📚 Thinking With Tinderbox continues to pay dividends, even though I am not learning anything about the app’s mechanics. One of the footnotes led me to About This Particular Outliner and its parent, ATP Macintosh and now I am thinking about the greatness of pre-2016 Internet. Quite the rabbit hole.

Finally, a definition of “paradigm” I can understand:

So let’s get clear: a paradigm is made out of units and rules. It says, “the part of the world I’m studying is made up of these entities, which can do these activities.”

In this way, doing science is a lot like reverse-engineering a board game. You have to figure out the units in play, like the tiles in Scrabble or the top hat in Monopoly. And then you have to figure out what those units can and can’t do: you can use your Scrabble tiles to spell “BUDDY” or “TREMBLE”, but not “GORFLBOP”. The top hat can be on Park Place, it can be on B&O Railroad, but it can never inside your left nostril, or else you’re not playing Monopoly anymore.

From Adam Mastroianni, and the rest of the article is even better.

Two good travel-adjacent articles that recently came out:

• Why travel didn’t bring the world together from FT’s Janan Ganesh (that is a gift link)
• Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor? from Chris Arnade

Here is Ganesh:

Travel is enormous fun. Besides that, it can be an educational top-up, if you arrive in a place with a foundation of reading. (And if you don’t over-index whatever you happen to observe in person.) But a connecting experience? A reminder of the essential oneness of humankind? If it were that, we should have expected national consciousness to recede, not surge, in the age of cheap flights, a dissolved Iron Curtain and a China that became porous in both directions. 

To explain this away, some will insist on the difference between crass “tourism” and real “travel”. Please. This has become a class distinction, nothing more, like that between “expats” and “immigrants”.

And here is Arnade:

It is primarily we intellectuals and elites who culture shop, picking and choosing what works best for us. That’s true in Europe and the US, where each group of elites is inoculated from the least admirable qualities. Well-to-do Americans can escape the banal landscapes, either through travel or by living in the exclusive US neighborhoods that share European qualities, and find belonging in communities formed from their careers that cross national and cultural boundaries. Highly motivated Europeans can move to America, or work in a large corporation and escape European provincialism, while not giving up the aesthetic and communal benefits it offers.

It is the ‘normies,’ working-class, back-row, or whatever you want to call them, who make up the vast majority of citizens, that are tethered to live within their culture. That isn’t who is engaged in this debate, but it is who it should be about, not us cultural chameleons.

I am writing this from Zürich where I have spent a lovely spring day flaneuring in between business meetings. So, yes.

Today in titles that trigger me: Where is the YIMBY movement for healthcare?.

YIMBY is too simplistic of a concept to be easily applied to healthcare. It relies on a single dimension — how easy is it to build housing — and any proposed policy can be easily placed on the NIMBY/YIMBY spectrum. And since everyone can agree on where a particular policy lies on that spectrum, creating alliances is easy.

No such luck for American healthcare, where there are many dimensions: accessibility of new procedures (clinical trial YIMBYism), accessibility of approved treatments (insurance YIMBYism), accessibility of healthcare providers (practitioner YIMBYism), accessibility of MDs in particular (doctor YIMBYism)… And even there it is not clear what the YIMBY-equivalent stance would be. Does clinical trial YIMBYism mean you want more trials, quicker trials, or just more drug approvals and doing away with trials entirely? If you are a doctor YIMBYist, do you want to increase the number of medical schools? Residency and fellowship slots? Enable more foreign medical graduates to enter practice? All of the above? But then how do you deal with practitioner YIMBYists, who want to do away with most doctors altogether and delegate most work to physician assistants, nurse practitioners and, at the end of the line, large language models?

There is not a single person in America who would say its healthcare system is working, and yet it is clear why there is no unified front on how to fix it.

To be clear, I quite like the ideas brought up in that leading article. The five sample issues it names — breakdown of the direct doctor/patient relationship, unclear fees for service, frequent insurance switching, no room for insurer creativity, too much money spent on end-of-life care — are spot on. ⊕ If I had to pick one thing where I would want to be a YIMBYist, it is to remove any direct influence of the federal budget on healthcare. A large pot of money leads to hypertrophy of every other part of the system which down the line lead to many of the issues above. But is that really a YIMBY attitude?But alas the issues in question are too complex to be boiled down to a YIMBY-equivalent jingo, and to emphasize that point the article has an addendum linking to a 10,000-word report on the topic which at a glance seems to be raising the right points but I couldn’t really tell you since I have a day job that doesn’t leave much time for reading 10,000-word policy papers.

