A Darkness the Light cannot Master
A priming note for Secular and all non-Xtian readers – what Xtians call the New Testament has 4 Gospels. Three open with variations on what most folk from Hollywood to the Vatican would view as the conventional Xmas Nativity story – cold time of year, manger, donkeys, star.
The fourth, the Gospel according to John, is radically different. Its first paragraph tells you in 4 sentences that God made everything, especially life, and life is the light of man. The resonant fifth line describes the advent of the Christ in terms the other Gospels do not even hint at.
A light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot master it
There are many translations of an ambiguous Greek word in this sentence. Master, overcome, get control of, comprehend have all been used.
Two Thousand Years
Two thousand years later, many of us are grappling with questions about the birth of A.I. and how this birth might shape our futures. Can we master, get control of it. Do we comprehend what has come into our world?
From perhaps the advent of the printing press, but developing at an ever increasing pace since the industrial revolution, extraordinary technologies have miraculously transformed our lives. We are reassured that the light of science drives this transformation.
The light of science stems supposedly from its rationality. It is difficult to argue with rationality as a guiding light without being seen to embrace irrationality or misinformation. For today’s religion of secularism being Rational is the Way, the Truth and the Light.
The light of science will banish the darkness of superstition and in due course exorcise the demons lurking in our bosoms which, right up to the present day, have led to horrific acts beyond anything our primitive and superstitious ancestors could have comprehended or at least acted upon.
The intensity of this light can frighten us. We are alarmed at prospects of inevitable job-loss on a mass scale. What will happen to us then?
We are alarmed at prospects of machines as new masters, or the few who control the machines. Machines that are unlikely to terminate themselves, the way humans do, if they make a disastrous mistake.
The social media radiating from increasingly all-enveloping platforms alarm us. These once looked like they would open onto new forms of democracy, would shine a light in dark corners, enable us to mobilize and use boycotts or other means to restore decency to what was once called healthcare.
Now the platforms seem to be imprisoning us ever more comprehensively, seem ever more a tool of big corporations or oligopolists. Linked to this imprisonment we have a rising tide of suicides and infertility among younger people that is threatening our entire social fabric.
Healthcare is where our politics becomes personal, where economics translate into life expectancies. Our economies are in big trouble, but we are told on all sides the situation must be our fault because our ‘leaders’ are doing the only possible rational thing – they are following the numbers rather than letting prejudice cloud their vision.
Our Life Expectances are falling fast, nowhere more so than in the U.S.. Our doctors say they are doing the only rational thing – they are following the numbers of evidence based medicine and not letting what the ignorant might think was sensible cloud their vision.
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), an intensely algorithmic, averaging process, lie at the heart of this. RCTs transubstantiate risky chemicals from which we hope to bring benefits into sacraments that only do good and cannot harm. It has become blasphemous to suggest the sacraments could cause a problem.
Singularities
Despite what is happening, despite it being driven forward by an averaging tool, there is increasing talk of personalized, even precision medicine. Far from more personal our health contacts are ever more impersonally algorithmic. Far from being precise, everyone is on the same set of blockbusters.
Personalized medicine has a ‘Because You’re Worth It’ veneer, with variations stressing ‘Our X is as Unique as You’.
Marc Casanas recently drew my attention to Society of Singularities, a 2017 book by Andreas Reckwitz. Here is a Precis. Although written in 2017 it seems dated. Society apparently changed in the early 1980s. In the early 1980s, Ulrik Beck, another German, was announcing the birth of Risk Societies. Andreas doesn’t see the problems that worried Beck.
For him sophisticated technologies are leading to a new abundance of must have goods that enable companies to cater for singular tastes (tastes not needs). Not for Andreas the inevitable doom scenario linked to our embrace of technologies, outlined by yet another German, Martin Heidegger – The Creation Narrative and God Complex.
Andreas gives no hint that a focus on singularity might stem from increasingly sophisticated propaganda technologies that aim at installing in each of us beliefs that we are singular.
The Antidepressant Era, written 30 years ago, ends on the following notes:
As with many other aspects of the marketplace, therapeutics seem to be leading to an atomization of distress. The ‘ideal’ market arrangements would have everyone living in a single’s apartment, each complete with washing machine, dishwasher, fridge-freezer. So also treatment development in practice disconnects individuals from their social milieu.
In 1982, Jachuk and colleagues looked at the perceptions of doctors, patients and relatives of the effects of antihypertensive medication. All doctors reported it as working – blood pressure was reduced. The patients were mixed in their views, some reporting benefits and others reporting problems with the medication. Almost all relatives reported that treatment was having adverse effects – the patient was now complaining of side-effects and the diagnosis had made them hypochondriacal.
How rational is the treating the numbers game? If treatment of a disease which wasn’t affecting a family up till then has more effects on a family than the disease itself, who should be making the risk-benefit assessments and what should be put in the equation?
The Antidepressant Era chronicled who discovered what and when. It steered clear of issues like antidepressants and suicide. It was favorably viewed by the pharmaceutical industry despite snippets like the piece above.
Medicine, however, was changing fast. The changes were built into Let Them Eat Prozac, which came out in 2003.
