Jacob Ward on our rapidly expanding post-truth era

 

I followed Jacob Ward's excellent work back when he worked for NBC. Cited him here back in December 2018. I now follow him via Substack, specifically URL'd at TheRipCurrent.com.

 

This is an intriguing segment.

 

A few relevant prior riffs of mine. Search on "965."

 

UPDATE

 

Check out Jacob's Ethics Statement page. Read all 0f it, including the lengthy "A Note on Trust." Sold me, bro'.

 

Jacob's book. 

Click here

Another book jumps the rope line. Just started reading.

 

I've been gumshoeing "Artificial Intelligence" related stuff for a decade or so. 

I don't much care for Substack (notwithstanding my passive account there), a weak authoring platform with a chaotic viewer interface. Nonetheless, based on what I've viewed and read today, I will be upgrading yo a paying RipCurrent subscriber.

 

UPDATE

 

Trump just signed an E.O. re-scheduling marijuana. Jacob discusses the implications.

 

My 1998 grad thesis comprised an exhaustive examination of incoherent suspicionless workplace drug testing policies. Much of the policy idiocy remains in place, legalization initiatives notwithstanding.

 

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

My Yooper sister always sends me Christmas tree ornaments. This one is priceless.

 

Love ya, Carole.
 

More shortly... 

"EVERY oil empire thinks that THIS time js going to be different"

Jacob Ward's Rip Current

    

Jacob Ward is consistently worth your time.

One of the historical conflicts Jacob cites.

 

 I think I was 10 at the time.

 

2026 INCOHERENCE AT THE U.S. STATE DEPT

 

"Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, asserted on Monday that Greenland rightfully belonged to the United States and that the Trump administration could seize the semiautonomous Danish territory if it wanted.

“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper, the CNN host, after being asked repeatedly whether he would rule out using military force.

The remarks were part of a vocal push by Mr. Miller, long a powerful behind-the-scenes player in Trump administration policy, to justify American imperialism and a vision for a new world order in which the United States could freely overthrow national governments and take foreign territory and resources so long as it was in the national interest.

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”"

That is not the U.S. I have been a part of for 80 years.

January 6th, 2021 

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.

Yarrow Dunham and Jacob Ward

 

I just spent the past hour and seven minutes experiencing a totally wonderful discussion. Jacob Ward interviews Yale's Yarrow Dunham…

 

Relevant prior posts, "Moral Tribes." Also, I was pleased by their discussion of the work of Robert Cialdini (the "levers of influence" guy).

 

More ASAP.

PanDigicon update

Jacob Ward is killin' it of late.

    

From his Substack.

"A federal class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco accuses Perplexity AI of embedding tracking software that transmitted users’ private conversations to Meta and Google — even when users had specifically enabled the app’s Incognito mode, which explicitly promised not to track data. The complaint, Doe v. Perplexity AI Inc. (3:26-cv-02803), names all three companies as defendants and alleges violations of California privacy law.

 
The actions alleged are both ugly and, unfortunately, very common. According to the complaint, trackers download onto a user’s device the moment they log in, giving Meta and Google full access to everything typed into Perplexity’s search interface — before the query even reaches Perplexity’s own servers. This allegedly includes not only email addresses, Facebook IDs, IP addresses, and device information, which Meta and Google can theoretically pair with names and home addresses to specifically identify them. It also, according to the suit, includes the text of the exchanges between the users and the AI. The Incognito mode that Perplexity described as creating “anonymous threads” that “expire after 24 hours” offered, according to the suit, no actual protection at all.

 
It is industry practice to embed analytics code like what’s described in the suit to improve performance and offer a tailored experience. But the idea that the code could also be delivering the content of the conversations is new, and a clear violation of what people would reasonably expect..."

The "PanDigicon?" Bentham's "panopticon" for our time. Man, my privacy gumshoe stuff in now so dated. Started my privacy ranting in grad school 30 years ago. 4th Amendment scruples today? How quaint.

 

I still try to stay abreast. See expanded riff here as well.

 

  
Jacob Ward is hugely worth your time. Subscribe to his stack.

