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About Tyson

Love writing all kinds of stuff including fiction, non-fiction, editorials, etc. But writing software is the only writing I do for love AND money!

What are Deficit Hawks Thinking?

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At every budgeting cycle the Republican deficit hawks work themselves into a frenzy of concern about budget deficits. To remind you, the annual deficit is the amount our government has spent beyond what it has taken in that year. Implicitly included under the umbrella of deficit is the debt, which is the credit card balance we owe for all past unpaid deficits.

Certainly debt and deficits are liabilities and it would be great if we could avoid them completely and spend only what we take in, but we realistically cannot operate without dipping into our credit card sometimes. The contention arises around how to control spending in order to avoid crippling credit card payments.

To reduce our credit burden, both parties strive to increase efficiency and reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. Beyond that, Democrats generally aim to raise revenue from the wealthy and corporations, and (to a far lesser extent) reduce military spending, while protecting and expanding social programs. Republicans mostly push for cuts to social programs, while increasing tax cuts (only for the wealthy), and opposing new taxes (only on the wealthy), while maintaining or increasing defense spending.

Democrats assert that the rich and powerful do not pay anything near their fair share and can afford to contribute far more, while Republicans assert (incorrectly) that the rich and powerful deserve even more money that will supposedly then “trickle-down” to help poorer people.

Not many appreciate that the concept of a “trickle-down” economy did not originate with Ronald Regan who put it forth as a credible economic principle. It was originally a satirical joke made by Will Rogers back in 1932 to mock then President Hoover’s response to the Great Depression in giving more money to rich people.

I’m going to forgo a lot of additional argumentation and simply skip ahead to the conclusion that Republicans are simply wrong on both the merits and the ethics of their budget logic, and rather try to understand their thinking.

I’m going to put aside sheer greed and self-interest as uninteresting. My interest is in how well-meaning people can come to support Republican policies.

First and perhaps foremost, Republicans believe incorrectly that rich people and corporations deserve (are entitled to) more money because the rich deserve it and can make the best use of it. Second, they love a strong military because either they are fearful, love having the biggest guns, love war profits, or are just afraid of looking weak on defense. Finally, they believe that regular people deserve nothing and should either get rich or die quietly without bothering anyone.

These biases result in the following internal logic. A) we must give as much as we can to rich people, and B) we must maintain or expand the military, so C) the only way we can accomplish both is to siphon away money from the 99%. This is accomplished by finding new ways to tax or increase costs for regular people, by destabilizing and pillaging the social security fund that they paid into, by compromising or withholding their healthcare, and by deregulation that shifts the cost of doing business from rich corporations to ordinary communities.

To extract wealth, they continue to perpetuate the joke of trickle-down economics. The term may be discredited, but the concept still underpins their worldview. They extract wealth by grossly downplaying the amount of money being spent on the military, and by exaggerating the cost of social service programs (see here).

And they have elucidated no limit whatsoever in just how much more the rich and powerful deserve. In fact the expressed American value is that personal wealth should be unlimited. Therefore, their goal of decreasing the debt and deficit can never be achieved no matter how much they extract, no matter how much damage they do, no matter how many people they impoverish, the rich can and will never have enough under the logical framework they have constructed.

Thus is the folly of their worldview, their rationalizations, and their policies. Their concern about the debt and deficit may or may not be genuine, as is their belief that the rich should receive even more. But to achieve both, the vast majority of people have to suffer. The end result of their thinking can only be incredibly harmful, unsustainable, and unethical budgetary policies enacted under the pretext of responsible deficit reduction.

Cook Your Frog Slowly

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In my last article I talked about How We Liberals Destroyed Democracy. I was not saying liberals were wrong to push for social change. But I was making the argument that we made the tactical error of miscalculating our pressure. Or, to put it in a more fanciful way, I have no problem with cooking the frog for dinner. But if you want to end up with tender, juicy frog legs you have to cook it slowly. Turn up the heat too high too quickly and the skittish jumpy frog bolts. You’re left holding only an empty pot, and that’s on you.

I wasn’t giving the normal advise we seem to hear from most every other pundit writing for major publications. In one form or another, their sage advise is essentially “give conservatives what they want and they’ll like you more.” Their wisdom is a little like advising frustrated parents that if you just tell your kids to eat McDonalds Happy Meals every day then they’ll finally listen to you.

I was rather saying, be smarter. Be more patient. Be more strategic, more methodical, more incremental. Cook your frog slowly so that it does not jump out of the pot. To illustrate this further I want to segue into another topic I love to talk about as well, and that is self-driving cars.

In Cars Have to Go, I argued that mankind simply cannot sustain our current system of private car ownership. If we are to survive, cars as we know them have to go. Short of reducing the need for private transportation, for example by redesigning our cities, our only hope is automated fleets of shared vehicles.

And beyond just saving energy and resources, try to think through of all the other advantages a complete self-driving fleet would provide. You would not have to own, maintain, and insure your own car. You could simply call for one anytime. Our driving infrastructure could be far more efficient and cost-effective. All traffic control could be dispensed with if self-driving cars coordinate traffic flow safely and efficiently amongst themselves. No more problems of compromised, drunk, or distracted drivers. No more speeding or running red lights. Automated cars don’t suffer from road rage. No more possibility for vehicles to be used as weapons of mass murder. The social benefits are incalculable and innumerable.

