Losing My Perspicacity December 6, 2024

Anthem BC& CS proves online bullying works; The NYPD should have checked social media; AI isn’t it; Eric Bienemy is out of a job; A new study links hockey and CTE; Jewell Lloyd wants out of Seattle, and We end on The High Note.

Author

Julie DiCaro
December 06, 2024

Hello and Happy Free Friday! I’m glad to see you this morning!

I know that with Giving Tuesday and the downfall of media in America, we’re all being inundated with requests for financial support, so let me add mine to the din. Please consider supporting independent journalism by becoming a premium subscriber. You’ll get LMP in your inbox five days a week, and more subscriber perks are coming in the new year. And to all of you who continue “buying me a coffee” via the button at the end of the newsletter — thank you so much for your support and generosity. Your kind messages have kept me going as I approach nine months of self-employment.

By the way, if you’re looking for a holiday gift for a sports-loving feminist in your life, a reminder that I wrote an entire book on the subject.

Before we get to the news, I wanted to take a moment to talk about Pantone’s Color of the Year, which I eagerly look forward to every December. I don’t work in any kind of visual art or medium, but I do love Pantone (I don’t know why) and I normally love whatever color they choose.

However.

Ehhhhh. I’m not feeling the poop brown, sorry. Though I do feel it’s highly representative of what awaits us in 2025. I know they keep trying to compare it to milk chocolate or chocolate mousse, but all I see when I look at that color is a full diaper.

Anyway.

Today: Anthem BC& CS proves online bullying works; The NYPD should have checked social media; AI isn’t it; Eric Bienemy is out of a job; A new study links hockey and CTE; Jewell Lloyd wants out of Seattle, and We end on The High Note.

Here we go.

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One day after online skewering, Anthem backtracks on new anesthesia policy

Wednesday, in the wake of the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the disastrous announcement that they would stop paying for anesthesia if surgeries ran over a certain time limit, the internet came down hard on Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield.

Now, the company has decided not to proceed with the new policy, citing online “misinformation.”

One of the country's largest health insurers has reversed its decision to no longer pay for anesthesia care in certain states if the surgery or procedure goes beyond a particular time limit. The original move by Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, which would have started next year, alarmed doctors and policymakers.

"There has been significant widespread misinformation about an update to our anesthesia policy. As a result, we have decided to not proceed with this policy change," the company said in a statement to NPR on Thursday afternoon.

"To be clear, it never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services," the company added. "The proposed update to the policy was only designed to clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines."

Sure, Jan. We all just misunderstood. Apparently, the American Society of Anesthesiologists, who certainly have more experience than us laypeople in parsing medical language, fell prey to the same “misinformation” campaign because this is the lede graf on their website:

CHICAGO – In an unprecedented move, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield plans representing Connecticut, New York and Missouri have unilaterally declared it will no longer pay for anesthesia care if the surgery or procedure goes beyond an arbitrary time limit, regardless of how long the surgical procedure takes. The American Society of Anesthesiologists calls on Anthem to reverse this proposal immediately.

It's a good thing we all just misunderstood, because a policy like that would be positively ghoulish. Right, Anthem?

Media parrots the NYPD, gets it wrong

Immediately following the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday, multiple national news outlets reported that the suspect fled the scene on a Citibike (the NYC version of Divvy Bikes or whatever public bike share you have in your area). Almost immediately, social media users who saw the photos of the perpetrator began saying that it was not, in fact, a Citibike, pointing out the differences between Citibikes and the bike seen in the police photos.

Meanwhile, the Citibike claim spread like wildfire, even sucking in the NYT and Mediaite.

Of course, the internet is always right, and the NYPD reportedly spent time chasing down the Citibike lead. Do they not have anyone monitoring social media? They could have had this info almost immediately.

To reiterate what I learned in J-school: If the cops tell you the sky is blue, your job is not to just print it without question. Your job is to look outside and see if it’s true. It’s bewildering that the NYT didn’t have anyone on staff who was able to point out what half the internet did. Or that no one at some of America’s biggest news outlets even thought to question it.

AI ain’t it

As a journalist who has watched AI devastate my entire industry, I’m not a huge fan of AI. I’d like AI to do the jobs no one wants to do, like transcription and medical billing, not the things people desperately want to do, like create art and music. As one Bluesky user pointed out, without the humanity, AI “art” is just content.

Then there’s the remote possibility that AI will destroy humanity. But don’t worry! Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, really hopes someone will figure out how….not… to do that.

At one point, Sorkin asked: “Do you have any faith that the government, or somebody, is going to figure out how to avoid” the existential threats posed by “superintelligent” AI systems?

Cue the shy-guy deflection.

“I have faith that researchers will figure out to avoid that,” Altman replied. “I think there’s a set of technical problems that the smartest people in the world are going to work on. And, you know, I’m a little bit too optimistic by nature, but I assume that they’re going to figure that out.”

He goes on to suggest, without elaborating, that perhaps the AI itself will be so smart that it will just figure out how to rein itself in.

“We have this magic —” Altman said, before correcting himself. “Not magic. We have this incredible piece of science called deep learning that can help us solve these very hard problems.”

Well that’s reassuring. Have none of these people seen The Matrix? “We don’t know who struck first … but we know it was us that scorched the sky.”

Altman’s answer sort of confirms my feelings on AI, which is that none of these guys have much of an idea what AI can or should do, but they’re all barrelling full-speed ahead on pushing it out anyway, the rest of us be damned, because everyone else is. Over at his excellent newsletter, Where’s Your Ed At?, journalist Ed Zitron seems to feel the same way.

