Posts in: podcasts

I have linked to a Conversation with Tyler (Cowen) in a while because most of them have to date been bland (Nate Silver? Seriously?) but the most recent one with Kyla Scanlon was compelling. She is a 27-year-old book author and… popularizer of economics (?) who writes on Substack and makes videos.

Last week’s EconTalk with Marty Makary featured several topics relevant to zombie medicine. One was a zombie’s return to the world of the living, with hormone replacement therapy for women not being as bad as we thought, particularly for preventing hot flashes in early menopause (before age 60). The other was the emergence of a new zombie: removing ovaries to prevent ovarian cancer when it is now thought that most ovarian cancers arise from the Fallopian tubes, not the ovaries themselves. I wouldn’t call it a full blown zombie just yet as there is an ongoing randomized controlled trial comparing the two approaches and who knows, its results may kill the old practice outright.

📚 Finished reading: The Friction Project by Robert I. Sutton, one of those books that should have been a blog post. The fluff is a rapid-fire succession of case studies that are too brief to be memorable but too detailed to be quickly filed away. Just listen to the podcast episode and skip the book.

Today in teaching birds how to sing

From the Institute For Progress-supported newsletter, Macroscience:

Last year, IFP brought together some of our closest friends and collaborators to put together a podcast series that would serve as a beginner-friendly introduction to metascience.

The result? “Metascience 101” – a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement. We investigate why building a genuine “science of science” matters, and how research in metascience is translating into real-world policy changes.

So far so good. First guests?

Journalist Dylan Matthews sits down with economist Heidi Williams and IFP co-founder Caleb Watney to set the scene.

Bah-rump. Episode two?

OpenPhil CEO Alexander Berger interviews economist Matt Clancy and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison to talk about whether science itself is slowing down, one of the key motivating concerns in metascience.

A journalist, an entrepreneur, two economists and a policy wonk gather around the fireplace to talk science. What seems to be missing is actual scientists. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

And if your retort is that few if any scientists have metascience as there full-time field of study, well, are any of the above doing it full time? I am sure the discussions will be brilliant — I will write up updates as I listen along — but the start looks a helluva lot like an echo chamber. Hope I’m wrong!

(↬Tyler Cowen, because who else. He will also be a guest in a future episode.)

ChatGPT, the blog expert

The latest episode of The Talk Show was with Taegan Goddard, who all the way back in 1999 founded the blog Political Wire which is apparently a continuous intravenous drip for people interested in US politics. Now, I’ve had other preocupations back then and not being an American citizen still have little to no interest, so this blog wasn’t even on my radar until listening to the episode. But now I wonder: are there any more relevant blogs I’ve missed out on, about medicine and biotechnology in particular?

ChatGPT’s first pass was mediocre. I’ll save you the verbalist padding, but here are its suggestions in response to my prompt: “Is there a website/blog like politicalwire.com or daringfireball.net but for biotechnology?”

It’s a 20% hit rate: only Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline comes close to what I asked for. The others are all medium to big news outlets that yes, focus on biotech, but that’s not what I asked for. The second try, after I asked for more like Lowe’s, was a tad better:

That’s more like it! 80% now, and if I were feeling generous I’d give it a full 100% since In the Pipeline is, in fact, a Sci Trans Med blog. But then I asked for too much, and it hallucinated 3 more, two of which were hallucinations (BioPunk and BiotechBits, which were at least plausible names) and one was a sub-blog of Endpoints that also didn’t exist.

So, now I have two new blogs to follow (Timmerman Report and The Niche; Biotech Strategy is behind a paywall and I’ve already been following the others), and an ever-increasing urge to update the Blogroll, which has been under construction for the past five months with no end in sight.

David Perell’s podcast “How I Write” underwhelmed in the beginning, but a year in he got my attention. The episode with Ben Thompson of “Stratechery” was stellar — with a guest like Ben how could it not be — but I didn’t expect to like this episode on copywriting as much as I did.

My last post mentioned the new World War I memorial in DC, due to be unveiled next month. I only found out about it yesterday, thanks to this brilliant interview that Russ Roberts had with the memorial’s creator, Sabin Howard. Highly recommended!

The Incomparable’s episode about The Boy and the Heron was a good sanity check that my own intuition was right. Yes, it’s weird and yes, most of it is just a dream, following the incoherent-but-comprehensible dream logic better than most movies. As a non-native speaker of English I did not find Christian Bale’s voice acting as off-putting as TI guests did, but I agree that he comes off as not a very nice person and even a bit of a war profiteer. How that can be any different in the Japanese version I can’t foresee, but I’ll find out soon enough.

📚 Finished reading: Toxic Exposure by Chadi Nabhan, in record time. The prose may have been clunky but the drama of the Monsanto Rondup trials was real and the book was a page-turner, so it took me less than 48 hours to zip through cover to cover.

The court transcripts make the story, especially when Chadi was cross-examined about the nuances of probability, causality and informed risk. If those topics sounds appealing, I recommend you listen to Chadi’s one-hour conversation with Nassim Taleb about the book. If only Taleb could have been there as an expert witness…

Nassim Taleb doesn’t often do podcasts unless they are with Russ Roberts, so him being a guest on The Tim Ferris Show was a surprise. The episode begins with a protracted introduction and a lot of reminiscing, but things take off in the second half which is an excellent introduction to Taleb’s concepts on probability.

Great for forwarding to friends and family who may have heard of Ferris but don’t know anything about Taleb except for his Twitter escapades (or are they now called X-scapades)? .