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I have tons of free time, as is evidenced by (a) that I’m spending a half hour writing this blog post and (b) that I spent a couple hours earlier this week reading Atlas’s book, for no other reason than I felt like it. And this wasn’t even the only pleasure book I read over the Thanksgiving weekend. But I’m also in a continual time debt, a veritable treadmill of time commitments. I’m in the middle of writing 5 books and a few dozen research articles, and I keep taking on new projects. No way I can do all of these! But, as with Atlas and his finances, somehow I keep going.

Andrew Gelman describes my life, basically.

Richard Feynman popularized the term “cargo-cult science” as actions of research who follow the form but not showing much if any care for the substance of science. Andrew Gelman has second thoughts about the metaphor and proposes “ritual science” instead, and for good reason: cargo-cult implies a technological gap that may be impossible to bridge, while he uses ritual here to mean mindless repetition.

The maneuver does throw rituals under the bus, as proper rituals are far from mindless. Still, this is indeed how the word “ritual” is used colloquially so Gelman is on the right track. “Mindless science” would also cover the phenomena though is too broad: science — or rather, scientists — can be mindless in other ways. (ᔥAndrew Gelman)

Happy Friday! A few links for the week’s end:

A brief Q&A:

When Tim Berners-Lee has something to say about the future of social media I listen, even if it ends up being a pitch for his next two projects. They are Solid, a standard of data sharing across platforms, and Inrupt, a “data wallet” built on top of Solid. Godspeed, and may he avoid xkcd #927.

Here is a great quote on leadership in John Gruber’s pre-post-mortem of Apple Intelligence:

The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.

“Leadership” is a suitcase word and although I disagree with most of the concepts packed into it, maybe it has not become completely useless.

Some pre-weekend reading:

Sentences to get depressed about:

The Great Multitasking Panic of the Late Oughts ended, like all panics, not because we found a solution, but because we just…stopped panicking. […] Most of our fears ended up being right, but by then we weren’t afraid. Grandma got an iPad, and it was game over.

From Adam Mastroianni, excellent as always.

This is explained, sort of, by her being descended from Serbian cat people. At one point in the movie a very catlike woman addresses her, in Serbian, as moja sestra — “my sister.”

I am always on the lookout for an unexpected mention of my people, and Alan Jacobs delivered.

I always thought it was good news when an RSS feed on my “Paused and Defunct” list woke up, but it looks like sometimes these feeds wake up as zombies. The latest one is Thought Catalog which I followed for the occasional post from Ryan Holiday but is now dead as a website and posting random articles like this on its feed.

Fortunately Ryan Holiday still has a blog, doing his part to prevent the web from becoming auto-generated slop.