Into the Heart of Life: Richard Powers on Living with Bewilderment at the Otherworldly Wonder of Our World – The Marginalian

Maria Popova again has me thinking this (like its predecessor "Overstory") would be a good text for Environmental Ethics. Bioethics too.

"…Set sometime in the near future, when our search for life beyond the Solar System has come to its inevitable fruition, [Bewilderment] tells the story of a thirty-nine-year-old astrobiologist and his neurodivergent, frightened, boundlessly courageous nine-year-old son, searching together for other worlds and instead discovering how to reworld ours with meaning. 

Radiating from their quest is a luminous invitation to live up to our nature not as creatures consumed by "the black hole of the self," as Powers so perfectly puts it in his talk, but as living empathy machines and portable cosmoses of possibility, whose planetary story is yet unwritten…

As the father searches for other worlds, he is savaged by despair at humanity's catastrophic mismanagement of this one, haunted by the growing sense that we couldn't possibly be good interplanetary emissaries until we have become good stewards of our own home planet. But each time he hits rock bottom, he bounces back up — as we all do, as we all must in order to go on living — with rekindled faith in what we are capable of…"

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/06/26/richard-powers-bewilderment/

Unethical?

Would You Clone Your Dog?
by Alexandra Horowitz

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/01/would-you-clone-your-dog

Atul Gawande on finding meaning in mortality

On Mortality and Meaning by The On Being Project

The eighth episode in our Wisdom Season

Read on Substack

Not enough rocks?

Google Is Using A.I. to Answer Your Health Questions. Should You Trust It?

…The system has already been shown to produce bad answers seemingly based on flawed sources. When asked "how many rocks should I eat," for example, A.I. Overviews told some users to eat at least one rock a day for vitamins and minerals. (The advice was scraped from The Onion, a satirical site.)
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/well/live/google-ai-health-information.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

On Call

Dr. Fauci's book describes trying to build a government response to Covid "with a president who literally did not understand what was going on in some very fundamental ways." Some examples.

https://www.threads.net/@maddowshow/post/C8Vze4FxImX/?xmt=AQGzVW1N-Bsp_vcCfymOvAqz2JlOJTYcYaRg4A_A1uxxPw

Pandemic lit

The growing body of literature about the pandemic "radiates a desire to be useful, somehow, and a sense that perhaps fiction can give people a new way of thinking about the crisis," Katy Waldman writes.

https://www.threads.net/@newyorkermag/post/C8C7MYhR8on/?xmt=AQGzamCu9Yn97gHusiSyOs4fF_OnIRCe-j37P9X2mAlv6A

How Do We Know What Animals Are Really Feeling?

Animal-welfare science tries to get inside the minds of a huge range of species — in order to help improve their lives.

"...a true ethical question, one that troubled the entire premise of a multibillion-dollar global industry: "whether or not it is ethical to keep these hens for the sole purpose of egg-laying, only to have them slaughtered at the end." Among the scores of students we watched over the course of a weekend, LeBlond and her teammates from the Atlantic Veterinary College were the only ones who, in the final seconds of their talks, raised deep questions about the scenario's entire premise — about whether, in the end, these fictional animals should have been put in these fictional situations in the first place.

It was a question that the judges of the Animal Welfare Assessment Contest had no doubt considered, but it also was one that seemed to lie outside the contest's purview: In its either-or structure, the contest is helping train future professionals how to improve, rather than remove, the ties that bind animals into human society. Unless the day arrives when there is no need for laboratory rats, or poultry barns, or facilities to house desert tortoises and other captive wildlife, the animals of North America will be in the hands of veterinarians and animal scientists like LeBlond and her classmates, to help shape their situations the very best way they can." nyt

Steve Gleason’s good life

What's the last great book you read?