But rather than go on about the benefits reengineering private transportation, where I want to go is the strategic issue of how to get there. How do you boil this frog? If you promise all these dramatic changes, as I am doing here, you run the risk of causing your frog to bolt. My feeling is that Elon Musk, by overhyping self-driving cars, has done harm to the long-term goal I embrace. He made the frogs all panic and jump.

Far smarter and more effective still would have been to get to self-driving fleets quietly and systematically, by offering incremental benefits that anyone and everyone would welcome at every step.

Just to give you a flavor, you start with lane departure warnings. Keep your kids safe. We are all OK with that. Then Smart Cruise. What? The car will slow down and follow a slower vehicle, yes please!

Hmm, self-parking? OMG yes. I hate parking. I want that!!

Wait, my new car can also go off on it’s own to find an open space in a parking garage or at the airport so I can catch my flight and then come pick me up when I return? Where has that been all my life???

And I also have the option of unpacking my car in front of my house and then sending it off to find street parking all by itself? I want that too!

Now if only anyone in my extended family could summon my car if they need to use it too, that would be so cool… wait they can??? Hmm then maybe we should all just go in together on one shared car…

People would generally love and welcome every incremental improvement along the way and find themselves welcoming the natural progression to self-driving fleets. But if you try to pressure them into contemplating a radically different future with self-driving fleets, there can be no surprise when they panic and jump right out of that pot.

In my book, Pandemic of Delusion, I talk at great length about how we can gradually move people from any position A to any other position B. But you have to do it gradually. Push too hard too fast, and impenetrable defenses will arise to block your way.

Liberals should have learned that the hard way recently, and I truly hope that there is still a sure path for both for democracy and for self-driving fleets to accomplish dramatic change through patient, incremental steps.

And equally importantly, success requires restraint to recognize when your frog is optimally cooked and stop there. Too often advocacy groups become institutionalized and they lose any ability to turn down the heat even after the frog starts to fry and burn. But that’s another discussion!

How We Liberals Destroyed Democracy

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The title of this article is intentionally provocative. But for good reason. Democrats should at least consider their shared responsibility for destroying our democracy. I’m not trying to be fair and balanced and comprehensive here. I and others have opined ad nauseum about the flaws and dangers of conservative thinking. But in this article I wish to focus on the role of liberals.

Regardless of what we will admit to ourselves or to others, the Supreme Court immunity ruling and the subsequent reelection of Trump has effectively ended our long noble struggle to hold on to our democracy in America. I don’t believe it is hyperbole to acknowledge that we are now firmly, and probably intractably, marching along the path to becoming just like Russia, a brazen kleptocracy flaunting a thin facade of democracy.

And whether they will admit it in that way to themselves and others, half the country is effectively OK with that. It would not have been their first choice for our fate, but they would rather live in a dictatorship than continue to tolerate the excesses, real or perceived, of many democrats, at least of those driving the agenda. I predicted this based on game theory a while back (see here).

To be fair, conservatives have largely tolerated if not embraced a stunning amount of social change since the 1960’s and even before. The end of slavery was social change, women gaining the vote was social change, a sweeping host of equal rights practices was social change, interracial marriage was social change, women entering the workforce and arguably taking half the jobs in the country away from men was social change, the changing expectations of men in the home and in society was social change, accepting gay pride parades and gay marriage was social change. Those are just the broadest reminders of the incredible social change that conservatives tolerated if not always embraced.

But democrats weren’t satisfied. They pushed too hard, too aggressively, too gleefully on social, race, and gender issues mostly. I would suggest that the critical point at which their incessant pressure turned dark and counterproductive was the cancelling of Al Franken. It continued with a cancel culture that vilified everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Matt Damon. It took the form of policing gender pronouns, rallying behind gay wedding cakes, drag queen story hour, transgender surgery, bathrooms, and military service. The entire year leading up to Trumps election I watched liberal women on MSNBC fixate on women’s issues and overtly tell men they should support us or shut up. The list goes on and on and on.

So don’t tell me that democrats are purely the victims here and conservatives are the bad guys. I revile much or even most of what conservatives stand for, but democrats kept making more and more extreme demands until the point at which conservatives said, I’ve had enough of even trying to make this marriage work, I’m out.

One can continue to insist that all those demands were just and right. But even granting that, one must at least question the tactical wisdom of how we went about fighting for them. One can argue that regardless of the provocation and pressure, upending our democracy is a self-destructive and disproportionate response. True enough. But if liberals are capable of any self-examination they must consider their own hubris and lack of restraint in forcing this response.

In the media today there is a lot of coverage of democrats gleefully saying “I told you so” to conservatives in reference to the disastrous actions of Trump. But perhaps conservatives are also justified in saying “I told you so” to the democrats who have been so incessant and extreme in their long history of cattle-prodding conservatives into ever more unpalatable concessions without any apparent expectation of the extreme blowback that was virtually assured to come… and now has.

