Dr. Kliot Interview #1: We’re getting dumber
Dr. Michel Kliot, Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford University, has been helping Flow Immersive to understand the brain science behind virtual reality and memory. I interviewed him last week, and this is the first of several transcripts, slightly edited and shortened for clarity.
Jason Marsh: We’ve often chatted about how we have sort of evolved to a point where we have so much information that we need the kind of technology that Flow has developed simply to understand, analyze, and use the information in intelligent ways.
Dr. Michel Kliot: So the analogy I use in medicine is not in why tumors grow, but why most of them stop, and the problem today is not in the sensitivity but specificity: and by that I mean we have so many screening tests we do. We’ve uncovered so many tumors that were asymptomatic and the question is in a screening test, is it relevant? What is the specificity? Is this tumor going to create a problem?

And the problem when you screen too much is that we’re uncovering a lot of things that we think might be pathological based on old information, but which truly are not. They are not even going to bother you. If you pursue the conventional medical approach to something that’s not really a problem, you cause new problems. You may do a biopsy that’s unnecessary, you may get a false positive, you may get a complication. All these things stem from a lack of specificity, because our sensitivity has increased enormously.
In the information age, what I would say is just that we’re inundated with so much data, and we’re actually lost without the kind of tool that you’re creating. I think we will become dumber because we are swimming, no, we are drowning, in data. We’re actually drowning in data and what you need to do is create islands of intelligent information which we can grab onto.
Jason Marsh: Wow.
Kliot: Yea.
Marsh: Once we understand it, then we need to communicate it to someone else because a lot of what we are discovering is non-obvious, right? I think that our society maybe more than ever has these narratives that it believes in and medicine is a part of that, but politics, whatever it is, we have these confirmation-bias narratives.
And it turns out that data stories are one of the few things that can help us change the narrative in our minds.
Kliot: If we analyze it in an intelligent way.
Marsh: Data science focuses on analysis, but isn’t there two activities: data discovery and data communication?
Kliot: When I say analyze, I don’t mean it simply in an individual context. Obviously, your first pass is through your own brain, but then in order to make it really meaningful, then I think you have to communicate it to other people and consequently reanalyze it. I think we are drowning in so much information and I think we have to have tools like you’re developing to see through it all and allow us to analyze and communicate it in a relevant and intelligent manner.
But, I think what you’re doing has to happen in order for us to, frankly, continue to be intelligent, because what I find is we’re getting dumbed down. There’s so much information out there; I’m always amazed when I was at the VA or any large institution, I will look around and I would say 98/99% of the people are very nice and actually quite smart, but I will tell you I am constantly amazed at these stupid policies and things that happen at large organizations. There is a dumbing down that occurs when you reach a certain level of complexity. It’s almost inevitable.
And I think the only way we can sort of develop an antidote is to be clever. I think you’re being very clever in developing ways that the data can be filtered, analyzed and presented.
Marsh: Right.
Kliot: And you have to do that or we’re going to drown in the complexity. We get dumber, not smarter. Now that’s the danger of too much data: that you actually become dumber. But at least there’s the potential to become smarter if you can manage it.
Marsh: That’s the goal. That really is the big picture goal behind the company.
Kliot: I think it’s time. I almost think that you represent a need that has to be fulfilled, so I think if you believe in destiny, you can say that circumstances created it. There’s a need for it and then there’s nothing better than fulfilling an important need. That’s really a great thing.
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