When I was diagnosed [with ALS], one of the first questions I asked in a journal entry was, "Can I discover peace of mind, even if this disease destroys my body?" That inquiry has been a guiding light for me the past 13 years. "The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness," by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, has real-life stories I could relate to, providing insights which have helped illuminate the path for me to live longer, and be grateful and content."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/books/review/steve-gleason-a-life-impossible-als.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Healthy minds, flourishing lives

  

 

POSTSCRIPT. It was pleasing to receive a group email from Dr. Evins of the Honors College, at semester's end, thanking all the faculty participants for their contributions to the Mental Health semester series. These remarks in particular gratified: 

"...It was a really really really good series, thanks to all the wonderful presenters. Truly excellent... Phil touched on so much. He brought the classics and the wisdom of the ages directly to the students in one meta Philosophy lecture. It was powerful. The students will have much to say about the many points he touched on in his lecture. And also about going outside to walk the dog :) ...Also, Tom stood up for cat culture as personal therapy, balancing out Phil very nicely. (My husband is an Epictetus guy. I myself brought Epictetus home from both Phil and Tom.)"

Cat culture? Well, whatever works. 

 

MTSU Honors Lecture Series Spring 2024, here are the links to videos from each lecture; some videos are better than others depending on who was there to be the videographer!, but much was, happily, captured:

1/22 M. Evins, Honors Intro

1/29 Michelle Stevens, MTSU Center for Fairness, Justice, and Equity

2/5 Mary Kaye Anderson, MTSU Counseling Services

2/12 Rudy Dunlap, MTSU Health and Human Performance

2/26 Seth Marshall, MTSU Psychology

3/4 Spring Break – No Classes

3/11 Sarah Harris, MTSU Nutrition and Food Science

3/18 Kent Syler, MTSU Political Science

3/25 Rev. Susan Pendleton Jones, Belmont University

4/1 Bill Dobbins, NAMI-TN

4/8 Phil Oliver, MTSU Philosophy

4/15 Honors Student Presentations: Emilie Conners, Eli Ward, Madalyn Dye

4/22 Tom Brinthaupt, MTSU Psychology

Peter Attia’s Quest to Live Long and Prosper

The point isn't longevity, it's to feel good today and plan to feel good again tomorrow. And to know you'll be ready, whenever the time comes, to rejoin Russell's great ocean of "universal life" (which really you're already doing). The point is to "live long and prosper" right now.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/how-to-die-in-good-health?_gl=1*gdig7f*_up*MQ..&gclid=05dc19316ca81fce994f7f12f1af4029&gclsrc=3p.ds

Keep your health

https://www.threads.net/@_stoicteacher/post/C5er_xorptn/?xmt=AQGzjCrNjlYq7WlLHO06gD7-8q3Xauo3l97QmcHxz5elew

Haidt: end phone-centric childhood

https://www.instagram.com/p/C4vG6gzMscs/?igsh=aTNvMHM5bzkxZTE=

“deliberately exposed to radiation”

'Oppenheimer,' My Uncle and the Secrets America Still Doesn't Like to Tell

…"Oppenheimer" is a movie about a singular genius, an extraordinary collaboration and a turning point in history. But it's also a lesson in applied physics: the way a lone catalyst may trigger a chain reaction whose impact cannot be predicted or controlled. J. Robert Oppenheimer's greatest triumph set into motion forces that brought about his downfall. An innovation designed to make the world safer in the long term made it manifestly more dangerous. And in subsequent atomic tests through the postwar years, many Americans were deliberately exposed to radiation, to see what the blast and its aftermath would do to them...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/opinion/oppenheimer-secret-lives.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Pandemic lessons not learned

It has been four years since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

In 2022 Ed Yong wrote that the U.S. "made none of the broad changes that would protect its population against future pathogens, such as better ventilation or universal paid sick leave." He predicted that America will "continue to struggle against infectious diseases in part because some of its most deeply held values are antithetical to the task of besting a virus."

https://www.threads.net/@theatlantic/post/C4YzdRnRMYY/?xmt=AQGzVL8uXjPeUw92cc_xOhRNVYs1mCOg0E7vTYMC4LycRg

‘Fantastic Voyage’-ish A.I.

