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The Last Lonely Night Watchman Blows His Horn, “Signaling That All Is Well”

When I was a graduate student in philosophy and economics the exciting new read for the liberty-inclined was Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I was at first rejected from the philosophy graduate program at the University of Chicago because I had the audacity to praise Ayn Rand in my application essay. The rejection decision was eventually reversed. But imagine my reaction when then-young Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick had the guts to write a paper evaluating the philosophy of Ayn Rand. My memory is that he did not praise all that is Rand. But that is not the point; the point is that Nozick took Rand seriously. Regardless of the contents of his main book, Nozick was my hero.

The book is pretty good too. I still ponder much that Nozick pondered. Should we eat animals that think and feel? Should a libertarian society approve of people who voluntarily join an authoritarian community? If we could plug ourselves into a machine that would give us the false illusion that all is well, should we?

Not everyone I admired totally admired Nozick’s book. I remember reading (or hearing) Milton Friedman say that it was good but “too Talmudic.” (I assume that Friedman meant that there was too much back and forth nit-picking on minor issues, and too little dispositive empirical evidence on big issues.)

The main constructive section of Nozick’s book defends the libertarian’s minimal state, what Nozick memorably calls “the night-watchman state”–the fundamental justifiable function of government is to act as a conscientious night watchman. (Today many who call themselves “libertarians” are anarchists which is why I now sometimes call myself a “classical liberal.”) (For fans of The Lord of the Ring: I think of the Rangers, the unappreciated protectors of the Hobbits, as kin to night watchmen.)

Nozick solidified the heroic image of the night watchman going about his job.

(p. A11) Mr. Stein, a journalist and editor for BBC Travel, has globetrotting in his veins, but this book is much more than a travelogue. . . . . . . under the drizzle of a wet November, he climbs 14 stories to the belfry of a Swedish church with Scandinavia’s last night watchman and listens to the watchman’s call, on a 4-foot-long copper horn, signaling that all is well.

. . .

In reading about the night watchman, alone in the dark tower above Ystad, along Sweden’s southern coast, I felt the wind and rain, I awed at the sacrifice, I understood the power of tradition. Those who listen to his horn night after night, even cracking open their windows in subzero temperatures for the comfort of its lonely bellow, know that the world would be different without it. It would be poorer, less a home to mankind.

. . .

Mr. Stein’s great gift—his sensitivity and his dedication to capturing joy and hope, however fleeting—is worth giving to others.

For the full review see:

Brandy Schillace. “Bookshelf; The Great Chain Of Humanity.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Jan. 3, 2025): A11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 2, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Custodians of Wonder’: The Great Chain of Humanity.”)

The book under review is:

Stein, Eliot. Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2024.

Nozick’s book, mentioned in my introductory comments, is:

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974.

Patients Are Too Patient About the Time They Waste in Worthless Healthcare

Healthcare appointments are often too numerous, too time-consuming, too stressful, and too harmful. Journalist Paula Span, often citing the words and research of MD Ishani Ganguli, presents this as an outrageous revelation. Dr. Ganguli tells us “there are opportunity costs” and “you don’t have infinite time, energy and attention” (Ganguli as quoted in Span 2024, p. D3). Outrageous it is, but to few of us is it a revelation. Patients know because they experience. If they are smart (I am often stupid) they will stifle their complaints so they do not annoy their care-givers. But care-givers know also. Those implementing the time-wasting or onerous practices are not evil. But they often do not have the incentive, or sometimes even the power, to change.

Every time I go into a doctor’s office, I am weighed. I always ask, “Do you want me to take my shoes off?” The nurse or medical assistant always shrugs and says they do not care. If my weight mattered, shouldn’t it be taken consistently, either always with shoes on or shoes off? I have had my weight taken countless times but I cannot remember a single time when the doctor mentioned the weight measure from earlier in the appointment. Prescription lists are endlessly requested, even by those who do the prescribing. Many lab tests are done out of the inertia of routine. In many hospitals sleeping patients are interrupted by a “care-giver” who comes in and performs a routine task, like asking them how much pain they are feeling. The “care-giver” records the answer and departs, taking no other action, but in the meantime diminishing the healing sleep of the patient. Tasks of this sort must be damaging to the morale of the care-giver. They signed up to do good, not to do harm. But they must do harm to follow the mandated protocol, or they risk being punished.