 

This just came to my attention. Too much goin' on right now. More in a bit... 

More on climate change and health impacts

From Scientific American:

Also, nice piece at The Atlantic by Vann R. Newkirk II:

Climate change can seem almost too big to fathom. Reports such as the recent National Climate Assessment and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent release have made waves by portraying the dire threats of a warming world, making the case that the fundamental fabric of humanity will be degraded without immediate action. But the scenarios—the biblical floods and droughts, the mass migrations of dispossessed people, the creeping seas and the retreating glaciers—have a way of short-circuiting the brain. It’s almost easier to despair or to will oneself into ignorance than to begin to grapple with the future. What are human lives when measured against the coming tempest?

Efforts to assess the exact human costs of climate change, however, have provided new tools for understanding the ways in which those lives will be impacted. A major report published November 28 in the public-health journal The Lancet provides predictions of how climate change is degrading human health, and how it will alter health-care systems in the future. The findings are reliably grim. But in focusing on the health-care implications and the potential damage done to people and their descendants, the report provides a firm backing to the call to climate action. The experts behind the report hope to marry the urgency of climate science with the muscle of America’s most successful and most trusted policy experiment—its public-health system…

Read all of it (including the linked resources therein). The Lancet work can be found here [pdf].

From page 21 of the Report:

Training the Next Generation and Educating the Public on the Health Impacts of Climate Change
Correlates with Lancet Working Group 5: Public and Political Engagement 

Healthcare professionals need to be educated about the ways climate change is harming Americans’ health and well-being.These professionals include physicians, nurses, public health workers, and professionals in other health sciences. 

The International Federation of Medical Students Association (IFMSA) has created a 2020 Vision for Climate-Health in Medical Curricula as a call to action to include an element of climate-health in every medical school curriculum by 2020.67 The Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE), hosted at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, has developed Climate and Health Core Competencies for health professional students which can act as an institutional guide.

Recent polls show that nearly half of Americans (49%) are “extremely or very sure” that climate change is happening versus only 7% who are “very sure” climate change is not occuring. Given that the bedrock of public health is education about threats to health, it is critical that health providers inform their patients, communities, and policy makers about the health harms of climate change. 

Evidence shows that primary care providers are among the most trusted voices to deliver this message (Figure 15), while nurses are the most trusted profession in the country across all sectors. It has been shown that educating Americans about the health impacts of climate change can increase public engagement and decrease political polarization.

Interesting.

I keep coming back to the climate change thing because if we don't get a handle on it soon, a lot of other tech topics in the health care space are going to be increasingly moot, as increasing financial resources diverted to exigent disaster relief and recovery crowd out funds for tech R&D and other economic needs.

See some of my prior climate related posts here. And, don't forget Mr. Best Words.

Look closely at the left side vertical descending bars of the Scientific American graphic above. The costs associated with adverse health impacts are projected to significantly outstrip other categories. Our time for continued denial is running out.

“The way I think about it is: Somebody was made sick yesterday from climate change, someone is being made sick today as we speak, and someone is going to be made sick from climate change tomorrow.” - Georges Benjamin, APHA

DEC 7TH UPDATE

New post at Naked Capitalism:

The Inconvenient Truth about Climate Change and the Economy

FROM MY LATEST HARDCOPY EDITION OF SCIENCE MAGAZINE

EDITORIAL
Define the human right to science
Jessica M. Wyndham, Margaret Weigers Vitullo
       
The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly will mark its 70th anniversary on 10 December. One right enshrined in the UDHR is the right of everyone to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” In 1966, this right was incorporated into the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a treaty to which 169 countries have voluntarily agreed to be bound. Unlike most other human rights, however, the right to science has never been legally defined and is often ignored in practice by the governments bound to implement it. An essential first step toward giving life to the right to science is for the UN to legally define it…

