I am at ACR Convergence all weekend, but here are some quick shots:
I love and hate Maggie Appleton’s website at the same time. I mean, just look at it. But then the last essay went up almost 2 years ago, and “loose, unopinionated notes” come out at a rate of one every other month.
“Digital gardens” may not the best of metaphors. A garden left on its own will keep growing and may turn into something beautiful. A blog without new articles becomes a museum or, worse yet, a mausoleum with its own flesh-eating aliens.
RSS and Instapaper as cup and saucer
I have been reading Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals”, which builds on many of the concepts first mentioned in “Four Thousand Weeks”. One of them is looking at various aspects of life not as a to-do list that needs completing but as a river you dip in and out of as needed.
One big to-do list that has followed me for more than a decade now has been my ever-growing Instapaper queue. However, the river metaphor didn’t quite work there: the constant flow of a river implies I’d be looking at the newest thing each time I dipped in. But that’s what social media and RSS are for! Dave Winer himself has used the term River of News to describe a type of an RSS aggregator. What, then, to make of Instapaper and what purpose does it serve?
So here is how I’ve been thinking about it: Instapaper (or any other read-it-later service) is where all the hot takes I encounter go to cool down. The Senate of my reading Congress, if you will. And most things I put there will, in fact, turn out to be pieces of misshapen plastic not worth my time. But now and then a masterpiece may come out of the fire that will be worth sharing years hence. So, I really don’t care about the great resignation in academia all that much any more. C.S. Lewis talking about cliques? Yes, please.
Looking at years-old essays and blog posts removes current-event noise from my interpretation. Usually I also can’t remember why I saved an item in the first place. So, the piece will have to stand on its own without the benefit of my knowing that Tyler Cowen, or Cory Doctorow, or whomever else’s link blog I follow had put in a good word about it. Is QAnon destroying the GOP from within? I won’t have to read Ben Sasse’s ten thousand words from 3 years go on it because the answer was clearly “Yes”, and the deed is now done. How does Zeynep Tufekci keep getting the big things right? I don’t have to read the 4-year-old article now since there is a whole book about it (and not the one you think). Etc, etc.
The emerging pattern is that big news pieces in publications like The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic are the lowest yield, as they either become stale or discredited. Give me a thoughtful Substack newsletter any time! Better yet are items that were old when I saved them, like that C.S. Lewis speech from a few paragraphs up, or this brief remembrance of Paul Feyerabend that ends with a poignant paragraph:
Beneath Feyerabend’s rhetorical antics lurked a deadly serious theme: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble it may be, often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he actually believed it was no more valid than astrology or religion. Quite the contrary. He attacked science because he recognized—and was horrified by—science’s vast superiority to other modes of knowledge. His objections to science were moral and political rather than epistemological. He feared that science, precisely because of its enormous power, could become a totalitarian force that crushes all its rivals.
It was written in 2016. Eight years later, we are in for some crushing.
Bench to bedside in a bad way (on the virtue of clinical trials)
Andrew Gelman recently wrote about Columbia surgery professor’s research missconduct. I haven’t looked into the details but it seems like the retracted papers were all about lab research with no true clinical relevancy. In that context, this part of the post stuck out:
Can you imagine, you come to this guy with cancer of the spleen and he might be pushing some unproven treatment supported by faked evidence? Scary.
I can’t tell whether this was supposed to be a joke or if Gelman truly believes that faking mouse experiments directly leads to using unproven treatments, but in case it’s the latter I have to say that the logic is stretched. Yes, the kind of person who has no qualms about fake data is probably not all that rigorous about the evidence for surgical procedures, but for all we know he could be a master surgeon with excellent technique and great outcomes who also happens to have been a bad judge of character and trusted a bad actor. I suspect it’s the latter: the kind of multi-tasking surgery “superstar” that the professor in question seems to be tends to spend a lot more time in the the operating room (or, for another kind of a superstar, the board room), than the lab.
Now, if he were a medical oncologist or any other kind of doctor that gives cancer treatment then maybe things would have been more dubious — that kind of research tends to jump to clinic too quickly and without merit. But unless you’re transplanting pig’s hearts and working on other large animals, the lab is so far removed from the operating room that it is extremely unlikely any such evidence could be used to back up actual surgical treatment.
Incidentally, that last link is to Siddharta Mukherjee’s abomination of an article titled “The Improvisational Oncologist” (subtitle: “In an era of rapidly proliferating, precisely targeted treatments, every cancer case has to be played by ear.") from the May 2016 edition of The New York Times Magazine (it’s a gift link so feel free to read it; caveat lector) and it describes actual scientific and medical malpractice of bringing half-baked — though, admittedly, not faked — ideas from the lab into clinic. Gelman didn’t comment on his blog back then, but he did praise Mukherjee the following year for a New York Times opinion piece “A Failure to Heal” (another gift link there) that is about — wait for it — clinical trials that show the treatment that you thought would work doesn’t. These kinds of trials tend to be called “negative” but there’s nothing negative about them! They bring positive value to the world. Maybe our improvisational oncologist learn something in those 18 months that separate the two texts?
To be clear, what Mukherjee artfully called “improvisational oncology” was (lab) bench to (hospital) bedside medicine, which is distinct from bench to bedside research: the concept of bringing laboratory findings to clinical practice quickly, but still with some semblance of a clinical trial that includes a pre-specified protocol, informed consent and regulatory oversight. You know, all the stuff that decreases the odds of laboratory malfeasance endangering patient care. I say decreases the odds and not prevents them completely because we do have a case of a bad actor completely destroying an entire field of clinical research (Alzheimer’s disease). Can you imagine the damage that kind of shenanigans would do if we didn’t have clinical trials standing between the lab and the commercial drug market?
COI statement: I am involved in a [course about clinical trials][6 and think they are the best thing that has happened to medicine since a cloth merchant wanted to take a closer look at some garments so there is some bias involved, but then again say what you’ll do and do as you say is both a major tenet of clinical trialists and good general practice.
File under “headlines of note”, from Scott Sumner.
On a semi-related note, the NBA season is starting tonight and I look forward to the Wizards’ home game tomorrow night, even if it ends up being the devastating loss from the Celtics that everyone expects will happen.
I have to say there was a moment as the K-poptometrist and I stared deeply into each others’ eyes (him to assess my astigmatism, me because my head was in a cage) where I momentarily forgot that I am quite happily partnered with my girlfriend and in my head was like, wait, Dr Lee… what are we? Then he told me that I should be on the lookout for impending presbyopia due to my age, which brought me back to earth.
File under “footnotes of note”, from Rachel Kwon.
There’s no space in Bangkok left untouched, no discarded patch of land underneath a tangle of elevated roadways, no plot too harsh and uninviting, that doesn’t have at least four or five vendors pitching something, be it food, motor parts, lottery tickets, keys made on order, outdoor tailors, and haircuts. No placid backdrop your eyes can rest on to give your senses and brain a break.
File this one under “paragraphs of note”. Chris Arnade at his best.
I wanted the world to stop, and I wouldn’t stop until it did.
File this one under “sentences of note”. The entire essay is almost too good of a cautionary tale to be true, but who cares if it’s “true” as long as it’s good.
Not sure where I first saw the suggestion that one should never use typographic enhancements like bold or italic text to emphasize the written word, but the latest Daring Fireball post and the style guide that led to it are a good reminded for why it is indeed a good idea not to use them.
Busy day today, but there is always time for a few good links: