A Skeptical Take on A.I.
• An excellent podcast by Ezra Klein, interviewing Gary Marcus’ “Skeptical Take on the A.I. Revolution”; definitely worth a listen.
What an expert thinks about Crypto
• Mihir Desai at HBS and HLS opines — correctly in my mind — about the illusory promises of the crypto kingdom in his opinion piece in the NYT.
Twitter reduced to rubble?
Yet another sadly undistinguished rip off by Twitter as used office inventory goes out for auction…
Economic Perception and the Partisan Divide
I thought this was a very interesting (and revealing) excerpt from Matt Yglesias’ excellent Slow Boring, Jan 9 edition:
How Americans Pay for Health Care is Broken
• Yet another example of how our American health care payment systems are completely bonkers:
Goodbill researched hospital charges for a liter of saline; available online for about $10, some hospitals were charging many thousands of dollars (in one case $26,667.03!!!) for a bag of N.S. Goodbill used the machine readable lists of hospital prices mandated by the Hospital Price Transparency Rule to grab the data.
What a mess.
On Childhood Vaccinations
Zeke Emanuel and Matthew Guido write in the NYT about declining childhood vaccination rates in the US, leading to inadequate levels of population “herd immunity” and therefore increasing the risks of outbreaks. They advocate eliminating nonmedical exemptions for vaccinations and allowing children 14 or over to get immunized without parental permission. I agree.
on AI
• David Marchese interviews Yejin Choi in the NYT; what I found to be an excellent discussion of where the science stands right now ensues.
Gruber on Twitter
• John Gruber’s Daring Fireball has a good post on Twitter and Musk’s recent machinations; recommended. One excerpt:
“But it gets better. Last night Twitter began classifying all links to all popular Mastodon servers as “malware”. That includes links to one’s own Mastodon account that a Twitter user might put in their account profile”
Thank you and best wishes, Tony Fauci
• I’ll be sad to see the wonderful Tony Fauci step down from his role at the NIAID. He’s a wonderful man, and a true icon — especially for physicians like me who practiced through the beginnings of the AIDs epidemic and the subsequent discoveries of effective treatments. We’ll miss his resolute leadership and integrity. He has a parting message “to the next generation of scientists and health workers” published in the NY Times.
An American Tragedy, Indeed
German Lopez, writing in the NYT’s “The Morning” newsletter, writes on the toll of firearms on child mortality in the U.S.; an excerpt:
“Guns are now the No. 1 cause of deaths among American children and teens, ahead of car crashes, other injuries and congenital disease.
In other rich countries, gun deaths are not even among the top four causes of death, a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report found. The U.S. accounts for 97 percent of gun-related child deaths among similarly large and wealthy countries, despite making up just 46 percent of this group’s overall population.”
The NY Times Magazine has a story on the lives some of the children killed by gun violence lived.