(↬Ruxandra Teslo)

It took me four years to drop my Apple Watch habit, but drop it I did. Goodbye, constant notifications. Farewell, nudges to breathe and to stand up and to convert my walk to the grocery store into “an activity”. I will hardly miss you, phantom vibrations and the pale white band around my wrist. You were good for heart rate and pace tracking, and for that you can still sit in the drawer, awaiting my next run.

The de-watchification of my everyday life began a few months ago when I forgot to take it off the charger after leaving it there for the night. This in itself was an aberration as I tended to keep it on at bedtime for sleep tracking ⊕ The number of times I checked the results of this tracking is, of course, zero. This is also how many valuable insights on my sleep patterns I received from Apple’s Fitness app. and only charge it for a half-hour in the morning. I failed to notice a change on that first watchless day, or on subsequent days. A $30 Casio — itself an indulgence since similar performance could be had for under $10 — gave time just as well and did not require charging. With luck, I may eventually get to cleaning and repairing a slightly more substantial timepiece I got some 20 years ago, victim of an inept shopping mall jeweler trying to replace its battery.

This is not the only way I tried to introduce more friction into my life — see the iPhone dumb-down of a few months ago. Kyla Scanlon’s latest article, ⊕ If you haven’t yet checked out Kyla’s blog, please do so now. It is for economy and finance what Ruxandra Teslo’s blog is for biology. The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction, outlines the reasons why one should think about more friction better than I ever could. There is a clear distinction between the frictionless digital and the friction-full physical world, only the frictionlessness of the digital realm is largely an illusion, a sleigh of hand, for:

… we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn’t disappear; it just moves.

It was easy enough to nod my head in agreement for I thought of this every time I ordered my groceries to be delivered. But in Apple Watch’s nudge economy the underfunded infrastructure was my calendar and the overworked labor was me.

Quote of the day from Adam Mastroianni:

[L]ots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.

And since writing is thinking, this for many people boils down to: write more drafts and murder your darlings. Or post them online, like I do.

When “I don’t think I need to say much more” is followed by two more paragraphs of text the writer is not making the point they think they are making. The text in question is a defense of plagiarism which amounts to “what I copied wasn’t that original to begin with”. Hardy-har-har. (ᔥNassim Taleb)

A good observation from Christopher Butler: you can be a great designer and be completely unknown. I would also, as Charlie Munger suggested, invert: you can be well-known without being great at what you do.

Fame and skill do not correlate — unless the skill in question is being famous — and by “famous” here I mean famous in the field and not necessarily a widely recognized celebrity. In fact, I can think of reasons for there to be an inverse correlation, of the pick a surgeon who doesn’t look like a surgeon variety. (ᔥMatt Birchler)

Tyler Cowen on ChatGPT’s o3 model being Artificial General Intelligence:

I don’t mind if you don’t want to call it AGI. And no it doesn’t get everything right, and there are some ways to trick it, typically with quite simple (for humans) questions. But let’s not fool ourselves about what is going on here. On a vast array of topics and methods, it wipes the floor with the humans. It is time to just fess up and admit that.

Jacob Silverman on internet slop:

The influx of hallucinating chatbots is just the latest sign of the wider internet’s descent into hostility. The internet is now optimised for metrics that have nothing to do with human enjoyment, or convenience, or the profits of anyone except the platform overseers. And it’s only getting worse, as our dependence on these flawed tools grows daily.

Cowen is interested in peak performance, and good for him. He showed the same trait in his conversation with Jonathan Haidt, where all he cared about was that the really smart young people can do wonders with social media, externalities be damned.

Meanwhile, the median Internet user is exposed to reams of crap made by humans and AIs alike (Silverman’s article goes into more detail on the burgeoning field of paranoid schizophrenics boosting their own X posts for no particular purpose and the paragraph describing it is the closest I have seen real life come to an M. John Harrison novel which, if you know his prose, is somewhat concerning… and this is not the first time Harrison came to mind).

Note that for all the stories of the Internet’s demise it is still fairly easy to find good things. Look at micro.blog. Look at indieblog.page. Heck, look at reddit. You may have a website or two you visit out of habit — one you likely acquired before 2016 — which have since become chumbox-laden garbage. Delete those bookmarks: people who thought having clickbait adds was a good idea will have other ideas just as good.

A few links for what will be a rainy weekend:

• Medicare Bleeds Billions on Pricey Bandages, and Doctors Get a Cut
• Ads Don’t Work That Way
• What Makes a Good Teacher?
• How I read poems, with aphantasia