Clayton Davis for Variety:

The smartest defense is baked into the movie’s DNA. This is not a redemption tour. It is a study of the impossibility of ever knowing what is real, which is either the perfect subject for a branch that fetishizes authenticity or a provocation aimed straight at it.

Max Fisher for Newpress:

China quietly saved the world last month.

Max Kozlov for Nature:

The NIH is quietly restricting funding for research that evaluates how public policy impacts human health.

Ba-dump.

Frequent Infinite Regress linkee Ruxandra Tesslo wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about why we can’t get new cancer cures. Unsurprising for those who have read her past work, she places the bulk of the blame on the glacial speed by which clinical trials are designed, set up and run, at least in the US. Biotechs are looking at other countries — yes, including China — for their next first-in-human trial. All the cures we need are right there in the lab, you see, it is these darn trials that are too slow, keeping patients away from life-saving medicines. There is a nice n-of-one story about a patient with KRAS-mutated lung cancer who received a RAS inhibitor in a phase 1 trial to set the tone.

Vinay Prasad calls out a few big omissions in Tesslo’s article, and the number one point he brings out is the number one point I have issue with as well: the science is, in fact, lacking. There are no miracle cures locked in a drawer somewhere, not reaching patients because of government bureaucracy or a big pharma conspiracy.

But how can that be, with all the money thrown into cancer research ever since Dick Nixon’s War on Cancer? Well. Though I don’t know this for a fact, I have a strong suspicion that the answer to the curious lack of cancer cures is the same as the answer to that other question no one dares ask: if trials being so slow and expensive is a huge bottleneck, why are they so slow and expensive in the first place? It’s also the reason why a discerning reader of this blog may have noticed that my writing has taken a slight but unexpected anti-market turn.

Financialization, once the great enabler of garage-based startups, has turned every field of American endeavor into a casino and given one too many a bullshitter enough money to choke the competition. Biomedicine is particularly susceptible to bullshit large and small. Even if decently financed, the honest players — of which there are quite a few — have to fight for other limited resources in the ecosystem, from PhDs to do the actual research and clinical trial sites to attention. The result is hyperinflation of trial costs and a veritable bullshit bonanza in the biomedical literature, and this is not even taking into account the more personal motives of academics to fill the field with dreck.

My big fear is that no one is talking about the negative impact of financialization because it is water. Kudos to Tesslo for not talking about billion dollar drugs, but that seems to be the default, even among science journalists. Mr. Market will give you cheaper 4K TVs — surveillance comes for free — what it won’t give you is cancer cures.

A note on the title: I have come to detest The NYT’s two-sentence titles that go out of their way to dumb down the subject matter while piquing people’s interest, but thought it would be fun to write one for a quick post that’s a comment on a NYT article. Promise it won’t happen again.

• Dan Luu: Ed Zitron’s AI prediction track record. Not great. I have linked to Zitron a few times, to articles that were short enough for me to actually read and understand. Most of them were just too long and/or too angry. Fitting that a critique of Zitron’s writing is just as long, though much more even-keel.
• Lilly Lynch: Sympathy for the Devil? Lindsay Clancy, Mercy and Maternal Filicide in History. The less I know about this case the better, but this was some good context.
• Ernie Smith: Wanted: Some Cheap Computing. Issue No. 1 of Smith’s mini-PC newsletter. I am in the market for both a heavy-duty primary machine and some satellite servers, and thanks to the ramapocalypse the latter — and therefore this newsletter — is much more appealing.
• Derek Sivers: Bangalore India hospital flow. Today I learned Sivers was a fan of “executive health checks”. Yikes! As I wrote in a comment to the article:

The human body is not a car. We don’t know how most of it works. There are a handful of labs you should start getting once you hit 40 (or earlier depending on family history), and a few cancer screenings we know work. Anything else is a needless waste of money at best, and a recipe for an iatrogenic disaster if an incidental finding from a whole-body MRI leads to a wild goose chase, biopsies, surgeries, etc. Not to mention the false sense of security these things can give.

Calling it now: “quietly” is Word of the Year 2026.

What AI sired, mindless zeitgeist reverberators now rear.

• Michael Peel and Antonia Cundy: The cowboy clinics selling unproven longevity treatments. Wherein two FT reportes pose as patients and get to hear some ridiculous promises. How on Earth do these supposed doctors get to keep their licenses?
• Robert Armstrong: The US consumer is showing some strain. Great data analysis work. If only people gave that much scrutiny to biomedcial research.
• Miranda Green: Have you got 10 minutes? No? Neither do I.
• Madhumita Murgia: Anthropic launches AI tool that can conduct scientific experiments. As if science wasn’t slop-ridden already. Says the text:

AI has become increasingly important to drug research at big pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly, maker of popular weight-loss drugs, has partnered with AI chipmaker Nvidia chips and earlier this year invested in Insilico Medicine, a company focused on AI for drug discovery.

Please. I would wait until any of the money poured into drug discovery AI produces a tangible result before calling it “increasingly important”. Never mind that it’s not the discovery that is the real bottleneck.

This chart is a close relative to “you are not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.” Marginal Revolution comments, as usual, have it right; the actual chart title doesn’t.

If you have followed this blog long enough you will know that I am an unabashed fan of the life and work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, pugilistic social media presence and all. There is no simple way to summarize why — this post from the economist Branko Milanović is as good of an attempt as any — and reducing his Incerto series of books to a collection of One-Neat-Tricks (Ergodicity! Lindy! Skin in the game!) would not do them justice.