A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive

Given troves of data about genes and cells, A.I. models have made some surprising discoveries. What could they teach us someday?

...“I think these models are going to help us get some really fundamental understanding of the cell, which is going to provide some insight into what life really is,” Dr. Quake said.

Having a map of what’s possible and impossible to sustain life might also mean that scientists could actually create new cells that don’t yet exist in nature. The foundation model might be able to concoct chemical recipes that transform ordinary cells into new, extraordinary ones. Those new cells might devour plaque in blood vessels or explore a diseased organ to report back on its condition.

“It’s very ‘Fantastic Voyage’-ish,” Dr. Quake admitted. “But who knows what the future is going to hold?”

..."Professors should be very, very nervous."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/science/ai-learning-biology.html?smid=em-share

Portals

But don't underrate the value of being healthy. Things did not end well for Virginia.

"Virginia Woolf on being ill as a portal to self-understanding and a way of breaking through our ordinary waking-state perception" https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/05/06/virginia-woolf-on-being-ill/

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C2GY6ohxDni/

Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older – The Marginalian

Today, and for the next few weeks, my wife is chronologically older than me. She might need to hear what Maria  Popova and Simone de Beauvoir say about time's arrow… (And happy birthday to WJ, 182 today.)

…to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing).

"…There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion." Simone de Beauvoir 

Complement with Bertrand Russell on how to grow old and Thoreau on the greatest gift of the winter years, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on the ultimate frontier of hope and the artist's task to liberate the present from the past.  https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/07/31/simone-de-beauvoir-coming-of-age/

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/07/31/simone-de-beauvoir-coming-of-age/

Stephen Hawking happy

When asked about living with [ALS, Lou Gehrig's ] disease, he told an interviewer that he was "happier now" than before he became ill. "Before, I was very bored with life. I drank a fair bit, I guess; I didn't do any work . . .When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything that one does have."

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-monday-january-645?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Thank goodness

I'm reading Daniel Dennett's memoir "I've Been Thinking", which begins with the near-death experience that generated my favorite written testimonial of natural gratitude.

"ON OCTOBER 24, 2006, I WAS RUSHED BY AMBULANCE from my office at Tufts University to the emergency room at Lahey Clinic, where doctors discovered the problem: the inner and outer layers of my aorta had come apart—an aortic dissection—and I could die at any moment if the blood from my heart burst out into my chest cavity. The day before I had been in Mackerel Cove on Swan’s Island in Maine on my sailboat, Xanthippe. This was the last cruise of the season, joined by my Swedish friend Bo Dahlbom and his son Fredrik, and as I slowly pulled on the heavy anchor line I felt a slight pain in my chest, reminding me of the pain I had felt seven years earlier when I’d had a “silent heart attack” that had led to a triple-bypass operation. We sailed back to Blue Hill in a stiff headwind, moored the boat, took off the heavy sails, put the inflatable dinghy on the roof of my car, and went back to the farm, before I made a quick trip to the local hospital, where I was told I had not had a heart attack but should see my cardiologist as soon as I could. The next day we drove to Tufts, where I asked the department secretary if she had any Tylenol, and she wisely called the ambulance instead.

One of the little-known side effects of open-heart surgery is ministrokes caused by debris from the operation clogging up the capillaries in the brain, and my cardiologist explicitly warned the surgical team that since my mind was my life, they should strive to avoid turning me into a “pumphead”—the ugly term heart surgeons use in private for those whose brains are damaged by the heart-lung machine. After the operation, before they removed me from the machine, they reversed the flow of blood to my brain, sending it into the veins and out of the arteries, hoping to flush out any debris that was about to disable my res cogitans, my thinking thing (my brain, not, as Descartes would have it, a distinct and immaterial substance). So I’ve been brainwashed, quite literally. Did it work? As soon as I could sit up in my hospital bed after the operation I got out my trusty laptop and wrote a short piece to see if I still had my marbles. It was put on Edge.org, where it attracted a lot of attention. What do you think?

