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Today’s Slow Boring update started off great (the Home Alone house!), then came this whopper of a reasoning flaw and I stopped reading in frustration.

You can’t make any conclusions out of junk data, people, though apparently you can write a 5,000-word essay.

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.

A thought for the year, from the aforementioned Prof. Taleb:

Likewise, I don’t read letters and emails longer than a postcard. Writing must have some solemnity. Reading and writing, in the past, were the province of the sacred.

From How I Write, to which I have linked before. Good essays much like good books are worth re-rereading.

"Efficientize" is not a real word but even so: never ever efficientize the things you like doing

For all the hate X gets, you can still find nuggets of good information, Nassim Taleb and the Taleb-adjacent being a prime example. Here is one such post, from Juani Villarejo, shown here in its entirety for those who would rather not go to X to see the original:

Parkinson’s law says that work expands to fill the available time.

Jevons’s paradox states that every increased efficiency, will raise demand rather than decrease it.

And there is a work asymmetry:
Probably there are many more things you dislike doing than things you like.

Conclusion: If you allocate time to work, all the time will be filled with tasks to do.

If you make your work more efficient, your time will be filled with more tasks (demands increases).

But by the asymmetry, tasks you dislike doing have more chance to appear than tasks you like.

So when you make your work more efficient your time will always tend to be filled with more tasks you dislike doing.

Corollary: Never ever efficientize (sic!) the things you like doing. Take all the time and enjoy them slowly. They also serve as a defense wall against the things you dislike.

The links and emphasis are mine. For all its pretenses to the contrary X is still a horrible platform for anything longer than 300 or so characters and does not allow for hyperlinks.

Here are a few links to start off 2025 (see if you can spot a pattern):

Happy New Year, dear reader!

An article from Matt Maldre about skipping to the popular parts of a YouTube video caught my eye:

Take this two-hour animation of a candy corn ablaze in a fireplace. This cute video is a simple loop that goes over and over. Certainly, in two hours, there’s got to be sort of Easter egg that happens, right? Maybe Santa comes down the chimney.

Roll over the Engagement Graph, and you’ll see some spikes.

I checked out the spikes. Nothing different happens. It’s the same loop. It’s just people clicking the same spikes that other people did because other people clicked it.

Because humans are humans and nature is nature. Now how many fields of science are made of people analyzing, explaining, narrating and writing millions upon millions of words about an equivalent of these spikes? Microbiome for sure. Much of genetics as currently practiced. Anything that relies on principle component analysis. What else?

Man-made things don’t get better on their own, and without care and attention will in fact get worse. A post from Patrick Collison on X about important historical novels is a good example, not just because of the topic (19th century novels had more complex language, more intricate themes and had more respect for the characters than their modern counterparts) but also, well, just look at the teXt itself: a supposedly text-oriented platform has no formatting, no links, and is an insult to the eyes. Enshittification in action.

Nate Silver, who so vehemently defended Daylight Saving Time, does not in fact know what DST means. No, I will not call him a clown — though he has made himself appear to act like one — because he may actually be on our side!

A one-two punch on clinical trials from Ruxandra Teslo and Willy Chertman today: first their on-point agenda for clinical trial abundance as a guest post in Slow Boring, then Ruxandra’s longer essay which has been so thoroughly research that even yours truly gets a name-check. As I noted elsewhere, every US institution has made one bade tradeoff after another in how it conducts clinical trials to the point that it’s impossible to conduct a RECOVERY trial equivalent over here. That needs to change.

Never was a fan of Daylight Saving Time, but knowing that Nate Silver is a proponent gives me additional conviction.