• Derek Lowe: Life, Maybe, On Mars, Unless We Change Our Minds. You may have heard that the Mars Rover may have found evidence of microbial life in the planet’s past. If like myself you couldn’t find time to watch the 1-hour press conference, this is the most concise yet understandable explanation I could find.
• Nick Maggiulli: The Bar Only Gets Higher. On why it is becoming ever-harder to just get on with one’s life.
• Scott Sumner: Less wrong. He seems to be sad that we don’t live in a world of rational people. I am not so sure.
• Gina Trapani: Welcome to my blog. Her posts on Lifehacker are some of the first I followed via RSS at a time before even Google Reader was a thing (remember Bloglines?) Well, she is back blogging and I have started following for old times' sake.
• Andy Baio: DOOMscroll. A simple online game you should not play more than once.

Sascha Fast of the Zettelkasten blog writes, in a post titled The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”:

Rowlands et al. wrote about the so called “digital natives” that they lack the critical and analytical thinking skills to evaluate the information they find on the internet. We need a fully developed mental map of the subject in order to derive value from the results of an internet search.

In short: You need a trained brain to actually benefit from the internet.

But not just from the internet, as the post elaborates. This applies equally or even more to LLM outputs. A great example comes from a recent post on Andrew Gelman’s blog, though not from the man himself, where a human and ChatGPT 5 both try to improve upon a statistical model in a new-to-me language called Stan. Now if you don’t know Bayesian statistics or Stan this will all look like gobbledygook and ChatGPT won’t help you understand.

LLMs are also seeping into the everything-bucket software, the one whose primary purpose is to black-hole every article and textbook you will never read or video you will ever watch. Well now it can also give you the illusion of knowledge and control because you can ask questions about the contents. This is something Casey Newton learned this year:

I can give Notion a sprawling question like “how did the Cambridge Analytica case resolve” and get a good summary of regulatory actions across several years and countries. And by default, web search is off, meaning I know that its AI systems are drawing only on the vetted journalism that I have saved into my database.

This is a dream come true. I finally have a meaningful way to sift through millions of words of article text, ask follow-up questions, and get citations that I can use in my work. Notion may yet prove to be the AI librarian that Readwise never became.

One more thing I’m trying: I mentioned above that I continue to experiment with different ways to save material that might be useful later. Recently a Reddit post turned me on to Recall, which positions itself as a “self-organizing knowledge base.” Currently available as a web and mobile app, Recall lets you save web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, podcasts, Google Docs, and other materials into a single database that it then organizes on your behalf.

To be clear, I myself have asked for something like this from my everything-bucket software of choice, DEVONthink. And it delivered! But now I am realizing, and Sacha’s post was a good reminder, that these are becoming command line-level power tools — Hole Hawgs of the mind if you will — which can and will do great damage if not used carefully. And unlike the Hole Hawg they are freely available and come with no instruction manual. Caveat utilitor.

• Hyundai-LG immigration raid sparks alarm at foreign companies in the US. The US immigration system is a horror story co-written by Lovecraft and Kafka.
• Democrats rekindle Trump’s Epstein problem with birthday note. How many mosquito nets will it take to wash off the shame?
• After six years of silence and hype, is Silksong worth the wait?. About the Hollow Knight sequel. FT’s gaming coverage is quite good.
• How Novartis got ahead on ‘incredible’ cancer breakthrough. Their medicine coverage, on the other hand… I should write more about these kinds of promotional articles, this is just a reminder for me to do it.

All gift links. Enjoy.

• Jacobin magazine interviews Lily Lynch: Serbia Is a Showcase of Authoritarian Neoliberalism. An objective assessment of the situation in the Balkans, if you are interested in that sort of thing. It covers not only Serbia but Montenegro as well, and Kosovo too for those who consider it separately. The prime minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, comes out well. Everyone else — “the West” included — not so much.
• Jeff Atwood: Is Worse Really Better? Starts with a brilliantly disturbing story from Steve Martin then riffs on an excellent observation he had: “The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: it was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances.”
• Mike Solana: The Abundance Delusion. The book is still sitting on my pile, less and less likely to be read as time goes on, and here comes a very good rebuttal if not of the book then of the movement it spurred.
• Emi Nietfeld of Wired: The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It? A harrowing tale of surrogacy.

• Scott Sumner: The myths of Chinese exceptionalism. Very good! He has several quotes from Dan Wang at the end, and if you like those then you will certainly like
• Ross Douthat: Does the Future Belong to China? An interview with Dan Wang, with both video and a transcript. Reminder, Wang’s book Breakneck came out last month and quickly made its way to my pile (and the bestseller list, but I won’t hold that against it).
• Alex Tabarrok: The Simple Mathematics of Chinese Innovation. A short but sweet account with many more links. He also wrote about China Versus the US in the Competition for Global Talent.
• Alex Tabarrok (again): Could China Have Gone Christian? Betteridge’s law of headlines applies.

