• Derek Lowe: Where Do We Stand With “Liver-on-a-Chip” Technology?. It helps, but we are nowhere near replacing animal toxicology models with in vitro, let alone in silico assays. Now, that’s toxicology. I would have a much lower threshold for throwing out the window all those animal models of disease, particularly when testing any treatment that works wholly or in part via the host immune system. Those quickly turn into Rube Goldberg machines — good for intellectual stimulation, useless for inference.
• Brian Potter: Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US? A marvelous exploration of data that doesn’t point to a single cause but does more or less absolve phones while painting a big red “X” onto SUVs and (pedestrians taking) drugs. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
• Dan Snow: Secretive vendors are exploiting a free money glitch in the U.S. healthcare system. As much as it makes my blood boil to see this kind of profiteering in health care, ultimately Americans spend so much because they get so much, at least in terms of volume and technology if not outcomes. It may not be evenly distributed or even effective, but you get what you ask for. If anyone wants a different profile of health care spending they should look at some other people.
• Boone Ashworth and Kylie Robison for The Wire: I Hate My Friend. I saw these adds on the New York Subway a few weeks ago and wondered who on Earth would be crazy enough to wear an always-on microphone, and who would be delusional enough to think it could be a successful product. (ᔥJohn Naughton)
• Andrew Gelman: Uncanny academic valley: Brian Wansink as proto-chatbot. An article headline from last month asked what kind of an Age we lived in. “Despair” was my suggestion but I now take it back — the answer is clearly “bullshit”.

• Science: A cGAS-mediated mechanism in naked mole-rats potentiates DNA repair and delays aging. Or: why are naked mole-rats the longest living rodents, and not by a small margin? Seems important.
• FT: The quest to make young blood into a drug. Vampiric.
• NIH director embarasses himself on X. I am all for promoting healthy lifestyles, but one can do so without posting dubious charts from suspicious sources.
• All Derek Sivers’s e-books are free until October 18, prints are $4 each. All are highly recommended, particularly Useful Not True.
• The Drifter looks like a cool game for those who liked old-school point & click adventures. It’s in my Steam pile (yes, that’s how I’ll call it… ᔥRobin Rendle).

• Aidan Walker: now is not the time to ban phones. The Gen Z case against Jonathan Haidt, with whom I generally agree. Walker makes some good, if muddled points. In any debate about children, school and phones it is important to distinguish the extent of a ban (during class — absolutely, at recess — we can discuss the pros and cons), which kind of phones are to be banned (smartphones versus others, and nowdays they all come on a spectrum), and maturity of a child (there are some 12-year-olds who are mature enough to babysit and some who cannot be left alone by themselves, and in the same family!) So it is an issue with some subtetly and since both social media and public policy ale places where subtetly goes to die I do not expect these questions to be answered any time soon.
• Ted Gioia introduces Jared Henderson: The Honest Broker Launches an Interview Series with Our First Guest Cory Doctorow. Henderson being the host of the interview, posted on Gioia’s Substack page. Doctorow’s book Enshittification has just been published and even though I suspect it is one of those that could have been a blog post it is indeed on the pile. Doctorow’s closing recommendation, Letters from an Imaginary Country, will also end up there when it comes out.
• Casey Handmer: Career Development Guide for Job Seekers. Advice for academics and government employees who want to switch to industry, from the perspective of an engineer. Fortunately biotech is more forgiving or else I would never have made the transition but I imagine things are even more competitive now than four years ago so all this is helpful. More boradly, academia and industry have so many “false friends” — conventions and processes that have the same name but are different and in some cases diametrically opposed — and the interview stage is just the tip of the iceberg.
• Scott Sumner: Fat tails. It is more about slippery slopes than fat tails, but Sumner has never been one to write a good headline.

• José Luis Ricón: Systems Biology: understanding beyond genes. With an eye towards aging, but broadly applicable to much of medicine. As ever, there is a relevant xkcd comic on the topic (ᔥDerek Lowe).
• L. M. Sacasas: The One Best Way Is a Trap. “So, once again I invite us to ask a simple question: Is there, in fact, “one best way” in every realm of experience? And even if there were, at what cost would we discover it? And what would we gain? Might it be that in the course of pursuing the “one best way,” we would lose our way in a more profound sense?”
• Anthony DiGiorgio on X: Imagine we mandated everyone have car insurance that covers new tires, oil changes, and wiper fluid. I think you can guess where this is going, and he is not wrong. The cost of health care is skyrocketing because we are always finding new ways to spend money, and isn’t America a society of maximizers?
• Kyla Scanlon: Who’s Getting Rich Off Your Attention? Robert Reich responds, on Bluesky.
• Bonus: Tyler Cowen doubles down on min-maxing the society in his brief comment on Sora 2. “Still, from my distance it seems quite possible that the “slop” side of the equation is a simple way to fund AI “world-modeling” (and other) skills in a manner that is cross-subsidized by the consumers of the slop.” That way may be simple, but also quite diabolical.

• 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.

• Julie Segal: Nassim Taleb — and Universa — Versus the World. Says Taleb “How many people in the United States own a house without insurance on the house? The way they [critics of tail hedging] look at it, you won’t buy a house if the insurance is expensive. No, you would buy a smaller house. Insurance is not an option.” From September 2020.
• Samantha Rose Hill: Where loneliness can lead. “The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves. By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power. And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right.” From October 2020.
• John PA Ioannidis: How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science. “There was absolutely no conspiracy or preplanning behind this hypercharged evolution. Simply, in times of crisis, the powerful thrive and the weak become more disadvantaged. Amid pandemic confusion, the powerful and the conflicted became more powerful and more conflicted, while millions of disadvantaged people have died and billions suffered.” From September 2021.
• Justin EH Smith: Permanent Pandemic. “The old will eulogize all that’s been lost, while the young, lacking memory, will begin to draft visions of what should come next.” From May 2022.

All via Instapaper, which has been ever reliable in its role as a saucer.

• 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.