Thinking Out Loud in Public

There continues to be a lot of “discussion” concerning AI. I have not taken a stand on this blog, preferring to follow around @apoorplayer and make counter-arguments, which is just sort of trollish. So let me write here and give him a chance to follow me around for once.

Let me start with a personal story. On St Patrick’s Day 1978, my mother, who had just turned 42, died of liver cancer. I was 19 at the time, and dropped out of my freshman year at college to help during her illness, which lasted about 5 months. After her diagnosis, she went through surgery, but they found that the tumor was inoperable. They then treated her with an experimental chemotherapy, which made her extremely sick while leaving her cancer unimproved. We then decided not to go further, and she died a few months later.

Even today, the survival rate for liver cancer is low–37% in the best case scenario. However, the American Cancer Society notes “People now being diagnosed with liver cancer may have a better outlook than these numbers show. Treatments improve over time, and these numbers are based on people who were diagnosed and treated at least five years earlier."

Stating the obvious, she would likely have a better chance of survival, or at least a longer life, if she was diagnosed in 2025 than in 1978. There’s nothing particularly earth-shattering about this generally-accepted fact. Nevertheless, the problem with liver cancer is that it is often not diagnosed until it is advanced beyond the localized stage, which greatly reduces survival rates. One area of research is trying to discover biomarkers that would lead to earlier detection, or to treatment before the cancer developed at all. “Despite the significant advances in cancer biomarker research,” the website for cancer research lab Creative Biomart explains, “several challenges remain.”

One major challenge is the heterogeneity of cancer, where different parts of the same tumor or different tumors in the same patient may have distinct biomarker profiles. This complexity requires comprehensive and dynamic biomarker panels to capture the full picture. Another challenge is the need for standardization and validation of biomarker assays to ensure consistent and reliable results across laboratories and clinical settings.

They then say:

“Looking forward, the integration of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning with biomarker research holds great promise. These technologies can analyze large datasets to identify novel biomarkers and predict treatment outcomes more accurately. In addition, the development of non-invasive biomarker tests, such as liquid biopsies, will further revolutionize cancer detection and monitoring.”

The research to identify biomarkers is largely built on AlphaFold technology. In 2021, Forbes published an article describing the breakthroughs of AlphaFold2 (we are currently on AlphaFold3). “In 1972, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Christian Anfinsen made a historic prediction,” that “it should in principle be possible to determine a protein’s three-dimensional shape based solely on the one-dimensional string of molecules that comprise it.” The Forbes author continues:

Finding a solution to this puzzle, known as the “protein folding problem, has stood as a grand challenge in the field of biology for half a century. It has stumped generations of scientists. One commentator in 2007 described it as “one of the most important yet unsolved issues of modern science. AI just solved it.”

Before AlphaFold, they continue, “we knew the 3-D structures for only about 17% of the roughly 20,000 proteins in the human body. Those protein structures that we did know had been painstakingly worked out in the laboratory over the decades through tedious experimental methods like X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance, which require multi-million-dollar equipment and months or even years of trial and error. Suddenly, thanks to AlphaFold, we now have 3-D structures for virtually all (98.5%) of the human proteome.”

AlphaFold technology “is widely employed in various aspects of diagnostic research, such as the study of disease biomarkers, microorganism pathogenicity, antigen-antibody structures, and missense mutations.”

All of that was about AlphaFold2; AlphaFold 3 was announced on 8 May 2024. “It can predict the structure of complexes created by proteins with DNA, RNA, various ligands, and ions. The new prediction method shows a minimum 50% improvement in accuracy for protein interactions with other molecules compared to existing methods. Moreover, for certain key categories of interactions, the prediction accuracy has effectively doubled.”

AlphaFold is owned by Alphabet’s AI lab DeepMind, and the source code of AlphaFold 3 was made available for non-commercial use to the scientific community upon request in starting in November 2024. So instead of requiring each lab undertaking such research to purchase multi-milion dollar equipment, Alphabet has made it free for non-commercial use, which means that more researchers have access and the chance of solutions increase accordingly.

Thanks to AI, there is a chance that we will see significant breakthroughs that will prevent some other 19-year-old kid from having to watch their mother die.

