophical history “At the Existentialist Cafe” is broken into 11 screens of information; Michelle Obama’s memoir “Becoming” fills 13.

Litzak, in other words, although Blinkist, which has been around since 2012 and claims to “connect” 6 million readers, prefers a different spin. It calls its synopses “15-minute discoveries” to indicate how long it takes to read a Blinkist summary. “Almost none of us,” the editors assure us, “have the time to read everything we’d like to read.”…

Yeah, but,

"...a book is something we ought to live with, rather than speed through and categorize. It offers an experience as real as any other. The point of reading a book is not accumulating information, or at least not that alone. The most essential aspect is the communion between writer and reader.

The premise behind Blinkist, however, is the opposite: Reading can be, should be, measured by the efficient uptake of key ideas. Call it the Twitter of books, all those narratives in concise, digestible packages, conveniently consumable and once blinked at, toted up by the app in your “library” of instant reads."

 LOL.

From Quartz.com:

If you’re a voracious reader of new business titles, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Blinkist, the app that sells condensed versions of top-selling books.

The Berlin-based startup wants to solve what it calls the “modern reading problem,” which is that no one has much time for reading anymore. The app’s writers consume books on behalf of subscribers and reduce them to texts that take 15 minutes to zip through. The company hopes you’ll call these executive summaries “Blinks.”

If that sounds gross to you, you’re not alone. On the surface (Blinkist’s native territory) the service sounds like yet another sign of our culture’s demise. Facing short attention spans and a constant need for novelty, we’re throwing in the proverbial towel, giving up on any act that stretches our ability to focus on a narrative or go deep. (“After taking Blinkist for a spin, I think it may appeal less to a time-poor, avid reader than a sweating businessman, crouched in a golf course toilet, trying to quickly brush up on his knowledge of politics or astrophysics to impress his boss,” Sian Cain writes in her review of the app for The Guardian.)

Some argue that Blinkist and its competitors, like Scribd’s new Snapshots, can have a place in one’s life if applied judiciously. They ought to be prohibited as stand-ins for literary work, goes the thinking, but may be acceptable shortcuts for mainlining non-fiction. Some books, meanwhile, really are meant to be information delivery systems, not experiences. In theory, that should make Blinkist perfect for books about careers and entrepreneurship, which are often fat with repetitive anecdotes, bullet-pointed material, and rehashed descriptions of social psychology or management studies…

Obviously, a lot of subscribers thus far find this service "useful." I rather doubt that I would. And, it rather looks like a VC "acquisition exit" to me. Bezos or Zuck (or Google) could buy this company with pocket change.

Speaking of Jeff Bezos, I recently tweeted this.

I recently suggested to Jeff Bezos that he launch “APNN” – Amazon Prime News Network. A no-brainer, and, Trump would have an aneurism. @amazon @JeffBezos

— Bobby Gladd (@BobbyGvegas) August 30, 2019

 

ERRATUM

It will be, as always, fabulous. I lament no longer covering these conferences.
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More to come...