- Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Space mirrors, solar panels, fools, and their money.
A few months ago I noted that the one of the main reasons biotech was not like tech was its almost unlimited freedom do bullshit. Well, people are able to raise money by BS in other areas as well, as this article shows, but an order of magnitude less because most investors are able to do back of the envelope calculations.
- Bryan Vartabedian: The Measure of Everything.
A take on Goodhart’s Law as applied to medicine, this time through the lens of instrumentalisation. If any of these articles tickle you and you haven’t yet read Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, please do so now. Ted Gioia recently wrote about the book and its legacy. As an occasional note-taker I am in the minority club of Lila fans as well, though both of Pirsig’s books are due for a re-read.
- James Olds: The Chronology Problem.
The point is in the subtitle: “how our bias towards recency in scientific discovery hurts our understanding”. It rings true, and even reminded me of the 26 years it took for CRISPR/Cas systems to travel the path from an oddity to a gene editing platform, until I realized that those 26 years were not spent idling as this review in Cell describes in detail. So, the (lack of) developments in theoretical biology would be a much better example.
- Phil Price: Ted Williams and Me.
Ted Williams was, apparently, a base-ball player about whom John Updike had this to say: “For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.” This applies to any profession you can imagine, and indeed things outside of one’s professional life. People who have the inner drive to do things well even in the absence of stakes could unkindly be called “perfectionists”, but let’s remember that they are the ones who keep the wheels of civilization in motion, in opposition to the hordes of blankfaces, lazy asses and morons.