National Defense and Social Security Myths

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Most of us Americans figure we’re pretty well-informed about the realities of our national economy – at least in the big picture. Here are the Top 5 budget categories that you’ve probably seen cited everywhere by most every expert and trusted source:

  1. Social Security: $1,354 billion
  2. Medicaid (also NIH, CDC, FDA and more): $889 billion
  3. Medicare: $848 billion
  4. National Defense (direct budget only): $820 billion
  5. Unemployment (and most family and child assistance programs): $775 billion

Lists like this are usually invoked in order to provide support for a particular (false) mainstream narrative.

Mainstream Narrative: National Defense spending is not where we should be concerned. Rather it’s those big social entitlement programs that are the real problem, and the most worrisome of all is Social Security. In fact, we need to take immediate drastic action to prevent Social Security from bringing us to economic ruin!

But bear with me while I call that narrative into question.

First, that National Defense number of $848 billion is far too low. That only includes certain budgeted expenses. It does not include Supplemental Funding (which pays for most of our wars). Veterans Care and Benefits, Overseas Contingency Operations, Additions to the Base Budget, Interest on War Debt, and many other separately allocated costs.

To understand how misleading that is, imagine trying to convince your spouse that your gambling budget is only a very reasonable $200 per night. But that is just your betting limit. You neglect to include your Vegas hotel, limo rental, meals, bar-tabs, payments on the debt incurred by your previous losses, lost work, and additional payment for any “special deals” that you just can’t pass up.

Similarly, if we tally up all the buried line items that should fairly be included under National Defense spending, the total cost is far higher. The actual figure depends on which items you choose to include, but a conservative total of about $1.7 trillion is what my AI-assisted research came up with. No matter how you cut it, a more honest accounting puts National Defense spending well above Social Security levels. It should be number one by a large margin on any honest list.

Also, military spending has incredibly low stimulative value. While it provides some jobs, it does not stimulate secondary growth as does say a bridge or a building. It is essentially “lost” economic value except for the relatively few who extract wealth from it. But I digress. Maybe I’ll expand on that in a future blog article.

In any case, that addresses the first half of the false narrative, the deceptively low figure cited for military spending. Now let’s shift to the other half, Social Security spending. The figure of $1.3 trillion spent on Social Security is arguably just as misleading as is the figure for military spending.

People paid into their social security fund. Virtually all of that $1.3 trillion is money that is simply being paid to people who invested into it. There is only a relatively small deficit which amounted to $41.4 billion in 2023. That deficit was entirely paid out of the social security trust fund; excess revenue that was set aside in previous years to cover future shortfalls.

Now, those of you who are sophisticated about these things might say – wait a sec. Social Security is not like a savings plan where individual contributions are set aside. Instead, each working generation must fund the benefits paid to the retired generation.

But I contend that that explanation is another part of this false narrative. Regardless of how it is managed, Social Security is for all intents and purposes a savings plan. And isn’t that how all savings banks work? None of them literally put your money away in a lockbox. The money you deposit is used to fund withdrawals by others. When you eventually decide to withdraw your savings, that money will in a sense come from those future depositors.

To provide another analogy, what would you say if you went to take out your savings from your local bank and they tried to explain to you that they don’t have enough revenue coming in to give you back your money? You see, they say, it’s really not a savings plan as much as it is a pay as you go plan. You’d say that’s not acceptable.

We should not be manipulated into thinking of paying into social security as paying for others current benefits, but as paying for our own future benefits. But we tend to buy into the former perspective because we’re worried the funds won’t be there for us. That’s another part of the false narrative.

While it is true that, if we make no changes, Social Security will become “insolvent” in 2033, that is intentionally made to sound more scary than it is. It only means that at that time we’ll have to reduce benefits or increase revenue. It doesn’t all just collapse like some Ponzi scheme.

In fact, it isn’t that hard to “fix” Social Security. Just in the last few years there have been multiple bills proposed to keep Social Security solvent through the population wave. These include the Social Security Fairness Act, Biden’s 2025 budget proposal, and the You Earned It Act. All of these were voted down.

These legislation, and the many that preceded them, were not voted down because they would not work. They were voted down precisely because they would work. Just as with the border crisis, too many lawmakers don’t want to fix it. They want to keep fear mongering about it failing, and they cannot do that if they actually were to fix it.

Even worse, for some legislators it is more like their management of the Post Office. Their interest is in seeing it fail. They wanted the Post Office to fail so that their private business donors could profit from this business. Similarly, their big donors desperately want to get their hands on all that social security money. To those Privateers, Social Security funds are like Blackbeard’s Lost Treasure Hoard.

If President Bush’s full-court press to privatize Social Security had not failed in 2005, all of our Social Security funds might be invested in Bitcoin futures right now. Don’t think for one moment that the Privateers have given up on getting their hands on Blackbeard’s treasure.

If I sound conspiratorial, I’ll admit partially to that. While I don’t believe that a Capitalist cabal of billionaires sits around smoking big cigars and plotting the pillaging of our Social Security trust fund, I do believe that these efforts arise naturally as an emergent collective behavior borne of a lust for profit.