So this is why I find it difficult to get worked up about LLMs getting “trained” on your texts. There are bigger fish to fry, and your complaints are negatively affecting public opinion about an technological breakthrough that should be celebrating because it could solve this and many, many other complex problems that threaten humanity.

Ireland Frank Delaney

The one joy that has kept me going through life has been the fact that stories unite us. To see you as you listen to me now, as you have always listened to me, is to know this: what I can believe, you can believe. And the way we all see our story—not just as Irish people but as flesh-and-blood individuals and not the way people tell us to see it—that’s what we own, no matter who we are and where we come from. That’s why I spent my life as I did—because that was all I have ever owned, stories. Indeed, our story is finally all any of us owns, because, as I once told my grandson, a story has only one master. – Frank Delaney, Ireland

Using AI as a **partner **in a research team.

I have had it with US politics. It’s not because–or not ONLY because–the Trump Administration’s policies (I use the term extremely loosely) are uninformed, haphazard, and abusive, it’s because the entire process has become superficial and narrow. And while the Republicans seem to have cornered the market on superficial, narrow stupidity, the Democrats aren’t that far behind them.

The political system has been entirely taken over by marketing people. Political discourse is like one 30-second commercial after another, no vision, no depth, just slogans. No real sense of commitment or belief. No sense that anyone actually cares about something more important than getting re-elected. Exactly what in the hell did the Harris/Walz ticket stand for except “we’re nicer than they are” and “IT’S THE END OF DEMOCRACY! ARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!”

When was the last time you heard a politician say anything that was inspiring? I mean truly inspiring, rhetorically inspiring? “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” inspiring? When was the last time you heard a politician quote a poem or a novel or a play? When did they last refer to a philosopher or a songwriter who wasn’t Taylor Swift? Campaign speeches have become a series of social media posts strung together in a row with all the energy and excotement of listening to a bowling ball rolling down the basement steps. Debates are no longer about ideas but just about gotchas, name calling, and fact-checking.

The alternative has been something like Elizabeth Warren’s “I’ve got a plan for that.” That’s not a vision , that’s a to-do list, and about as inspiring. “Hey, I’m smart–vote for me” is about you, not me or the people I care about. Nor does it make me want to go out and help make things happen. Biden never could inspire anyone, and once 2020 came and he was told he needed to be “stronger,” he just turned into an unpleasant, combative old man trying to sound tough. I’m surpriosed he didn’t get a tattoo. I like Pete Buttigieg because he’s good at explaining things in pleasant and accessible terms, but does he ever say anything that makes you want to yell “Hell, yeah”? (If so, you’ve lowered the bar for inspiration so low that all it takes is someone who isn’t bearing a chainsaw to earn your kudos.)

It’s time to start reading again, politicians! And I’m not talking about the latest Mitch Albom bestseller. Read something hard, read something beautiful, read something soaring. Keep an eye out for metaphors and analogies that can serve to illuminate something happening today, or better yet something that could improve the future. You want to differentiate yourself from the mouth-breathing Repubicans? Tell us something we didn’t know, surprise us with an idea we never thought of before. Not a string of factoids and numbers, but stories, images, examples, aspirations. Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride showed us how it’s done: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” That’s prophetic speech–a description of something wrong that happened in the past followed by a vision for the future. Something the speaker was committed to do or would die trying, and that made us want to cheer him on. I don’t need you to make me smile because you can dance–or can’t dance, as the case might be. After we saw Tim Walz talking while changing his truck’s air filter once, the joke got old. It was a marketing idea that was about an inch deep. “Oh, look, Tim is such a guy.” But let him talk about why feeding schoolchildren breakfast and lunch is the right thing to do and he comes across as passionate, committed, authentic, caring.

So it’s not about anger–anybody can look stern, sound angry, pound the lectern, scowl into the camera. That’s Trump’s whole schtick. No, it’s about something authentic, heroic, determined. Believe in something.

Inspiration doesn’t come from a spreadsheet; it comes from the heart, the guts, the emotions. Kick the marketers out of the room, refuse to pay attention to another poll, and follow your principles. Make us feel alive again.

