Posts in: science

Five somewhat esoteric mental models I have found useful

In anticipation of the new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack arriving by mail — alas, the new delivery date is February 15 — I have been mulling over the more unusual mental models I’ve adopted since first reading about the latticework. The latticework is a mental model of its own — a meta-mental model, if you will — and you would do well to adopt some all of Mungers. The five I list here aren’t the models you will find in the Almanack, but I would not have identified them as such and remembered them were it not for Munger’s wisdom. The links are to Wikipedia and journal articles, for now, but I hope to write a detailed account of my own for each, you know, once I get around to it.

  1. C.H. Waddington’s probability landscape, which has applications far beyond developmental biology, where it was first introduced;
  2. Activation energy, especially as it relates to motivation and administrative inertia;
  3. Epiphenomena as real and tangible things and not nuisances to be brushed aside, which I realized via both Hofstadter and Girard;
  4. Phenotypic plasticity, which we take for granted at the level of an organism (in an environment of caloric abundance mammals will get fat) but not so much at higher and lower scales, i.e., cells and societies;
  5. Carcinization, the nature’s attempt to evolve every crustacean into a crab five separate times, or, as I like to see it, nature’s way of telling us that hyper-optimization is seductive but ultimately a dead end — and again, mind the scale.

These five are interconnected in interesting ways, and if you arrange the arrows just right they do for a mini-lattice. Kudos to Munger for finding the right term. Munger discussed his own mental models in detail in the Almanack and they form a larger, but still loose, network.

The web of mental models is, of course, Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, built so densely and interconnected so profusely that Branko Milanović was right to laud is as a new type of writing. And in fact of the five models I listed, the first one — Waddington’s probability landscape — is a neat bridge between Taleb’s investigations and the other four. But that is a discussion for a future time.

January lectures of note

The calendar is full again. Rejoice?

I tend to add “to all who celebrate” because the Serbian Orthodox Church is still on the Julian calendar, which is off by 13 days. Most orthodox churches are aligned with the Gregorian calendar and have been so for the last 100 years thanks to a revision proposed by — drumroll please — the Serbian Orthodox Church. Having a good idea and not following through because Russia isn’t on board is a typical Serbian thing to do, so points for consistency I guess.

Today’s Washington Post has a good write-up on how genetic engineering of the near-extinct American chestnut tree to make it more resistant to infection went wrong:

After he enlisted the help of Ek Han Tan, a geneticist at the University of Maine, to analyze the chestnut’s genome, they made their discovery this fall: The plants they were working on were, in fact, not Darling 58 trees.

Instead, they found they were working with a different chestnut line — called the Darling 54 — where the gene was inserted in another chromosome entirely, potentially corrupting one of the tree’s existing genes.

…

In a phone interview, Newhouse, the SUNY ESF director, acknowledged the mix-up but said he wasn’t sure what transpired.

“As far as exactly how it happened, we don’t know,” he said. “It must have been a label swap between these two trees that we were working with at the same time” in or around 2016.

The brilliant minds who think engineering mosquitos is a good idea can’t foresee that even a seemingly innocuous clerical error can lead to disaster, never mind the second-order effects to nature if your project succeeds. Whoever’s read Taleb’s Incerto (or some of his tweets) knows better.

If you think yourself a scientist or physician-scientist, please stop what you are doing and dedicate 5 minutes to reading Darren Dahly’s tip for recording data in a spreadsheet. Your future self, your statistician, and the general scientific community will thank you.

Adam Mastroianni is out with another long essay about science and how statistics are not the be-all and end-all of finding the truth, because:

… the whole ritual of “run study, apply statistical test, report significance” is only about 100 years old, and the people who invented it were probably drunk.

So a bunch of drunks built modern statistics on the foundations of probability theory created by a bunch of gamblers. Sweet.

Last year we showed that “better” cancer drugs don’t necessarily cost more. In a follow-up analysis just out in JAMA Network Open, it looks like novelty doesn’t have much to do with the price either. Then what does? To paraphrase № 46: drugs cost whatever the market will bear.

If you’ve haven’t heard of Big Biology until today, well, welcome to the club. It’s a podcast, and it describes itself thusly:

Scientists talking to scientists, but accessible to anyone. We are living in a golden age of biology research. Big Biology is a podcast that tells the stories of scientists tackling some of the biggest unanswered questions in biology.

Right up my alley! I started with the latest episode, on invasive species, and the intro seems a bit too scripted, but the focus is on the interviews, and those delivered. It’s already on my Overcast list of regulars. (ᔥRobin Sloan)

December lectures of note

Not too much this month, for understandable reasons:

There is both a science and an art to medicine. The “art” part usually comes into play when we talk about bedside manner and the doctor-patient relationship, but recognizing and naming diseases — diagnosis — is also up there. José Luis Ricón wrote recently about a fairly discrete entity, Alzheimer’s disease, and how several different paths may lead to a similar phenotype. This is true for most diseases.

But take something like “cytokine release syndrome”, or “HLH”, or any other syndromic disease that is more of a suitcase phrase than anything, and that can present as a spectrum of symptoms. Different paths to different phenotypes, with only a sleigh of molecular storytelling to tie them together. Yet somehow it (mostly) works. It’s quite an art.