• Kevin Kelly: Your Most Improbable Life.

Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. This is true whether you favor traditional humanist directions or work on a frontier.

This is a nice preamble to a bit of personal news I can finally share: I will soon be going back [Note: It is a qualified “back”, as I have never actually practiced medicine full time, being either in training, doing clinical research as my main job, or being out of clinic altogether save for a few hours a week doing charity work. ] to the practice of clinical medicine. This week is in fact the last in my current position, which had been a magnificent experience but was going, as the careful reader of this blog would have already noted, in a direction not entirely suited to my preferred lifestyle and more importantly — let’s not sugarcoat it — values and beliefs. Onwards and upwards!

• Derek Robertson: 5 questions for Meredith Whittaker. ⊕ [Note: ᔥVoline on Mastodon ]

Whittaker, who is the president of the Signal Foundation (as in the app), had this to say about venture capital back in 2023:

Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto.

It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Emphasis is mine, as it could be transposed word-for-word into the current world of drug development. Consider it a more polite rewording of prof. Taleb’s take.

• Venkatesh Rao: Commodity Intelligence.

Commodified knowledge is “general knowledge” in the sense tested by trivia/quiz contests. In grade school, we actually had a subject on the curriculum called “GK” and kids good at it (I was one of them) got put on quiz teams to represent their class or school. General intelligence of the sort we actually have today is simply AIs trained on general (ie commodified) knowledge.

But the theological motte-and-bailey move that conflates it with some totalizing-universal divine-omniscience idea of “Artificial General Intelligence” traps a great many of even the smartest people. A category error motivated by theological yearnings, validated by second-order Labatutian psychoses, sustained by epistemic bubbles, and encouraged by sketchy business roadmaps that need a story to justify trillion-dollar investments.

This is a charitable way of justifying the AI billionaire panhandlers’ selling of large language models as AGI, even putting the term in official titles. Less charitably, they all know what Yann LeCun has been saying for years: LLMs will never reach human level of intelligence (“ChatGPT, make me a sandwich”). Whether LeCun’s own pursuits are wise is a different matter.

Separately, Rao gives some good book tips and Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World is now on the Pile.

• Andrew Gelman: Don’t cite sources you haven’t read, and don’t trust when people claim to be reporting something from the literature.

No quotes because, true to form, everything salient is already in the title. Natural continuation of the debate started last week (see the last link), although apparently written before the new arXiv policy for a 1-year ban for hallucinated references.

• Kieran Healy: Zero Sum Problems.

Healy wrote a book about data visualization so I feel somewhat foolish in writing this, but I do not find Apple Sports’ presentation least bit confusing: the numbers are absolute, the bars show percentage of the total. If the goal is to have more of each (assists, rebounds, steals, etc.) the bigger bar shows the opposing team’s dominance. It’s fine. Healy’s proposed solutions are all notably uglier and demote low-occurrence events like blocks and steals even though they may be crucial in a game. Shows how little both Healy and Gruber — on whose post Healy riffs — know about the game of basketball.

• Sarah Kliff, Margot Sanger-Katz, Erin Schaff and Asmaa Elkeurti for The NYT: Short Naps, Long Hours: How Autism Clinics Squeeze Medicaid Dollars Out of Preschoolers.

At Compleat Kidz, a fast-growing chain of autism clinics based in North Carolina, the policy is firm: Naps cannot be longer than seven minutes before children are awakened to resume therapy. The company says this is necessary to prevent fraud since clinics can be paid only when children are awake and getting services. But it also allows the clinic to bill insurers or Medicaid for more hours.

Yes, you have read that correctly. Waking up a child after a 7-minute nap to perform “therapy” — as if anything meaningful can be accomplished in that hypnagogic state — is both cruel and unusual. But not a punishment! It is merely a way to avoid fraud while optimizing revenue under the watchful eye of private equity:

Private equity firms have acquired at least 500 clinics over the past decade. “There’s just huge opportunities to grow these businesses and help increase access to care,” said Jon Krieger, a managing partner at Calex, a financial firm that assists with autism clinic mergers and acquisitions. He estimates the market could grow to $90 billion.

Mr. Market is a bad doctor, an even worse vet and, it seems, a most diabolical nanny.

Both the ghost and the mermaid museums we visited this weekend were in Berlin, MD, est. 1868. Was it per chance founded by German immigrants, I hear you ask, or a Teutonic-leaning group huddling after the Civil War? Why no: it is a contraction of Burley Inn, so the town is in fact “Burl’in”. TIL.

Yesterday’s ghosts are today’s mermaids. Here is a Fiji mermaid as advertised (above) and in reality (below). Not the PT Barnum specimen, but apparently made around the same time.

On a semi-related note, here is some good life advice from ol’ PTB.

Where better to spend a rainy Saturday on the Eastern Shore than the Ghost Museum in Berlin, MD?

The creepy mask was used in Odd Fellow rituals in the 1950s and, having their building right next door to our place in DC, I am at the same time intrigued and repulsed by what may be going on in there.

The departure of Marty Makary is looking more and more like a Murder on the Orient Express situation: everyone wanted him out. Well, everyone except for uniQure, Capricor and ImmunityBio who were named in the original version of that Endpoints News story as some of the companies lobbying for Makary’s ouster, then asked for their mentions to be removed, as the Editor’s note now helpfully clarifies. C’mon, people. Own it.

• Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett for The NYT: A $5 Million Donation From Big Tobacco Preceded F.D.A. Vape Decision. ⊕ [Note: Gift link ]

There is no definitive evidence linking the new F.D.A. guidance to the lunch, the donation or specific lobbying. But the episode represented a victory for an industry that mostly had been on the defensive for years.

