Part the First: War Begets War, A Conversation. Daedalus hosted a conversation among Robert Jay Lifton (1926-2025), Neta C. Crawford, and Matthew Evangelista last year. It was preprinted recently in The MIT Press Reader. I immediately noticed the participation of Robert Jay Lifton. Back in my dark ages, when the university had a University Bookstore that sold books instead of branded apparel and other junk, that store introduced me to Lifton through Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, after I had read Hiroshima by John Hersey in high school. Both works are still important and will remain so for as long as people read books. From War Begets War, which is accessible and worth considering when there is time:
Triumph breeds hubris. Defeat breeds grievance. Either way, from World War II to Afghanistan, America has fueled a cycle that never ends.
Crawford: This conversation began with a concern about the ways that the post-9/11 wars had affected American democracy. We also want to hear what you say about defeat in a “lost war,” the role of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which you helped conceptualize, and the diagnosis of it among Vietnam War veterans. Can you relate that to the concept of the lost war?
Lifton: Well, first of all, I would say the principle here is that war begets war. War creates more war, and it always has to do with something that happened or didn’t happen in the previous war. Just as we speak of “nuclearism” as an embrace of nuclear weapons to solve human problems, so can we speak of war or “warism.” Warism requires a high degree of militarism and an ever-present potential use of force. This is especially true of a superpower, which maintains a dubious claim to omnipotence.
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Lifton: Yes, there is the question of the individual and the collective, and that question runs all through my work. I have mostly interviewed individuals and looked for what I call shared themes, which can then identify the collective. Shared patterns of individuals — including trauma and pain — become sources of understanding of the collective. Collective behavior becomes crucial to bringing about any social change or to characterizing what is happening in a society.
The “Rambo” phenomenon wouldn’t have taken shape if there wasn’t a long-standing collective support of the war, which amounted to a collective falsification of the war. That pattern was interrupted by the antiwar activities of veterans I interviewed.
It is difficult to believe our more recent wars of choice would have happened without the “Rambo Phenomenon.” Too many Americans still believe that politicians stopped the United States from “winning” the war in Vietnam. The corollary is that our recent wars have beaten our Vietnam Syndrome.” I distinctly remember asking my mother why we were at war with North Vietnam. Her reply was that the South Vietnamese had asked us to help against the communist followers of Ho Chi Minh, who had designs on all of Southeast Asia. So, we had to stop the communists there so we would not have to fight them here. The 10-year-old me believed that. The 16-year-old me wondered. And then as a college freshman I read The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam.
The hubris and imperial design of the unitary state in the United States have led right up to the current War in West Asia.
Lifton: Let me conclude with a few simple thoughts. Wars seek to solve human problems, but never do. Rather, each war contributes to subsequent wars and general violence. Winners can experience dangerous forms of triumphalism, among them the fantasy of controlling the events of history. Losers are likely to invoke Rambo–like attempts to reverse the outcome. What is unacceptable psychologically is the idea that a large number of one’s nation’s men and women have “died in vain.”
There is always an early “war fever,” a widespread experience of transcendence with a glorification of a deadly version of patriotism. But soon afterwards comes the killing and dying. The chaos and violence of war lead to the emergence of dictators and of totalistic ideologies like communism and fascism.
Our task becomes that of breaking this collective vicious circle of violence by invoking diplomatic forms of interaction among nations and institutions within our own country that remain committed to truth-telling. The process is ongoing, a continuous dynamic of resistance to the rule of force by means of the rule of law.
I have written here before that “War is never the answer to a properly posed question.” The problem is that too many questions posed are improper. It is difficult to know an answer, much less the answer. But the Great War of 1914-1918 was folly from start to finish and beyond. It begat our unwelcomed world.
If the Ramadan War in West Asia ends as it is tending, perhaps that will portend the end of war as politics by another means. One can only hope.
