When a project I have been putting off for 2 months gets done after 90 minutes of concerted effort, how should I feel: relieved or annoyed? Because right now it’s the latter.

After a nearly two-year hiatus, Wondermark is back. But will there be a calendar?

Here is an obvious analogy for you: the physical world — meatspace, if you will — as “meat” of an actual body, both skeletal (muscles, ligaments, tendons and such), and visceral (entrails, the liver, vital organs); the internet as nerve impulses connecting the various parts both sensorially (how are the navels of the world doing these days?) and in effect (from Facebook groups to GoFundMe pages bringing actual change).

You know how X and other social networks made everything feel connected to everything else? Well, there is an organic counterpart to this phenomenon, and it’s called a generalized tonic-clonic — or grand mal — seizure, manifesting, in the clonic phase, in widespread convulsions of the body.

The reason why our bodies are usually not convulsing is that the nerve impulse pathways are tightly controlled in space: there are separate nerves, differentiated brain areas for different roles, and let’s not forget the biggest separation of them all: two semi-independent brain hemispheres connected only by the corpus callosum which, imagine this, is sometimes cut completely for treatment of refractory seizures. There is also chemical separation: many of the pathways are inhibitory, and the most abundant neurotransmitter in the body is not dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine or others you’ve heard of because they go haywire, but glycin, a modest amino acid which people don’t hear about because it is so good at its job of tamping down bad impulses.

The world’s ongoing convulsions started — after an initial tonic phase — right after we have all become interconnected: Hezbollah, Hamas, and your neighborhood association all hooked up to the same firehose. There is a feeling at the edge of my consciousness that the answer to solving them is in ourselves, and not in a new age self-fulfilment way but in pragmatic steps we can take to extrapolate from this most obvious analogy.

Just another day in Maryland.

Adam Mastroianni had another interview with Russ Roberts, and this one didn’t sit with me as well as his previous appearance. They talked about things we learn in school — higher education, for the most part — and what the point of it all was when most of what we cram in is forgotten.

They gave several examples of this, all of which I have quickly forgotten (ha!), but listing things we were made to learn in medical school never to use again was a popular past time on #medtwitter so I will list a few topics that come to mind first:

• Bernoulli’s equation
• the Krebs cycle
• names of all 12 branches of the maxillary artery
• formula for the independent two-sample t-test
• recommended step height and depth for elementary school stairwells

Though that last one was clearly a relic of Serbia’s socialist past, the first four weren’t, and are still being taught in pre-med courses and medical schools around the world. If the goal was to have every doctor know all of these throughout their careers, well, mission failed. But why would we even want that to happen?

Well, I have come around a bit since that 6-year-old tweet and came to appreciate the exposure to different concepts as the scaffolding to whatever career we end up in. No one cries out, after a skyscraper is complete, about all the money and time wasted putting up a scaffolding, setting up cranes, temporary elevators, and such. It is not a perfect analogy since most people in higher education don’t have a blueprint — not even medical students since a doctors' job can be anything from an artist (plastic surgery) to woodworking (orthopedics) to glorified administrative asssistant (general practitioners in most countries) — so it is like building a scaffolding to nowhere, parts of which ossify into the building proper, parts of which decay with time, and parts of which you dismantle as soon as it seems safe to do so, since you hate them from the bottom of your being.

“Why ever did I bother learning about the Krebs cycle five different times!?” ⊕ Twice in high school — biology and chemistry separately, and three times in medical school — chemistry proper, biochemistry, and physiology. I cry out now, as a hematologist/oncologist without a regular practice; but things could have taken a turn towards a career in organic chemistry, or genetics, or one of those specialties where the cycle is more relevant (though really oncology may very well be one of them!)

The poor Krebs cycle is notorious because it is repeated so often without practical use for most of medicine, but there are many more such concepts throughout life that went in one ear and out the other (Are viruses causing hemorrhagic fevers made of DNA or RNA? Well, I knew it for my USMLE Step 1 exam!) ⊕ RNA, says Wikipedia.

The scaffolding analogy puts a slightly different spin on grades as well, which could be a rather useful signal of where your construction should go and what kind of a building you want to make, and not your worth as a human being that most teachers and some students want it to be. But let’s not bring up grades again.

So I was surprised by Mastroianni’s and Roberts' surprise about us forgetting — because of course we do! And if the intent of the teachers was to instill knowledge that will last forever and ever, well, most of it is a miserable failure, except for that one sliver of insight that each of us carry for life. But the slivers are different for each of us, and to appreciate your unique sliver you may still need background knowledge that you will eventually forget — the more specialized the area, the more background knowledge needed, so good luck trying to untangle that web.

Tim Harford:

The proportion of genetics papers with autocorrect errors was estimated in 2020 to have reached 30 per cent. The Human Gene Name Consortium decided to rename the genes in question, wisely accepting that this would be easier than weaning researchers away from Excel.

At the intersection of science and technology lies the festering boil that is Microsoft Office.

Nassim Taleb in Antifragile: ⊕ The link points to an excerpt posted on the Farnam Street blog, which I stopped following years ago — too much noise in the form of wisdom nuggets — but still has its uses. You should really read the whole of Incerto

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself.

…

Now let’s add the psychological to this: we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never small ones.

Alan Jacobs today:

If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated. Try giving yourself a break from it. Look at this stuff at wider intervals, and in between sessions, give yourself time to think and assess.

Always good to see convergence on important topics. I now get most of my news from books.

Epsilon Theory is a Web 3.0-adjacent website which I discounted simply by the virtue of its co-founder having a laser-eyed profile on X, but their article about news coverage of recent events is spot on:

After the deadly explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, Hamas issued a statement through its Health Ministry claiming as many as 500 or more deaths as a result of an Israeli airstrike. Instead of reporting what was known – an explosion with casualties – while working to confirm details about the scale of the blast, the number of deaths and the source of the explosion, each of the major newswires simply rushed to repeat each of the claims of Hamas verbatim. The Associated Press did it. So did Reuters. So did AFP. The west’s largest English-language news organizations followed suit. The Washington Post did it. So did CNN. So did the Wall Street Journal.

None of it was a huge surprise — things haven’t changed much since the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, when I witnessed in real time how pure speculation from a local TV network that was literally accross the street became Sky News scrolling text within the hour — but still disheartening to see after so much ink has been spilled about fake news and sundry.

Even more disheartening: when the stakes are high and facts are uncertain, journalists error on the side of blurting out whatever will get the highest emotional reaction — for the sake of a click. When stakes are low and there is plenty of time for research — they do the same!

This is the part where I note how not all journalists are alike, and indeed they are not! James Fallows' newsletter Breaking the News ocassionally has some brilliant dissections of the prevalining narrative, though he is too often obsessed with airplanes. I already wrote about The Washington Post’s great long pieces. Even The New York Times, has moments of brilliance. And there is always the local news, which is closer to the ground, less able to test the readers' credulity, and on the chopping block.

So with useful daily news (which is to say, local) becoming extinct, and good weekly/monthly journal articles becoming ever more rare, at least the amount of cognitive noise in our lives should decrease! If only we weren’t such suckers for noise-generating machines (which is to say, most social networks).