As did those before us, we need to wisely continue to resist these efforts to siphon wealth from the general population into the hands of the few. Toward that end, here is my alternate narrative that I hope you will consider.

Alternate Narrative: Those in power strive to bury, obfuscate, and minimize our level of military spending for many reasons, but mostly just so the population will not push back against it. One method they use to distract from military spending is to compare their fake accounting against social spending numbers, numbers that are also at times misrepresented. Social Security is both their most shiny object to distract us from their levels of military spending and the greatest prize for Privateers who want to control those funds. For our own sake as well as our posterity, we need to resist both excessive military spending and the privatization of critical social services.

The Harris-Trump Debate Debate

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Last night many of us saw the 2024 Harris-Trump Presidential Debate on ABC. What any clear-minded viewer should have seen was a stark contrast between an eminently smart, qualified, and ethical woman with a passion for public service who was forced to enter into debate with a stupid, disqualified, and completely unethical wannabe dictator to whom public service is no more than a grift in service of an unbounded appetite for self-aggrandization and settling personal scores.

Let’s be perfectly clear, while some of Trumps’ statements might have contained some arguable grain of truth, or might be sane-itized in some fashion to sound coherent, he was substantively lying or mistaken about practically everything he asserted.

That is not to say that, as someone who is generally Liberal on most issues, I was perfectly satisfied with Harris’ performance or positions on every issue. Contrary to what some on the Right might like to think or claim, she is certainly not my personal wet-dream of a candidate.

Following are some of the particular things that disappointed me about Harris’ performance and positions in last-night’s debate:

  1. On guns, Harris forcefully emphasized her support for guns and for the 2nd Amendment. I would have liked her to vow to begin reducing the number of guns in private hands and to rationally reinterpret the calamitous 2nd Amendment, or better yet support repealing it completely.
  2. On the military, Harris emphasized her desire to ensure we have “the most lethal military in the world.” I would prefer that we aspire to having the most efficient, effective, and ethical military in the world.
  3. On the pullout from Afghanistan, rather than merely touting what a great job we did, I would have liked to have seen Harris express some of the deep sense of loss that any military commander-in-chief should feel when they lose soldiers and commit to doing everything in her power to prevent the loss of life on both sides while acknowledging the inevitable losses that will occur in military conflicts.
  4. On Gaza, I would have very much preferred if Harris stopped playing both-side-isms on this issue and differentiate herself from the Biden entrenchment of unqualified support and unlimited military funding for Israel, with only platitudes for the victims in Gaza.
  5. On abortion, while it was good that she clarified that post-birth abortions are not actually a thing, Harris left hanging the issue of late-term abortions by so obviously avoiding it. It is disappointing that she, like most of the abortion community, fuel unwarranted paranoia about the frequency of late-term abortions by failing to address it head-on with actual facts.
  6. On fracking, Harris’ support felt like pandering to Pennsylvania. I would have preferred that she accompany her support for fracking with an initiative to improve the industry by helping it to reduce the unnecessarily high levels of methane emissions throughout the entire fracking pipeline.
  7. On taxation, I would have preferred that Harris stick with the more progressive Biden taxation levels and other fiscal policies for the ultra-rich.
  8. Harris disappointed me by failing to adequately call out Trump’s insistence that a tariff is not a tax. She did refer to it indirectly as a Trump-tax, but she was not clear that she was referring to the tariff. The moderator did a better job of fact-checking Trump on this very important and insistently repeated false claim.

All of this is not to nitpick Harris, but to point out that her positions aren’t entirely in line with my own on important issues that I care about deeply. But presidential candidates hardly ever align completely with our own views on every issue. And often it can be a difficult calculus to decide which to support.

Harris is also very moderate leader. I wish we could elect a more positively radical leader to tackle things like climate change and wealth inequality more aggressively and more quickly. But radical leaders, even those who are radical in positive ways, can’t get elected in a healthy pluralistic democracy. And we certainly should never seriously consider electing a dangerously radical leader like Donald Trump ever again.

So regardless of how your issue-by-issue calculus works out, and regardless of your deeply felt priorities, it is not even a legitimately debatable question about who to support in this election. This election is about whether you are willing to recklessly risk your nation and your future on someone who is utterly corrupt and destructive, merely because you like some of his positions or don’t like some of hers.

Our Automobile Obesity Problem

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In his “press conference” today, August 8th, Donald Trump regurgitated too may lies to reiterate here. And there is no need. Most of you are sane enough to know that virtually everything Trump says is either factually wrong or a bold-faced lie. However, I do want to talk about his particular lies regarding electric vehicles, as his stupidity or dishonesty on this topic may not be immediately obvious to everyone. Also, talking about these particular lies of his sets the stage to discuss the problem of automobile obesity.

This wasn’t the first time Trump has spread misinformation about electric vehicles (see here). He has been doing so for quite a while. Today he repeated false claims that electric vehicles are “twice as heavy” as comparable gas-powered vehicles. They are in fact a bit heavier because of the weight of current battery technology, but at most by only about 30%.

