Tag: Personality

The Social Network

The David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin film collaboration called “The Social Network” is not about technology, though there are scenes that suggest how code is produced through focused work (which actually looks boring when you’re watching it “IRL” (in real life), without Fincher’s hyperactive perspective – but is so engaging you can lose yourself totally in the process when you’re the one actually producing the code).  The film is more about the entrepreneurial spirit, what it takes to have a vision and see it through. The real visionary in the film, Mark Zuckerberg, appears far less intense IRL than Jesse Eisenberg’s interpretation would suggest, but his drive and work ethic are undeniable. It’s not an accident that a guy in his twenties produced a billion-dollar platform; he could have been derailed if he’d lacked the persistence of vision and intent that the film shows so clearly. And, of course, he was kind of a jerk, probably without meaning to be. That kind of focus and drive tends to override comfortable social graces, kind of ironic when you’re building a social platform.

Larry Lessig complains that Sorkin’s ignorance of Internet technology caused him to miss the real story here, that Facebook exists because the Internet is free and open and presents few barriers to innovation. But I don’t think Sorkin wanted to write that story – he found drama in the Zuckerberg vs world conflict and wrote the story he had to write, acknowledging that he made no attempt to be true-to-fact.  He does pick up on the IP issue, and the fact that Zuckerberg shouldn’t have been forced to pay the Winkelvoss twins (there’s a line in the film where Zuckerberg says a guy who builds a better chair shouldn’t have to share his profits with anybody else who’s thought about building a chair before he got to it). In the film, he’s clearly having to pay because his grating personality and arrogance make him unattractive, not on the merit of the facts of the case. Eduardo Saverin seems in the film to have been screwed over, though one could argue that dilution of his shares was justifiable owing to a lack of commitment to the enterprise. More here.

After seeing the film, and reading and thinking some more about the creation and evolution of Facebook, I find that I have more respect for Zuckerberg’s genius and his drive… but like many I’m concerned about his apparent lack of social and ethical depth, especially since Facebook is how so many people today experience the Internet. Working on a talk about the future of the Internet, I’m finding that one plausible scenario is that Facebook replaces the web as a kind of operating system/interface. What are the implications?

Self-Diagnosis and Participatory Medicine

The Journal of Participatory Medicine has published an interesting piece on Self Diagnosis, subtitled A Discursive Systematic Review of the Medical Literature. It’s a complex subject – as patients become more informed and empowered, they are more liable to want to have a role in diagnosis, and more apt to question a doctor’s perception or framing of their condition. This isn’t new for some of us – thirty years ago I was disagreeing with my physician to the extent that he would prescribe to treatments, one based on his assessment and one based on mine.

The systematic review published in the JOPM turned up 51 articles, of which 38 were suitable for inclusion in the review. There are three assessments of self-diagnosis: that it’s reliable and desirable (31%), that it’s not reliable but still desirable (23%), or that it’s neither reliable nor desirable (29%).

I’m sure the assessments depend to some extent on context and personality, which varied in the papers assesed. One significant problem considered in the discussion is that “self-diagnosis obviously challenges the authority of medicine, an authority which may already be in decline.”

A decline in medical authority is not necessarily a bad thing, even from medicine’s perspective. The notion of self-care and the changing nature of the doctor-patient relationship have been lauded as positive changes in the health system.

The article goes on to discuss how the patient/doctor relationship was historically “characterized by an authoritative, paternalistic doctor managing the care of the submissive patient.”

With respect to patient self-diagnosis, the modern patient clearly would participate in diagnostic decision making, but not necessarily with ease. The ability to assess quality and reliability of health information is not necessarily within the grasp of most lay people, presenting a difficulty on two fronts. On the one hand, any attempt to mediate access to information, or to recapture control of its delivery will infringe upon lay autonomy, returning the patient to the paternalistic care of the omniscient physician. On the other, consuming information without adequate understanding results in individual vulnerability for both patient health and the doctor-patient relationship.

I think this gets to the challenge we face in advocating participatory medicine, but the same challenge is inherent in any democratization of knowledge: to participate, you have to be able to make informed decisions – you have to be informed, and you have to be capable of understanding the information that’s accessible to you. The real source of empowerment may be, not just in the education and participation of the patient, but in the mutually empowering relationship of physician and patient.

The article concludes “that there are no clear binaries to guide the incorporation of self-diagnosis into contemporary health management.”

It is a complex matter, because it is a relational one, tightly bound up in the ways lay people and doctors position themselves and interact relative to one another and relative to particular disease categories.

Synthetic biology

Synthetic biology is riff on nano/bio tech – according to Rudy Rucker, “it’s about building slippery wetware entities that might live in the real world.” Rucker has a rich post about the field, and its promises (“we ought to be able to design some kind of microorganism that eats
inexpensive crud and generates energy in some usable form or another”) and problems (“what’s to stop a particularly virulent synthetic organism from eating everything on earth?”) Ending with a cool science friction premise:

Suppose it were possible to encode a person’s memory
and personality into a single, very large, DNA-like molecule. Now
suppose that someone turns himself into a viral disease that other
people can catch. If I were you—sneeze—oh, wait, I guess I am.

Gesundheit.