Yesterday, I read a talk Paul Krugman had with Azeem Azhar about A.I.
There’s either very, very little or almost nothing I understand about A.I., except that I believe I’m using it when asking Perplexity.com to find some fact for me or answer a question. Most particularly, I don’t understand why the thing itself and the terminology attached to it seem to be dominating absolutely everything I read.
Given my characterological absence of paranoia, it’s not that I fear A.I. will be taking over my brain anytime in the future, despite that “neural implant” Musk promotes which sounds almost as real as the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
But, hey, I do try to get some idea about things esoteric and if anyone can teach me something about elusive principles, it’s Paul Krugman, because he isn’t afraid to say things like, “I don’t really understand this,” and ask for explanations.
I read through a lot of it and for a while was beginning to understand something but the talk eventually went too deep for me so I stopped reading.
Then I got back to the utter craztupidity (the new word) I was thoroughly able to understand in a April 13, 2006 New Yorker article by Dhruv Khullar, a physician himself as well as a journalist, called “Pick Your Poison: Why are people injecting themselves with peptides?”
Indeed.
Dr. Khullar was scrupulous (his tone is both earnest and deadpan), digging up scientific and scientificish journals, buying peptides (one seller demanded crypto) and sending samples to labs he trusted. He interviewed dispensing physicians and went to conventions and “clinics” where peptides are stars.
A few quotes from the article will provide a full definition of my brave new word.
About a decade ago, a group of competitive CrossFitters in Charleston, South Carolina, went looking for ways to improve their athletic performance without taking steroids. At the time, members of the fitness community were starting to inject themselves with peptides–short chains of amino acids…Certain peptides were said to enhance strength, energy, endurance, and recovery. They hadn’t been officially approved for us as drugs, however, and many had never been studied in humans.
Dr. Khullar introduces us to Craig Koniver, a doctor who’d segued from the practice of family medicine to offering Botox, skin fillers and I.V. drips, “that were supposed to slow aging.”
Koniver began ordering peptides from compounding pharmacies, which produce custom medications. He tinkered with various doses, often extrapolating from animal studies, and tried some on himself. He gained a reputation for peptide wizardry.
And — surprise! — his practice entered boom times:
He now sees a total of about a thousand [patients]; six thousand more are on a wait list. A membership to his practice can cost fifteen thousand dollars a year…”I could charge more,” Koniver said. “But I want to sleep well at night.”
[!?!?!?!?!? Am I being too too snotty here?]
Koniver gives Dr. Khullar a tour of the clinic and offers him a poke bowl for lunch, as well as a “complimentary” drip of something called methylene blue. Dr. Khullar writes:
I knew it as a last-resort blood-pressure drug that, at high doses, constructs blood vessels so much that it can cause gangrene. I accepted the poke but declined the drip.
Now we meet a new patient, whom Dr. Khullar calls “Toby,” who could be my model for craztupidity:
A nurse inserted an I.V. into one arm; Koniver shook his other hand, saying, “Welcome aboard!” Toby and his family had recently been in a car accident, but he’d lost trust in most doctors, he said, after they became “obsessed” with viruses and vaccinations during the pandemic. He was glad that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr…was getting the country “on the right track.”
“I’m not a big vaccine guy,” Koniver replied. “A lot of them don’t have the data.”
Now do you see how I came up with craztupid? (BTW, Robert F. Kennedy claims he does peptides.)
I was puzzled, perhaps naively, that little-studied peptide shots had earned Koniver’s trust, while meticulously studied COVID-19 vaccinations had not. “Anecdotal data means a lot to me,” he said. “Two days after a vaccine, someone has a stroke. Two days later, they’re dead…You see enough of that, it makes an impression.”
Argue with me, but I don’t think “anecdotal” and “data” belong in the same phrase.
Dr. Khullar interviews another doctor, an Eastern European (not subject to U.S. regulations), who reflects on whether people should be using the peptides he provides, “given the lack of data in humans”:
“As a medical doctor, I should reply negatively. As a human person, I’m not sure. You have to do what’s right for you.” Regulatory agencies have a role to play, he said, but “the final judgment of whether something works belongs to the people, not the F.D.A.”
“Human person…”
Easy to leap to the conclusion that people in the U.S., if not everywhere, are getting crazier and stupider, but I don’t think so. I do think we’ve always had such people imbedded in our nation, but they have now gotten the go-ahead to enter the public sphere (see, Dunning-Kruger Effect) by a demagogic cabal who brazenly perform their own craztupidity under Klieg lights, bizarrely claiming their ignorance is existential superiority.
Also, and maybe more significantly, these loud stupid people have clearly been making enough money to lavish it upon “wellness” frauds.
I have not yet come up with a portmanteau for physicians who are crazed into dangerously stupid statements by appalling greed.