The scientific community has contributed three key insights to the ongoing UN process. One is that the right to science is not only a right to benefit from material products of science and technology. It is also a right to benefit from the scientific method and scientific knowledge, whether to empower personal decision-making or to inform evidence-based policy. In addition, access to science needs to be understood as nuanced and multifaceted. People must be able to access scientific information, translated and actionable by a nonspecialist audience. Scientists must have access to the materials necessary to conduct their research, and access to the global scientific community. Essential tools for ensuring access include science education for all, adequate funding, and an information technology infrastructure that serves as a tool of science and a conduit for the diffusion of scientific knowledge. Also, scientific freedom is not absolute but is linked to and must be exercised in a manner consistent with scientific responsibility…

In October 2018, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights released a list of 29 questions related to defining the right to science [pdf]. Three of the most important questions were: What should be the relationship between the right to benefit from science and intellectual property rights? How should government obligations under the right differ based on the available national resources? What is scientific knowledge and how should it be differentiated, if at all, from traditional knowledge?…

The power and potential of the right to science for empowering individuals, strengthening communities, and improving the quality of life can hardly be overstated. It is time for the UN process to reach a responsible and productive end and for the right to science to be put into practice as was intended when it was first recognized by the United Nations in 1948.

Better late than never, I guess, when it comes to precisely pinning down core conceptual phrases.

Beyond international legal definitions, this goes to issues of "Ethics," no?

apropos of one specific science-technology area and ethics, "Artificial Intelligence," I call your attention here:

From their 2018 Report:

University AI programs should expand beyond computer science and engineering disciplines.
AI began as an interdisciplinary field, but over the decades has narrowed to become a technical discipline. With the increasing application of AI systems to social domains, it needs to expand its disciplinary orientation. That means centering forms of expertise from the social and humanistic disciplines. AI efforts that genuinely wish to address social implications cannot stay solely within computer science and engineering departments, where faculty and students are not trained to research the social world. Expanding the disciplinary orientation of AI research will ensure deeper attention to social contexts, and more focus on potential hazards when these systems are applied to human populations.

That's interesting. I am reminded of my cite of Dr. Rachel Pearson's book (MD, PhD) and her scholarship in the "Medical Humanities." Interdisciplinary synergy.

UPDATE: JACOB WARD

Saw an MSNBC Ali Velshi interview with this Jacob Ward fellow, and was rather impressed. Glad to now be aware of him.

Warrants following.

JacobWard.com

Could not agree more with that statement. Easier said than done. One of my favorite "Futurists," Ian Morrison, joked during a Health 2.0 Conference that "the benefit of being a Futurist is that you never have to change your slides."

Good writer, Jake Ward. Check this out:

In 1999, a trio of economists emerged from a conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, squinting without sunglasses in the unfamiliar sun, and began a slow walk through the hills overlooking the city. The three of them — a Harvard economist-in-training, Daniel Benjamin, and the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and David Laibson — were reeling. They had just learned about a new field, neuroeconomics, which applies economic analysis to brain science in an effort to understand human choices. Now they were strolling through the taxonomy of midday joggers and dog-walkers in Los Angeles, talking all the while about how people become what they are. Benjamin recalls feeling very out of place. “Everyone was so beautiful,” he says.

The economists spent the walk discussing what else they could measure across such a wide variety of human beings. By the time the sun began to set, the conversation landed on the very building blocks of life. “If economists are studying the brain,” Laibson asked, “what about studying genes?”

At that time, the standard method for connecting genes to human outcomes was to look for connections between specific DNA clusters and specific conditions in the lives of people who share those genes. B.R.C.A., perhaps the best-known gene sequence in medical science, is associated with a high risk of breast cancer. The A.P.O.E. sequence seems to have a connection to your chances of developing Alzheimer’s. “We thought we were going to find a few candidate genes that were the critical genes for impulse control or risk taking or cognitive ability,” Benjamin says. But when Benjamin, Glaeser and Laibson began writing to the keepers of DNA databases, asking to partner up, they found the geneticists reluctant to join forces. And matching D.N.A. to social outcomes, like educational attainment or wealth, wasn’t just ethically questionable, it was practically impossible…

…researchers themselves acknowledge that it’s hard to think about oneself clearly when subjected to this new [DNA] tool. Benjamin, Conley and several others in the study went ahead and got their own polygenic scores measured. It was for fun, mostly, and no one was unhappy with their results. “But at the moment I did it, I regretted doing it,” Conley says. “It’s a cognitive trap. I immediately realized that at an individual level, it doesn’t predict anything, but it’s human nature to want to know more about yourself. I don’t know …” He pauses for several seconds. “People parse meaningless distinctions.

