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Monday links, science, technology and cults

Saturday links, FT gift edition

  • Michael Stott: Will pressure from Trump cause Cuba to finally buckle? We visited Cuba 12 years ago and impressions from that visit now seem terribly quaint. A horrible regime doing horrible things to good people.
  • Steven Simon: How ‘homeland’ put America on the path to illiberalism. My favorite T-shirt is almost as old as the Department of Homeland Security — should it not have been the first one to go if one were to cut down on the number of government agencies? As Cory Doctorow recently wrote: “…things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children.”
  • Laura Bates: How tech turned against women. Not surprising to anyone who’s spent 5 minutes scrolling through a large enough men-only group chat. Out of 20 men at least two will be pervs — enough to poison the stream through mutual encouragement.
  • Janan Ganesh: What social media gave us. An avenue in which to spot the ocasional flash of insight from an unlikely intellectual, mostly. But:

Notice that I have used the past tense about social media in much of this column. To my mind, it is dead, as I quit it long ago. That is a move to be recommended. (Don’t announce that you are leaving, though. Just leave. You are not Adele cancelling that last Vegas residency of hers.)

Indeed.

Friday links, quick hits

  • Martha Lane Fox: The Price of initiative just collapsed. On the lag between invention and implementation, from printing press to AI.
  • Scott Shambaugh: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me. A taste of what’s possible, with follow-up.
  • Steve Blank: You Only Think They Work For You. About contracted service providers. The article is about public relations, but applies just as well to contract research organizations (CROs) and these complex dynamics are part of the reason clinical trials are so expensive.
  • Andrew Gelman: The 80% power lie. A clear example of why frequentist statistics, so favored by conservative regulators, institutional review boards and scientific review committees, are more often than not based on false assumptions.
  • Dr. Drang: Chinese New Year and Ramadan. The pseudonymous doctor often shifts between programming and scripting languages, from R through Python to Mathematica which coincidentally matches my own amateur programmer journey. For this post he used Emacs Lisp and I am very much interested in Emacs and Lisp right now due to recent experimentation with Linux. Saliency FTW.

Tuesday links, on science, medicine, technology and a bit of something extra

Why no scientist should hang their hat on a single pet theory, with real-world examples. The same problem haunts the world of biotech even as its denizens claim their superiority at drug development.

About a recent Nature Medicine article which found that LLMs were no better than Google at helping patients diagnose and manage their self-reported maladies. The reasons are those that I suggested two and a half years ago — ChatGPT can give you the correct answer from a properly structured clinical vignette, but the art and science of medicine are transferring the reality in front of you — the patient’s haphazard story, their hodge poge of medical records, the subtle physical exam findings — into something salient. Not saying AI won’t get there at some point, but it clearly still needs work.

Rao has collected 101 (!?) of his best Twitter threads and a few hundred single tweets into a book. A note on the title page says:

This book is LLM-friendly. Point your LLM to venkateshrao.com/twitter-book if you want it to explore it. A full interactive archive, explorable via an AI oracle, is under development.

Living up to his call to be (slightly) monstrous.

Yes, it is a person I hate making a good point, which is that the brutalist architecture of L’Enfant Plaza is out of place so close to the National Mall and should be kept where it belongs. I even prefer the proposed neoclassicist style to what Trump’s ego would want, which I imagine to be a Dubai And even Dubai would be better than what’s in the President’s id. on the Potomac.

