Category: Education

The Academic “Herd Mindset” May Be the Cause of What Elon Musk Calls the “Woke Mind Virus”

(p. B3) “I listen to podcasts about the fall of civilizations to go to sleep,” Musk said this past week during an appearance at the Milken Institute conference. “So perhaps that might be part of the problem.”

One provocateur, in particular, has caught his attention of late: Gad Saad, a marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal, and author of the book “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.”

. . .

Saad wrote that “The Parasitic Mind” was inspired, in part, by his experience in academia, where he described a herd mindset that chastised innovative thinkers. He described pushback he encountered, including his ideas being labeled as “sexist nonsense” and his efforts to use “biologically-based theorizing” to explain consumer behavior being dismissed as too reductionistic.

“The West is currently suffering from such a devastating pandemic, a collective malady that destroys people’s capacity to think rationally,” the 59-year-old Saad wrote at the beginning of his book. “Unlike other pandemics where biological pathogens are to blame, the current culprit is composed of a collection of bad ideas, spawned on university campuses, that chip away at our edifices of reason, freedom, and individual dignity.”

. . .

Another inspiration for his book, Saad writes, was his experience as a boy fleeing with other Jews from his home in Lebanon during that country’s civil war. In the book, he detailed some of the horrors he experienced, including the kidnapping of his parents.

. . .

Musk has said his concerns about Woke Mind Virus, his way of labeling progressive liberal beliefs that he says are overly politically correct and stifling to public debate and free speech, helped fuel his desire to acquire the social-media company Twitter turned X in late 2022.

For the full commentary see:

Tim Higgins. “His Musings Fuel Musk’s Nightmares.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, May 13, 2024): B3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 11, 2024, and has the title “The Man Whose Musings Fuel Elon Musk’s Nightmares.” The last two ellipses above indicate where I omit sentences that appeared in the longer online version, but not in the print version.)

The Saad book that has influenced Elon Musk is:

Saad, Gad. Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. New York: Regnery Publishing, 2020.

Scientists Invest Much Money and Time to Develop Machines Able to Sniff as Well as a Dog

Seven years have passed since the article quoted below predicted that sniffing devices would be available to clinicians in three to five years. I believe the prediction was premature. In the meantime, we should be making more and better use of dog noses to sniff out disease.

(p. D5) But not every physician’s nose is a precision instrument, and dogs, while adept at sniffing out cancer, get distracted. So researchers have been trying for decades to figure out how to build an inexpensive odor sensor for quick, reliable and noninvasive diagnoses.

. . .

“You’re seeing a convergence of technology now, so we can actually run large-scale clinical studies to get the data to prove odor analysis has real utility,” said Billy Boyle, co-founder and president of operations at Owlstone, a manufacturer of chemical sensors in Cambridge, England.

Mr. Boyle, an electronics engineer, formed the company with two friends in 2004 to develop sensors to detect chemical weapons and explosives for customers, including the United States government. But when Mr. Boyle’s girlfriend and eventual wife, Kate Gross, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2012, his focus shifted to medical sensors, with an emphasis on cancer detection.

Ms. Gross died at the end of 2014. That she might still be alive if her cancer had been detected earlier, Mr. Boyle said, continues to be a “big motivator.”

. . .

A similar diagnostic technology is being developed by an Israeli chemical engineer, Hossam Haick, who was also touched by cancer.

“My college roommate had leukemia, and it made me want to see whether a sensor could be used for treatment,” said Mr. Haick, a professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. “But then I realized early diagnosis could be as important as treatment itself.”

. . .

In the United States, a team of researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the University of Pennsylvania received an $815,000 grant in February [2017] from the Kleberg Foundation to advance work on a prototype odor sensor that detects ovarian cancer in samples of blood plasma.

. . .

“We are trying to make the device work the way we understand mammalian olfaction works,” said Charlie Johnson, director of the Nano/Bio Interface Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who is leading the fabrication effort. “DNA gives unique characteristics for this process.”

