At the very start of the textbook Fundamentals of Clinical Trials the authors make a distinction between clinical trials — comparing two or more different interventions — and clinical studies, which merely describe an intervention without comparing it to anything. So, there can be no such thing as a “Phase 1 trial”, since they typically involve a single drug at different doses and schedules. The only true trials, according to the authors, would fall under Phase 3, or Phase 2b at the earliest.

This is stupid, misleading, and not at all how the words “trial” and “study” are used by anyone else, including the biggest and most important drug regulatory agency in the world. There are many such pointless exercises of professorial power in medicine, including my favorite: whether the correct pronunciation of “+” in “7+3” is “plus” or “and”. They amount to nothing more than purity tests that award the wielders of the right language a false sense of precision. As Nassim Taleb wrote, nitpicking is the enemy of thought.

The rest of the book is good enough, but more on that later.

Finished reading: 1177 B.C. by Eric H. Cline 📚

Come for the meticulously documented story of the Bronze Age collapse, stay for what preceded it: alliances, feuds and intrigue to rival anything you’d find in the Game of Thrones.

📚 An unpopular opinion: nonfiction audiobooks are an oxymoron. Those which are better heard than read (see: Gladwell) are entertainment disguised as education, giving only an illusion of understanding.

The very best works of fiction, however, work equally well as either.

Finished reading: How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia 📚

“Finished” as in read every word on the page, yes. But to actually finish this one will take a few years’ worth of listening, as you can imagine. At least I won’t be listening blindly.

Finished reading: Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott Scheper 📚🗃️

There are two and a half books here for the price of one in this note-keeping samizdat:

• one: a brief practical guide on how to make an analogue note system;
• two: an exhaustive list of more or less science-based reasons for why you would pick analogue over digital;
• and a half: the author’s self-conscious and slightly over the top running commentary about it all.

The first one was spot on and valuable. The second needed an editor: repeated paragraphs were peppered throughout the chapters a few too many times for me to find it just charming. But an editor may also have cut the commentary, which ended up adding some sparkle — lacking in most other non-fiction books.

Better than expected, even after accounting for low initial expectations. See number 24 here

Currently reading: How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia 📚

Always wonderful to read experts in their craft writing about it. Two dozen pages in and I am already picking up on concepts beyond jazz, efortless teamwork versus dysfunctional prima donnas being broadly relevant.

Finished reading: On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt 📚

A timeless masterpiece that takes less than an hour to read, much longer to digest. What reminded me of Frankfurt’s essay was an article about the age of the bullshitter which, alas, ended up being its own kind of bullshit.

Finished reading: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison 📚

A story of damp decay. I didn’t know enough about English geography to fully appreciate the intricacies, but Harrison is the master of the uneasy atmosphere and he got that one just right.

Posting yearly reading lists has become risky as of late, but that won’t stop me. As with last year’s this is more of a guide than a mandate: I may — but probably won’t — read all of them. Odds are, my favorite book of the year won’t even be one on the list.

1. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (M. John Harrison)
2. Hitler (Joachim C. Fest)
3. NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible (C. S. Lewis et al.)
4. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric H. Cline)
5. Rules of Civility (Amor Towles)
6. The Odyssey (Homer, Emily Wilson translation)
7. Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Plutarch, Dryden translation)
8. Station Eternity (Mur Lafferty)
9. Talent (Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross)
10. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (Luke Burgis)
11. The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success (Albert-László Barabási)
12. An Immense World (Ed Young)
13. From Baghdad to Boardrooms: My Family’s Odyssey (Ezra K. Zikha and Ken Emerson)
14. Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection (Sam Apple)
15. How to Listen to Jazz (Ted Gioia)
16. Whole Earth Discipline (Stewart Brand)
17. The Revolt of the Masses (Ortega y Gasset)
18. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (David Graeber)
19. Against Method (Paul Feyerabend)
20. I Am a Strange Loop (Douglas R. Hofstadter)
21. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard)
22. Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
23. Empty Space: A Haunting (M. John Harrison)

This is the big one.