Having said that, here is One Neat Trick: when deciding to act, think about the best-case and the worst-case scenarios and try to pick one with known and limited downside and a potentially unlimited upside. The classic example here is buying stock options: for pennies on the dollar you purchase the right to buy stock at a certain price by a certain date. If the stock costs less than that price by the time it expires your only loss is the price of the option. But in the unlikely but possible case it skyrockets, you can pocket a good chunk of change. ⊕ [Note: People misunderstand this as Taleb recommending that people from all walks of life go into options trading. Far from it. In fact, one thing he said at my first RWRI years ago which has served me well is that if you are not a professional trader and you earn money from a different profession, your priority should be capital preservation, not generation. ]

The flipside and what you should definitely not do is selling uncovered stock options. Yes, most of them will expire and be worthless and you will get to keep the modest steady income derived from the selling price. But in the unlikely but possible case it skyrockets, and you don’t actually own those stocks — that’s the “uncovered” part, and yes people actually do that — you will need to purchase them on the open market at that very high price. D’oh.

Rarely are real-life choices this clear. You usually have to pick between several bad options with the same limited upside and different downsides. Case in point — and we are finally getting to the point of the title — is what the Colorado town of Erie has to deal with. Some houses in Erie are yards away from the Draco pad, one of several new fracking projects slithering around Denver. The city council was initially against it, then one member did an about turn, changed his vote, and allowed the sale of mineral and oil rights “for up to $35 million over the next two decades” along with some 160 acres of land previously used for drilling.

Quoth the Mayor, Andrew Moore: “So when we get to the point of, ‘Hey, the state approved this’ — I can’t change that,” Moore said. “But I think we need to work to get as much as we possibly can for Erie.”

In case you missed it, his thinking was that the state approved it already, drilling is down in the next-door Weld County and Erie can’t stop it, so they might as well get something out of it, like keeping the 10/10 elementary school and building up some more of the infrastructure. The downside is that it is and the upside looks good, so what’s wrong with that?

Well, if you stopped to think about it for more than a millisecond a question may come to mind: why on Earth would a publicly traded company give anything to the town if they were going to drill and get the oil anyway, There Will Be Blood-style? Out of the goodness of their corporate hearts? Please.

First, the upside is not what it seems. This is from yesterday’s Denver Post:

Under the agreement negotiated by Owens, Erie would receive a $4.5 million upfront payment and 3% royalty interest for the life of the project, which the town projected at the time of the council’s vote could range from $19 million to $31 million. The royalties wouldn’t kick in until SM Energy has recovered 200% of its cost to develop Draco.

$4.5 million is significantly less than $35M, as there are no guarantees whatsoever that any royalties would be paid out: those development costs can skyrocket, particularly when it’s the company itself estimating how much everything cost. Fungible accounting ftw.

Worse yet, by selling their rights I can only assume that the townsfolk are giving up the opportunity to sue the company for any untoward consequences of pumping millions of gallons of pressurized fluid into a landscape pockmarked with old oil and gas wells. Paying the town $4.5 million to not have to think about would be a steal, and easily defensible to even the stingiest of the board members.

So these are the two bad, ugly, abysmal choices put forth: take the $4.5M upside in return for the unlimited downside if and when things go wrong and there is no one to hold liable; or don’t take anything but lawyer up and reserve the right to block everything in courts at the first sign of trouble while also getting some money for potential damages.

My choice would be preservation, but then one of the big reasons we are in Denver and not north of it is that we didn’t want to make choices like that.

I am shocked — shocked! — to find a zoomer “AI investor” caught swimming naked at the first turn of the tide:

Aschenbrenner, who had no previous trading experience before starting the fund, worked for the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire before it collapsed in late 2022. He later joined OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team before being fired over an alleged leak.

With such an illustrious pedigree, how could things have possibly gotten so wrong so quickly?

And in the unlikely case you were still wondering if there was an AI bubble, even FT called it.

• Gillian Tett for the FT: Welcome to the era of financial candyfloss. ⊕ [Note: Gift link, if you click on time. ] It is the perfect metaphor for American finance: spinning thin and devalued real properties into mounds of tooth-decaying fluff. You know things are bad when it comes not from the Guardian but from a seasoned Financial Times columnist.
• Brett Murphy for USA Today: Rigged. ⊕ [Note: ᔥCorey Doctorow ] An exhaustively sourced, dramatically illustrated, harrowing story about truck drivers working as slave labor, from 2017. If only there were a mechanism by which the richest, most prosperous country in the world could control this and similar excesses of a greedy minority.
• Alice Fleerackers for Nautilus: When Stupid Was a Diagnosis. On the plight of people with intellectual disabilities. In some ways, the 1700s were better to most of them than even now, or rather, they were equally cruel and bad to everyone regardless of their mental prowess. Then came the oh so ironically named Enlightenment.
• David Tuller: Trial By Error: No Benefits for Multidisciplinary Rehabilitation in New ME/CFS Study. “ME/CFS” stands for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and it seems to be the consequence of viruses playing havoc with people’s immune systems, which leads to their autonomous nervous systems being out of whack. Many of you may not remember, but there was a big viral infection going around 5-6 years ago that left everyone exposed all at once, which led to an explosion of these cases in absolute terms, though in terms of percentages it is thankfully still a vanishingly small fraction. Sadly, you can’t rehabilitate your way out of this particular organic problem, and it puts many young and otherwise healthy people out of commission. If only there was a mechanism to fund more basic research.
• Davide Gioia: Wildlife on the Planet Furaha by Gert van Dijk. A book review. The book in question is an alternative evolutionary history, richly illustrated, from a professor of neurology at Leiden University. An instant pre-order for me, and it is coming out next week in the US!

Every dickover is infuriating, but the worst ones by far are on the websites I’m already paying to access. Go to hell, Gray Lady; what you’re selling doesn’t need an app.