Why do these practices continue? Because they have been done in the past. No one will be rewarded for dropping them, and the care-giver who fails to do them is at risk of being criticized or punished. In a non-entrepreneurial, litigious, and highly regulated system, much that is done is not done for the benefit of the patient. It is done for CYA (“Cover Your Ass”).

But hope abides. We could deregulate healthcare. Then doctors could tell their nurses to only take the patient’s weight when it is actually needed. Hospital entrepreneurs could tell staff to only ask patients of their pain when they are awake and complaining of pain. Options in healthcare would be more diverse. But some of the options would actually make sense. Care-givers providing options that make sense would expand their own practice and be imitated by others. We would have better care and less wasted time.

The commentary by Paula Span, mentioned above, is:

Paula Span. “Too Much Time Spent on Doctors.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 26, 2024): D3.

(Note: the online version of Span’s commentary has the date Nov. 23, 2024, and has the title “So Many Days Lost at the Doctor’s Office.”)

An academic article co-authored by Ganguli presents empirical evidence on how much time patients spend in healthcare activities:

Ganguli, Ishani, Emma D. Chant, E. John Orav, Ateev Mehrotra, and Christine S. Ritchie. “Health Care Contact Days among Older Adults in Traditional Medicare: A Cross-Sectional Study.” Annals of Internal Medicine 177, no. 2 (Feb. 2024): 125-33.

In an academic op-ed piece, Ganguli justly laments how the healthcare system often wastes patients’ time, sometimes even resulting in worse health. She uses the example of the severe cardiac side-effects from the eight weeks of Monday through Friday radiation that her 81-year-old father was given for his recently discovered prostate cancer:

Ganguli, Ishani. “How Does Health Care Burden Patients? Let Me Count the Days.” New England Journal of Medicine 391, no. 10 (Sept. 7, 2024): 880-83.

L.E.D. Pioneer Akasaki’s “Perseverance — Sheer Doggedness — Paid Off”

(p. B10) Isamu Akasaki, a Japanese physicist who helped develop blue light-emitting diodes, a breakthrough in the development of LEDs that earned him a Nobel Prize and transformed the way the world is illuminated, died on Thursday [April 1, 2021] in a hospital in Nagoya, Japan. He was 92.

. . .

Bob Johnstone, a technology journalist and the author of “L.E.D.: A History of the Future of Lighting” (2017), said in an email, “The prevailing opinion in the late 1980s was that, because of the number of flaws in the crystal structure of gallium nitride, it would never be possible to make light-emitting diodes from it, so why would you even try?”

Dr. Akasaki, he continued, “was willing to stick at what was almost universally recognized to be a lost cause, working away long after researchers at RCA and other U.S. pioneers of gallium nitride LED technology had given up.”

“Eventually,” Mr. Johnstone said, “his perseverance — sheer doggedness — paid off.”

. . .

Dr. Akasaki was awarded hundreds of patents for his research over the years, and the royalties from his groundbreaking work with Dr. Amano eventually funded the building of a new research institute, the Nagoya University Akasaki Institute, completed in 2006.

. . .

When asked in a 2016 interview with the Electrochemical Society to summarize the philosophy guiding his many years of single-minded research, Dr. Akasaki replied, “No pain, no gain.”

“I say this to younger people: Experience is the best teacher,” he continued. “That is, sometimes there is no royal road to learning.”

For the full obituary see:

Scott Veale. “Isamu Akasaki, 92, Nobel Laureate Whose LED Breakthrough Rippled Around the World.” The New York Times (Wednesday, April 7, 2021 [sic]): B10.

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

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date April 6, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Isamu Akasaki, 92, Dies; Nobel Winner Lit Up the World With LEDs.”)

The book by Bob Johnstone mentioned above is:

Johnstone, Bob. L.E.D.: A History of the Future of Lighting. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017.

600,000 Americans Projected to Die of Cancer in 2025

Progress has been made against some specific cancers for some specific people. But overall there’s still a lot of cancer to be cured.