Thank Goodness! (November 2, 2006)

There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder..."

Continues: https://a.co/982hZQy

“My Year of Being Very Online About Dogs”

My friend Daryl's friend and former colleague at W.Carolina, on dogs and the culture wars. What a strange world, dogs' AND ours…

Dogs are where we project our "fantasies about what we want — either who we want to be or what we want the world to look like," said Katharine Mershon, a professor of religion and philosophy at Western Carolina University who studies the role of dogs in American society.

Dr. Mershon told me how dogs had become a focal point for tensions in her rural Appalachian town: Her local NextDoor was filled with arguments about whether leaving hunting dogs to roam about freely, slightly underfed and living mostly outside, constituted abuse. This was an argument, ostensibly about dogs, that was actually about gentrification and the place of newcomers to impose their values on local life.

At points in my conversations with Dr. Gabrielsen and Dr. Mershon, we discussed the poet, philosopher and animal trainer Vicki Hearne. "Dogs are domesticated to, and into, us," Ms. Hearne wrote in her 1986 book "Adam's Task." "And we are domesticated to, and into, them."

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/20/opinion/dogs-culture-wars.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
My Year of Being Very Online About Dogs

What is life?

We don't really know, Jaime Green writes.⁠

"Hold a rock next to a flower and you're probably confident you know the difference," Green writes. "But since the days of Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have struggled to draw a precise line between what is living and what is not, often returning to criteria such as self-organization, metabolism, and reproduction but never finding a definition that includes, and excludes, all the right things." https://theatln.tc/auxkhAiW

https://www.threads.net/@theatlantic/post/C0fFMQlxW6Z/

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Poetic ecology and the biology of wonder

"The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature."

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C0ekyxqOV_k/

‘Medical Freedom’ Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates

For more than 40 years, Mississippi had one of the strictest school vaccination requirements in the nation, and its high childhood immunization rates have been a source of pride. But in July, the state began excusing children from vaccination if their parents cited religious objections, after a federal judge sided with a "medical freedom" group.

Today, 2,100 Mississippi schoolchildren are officially exempt from vaccination on religious grounds. Five hundred more are exempt because their health precludes vaccination. Dr. Daniel P. Edney, the state health officer, warns that if the total number of exemptions climbs above 3,000, Mississippi will once again face the risk of deadly diseases that are now just a memory.

"For the last 40 years, our main goal has been to protect those children at highest risk of measles, mumps, rubella, polio," Dr. Edney said in an interview, "and that's those children that have chronic illnesses that make them more vulnerable." He called the ruling "a very bitter pill for me to swallow."

Mississippi is not an isolated case. Buoyed by their success at overturning coronavirus mandates, medical and religious freedom groups are taking aim at a new target: childhood school vaccine mandates, long considered the foundation of the nation's defense against infectious disease...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/us/politics/mississippi-childhood-vaccine-mandates.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
'Medical Freedom' Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates

Exactly How Much Life Is on Earth?

According to a new study, living cells outnumber stars in the universe, highlighting the deep, underrated link between geophysics and biology.

What’s in a number?

According to a recent calculation by a team of biologists and geologists, there are a more living cells on Earth — a million trillion trillion, or 10^30 in math notation, a 1 followed by 30 zeros — than there are stars in the universe or grains of sand on our planet.

Which makes a certain amount of sense. The overwhelming majority of these cells are microbes, too small to see with the unaided eye; a great many are cyanobacteria, the tiny bubbles of energy and chemistry that churn away in plants and in the seas assembling life as we know it and mining sunlight to manufacture the oxygen we need to breathe.

Still, it boggled my mind that such a calculation could even be performed. I’ve been pestering astrobiologists lately about what it means. Could Earth harbor even more life? Could it have less? How much life is too much?

