Notes in the Margin - 31 January 2025
Tech for grief, tech for death, tech tech tech, and more
Notes from a Family Meeting is a newsletter where I hope to join the curious conversations that hang about the intersections of health and the human condition. Poems and medical journals alike will join us in our explorations. If you want to come along with me, subscribe and every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
Every so often, I’ll share things I’ve been reading with a few words of mine scribbled in the margins. If you have something to share, please do! The comment section is open.
The Nocturnists: The Age of Supertechnology
Emily Silverman interviews Jamie Metzl on his new book about the precarious place we find ourselves as a species. We have technologies that promise immense good and technologies that threaten unfathomable destruction. He suspects there’s a 99% chance that it will require a global crisis much worse than COVID to wake us up to the need to improve things. However, his suggested response (in the interview; I haven’t read his book) is to double down on technical fixes. As anyone who has read this newsletter for some time knows, I think technical fixes will be toothless without transforming the character of our society (i.e., changing the hearts of the users of technology).
The Hippocratic Society Podcast: Physician Identity and Formation
John Rhee and Michael Egan interview Ben Frush and Brewer Eberly about what it means to become a physician. Medical training isn’t mere knowledge transfer and skill acquisition; it’s a process of moral formation, for good or ill. Frush and Eberly review some of those deformative processes, and what can be done to resist them.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Grief
reflects on how deepfakes of deceased loved ones might subvert our need to grieve. This technology, he also argues, is a means of our hyper-productive culture to prod us more quickly through something that shouldn’t be rushed.Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher describe two ways of doing science: day science, in which researchers chip away at the well-known work of hypothesis testing, and night science, where questions come to them usually at odd times. Thomas Kuhn described this decades ago: paradigms shift in science not because of the day-to-day work of researchers, but because of often unpredictable flashes of disruption that raise new questions.
Speculation: Euthanasia Will Become Coercive
argues that euthanasia can become coercive because “If you get a condition where everybody else with it chooses euthanasia, you eventually won’t have a lot of other care options. Doctors won’t have experience treating you. Drug companies won’t produce the medicines that might save you. If clinical trials happen at all, they won’t proceed to commercial stages.” I don’t think any euthanasia program is advanced enough to have this kind of impact yet, but one could imagine it happening, similar to how the birth of children with Trisomy 21 has been eliminated from some places.From the Archives
Here's something, only a little dusty, that new readers may not have seen.
What kinds of judgments are we making when we claim that dying has been prolonged (vs. life has been sustained)?