(p. A1) More Americans are surviving cancer, but the disease is striking young and middle-aged adults and women more frequently, the American Cancer Society reported on Thursday [Jan. 16, 2025].

. . .

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, but the leading cause among Americans under 85. The new report projects that some 2,041,910 new cases will occur this year and that 618,120 Americans will die of the disease.

Six of the 10 most common cancers are on the rise, including cancers of the breast and the uterus. Also increasing are colorectal cancers among people under 65, as well as prostate cancer, melanoma and pancreatic cancer.

For the full story see:

Roni Caryn Rabin. “Cancer Striking Younger Women.” The New York Times (Friday, January 19, 2025): A1 & A18.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Jan. 17, 2025, and has the title “Cancer’s New Face: Younger and Female.”)

The academic article that is the basis for the summary statistics quoted above is:

Siegel, Rebecca L., Tyler B. Kratzer, Angela N. Giaquinto, Hyuna Sung, and Ahmedin Jemal. “Cancer Statistics, 2025.” CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 75, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 2025): 10-45.

Some of the key statistics from the academic article appear in:

American Cancer Society. “Cancer Facts & Figures 2025.” Atlanta: American Cancer Society, 2025.

Amar Bhidé on Uncertainty

I have not read the latest book by Amar Bhidé, briefly discussed in the passages quoted below, but I have assigned a couple of his earlier books in my Economics of Entrepreneurship and Economics of Technology seminars. Bhidé asks important questions and I like his empirically rich and methodologically pluralist approach to answering them.

(p. R2) “Uncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the Known” is a must-read for anyone seeking a roadmap to the bewildering array of new technologies exploding today. Written with considerable charm by the distinguished economist and scholar Amar Bhidé— . . . —the book makes a compelling case that hard facts alone cannot prove or predict whether a new political movement, business idea, technology or TV series will succeed. The author offers a fascinating array of stories, examples and ideas of great thinkers— . . . —rather than relying solely on math or statistics. This book provides a new way of looking not only at risk but, more importantly, at uncertainty in an unpredictable world.

For the full review, see:

Elaine Chao. “12 Months of Reading: Elaine Chao.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, December 7, 2024): R2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Dec. 6, 2024, and has the title “Who Read What in 2024: Political Voices: Elaine Chao.”)

The book praised by Chao is:

Bhidé, Amar. Uncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the Known. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Keep Raging at “the Dying of the Light”

I still remember as an undergraduate at Wabash College reading in our intro psychology textbook of an experiment in which a dog was put in a box. Every time the dog tried to leap out of the box, he received an electric shock. Eventually the electric current was turned off. But the dog never again tried to leap. Are we like the dog, too discouraged by past constraints, so that we are resigned to accept the Biblical limit of “three score and 10” (Psalm 90:10)?

But there is a paradox. Kloc cites an article claiming a very high market value for expanded lifespans. But then where are the voters urgently demanding that medical entrepreneurs be unbound? Where are the citizens demanding that regulators stop mandating Phase 3 clinical trials? Citizens with a sense of urgency can make a difference–see the Act-Up movement in the early years of AIDs. When will they?

(p. 1) The longevity industry is coming off perhaps its best run on record. The expected span of an American life has increased by about three decades since 1900 — to around 78 as of 2023. But for many people, even 78 years just won’t do.

The Methuselah Foundation, a biomedical charity, for example, wants to “make 90 the new 50,” and scientists at one biotechnology firm have argued that, unencumbered by disease, the body could potentially make it all the way to age 150. Even more optimistic estimates put the number closer to 1,000.

Whatever the maximum human life span may be, people appear increasingly determined to find it — in particular men, who are more inclined to favor radically extending life, maybe even indefinitely. Last year, nearly 6,000 studies of longevity made their way onto PubMed, a database of biomedical and life sciences papers; that’s almost five times as many as two decades ago.

Along with the creation of dozens of popular podcasts and a sizable supplement industry, that zeal has led to efforts to preserve organs, search out life-extending diets and even try to reverse aging itself.

. . .

(p. 24) Researchers at Harvard and Oxford recently tried to gauge that interest in the marketplace today. They estimated that the total value of any scientific breakthrough that added another decade to global life expectancy would be worth $367 trillion.

