Hello friends,
I know it’s a rough opening, but we stand on the precipice of more war. I’m talking specifically about Iran, where the UK has withdrawn its embassy staff in anticipation of an attack by the US. In preparation for retaliatory attacks, American embassy employees were advised to leave Israel today. And right now, the administration and our military leadership are engaged in extremely public histrionics over any limitation on its use of AI for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weaponry.

When I launched this project, I wrote a note to myself, saying that I wanted it to be,

“a way to keep a handle on what’s happening without drowning in the churn…. to validate grief and rage without getting entirely swamped in it… a steady voice in the storm.”

So this was Year 2, Week 9. Steady as we go, yeah?

What happened in science & higher ed

• Ellie Aghayeva, the Columbia student that ICE lied their way into campus housing to detain yesterday morning, has been released. Campus security cameras recorded the agents pretending to search for a missing child. What’s unusual about this case is not the lie, sadly, but how quickly the university president, mayor, other officials spoke out and took action to intervene - and how quickly Aghayeva was set free. New York governor Kathy Hochul has proposed a bill she says would keep ICE out of dorms and schools. But law enforcement agents are already required to secure a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to enter Columbia university housing, classrooms, and other areas that are not public access. Do you know what your institution’s policies and protocols are about ICE?
• Last week, NIH director Jay Bhattacharya also became acting head of the CDC, in a move that is tantamount to public health malpractice. STAT has an excellent analysis of why filling the CDC director role is so fraught. He replaces Jim O’Neill, who will be nominated to direct the NSF, despite the fact that he does not have a PhD, MD, or engineering degree. This week, the Senate HELP Committee held its confirmation hearing for Surgeon General nominee Casey Means. The Surgeon General is the country’s primary spokesperson and advisor on health issues. Their work can be socially transformative, like the 1964 warning on cigarettes, or the 1986 report on AIDS. Our next Surgeon General is walking into multiple public health disasters, including raging outbreaks of measles, which is a likely harbinger of other vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks. Means refuses to actually endorse measles vaccination and does not hold an active medical license. She is, however, a MAHA influencer who earns hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting longevity supplements.
• On Wednesday, after a month of malfunction-related delays on the launchpad, NASA sent the Artemis rocket back to the hangar for repairs. On Thursday, the agency’s safety advisory panel released its annual report, which highlighted repeated warnings about elevated risk for upcoming Artemis missions due to overly ambitious timelines and multiple contingencies related to unproven SpaceX and BlueOrigin equipment. Since then, we’ve already seen abrupt changes to the mission plans, but creating even more aggressive schedules. While we’re talking about NASA, I have not been able to find any new updates on the latest funding pause that OMB placed on scientific missions earlier this month. We are now well past the ten-day window for the temporary hold.

And what’s next

I recently came across a fantastic thread from Molly Crockett that introduced me to the term epistemic vigilance. It describes the way we protect ourselves against being misled, and it has two necessary subcomponents: scrutiny of the content itself and scrutiny of the person offering you the content. She writes, “When I get info from another person I can ask: how does the content relate to their expertise? Their lived experience? Their interests and biases?”

Her thread is specifically about how we think about LLMs, and why we must fundamentally treat the products of agents like Claude differently - no matter how carefully we scrutinize the content they produce. She’s also published on how LLMs create an illusion of understanding that is particularly insidious in research contexts. That paper closes with the reminder that knowledge production “is a fundamentally social practice that is shaped by the norms of its institutions.”

Right now, those norms are changing radically - and not for the better. I had already been planning to write about how NSF is retooling its priorities to be all about AI and quantum computing. I think it is entirely reasonable to hypothesize that the disruptions in the GRFP are linked to new budget priorities that subsume everything else.

It’s the same pattern over and over again - unqualified people in positions of power are diverting all the resources into executive priorities that simply do not align with the best interests of the vast majority. It would be tedious if it wasn’t so dangerous.

I will leave you with some questions tonight, rather than my usual exhortations: What do we do once the pattern is clear? What are the perks of realizing that the chaos is all-too-predictable? And how might asking those questions help process the next onslaught of news?

Liz

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