I just had Claude work out the forecast for the the US Senate election results using all of the metrics I could think of, with Claude adding some others. The bottom line is that the Democrats most likely will have a majority with anywhere between 51 and 55 seats. The most likely outcome will is 53 seats. Below is a table and a plot of the data.
Productive discussions about opinions need to be steeped in facts. Facts are determined in a disciplined process that requires us to set aside ideology and to make an honest effort in seeking the truth.
The first step is to aggressively seek evidence that falsifies your most cherished beliefs. Then, change your mind when the facts contradict your worldview. A strong emotional commitment to a candidate or ideology makes objectivity impossible, so suspend those emotions if you are earnestly seeking the truth.
Trust the consensus view of experts who devote their lives to politically neutral research and scholarship, and who advance knowledge, science and technology through rigorous studies that employ scientific methods. Publications such as Scientific American, The Economist, Physics Today and Skeptical Inquirer are excellent sources of reliable information and honest debate on important topics. Distrust outlier studies even when their conclusions support your views and avoid fringe “experts” on social media.
Trust testimony under oath over tweets, social media posts and TV interviews. For example, Republican White House lawyers and staff, Trump-appointed officials, and other insiders have testified under oath about Trump’s extensive unethical and criminal behavior. They have nothing to gain personally from their testimony, and to the contrary, are threatened with physical violence by Trump’s MAGA minions.
Trust multifaceted evidence that paints a consistent picture. Trump’s election fraud “evidence” consists of disjoint accusations that have been individually debunked and/or dismissed by the courts.
According to these standards, Fox News is unreliable. Damning internal emails obtained during discovery by Dominion Voting Systems and the $787 million libel suit settled by Fox exposes Fox’s dishonesty. “Mainstream media” has biases but is mostly trustworthy, and routinely corrects errors. Fox, NewsMax, OAN and RTV have a record of intentionally deceiving viewers and not correcting errors. In Fox’s defense, they have backtracked on repeating stolen election lies on air since the Dominion settlement but continue to peddle other lies.
Don’t trust ideological organizations such as anti-vax groups and True the Vote, the source of misinformation in the “documentary” 2000 Mules. Under court order, they were unable to provide evidence of election fraud. Independent investigations by the department of justice and security analysts – even those hired by Trump -- found the claims in 2000 Mules bogus. Outstanding libel cases brought by those falsely depicted in the film provide additional granular evidence.
Don’t trust known liars. Trump’s lies are repeatedly exposed and are obviously intended to stoke his ego and serve to avoid criminal prosecution. Lies that are relentlessly repeated don’t make them true. Lies parroted by his sycophants, spineless politicians, and hapless supporters -- even after amplification by social media -- are still lies.
Form opinions AFTER seeing the evidence. House Republicans are fishing for “evidence” to impeach Biden. Their “evidence” was discredited by the Trump-appointed prosecutor, which exposed a link between the Republicans’ star “informant” and the Kremlin. In contrast, voice recordings, videos, signed paper documents, emails, texts and under-oath eyewitness testimony by former Trump loyalists have convinced several grand juries, in both red and blue districts, of massive criminal conspiracy with Trump as its mob boss. Readers should study the taped testimony and recordings of live Jan6 hearings and court documents filed by Jack Smith, which paint an indisputable picture of Trump’s attempt to steal the election. The totality of the evidence supports Biden’s innocence and exposes Trump’s criminal/anti-democratic behavior. The republicans are fabricating a narrative of FALSE equivalence between Biden and Trump.
An existential threat to our democracy is being fueled by a false belief in lies and conspiracy theories at a time when solutions to complex problems need to be guided by reality. The antidote is an informed electorate. It is thus the responsibility of every US citizen to uncover the truth using trusted sources and sound methodology. Let’s inform debate with facts – not talking points, elect thoughtful and intelligent leaders – not those with debunked ideologies, and demand that our elected leaders implement effective policies based on the evidence. Only then can we unleash the power of a unified America by bursting the artificial bubbles that divide us so that we can together focus our energies on solving real problems.