For the full story see:

Joe Kloc. “Gilgamesh, Ponce and the Quest to Live Forever.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, January 19, 2025): 1 & 24.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 18, 2025, and has the title “The Centuries-Old, Incredibly Male Quest to Live Forever.”)

When Kloc mentions estimates of possible human lifespan “closer to 1,000” he links to a Scientific American interview with João Pedro de Magalhães, professor of biogerontology at England’s University of Birmingham. João Pedro de Magalhães believes that in principle humans could live to 1,000:

Gifford, Bill. “How Old Can Humans Get?” Scientific American (July 31, 2023). Available from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-old-can-humans-get/.

When Kloc says that some “even try to reverse aging itself” he links to:

Poganik, Jesse R., Bohan Zhang, Gurpreet S. Baht, Alexander Tyshkovskiy, Amy Deik, Csaba Kerepesi, Sun Hee Yim, Ake T. Lu, Amin Haghani, Tong Gong, Anna M. Hedman, Ellika Andolf, Göran Pershagen, Catarina Almqvist, Clary B. Clish, Steve Horvath, James P. White, and Vadim N. Gladyshev. “Biological Age Is Increased by Stress and Restored Upon Recovery.” Cell Metabolism 35, no. 5 (2023): 807-20.

Kloc also links to estimates of the economic value of extending lifespans by one year, and by a decade, as given in:

Scott, Andrew J., Martin Ellison, and David A. Sinclair. “The Economic Value of Targeting Aging.” Nature Aging 1, no. 7 (July 2021): 616-23.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light” is a line from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

For Quicker Cures, Do Not Cancel Those Who See What We Do Not See

Dogs smell odors that we do not smell. They say Eskimos can distinguish 40 or more kinds of snow. Physical differences in biology and differences in past experiences allow some people to perceive what other people miss. We should encourage, not cancel, those who see differently. They can communicate and act on what they see, giving us more cures more quickly.

In the passages quoted below, a case is made that Pasteur’s artistic experiences allowed him to see a structural difference (chirality) in crystals; a difference that turns out to matter for medical drug molecules.

(p. D5) In a paper published last month in Nature Chemistry, Dr. Gal explains how a young Pasteur fought against the odds to articulate the existence of chirality, or the way that some molecules exist in mirror-image forms capable of producing very different effects. Today we see chirality’s effects in light, in chemistry and in the body — even in the drugs we take.

And we might not know a thing about them if it weren’t for the little-known artistic experience of Louis Pasteur, says Dr. Gal.

. . .

As a teenager, Pasteur made portraits of his friends, family and dignitaries. But after his father urged him to pursue a more serious profession — one that would feed him — he became a scientist. At the age of 24 he discovered chirality.

To understand chirality, consider two objects held up before a mirror: a white cue ball from a pool table and your hand. The reflection of the ball is exactly like the original. If you could reach into that mirror, pull out the reflection and cram it inside the original, they’d match up point for point. But if you tried the same thing with your hand, no matter how much you tried, the mirror image would never fit into the original.

At the molecular level some objects are like cue balls, and they are always superimposable. But other things are like hands, and they can never be combined.

. . .

During winemaking, a chemical called tartaric acid builds up on vat walls. In the 18th and 19th centuries, makers of medicine and dyes used this acid.

In 1819, factory workers boiled wine too long and accidentally produced paratartaric acid, which had unique properties that intrigued scientists like Pasteur.

. . .

When studying the paratartaric acid, Pasteur found that it produced two kinds of crystals — one like those found in tartaric acid and another that was the mirror opposite. The crystals were handed, or what the Greeks call chiral (kheir) for hand.

. . .

“Several famous or much more accomplished scientists, some well along their illustrious careers, studied the same molecules, the same substances,” said Dr. Gal. “Realistically you would think they’d have beaten him to the punch, and yet they missed it.”

So why did this young, inexperienced chemist get it right?

Dr. Gal thinks the answer might lie in the artistic passions of Pasteur’s youth. Even as a scientist, Pasteur remained closely connected to art. He taught classes on how chemistry could be used in fine art and attended salons. He even carried around a notebook, jotting down 1-4 ratings of artwork he visited.

And then Dr. Gal stumbled upon a letter Pasteur had written to his parents about a lithographic portrait he had made of a friend.

Lithography back then involved etching a drawing onto a limestone slab with wax or oil and acid, and pressing a white piece of paper on top of it. The resulting picture was transposed, like a mirror image of the drawing left on the slab.

In his letter, Pasteur wrote:

“I think I have not previously produced anything as well drawn and having as good a resemblance. All who have seen it find it striking. But I greatly fear one thing, that is, that on the paper the portrait will not be as good as on the stone; this is what always happens.”

Eureka. “Isn’t this the explanation of how he saw the handedness on the crystals — because he was sensitized to that as an artist?” Dr. Gal proposed.

. . .

We now know that many drugs contain molecules that exist in two chiral forms, and that the two forms can react differently in the body. The most tragic example occurred in the 1950s and ’60s, when doctors prescribed Thalidomide, a drug for morning sickness and other ailments, to pregnant women. The drug also contained a chiral molecule that caused disastrous side effects in many babies.

For the full story see:

Joanna Klein. “How Pasteur’s Artistic Insight Changed Chemistry.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 20, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 14, 2017 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The academic article in Nature Chemistry authored by Gal and mentioned above is:

Gal, Joseph. “Pasteur and the Art of Chirality.” Nature Chemistry 9, no. 7 (2017): 604-05.

Ozempic 25 Years Sooner Would Have Saved and Improved Many Lives

Apparently Ozempic had been discovered in the late 1980s and could have been on the market roughly 25 years ago. Pfizer decided that the likely potential revenues were not sufficient to justify the huge costs. But what if the costs had not been so huge? For instance what if we adopted the proposal suggested by Milton Friedman, and advocated by me, to stop mandating hyper-expensive Phase 3 clinical trials to prove efficacy? (The mandates to prove safety through Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials would be retained.) With lower costs, Pfizer might have moved forward. Or if Pfizer had not, some other firm probably would have entered the breach sooner. If Ozempic had been available sooner, by now it would be much cheaper. Many lives would have been saved that have been lost. Other lives would have been healthier and happier.

(p. A26) They called 2023 the year of Ozempic, but it now seems GLP-1 drugs might define an entire decade — or an even longer era. The game-changing drugs, which mimic the hormone GLP-1, offer large benefits for not just diabetes management and especially weight loss but also, apparently, heart and kidney and liver disease, Alzheimer’s and dementia, Parkinson’s and addiction of all kinds. And perhaps because of widespread use of the drugs, the obesity epidemic in America may finally and mercifully be reversing.

But of all the things we learned this year about GLP-1s, the most astonishing could be that the revolution might have started decades earlier. Researchers identified the key breakthrough for GLP-1 drugs nearly 40 years ago, it turns out, long before most Americans had even heard the phrase “obesity epidemic.”

This summer, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, published a long personal reflection that doubled as an alternate history of what may well be the most spectacular and impactful medical breakthrough of the century so far. In 1987, Flier co-founded a biotech start-up that pursued GLP-1 as a potential treatment for diabetes, not long after it had first been identified by researchers who’d also found that the hormone enhanced insulin secretion in the presence of glucose.

The startup obtained worldwide rights to develop GLP-1 as a metabolic therapy from a group of those researchers, based at Massachusetts General Hospital. They even generated clinical results that suggested it might have promise as a weight-loss drug as well — only to have Pfizer, which had agreed to fund the research, withdraw its support, without providing the researchers with an especially satisfying explanation. Instead, Pfizer told Flier and his partners that the company didn’t believe there would be a market for another injectable diabetes treatment after insulin. Well, Flier tells me, “they were wrong.”

. . .

. . . Flier’s memoir is not just a lament for what might have been. In the aftermath of the pandemic emergency, as citizens and officials alike have embraced a more libertarian attitude toward public health, there’s been a similar drift in the public conversation about drug discovery and development. Operation Warp Speed is often held up as a new model — calls for an Operation Warp Speed 2.0 have been followed by those for an Operation Warp Speed for everything — . . .

Many of the same reformers will complain about all the red tape at the F.D.A. and C.D.C., tallying up huge mortality costs imposed by slow-moving government, arguing for human challenge trials in which individuals volunteer to take untested drugs and be deliberately infected and even talking about the invisible graveyard of unnecessary regulation and delay.

