On the May 1 Nature finding, and an open offer to respond on the record.
Dr. Lucas —
I have published a piece anchored on your 2014 and 2017 work on Ellie and disclosure. It lives at itethered.com/after/articles/what-soldiers-told-ellie. The piece is reported and cited, and your finding is treated, I believe, fairly.
The reason I am writing is the Nature paper that came out on May 1. Patients gave lower-quality symptom reports to chatbots than to physicians, in a preregistered five-hundred-patient comparison. The architecture you helped legitimize as a disclosure tool, in a clinical pipeline that ended in care, is now in consumer products whose business model is engagement. The two findings live next to each other now. Your 2014 result still holds for what it measured. The 2026 result holds for what it measured. The population most exposed to both is the population your 2017 paper was about.
I am writing to offer two things, and to ask one.
The first offer: a link back to your current work, your lab page, or any preferred destination, alongside the article. Wherever you want readers sent.
The second offer: a byline. If you want to write about any of this — to update your earlier conclusion, defend it, take issue with the May 1 result, or speak to where the architecture has gone since you measured it — itethered will publish you under your own name, unedited, on this site.
The ask: a single sentence, if you have one, that we can run alongside the piece. On the record. Yes, no, or any version of either.
The address is real. The audience is the population your work was about. They deserve to read you in your own words, this month, while the May 1 finding is still the news.
— Character零号