Science news: Oliver Sacks, the man who mistook bullshit for the truth

Maria Konnikova, late last year, riffing on a New Yorker piece, had a strong takedown of psychologist Sacks. Turns out he made up a bunch of both clients and case histories in his books — and like Jonah Lehrer and others, in New Yorker essays.

That New Yorker piece is based on author Rachel Aviv being gifted with decades of Sachs diaries and  correspondence by the Oliver Sachs Foundation. It shows a Sachs with other issues — acting-out sex when he decides to break things off with a European lover, major amphetamine use, followed by essentially a sublimated non-consummated relationship (on his part) with a counselor that he continued to see for decades.

As for the matter at hand? This:

Sacks wrote that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to his work: he had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.” Some details, he recognized, were “pure fabrications.” He tried to reassure himself that the exaggerations did not come from a shallow place, such as a desire for fame or attention. “The impulse is both ‘purer’—and deeper,” he wrote. “It is not merely or wholly a projection—nor (as I have sometimes, ingeniously-disingenuously, maintained) a mere ‘sensitization’ of what I know so well in myself. But (if you will) a sort of autobiography.” He called it “symbolic ‘exo-graphy.’ ”

A number of people at the Substack linked up top, and the Facebook comment where I saw it, have wondered just how much we've lost in terms of replication and related. 

Beyond what has been lost? A lot of Sachs' fictionalizations seem to involve a fair amount of psychological projection. There's a lot of that in "Awakenings."

Ultimately, there's a lot of sadness in Sachs' personal life, beyond this. I empathize. 

Homelessness and reinstitutionalization

The Observer has an "interesting" story on homelessness and housing — "interesting" that it minimizes to a fair degree GOVERNOR Ronald Reagan starting the deinstitutionalization of the seriously mentally ill and minimizes the degree to which reinstitutionalization might help. Much of the story is good, above all for rightly lambasting Monty Bennett, but that part is not. 

My rule of thumb has long been that approximately one-third of homeless are that way for problems outside their control, whether simply having too low of income (the Observer doesn't mention roommates, nor in today's world, a screening system for pairing people up with such) or things such as medical bankruptcy, one-third are due primarily to addiction, and one-third primarily due to mental illness. The second and third, of course, have some overlap.

This is not to deny that the world of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" didn't have problems. It certainly did. But, both in, theoretically, the operation of inpatient long-term mental health care housing today, and the variety of medications available today vs 50-60 years ago, we're generally not in that world.

Also, interestingly, the Observer didn't even talk about "housing first" outside the US. For me, when I started the story, Vancouver, British Columbia came immediately to mind.

But, back to the main problem. Mentally ill on the streets will NOT be medication-compliant. And shelters aren't well-trained in this. Period. And, of course, "housing first," if it means non-shelter housing, means mentally ill remaining medication-noncompliant. 

Texas Progressives Roundup — age, hypocrisy and more

Off the Kuff has interviews with three Democratic candidates for CD38 - Melissa McDonough, Theresa Courts, and Marvalette Hunter. 

SocraticGadfly at least in part agrees with the northern 'burbs of Dallas about DART, but says they have the wrong ideas on fixing the problem, something that reflects stale thinking in mass transit in general.

The Trib has a Captain Obvious story about Dan Patrick-backed state Senate candidates.

If only I didn't already have a degree, I'd take up UNT's free tuition and fees promise program and become Zonker Harris.

At the Monthly, Dan Solomon talks about politics and merch. 

The Monthly states what I've long known — Mexico even meeting "its full debt" on Rio Conchas water won't ease larger drought issues — even as Mexican and US states on both sides of the Rio Grande continue to raise more water-sucking pecan trees. 

Meet four Texas businesses with Patriot Front affiliation. 

Voucher application forms by schools so far show three things — schools with pro-Christian discrimination, schools with discrimination in general, and about zero rural schools, all of which all of us who weren't bought off by Wilkes and Dunn knew was coming. 

I’m sure the same usual suspects who deny Israel is committing genocide in Gaza will also deny it’s committing torture, even though it is. And Texas "pergressuves," even those who protest outside John Cornyn's Houston but don't make this part of their protest, are part of the problem. And yes, Charles Kuffner and Neil Aquino, I think I'm going to slip something in about this every week in MY version of the Texas Pergressuves Roundup.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project said no matter what John Whitmire & Armando Walle say, access to tax dollars we send to Austin should not depend on giving up our rights and freedoms.

The Dallas Observer lists Texas' oldest legislators, two of whom it should be noted are not running for re-election.

The Texas Signal explores Ken Paxton's war against legal aid for immigrants.

Law Dork reads the tea leaves on the SCOTUS hearing on state trans sports bans.

Houstonia celebrates the dishwashers who keep Houston restaurants running.

The Barbed Wire reminds us about Amber Hagerman, the nine-year-old girl for whom Amber Alerts were named.

ICE, Democrats and midterms

CNN polling says Democrat rank-and-file are optimistic about this year's midterm elections even as they largely hate party leadership for not confronting Trump more. Meanwhile, Josh Marshall notes Ruben Gallego of Arizona calling for ICE to be "totally torn down." Marshall also notes Gallego was a political chameleon and shape-shifter on this issue to get elected to the Senate.

Meanwhile, The Barbed Wire has an in-depth story about young activists' reasons for wanting to "abolish ICE." It also notes Democrats' past chickenshittery on the issue. 

What's tipped this off, of course, is that Joe Rogan called ICE the "Gestapo." 

