• Nassim Taleb: The introduction to my paper on data hacking, particularly p-hacking. “The implication is that the conventional p < 0.05 threshold is grossly insufficient; one must demand orders of magnitude stricter cutoffs or radically reframe inference procedures to achieve robustness.” Most of the rest of the pre-print is way over my head, but there are a few highlights for the non-mathematicians.
• Kagi Blog: Introducing Kagi News. One daily update, well-sourced, beautiful reading experience online and in the app, has an RSS feed. What’s not to love? (ᔥJeremy)
• Scott Sumner: Subjective time. On the consequences of time passing by more quickly as we age. You may not want to live to one thousand!
• George Packer: America’s Zombie Democracy. I have enjoyed Packer’s righting ever sine he got Richard Holbrooke’s story exactly right and he doesn’t disappoint here either. There is, of course, a straight line running through the people Packer covered — and was friends with — and the country’s current zombified state. (ᔥTipsy Teetotaler)
• Aidan Walker: memory is a contest. History both is and isn’t what it used to be, in that the digital age has started a reversion of history to premodern times, relying on a battle of narratives more than the written record. Or has it always been a battle?

• David Graeber: Hostile Intelligence: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank. From 2015, but ever-more relevant. “A life of calculated degradation” was an apt description for what has been going on, and it seems to have reached the end stage.
• The WSJ Editorial Board: Dr. Prasad, the FDA’s Grim Reaper. I won’t quote from this article because it is behind a paywall. Instead, here is FDR: “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” (ᔥThe Niche)
• Chris Arnade: The meaning of, and in, McDonald’s. From December 2024 and I don’t know if I have linked to it before — likely I have — but it came to mind when reading the article below.
• Ted Gioia: David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us About these Eight Things. They are, as summarized by Gioia (but do read the whole article for the explanation):

1. Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
2. This will lead to widespread depression.
3. This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
4. Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
5. The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
6. Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
7. We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
8. Art can help us heal.

Indeed.

• Jasmine Sun: 🌻 are you high-agency or an NPC? Life in San Francisco, as depicted here, sounds absolutely horrifying. It is a beautiful city and if you can afford to live there without getting involved in tech you should absolutely check it out, but sheesh. (ᔥJohn Naughton)
• Alexey Guzey: I ran out of money a year ago, spent the last of my savings on a prostitute in Hong Kong, and became a commie. Intentionally provocative headline for an article that ends with: “If there’s at least one thing I learned this year, it’s that even when I’m completely useless to the world, it’s not going to abandon me. And I wish nothing more than to make sure that every single human, no matter who and where they are, knew this too.” Especially if you choose to live in San Francisco!
• Steven Johnson: The Blank Page Revolution. Begins as a review of Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (which I also liked) then delves into the importance of paper as a material. I would read Johnson’s book on paper, if he were ever to write one.
• Anil Dash: How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. He sure did. I don’t hate liquid glass but I also don’t see the point, and that is just the tip of the iceberg for Apple’s missed chances to make a difference. “Sugar water” indeed.
• Chris Arnade: Final thought on Australia. He links to the three preceding articles as well, and each and every one of them is well worth your time. The finale begins thusly: “I went to Australia expecting little, on a whim to escape the heat of August and travel crowds, and I’ve never been more wrong about a place. I had assumed I’d be bored by the bougie, but instead I found an endlessly fascinating country that, even after a month of travel, I only scratched the surface of, and now sitting here typing this, I am happily dreaming about returning to.” And now I want to go!

Note: four of the five websites above are on Substack. I don’t like Substack. But it is so much of a behemoth that people you would least expect, like Nassim Taleb, are dipping their toes. The implications of even him abdicating to the winner of the most recent round of tech roulette are dire — yet another thing I should write about more, when time allows.

I nod my head agreeing with much of what Tyler Cowen says and writes, but the points where he is off are not minor. Here he is a few weeks ago, on a new RCT banning smartphones in the classroom showing (very) modest improvements in grades:

Note with grades there is “an average increase of 0.086 standard deviations.” I have no problem with these policies, but it mystifies me why anyone would put them in their top five hundred priorities, or is that five thousand?