In addition to these groups, teams in Austria, Switzerland and Japan also are developing odor sensors to diagnose disease.

“I think the fact that you’re seeing so much activity both in commercial and academic settings shows that we’re getting a lot closer,” said Cristina Davis, a biomedical engineer and professor at the University of California, Davis, who also is helping to develop an odor sensor to diagnose disease.

“My estimate is it’s a three- to five-year time frame” before such tools are available to clinicians, she added.

For the full story see:

Kate Murphy. “The Race to Sniff Out Disease.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 2, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 1, 2017 [sic], and has the title “One Day, a Machine Will Smell Whether You’re Sick.”)

In Middle Ages the Less Credentialed Offered “Daily Care,” While “Experts” Theorized

(p. 12) A new book about medieval views on medicine helps explain the Oby nuns’ contentment with the cheapness of their lives. In “Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages,” the British art historian Jack Hartnell tackles a difficult phenomenon: the medieval embrace of medical “theories that have since been totally disproven to the point of absurdity but which nevertheless could not have seemed more vivid or logical in the Middle Ages.”

The doctors of Europe and the Mediterranean were not practical specialists but rather scholars of Greek and Roman natural philosophy, which taught a theory of nature composed of four basic elements (fire, water, earth, air). Each was associated with differing levels of moisture and heat. The human body contained four viscous liquids or “humors”: phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile. A doctor’s job was to correct an uneven humoral balance, drying up perceived wetness with spices or relieving an excess of heat with cooling herbs.

While experts promulgated theory, daily care was mostly administered by midwives, apothecaries, dentists and the odd entrepreneurial carpenter. A local barber might puncture your neck to drain three pints of blood if you complained of a headache.

For the full review see:

Josephine Livingstone. “Death by a Thousand Cuts.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, January 5, 2020 [sic]): 12.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 19, 2019 [sic], and has the title “Bad Bishops, Bloodletting and a Plague of Caterpillars.”)

The book under review is:

Hartnell, Jack. Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Noncredentialled Intense Outsider Duggan Brings Two Blockbuster Cancer Drugs to Market

(p. B11) There is a myth that making money in biotechnology stocks requires an advanced degree. But Bob Duggan, an avid surfer who never graduated from college, has proven that notion wrong. Twice.

Duggan’s latest investment, Summit Therapeutics SMMT 9.25%increase; green up pointing triangle, has become one of the industry’s greatest bets in recent years. The stock is up more than 1,000% in the past 12 months thanks to data from a late-stage trial that showed that its drug, Ivonescimab, beat Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda in patients with a form of lung cancer. Duggan, who was already a billionaire before the Summit investment, is now worth about $16 billion, according to Forbes data.

There is much still to be worked out with the drug, which Summit licensed from Chinese biotech Akeso in 2022. For starters, investors are eager to see how it performs in global trials outside of China. What is remarkable about Summit’s success so far, though, is that this isn’t even Duggan’s first time making billions in biotech.

About 20 years ago, Duggan, a member of the Church of Scientology, began acquiring shares in a little-known biotech company called Pharmacyclics. He was drawn to the company’s cancer drug Xcytrin because of a personal loss: his son’s death from brain cancer. Pharmacyclics ultimately dropped the development of Xcytrin after multiple setbacks but went on to develop leukemia blockbuster Imbruvica. In 2015, AbbVie paid $21 billion for the company.

. . .

Nathan Vardi, author of “For Blood and Money,” which chronicles the development of Imbruvica and a competitor molecule, says that during his research he noticed that many people in biotech circles thought Duggan simply got lucky. While luck certainly plays a big role in the binary world of drug development, few would stick to that argument now.

So what is his secret? One thing Vardi points to is the ability to know when to retreat and when to go all in on an investment. “Duggan has a lifetime of experience making big bets with his own money on the line and figuring out when to hold or fold,” he wrote in an email. “Nobody gets these things completely right, but I think we have to admit he’s doing really well.”

