No, Everything Really Is Worse: Technology and the Degredation of Public Life and Everyday Experience

To be sure, there is a real and misguided tendency to romanticize the past. But for a long time I’ve been agitated by a nagging feeling that this time is different. Many aspects of social life and everyday experience really are worse. Beyond shaking my fist at the sky, I didn’t have a good way of articulating what was underlying this feeling. This is my attempt to do so.

The story begins with two common observations that, taken together, give rise to a paradox: First, we seem to be inundated with customer feedback surveys. No matter how trivial the interaction with a business or institution, we inevitably receive a request to fill out a customer feedback survey. The second observation is that, in many industries, customer service seems worse than ever.

How does this make sense? If we’re constantly filling out customer feedback surveys, we should be living in the golden age of customer service. What explains this paradox?

Violence, Virtue, Masculinity, and Martial Arts

There’s a not-so-small subset of the martial arts community–particularly within Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA–that believes quite ardently that violence is a virtue. Relatedly, they tie this “virtue” to masculinity. If you have any familiarity with online BJJ social media accounts and podcasts, you’ll know what I’m referring to. I find these views quite perplexing […]

Reflections and Accumulated Practical Wisdom after 50 years of life

I turned 50 this month. Here is a list of random nuggets of practical wisdom I’ve learned/wished I’d known or am still unsure of. A caveat: Unless you’re a Platoninst about knowledge, practical wisdom is not something we are born with but rather comes from experience. That is to say, for just about every nugget […]

On Honesty and Transparency with the Dying

Doctors and other clinicians do not like telling the dying that they are dying and often delay until there is a crisis. This is understandable. No one wants to be a bearer of bad news, much less what is often considered to be the worst news. To get around this problem, clinicians use a host […]

Food, Caring, and Cancer: Understanding Caregiver Distress about Feeding

His wife was pleading tearfully with us. “Please, if you just let me feed him, he’ll get strong enough for chemo.” The patient’s three adult children echoed their mother’s plea. This is not an uncommon scenario when I am called to facilitate a discussion between the medical team and the family of a patient with […]

Are Vaccine Mandates similar to nazi medical experiments?

By now you’ve probably encountered antivax rhetoric claiming parallels between vaccine mandates and Nazi Germany medical experiments. In this post, I will explore whether such analogies are legitimate. I’m not the first to do this but I hope to contribute a perspective that adds a new dimension. Before evaluating any alleged parallels between vaccine mandates […]

The Pfizer whistleblower: What Does it mean?

Recently a “bombshell” article appeared in the BMJ in which an investigative journalist reports a whistleblowers account of problems with the original Pfizer trial (linked below). As usual, Orac over at Respectful Insolence has done an excellent job evaluating and contextualizing the whistleblower’s claims. Rather that repeat Orac’s labor I want to contemplate the logical […]

The Death of Colin Powell and Covid-19 Vaccines

Colin Powell died from complications due to Covid-19…but he was vaccinated. What conclusions can we draw about vaccine effectiveness? The facts: Colin Powell was 85 years old and had multiple myeloma—a rare type of blood cancer. This nefarious type of cancer attacks the cells that make antibodies (the things you need to effectively fight off […]

Covid-19 vaccine refusal and organ transplant eligibility

The latest hot topic in the news is organ donor ethics. Several donor clinics have removed from eligibility potential recipients who refuse to get a covid vaccine. Let’s learn about the ethics of organ donation to understand the policy. There are about 100 000 people in the US waiting for an organ transplant. Unfortunately, not […]

Predicting Anti-Vaccine Explanations for the Eventual End of the Pandemic

When this pandemic eventually ends, the anti-vaccine movement will claim that it wasn’t because of vaccines. If the anti-vaccine movement is anything, they are consistent. Historically, they have always tried to point to some other variable besides vaccines to explain away a disease’s decline. The favorite explanation is that many communicable diseases declined precipitously because […]

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