He also points to an older trial from Norway, which had similar results. Cowen frames the bans as tiny gains for unknown and potentially enormous cost. And student comments like the following he found worthy enough to repost:

As an academically successful student in a pretty well ranked high school my recollection was that the entire experience was horrible and torturous and essentially felt like being locked up in prison. The pace of teaching was also so slow that the marginal value add of being in class was essentially 0 when compared to the textbook reading I would do after school anyway.

So… yes it was nice to have a phone and I don’t care if it distracts stupid students from learning.

And here is Rana Foroohar in this morning’s FT, under the headline Trump’s war on America’s schools:

[Randi] Weingarten, those of you reading outside the US could be forgiven for not knowing, is the head of America’s second-largest teachers’ union. In her new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, she lays out some of the history of authoritarian backlash against public education and its teachers, from the post-civil war Reconstruction era in the US, to Europe in the 1930s, to Vladimir Putin’s justification of crackdowns on teachers and universities in Russia (“wars are won by . . . schoolteachers”).

She also quotes the Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, who found that a lack of “critical thinking” made people more receptive to authoritarian leaders. As he put it, “the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads”. Or, as Trump so memorably put it after a 2016 primary win: “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

Reading is going out of fashion, but I would urge the student above, and Tyler Cowen, and everyone else who thinks eaking out marginal gains for top-performing students is worth the cost of “distracting stupid students from learning”, to (re)read Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas or — if they have more time — Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov which served as an inspiration with this passage in particular:

“I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?”

And some may agree (I don’t)! But of course the equilibrium is not in focusing all of the world’s misery into a single person, as it tends to spread out, and you can’t lock up those exposed in a dank basement like the citizens of Omelas did. Rather, those people get to vote, and not in a way you may like.

• Rachel Kwon: Slowing Down. It is about living life in the slow lane after 40. As a recent entrant into the fifth decade I observed the same. For me, this only applies to the physical world — I still tend to be impatient with bits and bytes.
• Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Some data on homework and its correlations. This is about assigned work at university level courses, and in my mind “homework” should be kept in grade school. I remain a big proponent of oral exams, though we don’t use them in the one course I teach.
• Katarina Zimmer for the journal Nature: ‘Lipstick on a pig’: how to fight back against a peer-review bully. Quoth reviewer two: “The first author is a woman. She should be in the kitchen, not writing papers.” Should we trust science more or less when we have this kind of information? (ᔥDerek Lowe)
• Nori Parellius: What the left hemisphere might tell us about large language models. Very much a plug for Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary which I have yet to read. I, too, would much prefer we use “confabulation” instead of “hallucination”, though it also has some troubling assumptions of its own.

• The Omg Lol Times: Disconnecting from Discord. My distaste of Discord is from their overall esthetics and not because they are snitches, but I am not surprised. Only in Hollywood do villains have taste.
• Kyla Scanlon: 6 Economic Lessons from Books About Power, Propaganda, and Decline. Sure, it’s a listicle, but every item stands on its own.
• Ruxandra Teslo: For clinical trial reform, we need more hobbits. There is also a quick follow-up. I will have more to write on this topic.
• Scot Sumner: Breakneck. It is about Dan Wang’s book. Consider it a continuation of this list.
• Derek Guy: Cuttings: Armani Obit, Republican Style, Office Wear, and Bare Chests. The man behind the @dieworkwear social media accounts has a blog which is, surprise surprise, much less engagement-bait-y and political than any of the media personas. The most recent article is “just” a series of excerpts from his recent big-media articles, but I imagine scrolling through the archive would be a good exercise for the weekend.