“What if what we're seeing today isn't a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn't actually capable of doing much more than what we're seeing today, and what if there's no clear timeline when it'll be able to do more? What if this entire hype cycle has been built, goosed by a compliant media ready and willing to take career-embellishers at their word?” - Me, in March 2024.

I have been warning you for the best part of a year that generative AI has no killer apps and had no way of justifying its valuations (February), that generative AI had already peaked (March), and I have pleaded with people to consider an eventuality where the jump from GPT-4 to GPT-5 was not significant, in part due to a lack of training data (April).

This reminds me of the last few newsrooms I’ve been in, where management is super-excited about AI but has no idea how or why to use it. As one big muckety-muck told me, “We have to master AI before it masters us.” I still have no idea what that was supposed to mean, how to use AI (other than from transcription), or why it benefits journalists.

What I do know is that several AI companies have reached out to me to ask me to train their Large Language Models (LLMs) to write like me. That’s a hard pass from me.

In conclusion, support human journalism and art. (I can’t believe I have to write that in 2024 - I thought I had a few more decades, at least.)

How does this keep happening to Eric Bienemy?

I can’t remember how many years it’s been since people started declaring that Eric Bienemy was the next guy in line for an NFL head coaching job, but it feels like it’s been decades. Bienemy was the OC for the high-flying Kansas City Chiefs offense from 2018 to 2022. During that time, the Chiefs won the AFC West five times and the Super Bowl twice. In his first year as KC OC, the offense ranked first in the NFL in yards per game and total points scored. I’m not putting the success of Patrick Mahomes entirely on Bienemy’s shoulders, but you can’t exclude him from the conversation, either.

After a forgettable stint with the Commanders in 2023, Bienemy was hired by UCLA as an associate head coach and offensive coordinator in 2024. Now, he’s out of work again.

You might wonder how a guy with a resume like that winds up getting fired from UCLA instead of an NFL head coaching job, and so does everyone else. Bienemy’s name was mentioned no less than 15 times in Brian Flores’ racial discrimination lawsuit against the NFL.

For what it’s worth, I’d rather have had Bienemy than any of the last four guys the Bears have hired.

A study of CTE in hockey players confirms what we all feared

It seems that CTE in hockey, like football, is not only a result of how hard a given player is hit, but is also impacted by the cumulative effect of multiple hits over a lengthy playing career.

Here’s a snippet of NPR’s report on the recent JAMA study on hockey and CTE:

JESSE MEZ: What we know from American football is that it's these accumulation of hits, thousands of hits over the career, that are really related to this disease and this pathology. We know less when it comes to hockey.

SULLIVAN: Mez is a neurologist at Boston University and co-author of the new study in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. The reason that he and his fellow researchers had studied football the most was because they rely on donations of brains from athletes who've died. For years, those mostly came from football. Now they finally had enough samples from ice hockey players - 77 brains, to be precise.

MEZ: So we had professionals, juniors, semi-professional, college, high school, youth.

SULLIVAN: Of those who only played youth or high school hockey, about 10% had CTE. But among professional players, that number was 96%. Selection bias is definitely a factor Mez acknowledges, because families may be more likely to donate brains if they saw signs of cognitive decline in their loved ones. Still, the relationship between CTE and the length of a player's career was clear.

MEZ: We found that with each additional year of play, the odds of having CTE increased by 34%.

(emphasis added)

As I wrote for Wapo a few years ago, this is why my kids stopped playing football in junior high, and why some neurologists insist that children should not play the adult version of sports. That means no heading in soccer, no tackling in football, and no checking in hockey until at least high school. I know too many parents who brush off the danger of CTE by saying, “My child has never had a concussion.” But concussions are not the problem with CTE. The hundreds of sub-concussive blows are.

Spread the word.

Jewel Lloyd wants out of Seattle

This isn’t all that surprising, considering the WNBA gossip has claimed for a while that Lloyd was behind the WNBA’s investigation into bullying by the Storm’s coaching staff. Still, Lloyd’s potential move has seismic implications for the rest of the WNBA.

Six-time All-Star Jewell Loyd has requested a trade from the Seattle Storm, according to Annie Costabile and ESPN. The news came shortly after the organization announced that an investigation into the behavior of team's coaching staff last season found no violations. 

"The Storm recently received internal allegations of potential workplace policy violations," the team said in a statement to ESPN. "The organization retained an outside investigator to conduct an impartial investigation into the allegations. The investigation has been completed and there were no findings of policy violations or any discrimination, harassment, or bullying."

Loyd was reportedly the player who filed the complaints against coach Noelle Quinn and her staff, accusing them of harassment and bullying during games and practices. Now that nothing has come of the investigation, Loyd wants out.

Lloyd signed a two-year extension in 2023, which means she still has a year and a $250,000 payout left on her contract with the Storm. I’d love to see her in Chicago, but I’ll live with her going anywhere but the Liberty.

The High Note

Step up your game, men of North America.

A man who “leapt” onto a polar bear when it lunged at his wife during a rare attack earlier this week was seriously injured but is expected to recover, tribal authorities in Canada said.

A neighbor fatally shot the bear during the Tuesday incident in the Fort Severn First Nation, in the far northern section of Ontario, the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service said in a statement.

If you haven’t jumped on a bloodthirsty polar bear to save your wife, what are you even doing?

Finally, let’s head into the weekend serenaded by the dulcet tones of British footy fans.

Have a great weekend — see you all on Monday.

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