• Joe Wilkins: McDonald’s Pulls Down AI-Generated Holiday Ad After Deluge of Mockery. The offensive ad is still available for viewing, and I am horrified to report that it is in fact on par with non-AI holiday marketing shlock. Every profession that feels collectively threatened by LLMs has spent decades undermining itself and is now reaping what it sowed, and yes I include many medical specialties here.
• Sam Kriss for the NYT: Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? A brilliant essay with illustrations that would make me blow a fuse if I were to see them out in the wild. Kriss has a blog to which I am now subscribed and also seems to post on this new social network for writers called… Substack? And Curtis Yarvin plus the rationalist buffoons hate him? Worth following!
• Christopher Butler: The Last Invention. “The real threat of AI as ‘the last invention’ isn’t that it will actually end human innovation and put us all out to pasture in a withering culture of leisure, but that we’ll believe it will. That we’ll internalize the narrative of our own obsolescence and stop trying. That we’ll mistake the tool for the maker and forget that the heart that yearns past the boundary is what drives everything forward.”
• Andrew Sharp: Netflix and the Flattening of Everything. I am not a fan of Netflix. In fact, I dread the moment when they gobble up the last thing, idea or person standing on their path to entertainment singularity. And yet I stay subscribed.
• Taylor Jessen on Mastodon: Candidate for Post of the Year. The post in question is a screenshot from Bluesky which perfectly demonstrates end-stage enshittifaction of what used to be the capital-I Internet, but that is beside the point which is in fact funny and true.

• Ruxandra Teslo and Jack Scannell: To Get More Effective Drugs, We Need More Human Trials. I maintain that this will be nigh-impossible to do in the US until we break the healthcare ouroboros. AI as used now, to increase the number of drug candidates without making a dent in the speed of actually testing them, will only make things worse.
• Benjamin Mazer for The Atlantic: Yes, Some Children May Have Died From COVID Shots. Indeed, and the attempts to say otherwise can only Streisand the issue that should have been just a footnote to the long list of historical vaccine concerns.
• Simon DeDeo: Advice for Early-Career Academics, Part I: Mentorship. No-nonsense advice I wish I had 20-some years ago. I particularly like the distinction between mentors, supporters, fans, friendly elephants and noble adversaries. Left unmentioned are the many people who don’t have your best interest at heart.
• Michael Levy on YouTube: “Hurrian Hymn no. 6” (c.1400BCE) - Ancient Mesopotamian Musical Fragment. The Hurrian songs come not from Mesopotamia but from Ugarit, a city in what is now northern Syria which was one of many victims of the Late Bronze Age collapse. One would hope this would put to rest any questions on whether the humans of that age were like us, but then there are people alive now who don’t think their contemporaries are anything like them.

• Gina Kolata for the NYT: Why Some Doctors Say There Are Cancers That Shouldn’t Be Treated. Is the rise in cancer rates due to overdiagnosing tumors that would have been harmless or a true “epidemic” of deadly malignancies? The answer is “Yes”.
• Alex Telford: Going direct: notes on Eli Lilly at a trillion. Why has the valuation (if not true value) of Eli Lilly skyrocketed while the other big GLP-1 company, Novo Nordisk, is in turmoil? The answer is “tech company mimesis”. Girardian.
• Caasey Handmer: Energy Predictions 2025. What is the future of world energy production? The answer is — and this should not be a surprise — “soral”, but good luck to cloudy countries with a NIMBY attitude towards wind power.
• Ben Werdmuller: Why RSS matters? Because you would not be able to read this without it!

• Vincent Rajkumar on X: I’ve been on this platform for 16 years. Here are some tips on how to be productive, and gain influence and credibility on X. Great advice for those attending the 2015 ASH Annual Meeting, but I am not so sure about their utility a decade later. Where is the hematology dark forest?
• Edward Zitron: The Era Of The Business Idiot. The more sociopathic of Taleb’s IYIs become executives; hilarity ensues.
• Cory Doctorow: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI. An introduction to Doctorow’s new book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Astute as ever.
• Chris Arnade: Why are Americans Unhappy. Arnade dismantles the $140,000 poverty line idiocy with a side jab at the abundance movement by repeating the insight he has each time he visits a seemingly poorer but more communal part of Europe:

So yes, Americans are materially wealthy and unfulfilled, and the primary problem is cultural—we’ve sacrificed community and meaning to emphasize an archetype built on acquiring as much stuff as possible, but then we have made that unnecessarily hard to do. When you give your citizens a cultural script, built on the material, that promises hard work will lead to success, and then your policy design ensures it doesn’t, people will end up both economically frustrated, as well as spiritually empty, sitting in their living room streaming the latest movie wondering what exactly is the point of life. Or, they will feel they have failed at the material, while also having little else to give them meaning.

