• Peco Gaskovski: How Turtles Can Fly (subheading: “Sometimes the path to originality goes through conventionality”)
• Scott Sumner: Almost everything is downstream of integrity (ᔥTyler Cowen and technically titled “My Final EconLog Post”, showing that Sumner is a better movie reviewer than headline writer)
• Ben Thompson: U.S. Intel (with a preamble on steelmanning)
• Andrew Gelman: Aiming your gatling guns in the wrong direction. Shooting the messenger for something the messenger was never saying. (this is not an excerpt, it is the actual title; kudos)
• Ben Werdmuller: Political Pollsters Are Trying to Save Money by Polling AI Instead of Real People, and It’s Going About as Well as You’d Expect (titles like the above two why my link posts now all have titles themselves; so it goes)

Andrew Gelman writes:

One reason why these celebrity scientists have such great stories to tell is that they’re not bound by the rules of evidence. Unlike you or me, they’re willing to make strong scientific claims that aren’t backed up by data.

So it’s not just that Sapolsky and Langer are compelling figures with great stories who just happen to be sloppy with the evidence. It’s more that they are compelling figures with great stories in large part because they are willing to be sloppy with the evidence.

An under-appreciated fact which reminded me of this old post of mine.

• Joan Westenberg: I Deleted My Second Brain (ᔥMatt Birchler)

There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts. But there is a special anxiety reserved for unread lists of unread things. My reading list had become a totem of imagined wisdom. A shrine to the person I would be, if only I read everything on it.

When I deleted that list, I lost nothing real. I know what I want to read. I know the shape of my attention. I do not need a 7,000-item database to prove that I have taste or ambition.

• Victoria Song: AI doesn’t belong in journaling

There’s one quote in the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that sums it up for me. “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort — which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”

I don’t always agree with author Oliver Burkeman about this. I find no meaning in toiling over hand-washing dishes, and am eternally grateful to the inventor of the dishwasher. But as it pertains to Big Tech’s never-ending quest to simplify writing with AI, I wholly agree that the struggle is what makes the process worth anything.

• Anna Havron: Personal Productivity Analysis Paralysis

I personally abandoned digital for tracking my projects and tasks because I can think of infinity things I would like to create and get done! My imagination is THAT good and ambitious! Thank goodness for paper, which forces me to edit, thank goodness for the friction involved in recording and transferring thoughts and ideas. It keeps me semi-reality-based.

• Nick Maggiulli: Optimizing Ourselves to Death. This is nothing new, of course. Modus omnibus in rebus was first written down some 2600 years ago and has withstood the test of time. It is good to have an occasional reminder.
• Joe Stone: A moment that changed me: I resolved to reduce my screen time – and it was a big mistake. Case in point to the above. Smartphones are magical, when you remember to tone them down.
• Dwarkesh Patel: Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. Moderation in everything, even in moderation. Here are two examples of people, Johnson and Caro, who did not hold back on their own thing, with great success.

Robert Caro’s books are about formidable, single-mindedly devoted characters with storybook life arcs. It may be the case, then, that the only person who could write the biography of Robert Caro is the man himself.

• John Gruber: Gold, Frankincense, and Silicon. The amount of money and power one obtains in life are proportional to the size of frogs — or, if you are feeling less charitable, turds — one swallows throughout life, and at some point you either acquire a taste for frogs (maybe you’ve always liked them!), spend a lot of money on therapy and/or drugs, or drop out. And Tim Apple hasn’t dropped out just yet.
• John Gruber again: OpenAI Brings Back Legacy ChatGPT 4o Model in Response to Outcry From Users Who Find GPT-5 Emotionally Unsatisfying. To quote Gruber, “These people need help, and that help isn’t going to come from a chatbot.”
• Duncan McClements: The Sun Never Leaves. The subtitle is “How emigration ended the British Empire”, and it could not have happened to a nicer bunch of overindulgent cut-throats.

Happy reading.

• Why I Hate Your Podcast (Because it is unnatural, overproduced, and tries too hard to imitate Joe Rogan, for the most part.)
• Everything I Know about Self-Publishing (From Kevin Kelly. I am getting more serious about putting words to paper, and this is an invaluable resource.)
• Oreos Combined With Reese’s? Inside the Manhattan Project of Snacks. (Capitalism at its best, and most hilarious. Jerry Seinfeld should have made a movie about this.)
• A Good and Faithful Servant (A wonderful reminiscence on a recently deceased person the mere reading of which makes me want to be a better person.)

Enjoy.

• From the ever-excellent Kyla Scanlon: How AI, Healthcare, and Labubu Became the American Economy
• From a good friend, Timothée Olivier: Can I confidently say to patients that a 3-year structured exercise program may save their lives?
• From the recently-returned-to-blogging Thomas Basbøl: A simple test
• From the never-stopped-blogging Derek Lowe: In Praise of Weirdness
• From Dorothy L. Sayers, written in 1947, and touching upon everything above: The lost tools of learning

Happy Friday, etc.

• Razor, Gun, Fence and American, both from Kieran Healy
• The Paradox of India from Samir Varma (ᔥTyler Cowen (as a good example see Strategic Ambiguity as Wisdom: “Not everything needs to be defined, categorized, and resolved. Sometimes the wisest response is a head waggle that means yes, no, and maybe all at once.”. Indeed.)
• The growth and collapse of autonomy at work (after age forty, feelings of career autonomy apparently tend to decline; perhaps for some)
• Fortune Dark, a TTRPG system with an update here

• How to travel from Janan Ganesh (I agree with most, and the discerning reader should have no trouble identifying the minor point of disagreement)
• Journal articles are trying to do six things at once — no wonder they’re unreadable (yes!)
• Is atheism like a point null hypothesis? and other thoughts on religion (Tyler Cowen was correct)
• The Sacrifices We Choose to Make from Michael Nielsen (in the same vein as the above)
• The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture? (written in 1948, but more and more herds of ever-more independent minds are still roaming)

• From the FT Editorial Board: The risk of letting AI do your thinking (the only nit I have to pick here is that by “AI” the esteemed Board means “LLMs” or, if you want to be kind and stretch the definition of intelligence, “generative AI”)
• From Dave Winer: AI should behave like a computer (see previous note)
• From a person on the Internet: Cognitive Hygiene: Why You Need to Make Thinking Hard Again (file under YouTube videos that should have been blog posts)
• From Michael Lopp: Every Single Human. Like. Always. (subtitle: The robots… They did the thing.)

And with these four links I hereby declare a moratorium on LLM-related matters on this blog, until further notice.

• Vinay Prasad Is a Bernie Sanders Acolyte in MAHA Drag (Apologies for linking to the WSJ. Please file it under “textbook hit piece”, that worked.)
• Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market (From Kyla Scanlon, whose substack blog is a jewel.)
• Design Your Own Rug! (We just came back from Istanbul, where rugs are no longer made by hand and the ones who are sold as such were made 40+ years ago and “refreshed. These are from Afghanistan and are “only” around $1K.)
• Belgrad Forest on Wikipedia (Speaking of Istanbul, the forest closest to it was named after the village next to it, “settled by thousands of Serbs who were deported to the capital Constantinople from the city of Belgrade in 1521” — to maintain a millennium-old Byzantine aqueduct. Please file it under “isn’t history fascinating”.)