Duggan, who built successful businesses in baking and robotics before jumping into biotechnology, suggests that the naivete of an outsider, combined with the intensity he brings to whatever he does, allowed him to try unconventional things. Nathan Vardi, author of “For Blood and Money,” which chronicles the development of Imbruvica and a competitor molecule, says that during his research he noticed that many people in biotech circles thought Duggan simply got lucky. While luck certainly plays a big role in the binary world of drug development, few would stick to that argument now.

So what is his secret? One thing Vardi points to is the ability to know when to retreat and when to go all in on an investment. “Duggan has a lifetime of experience making big bets with his own money on the line and figuring out when to hold or fold,” he wrote in an email. “Nobody gets these things completely right, but I think we have to admit he’s doing really well.”

Duggan, who built successful businesses in baking and robotics before jumping into biotechnology, suggests that the naivete of an outsider, combined with the intensity he brings to whatever he does, allowed him to try unconventional things.

For the full commentary see:

David Wainer. “Heard on the Street; An Outsider Crashes the Biotech Party.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 24, 2024): B11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date September 23, 2024, and has the title “Heard on the Street; How a Surfer Who Never Finished College Became a Biotech Billionaire.” The sentence starting with “Léon Bottou” appears in the online, but not the print, version. Where there are small differences between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The book by Vardi mentioned above is:

Vardi, Nathan. For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Milton Friedman Bubbled with Energy as He Grabbed His Sunday New York Times

During my first year in graduate school at the University of Chicago, I lived in a dorm for graduate students that had been built with money from John D. Rockefeller. It was next to a several story apartment tower that I had heard was built by Milton Friedman who owned and lived in the top apartment. On Sunday mornings, on more than one occasion, I remember Friedman used to bounce down the hallway of International House and go up to the mail counter, which always had a pile of The Sunday New York Times for sale. He would buy one, and bounce back down the hallway. Friedman was curious, energetic, optimistic, and engaged in the broad world of policy. A libertarian who wants to move the intellectual consensus, benefits from reading The New York Times.

Charter School Founder Stood Up to “Education Bureaucrats”

The NYT ran an inspiring obituary for Joseph H. Reich last Tuesday. Reich and his wife were pioneers in the Charter School initiative. The obituary quotes them as saying that they were able to afford to send their own children to private school, but poor parents who want better for their children than what is on offer by the government public schools could not afford a similar option. They were quoted as saying “We recoil against this injustice.” They created one of the first charter schools and also donated $10 million for general support of charter schools. The obituary says that they stood up against “vigorous pushback from education bureaucrats.”

For the full obituary see:

Trip Gabriel. “Joseph H. Reich, 89, Pioneer of New York City’s Charter Schools, Dies.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 15, 2024): A21.

People Thinking about the Rules They Have to Obey, Are Not Thinking about the Problems They Have to Solve

(p. A18) . . . I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.

. . .

In every organization I’ve interacted with, the administrators genuinely want to serve the mission of the organization, but the nature of their jobs is to enforce compliance with this or that rule.

Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up. I don’t know about you, but my health insurer sometimes denies my family coverage for things that seem like obvious necessities, but I let it go unless it’s a major expense. I calculate that my time is more valuable.

As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion. These are two different mentalities. As Howard writes, “Studies of cognitive overload suggest that the real problem is that people who are thinking about rules actually have diminished capacity to think about solving problems.”

. . .

. . ., Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.

In a recent essay in Liberties Journal, he illustrates how administrators control campus life . . .

. . .

Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives. They have to be trained never to take initiative, lest they wander off into activities that are deemed by the authorities to be out of bounds.

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” In his Liberties essay, Edmundson writes that this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data. He concludes: “They are using the terms of liberation to bring more and more free people closer to mental serfdom. Some day they will awaken in a cage of their own devising, so harshly confining that even they, drunk on their own virtue, will have to notice how their lives are the lives of snails tucked in their shells.”

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.

For the full commentary see:

David Brooks. “Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts.” The New York Times (Friday, January 18, 2024): A18.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 19, 2024, and has the title “Lessons of the Trump Assassination Attempt.”)