• Lily Lynch: How the US Stunted Europe. Short and to the point, no notes. Sufficient to make me re-subscribe to Lynch’s newsletter. She links to her review of Sanna Marin’s biography, which is also no-notes wonderful.
• Chris Person for Aftermath: Horses is Tame. I have never heard of the game Horses before or the controversy surrounding it, so I must assume that Valve, Epic and others who banned it for not sure what exactly have never heard of the Streisand effect. Well done, folks.
• Jim Olds: How Will You Know You’ve Succeeded?. I have panned this career research administrator’s first blog post, but this one was in fact enlightening. You have to keep the funders happy, even if they are an amorphous blob called “the American taxpayer”.
• Dr. Christine Corbett Moran: Scaling Career and Family: Systems Thinking, Public School, Home Enrichment. Advice on raising kids from a couple of scientists/engineers turned entrepreneurs. Useful, if a bit on the spectrum, and I even more thankful we had extensive family support when raising our kids, particularly early on.
• Nick Maggiulli: There is No Substitute for Thinking. What are students who use ChatGPT thinking, if they are thinking at all? Will they be writing texts like the ones above or post AI slop in their middle age? Time will tell.

• Michael DePeau-Wilson for Asimov Press: Why the FDA Is Slow to Remove Drugs. And more importantly, why this is bad. You can’t accelerate drug approvals without also doing more culling on the back end. Symmetry, please.
• James L. Olds: Why Transformational Science Can’t Get Funded: The Einstein Problem. I disagree with most of it, but it is in fact the institutional point of view.
• Anonymous for the Good Science Project: A Top Scientist’s Ideas as to NIH. Did AI write this? Not great, but again, an institutional point of view masquerading as call to reform.
• Bryan Vartabedian: Physician authority and influence. An important distinction, and kudos to Dr. Vartabedian for coping that he has more influence than authority. I, on the other hand, have neither.
• Joe Boudreau: On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads. I have been doing it for at least 15 (13 of those in English) and it is in fact wonderful.
• Todd Vaziri: The “Mad Men” in 4K on HBO Max Debacle. The best and most concise review of this royal screwup of one of my favorite shows.

• Jamie Thingelstad: I gave Gemini “Thinking 3 Pro” and Nano Banana Pro a more interesting question tonight. Ready for prime time in biomedical graphics? I would be ever paranoid about a mistake that I missed, so still not for me.
• Tom Loughlin: According to timeanddate.com, sunset is at 4:44PM EST, and will continue to set at this time until Dec. 15th. Look in the comments for the answer why.
• Paul Williams: The Verge on HBO’s poor execution of the “remastering” of Mad Men in 4k for streaming. I had a look today and even the picture quality wasn’t that great, but the errors they are describing are truly bad. Matthew Weiner can’t be happy.
• Niko Kultalahti: I enjoyed this list about 15 rules of blogging, especially rule 2, and they are quite similar to mine. Using micro.blog helps.

And better than any list I can give is the newly-refreshed (by a new curator) Discovery feed, also available as RSS!

“The internet is dying on the outside but growing on the inside”, wrote Yancey Strickler last month in a follow-up to his 2019 essay The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. To avoid misunderstanding, malicious interpretation, competitive intelligence gathering and cancelation, conversations have been moving from the public-facing “social” “media” to gated, invitation-only services (e.g., your favorite Substack author’s members-only discussion forum) and private group chats (e.g., the Let’s Bomb Yemen Signal texts).