• J Mark Sloan, a hematologist/oncologist at Boston Medical Center, on X: As Hematology-Oncology Fellowship Program Director, I’ve reviewed 647 applications this cycle. Every personal statement cites a passion caring for cancer patients, research and teaching. 85% explicitly prefer academic medicine. No one mentions wanting a career in pharma…. And yet many newly-made oncologists go to work for the industry within 5 years of graduation, as the brief thread continues. Why is that? I blame social media, Instagram most of all, and I am not joking.
• Merlin Mann on Mastodon: Every aspect of this video breaks my brain. It’s a good video and what’s even better is the trailer to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? to which he linked below, and now I want to see the movie. Late 1960s to early 1970s was the golden age of Hollywood movies.
• Bogdan Ionescu: Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape. What it says on the tin. Quite an achievement and it’s not ugly to look at either. (ᔥThought Shrapnel)
• Taylor Troesh: 100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon. The winner of Adam Mastroianni’s blog post competition. Intriguing.
• Aidan Walker: is MrBeast the antichrist?. This being a substack post and not a newspaper article, Betteridge’s law of headlines does not apply.

• Nassim Taleb: The World in Which We Live Now. This is the essay version of his talk at the Ron Paul Institute, and much easier to follow.
• Miloš Vojnović: The 2020s: The Age of What?. My suggestion: despair.
• Leo Tolstoy: A Confession. Serialized by Cluny Journal, two of 6 parts out as of this morning.
• Tanner Greer: Bullets and Ballots: The Legacy of Charlie Kirk. A viewpoint about a person of whose existence I wasn’t even peripherally aware until last week: “I do not think liberals, progressives, or even older conservatives understood the amount of slime thrown at Kirk by those to his right. His eagerness to work with the new establishment inside established political forms, his program for the right’s spiritual renewal, and his generally pro-Israel line made him a constant target of Nick Fuentes and the “Fuentards” who follow him. His commitment to populist coalition-building made him an enemy of people like Laura Loomer, who described Kirk as “a political charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next” just a few weeks ago.” If you are known by your enemies…
• Ernie Smith: Saying Exactly What You Mean. Another viewpoint, but more so about Jesse Welles whose song [“Charlie”][5a] is very good.
• Claude Taylor on X: This is still the best reading of all this I’ve seen. I have no idea who this is-but (I think) he’s got it. I agree! The commentator’s name is Aidan Walker and he has a blog about memes to which I am now subscribed.

🎙️ Russ Roberts responded to my comments from yesterday on his conversation with Munger. There is an episode of EconTalked with Sam Altman that goes into the Y Combinator version of AirBnB’s founding. But the details are not relevant to my point, as I replied. This is why I still keep an X account.

• Cory Doctorow: You should be using an RSS reader. Almost a year old, but an important preamble for what’s below, especially if you only have a vague idea of what RSS stands for.
• Buttondown’s blog: The story of how RSS beat Microsoft (ᔥDave Winer, or rather his link blog so I couldn’t figure out a way to link to his actual post made on September 10th, 2025. This was his comment to the link: “We weren’t trying to beat anyone, we just wanted to make a level playing field where bloggers and news orgs could coexist on the web.")
• From the man himself: It’s really simple. Dave Winer’s pre-notes for September 18th, 2025, which will be the 23rd anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0.

A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That’s what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn’t be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.

• Alan Levine: A(I)s We May Not Think (nor search, nor link) (ᔥx28’s new Blog). A riff on Vannevar Bush’s 80-year-old essay As We May Think. Though only mentioned once, the spirit of RSS is strong in this one.
• Buttondown’s blog, again: rssrssrssrss (that is not a typo). Yesterday was the first I’ve heard of Buttondown, which is apparently a newsletter service, but they have a nice blog and do cool things with RSS. This is an open-source service that combines multiple RSS feeds into a single feed. The use cases write themselves.

In the unlikely case you are reading this but aren’t using RSS feed readers, may I suggest a few resources, in no particular order:

• Feedbin (most user-friendly, but you have to pay)
• Feedly (more enterprise-oriented but still good; has a free tier)
• Feedland (Dave Winer’s own creation; unorthodox and completely free)
• NetNewsWire (open-source, iOS/macOS only)

And if I get just one person to stop scrolling down social media walls and start making rivers of news of their own, this Friday won’t have gone to waste.