Coffee Break: Political Grownups, Bending Time, CDC at Sea, Snakebites, and AI Again

Part the First: Where Have All the Grownups Gone?  Corey Robin is always worth reading (the first edition of The Reactionary Mind is much better than the second), and lately he has been more active publicly, here asking about the grownups:

For a long time now, I’ve thought that you’re never really a grownup until you realize that there are no grownups. We all have a fantasy, inherited from childhood, that somewhere, someone, is truly in charge and knows what they’re doing and has got things under control. I remember the moment when I realized that’s not true. There is no such person. It’s on you, me, us, to try to be a little wiser than we are, which involves, as a first step, giving up the fantasy that anyone in the actual world knows entirely what they’re doing.

This was followed by his take on Andrew Cuomo flailing impotently at Zohran Mamdani.  We have all seen it, no matter what we do for a living, and in the academic world, well, there are too many people haunting the halls who have never had to work for a living.  In politics, I did think that Susie Wiles would be the grownup in the room at the White House, but it could be that grownups have no power to tame the feral politco:

One of the elements of W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument in Black Reconstruction that surprised me most the last time, or maybe the time before that, that I taught it, was just how much attention he pays to the Radical Republican’ vision of congressional power and congressional government over and against a Constitution based on presidential power and presidential government.

I bring this up today as I read about Trump’s plans (after denying such plans) to demolish entirely the East Wing of the White House, which are grotesque in every way you can imagine, for the sake of building the biggest ballroom ever. Incidentally, that desire, and its frustration, is a recurrent grievance in Trump’s many complaints in one of his many campaign books prior to 2016, about how he repeatedly called the White House to offer to pay for a big new ballroom there and how Obama, snoot that he was, never would take his call.

Congressional democracy?  DuBois thought it could exist.  And maybe that is what we should be working toward, long-term, however long that term lasts:

It is a vision a world that does not hinge upon what happens every four years, in one election, of a world where one individual can’t impose his vision of a ballroom in the sky upon all of us, of a world in which our actions and those of our representatives, on a day to day, more proximate (in time and space) basis, matter most.

Hey, a boy can dream, but I have been voting since the midterm election of 1974.  Still dreaming.

Part the Second: We Finally Get that Hour Back, for a Few Months.  I remember when daylight savings time (DST) was restarted in the late 1960s.  It meant that in summer we could stay out for an extra hour after supper, and when we rode our bicycles to the softball games at the recreation department we could watch twilight descend over the salt marshes.  Later when I was a freshman in college and the time did not change back in the fall, I went to first period class that began at 7:50 am in the cold and dark rain, while successfully avoiding getting flattened by a university bus.  Anyway, the argument continues about the utility of DST in An Indigenous approach shows how changing the clocks for daylight saving time runs counter to human nature – and nature itself.

It is that time again. Time to wonder: Why do we turn the clocks forward and backward twice a year? Academics, scientists, politicians, economists, employers, parents – and just about everyone else you will interact with this week – are likely debating a wide range of reasons for and against daylight saving time.

But the reason is right there in the name: It’s an effort to “save” daylight hours, which some express as an opportunity for people to “make more use of” time when it’s light outside.

But as an Indigenous person who studies environmental humanities, this sort of effort, and the debate about it, misses a key ecological perspective.

Biologically speaking, it is normal, and even critical, for nature to do more during the brighter months and to do less during the darker ones. Animals go into hibernation, plants into dormancy.

Humans are intimately interconnected with, interdependent on, and interrelated to nonhuman beings, rhythms and environments. Indigenous knowledges, which despite their complex, diverse and plural forms, amazingly cohere in reminding humans that we too are an equal part of nature. Like trees and flowers, we are beings who also need winter to rest and summer to bloom.

As far as we humans know, we are the only species that chooses to fight against our biological presets, regularly changing our clocks, miserably dragging ourselves into and out of bed at unnatural hours.

The reason, many scholars agree, is that capitalism teaches humans that they are separate from, and superior to, nature – like the point on top of a pyramid. That, and I argue, that capitalism wants people to work the same number of hours year-round, no matter the season. This mindset runs counter to the way Indigenous people have lived for thousands of years…

In my view, people might be better off if the discussion about changing the clocks in the fall and spring wasn’t about how much time we can “make use of” or how much daylight we might “save,” but rather about reducing the number of hours we are expected to be made useful – and profitable – to secure a more just and sustainable existence for all.

