• Andrew Gelman: Similarities and differences between stage magicians purporting to do close reading, and p-hackers purporting to do real science. An excellent post about what’s in the headline, spurred by a five-hour video which I haven’t seen. Note that this is on Gelman’s substack newsletter which purports to be merely a summary of what’s on his blog and early access to some of the articles which he plans to post there, but no, much of the original content is unique to the substack. Have we learned nothing from Twitter et al.?
• Mr. Market (pseud., clearly): What the Fuck Happened to Nerds. How we got from Jobs and Woz to Altman and Musk. His other posts are also quite good.
• Mike Masnick: And Now Basically Everyone In This LEGO Dispute Looks Sketchy. An update from last week’s Thursday link on the great LEGO heist. The more you know, the blurrier everything gets.
• Brennan Kenneth Brown: Yes, Buy Them a Coffee: Support and Mutual Aid on the IndieWeb. For a few days this week most posts on bubbles.town were about the great coffee controversy, spurred as these things often are by a curmudgeonly take on “Buy me a coffee” buttons. I largely agree with Brown — these requests are unobtrusive and satisfy the people’s need to help each other out.

To state the obvious: I have been following blogs for much longer than I’ve had one. A version of what now goes under “Infinite Regress” first started in October 2010, shortly after I moved to the US. Most of it was in Serbian and now available elsewhere but in 2012 I started blogging in English and, well, here we are.

There is only a handful of blogs which I have been following from before that time. The list does not include Marginal Revolution, which I didn’t know about until around 2015, when a hematology attending at NHLBI mentioned it during rounds. ⊕ [Note: Here is the too much information part, and not particularly relevant to the topic at hand: the attending was Neal Young, who also introduced me to Edward Tufte; it was during the post-Tuesday clinic roundup of patients with aplastic anemia, which were always fun; and it was him showing a video of a bear which Tyler Cowen linked to the day before. Why I can remember those facts but not to pick up ricotta cheese at the store as instructed to by my wife is one of those small mysteries of life. I do also remember being somewhat surprised that the super-smart and erudite Young was impressed by a stupid bear video. ] Andrew Gelman’s “Statistical Modeling…” also wouldn’t make the cut: even though he started blogging in 2004, around the time I discovered Bloglines, I wouldn’t become a subscriber until some time during covid lockdowns during a brief period when I thought I had enough time to read much more than I actually could and ultimately and inevitably overcommitted. Yet I try to model their regularity (consciously) and irreverence (not as consciously, more as a permission), if not Cowen’s positions as of late.

Then there are the blogs which are now dead, defunct, or a shadow of themselves. Many of those productivity-adjacent. Stuff like Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Kevin MD. These I couldn’t say were explicit current influences in format or style, but I do still have a GTD and a medicine tag and I update both fairly frequently.

There are only three blogs I can think of that I have been following pre-blogging and still do, with some interruptions in between. Two of them should not be a surprise to even a casual recent reader: John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and Dave Winer’s Scripting News. ⊕ [Note: I fought hard against finshing the title of this post with a (the last one may surpirse you) because this is one of those cases where the clickbaity headline may actually have fit. ] The third, though, fell off my radar during the last great feed reader reshuffle as it has several more times over the last 22 or so years I have been a not-so-faithful follower: Dubious Quality by Bill Harris, which has gone from being predominantly about gaming to game developing to, well, something that is less focused than even what you are reading here so I would not exaggerate if I called DQ the ur-influence of “Infinite Regress”.

And a few decades before @jtr’s push to write more emails I was a fairly regular emailer to Harris. In fact, my very first email to him, my Gmail archive tells me, was dated August 24, 2004 and had the subject line of “RSS feed, please”. I haven’t changed much, have I?