But some parts of this Cozy Web are growing faster than others, and as if often the case doctors and scientists are ruled by inertia. Both groups have the perfect setup, in the form of professional societies, to carve off some gated space in which to have potentially controversial discussions without providing fodder to “the enemy”. ⊕ In these kinds of metaphors I always reach out to Venkatesh Rao’s The Internet of Beefs, which explains quite well why the public Internet has turned into a dark forest in the first place. And yet even the most developed online community program I know of — American Society of Clinical Oncology’s myConnection — is a stuffy, ⊕ ASCO boasts as having more than 50,000 members. The two largest “communities” on MyConnection, “New Member” and “Women in Oncology”, have more than 9,000 members each yet the last post on one was 9 days ago (with zero replies) and 7 days ago (two replies). All of November, the more active WiO group had 9 posts with median 1 reply (range 0–20). formal messaging board that can barely be considered active. Most of ASCO’s online activity is still on X, where the official account has almost 150,000 followers and the hashtag for its annual meeting is heavily promoted. Other large hematology/oncology societies like ASH (hematology) and AACR (general cancer research) don’t even have that. Their “online community” is a member directory and heavy promotion of in-person conferences, which I can only assume are the true money-makers.

So I have to wonder, do they still deserve to call themselves “societies”? It is, after all, 2025 and much of life has moved online. By not providing an avenue for true internal discussion and instead promoting public debate, are they hurting their members' cause more than helping? ⊕ Yes, it was fun to post out in public when there was a slight chance that your favorite celebrity — or the POTUS — would retweet your post, but we have since learned that this is a liability more than a benefit and there are more high-follower accounts on X now that I would rather avoid. I have argued recently that scientists may want to button up their conversations if they are to keep or regain trust. Should these societies not be providing the means to do so, and not only once per year in a stuffy conference room? ASCO’s MyConection is on the right track, but much too formal. Yes, give people the opportunity to create subgroups and even more private chats as you do now. But if you think debating on X with millions of spectators is healthy, why not give all 50,000-plus members a chance to interact by default, and do so in a format that is not an early 2000s web forum?

Concluding the most recent article, Yancey Strickler provided a toolbox for people to create their own communities which he called the Dark Forest OS, of DFOS. While laudable, this effort is to put it bluntly too artsy fartsy for me. Strickler comes from the world of “creators” whose sensibilities are much different from those of doctors and scientists. But then science and medicine already have much of DFOS in place, from a members list to paying dues. The only thing we need now is for the said societies to build their walled gardens — with an app included! — which they would promote instead of X at the annual meetings and other conferences.

Where a SciMeDFOS would come useful is at smaller scale, for collaborative groups and maybe even large individual labs, where members are known but there are no dues, funds, or IT workers ready to build a custom Twitter clone. If I were to make one now I would probably use Hometown, which is a fork of Mastodon that enables local-only posting, though it being a single person’s passion project makes me a bit reluctant. But then what else do we have, Discord, WhatsApp and Signal? Whatever Dave Winer comes up with in collaboration with Wordpress? Maybe Squarspace could make creating private Twitter clones be as easy as creating websites? I will be on the lookout.

• Rachael Bedard: I Went to an Anti-Vaccine Conference. Medicine Is in Trouble. Tragic considering all the good vaccines have brought us, most recently against cervical cancer. And the news from the FDA is, of course, a disaster from any perspective.
• Kurt Streeter: How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life. A palate-cleanser for the above. And if this piques your interest, Chris Aldrich has a wonderful primer on learning typewriter maintenance and repair.
• Ross Douthat interviews Paul Kingsnorth: ‘This Is the War Against Human Nature’. Not the only interesting interview Dothat made, and they make for better reading than listening.
• Jeff Giles: How I Began to Love Reading Again. I too loved If on a winter’s night…

Enjoy!

• Oliver Burkeman: Interest is everything. The argument for living a life that is interesting to yourself, with which I agree. I have also learned about type 2 burnout in which “you’re not overworked, you’re just working against your own grain.” That too is interesting.
• Casey Handmer: Antimatter Development Program. A ridiculously (to my untrained in physics mind) detailed writeup of what could be the next generation of rocket fuel. To the above point: Handmer’s interest in the topic is contagious.
• Sacha Fast: One (and another) Gear in the Zettelkasten Machine: A Deep Dive into a Key Mechanism. Another person writing about a topic they love, which is slip-boxes. These kinds of posts are dangerous because this interest too is contagious but unlike Handmer’s is also immediately actionable at home. Caveat lector!
• Tanner Greer: The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite. Nominally a book review, actually an essay that surpasses the said book in its coverage of the topic.
• Ben Hunt: World War AI and Nick Maggiulli: Is This How the AI Bubble Pops? with two angles converging on the same conclusion, which is that our interesting times are about to become even more interesting.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear reader!