Another good podcast episode: neurosurgeon Theodore Schwartz talking to Tyler Cowen. Dr Schwartz is a bigger believer in science than yours truly:

COWEN: Do you think there are areas of science, though, where the institutions are so screwed up that you don’t actually trust the product of what is coming out, and there’s some systematic bias in the ideas being generated?

SCHWARTZ: I think, yes, there’s always going to be politics involved, and we always come to any problem from a unique single perspective, and institutions are going to have their biases. Yes, that is true, but in the long run, the scientific method will figure it out, and there will be one right answer. That institution — whatever their bias is — will be proven wrong in the long run. Now, those people might be dead and won’t be able to apologize at that point.

The problem, of course, is even when the scientific method does figure something out, people still keep doing things the old way, and no, generational change does not help. Witness homeopathy, kyphoplasty, vitamin C for colds, and — more relevant to Tyler’s question — the amyloid plaque hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease. Abandoning lobotomies was an aberration, zombie medicine is the rule.

🎙️ Good podcast episode alert: the most recent EconTalk guest is Patrick McKenzie, a credit card savant. Have someone thoughtful and eloquent talk about their area of expertise and they will make anything interesting.

🎙️ After listening to a half-dozen episodes of the Plain English podcast I have come to the conclusion that I don’t like it for reasons of both substance and style. Style-wise, it is just too polished. The host, Derek Thompson, talks like someone who has spent way too much time in his childhood watching News at 10 and now has the cadence of a seasoned newscaster. Thirty years ago this may have projected authority but nowadays, to me, sounds fake.

Substance is the bigger problem: the choice of guests is just too self-centered, wherein by “self” I mean The Atlantic in-crowd. Case in point, the episode about cultural decay starts with a description of Ted Gioia and mostly discusses the ideas of Ted Gioia, but instead of Ted Gioia the guest is… a writer from The Atlantic who spent several hours talking to Ted Gioia to include only a few of his comments in the final article. It was so egregious that Gioia himself commented.

And so Plain English moves from my ever-shortening playlist of must-listen podcasts to the one that’s case-by-case, good guests only. Which is, in fact, most podcasts around.

Listening to the most recent episode of ATP, I learned a surprising fact about how Apple developers see their user statistics: the number of people who opt out of sharing is not available, and the only statistics developers get is about the users who opted in. This may make naïve sense — hey, they don’t want you to know about them so we’ll erase them from existence Soviet-style — but is in fact statistical malpractice. The numbers Apple does share are only a sample of the total user base, which is fine as long as you know or can estimate the size of the population you are sampling. Without a way to estimate the denominator, the numbers are meaningless.

The bare minimum that Apple could and should do, without breaking any privacy rules, is to share the number of people who opted out. With this number in hand, a developer would be able to project worst-case scenarios and likely ranges for each statistic of interest. If Apple dedicated just a tiny bit more resources to developer relations, they could automate this step and build in worst-case numbers into the interface. A more sophisticated company that cares about the developer ecosystem could even create complex predictions models that would give both worst-case numbers and the 95% confidence intervals for each statistic in question.

Why should Apple care, other than doing a solid to their developer ecosystem with a minimal investment? Well, by making their default user statistics useless they are in fact incentivizing developers large and small to track their users by other means. Large developers may do that anyway since they are likely to have a could component to their app. But an indie developer may turn to third party services: if I am a teenager working on my first big app I will probably turn to the fastest and cheapest way to track, and not knowing anything about anything I am going to guess some of the offerings in that part of the price-value spectrum are going to be less than scrupulous.

So this is how Apple’s privacy-minded view combined with thriftiness and lack of care towards developer experience can lead directly to worse overall privacy for their users. What a surprise.

The most recent episode of Conversations with Tyler featured Ezra Klein as a guest. I won’t delve into their discussion, but I will note two quirks in Tyler’s thinking that were somewhat off-brand.

When Ezra mentioned mass firings and re-hirings in the federal government, Tyler expressed uncertainty about that actually being the case — essentially a denial of what is widely known. As a counter, Ezra mentioned knowing people who were fired. I, too, know people who were fired simply because they got promoted and transitioned from contractors to full-time employees within the last two years, despite having deep expertise in the subject matter they were hired for. The “I’m not sure that’s happening” sounds what one would hear on the streets of Berlin in the late 1930s, motivated reasoning par excellence.

Another example is Tyler’s tendency to extrapolate into the future and then use that hypothetical future as a benchmark for current policy. Think “Sam Altman says it will be possible to have billion-dollar companies run by one person” at some unspecific time in the future as a context for massive federal government downsizing now. We do not, in fact, have billion-dollar companies run by a single person; that is a VC pitch at best, and if we are being less generous pure vaporware. Government hiring policy by vaporware sounds bad.

I think Tyler was aiming for provocation. He didn’t mention in his show notes that he “tried to “push him further from a libertarian point of view”, but then what is he really thinking? To come back to the 1930s analogy, I picture this interview’s version of Tyler in the FDR-era US and I see him praising Charles Lindbergh (they both speak German) and Henry Ford — progress über alles — and not really being a fan of FDR. Yikes!

Much has been written and said about the faults of peer review but one thing I think hasn’t been emphasized enough so I’ll state it here: journal editors need to grow a spine. And they need to grow it in two ways, first by not sending obviously flawed studies out for peer review no matter where they come from, then by saying no to reviewers' unreasonable demands, not taking their comments at face value, and sometimes just not waiting 6+ months for a review to come back before making a decision.

Podcast-wise, I am in my 2016 mood. There were five prospects for 2024. I became a regular listener of exactly zero. The true regulars continue to be ATP, EconTalk, Conversations with Tyler, The Talk Show and Dithering, but even there I skip through more episodes than I complete.

Still, moods shift and if I listen to more of anything next year it may be one or more of these:

• The VPZD Show, which is back, intermittently, with more cursing than ever, but also some interesting viewpoints that differ enough from my own to make things interesting.
• The Marginal Revolution Podcast with Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Kyla Scanlon would have been a better co-host to either, but this will have to do.
• Plain English with Derek Thompson is very much outside of my preferred format, being over-produced and a bit too highfalutin' with its choice of guests, but some of those guests do seem interesting so it may become one of those skip-more-than-I-listen-to shows.

And here are years past: 2023 — 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one

I have been reading Order without Design for the last few weeks — it’s a dense book! — so it is complete coincidence that its author Alain Bertaud was on EconTalk as a guest the same week that I finished it. Bertaud talked to to Russ Roberts once before, back in June 2019. I haven’t listened to either episode yet but they’re on the list.

I have linked to a Conversation with Tyler (Cowen) in a while because most of them have to date been bland (Nate Silver? Seriously?) but the most recent one with Kyla Scanlon was compelling. She is a 27-year-old book author and… popularizer of economics (?) who writes on Substack and makes videos.

Last week’s EconTalk with Marty Makary featured several topics relevant to zombie medicine. One was a zombie’s return to the world of the living, with hormone replacement therapy for women not being as bad as we thought, particularly for preventing hot flashes in early menopause (before age 60). The other was the emergence of a new zombie: removing ovaries to prevent ovarian cancer when it is now thought that most ovarian cancers arise from the Fallopian tubes, not the ovaries themselves. I wouldn’t call it a full blown zombie just yet as there is an ongoing randomized controlled trial comparing the two approaches and who knows, its results may kill the old practice outright.