• Greg Wilson: How We Got Here. A primer on the creation of money, monopolies, corporations and the works. Less didactic and an easier read is his more recent article, When the Model Is the Harm.
• Cory Doctorow: The world has moved on. Whereby “moved on” means left to entropy, with systems holding entropy back destroy by, well, see above. Relies heavily on Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, making Doctorow’s post the first reference to the gunslinger on this blog since 2014.
• Aidan Walker: Cuck Internet Theory. I was less interested in the meme Walker discusses — having abandoned most social media this is the first time I saw photos of “a cuck chair” in that particular context — than in the phrase he used near the end when he inevitably turned to AI: the permanent underclass. The “permanent” part never sat well with me, because it goes against the entirety of the human history which time and again has shown us that members of “the underclass” are very capable indeed of carrying pitchforks if and when the need arises.

• Sasha Gusev: Thoughts on AI in academia. They are good ones. Extra points for leading me to an article from Sam Kriss in Harper’s Magazine about some magnificently agentic stupid people spending away their youth in San Francisco.
• Ruxandra Teslo: Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy. The FDA wants companies to make at least two batches of product at the highest standard of manufacturing before approving it for commercial use. You should know this before starting your clinical program, especially if you have manufacturing that’s expensive, so maybe make two small batches instead of a big one? Just a thought. Separately, none of this would be an issue if there was momentum towards considering cell & gene therapy more of a blood bank/cell processing thing than a commercial drug. But then you couldn’t charge as much, could you?
• Regan Penaluna for Nautilus: Lessons in Chemistry, 19th-Century Style. Frustratingly, it takes Penaluna four paragraphs to mention the full name of Jane Marcet, the woman whose book “Conversations on Chemistry” inspired Michael Faraday — first paragraph mention! — to pursue science. The headline is also too broad: this was 1806, pre-Victorian times and barely 19th century. An extraordinary woman. Also: I want that book.
• Kristen French, also for Nautilus: Solving Feynman’s Formula for Eating Well, Parking Your Car, and Finding a Mate. How Feynman’s scribbles in a Thai restaurant lead to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with mathematical proof of a common-sense inkling: more possible choices and more time should lead to more experimentation in order to discover “the best” of anything.
• Adam Mastroianni: Stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos. One of Mastroianni’s best, hinged on one key insight: Americans used to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. High fortune now being so out of reach for many that it is simply unimaginable, they now see themselves as temporarily anonymous celebrities instead, which is why we have become more tolerant of celebrities hawking Oreos and less tolerant of billionaires. Also, good confirmation that I did not imagine the period when artists were trying very hard not to be labeled as sellouts.

• Tim Bradshaw and Cristina Criddle for the FT: ‘Close to the Terminator narrative’: the dawn of self-improving AI. On one hand I want to pat myself on the back for writing that this would happen more than 3 years ago — be vague enough and give it some time and you too may become a futurologist — on the other, how much of the narrative is bubble self-inflation?
• Jason at mybricklog: Bricks & Minifigs Corporate Stole a Man’s $200,000 LEGO Collection and Told Him to Get Bent. I saw a “Brick & Minifigs case” being referenced in several places without knowing what that meant. This is the best description of the case I could find, and it is quite the saga.
• Jordan Michelman for Taste: I Want to Live Like Costco People. ⊕ [Note: ᔥPaul Williams ] I, too, love Costco and appreciate anyone willing to share their own enthusiasm for that shining beacon on the liberal capitalism hill. Still, isn’t it weird seeing what other people buy there? Trays of cocktail shrimp? Turkey and Swiss cheese pinwheels? Why, I never…
• Daniel Frank: the Bill Frisell problem: why we fail to recognize things we ought to love. Because the love is messily intertwined with signaling? But never mind me, I am being too cynical.
• Greg Wilson: Late Merge. Mathematical proof for what should be obvious: in the case of a disappearing lane, zipper merge is superior to getting into the opposite lane early. Note that this does not apply when one of the lanes have a big honking YIELD sign on it, something many DMV area drivers do not appreciate.