The article by Lowrey mentioned above is:

Lowrey, Annie. “The Time Tax; Why Is So Much American Bureaucracy Left to Average Citizens?” The Atlantic, July 27, 2021. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-government-learned-waste-your-time-tax/619568/

The academic paper co-authored by Himmelstein that underlies the Reuters article cited by Brooks above is:

Himmelstein, David, Terry Campbell, and Steffie Woolhandler. “Health Care Administrative Costs in the United States and Canada, 2017.” Annals of Internal Medicine (2020) doi:10.7326/M19-2818.

The article by Howard mentioned above is:

Howard, Philip K. “Bureaucracy Vs. Democracy.” The American Interest (Jan. 31, 2019) Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/opinion/american-life-bureaucracy.html?searchResultPosition=1.

The article by Edmundson mentioned above is:

Edmundson, Mark. “Good People: The New Discipline.” Liberties Journal 3, no. 4 (2023) Available at: https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/good-people-the-new-discipline/.

The two Tocqueville quotes are from Book 4, Chapter 6 of:

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 (1st ed. 1835).

Sometimes Indigenous People Know More Than Credentialed Scientists

(p. D4) As a group of European botanists prepared to travel across Borneo by motorboat and four-wheel-drive vehicles, they heard about a species of palm with an extremely rare quirk.

It flowers underground.

The palm, Pinanga subterranea, is one of 74 plants that scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London named as new to science last year, thrilling some in the botany world. The botanists who went plant-hunting in Southeast Asia six years ago were not expecting to find it.

But the plant is not hard to find: It grows abundantly on Borneo, the third-largest island in the world, which includes parts of Indonesia and Malaysia.

. . .

. . ., the “discovery” of Pinanga subterranea is an example of conventional science catching up with Indigenous knowledge.

“We have described this as new to science,” said William J. Baker, the most senior scientist on the trip. “But the preexisting knowledge about this palm is layered, and was already there before we even got anywhere near it.”

Over the past 30 years, non-Indigenous scientists have turned more to Indigenous knowledge to expand or test their research, with varying degrees of sensitivity.

. . .

There have been a number of collaborative studies that credit Indigenous communities with having generations of wisdom on topics that include shellfish productivity, grizzly bear management and raptor behavior. In some cases the communities lead or participate in the research.

For the full story see:

Mike Ives and Hasya Nindita. “‘New to Science’ Plant Wasn’t Such a Secret.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 30, 2024): D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 20, 2024, and has the title “A Plant That Flowers Underground Is New to Science, but Not to Borneo.”)

“Fiennes Is Superb” as “Calmly Eccentric Self-Taught Scholar”

(p. A13) Every now and then a film comes along—not a great one, necessarily—that makes you deeply glad. It’s how I feel about “The Dig.”

. . .

The dig in question has come to be called Sutton Hoo, after its site on the banks of a tidal river in Suffolk. The film, directed by Simon Stone and adapted by Moira Buffini from a John Preston novel about the discovery, plunges us into the adventure by following an unassuming gent named Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) as he bicycles his way to the fairly imposing house of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), a widow eager to investigate a mysterious group of mounds on her property. The project calls for an archaeologist—not Indiana Jones, necessarily, but someone with more extensive training than Basil, who was, in real life, the man who made the discovery, and who describes himself here with with laconic pride as a lifelong excavator. Yet the nation is preparing for war, no archaeologists are available and Basil will have to do.

Thus does “The Dig” deftly address issues of class—Basil knows more about the history and texture of Suffolk’s soil than any credentialed expert a museum might have sent—while giving us a prime example of an archetype dear to English films, the calmly eccentric self-taught scholar (who of course smokes a pipe). Mr. Fiennes is superb in the role—you’ll be glad to watch him digging away with his shovel, and you’ll be thrilled, as I was, when, after digging for a good while, he shows up at Edith’s door and says, his voice quivering with emotion, “I think you’d better come and see.” (The emotional spectrum of the cinematography, by Mike Eley, ranges from solemn to ecstatic.)

