This week’s weekly reads include looks at CIA torture, medical spending and savings, Wikipedia, and more.
Dark Again After Report on C.I.A. Torture – NYTimes.com – “Employees of the C.I.A. and the military, as well as private contractors, illegally detained, tortured and abused prisoners — some of them really dangerous men, but also some who should never have been detained. None of them should have been dealt with in such a shameful and evidently unlawful way.” NY Times
How risk factors drive medical overtreatment – Jeff Wheelwright – – “There’s a more fundamental issue. Risk factors and risk calculators are reminders that medical science does not completely understand the mechanisms of disease. Risk factors are associations; they don’t represent cause-and-effect relationships unless the connection to the disease is especially strong, like the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. Risk factors are based on averages taken from large groups, and consequently the individual patient can’t know his or her true probability of contracting the condition. For any population, the calculator could accurately forecast the number of, say, heart attacks over a 10-year period, but the algorithm can’t identify who will succumb and who will be spared.” Aeon
A Bit of Good News About Journalism – “At such a moment, it may seem a bit off to focus on the positives. But there are some encouraging things happening. While many journalists have lost faith in the future of their trade, venture capitalists are taking the opposite view. Far from giving up on journalism, they are providing big chunks of funding to online news providers, such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox. Some of what these publishers put out is mere click bait, but they also produce serious journalism, such as this story, from The Verge, a Vox site, which details how the N.Y.P.D. is using social media to lock up Harlem teens, and this interview that Vice scored with James Mitchell, the psychologist who helped the C.I.A. to develop its “enhanced interrogation”—i.e., torture—techniques.” New Yorker
Vaccine Myth-Busting Can Backfire – – “Last year, only slightly more than 40 percent of U.S. adults got vaccinated against the flu—a number that could likely be explained, at least in part, by the persistent (and wrong) belief that the shot, which contains only inactivated viruses, can actually give people the flu. Despite efforts by the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and even CVS to debunk the idea, it remains stubbornly pervasive. But according to the Vaccine study, all that myth-busting may be for nothing, anyway: The study found that when people concerned about side effects of the flu shot learned that it couldn’t cause the flu, they actually became less willing to get it.” The Atlantic
Wikipedia editing disputes: The crowdsourced encyclopedia has become a rancorous, sexist mess. – “Wikipedia is a paradox and a miracle—a crowdsourced encyclopedia that has become the default destination for nonessential information. That it has survived almost 15 years and remained the top Google result for a vast number of searches is a testament to the impressive vision of founder Jimmy Wales and the devotion of its tens of thousands of volunteer editors. But beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story. And it can be particularly unwelcoming to women.”