The power of the Internet is that, under an innocuous title such as Sdcv-quick Update, on a mostly technical blog dedicated to Emacs, one can find a most delightful essay by James Somers — from way back in 2014, the days of still-capitalized Internet — about the power of the old Webster’s Dictionary, how it outshines its modern successors, and how, wonder of wonders, you can download and install Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828) onto your computing device of choice. [Note: But not Emacs. That’s where quick-sdcv.el comes in! ]

Somers does not quite reach the heights of David Foster Wallace’s Authority and American Usage but then he also takes only about a fifth of the space to make his point. ⊕ [Note: If these two weren’t enough, “Draft No.4” by John McPhee will do nicely to meet your dictionary essay needs. ] His whole blog makes for great reading, most of it having been written pre-LLMs. This is important: Somers is a professional writer whose most recent articles in The New Yorker and The Atlantic keep glazing AI. If you think I am exaggerating, here are some of the more recent titles: “The Coming Software Apocalypse”, “The Scientific Paper is Obsolete”, “How Will A.I. Learn Next?”, “A Revolution in How Robots Learn”, “The Case That A.I. Is Thinking”… With this kind of coverage, who needs a marketing department?

In the preamble to his Morose thoughts at the Semiquincentennial, @ReaderJohn notes:

I’m on a social medium (I refuse to abuse the plural “media”) with an astonishing number of people, many of them decades younger than me, who manage, without coming across as idiots (au contraire: I’m struck by how many there make me feel unobservant and thick-skulled about what I do observe), to focus on positive, and personal, and local things. Kudos to its designer, who consciously designed it that way (I’m not sure how, except that one never knows how many people follow him or her, and there are no buttons to simply “like” a post).

That last parenthetical is, I believe, exactly the reason why micro.blog turned out the way it did. My first thought was that it filtered out people who liked to see numbers go up — many of them not of the clearest mind — right at the outset. But that is not all there is to it, probably not even the most important part. The intentional lack of statistics cuts the feedback loops which tend to make some people into complete assholes, and every person into an occasional asshole. [Note: Or at the very least an asshole-appearing online presence, but to the exposed person — meaning you, dear reader — there is no difference. ]

Every popularity contest will reward the extremes. This is why I gave up following the Bear Blog Discovery feed. Random posts from to-me unknown authors just popping into my RSS reader [Note: These days a combination of the [Inkwell][4] Android app on my Daylight tablet and my own homebrewed [Inkling for Emacs][5], which is where I’m writing this! ] reminded me too much of Twitter’s algorithms, and even Bubbles — posts from 5,000+ independent blogs, including this one, ranked by timeliness and popularity — favors criticism of AI and tech in general combined with outrage/despondence/resignation towards news of the day/breakage of everyday life/civilizational decline. The only ever Infinite Regress post that ended up on the Bubbles front page fits right in. ⊕ [Note: A kind reader even uploaded it to Hacker News, where it — thankfully! — received just 4 upvotes and no comments. Small mercies. ] It is, in that sense, no different from Reddit: the medium (of voting) is the message.

Incidentally, these Bubbles and Hacker News and Kagi Small Web and indieblog.page and ooh.directory visitors all leave footprints on this here web site’s Tinylytics dashboard, which has become delightfully uninterpretable owing to the influx in the past few months of what I can only assume are digital ghosts from Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Mexico, in that order. An unexpected benefit of LLM crawlers.

There is something about numbers that makes people’s brains stop working. This is common in medicine, where reflexively treating a lab abnormality without thinking an iota about the patient or even about the ground truth — is this number here “real” or is it a blood collection/lab analysis/data entry error? — is a phase most doctors go through and some never leave. Call it video game brain: confusing the hardcoded information of an RPG stat or a FPS health bar with more malleable values we get from physical measurements.

Well, I know enough about myself not to expect an effortless change in behavior. The effort tank being depleted daily by issues more pressing, I avoid having to interpret these numerical tricksters in any way I can. You see, for feedback to be of any use there has to be effort somewhere and by making leaving it effortless (thumbs up or down? how good was our service from 1 to 10? the text field is optional!) we have made interpreting it seemingly straightforward but in fact harder. Did someone “like” a blog post because reading it was a life-changing experience? Slightly more amusing than the cat photo just below? A toilet seat mistap? Or was it herding?

