• Doc Searls: Smart is as Smart Does. On the deficiencies of IQ as a metric, and I wholeheartedly agree.
• Damon Linker: The Most Moving TV Show I’ve Ever Seen. Which is The Leftovers, of course, and I agree. Bonus article: last year’s NYT interview with the showrunners. (ᔥTipsy Teetotaler)
• Andrew Gelman: Conflicting statistical evidence on the long-term effects of children on being whacked by their parents. How one feels about spanking depends greatly in their own experience of it as a child, as the comments to this blog post show.
• Joseph Heath: Populism Fast and Slow. An aside from this article did more to dissuade me from spanking (sorry, “whacking”) as a teaching method than anything Gelman cited. Its main point is also important, and I will quote it here:

People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world.

As a card-carrying member of the cognitive elite, I fully support the rebellion.

The first note is on quickly estimating the 95% confidence interval of an event rate when there are no observed events: if you observe n patients, and none of these patients have the event, then a 95% confidence interval for the probability of the event goes from zero to 3/n (source, with more mathematical detail than I care for). So, if you treat 5 patients and none of them respond, the true response rate could still be as high as 60%. Note that there are many drugs on the market now approved for response rates much lower than 60%, possibly because of the flipside of this calculation (5 of 5 responders could still mean that the true response rate is “only” 40%) combined with some persistence on the part of the developers. But are some drugs dropped too quickly? Probably, which increases the urgency of making clinical trials easier and cheaper to run.

Another implications is that in your standard 3+3 dose escalation design, where you go up in dose if the first 3 study participants don’t experience a dose-limiting toxicity, the 95% confidence interval of the DLT rate at that dose level is still 0 to almost 100%. So, the trials we are running aren’t giving us good enough information. Yay!

The second note, much les philosophical, is that there exists and online tool called reference extractor which can go through a document and extract all Zotero and Mendeley references from it for export into a variety of formats. It can also select those references in your Zotero library, which is life-saving for a slob like me who keeps his references haphazardly strewn across dozens of subfolders. This way anyone who asks can get a neat export, files included.

It wasn’t my imagination: the MacOS 26 Tahoe slowdown I noted immediately after upgrading was due to an Electron bug. Shamelectron (↬ATP) is a website that helpfully lists all Electron apps that are yet to fix it. The last holdout on my Mac has been Logitech’s Logi Options, which is now deleted and everything is — knock on wood — flying like before. Whew.

• Kyla Scanlon for the NYT: It Is Trump’s Casino Economy Now. You’ll Probably Lose. Left unsaid is what fuels it: the self-reinforcing duo of greed and envy.
• Lily Lynch: The Curtain Falls on Aleksandar Vučić’s Foreign Policy “Balancing Act” I wish I could consider this good news. Alas, “king” Aleksandar’s reign was full of pathos and drama tinged with blood, so it is hard to see its end being any different.
• The anonymous person behind “Applied Divinity Studies”: Peter Thiel and the Antichrist. A brief defense of Peter Thiel including zingers like “Since technology can progress, it may eventually become powerful enough to kill everyone. But a force capable of regulating this technology would be at least as powerful, and stagnation comes with its own dangers”. What dangers, the essay doesn’t say. I suspect the biggest one is to Mr. Thiel’s pocketbook.
• Ernie Smith: The Sky Is Falling, The Web Is Dead. A deep dive into one analyst’s history of making false claims. Motivated reasoning is a powerful force, particularly when the motive is money.
• Daniel Kolitz for Harper’s Magazine: The Goon Squad. A scary story about a particular corner of the Internet. Warning: there are some graphic depictions of despair that may be distressing for people who have children and now have to worry about protecting them from the bottomless pits of porn. Make no mistake that this, too, is fueled by greed.

• autoeq.app which will give you the most pleasing equalizier settings for your brand of headphones and EQ software
• QuickNotes, a simple voice transcription app for iOS from Matt Birchler
• Luminar, unapologetically Japanese photo editing software
• Andrej Karpathy’s interview with Dwarkesh Patel, for a dose of techno-realism
• The Empire Podcast, for its 10-part series on Gaza

Have a good weekend, all.

A prediction, based on nothing but this short post from John Gruber and a hunch: within 5 years, Apple will have a deal to stream all college football. NFL may be out of reach, but for many people — Tim Cook included — NCAA is what matters.

• Derek Lowe: Where Do We Stand With “Liver-on-a-Chip” Technology?. It helps, but we are nowhere near replacing animal toxicology models with in vitro, let alone in silico assays. Now, that’s toxicology. I would have a much lower threshold for throwing out the window all those animal models of disease, particularly when testing any treatment that works wholly or in part via the host immune system. Those quickly turn into Rube Goldberg machines — good for intellectual stimulation, useless for inference.
• Brian Potter: Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US? A marvelous exploration of data that doesn’t point to a single cause but does more or less absolve phones while painting a big red “X” onto SUVs and (pedestrians taking) drugs. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
• Dan Snow: Secretive vendors are exploiting a free money glitch in the U.S. healthcare system. As much as it makes my blood boil to see this kind of profiteering in health care, ultimately Americans spend so much because they get so much, at least in terms of volume and technology if not outcomes. It may not be evenly distributed or even effective, but you get what you ask for. If anyone wants a different profile of health care spending they should look at some other people.
• Boone Ashworth and Kylie Robison for The Wire: I Hate My Friend. I saw these adds on the New York Subway a few weeks ago and wondered who on Earth would be crazy enough to wear an always-on microphone, and who would be delusional enough to think it could be a successful product. (ᔥJohn Naughton)
• Andrew Gelman: Uncanny academic valley: Brian Wansink as proto-chatbot. An article headline from last month asked what kind of an Age we lived in. “Despair” was my suggestion but I now take it back — the answer is clearly “bullshit”.

• José Luis Ricón: Systems Biology: understanding beyond genes. With an eye towards aging, but broadly applicable to much of medicine. As ever, there is a relevant xkcd comic on the topic (ᔥDerek Lowe).
• L. M. Sacasas: The One Best Way Is a Trap. “So, once again I invite us to ask a simple question: Is there, in fact, “one best way” in every realm of experience? And even if there were, at what cost would we discover it? And what would we gain? Might it be that in the course of pursuing the “one best way,” we would lose our way in a more profound sense?”
• Anthony DiGiorgio on X: Imagine we mandated everyone have car insurance that covers new tires, oil changes, and wiper fluid. I think you can guess where this is going, and he is not wrong. The cost of health care is skyrocketing because we are always finding new ways to spend money, and isn’t America a society of maximizers?
• Kyla Scanlon: Who’s Getting Rich Off Your Attention? Robert Reich responds, on Bluesky.
• Bonus: Tyler Cowen doubles down on min-maxing the society in his brief comment on Sora 2. “Still, from my distance it seems quite possible that the “slop” side of the equation is a simple way to fund AI “world-modeling” (and other) skills in a manner that is cross-subsidized by the consumers of the slop.” That way may be simple, but also quite diabolical.

Burn it.

This year’s macOS and iOS updates have been disastrous. My M1 MacBook Air is slowed down to a crawl, with sound completely broken. I need two extra taps to do anything on the phone. And for what? An inconsistent, superfluous anti-user interface effect made for TikTok and Instagram, not humans.