For the full review see:

Joe Morgenstern. “Unearthing a Glittering Tale.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Jan. 29, 2021 [sic]): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 28, 2021 [sic], and has the title “‘The Dig’: Unearthing a Glittering Tale.”)

Successes of Thiel’s Entrepreneurial Anti-College Fellowships Undermine Veneration of Higher Ed

Gary Becker won the Nobel Prize in part for his work as a founder of the study of the economics of human capital. One common finding of the field is that investment in higher education has a high rate of return. So Becker was puzzled when his own grandson pondered skipping college in order to directly become a technology entrepreneur.

I speculate that information technology will make it increasingly easy for autodidacts to learn on their own what they need to know, whenever they need to know it. I further speculate that formal education, especially formal higher education, will wither into irrelevance, just as the Post Office has withered in the face of email and Amazon.

(p. B4) Peter Thiel is trying harder than ever to get young people to skip college.

Since 2010, Thiel, an early Facebook investor and a founder of PayPal Holdings, has offered to pay students $100,000 to drop out of school to start companies or nonprofits.

. . .

Some big successes include Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the blockchain network; Laura Deming, a key figure in venture investing in aging and longevity; Austin Russell, who runs self-driving technologies company Luminar Technologies; and Paul Gu, co-founder of consumer lending company Upstart.

When he began his fellowship, Thiel, a vocal libertarian who was an active supporter of Donald Trump in 2016, was disenchanted with leading colleges and convinced they weren’t best suited for many young people.

His aim, at least in part, was to undermine the popular view that college was necessary for all students, and that top universities should be accorded prestige and veneration.

Since then, public opinion has shifted toward his perspective. More Americans are rethinking the value of a college education. At the same time, America’s elite universities have come under fire for their handling of a surge in antisemitism and for maintaining what critics call a double standard regarding free speech.

For the full story see:

Gregory Zuckerman. “Thiel’s Offer to Skip College Draws Many.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Feb. 26, 2024): B4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 24, 2024, and has the title “Peter Thiel’s $100,000 Offer to Skip College Is More Popular Than Ever.”)

Becker is best known for:

Becker, Gary S. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis; with Special Reference to Education. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Black Physician Wants to “Play Fair” and Be Judged on Merit

(p. A17) Do I deserve to jump the line? If I say yes, I may play a leading role in ending the scourge of atherosclerosis—also known as hardening of the arteries. If I play fair, I may lose the opportunity to save people around the world from heart attacks and strokes. I’m angry at the National Institutes of Health for putting me in this position. I’m even angrier it has done so in the name of racial equity.

My quandary comes down to whether I should “check the box” on an upcoming NIH grant application attesting to my recent African heritage. Since at least 2015, the NIH has asserted its belief in the intrinsic superiority of racially diverse research teams, all but stating that such diversity influences funding decisions. My family’s origins qualify me under the federal definition of African-American. Yet I feel it’s immoral and narcissistic to use race to gain an advantage over other applicants. All that should matter is the merit of my application and the body of my work, which is generally accepted as foundational in atherosclerosis research.

. . .

If I refuse to identify myself as African-American, our application is more likely to lose on “diversity” grounds. It’s a double wrong. Not only is the system rigged based on nonscientific—and possibly illegal—criteria; it encourages me to join in the rigging.

Truth be told, I made my decision years ago. When my study team files our application, it won’t note my West African origins. If we don’t get the grant, so be it. I refuse to engage in a moral wrong in pursuit of a moral good—even one as important as saving lives from the leading killer on earth. My father, who struggled against racism to achieve so much on the merits of his own work, would never forgive me for “checking the box” to grab a race-based advantage.

And no matter what happens, I can never forgive the National Institutes of Health for reinjecting racism into medical research.

For the full commentary see:

Kevin Jon Williams. “Why I’m Saying No to NIH’s Racial Preferences.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, March 28, 2024): A17.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 27, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)