Now think about all those feedback surveys you started filling because the first page was a deceptive 1–10 scale only to abandon it because page 2 had five large fields for free text, all with a mandatory character count. This puts majority of the cognitive effort on the feedback provider; reading it does take more time than glancing at a number, but the receiver can quickly and effortlessly tell whether it is a) from someone whose opinion they care about and b) what the said opinion is.

So yes this is a long-winded way to nudge you towards writing more emails. Or leaving more comments. Or even starting your own blog. More words, fewer numbers, please. And yes, yes, I am aware how silly asking for more words sounds in these, our Days of Slop. But to go back to the blog post that started all this, and then two links deep to a most brilliant text from Sam Kriss: when everyone from your middle manager bosses to Guardian journalists to prize-winning authors and random tech folk debase themselves with AI, the value of the human-written word does in fact go up.

• Kyla Scanlon: Is AI Going to Destroy our Lives or Not? It has been two months since Scanlon last posted so this is a long update that doesn’t cover much more than Ed Zitron recently did, albeit in a — to me, at least — more readable style. The last section, titled “What Do You Do About It”, may be useful to many.
• Reese Richardson: How much of Thermo Fisher’s antibody data has been manipulated? A lot of it, it looks like. I wonder how many poor PhD students and postdocs wasted weeks and months of effort because the antibodies Thermo Fisher Scientific sold weren’t as specific or sensitive as they claimed. Surely as a publicly traded company TFS should have known better. Must have been a rogue employee, or a hundred. Caveat emptor!
• John Siracusa: EV Stupidity Checklist. Twelve physical items that have gotten worse since more cars became electric, with recommendations on how to go back to saner designs. You know, ones that include a rear window
• Brian Philips for The Ringer: The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech. ⊕ [Note: ᔥAlan Jacobs ] A broader list and more tongue-in-cheek, but items 37 through 39 cut deep.

Have a great weekend!

• Dynomight: Is “colorectal cancer” rising in “young people”? It is, and not just colorectal cancer, and not all of it is from overscreening. The anonymous author lists many potential causes; I would group all likely suspects under “new substances”, whether in the air we breathe, the food we eat, or in every friggin’ thing we touch. The price we pay for a modern life, eh?
• Vinay Prasad: Are “healthy people” an endangered species? Speaking of overscreening, Prasad makes a good point about how accessible all these different kinds of blood tests are that will tell you that something is wrong even though you may be feeling just fine. Sometimes this is warranted — a yearly blood count picks up a small decrease in hemoglobin that is the result of intestinal blood loss from an ulcer or (see above) colon cancer — but more often this is a form of medical divination. To repeat myself from 3 years ago, I am not a fan of the “wellness” visit.
• Niko McCarty and Noah Olsman: What’s the Point of Theory in Biology? An interesting exchange between McCarty, who has a degree in bioengineering but has been more focused on the journalism and policy side of science, and Olsman, who as a practicing postdoc with an interest in theoretical biology does well to explain its limits.
• Christos Lynteris for Nautilus: Poop Cruises Are No Laughing Matter. Oh but they are, even without the poop — has Lynteris never heard of a supposedly fun thing DFW will never do again? More seriously, the observation that people pay more attention when things happen to famous people is apt: remember Tom Hanks getting covid? More tangentially, Greg Wilson recently wrote about the upper/lower deck divide as it pertains to the general overhead of living.
• Brett & Kate McKay: The Cheapest, Easiest, Most Ridiculously Effective Way to Eradicate Mosquitoes From Your Property. I wish I knew about mosquito dunks and was able to test them while we still had a back yard which, as any back yard in DC, was nigh unusable in the summer owing to constant bloodsucking.

• Kevin Kelly: Your Most Improbable Life.

Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. This is true whether you favor traditional humanist directions or work on a frontier.