A decade earlier I’d written up the cases of two men who became suicidal on Prozac. Despite this, companies were still using me as a speaker and between this and ghostwriting articles for me they revealed a lot about their modus operandi.
I ended up being an expert witness in two suicide-homicide cases for an almost unbelievable reason – American lawyers could find no other credible witness.
These Legal Cases made clear that pharmaceutical companies were using the assays (RCAs not RCTs) they had done to get licensed as the Gold Standard Way to hide Adverse Events. The Light that banished the Darkness. Courts were challenged to accept that sometimes fraudulent exercises offered a Science of Cause and Effect while the views of clinicians about what was happening right in front of them might be interesting but were essentially anecdotal.
Linked to the death this year of Thomas Kingston, this story has been told in Aunts, Ants and Regulators and in Probity Blockers and Trans Medicine. In 1991, thanks to Richard Smith and the BMJ, followed soon afterwards by most major journals, company efforts led to the creation of what is called Evidence Based Medicine but de facto is Trans Medicine.
RCTs were converted into Benefit-Risk assessment tools where the Benefit always outweighed the Hazards. This gave rise to a new science of Risk Communication, which aimed at dictating to people that the Benefits they might underestimate always outweighed their perception of Risk from any Hazards.
Company assays show there pretty well are no Hazards. People are neurotic and prone to misperception. Unlike Hazards Risk is a perception. Good Risk Communications aims at putting people straight. There really is no problem with having a nuclear power station next door or 10,000 vaccines in the the last few weeks of pregnancy.
Doctors, the clergy, who were Managing the Hazards, after they dished out what had been Chemicals but were now Sacraments, found their views dismissed as anecdotal. We who suffered actual Hazards that did not seem to be in our minds, found ourselves being gaslighted.
These Secular Clergy were becoming more Abusive – at least on a bigger scale – than religious clergy had ever been.
Those who suffered from serious Adverse Events, became lepers – more discriminated against than women, or the elderly, or people with a different skin color. Not even other lepers want the company of outcasts.
Bad luck is our most primitive fear. Fearing contagion, from time immemorial, we have stigmatized and shunned those with conditions – from leprosy to AIDS. Our new religions allow us to destigmatize sinners with conditions – those with leprosy, AIDS, epilepsy or madness can be one of us provided they are taking the sacraments.
We who are enlightened, however, shun anyone who is doubly unlucky enough to have a condition and a treatment induced Hazard. Someone for whom the sacraments don’t work. Someone whom the Light doesn’t want to know. Who Sins by claiming something that flies in the face of the Light.
This is the Stone the Builders Reject. It is also the way we profess to, but don’t in fact, do science – the Black Swan that makes us realize that our older idea about Swans was wrong.
This is the Darkness that the Light we have chosen to Guide Us is unable to comprehend. If we really want to engage with a science from which Light and Life comes, this is what we must engage with, especially with those we have made outcasts – See links below.
A Web of Our Own Making
Society of Singularities is not a great option for New Year reading, but even though I think he misses a trick – see below – Anton Barba Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making is worth getting acquainted with.
You don’t have to wait for an internet platform to get the book to you – the link above is to a video of a lecture unlike anything you are likely to see these days. With the exception of a movie clip to start, it is tech free. Just a guy talking. The surroundings are about as primitive as you can imagine for an invited lecture.
The introduction is not polished. The Q and A afterwards has more ‘Great question, I don’t have an answer’ answers than you expect from an expert brought in to enlighten us.
Even before you commit yourself to an hour’s retro viewing, there is something you can read immediately – before continuing with this post. [Do not opt for the sacrilegious voice processor version]. Read The Sound of My Own Voice.
The first six pages cover things about the Web that on separate levels we know and don’t know. The final four pages have a new way to view what we must all, since early November, regard as a phenomenon of our times.
Anton, like Andreas, places the emphasis on the technology that is the physical internet (even clouds are physical things), but he sees it as obliterating our singularity. Is he completely right here or just less wrong than Andreas?
Anyone who works with the stones healthcare builders reject can see that the loss of our voice began in the 1980s and flourished dramatically as of 1991. This was before we had an internet and soon after got a very primitive internet, with no Apps or social media, and no forums in which lepers could congregate.
We were in deep trouble once Eli Lilly and BMJ replaced The Sound of Our Voices with an algorithm. That is when the Singular got Shipwrecked.
I am black and beautiful,
Do not gaze at me because I am dark,
because the sun has gazed on me.
Why should I be like one who is veiled
The Year’s End
Often getting end of year dates wrong, DH and RxISK run ‘Religious’ posts. At this supposedly Xtian time of the year, the contrast between aspiration and reality can be grimly apparent instead. Here are some links:
- No Room at the Inn
- In Secula Seculorum
- Has Healthcare gone Mad
- Religion and Technology
- Tis the Season to Rebel
- The Snow Queen
- Rock, Stone, Crack and Disappear
- The Girl Who Cried Wolf
- Pandora Dos Centavos
- Dos Centavos
Some wonderful books also echo themes above.
- Franke James’ Freeing Teresa
- Jim Gottstein’s The Zyprexa Papers
- Patrick Hahn’s The Day the Science Died
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