John Horgan
American science journalist; staff writer at Scientific American from 1986 to 1997. Author of The End of Science (1996) and Pay Attention (2023). Writes Cross-check, a free journal on his site, on science, AI, mind and war.
John Horgan did not write this page.
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Their wordsMost of the excitement about optogenetics is based on experiments on mice, monkeys and other animals. This research provides limited insights--at best--into complex human illnesses such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
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Their wordsBut optogenetics alters the cells and circuits it seeks to study so much that experimental results might not apply to unaltered tissue.
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Our reading
High-tech tests and treatments contribute to high medicine costs and often have dubious benefits.
Their wordsFar from being the solution to our healthcare woes, technology is part of the problem. High-tech tests and treatments contribute to medicine's high costs and often have dubious benefits.
- 5 weeks earlier
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Their wordsThis perspective, called solipsism, is a bit extreme, but it reflects a hard truth about our existence: No one really knows what anyone else is thinking.
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Their wordsMost of us only care about knowledge that benefits us in practical ways. Helps us live longer, get around and swap info faster, get richer, kill our enemies and so on.
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Their wordsReality isn't just temporarily weird, weird until we figure it out. Reality is intrinsically, objectively weird. The more we study existence, the more improbable it seems.
- 7 weeks earlier
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Our reading
Their wordsAlthough AI (unlike nukes) can be useful, I fear its net effects will be catastrophic.
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Their wordsThat debate is irresolvable because of the solipsism problem. I can't be sure my fellow humans are conscious, let alone Claude or Grok.
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Our reading
Their wordsA ban on AI looks even more unlikely than a ban on nuclear weapons.
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsWe're in a greatly diminished journalistic enterprise in this country.
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Their wordsScience journalism has never been more important, or imperiled, than it is right now.