This is a nice preamble to a bit of personal news I can finally share: I will soon be going back [Note: It is a qualified “back”, as I have never actually practiced medicine full time, being either in training, doing clinical research as my main job, or being out of clinic altogether save for a few hours a week doing charity work. ] to the practice of clinical medicine. This week is in fact the last in my current position, which had been a magnificent experience but was going, as the careful reader of this blog would have already noted, in a direction not entirely suited to my preferred lifestyle and more importantly — let’s not sugarcoat it — values and beliefs. Onwards and upwards!

• Derek Robertson: 5 questions for Meredith Whittaker. ⊕ [Note: ᔥVoline on Mastodon ]

Whittaker, who is the president of the Signal Foundation (as in the app), had this to say about venture capital back in 2023:

Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto.

It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Emphasis is mine, as it could be transposed word-for-word into the current world of drug development. Consider it a more polite rewording of prof. Taleb’s take.

• Venkatesh Rao: Commodity Intelligence.

Commodified knowledge is “general knowledge” in the sense tested by trivia/quiz contests. In grade school, we actually had a subject on the curriculum called “GK” and kids good at it (I was one of them) got put on quiz teams to represent their class or school. General intelligence of the sort we actually have today is simply AIs trained on general (ie commodified) knowledge.

But the theological motte-and-bailey move that conflates it with some totalizing-universal divine-omniscience idea of “Artificial General Intelligence” traps a great many of even the smartest people. A category error motivated by theological yearnings, validated by second-order Labatutian psychoses, sustained by epistemic bubbles, and encouraged by sketchy business roadmaps that need a story to justify trillion-dollar investments.

This is a charitable way of justifying the AI billionaire panhandlers’ selling of large language models as AGI, even putting the term in official titles. Less charitably, they all know what Yann LeCun has been saying for years: LLMs will never reach human level of intelligence (“ChatGPT, make me a sandwich”). Whether LeCun’s own pursuits are wise is a different matter.

Separately, Rao gives some good book tips and Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World is now on the Pile.

• Andrew Gelman: Don’t cite sources you haven’t read, and don’t trust when people claim to be reporting something from the literature.

No quotes because, true to form, everything salient is already in the title. Natural continuation of the debate started last week (see the last link), although apparently written before the new arXiv policy for a 1-year ban for hallucinated references.

• Kieran Healy: Zero Sum Problems.

Healy wrote a book about data visualization so I feel somewhat foolish in writing this, but I do not find Apple Sports’ presentation least bit confusing: the numbers are absolute, the bars show percentage of the total. If the goal is to have more of each (assists, rebounds, steals, etc.) the bigger bar shows the opposing team’s dominance. It’s fine. Healy’s proposed solutions are all notably uglier and demote low-occurrence events like blocks and steals even though they may be crucial in a game. Shows how little both Healy and Gruber — on whose post Healy riffs — know about the game of basketball.

• Sarah Kliff, Margot Sanger-Katz, Erin Schaff and Asmaa Elkeurti for The NYT: Short Naps, Long Hours: How Autism Clinics Squeeze Medicaid Dollars Out of Preschoolers.

At Compleat Kidz, a fast-growing chain of autism clinics based in North Carolina, the policy is firm: Naps cannot be longer than seven minutes before children are awakened to resume therapy. The company says this is necessary to prevent fraud since clinics can be paid only when children are awake and getting services. But it also allows the clinic to bill insurers or Medicaid for more hours.

Yes, you have read that correctly. Waking up a child after a 7-minute nap to perform “therapy” — as if anything meaningful can be accomplished in that hypnagogic state — is both cruel and unusual. But not a punishment! It is merely a way to avoid fraud while optimizing revenue under the watchful eye of private equity:

Private equity firms have acquired at least 500 clinics over the past decade. “There’s just huge opportunities to grow these businesses and help increase access to care,” said Jon Krieger, a managing partner at Calex, a financial firm that assists with autism clinic mergers and acquisitions. He estimates the market could grow to $90 billion.

Mr. Market is a bad doctor, an even worse vet and, it seems, a most diabolical nanny.