“The big take-home is this really sets up Earth as a benchmark for comparative planetology,” Peter Crockford, a geobiologist at Carleton University in Ottawa and the lead author of the report, which was published last month in the journal Current Biology, said in an email. The finding “allows us to more quantitatively ask questions about alternative trajectories life could have taken on Earth and how much life could be possible on our planet.”
...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/science/space/earth-biology-life.html?smid=em-share

The Morality of Having Kids in a Burning, Drowning World

"…Your happy childhood is no guarantee of the same for your kid, especially if they will grow up on a planet that will be warmer by nearly three degrees Fahrenheit. But you can reflect on the contributions that your parents made to that happiness and seek to emulate them. You can feel reasonably confident that the secure attachments you formed and the gentle guidance you received in childhood will be passed on like family heirlooms.

An unhappy childhood provides a trickier data set..."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/27/the-quickening-elizabeth-rush-book-review-the-parenthood-dilemma-gina-rushton

Climate-sensitive diseases

https://www.threads.net/@climatenewsnow/post/Cz2ZaRGLaTw/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Just What the (Urgent Care) Doctor Ordered

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/business/urgent-care-doctors-citymd.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Just What the (Urgent Care) Doctor Ordered

Tough Decisions About Dementia and End-of-Life Care

Letters—

"… Surely the ability to enjoy a mouthful of ice cream is not a meaningful benchmark for continuing the diminished existence his father had clearly feared and rejected?"

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/opinion/dementia-end-of-life-care.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Tough Decisions About Dementia and End-of-Life Care

Bioethics, SPRING 2024

PHIL 3345, BIOETHICS 

Course # 15899, T/Th 4:20 PM, James Union Building (JUB) 202

3 credit hours. Explores ethical issues arising from the practice of medical therapeutics, from the development of new biomedical technologies, and more largely from reflections on life’s meaning and prospects in the face of changing modalities of intervention fostered particularly by the various life sciences. Dr. Oliver

Supporting the philosophical study of bioethics, bio-medical ethics, biotechnology, and the future of life, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "Keep your health, your splendid health. It is better than all the truths under the firmament." William James --Course blogsite

TEXTS

• BIOETHICS: THE BASICS (Campbell) ”the word ‘bioethics’ just means the ethics of life”... 
• BEYOND BIOETHICS (Obasogie) “Bioethics’ traditional emphasis on individual interests such as doctor-patient relationships, informed consent, and personal autonomy is minimally helpful in confronting the social and political challenges posed by new human biotechnologies”... 
• THE PREMONITION (Lewis) "The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society"... 
• WHAT WE OWE THE FUTURE (MacAskill) "argues for longtermism: that positively influencing the distant future is our time’s key moral priority. It’s not enough to reverse climate change or avert a pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; counter the end of moral progress; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are digital. If we make wise choices now, our grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty"...
• And to be announced...

A Hospice Nurse on Embracing the Grace of Dying

"…Have you thought about what a good death would be for you? I want to be at home. I want to have my immediate family come and go as they want, and I want a living funeral. I don't want people to say, "This is my favorite memory of her," when I'm gone. Come when I'm dying, and let's talk about those memories together. There have been times when patients have shared with me that they just don't think anyone cares about them. Then I'll go to their funeral and listen to the most beautiful eulogies..."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/22/magazine/hadley-vlahos-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
A Hospice Nurse on Embracing the Grace of Dying

Forget About Living to 100. Let’s Live Healthier Instead.

I'm 66. I reject this "estimate":

"…we do not rigorously measure and report health span as we do life expectancy.  Best estimates indicate that the average American can expect to celebrate only a single birthday in good health after the traditional retirement age of 65…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/28/opinion/aging-public-health-healthspan.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Forget About Living to 100. Let's Live Healthier Instead.

A Fitting Final Gift From Jimmy Carter

He showed us that hospice is not something to fear.

When former President Jimmy Carter entered hospice care in February, many assumed that his death would be imminent, a matter of weeks at most. But six months later, he is still spending time with family and friends, still enjoying moments with his wife of nearly eight decades. Life continues, albeit under a shadow.