Benjamin is less conflicted. “I don’t regret doing it,” he says. “But I’m an economist, so I’m trained to always think more information is better.”

Ahhh... more "Omics" stuff. "Geno-economics?" "Neuroeconomics?" What could possibly go wrong with that kind of stuff? The hell with your GPA and GMAT. The hell with your FICO score (some people would end up in the "subprime DNA" demographic). The hell with your VC Startup Seed Round Pitch Deck. Just give us your whole genome assay result. GINA et al be damned.

I know: I should do a startup called EconoGenomics.com™ 'eh? Get me some of that Silicon Valley money. Hmmm.. relatedly, how about NeuroCriminalistics.com™?

Read Jacob's entire NY Times Magazine article. Very thoughtful, analytical take on the issue. He's on Twitter here.
_____________ AnthropoceneDenial

DEC 10TH  CODA

Imagine my surprise.

@Arctic21

_____________

More to come...

"The end of social media as we know it?"

Jacob Ward in discussion with Nita Farahany.

 

 

In the wake of the New Mexico and California civil liability verdicts.

 

 

"The end of social media?" I guess we'll see. 'Not anytime soon' would be my speculation. Good discussion. I've cited both Nita and Jacob before.

 

My Grandson Calvin at 13 months, LOL.
He is now six. "Hey, Pop, can I use your iPhone?"

  

Baby brother Arlo, last week, 5 months.

Couple Jake and Nita's discussion above with that of Laurie Segall and Becky Kennedy in the prior post. Lotta good stuff to ponder. 

apropos...

ON DECK, COMES OUT MARCH 31ST:

 

Even by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called geniuses, Demis Hassabis is a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents, a chess prodigy by age five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven figure offer before turning 18 to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, the ultimate goal being to unravel the mysteries of biology and theoretical physics and to usher in super-abundance. Alongside a small group of fellow travelers, that is the path he is still on, leading the AI research at Google, winning a Nobel Prize along the way, and imagining machines that will compound, or possibly supplant, the human understanding of the universe.

Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his time, sitting for over thirty hours of conversation. But Mallaby has also drawn from Hassabis's detractors, such as his estranged cofounder Mustafa Suleyman; from his rivals, such as OpenAI's leading scientist Ilya Sutskever; and from academic pioneers who now fear for human survival, such as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. The result is a revelatory account of a singular figure and his company and a profound reckoning with this protean field as it leaps from the periphery to the center of our consciousness.

No one questions Hassabis’s brilliance. There are those who, like Elon Musk, have at times regarded him as an "evil genius." He is in a game where the stakes are matched only by the exorbitant costs — for talent, and for compute. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery. Others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often, the technology controls them.

Despite Hassabis’s pivotal role inside Google’s engine room, this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but remains outside and furiously critical of it, lambasting its leaders in conversation with Mallaby. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, Hassabis's quest to will a new form of cognition into the world is a defining story for our era.

See "The man who thought he could keep AI safe." 

_______ 

 

CODA: GRATUITOUS MUCKING AROUND ON MY BLOG

 

Amid Donald Trump's recent nearly 2-hour long televised White House Cabinet Meeting, at 38:14 he launched into his trademark random mumbling grievance ramble. It lasted a little over 19 minutes. I had it up on my iPad via a YouTube feed. At one point I gripped the screen tightly with one hand while holding it at an angle. It went into 2x speed mode (without going into "Chipmunks"). It was funny, so I launched my voice memo app and re-rolled the video. After I got a decent audio take, I dropped the ensuing .mp4 file over to my Macbook, pulled it up in Garageband (I also have Logic Pro, but this was easier), clipped off the front and end loose matter, and exported it to an audio .mp3. I mounted it here, below. The dude is unreal.