This is all fine and good — there are surely lots of things those agencies can speed up. And in recent years, reformers of various stripes have lobbied some worthy additional proposals into the biomedical zeitgeist — for a system based not on patents but on huge and direct cash prizes for medical breakthroughs, for instance, or one helped along by advance market commitments or benevolent patent extensions. Just last week the researchers Willy Chertman and Ruxandra Tesloianu published “The Case for Clinical Trial Abundance,” an invigorating manifesto for drug development reform.

. . . in focusing on government bureaucracy as the major biomedical bottleneck, we are seeing just one piece of the picture and overlooking what is perhaps the central challenge of research and development — that it is, at present, so complicated that difficulties or bad decisions at any stage can stifle the whole decades-long process, distorting the actual medical and public-health functions of drug development in countless ways.

For the full commentary see:

David Wallace-Wells. “We Could Have Had Ozempic Years Ago.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025): 11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 25, 2024, and has the title “Pfizer Stopped Us From Getting Ozempic Decades Ago.”)

Dr. Flier’s published “memoir” mentioned above is:

Flier, Jeffrey S. “Drug Development Failure: How GLP-1 Development Was Abandoned in 1990.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 67, no. 3 (Summer 2024): 325-36.

“The Clinical Trial Manifesto” mentioned above is the introductory essay in the compilation referenced below. Another essay that looks promising in the compilation is “Unblocking Human Challenge Trials for Faster Progress.”

Chertman, Willy, and Ruxandra Tesloianu, eds. The Case for Clinical Trial Abundance: A Series of Short Papers Outlining Reform Possibilities for Our Nation’s Clinical Trials. Washington, DC: The Institute for Progress (IFP), 2024.

Reductio ad Absurdum: When a Functional MRI Showed Activity in a Dead Salmon’s Brain

I have long thought that most college students would benefit from a course in practical reasoning. One topic in such a course would be to define and illustrate the Reductio ad Absurdum argument. The argument starts with a proposition, and then infers an absurdity from the proposition, thereby refuting the original proposition. The review quoted below mentions such an argument that implicitly starts with the proposition that fMRI scans are reliable guides to human thought. The absurdity is that fMRI scans sometimes light up in the presence of a dead Atlantic salmon, which would seem to suggest that the salmon is thinking. The conclusion: be careful what you infer from fMRI scans.

My favorite reductio ad absurdum argument starts with the proposition that all actionable knowledge must derive from randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs). The argument then shows that no RCTs have been performed to show the efficacy of parachutes. The absurdity is that before anyone uses a parachute when exiting a flying airplane, he must first find an RCT to prove the efficacy of parachutes. The conclusion: when you volunteer for the first such RCT, hope that you are not assigned to the control group!

(p. A15) In 2009 a group of researchers placed a dead salmon in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and showed the fish some photos of people in social situations. Their results, presented under the title “Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon,” were surprising. The scans revealed a red spot of activity centered in the salmon’s brain.

The authors of the study weren’t trying to pull a fast one on the scientific community. Nor did they believe in zombie fish. They were showing that statistics, used incorrectly, can demonstrate almost anything. Specifically, a certain type of data analysis, often used on fMRI scans, can find signal where there should be only noise.

Russell Poldrack, a psychologist at Stanford University, mentions the stunt in “The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal About Our Thoughts.” His book, ostensibly about fMRI and its use in studying how the brain functions (hence “functional”), serves as a lesson in how the science works—or should work. Through blunders and baloney, innovation and self-correction, the young field of cognitive neuroscience is quickly evolving.

For the full review see:

Matthew Hutson. “Bookshelf; Scanning For Thoughts.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, November 28, 2018 [sic]): A15.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 27, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘The New Mind Readers’ Review: Scanning for Thoughts.”)

The book under review is:

Poldrack, Russell. The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal About Our Thoughts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

The parachute reductio argument is in:

Smith, Gordon C. S., and Jill P. Pell. “Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma Related to Gravitational Challenge: Systematic Review of Randomised Controlled Trials.” BMJ 327, no. 7429 (Dec. 18, 2003): 1459-61.