Last year, I set out to read at least 22 books, and gave my self a list. Things went better than planned: in addition to 19 of the 22 books from the list, I found time ⊕ I attribute this to one thing and one thing only: waking up one hour before anyone else in the house. After all, who needs sleep? for 13 more.

In no particular order:

1. The Scout Mindset (Julia Galef) ⊕ The links mostly go to my reviews, as brief as they may be. If I haven’t written about some of these — and I am only now finding out I have skipped quite a few — the link is to the book’s Amazon page. So it goes…
2. How to Live (Derek Sivers)
3. Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics (Daniel Kaplan and Leon Glass)
4. Light (M. John Harrison), which I haven’t written about, maybe because it was a re-read of a book that fascinated me way back when I was in medical school, or maybe because Harrison’s dense prose made me so numb I couldn’t write anything for days. Regardless, it is a masterpiece of science fiction.
5. Safe Haven (Mark Spitznagel)
6. Pieces of the Action (Vannevar Bush)
7. The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan)
8. Where Good Ideas Come From (Steven Johnson)
9. Calculated Risks (Gerd Gigerenzer)
10. Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World (Yaneer Bar-Yam), which is another one without a quick review, though again I can’t remember why. Bar-Yam is now more known for his zero Covid activism, which is unfortunate because it may turn away people from his general work on complex systems and the importance of scale.
11. The Morning Star (Karl Ove Knausgaard), but I know full well why I didn’t write about it — it was because I didn’t like it and, even worse, I recommended it to a friend before reading the whole thing on the strength of the setup. Turns out setup is all it was. Shame.
12. Alexander Hamilton (Ron Chernow)
13. The Fifth Risk (Michael Lewis)
14. Checkpoint Charlie (Ian MacGregor)
15. Checkmate in Berlin (Giles Milton) which I ended up liking more than the unfocused Checkpoint Charlie, though what the message is other than be careful of temporary solutions because they may last longer than you think, or want I am not quite sure.
16. The Complacent Class (Tyler Cowen)
17. Craft Coffee: A Manual (Jessica Easto)
18. Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization (Donald W. Braben) is another one that didn’t sit with me as well as I thought it would, mainly because it turned into the author’s explanation and justification for what the research institue he was running did. Old man explains himself can be a good genre — see Pieces of the Action, above — but this one didn’t quite cut it.
19. Adventures of a Computational Explorer (Stephen Wolfram) confirmed that Wolfram is a lovable blowhard.
20. A World Without Email (Cal Newport)
21. Twilight of Democracy (Anne Applebaum)
22. Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber)
23. Gödel, Escher, Bach (Douglas R. Hofstadter) was the best book I read this year. I didn’t write about it because I wanted to keep it for myself but I guess that now the secret is out.
24. Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) had the opposite effect of the intended: I realized that the PKM genre is mostly BS and that people with the best “systems” — if you can call them that — don’t write about their workflows but rather about the things around and because of which those workflows were created in the first place. Ryan Holiday comes to mind, but really it is better to find the people in your field whose work you admire and see what they are doing, not what some PKM guru is saying you should do.
25. Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom (Katherine Eban)
26. Fooled by Randomness (Nassim N. Taleb)
27. How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness (Russel D. Roberts) Denser than the title and the cover would suggest, and with some good messages.
28. Nova Swing (M. John Harrison) because I am a gluton for punishment (but seriously: this is the lighter and more readable sequel to Harrison’s Light)
29. Wild Problems (Russel D. Roberts)
30. The Courage to Be (Paul Tillich) which left enough of an impression that I dedicated a whole podcast episode about it, though in Serbian. What I really thought about non-Serbian speakers shall never know.
31. Coddling of the American Mind (Greg Lukianoff and Jonatha Haidt) was merele OK, as it considered the general decay of intellectual life as phenomenon isolated to American universities. Haidt, one of the authors, recently wrote a brilliant essay correcting this mistake.
32. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis), which I didn’t understand. I should probably read it again and with more care. A project for another year…

Dishonorable mention goes to Ministry for the Future, the only book I started this year without finishing because it read as an underbaked piece of propaganda. The only other book in recent memory which suffered the same fate was the loud, the insufferable, the too smart for its own good Catch 22, to give you an idea of my literary proclivities. They just weren’t for me.