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A few good links for the weekend:

ChatGPT, the blog expert

The latest episode of The Talk Show was with Taegan Goddard, who all the way back in 1999 founded the blog Political Wire which is apparently a continuous intravenous drip for people interested in US politics. Now, I’ve had other preocupations back then and not being an American citizen still have little to no interest, so this blog wasn’t even on my radar until listening to the episode. But now I wonder: are there any more relevant blogs I’ve missed out on, about medicine and biotechnology in particular?

ChatGPT’s first pass was mediocre. I’ll save you the verbalist padding, but here are its suggestions in response to my prompt: “Is there a website/blog like politicalwire.com or daringfireball.net but for biotechnology?”

It’s a 20% hit rate: only Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline comes close to what I asked for. The others are all medium to big news outlets that yes, focus on biotech, but that’s not what I asked for. The second try, after I asked for more like Lowe’s, was a tad better:

That’s more like it! 80% now, and if I were feeling generous I’d give it a full 100% since In the Pipeline is, in fact, a Sci Trans Med blog. But then I asked for too much, and it hallucinated 3 more, two of which were hallucinations (BioPunk and BiotechBits, which were at least plausible names) and one was a sub-blog of Endpoints that also didn’t exist.

So, now I have two new blogs to follow (Timmerman Report and The Niche; Biotech Strategy is behind a paywall and I’ve already been following the others), and an ever-increasing urge to update the Blogroll, which has been under construction for the past five months with no end in sight.

ChatGPT, the font expert

I follow most blogs via RSS and imagine everyone doing the same. This makes me forget that this very blog is an actual website that may need tending, and every time I visit (which is rarely) a thought comes to mind: I should really do something about that font … typeface … those fonts.

But I don’t want to just copy someone else, which is what I did with the current version that uses Iowan Old Style. ChatGPT was sadly lacking in font recognition skills. When I showed it a screenshot of this website it said the font was Georgia. When asked whether it might be Iowan after all, it had this to say: Upon closer inspection, the typeface in the image does indeed have characteristics that are more aligned with Iowan Old Style rather than Georgia. Which is some master-work backtracking and a sign of an expert BS-er.Not knowing much about typefaces, I asked someone who might.

Me: What is a high-quality publicly available serif typeface highly regarded by most if not all experts?

ChatGPT-4o: One of the most highly regarded publicly available serif typefaces is “Cormorant.” This typeface is available on Google Fonts and is praised for its elegance and versatility. Designed by Christian Thalmann, Cormorant is inspired by the classic Garamond typefaces but with modern refinements that make it suitable for both print and digital use.

Cormorant is highly regarded for its high contrast, sharp serifs, and a wide range of styles and weights, making it a versatile choice for various design needs. It’s well-crafted and respected among designers for its beauty and readability.

Me: Can it be used as a body typeface? If not, is there a typeface that I can use as body typeface?

ChatGPT-4o: While Cormorant is beautiful and highly regarded, it is generally better suited for display use (e.g., headlines, titles) rather than as a body typeface. This is because of its high contrast and intricate details, which can make it harder to read at smaller sizes, particularly in large blocks of text.

For a high-quality serif typeface suitable for body text, I recommend “EB Garamond.” This typeface is also publicly available on Google Fonts and is an excellent choice for body text due to its readability, classic design, and balanced proportions. EB Garamond is a revival of the original Garamond typeface from the 16th century, known for its timeless elegance and clarity, making it an ideal choice for both print and digital use.

EB Garamond is widely praised for its legibility, even at smaller sizes, making it an excellent option for body copy in various design projects.

Me: What is a good monospace typeface equivalent to EB Garamond?

ChatGPT-4o: A good monospace typeface equivalent to EB Garamond, in terms of quality and readability, would be “IBM Plex Mono.”

IBM Plex Mono is part of the IBM Plex typeface family, which was designed with clarity, neutrality, and versatility in mind. While it’s a monospace typeface, it maintains a sense of elegance and professionalism that aligns well with the qualities of EB Garamond. It has well-balanced proportions and is highly legible, making it suitable for coding, technical documents, or any design where a monospace font is needed.

IBM Plex Mono is also publicly available on Google Fonts, making it easily accessible for a variety of projects. Its modern design and attention to detail make it a strong choice for anyone looking for a high-quality monospace font.

Why ChatGPT would be hawking Google Fonts is a question beyond my pay grade, but hey, it’s free and easily implemented, so I might as well try.

Back in 2008, Tyler Cowen wrote about the stupidity button, in response to some rabble-rousing rhetoric:

When I see people writing sentences of this kind, I imagine them pressing a little button which makes them temporarily less intelligent. Because, indeed, that is how one’s brain responds when one employs this kind of emotionally charged rhetoric.

As you go through life and read various writers, I want you to keep this idea of the button in mind. As you are reading, think “Ah, he [she] is pressing the button now!”

I’ve pressed that button myself many times, and always regretted it.

