🏀 And the award for the most poetic basketball headline goest to The Washington Post: “Wizards cast hopeful look into mirror of future, see Thunder looking back”.

At least they are only the second-worst team in the NBA this season, topped only by the worst-ever team in the league’s history.

The news of San Francisco’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. What a delightful town.

It’s my first time in San Francisco today, and waiting at SFO’s designated spot for my Lyft ride I am stunned — stunned, I tell you — by how many BMWs, Lexuses and Teslas are used for ride sharing. An interesting data point.

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. ⊕ [Note: 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.

Currently reading: Talent by Tyler Cowen 📚 and so far the book is… reprehensible? If Cowen and his co-author Daniel Gross are serious about their recommendations on hiring then they are deserving of contempt — more on the specifics once I finish the book. But Cowen is a fan of Straussian readings; my Straussian reading of Talent is that people who take the book’s advice to heart without questioning its underlying premise are the contemptible ones.

Of course, that could be my own ego-defense mechanism talking. Surely I couldn’t have been reading and listening to Cowen for so long and not have realized that he was a sociopath.

The calendar is full again. Rejoice?

• Demystifying Medicine — Primary Immunodeficiency: Mechanism and Management by Drs Jennifer Puck (UCSF) and Luigi Notarangelo (NIAID), Tuesday January 9 2024 at 4pm EST (two hours long and provides CME)
• Neutrophils: Acute Responders in Chronic Inflammatory Diseases by Dr Mariana J. Kaplan (NIAMS), Wednesday January 10 2024 at 4pm EST
• Pharmacogenomics of Drug Toxicity and Its Clinical Implementation by Dr Jun J. Yang (St. Jude’s), Wednesday January 17 2024 at 12pm EST (provides CME)
• Reducing Firearm Violence: a Public Health Approach by Dr David Hemenway (HSPH), Wednesday January 17 2024 at 2pm EST (provides CME)
• CARD Distinguished Duo Lectures Series — Alzheimer Disease by Drs Alison M Goate (Mt. Sinai) and Anna Podlesny-Drabiniok (Mt. Sinai), Thursday, January 18 2024 at 9:30am

The Washington Post reports another wave of covid is coming to America. Well, it certainly came to our household. And much like the first time around, I got it days after a vaccine — just my luck. At least this time it’s only 3 days of sore throat and runny nose, and not a full week of high fevers.

Feature suggestion for a microblogging service: a “Do Not Post” button. Get all those poison darts and built-up steam out of your system together with the satisfaction of a button click, without the anxiety or guilt.

Oh no, wait, it already exists.