Donald Trump, March 26, 2026 mid-cabinet meeting rant, 2x speed

2019 in the health care space?

"I never make predictions, especially about the future." - Yogi Berra

"The great thing about being a health care futurist is that you never have to update your slides." - Health Care "Futurist" Ian Morrison

LOL. Ian also once quipped during a Health 2.0 Conference Keynote "I've got slide decks older than some of my clients."

Below: this is an actual thing.

"APF." Not kidding. Hmmm... Wonder if Ian is a member? (As well as my equally cool Futurist friend Joe Flower? And, how about Jacob Ward?)

From the APF website: "What is a Futurist? A professional futurist is a person who studies the future in order to help people understand, anticipate, prepare for and gain advantage from coming changes." Okeee-dokee, then. "studies the future"? (Wiki page on "Futurist.")

Michael Burry MD, now there was "Futurist" ("The Big Short" guy).

Stay tuned. Just got home from a Christmas trip back to the Baltimore area to see our son Matt. Met the most gracious, spectacular people in his circle. Stayed silent about being gone on social media, for what should be obvious reasons.

First, some random stuff in the waning 2018 days.

Finished this book while gone:

Highly recommended. A comprehensive, scholarly, accessible (and non-partisan) history of the evolution of the space. From the Amazon blurb:

Written for nonexperts, this is a brisk, engaging history of American healthcare from the advent of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s to the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the 2010s. Step by step, Jonathan Engel shows how we arrived at our present convoluted situation, where generic drugs prices can jump 1,000 percent in a day and primary care physicians can lose 20 percent of their income at the stroke of a Congressional pen.

Unaffordable covers, in a conversational style punctuated by apt examples, topics ranging from health insurance, pharmaceutical pricing, and physician training to health maintenance organizations and hospital networks. Along the way, Engel introduces approaches that other nations have taken in organizing and paying for healthcare and offers insights on ethical quandaries around end-of-life decisions, neonatal care, life-sustaining treatments, and the limits of our ability to define death. While describing the political origins of many of the federal and state laws that govern our healthcare system today, he never loses sight of the impact that healthcare delivery has on our wallets and on the balance sheets of hospitals, doctors' offices, government agencies, and private companies.

I'm already rather well-read up on this type of material, but Jonathan's was thoroughly enjoyable and instructive nonetheless. I would encourage everyone to read it, health care professionals and lay people alike.

Gonna be starting his latest release shortly.

Again, the Amazon blurb:

The diet and weight-loss industry is worth $66 billion – billion!! The estimated annual health care costs of obesity-related illness are 190 billion or nearly 21% of annual medical spending in the United States. But how did we get here? Is this a battle we can’t win? What changes need to be made in order to scale back the incidence of obesity in the US, and, indeed, around the world? Here, Jonathan Engel reviews the sources of the problem and offers the science behind our modern propensity toward obesity. He offers a plan for helping address the problem, but admits that it is, indeed, an uphill battle. Nevertheless, given the magnitude of the costs in years of life and vigor lost, it is a battle worth fighting.

Fat Nation is a social history of obesity in the United States since the second World War. In confronting this familiar topic from a historical perspective, Jonathan Engel attempts to show that obesity is a symptom of complex changes that have transpired over the past half century to our food, our living habits, our life patterns, our built environments, and our social interactions. He offers readers solid grounding in the known science underlying obesity (genetic set points, complex endocrine feedback loops, neurochemical messengering) but then makes the novel argument that obesity is a result of the interaction of our genes with our environment. That is, our bodies have always been programmed to become obese, but until recently never had the opportunity to do so. Now, with cheap calories ubiquitous (particularly in the form of sucrose), unwalkable physical spaces, deteriorating rituals and norms surrounding eating, and the withering of cooking skills, nearly every American daily confronts the challenge of not putting on weight. Given the outcomes, though, for those who are obese, Engel encourages us to address the problems and offers suggestions to help remedy the problem.