To Kill a Dam, Environmentalist “Scientists” Lied About the Existence of the So-Called “Snail Darter”

In the 1970s the building of a dam in Tennessee was delayed because environmentalists claimed that its construction would threaten the extinction of a small fish they called the “snail darter.” Now fish biologists have established that there is no snail darter. The fish previously identified as a “snail darter” has the DNA of a small fish called a “stargazing darter” which was not, and is not, endangered.

A co-author of a new study says that this was no innocent mistake.

Dr. Near, . . . a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered.

Dr. Near contends that early researchers “squinted their eyes a bit” when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville.

“I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the ‘conservation species concept,’ where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,” Dr. Near said.

In other words environmentalist “scientists” deliberately lied in order to promote their political agenda of cutting energy production.

The New York Times article quoted above is:

Jason Nark. “How a Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction.” The New York Times (Sat., Jan. 4, 2025): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of The New York Times article was updated Jan. 4, 2025, and has the title “This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction.”)

The academic paper co-authored by Near, that Nark summarizes in The New York Times article mentioned and cited above is:

Ghezelayagh, Ava, Jeffrey W. Simmons, Julia E. Wood, Tsunemi Yamashita, Matthew R. Thomas, Rebecca E. Blanton, Oliver D. Orr, Daniel J. MacGuigan, Daemin Kim, Edgar Benavides, Benjamin P. Keck, Richard C. Harrington, and Thomas J. Near. “Comparative Species Delimitation of a Biological Conservation Icon.” Current Biology. Published online on Jan. 3, 2025.

In 2023, Costs of Medical Care Rose 40% Faster Than Overall Inflation

If rising healthcare costs were clearly due to improving health outcomes, few would be angry. The anger arises from rising fraud, inefficiency, and inertia. Many healthcare workers are paper pushers and the paper pushed is often inaccurate and opaque. Other healthcare workers enforce protocols that slow innovation. And of course mandated regulations, most notably Phase 3 clinical trials, enormously increase costs.

(p. A3) The killing of a health insurance executive in New York City prompted a furious outpouring of anger over the industry and healthcare prices. So just how much have healthcare costs and spending been going up?

The short answer: a lot. National healthcare spending increased 7.5% year over year in 2023 to $4.867 trillion, or $14,570 per person, according to data released Wednesday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

. . .

The 7.5% rise represented a much faster pace of growth than the 4.6% increase in 2022.

. . .

Over the past couple of decades, the price index for what the Labor Department classifies as medical care—which includes visits to doctors, hospital stays, prescription drugs and medical equipment—has risen roughly 40% faster than the overall pace of inflation. Healthcare tends to rise more quickly than overall inflation because of high labor costs in the sector, as well as advancements leading to new and more expensive drugs and treatments. Demand for healthcare is also increasing as the population ages.

. . .

Hospitals are . . . adding billions of dollars in “facility fees” to medical bills for routine care at outpatient centers, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal. That means patients are often paying hundreds of additional dollars for standard care like colonoscopies, mammograms and heart screenings.

. . .

Employers are shouldering a lot of those costs. For example, the average worker spent $6,296 in premiums for family coverage in 2024, according to KFF [a healthcare nonprofit]. Employers spent $19,276.

But when a company is paying more for insurance premiums for its workers, that leaves it with less money for giving out raises or reinvesting and expansion.

“It’s ultimately all of us who pay for [healthcare] either in the form of lower wages for people who have employer insurance or in the form of higher taxes to cover Medicare and Medicaid,” said Katherine Baicker, professor of health economics at the University of Chicago.

For the full story see:

Harriet Torry. “Nation’s Healthcare Tab Is Surging Amid Rising Wages, Hospital Fees.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Dec. 20, 2024): A3.

(Note: ellipses added. The first bracketed words were added by me; the second bracketed word was in the original.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated December 18, 2024, and has the title “Why Are Americans Paying So Much More for Healthcare Than They Used To?” Where there is a slight difference in wording between the print and online versions, the passages I quote above follow the online version.)

The source for some of the data discussed in The New York Times article appears to have been:

“National Health Expenditures 2023 Highlights.” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Last modified on Dec. 18, 2024.