The now former FDA Commissioner Mary Makary quit in protest, and this isn’t the first time lobbying has led to FDA turnover. Yes, lobbying is great again! Say what you will about Makary or his recent subordinate (and, full disclosure, my co-fellow, co-author and friend) Vinay Prasad — as I have — at least they had principles. Those who pay for a STAT+ subscription can get the opposite take from Matthew Herper, who called Makary the worst FDA commissioner in 25 years. ⊕ [Note: And before you ask what poor Jane E. Henney (FDA commiss 1999–2001) did to him, 25 years is how long Herper has been covering biotech. The headline could have used an “at least” for accuracy. ]

• Nick Bowlin and Katie Campbell for ProPublica and The Frontier: Oily Sludge Is Flooding Their Dream Home. Oklahoma Regulators Say They Can’t Help.

The basement of a brand new house being filled with oil-smelling, oil-appearing sludge and the government agencies are calling it “water”; a personal and bureaucratic nightmare. This is the wider context:

The Frontier and ProPublica’s reporting on oil and gas pollution in Oklahoma over the last year has shown how old oil wells abandoned by the industry pose severe public and environmental health risks. Officially, the state lists 19,000 orphan wells that state regulators are responsible for cleaning up, but the true figure is likely over 300,000, according to federal researchers.

Drill, baby, drill! Preferably through an LLC, so that you can forget about the holes you left behind once the boom busts. This is why I am surprised by otherwise sensible people like Casey Hendmer being so frustrated with lack of drilling [Note: X-post ] in oil-rich California. Could it be that even the smart Californians who would prefer not to live above an abandoned well? I mean, even the ones with just water in them can be scary. Or is it the case of Eden for the rich and stinky sludge for the poors? Let them have oil!

• Chance Townsend for Mashable: Google overhauls its AI subscription tiers, makes them cheaper.

This is one of many reports from Google I/O which focuses on the new prices without mentioning the severely restricted token limits for all tiers. Here is an example of what lower limits mean in practice. I would like to commend Google’s marketing team for this PR sleight of hand: does it count as shrinkflation is the prices have also gone down? And how on Earth would those lower prices help the already abysmally low revenue? Maybe the relative cost of tokens will have increased, but who knows? It’s not like Alphabet is a publicly traded company that should report that kind of information. Good thing AI is its own thing and isn’t affecting anything else around it. Asbestos indeed.

• Dalmeet Singh Chawla for Nature: Researchers who use hallucinated references to face arXiv ban.

There is now a one-year ban from posting on arXiv for all (co-)authors whose preprint have references that LLMs conjured out of thin air, or other signs of passing on LLM-generated content without human review (such as paragraphs starting with “Here is a 200-word summary of…”). ⊕ [Note: A question to readers more style-minded than me: is stringing these four — an ellipsis, quotation mark, right parenthesis, period — one after another a typographical faux pas? ] Note that this is for physical sciences only, life sciences-minded bioRxiv and medRxiv have not (yet) instituted such rules. Which didn’t stop some life scientists from defending [Note: X-post ] the practice of not checking one’s own references: who has the time? Apparently not people with current or former NIH funding. Having once spent a full day finding the correct reference to back up a non-essential introductory claim in one of my least-cited papers (7 as of today) I empathise with the suggestion that references should be more of a guide than firm fact, but empathy is one thing and truth another and in matters of science I will stand behind the truth because if not then what on Earth are we even doing? Unsurprisingly, Andrew Gelman has a good take on the matter.

DEVONthink Pro — henceforth DTP — is one of those Swiss Army Knife applications that is different things to different people. ⊕ [Note: At one point or another DTP has also been my app for journaling, structured note-taking (even bought a book about it), managing journal references, reading RSS feeds, archiving podcast episodes, batch renaming and automated file wrangling à la Hazel. Phew. ] After a dozen or so years of dabbling, I have pared down its use cases to a single one: managing documents both electronic (office files and emails, mostly) and physical (thanks to the now discontinued but still phenomenal ScanSnap iX500). The only reason I used DTP and not say Finder was its “intelligent” file sorting, or rather sorting recommendations paired with fast search. So, that was the only thing I had to replicate to get my DTP replacement on Linux now that I am making the slow jump.

And with quite a bit from Google Gemini — again — I think I have this one licked:

• Recoll provides full-text search, with consult-recoll for integration with Emacs (yes, it’s Emacs all the way down).
• Dirvish gives a nice 3-pane view of the file structure.
• A custom python script [Note: Note: this is a completely Gemini-generated piece of code. Use at your own risk or better yet ask your favorite LLM to make one for you ] which a) trains itself on the folder and file structure of my “Documents” folder to b) predict correct classification for a single (via Emacs) or a group of files (via command line). Yes, it’s the old-fashioned AI, a.k.a. Machine Learning, which now runs as a once-hourly cron job on my laptop.
• A custom Emacs function that binds the “c” key while in Dirvish — usually while in my “Inbox” folder — to classify a file and move it by TAB-completion; in the case I am not happy with the few folders it recommended I can start typing and it will fuzzy-find what I wanted.

Rube Goldberg-y? Yes. Does it work? By golly, it does. For 95% of things I need it for it works even better and faster than DTP, which required mouse-dragging to move a file whenever I wasn’t happy with the recommended classification. The only wrinkle left to address is naming conflicts: DTP didn’t care if two completely different files had the same name as it had its own way to track them. Trying to copy a file to a folder that already has it right now doesn’t work, but that should be a quick weekend fix.

🕹️ Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes seems to be a game I would enjoy, and this “review” in Aftermath is laudatory enough, but what on Earth made its author call it a “rougelike”? Tower defense, yes. Roguelike? Nuh-uh. Gaming journalism is going from bad to worse.