A few good links to start the week:
- Innovation and Repetition by René Girard
- Face it: you’re a crazy person by Adam Mastroianni
- How to build the perfect city by Chris Arnade (also in conversation with Tyler)
- Does the Pulitzer Prize Hate Substack? by Ted Gioia (note where or these articles live!)
Thomas Basbøll is back writing, with a wonderfully meta-post about why one would want to write at all:
The obvious alternative that I’m heading towards is to seek reasons to write within yourself, rather than in your environment. Write for the clarity it brings or the pleasure it affords. Write because it improves your mind, not the minds of your readers. In the future, as most of the prose we need to get by (the prose that stores and transmits useful information) is produced by machines, we will write for the same reason that we swim, rides bikes, jog, go to the gym.
That is the dream.
Some good links from the past week:
Yes, investigator-initiated clinical trials take time. But rather than back-patting and boasting about how it can still be done despite the setbacks, why not propose solutions for how to speed them up? I made a few off-the-cuff suggestions but you can also find serious efforts on that front.
If you say that “$1 of research investment yields $5 in returns to the economy” — as some do — but then clarify that under those $5 you have a lot of laboratory-building and infrastructure-supporting — as some did — what point exactly are you trying to make? As ever, there is much wisdom in r/Jokes.
A major entry in the Annals of Zombie Medicine must be screening for prostate cancer in men age 70 and above. Recent events had Nassim Taleb asking whether one could detect aggressive prostate cancer early, and one could, but… Indeed, this kind of screening has been singled out as something not to do for more than a decade, and yet:
Prostate screening in men ≥70 has not reached a 50% reduction in use since the 2012 guideline release.
Meanwhile, a full one-third of adult Americans is not doing the kinds of screening that are recommended, probably because they involve poop.
After finishing The Space Trilogy I was wondering which of C.S. Lewis’s many books I should read next. Well, Kyla Scanlon has just nudged me in the right direction with her Economic Lessons from the Screwtape Letters:
In Screwtape, evil doesn’t arrive through fire and fury. It creeps in through ease, comfort, and optimization. Screwtape wants to nudge people into passivity as a way of capturing their souls. Let them scroll. Let them spend. Let them smooth away all friction until they wake up hollow and can’t remember why.
Sounds about right.
Speaking of Gioia, I love his work, his most recent article is just wonderful, and I absolutely share his view on techno optimism… but blogging from Substack makes things a bit awkward.
📚 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.