mal shared this post from mikecaulfield on 27 August 2016, 1:38 am

I read this heartbreaking story today about the U.S.’s current opioid epidemic. The surgeon general was having dinner with a friend, a cardiologist. Then this happened:

“I was having dinner with him and I said, ‘Can you believe that we were taught that these opioid medications weren’t addictive in our training?’ ” Murthy told a group at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado in June.

“And he put down his fork and he looked up at me and he said, ‘Wait, you mean they are addictive?’ ” Murthy added.

Like many doctors, his friend, a cardiologist in Florida, learned in medical school and in residency that opioids weren’t addictive as long as a patient was truly in pain, Murthy said.

“He’s trained at some of the best institutions in the country. He’s one of the most compassionate doctors that you’ll ever meet,” he said.

I know that they’ve been proven addictive for quite some time now (in more than edge cases). You know that, I hope, by now. Experts know that. Professional boards and state committees know that.

The doctor: he had no clue. It so shocked the Surgeon General that he is writing a letter on opioids and sending it to every doctor in America.

But look deeper into that story and you’ll see the big problem:

Like many doctors, his friend, a cardiologist in Florida, learned in medical school and in residency that opioids weren’t addictive as long as a patient was truly in pain, Murthy said.

“He’s trained at some of the best institutions in the country….

What we come up against here is the idea that four years or six years or eight years of education is sufficient to what we do. But unless we graduate our students into a professional learning network that can get the right information to them as our knowledge evolves, tragedies like this will happen time and time again.

This is why we have to move past the infotainment model of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and the like and build some real fricking professional systems that let important information and insights flow from point A to point B in stigmergic ways. Our current model, based on advertising dollars, couldn’t give a crap whether your cardiologist is tweeting the latest Clinton Body Count conspiracy or important updates to prescribing guidelines, as long as effective adverts get shown.

But we care. We care a lot.

Anyway, *this* is what drives me. This sort of story where having a simple piece of information or making a simple connection between two ideas could make us smarter and better people, in ways both small and large, with impacts big and small.

I wish I could say we’ve gotten better at building media that expands the mind in the past decade or so. But we’ve gotten worse at this.

Ten years ago I co-founded a community for progressives in New Hampshire, mostly for one reason: I knew very little about New Hampshire politics and wanted to change that. While the “blogging community” format had its challenges, it was a life-changing experience for me, where we found ways to truly tap into the power of networks to raise the collective intelligence of people, and make them better informed about their state: the political structure, the bills sitting before the legislature, the crucial races, and the history of various state debates. We taught each other and it was beautiful.

For various reasons we pulled the plug on it a couple years back, after over 10,000 blog posts by members and 100,000 comments (actually probably more than that — those are 2010 numbers). There were many reasons why the site eventually petered out. But one issue was it was already in decline was because by 2012 people had moved to Facebook for their political community needs.

And as a recent NYT article describes, that’s a huge problem. Because Facebook is not a learning community in any sense of the word. It’s an identity factory:

[T]ruly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news…This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.

….

From a user’s point of view, every share, like or comment is both an act of speech and an accretive piece of a public identity. Maybe some people want to be identified among their networks as news junkies, news curators or as some sort of objective and well-informed reader. Many more people simply want to share specific beliefs, to tell people what they think or, just as important, what they don’t. A newspaper-style story or a dry, matter-of-fact headline is adequate for this purpose. But even better is a headline, or meme, that skips straight to an ideological conclusion or rebuts an argument.

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, except maybe to say that these two issues — the opioid crisis and America’s conspiratorial, Facebook-fueled political turn depress the hell out of me, rip my heart out and stamp on it cartoon-style until dust clouds billow out of it and it just expires.

I care about most of the things my readers do — corporate encroachment of education, a desire for “free-range” education, emergence, creativity, what-not. But at the root of all of it for me is a simple dream I had that we all shared, that we could use technology to make ourselves smarter and better people.  And it seemed for a while like we were heading there, until the current interests took over and turned technology into Skinner boxes for advert agencies.

I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t even give so much a crap about all Google’s data mining and analytics. I’d deal with it, if Google could just get that one fricking cardiologist a Google Now message that says “Hey dude, update: Opioids are addictive.”

But Google Now is not going to do that, because the dream of Google is not the dream of Engelbart or Kay. Those inventors wanted a world where we became better people, better doctors, better citizens, better architects. Google Now doesn’t give a crap about any of that. Google Now doesn’t want to make you a better doctor or a more compassionate human. It just wants to get AI down enough that it can sell you a Starbucks on your morning commute. And eventually, maybe opioids for your back pain too. Because it’s all just data, right?

Good job everyone. Welcome to the future.

Sorry, I’m legit sick to my stomach right now, and I have to sign off.