Part the Second. The Age of AI Parenting. When Sam Altman told Jimmy Fallon that he could not “imagine having gone through, figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” it was difficult to know what to think. My first thought was “Is Sam Altman really that stupid?” Jackson Greer has a short piece in Front Porch Republic about ChatGPT as the go-to source for the modern parent. I would rather ask Abby or her sister Ann, or just stop and think for a moment. Having been the sometimes-useful chief assistant in raising two independent children, it is really not that hard if you are willing to pay attention to your children and the world in which they live (which is not the world in which their parents lived, whatever the generation):
Interestingly, AI is presented by both Rodriguez and Altman as a guide for parents with their many questions. This ever-present deity-like assistant never slumbers and can not only pull data down through the ages from all the experts but can also offer those tender words of comfort that parents need in difficult moments. Altman, in his interview with Fallon, described AI as a “general purpose sort of life adviser.” Here, the first threat is already establishing an afront upon the authority of the parent. While it is described merely as an adviser and assistant, it is no mere assistant and certainly not worthy of the title, adviser. Altman, while acknowledging that people can and have parented before AI, stated that he cannot imagine parenting without it. His world, including his very child, is only accessible through the power of a screen. Even though his child is only 8 months old, there is coming a day when the child will be able to process and understand not only his father but his father’s “adviser,” and the dividing line may not be so clear as Altman would believe.
Altman admits that he feels bad for using ChatGPT in his parenting, but this guilt seemed more due to his own questions than the fact that he was using it in the first place. His panic regarding whether his son was on track developmentally sent him not to a fellow human being, family or friend, but to his trusted adviser, ChatGPT. It is rather telling that Altman describes the answer that he got back as “great,” though it’s not clear what basis he had for this judgment. It’s doubtful he asked his own parents or a mentor about the merits of the machine answers.
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After all, Altman’s child will eventually learn that his father finds him a very inefficient form of intelligence. As Altman explained to another interviewer who asked about AI’s energy usage, “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.” Altman’s child might have reason to doubt that someone who thinks like this would love him or care much about helping him develop as a person.
Anyway, AI is here to stay, as a glorified autocomplete. I see its use every day, as medical students use it to not learn the contents of the “Bug and Drug” file that is necessary for them to become a physician. At the end of the first two years of medical school there are at least a thousand entries in each file. I tell them to start their database on the first day of medical school. A few do. They are the doctors you will want. The others? The seem to think a pdf table built by ChatGPT is the bees’ knees. Some seem to believe, because they are told this by some of my colleagues, that UpToDate on their smart (sic) phone will handle anything they do not know. Perhaps. But certainly not all the time, or even most of the time. We have all heard that being educated means “knowing where to look something up.” Not true. Being educated means knowing what you need to look up, and in the day-to-day of any job of any kind, those things are rare.
Part the Third. AI “Thinks” a Fake Disease Is Real. Continuing on a theme…In the results of an experiment that will fool absolutely no one who is paying attention, Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real:
Got sore, itchy eyes? You’re probably one of the millions of people who spend too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue.
So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.
Until the AI Revolution I thought the problems of science and the scientific literature were caused (mostly) by too many people chasing too little research support. Scientists are just people (yeah, I know, hard for them to believe this at times) and if you put then in impossible situations a few of them will break (also hard for them to believe at times despite ample evidence). There was also a time not too long ago that a quick glance at a scientific paper would immediately tell members of that field they were looking at something worth paying attention to. Or not. But no more. And now we have generative AI leading us into oblivion:
The format of the fake-disease experiment — and the way the results pretended to be from an official source, namely an academic paper, might have been a key factor in its success. In a separate study of 20 LLMs, Omar found that LLMs are more prone to hallucinate and elaborate on misinformation when the text they’re processing looks professionally medical — formatted like a hospital discharge note or clinical paper — than when it comes from social-media posts (M. Omar et al. Lancet Digit. Health 8, 100949; 2026). “When the text looks professional and written as a doctor writes, there’s an increase in the hallucination rates,” says Omar.