Hmmm... this quote comes to mind:

“Medicine is supposed to be about helping you through the accidents — the misfortune of a genetic disease, the misfortune of a trauma, the misfortune of some pathogen. Nobody went to medical school to babysit someone through a life of self-inflicted misery because of two deadly habits: sedentarism and excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates.” — Greg Glassman, CEO, CrossFit Health

Glassman has a point, but I think things are a good bit more complex than that.

Like I said, stay tuned. lots to ponder and write about (still dragging my butt finishing up several other books in chronic, halting progress). We got home about 1 a.m. Gotta go fetch the dogs from vet/boarding. Can't wait to see that bill. Ranger is still having persistent ear infection problems.

UPDATE ERRATUM

From my latest hardcopy snailmail edition of Science Magazine:

apropos of my prior riffs on climate change,

…[T]he deeper cause of the ecological crisis: a pervasive worldview that imbues the trends of more with a cachet of inevitability and legitimacy. This worldview esteems the human as a distinguished entity that is superior to all other life forms and is entitled to use them and the places they live. The belief system of superiority and entitlement—or human supremacy—manifests in a range of anthropocentric commonplace assumptions, linguistic constructs, institutional regimes, and everyday actions of individual, group, nation-state, and corporate actors. For example, the human is invested with powers of life and death over all other beings and with the prerogative to control and manage all geographical space. The all-encompassing manifestation of the belief system of human supremacy is precisely what constitutes it as a worldview…

From "Reimagining the human."

Beyond Human Dominance
The dominant framework of technofixes, technological schemes, and fine-tuning efficiencies is by itself no match for the tidal wave of human expansionism expected in this century. Looming before us is the imminent escalation of food, energy, materials, and commodities production, and resulting increases in wildlands destruction, species extinctions, wildlife extirpations, freshwater appropriation, ocean degradation, extractionist operations, and the production of industrial, pesticide, nitrogen, manure, plastic, and other waste—all unfolding amid climate-change ordeals.

In the face of this juggernaut, a singular focus on a techno-managerial portfolio seems fueled by a source other than pragmatism alone. That portfolio—which would include such initiatives as climate geoengineering, desalination, de-extinction, and off-planet colonization—is in keeping with the social rubric of human distinction. The prevalent corpus resonates with a Promethean impulse to sustain human hegemony while avoiding the most expeditious approach to the ecological predicament—contracting humanity's scale and scope by means that will simultaneously strengthen human rights, facilitate the abolition of poverty, elevate our quality of life, counter the dangers of climate change, and preserve Earth's magnificent biodiversity.

To pursue scaling down and pulling back the human factor requires us to reimagine the human in a register that no longer identifies human greatness with dominance within the ecosphere and domination over nonhumans…

 Good luck scaling back our speciocentric hubris.

See all the articles under Tomorrow's Earth.

BELOW, NEWS HEADLINE TODAY

UPDATE

Interesting, in light of the foregoing on "reimagining the human." From The Atlantic:

An Elephant’s Personhood on Trial
A legal case involving a famous solitary elephant poses a fundamental question about animals’ rights.

"Personhood?" Yeah. Some of us want to bestow it on human zygotes.

BTW, see EO Wilson's "Half Earth."

MORE FROM SCIENCE MAGAZINE DEC 14TH ISSUE

This issue is jammed with great stuff. to wit,

Revealing the brain's molecular architecture
The PsychENCODE Consortium

The brain, our most complex organ, is at the root of both the cognitive and behavioral repertoires that make us unique as a species and underlies susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disorders. Healthy brain development and neurological function rely on precise spatiotemporal regulation of the transcriptome, which varies substantially by brain region and cell type. Recent advances in the genetics of neuropsychiatric disorders reveal a highly polygenic risk architecture involving contributions of multiple common variants with small effects and rare variants with a range of effects. Because most of this genetic variation resides in noncoding regions of the genome, establishment of mechanistic links between variants and disease phenotypes is impeded by a lack of a comprehensive understanding of the regulatory and epigenomic landscape of the human brain…

Man, I've been reading all day. My brain is tired...

