📚 Finished reading: False Dawn by John Gray, written in 1998 and getting many things right, most of all the vibes of a post-liberal, post-free market world. He still writes in the same timbre, though now he sounds more like a broken record played in an echo chamber. What a difference 25 years make.
A few good links for the weekend:
- Is progress in medicine too slow? by Ruxandra Teslo
- Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era (ᔥJohn Naughton)
- For Every Winner a Loser by John Lanchester
- Cozytech by Venkatesh Rao, alas the best parts are behind a paywall (coziness costs)
Seven years ago today. Time flies!
CNN writes about Surgeon General’s advisory on parental health:
The advisory describes how mothers and fathers now work many more hours than in 1985 but also spend many more hours every week on primary child care — and that doesn’t count their total time spent with children. “Demands from both work and child caregiving have come at the cost of quality time with one’s partner, sleep, and parental leisure time,” the advisory says. The strain is even greater on parents caring for aging parents or other loved ones.
Can confirm. The advisory itself is a quick read, well worth checking out.
Not one week after I first wrote about zombie medicine, this happened:
From "The Use of Ice in the Treatment of Acute Soft-Tissue Injury: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials", which showed marginal benefit in ankle sprains and no benefit in soft tissue injuries… 20 years ago. Good example of Zombie Medicine https://t.co/NWkWomY6U4 pic.twitter.com/L0sGgvSkds
— Miloš Miljković (@miljko) August 25, 2024
So many examples out there: icing injuries, treating mild fevers in kids, Paxlovid. Someone really ought to collect these and write a book.
David Perell’s podcast “How I Write” underwhelmed in the beginning, but a year in he got my attention. The episode with Ben Thompson of “Stratechery” was stellar — with a guest like Ben how could it not be — but I didn’t expect to like this episode on copywriting as much as I did.
Back in 2008, Tyler Cowen wrote about the stupidity button, in response to some rabble-rousing rhetoric:
When I see people writing sentences of this kind, I imagine them pressing a little button which makes them temporarily less intelligent. Because, indeed, that is how one’s brain responds when one employs this kind of emotionally charged rhetoric.
As you go through life and read various writers, I want you to keep this idea of the button in mind. As you are reading, think “Ah, he [she] is pressing the button now!”
I’ve pressed that button myself many times, and always regretted it.
As seen in some regulatory documents I have been reviewing:
… which is submitted herewith and incorporated herein by reference…
And now I’m looking for a good book that could explain how legalese came to be, because surely there was a reason “which is submitted and incorporated here” wasn’t sufficient.
When I first saw Patrick Collison’s “vague tech cannon”, the preponderance of biographies and Silicone Valley histories seemed like too much navel gazing. Tanner Greer had a more charitable perspective:
To study the great men of a community’s past is to study what greatness means in that community. That I think is half the purpose of these biographies of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Feynman and Oppenheimer, Licklider and Noyce, Thiel and Musk. These books are an education in an ethos. Such is the paıdeía of the technologists.
Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Feynman — yes. But Thiel and Musk?
Daniel Frank writes about agreements and disagreements:
There’s something to be said for the blissful ignorance of not knowing every opinion held by every person in our lives and for spending less time dwelling on divisive topics. If you got along well with your work colleague until you discovered their view on topic X, then maybe discussing topic X isn’t wise.
Right! That’s one way to avoid condemnation games.
@pcora This is how I have been using micro.blog, more or less. I do dedicate a 30 or so minutes each week to go through replies, as peeking into the mentions can lead to interesting new accounts to follow (mostly via RSS + micro.blog, sometimes micro.blog only).
@ReaderJohn Hear, hear. At the margin, I am sure the study would show that marriages through elopement are more sound than those that started at a destination wedding (full disclosure: my wife and I eloped).
Janan Ganesh published another banger of a column this week, Beware the professional ghetto. He quotes Taleb, and rightfully so, and puts out this fascinating bit of trivia:
Tim Walz is the first person on either the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school. That is 20 individuals across 10 elections over 40 years who pursued a JD or LLB. Not one of the four Republican presidents over the period had a legal background.
Fachidiocracy, anyone?