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The bixonimania experiment is a fresh spin on a bigger issue — the poisoning of AI systems by people who manipulate the academic literature. Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and research-integrity sleuth, notes that researchers have created fake books and papers to inflate their citation counts on Google Scholar — thereby exploiting the same automated indexing systems that feed into LLM training data. The worry is that the more fake content is fed into AI models, the more likely those AI models are to regurgitate the fake information, spooling us further away from facts and reality. “It’s all automated, so there’s very little chance of a human interfering and taking out fake information,” she says.
So, what is one to do? Read carefully and consider the source, after first reading the funding acknowledgments. If it sounds like AI, stop reading. There was a time when this was not too difficult. Archival journals were at one time useful depositories for good research that could someday become the foundation for future advances. This is where most research was published. The research published in Cell, Nature and Science, the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, was (usually) pathbreaking in one way or another (most of these brands now have subsidiary titles that are the new archival journals, so caveat emptor once again). Now, it is difficult for the layperson, as well as the stupid scientist, to know the sources and tell the difference. And if the Current Occupant succeeds in killing American science, there will come a time when the American scientific literature is viewed as the Chinese literature was 20-30 years ago. And American science will cease to exist as a going concern.
Part the Fourth: Some Good News for Some Muscular Dystrophy Patients. The gene that is defective in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is very long and encodes a very large protein called dystrophin. The identification of DMD was a signal advance in molecular medicine. Alas, gene therapy for DMD will probably always remain beyond the therapeutic horizon. The gene/protein is just too large and targeting/delivery of the therapeutic gene to skeletal muscle is also problematic because of size. Smaller versions of dystrophin have not worked very well.
But this does not mean that gene expression therapy is impossible. Like most of our genes, the sequence that encodes dystrophin is broken up into short fragments (79 in dystrophin; these coding parts of the “text” are separated by stretches of DNA called introns). The introns must be spliced out to produce a functional mRNA that directs synthesis of the protein. If a DMD mutation in an exon can be skipped using a therapeutic intervention, the muscle cell can produce a near-complete version of dystrophin that is functional. In a few cases this has worked, as explained in this article in STAT News, A decade ago these drugs tore apart the FDA. Today they might be some patients’ best hope (archived version). And probably only hope.
The article is long and tells the story of only one patient. But this patient is not only one anecdote. He is the proof of principle that exon-skipping drugs that skip the mutation can work. Why is this important? The knowledge underlying these therapies came out of basic research in molecular and cell biology. Without this work on gene structure, expression, and function; muscle cell biology (this has been a major focus of my research, which is related to the dysregulation of muscle structure caused by dystrophin mutations); and the biochemistry and cell biology of iron homeostasis, absolutely nothing could have been done for young Hawken Miller beyond supportive care. Pharoah’s slaves could not make bricks without straw in The Ten Commandments, and sophisticated therapeutic interventions cannot exist without a scientific and technical foundation that goes back to the nineteenth century.
I do not know how to reach the leaders of American politics and science who fail to recognize this plain and simple fact, one that made American science after World War II the biggest and the best (at times) in the world. But if we do not reach them, the opportunity costs for treatment of rare and not-so-rare diseases caused by genetic accidents will be incalculable. Reminding them that genetic accidents do not occur only in the undeserving seems not to work. Besides, as the president said, the federal government can afford only war, thereby destroying the central pillar of his MAGA movement. Have the MAGA faithful noticed this, and what it means for MAHA? Besides, raw milk is expensive and hard to find in my searches.
On the good note that there has been and will be more progress in the treatment of muscular dystrophy, see you next week. Thank you for reading!
Don’t forget to enjoy the spring flowers wherever you are! After the real High Holy Days this year we have the high holy days of golf. Yes, I have seen this in person; most of the plants are native and at the Masters, after you score a ticket, you can reserve $20 for food and have change after a dawn-to-dusk day. Try that at Dodger Stadium. Just leave the cell phone in the car unless you want to be unceremoniously escorted to the nearest gate if you are caught using it.