Sounds like a plan to me.  But while the Neoliberal Dispensation continues to dispense with every human need in favor of the “needs” of the economy, for as long as the economy creeps along, I’ll keep changing my clocks just like everyone else in the United States.  Except our fellow Americans in Hawai’i and Arizona.  I have watched the summer sunset in both states, an hour earlier.  Seemed about right.

Part the Third: When gCaptain Writes About CDC, It Is Probably Time to Get Your Affairs in Order.  gCaptain is one of my regular stops about all things shipping on the seas and it covered this accident, which happened in a place I know very well.  But now we have the good people at gCaptain covering this: Kennedy Orders CDC Probe Into Offshore Wind Health Risks.  The hits, they just keep on coming:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff to probe the potential harms of offshore wind farms, according to people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump marshals his administration to thwart the clean energy source he loathes.

In late summer, HHS instructed CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to prepare research about wind farms’ impact on fishing businesses, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Kennedy has personally met with NIOSH director John Howard about the issue and listed particular experts for Howard’s team to contact. The office of the US surgeon general has also been involved in the initiative, which HHS leadership — prior to the ongoing government shutdown — had aimed to have completed within a couple months.

Among the offshore wind health impacts that HHS staff have investigated is the electric magnetic frequency generated from undersea cables used to connect power from the machines to the electric grid, one of the people said. Wind proponents say they aren’t harmful. HHS spokespeople didn’t respond to inquiries.

Trump, who fought against a wind project within view of his golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland, has long shown contempt for wind power, claiming without evidence that the farms cause cancer, and dismissing them as overly expensive eye-sores. His efforts against them have included rescinding permits and halting construction for wind projects worth billions of dollars. This includes the Revolution Wind farm being constructed off the coast of Rhode Island by Orsted A/S, which was already 80% complete when it received a stop work order in August that cited national security concerns.

Well, Trump and his minions are not the only NIMBYs on offshore wind farms.  But with this we passed “ridiculous” five exits ago.  Might wind farms disrupt the marine habitat?  Undoubtedly.  But their effect is piddling compared to Melissa and bleached coral and North Atlantic right whales killed (only a few hundred left) because we leave our detritus in the sea and will not enforce a nautical speed limit where the whales are calving.

Part the Fourth: A Note on AI.  What is it good for?  One would imagine that it will eventually be good for what the internet has become good for, as noted by this link from Statista.com that lists the most visited websites in the world.  In first place is Google, no matter how enshittified it has become.  No surprise there.  The eighth, between Wikipedia and Yahoo is no surprise, either.  Now comes OpenAI. From The New York Times:

I’ve read more smut at work than you can possibly imagine, all of it while working at OpenAI.

Back in the spring of 2021, I led our product safety team and discovered a crisis related to erotic content. One prominent customer was a text-based adventure role-playing game that used our A.I. to draft interactive stories based on players’ choices. These stories became a hotbed of sexual fantasies, including encounters involving children and violent abductions — often initiated by the user, but sometimes steered by the A.I. itself. One analysis found that over 30 percent of players’ conversations were “explicitly lewd.”

After months of grappling with where to draw the line on user freedom, we ultimately prohibited our models from being used for erotic purposes. It’s not that erotica is bad per se, but that there were clear warning signs of users’ intense emotional attachment to A.I. chatbots. Especially for users who seemed to be struggling with mental health problems, volatile sexual interactions seemed risky. Nobody wanted to be the morality police, but we lacked ways to measure and manage erotic usage carefully. We decided A.I.-powered erotica would have to wait.

It won’t wait.  It can’t, or another AI giant will go all-in on bots that fill the need.  Scary times.

Part the Fifth: News You Can Use if Snakebites Are Likely to Be in Your Future.  In a previous life I worked with a very good scientist who was fascinated with snake venoms and how they did their damage.  There is a lot of fundamental protein chemistry, structure, and function in venoms.  Having grown up in snake heaven, where Crotalus adamanteus and Agkistrodon piscivorous are common, I have seldom ventured too far into the bushes without boots (although I have never found a pair of snake boots that matched those of my grandfather – thick leather with laces all the way up to the knee).

