Ethical theory

"This fall, I've been teaching Intro Ethics for the first time in years. It's a strange assignment, as though the students were previously feral and my task was to begin their moral education, age 18 to 22. Presumably, most were introduced to ethics already by their primary caregivers. At least, I hope they were.
There are difficult questions about what to teach in such a class and how. I once wrote about the risks of Intro Ethics, echoing Annette Baier's "Theory and Reflective Practices." "The obvious trouble with our contemporary attempts to use moral theory to guide action," she wrote, "is the lack of agreement on which theory to apply."
…
Kieran Setiya
https://open.substack.com/pub/ksetiya/p/intro-ethics?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

the ultimate thanks-giving

"I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."

When the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks learned that he was dying, he wrote something almost unbearably beautiful about the measure of living — the ultimate thanks-giving:

https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/oliver-sacks-gratitude

A crisis of crises

"..,Crisis can be a powerful catalyst for shaping policy and improving society. But just like any such tool, it can be misused as easily as used.

If that lesson isn't new, it's very much worth reviewing now. The United States is in what can only be described as an epoch of crisis. There is no quarter of American life that has not been claimed by the term, from the planet (climate) to the Republic (democracy, migration, housing) to the deepest chambers of the human heart (loneliness, despair). In the future, if we survive that long, historians will marvel at either our capacity to endure so much hardship at once or our ability to label so many disparate problems with the same graying word. In the meantime, officials and policymakers — and, yes, journalists — ought to consider how they employ this term and why, and whether it's having the desired effect..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/opinion/public-health-crisis-america.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Problematic

The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust By Francis S. Collins

“A recent cross-sectional study in two states, Ohio and Florida,37 showed that the rate of death in those states was strongly associated with political party affiliation—after May 2021, when vaccines were freely available to all adults, the death rate for Republican voters was 43 percent higher than for Democratic voters. The long echo of the negative public response to COVID-19 has led to greater resistance to all forms of vaccination, putting children at risk for diseases like measles and polio that had almost been eradicated in the developed world. This may be the most consequential example of distrust of science in modern history. This circumstance is utterly contrary to the way a person or a nation should respond to a threatening pandemic: political party should be set aside in favor of clearheaded and objective assessment of the facts. But with our current separation into divisive tribal communities, the opportunity for thoughtful considerations of options—for achieving wisdom—has mostly been lost. The consequences have been truly tragic.” ― Francis S. Collins, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust

A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness

A small study found ChatGPT outdid human physicians when assessing medical case histories, even when those doctors were using a chatbot.

Dr. Adam Rodman, an expert in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, confidently expected that chatbots built to use artificial intelligence would help doctors diagnose illnesses.

He was wrong.

Instead, in a study Dr. Rodman helped design, doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers' surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors.

"I was shocked," Dr. Rodman said.

The chatbot, from the company OpenAI, scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent.

The study showed more than just the chatbot's superior performance.

It unveiled doctors' sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they made, even when a chatbot potentially suggests a better one... nyt

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Readers respond https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/opinion/ai-doctors-diagnosis.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

health misinformation and political polarization

"I taught a course at Vanderbilt University on health misinformation and political polarization in 2022. My syllabus & readings are available on my website and unfortunately still highly relevant today. "

www.matthewfacciani.com/teaching MisinfoResearch

“If it kills me”

Clever dramatically-convergent portrayal of environmental activism & bioethics (long Covid, depression, mental illness), with a side of British humor…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0024w9s?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

AI as philosophers' stone?

As American civic life has become increasingly shaped by algorithms, trust in government has plummeted. Is there any turning back?

"...In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” posted last October, Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and notable Trump-Vance supporter, delivered a delusional account of human history as the triumph of the “techno-capital machine” over the constraints of nature. “We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet,” Andreessen proclaimed, preposterously. The solution is at hand: “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think.” This September, OpenAI’s Sam Altman posted an essay in which he argued that generative A.I. is “the most consequential fact about all of history so far,” and that humanity is on the cusp of solving every problem. “There are a lot of details we still have to figure out,” Altman wrote, unironically, “but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge.” The following month, not to be outdone, Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of Anthropic, a rival of OpenAI, published a blog post called “Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better,” in which he predicted that A.I. could lead, in five to ten years, to “the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights”—developments that will happen so fast and be so overwhelming that many of us will be “literally moved to tears.” Someone will be crying. That much is true.

Having built an information infrastructure that classifies and divides humans and drives them to ideological extremes, these same people and corporations are now building machines that purport to undo the very damage they have caused, much in the same way that geoengineering schemes seek to address catastrophic climate by using the very logic and tools that created the problem. In a study funded in part by M.I.T.’s Generative AI Initiative and published in Science this fall, conspiracy-minded Americans were subjected to long exchanges with a deprogramming chatbot. “The treatment reduced participants’ belief in their chosen conspiracy theory by 20% on average,” the researchers concluded. They don’t seem to have bothered to establish control groups who might, for instance, have been asked to read articles and books, or—seemingly beyond the realm of imagination—converse with another human..." Jill Lepore