As he now approaches what has been reported to be his “final chapter,” Mr. Carter’s decision to enter hospice and to continue publicizing that choice is a fitting final gift of candor from a former president to an American public that has long been uncomfortable with our own mortality.

Here in the hospital where I work as a critical-care doctor, the very word “hospice” so often conjures the idea of death and defeat. Just a few days ago, I found myself in a conference room with a man whose wife was dying. She was in her 50s, with cancer that had infiltrated her chest and abdomen. Her time was short, a matter of months at most, and she was in pain and scared, and wanted to be at home. So I suggested to the husband that we consider hospice. I said the word gently, but even so, my patient’s husband flinched. No. His wife wanted to do everything, to fight, to not give up. It wasn’t time for hospice. Not yet...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/opinion/jimmy-carter-hospice.html?smid=em-share

JK continues his gene editing "mission"

https://www.instagram.com/p/CwtF_ilhbv8/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Bad news, good news

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Asher Perlman (@asherperlman)

Forms

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cvu-U2IJGcf/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Digging up bones

My Last Shopping List for Him

"…When we bury our loved ones in Greece, tradition requires that we exhume the bones after three years for lack of space; it's rare to get a two- or three-year extension…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/style/modern-love-greece-loss-last-shopping-list.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
My Last Shopping List for Him

Natural (compost) burial looks better all the time…

Cure, sure; but...

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The New Yorker Cartoons (@newyorkercartoons)

What's in a name?

Should Medicine Still Bother With Eponyms?

The names of Nazi-era doctors are still found on diseases and body parts. By expunging them, will doctors forget lessons of the past?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/science/medicine-eponyms-nazis.html?smid=em-share

Broken

https://www.instagram.com/p/CtgcSMStSbZ/?igshid=NjZiM2M3MzIxNA==

Doctors Are Using Chatbots in an Unexpected Way

Despite the drawbacks of turning to artificial intelligence in medicine, some physicians find that ChatGPT improves their ability to communicate empathetically with patients.

...There's a reason doctors may neglect compassion, said Dr. Douglas White, the director of the program on ethics and decision making in critical illness at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "Most doctors are pretty cognitively focused, treating the patient's medical issues as a series of problems to be solved," Dr. White said. As a result, he said, they may fail to pay attention to "the emotional side of what patients and families are experiencing."

At other times, doctors are all too aware of the need for empathy, But the right words can be hard to come by. That is what happened to Dr. Gregory Moore, who until recently was a senior executive leading health and life sciences at Microsoft, wanted to help a friend who had advanced cancer. Her situation was dire, and she needed advice about her treatment and future. He decided to pose her questions to ChatGPT.

The result "blew me away," Dr. Moore said.

In long, compassionately worded answers to Dr. Moore's prompts, the program gave him the words to explain to his friend the lack of effective treatments:

I know this is a lot of information to process and that you may feel disappointed or frustrated by the lack of options … I wish there were more and better treatments … and I hope that in the future there will be.

It also suggested ways to break bad news when his friend asked if she would be able to attend an event in two years:

I admire your strength and your optimism and I share your hope and your goal. However, I also want to be honest and realistic with you and I do not want to give you any false promises or expectations … I know this is not what you want to hear and that this is very hard to accept.

Late in the conversation, Dr. Moore wrote to the A.I. program: "Thanks. She will feel devastated by all this. I don't know what I can say or do to help her in this time."

In response, Dr. Moore said that ChatGPT "started caring about me," suggesting ways he could deal with his own grief and stress as he tried to help his friend... nyt

Bad Blood: the story of eugenics in the USA

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

Normal docs

Every time I go to the #doctor in #Denmark I'm always shocked at the difference between US #healthcare and EU healthcare in how stressed the doctor looks.

The last three times I went to a doctor in Chicago, every general practitioner I interacted with looked worked to death. Bags under their eyes, too busy to make eye contact with me. Just always typing on the computer and then leaving the room. Truly looked like the worst job on the planet.