As one example, our family car, the all electric Mini Cooper SE, weighs 3,175 lbs. The otherwise identical gas-powered version weighs 2,813 lbs. This is a difference of under 13%. Cars with longer range are heavier, but the maximum difference is under 30%. For Trump to round that up to 200% is technically called a lie, whopper, or, colloquially, bullshit.

Moreover, the electric version is far cheaper to operate, has far lower maintenance costs, is far more convenient to charge up, performs far better, spew far less carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere, and can utilize far greener sources of electricity now and in the future.

But Donald never settles for just one lie about any given topic. He then went on to repeat his claim that if we “all” had electric vehicles we would have to rebuild “all” our bridges in the country lest they “all” collapse under the added weight of electric cars. This is, unsurprisingly, yet more nonsense. Our roads and bridges are built to support caravans of 80,000 lb semi trucks. The weight increase of electric vehicles would be relatively insignificant and responsible engineering organizations have tactfully characterized this claim as “massively overstated” (see here).

Trump assuredly did not come up with these bogus claims on his own, but he is clearly unable to assess the validity of wild assertions before he repeats them, or he just doesn’t care to do so.

But if we take Trump at his word, and take seriously his worry about all our bridges collapsing because of an added load of 20% or so, then shouldn’t Trump also be urging everyone to simply buy smaller cars to save our fragile bridges?

This transitions us to the topic of our big, fat, gas-guzzling American cars.

Have no illusions. American cars have gotten really fat and are only getting fatter. American cars have grown a foot wider, two feet longer, and much higher just over the last decade. Their average weight has increased over 1000 lbs since 1980.

In comparison, European cars are roughly 27% leaner than our fat American cars. This difference is on a par with the weight difference that Donald Trump is so concerned about in going to electric.

And let’s be clear, Europeans need, use, and love cars just as much as Americans. They just like them lean and mean, not fat and bloated. We don’t “need” big pickup trucks that we hardly ever carry anything in, or giant SUV’s to take that yearly trip to the mountains. We could buy small and rent to meet occasional needs. Overall that would be far more financially sensible than buying and maintaining a huge vehicle you hardly ever fully utilize.

The EPA estimates that for each 100 lbs added to a vehicle, the fuel economy decreases by 1-2%. That adds up to a lot of money.

But smaller cars are not only economically sensible, they are environmentally sensible. In fact, it’s hard to think of any single thing you could do as an individual to fight climate change more significant than to buy a smaller car, whether gas or electric.

Due to their greater size and weight, American cars consume from 11% to 23% more gasoline than do their equally satisfying European counterparts. That results in a literal ton of carbon dioxide. You could reduce your personal CO2 footprint by over a metric ton per year just by buying a lighter, smaller car.

Frankly, you are not doing much for the environment by buying an electric Hummer or Escalade or F-150, or even our new normal of ballooned up Civic. We should buy electric AND buy small to gain the most benefit not only for the environment but for our own finances. If you buy small and electric, I guarantee you will not miss your gigantic boat of a car for very long. You’ll quickly come to love your small athletic electric and will likely find that it meets all your needs very well.

Buying small also means not being so obsessed with range. Usage studies show that most drivers don’t actually need anything near the battery range they think they do and demand. That added battery weight only gets lugged around unused creating more CO2. Our Mini has a 100 mile range and that has been plenty for us and statistics confirm that it is plenty for most consumers. Again, if you need to travel farther you can easily rent or take mass transit.

Unfortunately, most manufacturers have given up on making smaller cars for our gluttonously upsized American car market. But if we create demand the supply will quickly follow. The government as well as environmentally responsible carmakers should do everything it can to incentivize a national automobile diet plan for America.

I know we’re addicted to our huge cars and we think we can’t live without them. But we can. I know we can. Believe me, you’ll feel so much better after you lose that extra 1000 lbs of car fat, and you’ll be helping save the planet to boot.

Shallow Science Reporting in The Atlantic

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On June 3rd, Jonathan Lambert published an article in The Atlantic entitled “Psychedelics are Challenging the Scientific Gold Standard” (see here). The tagline was “How do you study mind-altering drugs when every clinical-trial participant knows they’re tripping?“

I’ll first mention that articles relating to psychedelics are always attractive clickbait. That’s not necessarily bad. One might hope that such clickbait will attract readers enough to impart some more generalized science knowledge and insight.

But sadly this article instead spreads serious misinformation and creates harmful misconceptions. The other day my wife, who is an accomplished epidemiologist, shared her frustration over the many misinformed and misleading scientific arguments presented in this article.

I’ve already written quite a bit about the issue of terrible scientific reporting in this blog and in my book, Pandemic of Delusion (see here). So in this installment I’ll try to use this as a learning opportunity to share some more accurate scientific insight into clinical trials as well as to correct some of the misinformation presented in this article.

The author claims that the study of mind-altering drugs presents new challenges since participants can easily tell whether they are tripping or not. Being aware of which treatment you have received could result in a distortion or even an invalidation of the results.

But this is hardly a new or even remotely unique challenge. There are a wide range of non-hallucinogenic treatments that have side effects that are also easily apparent to the participants. In fact it is an extremely common situation for epidemiologists, one that they have dealt with successfully for many decades in any study where the treatment has noticeable side effects like nausea or lethargy.