Thursday links, hypothetical

Tuesday links, some old most new

  • Matthias Ott: Webspace Invaders. Independent blogs are being run over by LLM-adjacent crawlers spelunking in the rarely visited reaches of the Internet, and the hosting bills can break the bank. The most common point of origin seems to be Singapour and whatdayaknow so far this year almost as many “visitors” to this blog came from there as they did from the US of A. Greetings, Sing-a-bots! Do feel free to promote me on moltbook, maybe you and your friends will learn how to write prpr English.
  • Taylor Nicole Rogers for the FT: What fast food’s downturn says about the US economy. It says that we are in a “K-shaped recovery”, which is to say that the rich are getting reacher and the poor even poorer, as planned. It is still stunning to me that most Europeans consider American fast food to be a premium product. As I wrote earlier today I am currently in Barcelona and Sagrada Família is surrounded by a McDonalds, Ben & Jerry’s, Five Guys, Taco Bell and a Burger King. No further comment there.
  • Steve Blank: Revisionist History – Aliens, Secrets and Conspiracies. A stunning story of how Pentagon disinformed itself, thought as Blank said it will not convince the true UFO believers and may in fact push them deeper into conspiracy territory.
  • Alec Watson on YouTube: Algorithms are breaking how we think. I am 42 and thought this was some pretty basic Internet sleuthing, so basic in fact that it wasn’t even worth mentioning let alone making a 37-minute video about. But then I imagined my kids trying to do it and now I am designing a 3-month curriculum on important life skills. (ᔥTedium, which listed many other videos worth recommending)
  • Poul-Henning Kamp: Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?. My googling of Chandler let to this 1999 usenet (?) post so important it deserved its own domain. Yes, it refers to everyone having opinion on simple software — the simpler the software the more abundant the opinions — bogging down development. But it applies just as well to those Institutional Review Boards in which everyone has an opinion and wants to “leave their fingerprint”, as apparently the Danes call it. So there may yet be some boulders on the path of fast clinical trials and not just quicksand.

A tale of two economy Substacks

Here is Sebastian Galiani on the concept of marginal revolution: ᔥTyler Cowen on his blog, Marginal Revolution

In the 1870s, almost simultaneously and largely independently, three economists overturned classical political economy. William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras broke with the Ricardian tradition that explained value through labor, costs, or embedded substance. Value, they argued, does not come from the total amount of work put into something. It comes from the last unit—from what economists would soon call marginal valuation.

This was not a semantic tweak. It was a change in how economic reasoning itself works.

If those last four sentences triggered you it is for good reason, because there is more:

We see microeconomics arguments based on levels instead of changes, on identities instead of incentives, on stocks instead of flows. We see decisions justified by who someone is rather than by what happens at the margin. We see calls to preserve structures because they exist, to freeze allocations because change feels uncomfortable, to judge outcomes by averages rather than by trade-offs.

From a marginalist perspective, these arguments are not just wrong; they are incoherent.

And so on. To be clear, this is AI slop plain and simple and is identified as such in one of the top Marginal Revolution comments. It also has 38 likes, 7 reposts and 7 comments on Substack, none of which recognize that much of the text came from a Large Language Model.

Sebastian Galiani doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, but here is the first paragraph of his academic biography:

Sebastian Galiani is the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford and works broadly in the field of Economics. He is a member of the Argentine National Academy of Economic Science, and Fellow of the NBER and BREAD. Sebastian was Secretary of Economic Policy, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Treasury, Argentina, between January of 2017 and June of 2018.

Lovely.

As a palate cleanser, here is an early 2000s article about inequality that the economist Branko Milanović recently re-published on his own Substack:

Many economists dismiss the relevance of inequality (if everybody’s income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and argue that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care about inequality, and to hold that we should be concerned with poverty solely and not with inequality is internally inconsistent.

That is only the first paragraph. The text is not easily summarized or excerpted but it is a wonderful read with which I very much agreed and which only got better and more relevant as years went by. Here are the first two paragraph of Milanović’s Wikipedia page:

Branko Milanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Бранко Милановић, IPA: [brǎːŋko mǐlanoʋitɕ; milǎːn-]) is a Serbian-American economist and university professor. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality.

Since January 2014, he has been a research professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an affiliated senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). He also teaches at the London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. In 2019, he has been appointed the honorary Maddison Chair at the University of Groningen.

Milanović has 8 mentions on Marginal Revolution, including a 2015 post in which Cowen recognizes him as his favorite Serbian economist and blogger. But maybe he fell out of favor, as the last link from Cowen to anything of Milanović’s was back in 2023 (and the one before was in 2020, from Alex Tabarrok, who disagreed with what Milanović wrote about comparing wealth across time periods).