Denmark I needed a doctors appointment. My primary doctors office is closed for training, so I got routed to another office. Same day appointment, go in and the doctor looks normal. We have 30 minutes, I use 20 of them, he doesn't seem stressed or worried at all.

I pass by a group of doctors joking in a break room with some coffee and cake. It looks like a normal job. A lot is made of how bad the US system is for patients but you don't realize how horrible it is for doctors until you see doctors allowed to be normal people.

https://c.im/@matdevdug/110428770809815791

“a culture of resistance to change”

"…As my residency progressed, my doubts about my chosen profession only mounted. Time and again, my colleagues and I found ourselves coming into conflict with a culture of resistance to change and innovation. There are some good reasons why medicine is conservative in nature, of course. But at times it seemed as if the whole edifice of modern medicine was so firmly rooted in its traditions that it was unable to change even slightly, even in ways that would potentially save the lives of people for whom we were supposed to be caring. 

By my fifth year, tormented by doubts and frustration, I informed my superiors that I would be leaving that June. My colleagues and mentors thought I was insane; almost nobody leaves residency, certainly not at Hopkins with only two years to go. But there was no dissuading me. Throwing nine years of medical training out the window, or so it seemed, I took a job with McKinsey & Company, the well-known management consulting firm. My wife and I moved across the country to the posh playground of Palo Alto and San Francisco, where I had loved living while at Stanford. It was about as far away from medicine (and Baltimore) as it was possible to get, and I was glad. I felt as if I had wasted a decade of my life. But in the end, this seeming detour ended up reshaping the way I look at medicine—and more importantly, each of my patients…"

— Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia MD
https://a.co/0Rr8qnF

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Degraded personhood

"The Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?"

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto [2010]
https://a.co/6Rs2n1i

Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong’

In his most extensive interview yet, Anthony Fauci wrestles with the hard lessons of the pandemic — and the decisions that will define his legacy.

It was, perhaps, an impossible job. Make one man the face of public health amid an unprecedented pandemic, in a country as fractious as the United States, and there were bound to be disappointments and frustrations, and they were bound to get personal.

Still, in December, when Elon Musk joked on Twitter that his "pronouns" were "Prosecute/Fauci," it felt like the cresting of a turning tide against the man who had played essentially that role for the first three years of the pandemic. At least 30 state legislatures have passed laws limiting public-health powers in pandemics. This January, the month after Anthony Fauci retired as the four-decade head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, barely half of Americans said they trusted the country's public-health institutions to manage a future pandemic. The Wall Street Journal named that as his legacy — sowing distrust about public health and vaccines. Earlier in the pandemic, the leftist magazine The Drift mocked Fauci as "Doctor Do-Little," and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, proposed that Fauci had "blood on his hands." Upon the announcement of Fauci's retirement, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also a Republican, celebrated: "Grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac."

Of course, there were mistakes and missteps, including some by Fauci: describing the threat to the country as "minuscule" in February 2020, for instance; or first advising against wearing masks, and moving slowly on aerosol spread; or playing down the risk of what were first called "breakthrough infections" in the summer of 2021. And the broader public-health establishment that Fauci came to embody made other mistakes, too, even if it wasn't always easy to know at the time or identify later who exactly was responsible. Almost certainly, schools stayed closed longer than they needed to. Very conspicuously, American vaccination rates never approached the levels of peer nations — and the problem wasn't just the anti-vaccine right. Quarantine guidance was abruptly shortened in the midst of the Omicron variant, when thresholds of community-spread levels were suddenly redefined as well. There was no effective paid sick leave instituted, and the official end of the pandemic emergency on May 11 imperils the Medicaid coverage of 15 million Americans. But three years on, whether you are focused on Covid's direct carnage or on its collateral damage, it seems irrational to pin the brutality of America's pandemic on policy failures, however much Americans want to put the blame somewhere. Or on someone…

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/24/magazine/dr-fauci-pandemic.html?smid=em-share