NHS England has banned the use of puberty blockers to treat children struggling with their gender. Although the health service hasn’t quite admitted that it was wrong to prescribe these drugs in the first place, it has probably got about as close as the lawyers will let it. Yesterday, a spokesperson confirmed: ‘We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty-suppressing hormones to make the treatment routinely available at this time.’
The term “nocebo effect” derives from the Latin word nocere, which translates roughly as “to harm” (as in the Hippocratic injunction, primum non nocere—first, do no harm). Whereas the better-known placebo effect is typically positive (the alleviation of pain or malaise through treatments that otherwise have no inherent therapeutic value); the nocebo effect is negative, often manifesting as headache, skin irritation, or nausea.
No surprise, then, that the nocebo effect has been called “the placebo effect’s evil twin.” It can be more formally summarized as “the occurrence of a harmful event that stems from conscious or subconscious expectations.” Or, more simply: When you expect to feel sick, you are more likely to feel sick. […]
The mind’s unfortunate ability to create suffering ex nihilo can sometimes affect large groups of people though a process of social contagion (or, in the more indelicate language of the past, hysterical contagion). One such example, known as “The June Bug,” occurred in a U.S. textile mill in 1962. Many employees began to feel dizzy and nauseous. Some vomited. Rumors of a mysterious bug that was biting employees began to circulate, and eventually 62 workers became ill. Yet a subsequent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation determined that no bugs could be identified. Nor could investigators find any other physical cause of the illnesses. This type of phenomenon is now referred to as psychogenic illness—sickness caused by belief.
Over the course of history, there have been countless other examples of psychogenic illness, with symptoms ranging from hysterical laughter to seizures. Aldous Huxley, the famed author of Brave New World, described one such seventeenth-century example in his lesser-known historically-based novel, The Devils of Loudun. In the 1630s, as Huxley documents, an entire convent of Ursuline nuns in the western French community of Loudun became convinced that they’d been demonically possessed (complete with convulsions, and other symptoms recognizable to any connoisseur of the modern exorcism-themed horror-movie genre) due to the unholy machinations of a (genuinely licentious) local priest named Urbain Grandier.
Could such a mass outbreak occur today, in an era when few believe in demonic spirits? Consider that during 2016 and 2017, no fewer than 21 American diplomats serving in Cuba reported a range of bizarre neurological symptoms that later came to be collectively described as “Havana Syndrome.” News of the outbreak spread globally through American diplomatic networks, and eventually more than 200 U.S. diplomats became ill. One leading theory was that the Russian government was attacking American embassies and consulates with microwaves.
Toward a Leisure Ethic: How people spend their time is a fundamental mark of civilization. (Stuart Whatley, Spring 2024, Hedgehog Review)
This preference for leisure over work was hardly unique to Pacific Islanders. Urban and rural artisans in preindustrial England also took it as a given that more free time was better than work, even when more work promised greater monetary returns. When the prices they could command for their goods rose, they saw it as an opportunity not to amass wealth but to work less.2
In this limited respect, they were much like the elites of antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the idea of working beyond what was necessary was abhorrent. Likewise for the Roman elites, though their precise views on leisure differed from those of the Greeks. In both cultures, the word for leisure seems to have come first, with work and business framed as nonleisure—scholé versus aschole in Greek, otium versus negotium in Latin.
Similarly, in later centuries, following the rise of Christendom, religious thinkers generally favored leisure over work (vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa), because that was how one drew closer to God. Work, after all, was punishment for humankind’s original sin. “The obligations of charity make us undertake righteous business [negotium],” wrote Augustine, but “if no one lays the burden upon us, we should give ourselves up to leisure [otium], to the perception and contemplation of truth.”3
All were expressing a leisure ethic: a worldview in which a preference for free time and intrinsically motivated pursuits is accompanied by an understanding of how time can best be spent.
AI already shows great promise. India’s education system is in crisis. Over half of fifth graders cannot read at a second-grade level, and merely a quarter can manage simple division. If these students had a personalized curriculum – taught in their native dialect, without caste-based or economic discrimination – they could catch up. While poor incentives for educators, state-level politics, bad curricula, and socioeconomic circumstances have stood in the way of this solution, AI could make such obstacles surmountable.
Imagine an AI tutor interacting with a student from India’s poorest state, Bihar, where learning scores are abysmal, in her native Maithili dialect. It would evaluate homework through images, correct pronunciation, teach other languages, integrate numeracy through games, and offer endless, patient repetition. The same approach also could be used to offer teacher training at scale, with large language models (LLMs), like the one that powers ChatGPT, aiding curriculum development in India’s 100-plus languages and more than 10,000 dialects, all at low cost.
