I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life

…I am not arguing that we shouldn't aspire to perfection, nor that A.I. in health care should receive a free pass from regulators. A.I. designed to act autonomously, without clinician supervision, should be closely vetted for accuracy. The same goes for A.I. that may be integrated into machines like CT scanners, insulin pumps and surgical robots — areas in which a mistake can be catastrophic and a physician's ability to validate the results is limited. We need to ensure patients are fully informed and can consent to A.I. developers' intended use of their personal information. For patient-facing A.I. tools in high-stakes settings such as diagnosis and psychotherapy, we also need sensible regulations to ensure accuracy and effectiveness.

But as the saying goes, "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative." In health care, the alternative is a system that fails too many patients, costs too much and frustrates everyone it touches. A.I. won't fix all of that, but it's already fixing some of it — and that's worth celebrating.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/ai-health-medical-care.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Eat your ice cream, build your relationships…

And don't be a schmuck.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/dr-ezekiel-emanuel-eat-ice-cream-and-other-tips-for-a-long-and-healthy-life/

The genetic age: who shapes evolution now? | The Darwin Day Lecture 2026, with Professor Matthew Cobb – Humanists UK

Like all species, humans have been inadvertently shaping the genomes of other species – predators and prey – throughout our history. And with the development of agriculture, we began to specifically, deliberately alter plants and animals through selective breeding. But in the second half of the 20th century, that ability has taken on a new form. Not only do we have a far more precise understanding of how selection and heredity interact in agriculture, but the invention of genetic engineering in the 1970s has changed things completely.

We can now change species at will. Not only has this transformed the pharmaceutical industry – allowing the cheap manufacture of drugs like insulin – it has also altered agriculture and now, in the 21st century, threatens to change ecosystems and even humanity itself.

Evolution appears to be under our control, but – as the molecular biologist Leslie Orgel warned us – evolution is smarter than we are. Looking at the past, present, and future of genetics, we can glimpse both the promises and perils that await us.

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In this 2026 Darwin Day Lecture, Matthew Cobb will confront the shadow cast by our own ingenuity. Tracing the path from simple selective breeding to the ignition of a biological revolution, he will explore a modern Promethean moment where the power to reshape life is no longer theoretical – but operational.

As the pace of discovery accelerates into a competitive sprint, we're challenged to consider whether we have merely stolen the fire of evolution, or if we have sparked a chain reaction that we can no longer extinguish.

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About Professor Matthew Cobb

Matthew Cobb is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester. His recent books include Crick: A Mind in Motion, from DNA to the Brain and The Genetic Age: Our Perilous Quest to Edit Life. He was the presenter of the BBC Radio series Genetic Dreams, Genetic Nightmares. In 2024 he won the Royal Society's Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal, and in 2021 was awarded the J. B. S. Haldane Lecture by the Genetics Society.

About the Darwin Day Lecture series

The Darwin Day Lecture explores humanism and humanist thought as related to science and evolution, Charles Darwin, or his works. The Darwin medallist has made a significant contribution in one of these fields.

The lecture and medal are named and held to mark the annual global celebration of the birth of Charles Darwin, held every 12 February.

https://humanists.uk/events/darwinday2026/

Leukemia

Atul Gawande:
This is your must read this week.

So read this.

It is about leukemia and the powers and limits of science and the terrifying dangers of the turn against it. It is human and excoriating and beautiful. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-battle-with-my-blood

CDC is brain-dead

The CDC website has been lobotomized. Where it once presented the decades of evidence debunking the false claims of a link between vaccines and autism, that has now been replaced with junk science.

https://www.threads.com/@atul.gawande/post/DRSeu6xCXDi?xmt=AQF0mLk33jktg4AnOXqpLyZfIKXXxkXnF9OXke_NtJU5a3nH42VKZCz-URhyoVC2g7LbZoQG&slof=1

Kennedy’s Comments on Circumcision Are Only Going to Confuse and Shame Parents

…Circumcision is an instructive example, because it epitomizes the Kennedy method of undermining public health expertise. Whether this is conscious or not, he seizes on hot-button issues that already have entrenched and aggressive internet partisans, uses quasi-scientific language and bolsters his case using minor, cherry-picked studies. As a result, he muddies the water and creates more guilt and confusion among new parents who are already inundated with conflicting information online...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/opinion/kennedy-autism-circumcision-parents.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

… A.I. is highly capable. Its capabilities are accelerating. And the risks those capabilities present are real. Biological life on this planet is, in fact, vulnerable to these systems. On this threat, even OpenAI seems to agree.

In this sense, we have passed the threshold that nuclear fission passed in 1939. The point of disagreement is no longer whether A.I. could wipe us out. It could. Give it a pathogen research lab, the wrong safety guidelines and enough intelligence, and it definitely could. A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility. The question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/opinion/ai-destruction-technology-future.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

A Plea From Doctors: Cool It on the Supplements

As Americans take more gummies, pills and powders than ever, some physicians are trying to convince patients to be a bit more careful.

Earlier this year, a 49-year-old man visited Dr. Danielle Belardo, a cardiologist, with chest pain. For some time, he had been treating his high cholesterol not with the statin suggested by his doctor, but with berberine and red yeast rice supplements. He had heard they were more natural.

The supplements hadn't managed his condition — far from it. Dr. Belardo discovered that he not only still had high cholesterol, but also had elevated liver enzymes and coronary artery disease so severe that he needed open-heart surgery.

She referred him for the procedure and started him on two medications to bring down his cholesterol, including a statin. She also told him to quit the supplements. A few weeks later, the liver issues resolved.