Galiani has 10 mentions, the most recent before this AI slop being his NBER working paper in which he and his co-authors measured efficiency and equity framing in economics research using, yes, LLMs. I actually don’t have a problem with such papers since the LLM use is clearly identified. But selling an LLM’s voice as your own is a different matter altogether and would deserve a posting to the academic Wall of Shame if there was one.

By the way, this is what students at the University of Maryland have to do per UMD guidelines (emphasis mine):

Students should consult with their instructors, teaching assistants, and mentors to clarify expectations regarding the use of GenAI tools in a given course. When permitted by the instructor, students should appropriately acknowledge and cite their use of GenAI applications. When conducting research-related activities (e.g., theses, comprehensive exams, dissertations), students should refer to the guidance below for research and scholarship. Allegations of unauthorized use of GenAI will be treated similarly to allegations of unauthorized assistance (cheating) or plagiarism and investigated by the Office of Student Conduct.

Everything on Substack should be marked as LLM-generated until proven otherwise, and increasingly anything Cowen links to as well.

Kevin Kelley's Six Selfish Reasons to Have Kids, annotated

The numbered items are from Kelley’s recent post, comments below are mine after a bit more than a decade of experience.

  1. Having children is a good – perhaps the best – way to disseminate your values to the next generation.

Provided you have values to disseminate, know what they are, and especially know the difference between values and opinions because while your values may be identical your opinions will often clash.

  1. Children are entertaining, much better than any other streaming option you might pay for.

Absolutely true. My wife and I have a running list of every brilliantly stupid and stupidly brilliant thing our progeny has said. It is long and growing ever longer.

  1. There is a profound and primeval joy in helping a helpless infant become a functioning adult.

Experiencing this right now while having both an infant and a teenager at home. You tend to forget how large that gap actually is since you cross it in daily — nay, hourly — increments, but it is complete helplessness on one end and taking the metro from school by yourself and going on a field trip to China on the other.

  1. A primeval and foundational need of all humans everywhere is to belong, and to be loved.

For being loved alone you could also get a pet, but there is also a need to love that — and please fellow cat lovers do not kill me for writing this — no pet can completely fulfill.

  1. It is exceedingly rare for anyone born to later regret having been born, so the gift of birth is huge.

Well put. Though of course you also take a piece of your heart and put it into someone else, and then things may happen to them or they may be the thing that happens to other people, with strong feelings either way.

  1. If it all works out through adolescence, you will have friends for life.

Amen.

Thursday follow-up, on sensemaking and productivity

Last month I linked to two things that are now worth following up on:

  • John Nerst’s book “Competitive Sensemaking” is out. The only non-Amazon option is an ebook, so I will leave this one for the Daylight tablet.
  • Steven Johnson’s NotebookLM project “Planet Of The Barbarians” is also live, accompanying the newsletter series of the same name. Even more interesting to me are [the notebook][3b] and [newsletter post][3c] titled “The Architecture of Ideas”, referencing Johnson’s work on tools and workflows for writing. Warning: both are full of rabbit holes.

And on the abandoning Apple front:

  • Matt Gemmell has concerns about Apple much better baked than my own. He also has thoughts on detaching but seems less willing to give up on the ecosystem than I am. (ᔥJohn Brady)
  • My own toe in the Apple-less pool is giving up on the essential Mac-only apps. OmniFocus was the first on the chopping block, replaced by Emacs org-mode, though instead of going through now pretty dated tutorials behind that link I just asked Google Gemini how best to convert Kurosh Dini’s Creating Flow with OmniFocus into Org. And it worked! The idea is be to keep replacing apps with open-source equivalents until making the switch becomes easy. It will probably take years but you have to start somewhere.

Tuesday links, only positivity allowed

OK, these two are included more for saliency than positivity, but they are also good!

Update: Adam Mastroianni’s latest post fits here like a glove.