Not a day after his EconTalk episode, Adam Mastroianni wrote a most delightful essay about why people just can’t get each other: “Sorry, pal, this woo is irreducible”.

Well, most of it is delightful. The fifth paragraph is absolutely horrifying (you have been warned).

Aaron Goodman’s petition to eliminate MOC requirements has 16,000 signatures and counting. That’s a lot, but still <10% of ABIM’s 220,000+ active certificate holders for internal medicine alone. So, please sign if you haven’t already!

And if you have no idea what any of these acronyms mean, ABIM’s home newspaper of record has a good overview.

Nassim Taleb has updated his essay against IQ, and I don’t know if Figure 1 there is new or I haven’t been paying attention before, but it is a true eye-opener. It shows how meaningless correlation is in the absence of symmetry, and medicine is full of asymmetries. I shudder to think how much medical literature consists entirely of physicians-cum-naïve statisticians pouring through medical charts gathering data to calculate such correlations. Counting the official and semi-official guidelines based on such flawed papers would be a nice side project.

My favorite podcast host, Russ Roberts, has just posted an interview with one of my favorite bloggers, Adam Mastroianni: on the Brain, the Ears, and How We Learn. This is their second conversation; the first was on Peer Review and the Academic Kitchen. Highly recommended!

I ⊕ As a side note: Paperwhite is objectively worse in turning pages than the original Kindle. Poor touchscreen and unclear areas mean that I am never quite sure what will happen when I try to turn the page. Having real clickety-click buttons — not that capacitive junk — would have greatly improved the experience. tried using my Kindle more, I really did, especially for nighttime reading for which Paperwhite’s backlight seemed tailor-made. But I couldn’t. The experience felt off, and no matter how good the book was, picking up the tablet and flipping through the pages felt like a chore.

Scrolling through micro.blog’s timeline, I think I found out why:

surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control. People report that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier, for example, or quickly scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to have as much control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper however they choose. The Reading Brain in the Digital Age

I don’t know about “chemical ink”, but knowing where I am in the book — especially a 700+ pager Content warning: A nazi biography. — is important for how I retain information (less important) and my sanity (slightly more so).

As for reading proper (chemical?) books at night: that problem may be solved by this one simple trick, not due to arrive until Thursday. Let’s see how it goes.

I love that micro.blog hosts blogs as static websites. But if I were ever to need a non-blog static website, FastMail would be my number 1, 2, 3… host of choice. They’ve managed my email for a decade and have been nothing but outstanding. ↬This day’s portion

“In Defense of the Yugo”:

The Yugo had problems, but it also had the right idea: a cheap, fuel-efficient, sensibly sized car where the only point is transportation from one place to another. Cars as conspicuous consumption has been a disaster for the planet and for society at large. The end goal is to move away from car dependency and toward actually sustainable transportation — but as long as we have cars, small and fuel-efficient is the standard by which we should build them.

The Yugo as a foot soldier in the war against cars? Checks out.

🗃️ The analogue dashboard is working better than expected! This is how it started.