When I first saw Patrick Collison’s “vague tech cannon”, the preponderance of biographies and Silicone Valley histories seemed like too much navel gazing. Tanner Greer had a more charitable perspective:

To study the great men of a community’s past is to study what greatness means in that community. That I think is half the purpose of these biographies of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Feynman and Oppenheimer, Licklider and Noyce, Thiel and Musk. These books are an education in an ethos. Such is the paıdeía of the technologists.

Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Feynman — yes. But Thiel and Musk?

Daniel Frank writes about agreements and disagreements:

There’s something to be said for the blissful ignorance of not knowing every opinion held by every person in our lives and for spending less time dwelling on divisive topics. If you got along well with your work colleague until you discovered their view on topic X, then maybe discussing topic X isn’t wise.

Right! That’s one way to avoid condemnation games.

Here are four good articles on this fourth day of the week:

The American Dream isn't dead, it's just not evenly distributed

I’m a fan of Chris Arnade’s newsletter, but the latest post about the (stalled) American Dream just didn’t sit right with me. He travels through the rural US (Wheeling WV, Belmont OH, Bristol TN) and, surprise surprise, finds only disillusioned people who think the Dream is dead. His takeaway is that:

We have an ugly, selfish, winner-take-all culture — devoid of community, meaning, and the majestic — and almost all our policy is built around the notion that individual liberty, with the most stuff at the cheapest price, is the ultimate good.

The article reads like a travelogue of a man shocked, just completely shocked, to find so much snow and little if any sunlight on his July trip to Antarctica. Now I can’t speak to the collective American “we” for I am a mere green card holder — and a recent one at that — but this has not been my experience living in the US these past dozen and some years. I can think of many (large, populous) parts of the the country where the most stuff at the cheapest price has not been deemed the ultimate good, where there is still a sense of community, and where things still can be majestic.

The cheapest-price mentality is a consequence of being poor, not its cause. If it still prevailed everywhere, how could we explain the rise of the farmers' market, of the local bookstore, of Etsy? If none of those had a presence in places that Arnade had visited, well, maybe it’s because they are not compatible with poverty whereas the Dollar General and other discount store chains are. And to be clear — there is nothing wrong with cheap-as-affordable (in contrast to cheep-as-poor-quality): Costco is, unironically, up there with the Internet and 1970s Hollywood as one of the non-material Wonders of the Modern World.

There is also community for those willing to look. Just yesterday I accompanied our rising second-grader to a playdate-slash-class reunion held at a community garden cared for and maintained by 20-some year-old volunteers who donate all the produce. In a few weeks the parents and the kids will meet up to for a neighborhood cleanup. At the tween’s middle school we’ve collected money so that all the classmate can go to the annual field trip, and we’ll be doing the same this year. Our ANC meetings are well-attended, if occasionally contentious, and I consider myself an introvert living in one of the less communal neighborhoods in the city.

I also can’t wrap my head around the accusation that the United States are no longer aiming for the majestic. The new World War I memorial seems like it will be majestic. On the other end of the spectrum, the Sphere certainly is. So is the Olympic medal count. And the most majestic of all is America’s awe-inspiring natural beauty, which it still protects more than most other countries.

But these things aren’t everywhere — you need to travel around to get to the place that’s the right fit for you. Most people Arnade encountered were wizened old souls with not much spirit left in the tank. This is the tradeoff: other places he recently visited, whether in Europe or Africa, were gentler to the people who stayed — because they are the majority! But that is not the American Dream, which promises a safe and comfortable life for those of hard work and determination. Next time Arnade is in the area, may I suggest he visit Pittsburgh and talk to anyone who’s left Wheeling, West Virginia? It is telling that the only person Arnade spoke to who still believed in the Dream was a recent transplant to the area, going from a horrible situation to a slightly less bad one. I can only hope she will continue the journey.

I had Linus Lee’s blog The Sephist filed under “Paused and Defunct” for a while now, but he is back at it. Although most of the subject matter is out of my wheelhouse this mental model of Motivation as a function of Exploration (or was it the other way around) rang true — certainly truer to the scientific method than what my 6th-grader has been hearing at school.

Nassim Taleb wrote about how he writes:

The common fallacy is that if you want people to read you in the future, you must project something related to the future, focused on the contemporary and be as different from the past as possible –say by populating your work with space machines, high technology, and revolutionary ideas. My U.S. publisher still tries to squeeze modern art on the cover when I am looking elsewhere.

No, no; it’s the exact opposite. If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the contemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.

But there is also this:

Another discovery I made then, and to which I have been adhering until the present. If you consider writing a creative endeavor, then avoid practicing it in mundane matters as it may both dull your vitality and make it feel like drudgery, work. I find it painful to write outside of my books (or mathematical papers) –and immensely pleasurable to write in book form. So I limit my emails to one or two laconic (but sometimes incomprehensible) sentences, postcard like; the same with social media posts that are not excerpts from books. There is still such a contraption called a telephone. Likewise, I don’t read letters and emails longer than a postcard. Writing must have some solemnity. Reading and writing, in the past, were the province of the sacred.

Not to belabor the point, but I too have found pleasure in writing articles of a certain length — and it’s not the length of a book! To each their own.