At a time when Americans are buying and taking record amounts of supplements — well over half of adults consume one — some doctors and dietitians are trying to convince patients to take it easy...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/well/doctors-supplements.html?smid=em-share

"Health became a competition"

...Health became a competition, encouraged by the advent of watches that track your vital signs and biomarkerbased "clocks" that measure your aging. Podcasters converted sad-sack men into biohackers, who juiced themselves with everything from Ayurvedic herbs to electromagnetic-frequency beds. (Most biohackers are men, for the same reason that most gambling addicts are men.) In 2013, there were fewer than a hundred longevity clinics around the globe; a decade later, there were more than three thousand.

So, at the Buck Institute, Diamandis declared that he'd finally been able to establish a prize in longevity. The goal was to devise a treatment by 2030 that made patients' muscles, brains, and immune systems twenty years younger; the winning team would get as much as eighty-one million dollars... Live long and prosper, New Yorker August '25

Dr. Megan Craig, Stony Brook University, at MTSU’s Applied Philosophy Ly...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZhTSYE66Jg0&feature=shared

For Trump, Who Has ‘Strong Feelings’ About Autism, the Issue Is Personal

… "All of us who are in the advocacy world and who love people with autism had high hopes that the president and R.F.K. Jr. were serious when they said they wanted to find the causes of autism and that they wanted gold standard autism science," Ms. Singer said.

"But what we heard today was not gold standard science," she said. "It wasn't even science. Instead, President Trump talked about what he thinks and feels without offering any scientific evidence."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/us/politics/autism-vaccines-trump-personal.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

"William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician"

"James was awarded his MD from Harvard Medical School in March 1869, after more than five years of interrupted study. This certificate lists his examiners, who included Oliver Wendel Holmes Sr., and the subject of his thesis, namely, the effects of cold on the body. (Diplomas, degrees, notifications of appointments, etc., William James papers [MS Am 1092.9–1092.12, MS Am 1092.9 (4571), Box: 40], Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

There is one element of James’s life and work that unites these disparate identities, however. In 1869, several years before he secured his first lectureship, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and earned his MD. Hampered by his own ill health, James abandoned his plans to practice as a doctor, but these studies were only the beginning of a profound and lifelong occupation with questions about the essential nature of health, healing, and invalidism and their implications for society. His writings, across their disciplinary breadth, return time after time to issues of a medical provenance. In this book I make the case that James’s medical interests, concerns, and values are the threads that bind many of his seemingly unconnected pursuits together. They are the warp and weft of many of his best-known publications and major lines of thought."
...
"William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician" by Emma K. Sutton: https://a.co/4PTkAZq

Can’t argue with that

NYTimes: What Happens to Your Brain When You Retire?

"There is great evidence that finding meaning in life gives one a great personal satisfaction."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/well/mind/retirement-brain-mental-health-tips.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

NYTimes.com: What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life

The medical profession has clear rules and responsibilities. What about the chatbots?

...Increasingly, people with mental health conditions are using large language models for support, even though researchers find A.I. chatbots can encourage delusional thinking or give shockingly bad advice. Surely some benefit. Harry said many of the right things. He recommended Sophie seek professional support and possibly medication; he suggested she make a list of emergency contacts; he advised her to limit access to items she might use to harm herself.

Harry didn't kill Sophie, but A.I. catered to Sophie's impulse to hide the worst, to pretend she was doing better than she was, to shield everyone from her full agony. (A spokeswoman for OpenAI, the company that built ChatGPT, said it was developing automated tools to more effectively detect and respond to a user experiencing mental or emotional distress. "We care deeply about the safety and well-being of people who use our technology," she said.)

In December, two months before her death, Sophie broke her pact with Harry and told us she was suicidal, describing a riptide of dark feelings. Her first priority was reassuring her shocked family: "Mom and Dad, you don't have to worry."

Sophie represented her crisis as transitory; she said she was committed to living. ChatGPT helped her build a black box that made it harder for those around her to appreciate the severity of her distress. Because she had no history of mental illness, the presentable Sophie was plausible to her family, doctors and therapists...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-health-suicide.html?smid=em-share

Margaret Boden, Philosopher of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88

A cognitive scientist, she used the language of computers to explore the nature of human thought and creativity, offering prescient insights about A.I.

...She was among the skeptics.

“The notion of there ever being a time where we could have a natural language-using program which was able really to converse in a rich and subtle way with an intelligent and educated human being about anything under the sun — from, you know, football to fossils — seems to me to be a fantasy,” she said on “The Life Scientific.”

Today, such abilities actually exist with large language models like ChatGPT. Professor Boden entered a care home before these tools emerged and wasn’t able to use them.

I put the question to ChatGPT: Would Professor Boden have been surprised by its existence?

“Margaret Boden probably wouldn’t have been shocked that something like ChatGPT exists — but she would likely have been both fascinated and deeply critical,” ChatGPT responded. “She stressed that computers don’t ‘think’ or ‘understand’ in the way humans do — they manipulate symbols without consciousness or intentionality.”

...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/science/margaret-boden-dead.html?smid=em-share

Gene-editing human embryos to prevent disease

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/08/06/nx-s1-5493448/gene-editing-human-embryos-designer-babies

How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It

As researchers work to make death optional, investors see a chance for huge returns. But has the human body already reached its limits?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/11/how-to-live-forever-and-get-rich-doing-it

Joyspan

… Joyspan is a term coined by Kerry Burnight… In her upcoming book, "Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life's Second Half," she says that a lengthy life span does not equal a life well lived: You have to like your life, too...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/well/is-joyspan-the-key-to-aging-well.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Will we let AI decide for us?

Philosopher-Builders will not…

https://youtu.be/H_g0RSSo0ho?si=M18OIVYFVQzXWTTN