• Branko Milanović: To work or not to work. A modern economic take on the Red Queen’s race of capitalism. Pairs well with this question from Alex McCann.
• Alex McCann: The Case for Active Optimism. Speaking of! Yes, let’s extrapolate the transitions from agranian to industrial to information societies into this new transition to the society of slop (SoS). I still worry that those required levels of civic vigilance that we are not currently able to muster (and arguable failed at even as moved from industry to information, hence our current predicament).
• Derek Sivers: Offline 23 hours a day. A palate cleanser before the next course.
• Harry Crane: When Prediction Markets Don’t Predict: The Khamenei Resolution Debacle. Crane is a semi-professional gambler and views these new gambling devices rather favorably (see: name of his blog) but even he bristled at what happened here. There is also a follow-up.
• Sara Talpos and Michael Schulson for Undark: Do America’s Top Health Research Officials Stick Around Too Long? Yes, with interesting caveats. (ᔥJim Olds, who makes an appearance)

In addition to the categories listed on the blogroll my RSS reader has one labeled “New” which acts as a saucer for my feed subscriptions. I end up deleting quite a few of these — the post that got me interested may not be representative of the whole thing Which brings up an interesting question of whether or not blogs are ergodic. Let that be an excercise for the reader. — but some do move on. Below are a few of those.

Stories & Journals

• Weird and Deadly Interesting by Ahmet Alphan Sabancı, “a critical futurist, writer, journalist and activist”.

Economy & Finance

• Citation Needed by Molly White, “a researcher, software engineer, and prominent critic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based projects”.

Reading & Writing

• Note to Self by Gina Trapani, “a writer and programmer based in New York City”.

Science & Medicine

• Aaron Cheng, MD by Aaron Cheng, “a classical hematologist and clinical investigator”.

Philosophy & Religion

• Heavy Machinery by Mike Pepi, “a cultural critic”.

Hardware & Software

• Tonsky.me by Nikita Prokopov, “Software Engineer with a vast open-source portfolio and strong UI/UX background.”
• nickschaden by Nick Schaden, “an engineering manager and creative technologist”.
• journal.stuffwithstuff.com by Bob Nystrom, a “programming language developer at Google working on Dart, ex-game developer at EA, UI nerd, author of ‘Game Programming Patterns’ and ‘Crafting Interpreters’”.
• Disconnect by Paris Marx, who " hosts the award-winning Tech Won’t Save Us podcast and is the author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation."
• karpathy by Andrej Karpathy, “AI researcher”.

An honorable mention goes to the Bear Blog Discovery feed which will forever remain in the “New” category as new blogs keep bubbling up. That feed is also the reason “Hardware & Software” blogs overrepresented in the above list. My preferred platform, micro.blog, also has a Discovery feed, but since it tends to promote micro posts (duh) it is there more to find new people to follow on micro.blog itself rather than the feed reader.

So, any pointers to non-technical blog chains and other discovery mechanisms would be much appreciated!

• Aaron Cheng: On the emotional weight of a life in medicine. Thoughts of a newly-mintend hematologist which act as a good counterbalance to the popular fictional accounts. Feel free to peruse the few pre-2017 posts from the Infinite Regress archive for my own thoughts from that period.
• Fred Vogelstein: Enveda’s drugs from plants will turn pharma upside down. This is what Ruxandra Teslo warned us about a few months back.
• Joseph Howlett for Quanta Magazine: The Man Who Stole Infinity. On Georg Cantor, plagiarist. It does cause one to become more cynical, as we keep discovering that high-profile scientists built their reputiations on the backs of people with more scrupules and less need for attention. Taleb’s minority rule applied to sociopaths.
• Adam Mastroianni: The one science reform we can all agree on, but we’re too cowardly to do. It is to abolish for-profit scientific publishers, and I am all for it. But, people being people, I do not have high hopes that this prisoners' dilemma will have a positive outcome.

We went to the Hirshhorn Museum to see their Basquiat X Banksy exhibit, stayed for this magnificently decorated room by Laurie Anderson. She spent more than two weeks working 10-hour days to paint it in 2021, when she was 74 years old, and you can see the experience seep through the walls.

🍿 Oppenheimer (2023) was even worse on rewatch than I first remembered: disjointed, nonsensical, wooden characters, opaque motivations, telling-not-showing. There is a capital-m Movie to be made about the making of the atomic bomb but whatever Nolan did was not it.

• Derek Lowe: The Best Ideas Are Not Always Enough.

Drugs which look great in those cellular machinery flow charts with boxes and arrows pointing every which way, and which may even cure a few genetically monstrous and wholly artificial lab mice, tend to flop where it matters. Lowe links to 11 such examples and writes in more detail about the twelfth.

• Adam Kroetsch: Why clinical trials are inefficient. And why it matters.

An overly long article ⊕ ᔥNintil with which I don’t completely agree ⊕ For example, Kroetsch describes the role of a site investigator as resembling “that of a glorified data entry clerk - the investigator’s primary responsibility is gathering the data that the drug company needs and sending it to them”. This is incorrect: site investigators usually have clinical research coordinators and data managers to do it for them. But this deserves a post of its own. but which nevertheless provides a good overview of the many things wrong with how clinical trials are being conducted in the US, the biggest one being that they are reinventing the wheel each and every time they are done. The “lean trial” proposal at the end matches my own thinking.

• Ruxandra Teslo: A response to Dario Amodei on AI & clinical trials.

Teslo picks up on the tech bro magical thinking streak in which things you don’t sufficiently understand seem eminantly solveable using the most recent technological developments. Five years ago it was electronic medical records and blockchain, now it’s clinical trials and AI. The article gives the many reasons why things are not that simple. Now, if we all agreed on the set of LLM prompts that would provide an unbiased protocol and informed consent form review thus eliminating as many people from the loop as possible, well, then we may be on to something.

• Alex Tabarrok: If you have the right to die, you should have the right to try!

If someone qualifies for euthanasia, should they also not be eligible for every expanded acces, compassionate use, right-to-try scheme imaginable? Obviously: yes. Maybe not so obviously: there is a branch of my subspecialty aptly named desperation oncology which in the vast majority of cases leads to false hope, financial ruin and, worst of all, time misspent in doctors' offices and infusion clinics instead with your loved ones. As a doctor and a human being I am partial to life, so I see state-assisted dying programs like Canada’s MAID as monstrous, but “you’d rather be dead so here, take this drug” is only a half-step above that qualifier and leads to the bad reputation of experimental therapies.

iCloud on the web is surprisingly good. The only thing missing is iMessage, which should have been there instead of the never-used Invites app. It feels like it was created just to fill up that spot in the 4x3 rectangle.