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Breaking my “no politics until November” promise to self in order to quote today’s Stratechery update:

[The] Democrats gave up the enviable position of being the default choice for people who didn’t want to think about politics at all.

And this is exactly what has been bothering me since 2016. I spent my whole childhood and young adulthood in a country (Serbia) where you had no choice but to think about politics, and a big part of coming to the US was not having to think about it too hard. Alas, instead of the Balkans becoming westernized the West has been balkanized.

If there had been a webpage monitoring the progress of the actual moonshot in the 1960s, it would have said stuff like “we built a rocket” and “we figured out how to get the landing module back to the ship.” In 1969, it would have just said, “hello, we landed on the moon.” It would not have said, “we are working to establish the evidence base on multilevel interventions to increase the rates of moon landings.”

This is Adam Mastroianni skewering the “science moonshot” initiatives, and rightfully so. If all we have to show for them are 2,000 papers full of mealy-mouthed prose, it was a ground shot at best.

A few links to start off your morning with:

In today’s not-a-linkblog blog:

Have a great weekend, all.

This is not a linkblog. But here are some links that, if it were, I would have posted today:

Happy Thursday, etc.

Condemnation games

From Albert Wenger on his blog Continuations: I am quoting almost half of his fairly short blog post here but you should still go see it in context, click on the links and check out the rest of the blog while you’re at it.

Second, the world is continuing to descend back into tribalism. And it has been exhausting trying to maintain a high rung approach to topics amid an onslaught of low rung bullshit. Whether it is Israel-Gaza, the Climate Crisis or Artificial Intelligence, the online dialog is dominated by the loudest voices. Words have been rendered devoid of meaning and reduced to pledges of allegiance to a tribe. I start reading what people are saying and often wind up feeling isolated and exhausted. I don’t belong to any of the tribes nor would I want to. But the effort required to maintain internally consistent and intellectually honest positions in such an environment is daunting. And it often seems futile.

Tangential to this is a trend, particularly regarding the Capitalized Content above but also about News of the Day on any particular day, is an expectation to condemn of the “if you are not saying something publicly, you are complicit” variety. Show your colors. Plant your flag. Choose your hill or whatnot. To which I can only say: why?

A few years ago I have somehow gotten onto a list of potential democratic donor and am routinely solicited for money, even though as a non-US citizen I can’t vote or donate to a political party. It gave me a window into what declared American democrats are exposed to, and I assume republicans get the same raw deal: a barrage of emails in ALL CAPS declaring whatever is happening on any given day to be The Most Consequential Event of Our Lives, click this link to donate. I can only imagine that, slowly at first and then as a torrent, that language drips drips drips into people’s minds until it’s part of the background mental processing.

So with such a loud background it is no wonder that people feel like they need to yell to get heard, and who cares about whatever small project you’re working on in your provincial unimportant back yard when there is Important Stuff Happening over here. Being social and wanting to get heard, we start yelling out things which we believe people we would want to like us would want to hear. And if you think that sentence is confusing, well, yes it is, but not any more confusing than the predicament we’re in.

Because those things actually are important, and it’s good to have a dialogue about them, around the dinner table, at the water cooler, at the game, with people we know and care about in contexts other than internet screaming matches that, mold-like, spread over constructive online dialogue until it’s rotten to its core. So for this blog and the general and generally wonderful micro.blog community, I will have thoughts on science, coffee, books, an occasional photo, and come October maybe even some basketball. Not as consequential to the world perhaps, but consequential to me.

(↬Thought Shrapnel)

The Junk Charts blog sometimes links to charts that are not junk at all, today being one of those times. The link is to some beautiful storytelling on the many neighborhoods of New York City and now I wish the Washington Post had something similar for DC.

There is a phrase in Serbian when someone is bamboozling you that they are “trying to sell you a horn for a candle”. I have no idea how it came about, but here are some researchers trying to sell us social media for the internet and the phrase came to mind. (ᔥTyler Cowen)

Steven Johnson is one of the rare writers whose Substack newsletters I follow, and his most recent post will give you a good idea why. It is nominally about “The Infernal Machine”, his new book out today, but it is also about how he writes, and why, and has room for a story and a poem which both pack a punch. Recommended.

My entries in the April 2024 Photoblogging Challenge

April came and went, but the April photoblogging challenge photos are here to stay. And this time, there were two bonus days in May!

OK, I will now stop rhyming.

For even more photos, here are my entries in the September 2023 photoblogging challenge.