Timeline of COVID information decay

How the pandemic “ended”

Sentinel intelligence

What   Cassandra  had…

Sentinel intelligence refers to a special cognitive capacity that allows someone to detect threats before anyone else. Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy talk about this trait in their book, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. They review a number of natural and economic disasters throughout history. As they write, “in each instance a Cassandra was pounding the table and warning us precisely about the disasters that came as promised.” Not only were they ignored, but “the people with the power to respond often put more effort into discounting the Cassandra than saving lives and resources.” It just keeps happening.

Global health discourse

Is quite often

Global health nonsense

One of the most salient features of early 21st century global health discourse is that there is so much nonsense. Spin, hyperbole, meaningless buzzwords, and technocratic jargon have become common fare. Nonsense is not necessarily marked by a will to deceive. Rather, it is characterised by a “lack of a connection to a concern with truth—[an] indifference to how things really are.”1

This kind of discourse is marked by its “unclarifiable unclarity”2 and tends to be “pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious.”3 Whatever the intention behind nonsense may be, it usually underinforms or misinforms its audience, without thereby relying on lies.

Attempts to govern global health according to the goals, actors, modalities, and concepts of financialised markets are partially to blame for the spread of nonsense.4 Short term competitive funding rounds, the fetishisation of performance metrics, and a focus on returns on investment increase pressure to constantly project success.5 As a result, global health’s leading agencies routinely refer to “accelerators,” “catalysts,” and “investment cases,” emulating the hyperbolic self-praise of Silicon Valley.

Several observers have picked up on this trend and made the case for more meaningful and self-aware discourse. They provide sometimes humorous rejections of vacuous global health speak67 alongside serious reflection on the way language recapitulates and reinforces existing power hierarchies.8Nevertheless nonsense seems to be proliferating, perhaps because so many of us are implicated in producing it. Taking global public-private partnerships in the response to the covid-19 pandemic as examples, three main forms of global health nonsense are obfuscation, misrepresentation, and the omission of relevant information. We must call out nonsense because it stifles efforts to understand, critically assess, and improve global health governance.

Institutional failure and the polycrisis

The Exchange expounds….

it seems like a daily occurrence that something dramatic, important, and problematic sits right in front of me and honestly, I’ve just sort of learned to live with it. Pandemic? Economics? Politics? Climate? AI? Clean Water? War in Ukraine? Violence? Civil rights? Rule of law? Whatever.

It actually doesn’t make any difference whatsoever what your particular reality tunnel looks like or what party you donate money to; there’s just no question that the dominant form of political/economic structure — democratic capitalism — is facing a polycrisis, a term likely popularized by historian Adam Tooze from Columbia University. 

…

We desperately need the power of collective intelligence and distributed cognition (not to mention resource management) that functional, positive-sum institutions can provide, at the same time few of us believe those institutions are functional and positive-sum.

…

The problem with corporations is that, like all institutions, they are not themselves inherently intelligent. The other problem with corporations is that they are a structure that exists not with a mandate to make the world a better place but to make money for shareholders. In fact, most companies explicitly have in their charter that they exist to make money doing a thing. There’s nothing wrong with that mandate, but it does fall short of another function that institutions have traditionally held: projecting wisdom forward through time.

Elite mindset  prevents the people with power from exercising it for long term benefits to public good…

Neoliberalism

As a set of epistemological principles in service to political goals 

Philip Mirowski

as Thomas Hobbes once wrote, “Hell is Truth Seen too Late.”

Generating music

Text to image, images are of spectrograms(!)

Has created a lower dimensional latent space s.t. Interpolation works

Riffusion

Fit testing your N95

great information

I don’t do this but probably should…

Drought

what is it,

Consequences, mitigations, implications for eg Southern California 

COVID almost always causes lung damage

Informative thread with links

Studies are finding damage in children and the virus in lungs a year after infection, causing T-cell infiltration, scarring, and a mechanism for lung injury.

More ideas for chatGPT

Playtime!

I think the world is divided into two types of people: those obsessed with what creative AI means for their work & future and those who haven’t really tried creative AI yet. To be clear, a lot of people in the second category have technically tried AI systems and thought they were amusing, but not useful. It is easy to be decieved, because we naturally tend try out AI in a way that highlights their weaknesses, not their strengths.

My goal in this post is to give you four experiments you can do, in less than 10 minutes each, with the free ChatGPT, in order to understand why you should care about it. In fact, there are three levels to this AI revelation, and I want to explain why people get stuck at the first two, before giving you activities that might get you to the third:

1. This is a toy

2. This is a great way to create lots of written work (at this phase, people start to think about cheating on essays)

3. This changes so many things

People think it is a toy because the first thing you try to do with AI is what it is worst at: First, you use it like Google: tell me what the best city is, who is the best soccer player in history, and so on. These answers are terrible. They are limited to before 2021, they are often wrong, and they are really boring to read. Right now, AI is not Google. So people leave disappointed.

Second, they may try something speculative, using it like Alexa, and asking a question, often about the AI itself. Will AI take my job? What do you like to eat? These answers are also terrible. Creative AI systems have no personality or sense of self, are not programmed to be fun like Alexa, and are not an oracle for the future.

Mark Cubans drug company

Cost Plus drugs

Transparent pricing

Manufacturing

Most generic drugs are very inexpensive to produce. For example, a 30 count supply of 400mg Imatinib costs just $31.20. We do our best to price our drugs as close to the manufacturer’s price as possible. By cutting out the middlemen, we are able to pass the savings on to you!

15% Markup

We have a small team working hard to negotiate lower drug prices and add more products to our pharmacy every day. We ask you to pay just 15% more than the manufacturer’s price to support our operations. All other aspects of our price below are passed on to you with zero markup. For a 30 count of 400mg Imatinib, this 15% equals $4.80.

Pharmacy Labor

Our pharmacy needs to keep the lights on, too. We pass on the true cost of our pharmacists’ time and materials to you with zero markup. This cost is always $3.00 per drug per order, so you will maximize your savings by ordering the largest quantity possible each time you checkout.

Shipping

This is the amount we spend to package up your prescription and mail it with a shipping carrier. For 400mg Imatinib, this includes the pill bottle and envelope for shipping, which costs $0.48, and a variable fee for carriers, depending on where we are shipping to.