Developments in the neuroscience area will likely enhance progress in AI/ML, I would think. Expect significant advances in the coming year.

BUT, WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

This book was reviewed in this foregoing cited issue of Science Magazine:

"Off topic?" Nah.

...Maybe it’s a tinkerer’s curiosity that turned me into a scientist. Early on, physics allowed me to explore the sprockets and gears of the universe and the very forces that control our lives. Looking for more challenges, I turned later to the complexities of networks and data. For a vigilant asker-of-questions, I’ve chosen the right corner of the scientific world to call home. As long as a line of inquiry is based on numbers—the more the merrier—I can pursue it doggedly, following its scent through the maze of data now available to researchers in our hyper-connected, technological world. Hunting down an answer inevitably leads to more questions, new possibilities that hover like gnats on the periphery of any research I conduct. I try to swat them away and stay focused on the task at hand, but I’m not that different from the kid I once was, stubbornly asking “Why?” in response to… well, pretty much anything. It is the quest for answers that gets me up in the morning and keeps me up at night.

These days I run the Center for Complex Network Research, in Boston, where my job is exploring the “why” behind topics as varied as how people or molecules interact, where and how links form, and what our interconnectedness can tell us about society or our biological origins. We’ve examined the topology of the World Wide Web. We’re looking at how tiny hiccups in our genetic networks lead to disease. We’re exploring how our brains control their billions of neurons and how molecules in food attach to our proteins, ensuring our long-term health.

I love this kind of stuff—the math behind our social fabric, the way numbers provide a framework for understanding the essence of our connectedness. When I use models and tools to delve into unlikely topics for scientific analyses, these frameworks inevitably deepen our knowledge…

Barabási, Albert-László. The Formula (pp. 4-5). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

So much to learn, so little time.

OK, TAKE IT BACK TO THE TOP...

Stay tuned. For openers, Forbes' "Top 8 Healthcare Predictions for 2019." Not sure that I'm buyin' a lot of that at first blush.

Erratum: BobbyG on "The Future of Science" in 2016.

JOE FLOWER'S YEAR-END THOUGHTS

It’s December 30, 2018.

Healthcare is complex. Simple solutions are useless. Any simple picture of the future is a lie. Simple techno-optimism or innovationist neophilia get us nowhere…

Simple futurism is entertainment. It points at each shiny thing—AI, contractual blockchain, virtual worlds, augmented reality, cell transformation, haptic rebuilds—and says, “Wow! Look at this.” It’s a Jetsons way of looking at the future, as real as using the Flintstones as a guide to the past.

Thinking about the future is a complex business. It requires clarity, penetration, a broad view, and the insights of complexity science. Futurism based on the insights of complexity is a tool for thinking, planning, strategizing…

These skills can be learned…

A futurism based on complexity looks at every element, shiny, dull, or invisible, and asks:

• “What is it for?”
• “How does it get its energy?”
• “How does it affect other elements?”

Complex futurism can connect the dots and the 3-D networks of dots building out over time to paint the pictures of future scenarios, of ways the future could really turn out, what will take us there, and what strategies we might employ to meet them…

Healthcare is changing — consolidation, new tech, political chaos, a vast and growing IT overburden, shifting rules, ever-rising costs, new solutions, business model experiments. And it will continue to do this for some time...

'eh?

NEWS YEAR'S EVE ADDENDUM

Via STATnew:

What will 2019 bring for science and medicine? We asked the experts

PERSONAL HEALTH CARE ERRATUM

Just got what will likely be my last 2018 Humana EoB statement in the mail. Year-to-date (thru 12/24) "total billed charges," just a tad more than $544,000 (those BS "chargemaster" prices). Mostly evrything having to do with a minor surgery (large inguinal hernia) and a major one (open heart aortic valve replacement).

I have no way to know which providers actually got how much (the Medicare, Humana, and Silverscripts EoBs across the year each run to many pages of obtuse FFS detail). And, I've not really tallied up my own 2018 OoP (out-of-pocket). It was plenty.

Suspect that in the aggregate, reimbursements have been on average perhaps ~25% of "list." Fair?
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More to come...