Hustling. That’s what some people do in all industries. Young people in tech. Slightly older people in medical careers. I always admire people who hustle, even though I often wonder what the point of their work is. One thing I know for sure is that no matter how stupid and low yield and pointless and futile ideas might be in silicon valley— and believe me I live here and know just how bad it can be— ideas in medical research are often even more stupid and low yield and pointless and futile and worse of all harmful to human beings.
He’s not wrong, sadly.
@numericcitizen Agreed. I would also move away from "content consumption". Exploring, learning, trying to understand — yes, consuming content — not so much…
Attulus fasciger is a species of spider from the family Salticidae native to northern and western Asia. However, it has also been introduced to North America. The spider is brownish-black coloured, has 8 eyes, and is 3–4 millimetres (0.12–0.16 in) in size.
Shot with an iPhone 14 Pro Max. I should remember to take more close-ups!
@odd We started watching last night and it's good but repetitive. Even with the repetition it's one of Pixar's better movies in the last decade.
I saw my first Humane AI pin in the wild today, on a dapperly dressed man walking through a not so dapper part of town. It looked fine and unconspicous, too bad it doesn’t actually work.
@JohnBrady Hah, that's an apt comparison. Maybe he wanted to make a like-for-like comparison to European villages and small towns — and it's a valid comparison to make! — but I wouldn't call it the American Dream.
@JohnBrady “Tight” is an excellent way to describe it, and a great contrast to some less-than-tight works I’ve seen recently (Christopher Nolan’s).
@pratik 👌 Put a stack of index cards in the bottom right panel and you get perfection!
@ReaderJohn Heh, you have managed to hit interesting times at least twice in your life. May these be a tad less interesting than the 1960s.
@pratik How’s the app? I’ve been using MailMate with FastMail for more than a decade so it’s difficult to imagine anything else.
@pratik No gift link, but I can forward you the email! You can use the Reply by Email link to get in touch.
@lukemperez Indeed. I look forward to reading his book, which I suspect may be the reason for the break. For the same reason, I hope the break is not permanent.
@JohnBrady That is a most excellent quote. I had a everything-is-a-problem world view until quite recently. It makes perfect sense until you hit reality (and reality hits back).
@JohnBrady Yes! And the confusion is already creeping into everyday life even where I didn't expect it. E.g. I tried to find a trailer for an old-ish movie on YouTube and a surprising number of results were AI-generated "trailers"). So the sensible heuristic is to ignore everything.
@pratik Oh, without a doubt. Netflix is at the very extreme corner of that quadrant, and everything they made (except for some of the animation work like Arcane and Castlevania) would be there. Other streamers have a better track record.
It's the culture and obsession over timelines and predictability, I think. Good work can take time — The Sopranos had very long breaks between seasons — and you can't pay for that. I imagine corporate overlords want everything to be as per the initial spreadsheet (or — shudder — PowerPoint). The other component is that having too big of a budget may be harmful! Constraints can be good for creativity (see A24 and Bloomfield productions)
@pratik Exactly. They’ve done a disservice to so many characters and stories with the high-gloss low-effort production. 3BP and Sandman come to mind first… Their animation unit is better, though.
@Denny Spot on. I use Siri every day for similar questions and tasks, none mission-critical so the occasional slip up is fine. The biggest improvement they could make is faster failures when there is no internet, or when the connection is poor. OK, we’re in a dead zone, good to know and let’s move on.
@JohnBrady An excellent perspective — this world can turn on a dime, for better or worse.
@mandaris Ouch. If you are ever in need of something similar: the Ratio Eight carafe is costly but beautiful and guaranteed not to break (well, the carafe — the dripper is ceramic). Uses chemex filters, too.
@JohnBrady Always!
@JohnBrady @pratik It's being honest. We have an emotional reaction to the video because we know these tools, some of which have been around for centuries. "Kids these days" couldn't care less, and kids these days will soon be adults. Their own kids may be seeing those tools only in a museum (if we're lucky).
@pratik I saw it, great stuff. Thanks for the head nod :)
@pratik Completely agree. Creative destruction is rare but purposeless destruction is everywhere around us, so it's easy to see why many people saw it as the latter. I still think it's educational!
@pratik They should've aired it with the original iPad — the room would have been much more receptive back then.
BTW, I started writing a longer response but it got too big for a reply so here you go :)