• Bart’s Watch Stories on YouTube: How Casio Made the Most Sold Watch Ever. It is about Casio F-91W, my default watch, and I can attest to its — excuse the pun — timelessness.
• @StatisticUrban on X: What states do Americans most approve of? DC is the lowest at +1 net approval.
• Ruxandra Teslo: Your newborn is not Hepatitis B vaccinated because of wokeness. See also her exchange on X with Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, aka Mr Head-Up-Ass who loves the sound of his one voice even as he recommends disastrous remedies for obvious problems.
• Marioun Fourcade and Kieran Healy: Authenticate thyself. The subheading is “The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age”. It is more highfalutin than what I usually read — “The combination of epistemological self-centredness and hyperconnectivity makes people susceptible to diffuse forms of ‘supersense’-making (to borrow a term from Hannah Arendt).”, reads one sentence — but the essay does some important sense-making of its own:

As the deployment of digital technologies continues to generate ever-more stratospheric concentrations of wealth, the masses sink deeper into the void left by the evisceration of social solidarity and the rise of automation. The often-missed point about sovereign individuals is that not everyone gets to be one. But everyone should aspire to be one, and in the meantime follow one, as they walk down the road to selfdom.

Worth reading for that last sentence alone.

• The World in Which We Live Now is a 30-minute lecture Nassim Taleb gave in August at the “Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity”. Highly relevant.
• Culture Has No Name for This Cursed Vibe. It’s Everywhere from Ben Davis pinpoints the prevalent visual style of the world Taleb describes. And the cursed imagery is indeed everywhere, even in what the toddlers are exposed to. Just look at the cottage industries of Italian Brainrot, Creepy Pasta, or The Boiled One — all of which I learned about from my grade school-aged children as these are apparently what they talk about in the schoolyard. I think it started with Too Many Cooks (↬Tyler Cowen).
• Historians See Autocratic Playbook in Trump’s Attacks on Science is a cogent account by William J. Broad of the NYT of the hunch I had a few days ago that the complete mismanagement of science and education policy and funding is directly related to the regime’s dictatorial tendencies (↬James L. Olds).
• A New Institute for Neglected Research, How We Could Save Billions by Finding Which Medical Treatments Don’t Work, and The Case for a “Department of Government Efficiency” are a one-two-three punch from the Good Science Project on the radical measures the regime would be taking if it did want to make American science great again. The second one is of particular interest to me, as it matches perfectly with the types of clinical trials I think we need more of (“Set 2” trials in the linked article, not that the terminology matters).
• questioning (sic!) the prevailing narratives in which Winnie Lim comes to the same conclusion I did about two works of David Graeber: The Dawn of Everything latches on to your mind and shifts your perspectives years after you’ve read it; Debt: the first 5000 years was unreadable. Unlike me, she is willing to give “Debt…” another chance.
• Does Work-Life Balance Make You Mediocre?, in which Cal Newport reacts to a 22-year-old proclamation in the WSJ that “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.”​ is a fitting conclusion to this Labor Day list.

Happy grilling!

• Peco Gaskovski: How Turtles Can Fly (subheading: “Sometimes the path to originality goes through conventionality”)
• Scott Sumner: Almost everything is downstream of integrity (ᔥTyler Cowen and technically titled “My Final EconLog Post”, showing that Sumner is a better movie reviewer than headline writer)
• Ben Thompson: U.S. Intel (with a preamble on steelmanning)
• Andrew Gelman: Aiming your gatling guns in the wrong direction. Shooting the messenger for something the messenger was never saying. (this is not an excerpt, it is the actual title; kudos)
• Ben Werdmuller: Political Pollsters Are Trying to Save Money by Polling AI Instead of Real People, and It’s Going About as Well as You’d Expect (titles like the above two why my link posts now all have titles themselves; so it goes)

Andrew Gelman writes:

One reason why these celebrity scientists have such great stories to tell is that they’re not bound by the rules of evidence. Unlike you or me, they’re willing to make strong scientific claims that aren’t backed up by data.

So it’s not just that Sapolsky and Langer are compelling figures with great stories who just happen to be sloppy with the evidence. It’s more that they are compelling figures with great stories in large part because they are willing to be sloppy with the evidence.

An under-appreciated fact which reminded me of this old post of mine.

• Joan Westenberg: I Deleted My Second Brain (ᔥMatt Birchler)

There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts. But there is a special anxiety reserved for unread lists of unread things. My reading list had become a totem of imagined wisdom. A shrine to the person I would be, if only I read everything on it.

When I deleted that list, I lost nothing real. I know what I want to read. I know the shape of my attention. I do not need a 7,000-item database to prove that I have taste or ambition.

• Victoria Song: AI doesn’t belong in journaling

There’s one quote in the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that sums it up for me. “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort — which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”

I don’t always agree with author Oliver Burkeman about this. I find no meaning in toiling over hand-washing dishes, and am eternally grateful to the inventor of the dishwasher. But as it pertains to Big Tech’s never-ending quest to simplify writing with AI, I wholly agree that the struggle is what makes the process worth anything.

• Anna Havron: Personal Productivity Analysis Paralysis

I personally abandoned digital for tracking my projects and tasks because I can think of infinity things I would like to create and get done! My imagination is THAT good and ambitious! Thank goodness for paper, which forces me to edit, thank goodness for the friction involved in recording and transferring thoughts and ideas. It keeps me semi-reality-based.