I have two gripes with the medical profession. First, doctors should take more data not less. Also, medical professionals should recognize that most clinical trials assume that individuals are identical, which we know is untrue. I don’t direct these gripes at my doctors because I believe they are deeper thinkers than average and accommodate my eccentricities.
All tests have uncertainties and test results can also be affected by uncontrollable variables in people’s lives. As an example, physicians are reluctant to give the PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) test to younger men under the pretense that anomalously high readings lead to unneeded tests (such as biopsies), which can have harmful side effects. But a paucity of data is the true culprit, where one bad reading in vacuum has little predictive value. The need for early testing is to set a baseline. It’s the change in PSA levels that should be of concern, not a single high reading.
See: https://unknownphysicist.blogspot.com/2020/06/i-was-relieved-i-had-cancer.html and https://unknownphysicist.blogspot.com/2021/01/can-major-surgery-cure-depression.html
More recently, I got COVID while at a meeting in Seattle, then passed it along to my wife. My children had noticed that their resting heart rates had climbed when they had COVID last year. Since we all have Fitbits, I plotted the values for my wife and me, which appear in the plot here. The trends are remarkably similar.
Two family friends who I believe are both excellent physicians tell me that my metrics defy the conclusions of medical studies. My guess is that there are two factors involved. First, each human being has its own genetic makeup. There are many commonalities humans, such as infections making us sick and our immune system fighting back. But the details of how we each respond depend on our genetic programming. People like me have no problem with COVID, which I got in 2020 at a time when vaccines were not available, and the death rate was high. It’s genetic variability that gave me the strength to play ice hockey while infected during a time when others were on respirators and died.
Population studies take averages of metrics over people of varied genetic traits. If a certain diet is found to lead to a 12% decrease in mortality, it could be that 2/3 of the population experiences a 21% decrease in mortality while 1/3 of the population experiences a 6% increase in mortality. So, making recommendations based on an average value might help a majority of individuals, but could be harming a large minority of them. To take such effects into account, any large populations studies should include a breakdown by individual to determine if subgroups have adverse outcomes. Unfortunately, many studies do not have a large enough sample size for such fine-grained studies of the sort needed to get at the truth. In such cases, the studies are more than worthless to the unlucky minority.
Cancer treatments are an example where researchers and clinicians are now beginning to tailor treatments to an individual’s DNA, which results in much improved outcomes. One must ask about the ethics of choosing a medical treatment based on a population average when it is known that some treatments may not only lack efficacy but might do harm to the patient.
Another difficulty is ensuring that study participants adhere to the study’s parameters. For example, many studies use questionnaires to query participants about their habits. How many people on a self-proclaimed low carb diets cheat by eating a bit of sugar here and there. It’s only human nature to downplay our transgressions and exaggerate our virtues. While N=1 studies are unreliable for generalization to the population at large, they are useful to the important 1; the individual being tested.
In a past post, I described how eliminating fruit while keeping the rest of my diet fixed greatly reduced my blood glucose. (see: https://unknownphysicist.blogspot.com/2023/01/fruit-is-bad-for-you-at-least-it-is-for.html) Obviously, many people do well with fruit but not me. As an update to that study, I recently noticed that my blood glucose had drifted upwards during my bout with COVID. It never got into triple digits, but on average was elevated. Then I realized that I had been using lozenges to soothe my throat. They contain honey and sugars, so taking about a half dozen of them per day was enough to be noticeable. Within a few days of stopping, my blood glucose dropped.
For these reasons, I am an advocate for taking and analyzing more data. In aggregate, the data contains much more information than a yearly reading. Also, I believe that I’m more disciplined than the average survey taker, so I can trust my data to decide on a healthy lifestyle that suits my genetics. After my recent data with resting heart rate, I am motivated to cull my data in search of other interesting correlations that I can use to design new experiments. Until then, happy self-experimentation!
ChatGPT is a program that purportedly converses with humans like an equal. Professors have identified students who have used this artificial intelligence to write term papers by noticing that “the writing was too good for college students.” I was intrigued by this machine's uncanny ability to mimic human interactions through language, so gave it a spin.