A news article in Nature has the good news: Single antivenom protects against 17 different snakebites:

An antivenom using antibodies from a llama and an alpaca can neutralize venom from some of the world’s most venomous snakes, according to a study published today in Nature1. When administered to mice, the treatment conferred protection against toxins from 17 African snake species and reduced skin damage caused by venoms.

Snakebites are a neglected public-health issue that is estimated to kill roughly 20,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa every year. Around 300,000 snakebites occur annually in this region, and tissue death from venom leads to approximately 10,000 amputations.

Current antivenom treatments are made by injecting large animals, such as horses, with small doses of snake venom. The horses produce antibodies against the venom, and the horse plasma is extracted and used to treat bites in people. But these antivenoms are mostly specific to a single snake species.

It can be difficult to identify the snake behind the bite, and that makes providing timely treatment difficult, says study co-author Anne Ljungars, a bioengineer at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby.

Now, this is very good science.  There are many fewer different venomous snakes in North America, and I expect emergency rooms in the US to be stocked with a similar multivalent anti-venom against rattlesnakes, water moccasins, and copperheads soon.  Our dogs will appreciate this, too.

Part the Sixth: How We Should Think About AI While Dealing With It Willy Nilly.  After three years, I still have not asked ChatGPT a question and I have ignored prompts from other “vendors” to do so.  In January and February, I will be tutoring medical students in the Gastrointestinal System and Hematology.  This time around I will ask my students to close their laptops and put away their tablets and actually discuss the cases in the syllabus.  I imagine the pushback will be strong, but one thing does encourage me.  Earlier this week several students came to my office and asked when we were going to stop letting ChatGPT think for students in our tutorial groups, which is how we deliver most of our curriculum.  Not everyone has fallen for the magic fairy dust!

This essay from Front Porch Republic tells us a truth: ChatGPT Can Code. But It Cannot Discern:

From their inception, universities prepared students for the future not just as workers but also as citizens and human persons. Students read widely in the classics, poetry, and literature while also studying to become theologians or lawyers. In early America, this tradition continued with the founding of our nation’s oldest universities. But throughout the twentieth century, universities slowly narrowed their focus. Today, universities focus on “relevant” “skills” for the “global economy.” Educating deep thinkers, molding model citizens, and forming human souls are often afterthoughts.

Now ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are threatening this model. Skills can now be outsourced to generative AI. For Gen Z, ChatGPT and its analogs are quickly becoming the next calculator, word processor, and search engine rolled into one. For the future of our workforce, this may be a net gain. Depending on where and how it is used, AI can help many workers accomplish tasks better, faster, and more efficiently. Thus, teaching students to use AI must necessarily be part of universities’ role, especially in professional courses where students learn particular techniques and strategies to make the best use of the new tools that exist.

But the purpose of a true liberal education is to develop oneself as a person—a development that can be achieved only via reading, thinking, and practicing, not by taking shortcuts to a more efficient product. In short, universities must remember the human side of education. They must return to cultivating wisdom, teaching discernment, and preparing students for responsible citizenship—callings for which there is no AI replacement.

All true.  Except the university in America lost the plot long before ChatGPT was a gleam in the eye of any one of our pestilential misanthropes.  My university is a case in point.  Last week I was on campus for an event.  And this time, the University Bookstore (sic) had even fewer useful books for a university student than when I was there in February.  Where previously there were rows and rows of publishers’ backlist titles in natural science, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, politics, economics, art, and music, the entire space was taken up by branded apparel and other knickknacks with the mascot prominent always.

Yes, I know that most of my classmates seldom set foot in either the bookstore or the libraries, and some even bragged about never darkening a library door.  But ten percent did.  What does that ten percent do now?  Do they still exist?  I wonder.  Soon after starting in my current position, we had a group of medical students over for dinner.  One of them liked a set of lamps in the reading room.  I replied they were knock-offs of a Frank Lloyd Wright design.  She had never heard of him.

Books are essential tools of the intellect.  Without tools we are not human.

And on that cheery note, see you next week!  Happy Halloween!