The author then goes on to present this as a fundamental issue with Randomly Controlled Trials (RCT) as a clinical study design strategy. An RCT is a widely-accepted and well-proven practice of ensuring that participants are assigned to the different trial groups being tested and compared in a completely random manner. As Mr. Lambert correctly points out, RCT is the “Gold Standard” for clinical designs.

In his article, the author attempts to make a case that this “gold standard” is insufficient to meet the challenge of studies of this kind and that “We shouldn’t be afraid to question the gold standard.” This quote came from a source, but it is still being chosen and presented by the author to support his conclusions. I would be highly surprised if his source intended this comment to be interpreted as used in this paper. I know my wife is often incensed by the way that her interview comments were selectively used in articles to convey something very different that what she intended.

As an aside, I want to mention that generally when journalists interview scientists, they expressly refuse any offers to "fact check" their final article, citing "journalistic integrity."  I find this claim of journalistic integrity highly suspect, particularly when interviewers like Rachel Maddow commonly start by asking their guests "did I get all that right in my summary introduction?" This only improves, rather than compromises, their journalistic integrity and the accuracy of their reporting.

In any case, while every study presents unique challenges, none of these challenges undermine the basic validity of our gold standard.

But to support his assertion, the author incorrectly links RCT designs with “blinding.” He states that “Blinding, as this practice is called, is a key component of a randomized controlled trial.“

For clarification, blinding is the practice of concealing treatment group assignments from the participants, and preferably also from the investigators as well (which is called double blinding), even after the treatment is administered.

But blinding is an entirely optional addition to an RCT study design. Blinding is not a required component of an RCT design, let alone a “key component” as the author asserts. Many valid RCT designs are not blinded, let alone double-blinded. For more details on this topic I point you to the seminal reference work by Schultz and Grimes published in 2002.1

The author makes similar mistakes by conflating RCT designs with placebo effects. To clarify any misconceptions he has created, many, many studies, including randomized trials, do not include a placebo group nor are they always necessary or sensible. In many typical cases, the study goal is to compare a new drug to a previous standard, and a placebo is not relevant. In other cases, the use of a placebo would be unethical, such as in trials of contraceptives.

Next the author advocates for new, alternative study designs like “open label trials” and “descriptive studies.” But neither of these designs are new nor are they in any way superior to randomized trials. In fact they are far inferior and introduce a host of biases that an RCT is designed to eliminate. They are alternatives, yes, but only when one cannot economically, technically, or ethically conduct a far more rigorous and controlled RCT study.

Non-randomized trials can also be used as easy “screening” studies to identify potential areas for more rigorous investigation. For example, non-randomized studies initially suggested that jogging after myocardial infarction could prevent further infarctions. Randomized studies proved this to be incorrect, probably due to other lifestyle choices made between those who choose to exercise and those who do not. But again, their findings should be taken as tentative until a proper RCT can be accomplished.

And there are many options that trained researchers can utilize to study hallucinogenic drugs, as they do with a wide range of detectable treatment scenarios, without compromising the sound basis of a good randomized trial design. As just one example, they could administer their control group with an alternative medication that would cause many of the same symptoms, even tripping! This is done fairly routinely in other similar situations.

There are many other criticisms one could and should make of this article, but I’ll wind down by saying that psychedelics are not “challenging the scientific gold standard.” We do not need to compromise the integrity of good scientific methods in order to study the efficacy of hallucinogens in treating PTSD or any other conditions.

And further, we should push back against this kind of very poor scientific reporting because it propagates misinformation that undermines good, sound, established scientific techniques. The Atlantic should hold their authors to a higher standard.

  1. Kenneth F. Schultz and David A. Grimes, “Blinding in randomized trials: hiding who got what,” THE LANCET • Vol 359 • February 23, 2002 ↩︎

Hyperbolic Headlines are Destroying Journalism!

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In our era of information overload, most readers consume their news by scanning headlines rather than through any careful reading of articles. A study by the Media Insight Project found that six in ten people acknowledge that they have done nothing more than read news headlines in the past week​ (Full Fact)​. Consuming news in this matter can make one less, rather than more well-informed.

Take, for instance, the headline from a major online newspaper: “Scientists Warn of Catastrophic Climate Change by 2030.” The article itself presents a nuanced discussion about potential climate scenarios and the urgent need for policy changes. However, the headline evokes a sense of inevitability and immediate doom that is not supported by the article’s content. These kind of headlines invoke fear and urgency to drive traffic at the expense of an accurate representation of what is really in the article.

All too typical hyperbolic headlines contribute to instilling dangerously misleading and lasting impressions. For example, a headline that screams “Economy in Freefall: Recession Imminent” might actually precede an article discussing economic indicators and expert opinions on potential downturns. Misleading headlines have an outsized effect in creating a skewed perception that can influence public opinion and decision-making processes negatively.

It often seems that headline writers have not read the articles at all. Moreover, they change them frequently, sometimes several times a day, to drive more traffic by pushing different emotional buttons.