These AI tutors will be affordable, partly because of India’s huge market. One in three Indian students already pays for private tutoring, and well before the recent AI breakthroughs, Indians dominated YouTube, where education playlists help students master various state examinations. All the data these students provide will train models for foundational-learning tutors that can be deployed across the Global South, where students face similar problems.
But the kind of decoupling needed to achieve international climate targets is called “absolute” decoupling, when economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions veer in opposite directions: GDP up, emissions down. More recent research has documented this in a number of high-income countries. The U.S., for example, saw a 32 percent increase in GDP between 2005 and 2021, while its overall CO2 emissions fell by about 17 percent.
Something similar appears to have happened in other developed economies like France, Sweden, and Germany—even when you account for so-called “consumption-based” emissions, which include emissions from the production of goods that are imported or exported. In other words, these countries seem to really be reducing climate pollution and not just offshoring it to the developing world.
Since 2016, reports from the World Resources Institute, the Breakthrough Institute, and independent researchers have shown more and more countries achieving periods of absolute decoupling, including their consumption-based emissions. Perhaps the splashiest analysis came in 2022, when a Financial Times data columnist reported that 70 countries—one in three worldwide—had experienced at least five consecutive years of absolute decoupling between 1990 and 2020. “Green growth is already here,” the columnist wrote.
As the experts detailed, the mortality burden was greatest for cardiometabolic conditions, accounting for 52% of 8.34 million deaths linked to air pollution per year. Among those issues is ischaemic heart disease — a leading cause of heart attacks.
Meanwhile, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were both notable related illnesses, accounting for 16% each.
According to atmospheric consultant Jos Lelieveld from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, an estimated 5.13 million excess deaths could be avoided worldwide each year if we phased out fossil fuels.
Let AI remake the whole U.S. government (oh, and save the country) (Josh Tyrangiel, March 6, 2024, Washington Post)
Perna needed up-to-the-minute data from all the relevant state and federal agencies, drug companies, hospitals, pharmacies, manufacturers, truckers, dry ice makers, etc. Oh, and that data needed to be standardized and operationalized for swift decision-making.
It’s hard to comprehend, so let’s reduce the complexity to just a single physical material: plastic. Perna had to have eyes on the national capacity to produce and supply plastic — for syringes, needles, bags, vials. Otherwise, with thousands of people dying each day, he could find himself with hundreds of millions of vaccine doses and nothing to put them in.
To see himself, Perna needed a real-time digital dashboard of an entire civilization.
This being Washington, consultants lined up at his door. Perna gave each an hour, but none could define the problem let alone offer a credible solution. “Excruciating,” Perna tells the room, and here the Jersey accent helps drive home his disgust. Then he met Julie and Aaron. They told him, “Sir, we’re going to give you all the data you need so that you can assess, determine risk, and make decisions rapidly.” Perna shut down the process immediately. “I said great, you’re hired.”
Julie and Aaron work for Palantir, a company whose name curdles the blood of progressives and some of the military establishment. We’ll get to why. But Perna says Palantir did exactly what it promised. Using artificial intelligence, the company optimized thousands of data streams and piped them into an elegant interface. In a few short weeks, Perna had his God view of the problem. A few months after that, Operation Warp Speed delivered vaccines simultaneously to all 50 states. When governors called panicking that they’d somehow been shorted, Perna could share a screen with the precise number of vials in their possession. “‘Oh, no, general, that’s not true.’ Oh, yes. It is.”
A combination of regular exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy – a psychological treatment to help people understand how thoughts drive emotions and behaviors – can treat depression as well as any pharmaceutical, multiple experts have said.
Lucile’s story, along with countless others, inspires hope. Hope for a future where people can find better jobs, move into safer housing, and spend more time with their children. Hope for communities that need a little help — just a little help — to flourish and prosper. Hope for a country that recognizes poverty is bad for the soul and bad for the nation.
So why are some Republican lawmakers working to block and ban programs that deliver significant benefits to hard-working Americans, especially when guaranteed income programs are supported by voters on both sides of the aisle?
In a new poll, nearly two-thirds of American voters — Democrats, Republicans and independents — said that they support a guaranteed income. Voters surveyed supported programs that would directly give $500-$1,000 to individuals every month with no onerous requirements or strings attached. They understood the payments would be used by those who needed it to make necessary purchases and would empower people experiencing poverty to transform their lives.
These findings should be a political earthquake and mark the beginning of a policy transformation where leaders at every level of government work together to ensure every family across the country can thrive. But even with overwhelming bipartisan support from everyday Americans, there is a growing movement from Republican state lawmakers to thwart these anti-poverty measures.
The adoption of UBI will be driven by technology replacing the jobs of white men
Rocks and hotness have existed for billions of years, but it’s only now that the two can be used to help the world decarbonize — and it’s all because the insanely low cost of solar and wind power has made thermal storage economically possible.
