Give a lecture once and you help a few hundred people (if you’re lucky). Post the lecture to YouTube and you help millions. 7 years later, I am yet to find a better guide to academic writing.

NB: it’s good to have a live audience.

“Whether hot or cold water freezes faster remains unknown.”

Thus begins a wonderful Quanta Magazine article about the “Mpemba effect”, named after a Tanzanian teenager who saw something funny happen to his home-made ice cream. Reality is complicated.

“A lot of people simply won’t read a 15-page whitepaper, but will be impressed by flowcharts. By making the language of Web3 meandering and impenetrable and by building a culture that is very self-referential, investors make criticism harder to come by.”

Today’s Galaxy Brain newsletter is about Web3, but replace “whitepaper” with “manuscript” and “investors” with “researchers” and you get bad science in a nutshell.

“If you are trying to figure out a thinker and his or her defects, see if you can spot that person’s “once-and-for-all” moves. There will be plenty of them.”

Cowen is right, though we can debate whether early closure is a defect or a feature.

“This contains a combination of various life-extension medicines (metformin, ashwagandha, and some vitamins), and covid defense gear: a CO2 meter… masks, antigen tests and fluvoxamine.”

The reddest of crypto world’s red flags is their belief in longer life through chemistry.

“The convergence of genomics of the cancer—be it from the person’s DNA or tumor directly or the blood (known as liquid biopsy)—matched with the appropriate therapy is leading to outcomes that are being described as ‘unheard-of’ by expert oncologists.”

So writes one Eric Topol, who seems to have made a career out of telling high-status people what they want to hear. For reasons why most of what he wrote is wrong, take a few minutes to watch Vinay Prasad’s reviews of the articles in question.

The trend disrupting medicine back when Dr. Topol was writing about its Creative Destruction turned out to be not technology but rather the opioid epidemic. As a non-expert oncologist I would wager something other than liquid biopsies is leaving its hallmark on the field right now.

“The speed of review times and increasing number of FDA-approved cancer medicines has long been used as a metric for successful regulatory processes and improvements in patient outcomes.”

Here are three good reasons why that isn’t so, to which I would add Goodhart’s law.

The NYT dostarlimab article is reverberating through international media with predictable consequences: being hailed as a miracle cure for cancer. I wrote about it in Serbian, and Google’s translation of it is readable, in an AI-generated spam sort of way.

Residency programs' publication requirements generate the worst kind of scientific BS — useless case reports and rushed chart reviews that clog lit searches without creating any meaningful insight, all while wasting residents' precious time. Please stop.

“Brilliance represents an upper bound on the quality of your reasoning, but there is no lower bound.”

A frameable quote if there ever was one, from an excellent blog post on why smart people may believe dumb things.