Interesting things (20260906)
CIDRAP Op-Ed: How we can hear ‘high risk’ for measles and write it off
Risk stratification exists to direct protection toward the people most likely to be harmed. The phrase "only the old and the sick" distorts that same data into a reason to stop attending to those people. The analysis built to prioritize the vulnerable gets used to write them off. Whether a death counts less because it happened to someone older or sicker is a moral question, and my answer is no. This piece is about a different problem: what happens to everyone else's sense of their own risk.
AI Is an Anti-Primary Source Machine
[T]he most significant flaw to emerge from the exercise was what I think of as the lowest common denominator problem: AI flattens the historical record by relying on the most popular sources, eliminating minority voices. Many studies have shown anti-minority bias in AI systems. Here I mean something related but broader. Since the chatbot algorithm is designed to use available digital sources to generate the response most likely to be desired, the stories it fabricates already contain bias toward certain kinds of answers.
I try to teach my students that primary sources allow them to make new discoveries and offer new historical interpretations. AI chatbots present a problem for the teaching of history not only because they hallucinate, nor simply because they threaten to make even conscientious students’ writing less original, but because they thwart the process that might lead students toward original interpretations in the first place. No matter how you refine your questions, the chatbot will generate responses reflecting what the greatest number of users are likely to want to hear, which tends to be close to what they think they already know.
Shared biological pathways may explain chronic fatigue across diseases
"We now think the answer may lie in shared regulatory networks embedded within the body's immune and metabolic systems," said Prof Pshezhetskiy. "A Covid infection may trigger prolonged immune activation. Traumatic stress may disrupt stress-hormone pathways and inflammatory responses. But both disturbances appear capable of converging on common biological circuits controlling energy production, immune regulation and cellular resilience. When those systems become persistently dysregulated, the result may be the profound and disabling fatigue seen across multiple disorders."