- Niko McCarty: Here are 30 great essays about biology. They are indeed great, and it even includes one where I gave a modest and unattributed contribution (you will be able to guess which one). To this I would add William Kaelin’s Publish houses of brick, not mansions of straw, cited many times on this blog (most recently just last month).
- Jason Locasale: My latest article in The National Review on what 60 Minutes got wrong about Harvard and the biomedical research industrial complex, and why the deeper issues in science can’t be fixed by throwing more money at broken institutions. Here is the article, which I agreed with directionally but had so many “I know this person and let me tell you what they are truly like” moments that I thought there had to be a backstory to this insider-ish scoop. And indeed there was, as noted in responses to Michael Eisen’s tweet. So much drama, and all it does is make it easier for people to shrug their shoulders, say that it’s complicated, and defer to higher authorities (i.e., Harvard).
- Nassim Taleb: I believe this paper addresses, even solves, the most relevant statistical problem of the century, including the replication crisis & the fake results in publication. No false modesty here. Papers like this make me think that frequentist statistics are fine for the lab where you can truly do the same experiment over and over, but when it comes to clinical trials you can never cross the same river twice and we should all be Bayesians.
- Christopher Hooks: I sincerely believe that anyone pushing this should be shot. I agree in spirit. Whoever made this AI abomination should study Hayao Miyazaki and his work.