GPT’s essay is attached below. The statements that are false, highlighted in red text, are a large part of the document’s substance. On that count, GPT has failed. At the other extreme, it gets a high grade from MS Word, with the sole suggestion to remove a comma, which is highlighted in magenta. The parts of the essay that were nominally not wrong were devoid of content, using cliched praise without factual backup.
Philosophy professors were impressed with GPT’s writings on the greatest thinkers from antiquity. How could this be given that the essay on me was downright poor? My take is that GPT has at its disposal mega volumes of writing on well-known historical figures, so stringing together snippets of good writing with perfect grammar comes across as impressive. This will not work when the writer needs to understand multiple factual sources prior to synthesizing a new thought on the topic.
The error that GPT made in my case was confusing which information belonged to which subject. Information about me often appears on university websites, that lists multiple faculty on one page, or in the announcement of awards, which again usually names multiple recipients. When GPT attributed the wrong alma maters for my various degrees, it undoubtedly picked these items from a university web page, where it incorrectly mixed and matched faculty with their attributes. And the announcement of me becoming a Fellow of the OSA also included winners of other prizes. You get the point.
Finally, much of the remaining text might be confused with a
human’s writing, but not of a sophisticated one. For example, GPT praises my work with
superlatives in the to
me used when award citations are announced. GBT goes no further than to parrot these,
without explanation. It would have been impressive
if it had explained how a particular discovery could lead to an application,
but the text fell far short.
There are a couple of exceptions where GPT seems to have composed hair-raisingly meaningful sentences. I shudder at the fact that there may be a little some there beyond my criticism. But for now, I have no reason to believe that this had anything to do with the emergence of intelligence.
In conclusion, it is not surprising that GPT does well when no thought is required to understand the meaning of a topic, but a large gulf still separates it from thinking humans. Under many special circumstances, GPT may seem incredibly intelligent and thoughtful, but I am resting easy that no machine will replace the human mind soon.
Mark G. Kuzyk is a prominent physicist and materials scientist known for his research in nonlinear optics and photonics. He received his undergraduate degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Those of you who know me are aware of my love for data, and the fact that I collect all kinds of health indicators in a search for patterns. Over the last year, I was shocked by the rise in my A1C levels, which is an indicator of pre-diabetes. I was also aware of an occasional blood glucose level above 100 mg/dL, which is also associated with the onset of diabetes. But, my blood glucose levels were not high enough to warrant A1C levels of about 5.7. So I did what anyone of you would do, and that is to measure my daily blood glucose levels, giving better statistics than a weekly reading.
Indeed, I saw multiple weekly readings above 100 mg/dL with a high of 110 mg/dL. Then I noticed in a particular week that not one reading was over 100 mg/dL. The advantage of my highly structured diet is that it was simple to identify the change, and that was that my wife could not find fresh blueberries that week. We kept a fresh bowel on the kitchen counter, and I would grab a fistful after a meal or as I was lured to them as I passed buy. Being my favorite fruit, this my sole source of fructose, aside from a special low-sucrose and high-fat/protein chocolate that I make. (Not to mention the occasional chocolate chip cookie that I have with my grandson when we visit Starbucks and the exquisite pretzels my sister-in-law ships in creative gift boxes every Christmas.) Blueberries were the only source of regular fructose that I had been eating for the last couple years.
I plan on continuing the zero fructose diet for another month or so, followed by another A1C test, which provides a blood glucose value averaged over three months. This will allow the averages of both tests to be compared.
I will write more on this topic later when I have more time, but the conclusions are:
1. There is no such thing as a universally healthy diet.
2. There is no such thing as a healthy diet that is customized for a particular person.
Rather, our health is a struggle against internal and external forces, which adapts to evolutionary forces imperfectly. The best we can do is chose a balance that makes each of us relatively healthy, and then we must accept the negative consequences. In my case, a super-low-carb diet keeps me fit and trim, provides lots of energy and stamina, and has eliminated pesky annoyances such as heartburn and regular migraine headaches. On the downside, my diet makes me prone to kidney stones. These can be mitigated with simple meds, which are benign compared to treatments for diabetes and migraine headaches. And physical stamina is more important to me than pleasing my sugar-craving reward center.
May your New Year be a happy one, optimized for adequate health and pleasures within reasonable constraints.