The answer? Most Democratic candidates for US Senate and state governorships will engage in virtue signaling. Already on the ground? State DAs will prosecute nobody. Yes, ICE may have bigger guns than your state police; at least fill out an arrest warrant anyway. 

As Wikipedia turns 25 ....

Two pieces are worth reading, one from Financial Times and one from Josh Benton, an online media friend, at Nieman Lab.

First, a sidebar. Although Benton's piece is about the current status of Wikipedia versus the outside world, it, just like Financial Times, takes a pass on the semi-hardcore Zionism of Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, although it does discuss matters related to that.

With that, let's start with FT. I knew Wales founded Bomis before that, and used money from it to help start Wiki. I also knew he was some sort of Randian, and I'm not surprised. 

Before Wikipedia, FT notes there was Nupedia, and describes the pivot. It notes how this led to major reliability problems at times early on — legends of which are still used to tar Wiki today. It then describes today's much more rigorous process for suggested edits becoming permanent, focused on Musk's alleged Nazi salute on Jan. 20, 2025.

As for the nuts-and-bolts of editing? FT offers this (after giving me an anti-blogging bit of BS about copyright, ignoring fair use, when I copied to paste:

The interruption of the gunman at WikiCon was in protest at ScottishFinnishRadish blocking him eight months earlier (in a public statement, the latter would later criticise the Wikimedia Foundation for, in his view, failing to keep attendees safe). He’s not your typical Wikipedian. New England born and bred, he’s a big guy with a shaved head, beard, khaki cargo pants, heavy boots. He’s a gun owner, hunter and homesteader. He raises his own meat. “I call myself a small ‘l’ liberal,” he told me on day two of WikiCon. In his worldview, “Gays, good; trans, good; guns, good.” People are entitled to their rights, and corporations aren’t people, he says, deep-voiced and jovial. “But on the Wikipedia spectrum, that puts me way over to the right.”

I call semi-bullshit. That starts with Wales himself, per link above, supporting the locking down Wiki's article on the war and genocide in Gaza. (He didn't directly do it himself, but, he didn't not do anything; I think FT is engaging in oversell.)

And, to FT's semi-credit, that's where it heads next. But, it's only semi-credit because it doesn't mention his own Zionism, which goes back to smearing Jeremy Corbyn years ago. FT is British and it knows this, too.

To its more full credit, FT does ask how much Wiki's existence will be challenged by bad-actor individuals and bad-actor nation-states in the future. 

Now, to Benton. His piece, as an old newspaper reporter, is about the newsiness level of Wiki. To the plus side, contra hoary old legends, he notes something I note: How many footnotes a modern longer entry has, how they contain links, and the general quality of the links.

To the piece's detriment, Benton doesn't really even talk about Wales' Zionism, though, and not at all about his putting his thumb on the scale of genocide in Gaza.

Don't get me wrong; there's a lot right about Wiki, including its calling both the Maidan and the 2009 Honduras coups the coups that they are. 

EDIT and UPDATE: I want to touch on a couple of other issues I didn't think about that both pieces missed. Especially on the second issue, I think they both missed them for similar reasons — one is a financial newspaper and the other a journalism analysis site. In other words, they're both news-focused.

The first is site-bombing, but not for hardcore political reasons and goals. Rather, it's something that often happens in sports. Say that Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto had his profile edited to say that he's "the Toronto Blue Jays daddy."

Sometimes, this shades over into politics. Say that the entry for the White House has a latitude and longitude location on it, and somebody changes that to the Gulf of Mexico, or to Greenland, or whatever.

What are Wiki's policies on that, especially on non-political sites?

The second starts with the "non-political."

Outside of current events, Wiki's usually decent to good on pre-1900 history. It's often great on other things. For example, its entry on quantum mechanics does a nice, very nice, job of describing at "extended thumbnail" level of detail what the top different explanatory theories all hold.

In other words, focusing on Wikipedia as a news site shortchanges it. 

RRC lets bankrupt oil company stiff city of Midland

Inside Climate News discusses an oil company basically stiffing the city of Midland through bankruptcy and orphan wells causing delays on cleaning up the city's water system, as well as problems, natch, with Railroad Commission oversight. Part of the issue is the RRC artificially capping the environmental costs of things such as bad injection wells to make sure that, in bankruptcy, the capitalists get paid back, even if it leaves the people holding the bag.

Meanwhile, even as Midland is doing its own site remediation, it stonewalled Inside Climate News' request for more information. I can feel sorry for the people, but not any more sorry for those that govern them than I do for bankrupt oil companies.

And, the drought mentioned in the story? Likely to only worsen. The Permian Basin, or at least its western half, surely counts as part of the greater Southwest that is likely to remain generally in drought for the rest of this century. 

Also in the story? Wayne-o (not a) Christian apparently doesn't fully understand state law on groundwater protection. Shock me. 

Finally, per a bigger picture, and riffing on the story, this is why, or part of why, High Plains farmers and ranchers like Suzanne Bellsnyder were and are wrong about Proposition 4. 

How worried should you be about Texas sending your voter info to the feds?

"Moderately" would probably be the right answer, per last week's story. We'll know more about our worry level if and when stool-straddler (between Bushies and MAGAts) and general hypocrite Jane Nelson, the Texas Secretary of State, answers the questions she's been asked.

Tex-ass is already a state that sells your driver's license info to private business capitalists, which is why I don't have the worry level higher. 

More than moderately would be the answer not about the data itself, but Nelson's craven surrender, given that one federal court — over California — shortly thereafter ruled the request is indeed unconstitutional.