The Consequence of Matters

  Peter Buxtun died today at age 86 from Alzheimer's. Peter Buxtun is not famous but he should be. If you imagine that Nazis are the only ones to conduct horrific, lethal medical experiments on humans, I've got news -- the Shining City on a Hill (as Reagan called the US) did too. Peter Buxtun was the whistleblower who blew the lid off the Tuskegee Study. The Tuskegee Study was an infamous experiment conducted by the US Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972 to study the effects of untreated syphilis on black men. 1972 is surprisingly recent for something like this to still be going on, and was only 8 years in the past when Reagan ran for president. 600 Alabama black men were told that they would receive free medical care but all they ever got were placebos. Buxtun's actions led to the Belmont Report, released in 1979, a year before Reagan ran for office. It is a foundational document in medical ethics, and established guidelines and regulations for human subjects research ...

  Milan Kundera died this week. He was a Czech writer who was prominent back in the Cold War and seems to have been slotted permanently into that increasingly antiquated niche. He's most famous for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but my favorite of his works is The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It begins with a meditation on a photograph of a party apparatchik as he is slowly erased from history. That's certainly a Cold War image, but it hides a deeper concern. Kundera was deeply concerned with the relationship between culture, history, memory and identity. He believed nations, especially small ones, needed to preserve their culture and language. The identity of a people and a civilization is reflected and concentrated in what has been created by the mind, and that is culture. But, as with everything Kundera wrote about, there are ambiguities. Kundera was also deeply hostile to the idea of cultures being confined by national boundaries. The nations of central Europe, unde...

I watched "I'm Not There" yesterday, a film about the many sides and lives of Bob Dylan, played by 6 actors (it's art). It isn't a biopic, it's an abstract Dylan. Childhood Dylan is a small black child who tells everyone his name is Woody Guthrie and sings songs about unions and racism but in 1959. He's Dylan the faker. Outlaw Dylan is Richard Gere playing Billy the Kid. Rock and Role Dylan is played by Cate Blanchett in a stunning performance. The origin story of Cate Blanchett Dylan is Dylan going electric. It is explained by the notion that Dylan turned jaded and skeptical on protest, it is useless to try to change things because you can't change things. I think Cate Blanchett Dylan has a point. In the early 19th century, it was Catholics instead of Muslims who were going to force Papal rule on us rather than Sharia law. An influx of Irish, Italian and German Catholics changed the demographics in Protestant America and Protestant America didn't ...

Aristotle believed the heart was all important and the brain was simply a radiator to keep the heart cool. Descartes, impressed by the hydraulic action of fountains in the royal gardens, developed a hydraulic analogy for the action of the brain. Thomas Henry Huxley thought of the brain as analogous to a steam engine. Now we think brains are computers and so, therefore, computers are brains. However, leaving aside the fact that if an argument is true, the converse argument does not have to be true, the fact is that there is exactly zero evidence and exactly zero theoretical reason to believe that computers can be what brains are. To believe it nonetheless is an article of faith, not an article of science. There are, in fact, some reasons to believe that they are not. The computer/brain analogy is compelling because computers are able to do some things we find extremely difficult and to which we attribute high intelligence to people who can do those things. Playing chess, for example. Mo...

  A brief list of Republicans who do not favor cutting Social Security. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Johnson denies President Biden’s claim that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But after saying this he then called Social Security a “legalized Ponzi scheme” and says that Congress should no longer automatically pay Social Security benefits each year but rather decide each year whether to pay them and how much the benefit should be. “That doesn’t mean putting on the chopping block,” Johnson told local radio. “That doesn’t mean cutting Social Security. But it does mean prioritizing lower priority spending.” Senator Mike Lee (R-UT): Mike Lee also denies President Biden’s claim that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But running for Senate in 2010 he told supporters: “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.” Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA): Steve Scalise also denies President Biden’s claims that Republicans want ...

  The New York Times Magazine has a long piece on the development of Tesla's "full self driving" software. It is pretty interesting, but one thing stood out to me. Musk said straight up that he is deliberately using his customers as test subjects in the development process. It stood out because as far as I can see, it is blatantly illegal. Because of the Nuremberg trials, the Tuskegee experiments, and quite a few other events where dangerous experiments were performed on people against their will or even without their knowledge, human subjects research is strictly regulated by the Department of Health and Human Services under the Common Rule. The rule is a little vague about how you insure the rules are being obeyed, it simply mandates that you will. Most universities and research labs comply using something called an Institutional Review Board. All research proposals must be submitted to the IRB and it will conduct oversight throughout the project. An IRB can force signi...