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Articles by Dan Elton
How Online Imagery Puts Transhumanism in a Negative Light
Daniel C. Elton, Ph.D. Author’s Note: a version of this article was previously published as “Transhumanism has a visual aesthetics problem” on my Substack.¬† If you do a Google search for ‚Äútranshumanism‚ÄĚ, this is what you see: Three heads pop up. Let‚Äôs take a closer look: They are all pretty similar. All women, which is curious. All have shaven heads ‚ÄĒ also curious. Finally, all have weird things sticking out of their heads ‚ÄĒ curiouser and curiouser.
Sorry, Dr. Coughlin, “Aging” and “Old Age” Are Real, and They Suck
Daniel C. Elton, Ph.D. Author’s Note: This article was also posted on my Substack. Recently I attended a talk at the Broad Institute by Joseph F. Coughlin, who runs the “AgeLab” at MIT. I was shocked and disturbed by what I heard. In Coughlin’s view of reality, the elderly do not actually become less capable as they age, it’s just that society thinks they do.
A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic middle school health textbook from 1929
“This is a remarkable age. It is an age of skyscrapers, submarines, airplanes, dirigibles, phonographs, safety razors, radios, electric lights, steam and hot-water heat, gas stoves, vacuum cleaners, and other wonderful inventions. Many diseases have been conquered, and life has been lengthened. Life has been made more comfortable and in most ways safer.
A Defense of Peer Review
“I think peer review is, like democracy, bad, but better than anything else." — Timothy Bates, University of Edinburgh I used to see peer review as primarily good — an important gatekeeping process, essential for protecting capital “S” Science from all manner of quackery and nonsense. Looking back, I was clearly naive; plenty of junk science gets published in top journals despite the supposed guardrails of peer review.
FDA devastation during the pandemic - a review
I do not think we have had a proper reckoning with what happened during the pandemic. It seems people just want to forget the entire thing. 2,977 people died on September 11th, 2001. The September 11th attacks led to the creation of the 9/11 Commission about a year later. That commission held high-profile public hearings and produced an extensive report that became widely read, selling over 800,000 copies. The pandemic directly caused at least 1,130,000 deaths. That is the same as 379 9/11s.
Why Lawrence Lessig is wrong about Francesca Gino
Recently Lawrence Lessig has come to the defense of embattled Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Francesca Gino. (Gino is technically still a professor at HBS, although she is on two years of unpaid leave and barred from stepping foot on campus). Lessig is a legal professor at Harvard Law School and is the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. He also ran for president in 2016. Lessig says he believes Gino is 100% innocent.
Why AI doctors should not be FDA regulated
The FDA is a sacred cow in medicine. Thus, it was refreshing when I saw a recent critique of the FDA’s current system for AI regulation published in PLOS: Digital Health. The authors include medical researchers from the Harvard T. H Chan School of Public Health, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
Book review: "Innovation Breakdown"
Innovation Breakdown By Joseph V. Gulfo 258 pages 2014 Post Hill Press (Amazon link) Innovation Breakdown tells the story of a small startup with a promising lifesaving product that was unexpectedly screwed over by the FDA. As a result of the FDA’s actions the company’s reputation was permanently harmed, their device took several extra years to make it to market, and many people died who might have been saved. Innovation Breakdown is a remarkable account.
DeepMind’s generalist AI, Gato: A non-technical explainer
DeepMind’s recent paper, A Generalist Agent, catalyzed a wave of discourse regarding the speed at which current artificial intelligence systems are improving and the risks posed by these increasingly advanced systems. We aim to make this paper accessible to non-technical folks by: (i) providing a non-technical summary, and (ii) discussing the relevant implications related to existential risk and AI policy.
AI in Digital Therapeutics: Your Next Treatment Plan?
MANILA - Alongside the rise of telemedicine in the Philippines and throughout the world, there is another subset in which artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a significant role in successfully revolutionizing healthcare for the post-pandemic era. Digital therapeutics (DTx) delivers medical interventions directly to patients using evidence-based, clinically evaluated software to treat, manage, and prevent a broad spectrum of diseases and disorders.
AI’s Hippocratic Oath
ROSARIO, ARGENTINA - The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled the growth of the healthtech sector in Latin America and has witnessed a stunning number of successes. One fine example is Colombian startup Arkangel AI, which is sponsored by Google, Novartis, Everis, Roche and Nvidia.
Medical AI Has Both Loads of Promise and Hype
BOSTON - Back in 2016, deep learning (DL) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton famously stated that "people should stop training radiologists now - it's just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists. It might be 10 years, but we've got plenty of radiologists already." Hinton went on to make similar statements in numerous interviews, includingwith The New Yorker in 2017.
AI for medicine is overhyped right now
AI for medicine has a lot of promise, but it's also really overhyped right now. This post explains why and asks if we should update our timelines to existentiallydangerous AI as a result (tldr: personally I do not update much). Back in 2016 deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton famously said "people should stop training radiologists now - it's just completely obvious within 5 years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.
The Yuan AI 2022 - Evolution Opens Door to Longevity
The Yuan AI 2022 - Evolution Opens Door to Longevity Calum Chace presents the first in a series of articles this week on The Yuan platform predicting the evolution of AI in 2022. The best-selling author predicts in the tenth anniversary year of the Big Bang in artificial intelligence we will see better drug discovery processes, better diagnostics, and better understanding of human biology. LONDON - Next year is the tenth anniversary of the Big Bang in artificial intelligence (AI).
Why the FDA should legalize Pfizer's COVID pill immediately
The number of people dying from COVID-19 in the United States has been steady at 1,300 per day for the past 30 days. That is equivalent to thirteen 9/11’s each month. Moreover, the number of cases has been starting to slowly tick upwards the past week and there is an expectation this will continue as we go into the winter months and holiday season. On top of this a new strain that many experts believe is worse than delta is starting to spread. The pandemic is not over.
Europe's reckless precaution
Much of the content of this post was summarized this morning by Prof. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution. However, I think this such important material that it bears repeating and elaborating on more here as well. Nearly everything the EU has done to provide their citizenry with the AstraZeneca vaccine has been bundled. First, the European Commission spent months going back and forth with AstraZeneca about the price point of the vaccines ($5-$40 / dose).
AI for COVID-19 diagnosis - a case study in bad incentives
On February 26, 2020 the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) put out a press release proclaiming “CT Provides Best Diagnosis for COVID-19”. The release was quickly picked up by news outlets such as Science Daily, EurekaAlert, and many medical news sites. The lead in the RSNA’s press release states: In a study of more than 1,000 patients published in the journal Radiology, chest CT outperformed lab testing in the diagnosis of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
What happened? A timeline on the development and approval of Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca's vaccines
Why didn’t we get Pfizer’s vaccine before the election? Why wasn’t the AstraZeneca vaccine approved in the US shortly after being approved in the UK? Why were there not any COVID-19 human challenge trials until 7 March 2021? To shed some light on these questions, I constructed this timeline. However, much further autopsy is needed on the decision making processes that occurred at the FDA to prevent the FDA’s devastation this year from happening again.
Objections to Value-Alignment between Effective Altruists
With this post I want to encourage an examination of value-alignment between members of the EA community. I lay out reasons to believe strong value-alignment between EAs can be harmful in the long-run. The EA mission is to bring more value into the world. This is a rather uncertain endeavour and many questions about the nature of value remain unanswered.
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