There is so much BS in this article from American Theatre Magazine about what theater students should be taught about “the biz” thatit made my head explode.

If a university wanted to create an innovative theater program, I would come out of retirement to create a BA in Sustainable Theater. It would focus on environmentally sustainable design, playwriting, directing, and acting. There would also be a large component devoted to starting and running a company, and seniors would run their own company out of a storefront.

Wait, what??? I was one of the people whose Social Security benefit was lowered due to the Windfall Elimination Provision, which was eliminated by the Social Security Fairness Act that was signed by Biden in early January. Today, I received a letter from the SSA spelling out how that will affect my monthly benefit, and MY BENEFIT IS BEING REDUCED BY $138 A MONTH??? WHAT?

I confess I am fascinated by this Scottish theater company, who does a new play every week and performs in a pub. Last year, they celebrated their 20th anniversary. Here is an article about their 20 years in business. And below is a song with pictures written for the celebration. I have never seen a production, and I can’t even say whether I’d like what they do, but what I do like is the way they seem to have thought about theater from the ground up. I also like their commitment to the production of new plays.

(This post is the result of writing I’ve been doing on my personal project.]

I’ve been reading Ivan Illich’s 1970 classic Deschooling Society and John McKnight’s The Careless Society. I’ve admired the ideas of these two people over the years, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that they actually knew each other and that McKnight was greatly influenced by the time he spent with Illich. Reading the two books side by side (not literally!), it is clear you can draw a line directly from Deschooling Society to The Careless Society. It is probably more accurate to say that McKnight’s asset-based community organizing, as outlined in [Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets]((https://search.worldcat.org/title/36708153) is the how-to to Illich’s why-to. McKnight focuses on determining a community’s _assets _instead of its deficits; not what does it lack, but what does it have; not what can be done _for_it, but what can it do for itself. The goal is to allow the community to do for itself, rather than call on a “professional” to do it for them.

This feels right to me. It feels empowering. And the reason it feels empowering is that it is relying on what and who are to hand to shape their world. Nobody has to be professionally trained, nor do they need to have the latest gear to make everything all ooh-shiny.

There’s a guy my wife watches on YouTube who calls himself the Bike Farmer. He has a bike shop in Wisconsin and he posts videos of him fixing old bikes he’s rescued. He has a phrase he often uses–“Good enough for who it’s for”–that I think applies here. It isn’t that he’s proposing sloppy work and bad stuff–“good enough for government work”–but rather that most people don’t really have the need for all the bells and whistles. What they need is to get out on the road. But YouTube (or PeerTube) is jampacked with how-to videos showing you how to make or do something or repair something yourself. People helping people. And while, as with everything online, there is some pressure to “monetize” their videos, most people make videos because they like sharing their skills.

My friend Tom (@apoorplayer) recently posted a video he found and PeerTube that was a song called “Shitty Gear.” The Toronto musician, whose name isn’t used on the webpage that I could see, writes “it’s me playing various lower quality instruments in an effort to demonstrate that you can make okay music with inferior equipment.” And the song is really good! And I definitely “vibe” with that idea, and I think McKnight would too. People have lost the understanding that they can often make what they need themselves from materials that they already possess or can get cheap. Instead, they think in terms of the “best” (meaning “most expensive”), and if they can’t afford the best, then they do nothing at all.

This is true for theater people. How many years do young people spend waiting tables, going to auditions, and working in the theater only intermittently, when the amount of money they are spending could be used to create their own theater where they and their fellow artists can actually do the work they want to do. They don’t need the most expensive lighting and sound equipment, or a scene or costume shop; they don’t need to spend a bunch of money on marketing; they just need to do the work. Do a show in your apartment, in your back yard, on the library’s stage, in the church basement or senior center.

Look around at your neighborhood, at your friends, and see what assets you have available, and then build on that. In many ways (and I just realized this), my previous two books, Building a Sustainable Theater and DIY Theater MFA are built on this concept of asset-based organization. You don’t need the institutionalized approach – just do the work!

Michael Rushton does it again, this time calling BS on arts districts. open.substack.com/pub/micha…