Particularly egregious examples of this can be found in the political arena. During election seasons, headlines often lean towards sensationalism to capture attention. A headline like “Candidate X Involved in Major Scandal” may only refer to a minor, resolved issue, but the initial shock value sticks with readers. It unfairly delegitimizes the target of the headline. The excuse that the article itself is fair and objective does not mitigate the harm done by these headlines because, as we said, most people only read the headlines. And if they do skim the article they often do so in a cursory attempt to hear more about the salacious headline. If the article does not immediately satisfy that expectation, they become quickly bored, and don’t bother to actually read the more reasoned presentation in the article.

This headline-driven competition for clicks has led to a landscape where accuracy and depth are sacrificed for immediacy and sensationalism. Headlines are crafted to evoke emotional responses, whether through fear, anger, or salaciousness, rather than to inform. This shift has profound implications. When readers base their understanding of complex issues on superficial and often misleading headlines, they are ill-equipped to engage in meaningful discourse or make informed decisions.

Furthermore, the impact of misleading headlines extends beyond individual misinformation. It contributes to a polarized society where people are entrenched in echo chambers, each side reinforced by selective and often exaggerated information communicated to them through attention-grabbing headlines. This environment fosters division and reduces the opportunity for constructive dialogue, essential for a healthy democracy​ (Center for Media Engagement)​.

Consider the headline “Vaccines Cause Dangerous Side Effects, Study Shows.” The article might detail a study discussing the rarity of severe side effects and overall vaccine efficacy, but the headline fuels anti-vaccine sentiment by implying a more significant threat. Such headlines not only mislead but also exacerbate public health challenges by spreading fear and misinformation.

Prominent journalists like Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post and Jay Rosen of NYU have critiqued the increasing prevalence of clickbait headlines, noting that they often prioritize sensationalism over accuracy, thereby undermining the credibility of journalism and contributing to public misinformation. Sullivan has emphasized the ethical responsibility of journalists to ensure that headlines do not mislead, as they serve as the primary interface between the news and its audience.

Unfortunately I suspect that journalists typically have little to no say in the headlines that promote their articles. The authors and editors should reassert control.

Until and unless journalists start acting like responsible journalists with regard to sensational headlines, readers should be wary of headlines that seem too dramatic, overstated, or that attempt to appeal to emotions.

And this is not a problem limited to tabloid journalism… we are talking about you, New York Times! Most people are already skeptical about headlines published in the National Enquirer. Tabloid headlines are not actually as serious a problem as the “credible” headlines put forth by the New York Times and other publications who still benefit from an assumption of responsible journalism.

The current trend of sensationalist online newspaper headlines is a disservice to readers and society. The practice prioritizes clicks over clarity, hyperbole over honesty, and in doing so, contributes to a misinformed and divided public. It is imperative for both readers and journalists to advocate for a return to integrity in news reporting – particularly in the headlines they put out. Accurate, informative headlines are not just a journalistic responsibility but a societal necessity to ensure an informed and engaged populace.

Footnote: Did I fool you??

Does this article sound different than my usual blog articles? Is it better or worse or just different? This was actually an experiment on my part. I asked Chat GPT to write this article for me. I offer it to you with minimal editing as a demonstration of what AI can do.

I’m interested in hearing what you think in the comments. Should I hang up my pen and leave all the writing to AI?

The Vatican Combats Superstition

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The Church has always worked tirelessly to portray itself as scholarly, rational, and evidence-based. Going way, way back, they have tried and largely succeeded in marketing themselves as a bulwark against false gods, superstitions, and dangerous beliefs.

In “The Demon-Haunted World,” Carl Sagan told about Jean Gerson back in the 1400’s who wrote “On the Distinction Between True and False Visions.” In it, he specified that evidence was required before accepting the validity of any divine visitation. This evidence could include, among many other mundane things, a piece of silk, a magnetic stone, or even an ordinary candle. More important than physical evidence, however, was the character of the witness and the consistency of their account with accepted church doctrine. If their account was not consistent with church orthodoxy or disturbing to those in power, it was ipso facto deemed unreliable.

In other words, the church has spent thousands of years fabricating pseudo-rational logic to ensure that the supernatural bullshit they are selling is the only supernatural bullshit that is never questioned.

Their pseudo-rational campaign of manipulation is is still going on today.

Just recently, the Vatican announced their latest marketing initiative to promote themselves as the arbiters of dangerous and confusing supernatural claims (see here). They sent their salesmen out in force promoting it, and if their claims were not accepted by the media with such unquestioning deference, I would not need to write this article.

Just as did Jean Gerson in 1400, the modern Vatican has again published revised “rules” for distinguishing false from legitimate supernatural claims. But unlike most of the media, let’s examine a few of these supposedly new rules (or tests) through a somewhat less credulous lens.

The first requirement, according to Vatican “scholars,” is whether the person or persons reporting the visitation or supernatural event possess a high moral character. The first obvious problem is that anyone, even those of low moral character, can have supernatural encounters. So what is this really about? The real reason they include this is because it’s so fuzzy. It gives them the latitude to dismiss reports inconsistent with their doctrine based on a character judgement, and it ensures that if they are going to anoint a new brand-ambassador, that person will not reflect poorly on the Church.

They include a similar criterion involving financial motivation. Again, while a financial interest should make one skeptical, it is not disqualifying. And the real reason this is included, I suspect, is to provide the same benefit as a moral character assessment. It provides further fuzziness to allow them to cherry-pick what sources they want to support, and which they want to disavow.

But the most important self-perpetuating rule is the next one. The Vatican explicitly gives credence to any claims that support church theology and the church hierarchy, and expressly discounts any claims that are not in keeping with Church doctrine as ipso facto bogus.

In other words, since Church doctrine is the only true superstition, any claim that is not in keeping with Church doctrine is logically and necessarily false. This is the exact same specious logic put forth by Jean Gerson in 1400. The Vatican clearly knows that a thriving business must keep reintroducing the same old marketing schemes to every new generation.

Rather than dwell further on the points the Vatican wishes us to focus on, let’s think one moment about what they did not include. Nowhere in their considered treatise on fact-based thinking do they ever mention anything remotely like scientific or judicial rules of evidence. Nowhere do they mention scientific-style investigation, scientific standards of proof, or any establishment of fact for that matter. They emphasize consistency with Church doctrine, but nowhere do they even mention consistency with known universal laws. And certainty nowhere do they suggest a sliver of a possibility that any of their existing beliefs could possibly be proven to be incorrect by some legitimate new supernatural phenomenon.

I won’t go on further as I like to keep these blog posts short, but I hope this is enough to help you see that everything in this current Vatican media campaign is more of their same old, “we are the only source for truth” claim. It’s the same strategy designed to hold an audience that has been adopted successfully by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and any number of cults.

The Church is essentially a money-making big-business like Disneyland, selling a fantasy experience built around their cast of trademarked characters with costumes and theme parks, and big budget entertainment events. Imagine if Disney spent thousands of years trying to retain market share by assuring people that they are the only real theme park and that all the rest of them are just fake. Then further imagine that Disney went on to promote scholarly articles about how they are the only reliable judges of which theme park characters are real. That’s the Church.

Disneyland and Universal Studios are just a feel-good entertainment businesses and they admit it. Disney doesn’t insist that Micky Mouse is real and Universal Studios doesn’t claim that only the Autobots can save us from the Decepticons. What makes the arbiters of truth at the Vatican either liars or delusional or both is that they never stop working to convince everyone that their divine mission is to protect us from – all those other – false beliefs.

Keep on Bloviating Against Protests!

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We have long had a recurring pattern. Every single time we have protest actions, the bloviators mobilize to train their word processors on the protests. They hyperventilate and opine in the form of their considered and blistering critiques. Most start by lamenting that in <their day> they used to protest, so it’s not that they don’t support <proper> protesting, but while <their> protests were righteously motivated and properly executed, this current one crosses unacceptable lines.

Whatever the current protest might be, and however it may unfold, the bloviators always criticize it for crossing lines of proper protest decorum. Critics express concerns about malevolent actors in the movement. They denounce the protest for causing inconvenience to others. They raise issues over fairness to counter-protestors, about damage whether intentional or incidental, about the exact tone and wording of the rhetoric expressed. They share their sage, less inflamed, assessment that the demands of the protestors won’t have a worthwhile impact on the issue. They council that the protestors really ought to be doing something more worthwhile than protesting if they really want to see actual change.

But here’s the thing. As much as I just bloviated against the bloviators, we need them. They need to keep doing exactly what they always do – armchair bloviate. They are an essential part of an effective and sustainable protest mechanism for making progress on important social issues.

The bloviators serve the protests by reacting. That is precisely the goal of protests; to garner attention and get some reaction, any reaction. They often don’t expect their demands to be met immediately, and they certainly do not expect to solve the larger problems they are protesting about. They are just looking for some attention, some recognition of their issue in the hopes of starting a larger dialog, raising awareness, and forcing some due consideration an honest effort to address it.

When no one will listen, eventually you have to shout to get any attention. In attacking the methods and behavior of the protests and protestors, the bloviators help spread awareness of the important issues driving them. Even bad attention is some attention. Negative blowback ultimately becomes preferable, and in fact more logical and productive, than total apathy, lip service, and inaction.

And there is another way that the bloviators are essential to sustaining an effective tradition of protesting for social change. They fight to constrain the boundaries of what gets attention. By doing so, they make it easier for the next protest movement to garner some attention without going too far. Without them, if the boundaries did not get reset, every subsequent protest action would have to become more extreme than the last.

Imagine we did not have the bloviators. Without them lamenting how this new protest is somehow going too far, the threshold of disruption required to garner some attention would keep increasing. So in a way, they reset the disruption threshold so that we can react with concern and hand-wringing to the next protest, without those protesters having to go farther than the last to get any attention at all. If not for the bloviators constraining those thresholds, important and essential protests would be progressively forced become to extreme to continue to be allowed in our culture.

So bloviators, you keep wringing your hands and lamenting and armchair critiquing every protest. You play an essential part in our delicate balance of protest actions. Without you raising attention to them and resetting boundaries for the next one, we could not continue to live in a country in which essential protesting is both allowed and effective.