The complete opposite of Smith Island: modern-day Orient Express, from Calais to Istanbul via Budapest instead of Belgrade. Five-day trip in a regular cabin starts from $25K, and it is that much per day if you choose the double-bed suite. The YouTube videos are quite something.

Infrastructure Saturdays continue with some minor tweaks to the link underlining, which should reduce visual clutter. I have also spent an unreasonable amount of time moving the infinity symbol a few pixels down. Point of diminishing returns reached!

The Atlantic has a short (true!) story about DC politics:

“It’s almost like the government’s imposing its will on its residents,” Trayon White, the D.C. council member for Ward 8, said at the council’s June 6 legislative meeting. He wasn’t talking about a proposed highway, a subway station, a power plant, or—perish the thought—an apartment building. He was talking about trees: specifically, three linden trees on Xenia Street planted a few years ago by D.C.’s Urban Forestry Division. To my surprise, the legislative body of a major American city experiencing escalating homelessness and a serious spike in violent crime dedicated a quarter of its time that day to discussing three trees.

To be clear, he wants the linden trees removed! For context: Ward 8 has a single grocery store which may be closed due to increasing costs of security.

ᔥMarginal Revolution

Three months ago I would have thought this recognize-the-scam quiz from The Washington Post was too easy, misguided, just useless. But I’ve recently seen my dad interact with the modern Web, and I strongly recommend you forward this link to anyone you know who is over 70.

Andrew Gelman writes, under a typographical nightmare of a headline:

Back in the day, Steven Levitt was a “rogue economist,” a genial rebel who held a mix of political opinions (for example, in 2008 thinking Obama would be “the greatest president in history” while pooh-poohing concerns about recession at the time), along with some soft contrarianism (most notoriously claiming that drunk walking was worse than drunk driving, but also various little things like saying that voting in a presidential election is not so smart). Basically, he was positioning himself as being a little more playful and creative than the usual economics professor. A rogue relative to a stable norm.

I wonder how the Freakonomics team feels now, in an era of quasi-academic celebrities such as Dr. Oz and Jordan Peterson, and podcasters like Joe Rogan who push all sorts of conspiracy theories, and not just nutty but hey-why-not ideas such as UFO’s and space aliens but more dangerous positions such as vaccine denial.

Being a contrarian’s all fun and games when you’re defining yourself relative to a reasonable center, maybe not so much when you’re surrounded by crazies.

The parallel in medicine is John Ioannidis, who went from a praised debunker of bad science to a controversial “covid minimizer” without really changing his M.O. So, have their ways always been suspect, have their methods become faulty with the changing circumstances, or are they in the right even now, and it is the hyper-polarized environment to blame for our skewed perspective of their current work? I haven’t a clue.

Or you can look at it through the lens Venkatesh Rao’s field guide to the new culture wars, which is relevant even without a post-covid revision. The academic iconoclasts like Ioannidis, Levitt, et al. are useful in peacetime to serve as an internal control, strengthening the ranks or whatnot — I am not familiar enough with military culture to pick a better analogy — but become useful fools at best and traitorous collaborators at worst when the opposing sides gain in strength and start an offensive. But then, you still need some contrarians around to keep you in check. So how do you square that circle?

Well, Elon Musk helped when he destroyed Twitter. Criticizing one’s academic elders is a centuries-long tradition, tolerated and at times promoted, provided one didn’t do it out in the open. But saying anything to “civilians” — only there are no civilians in the culture wars, just potential alias and foes — is… was… is unseemly.

For better or worse, the barricades are on their way back, the indisciminate co-mingling of ideologies is waning, and (a different set of) iconoclasts will again find their groove. So it goes…

“The American Board of Internal Medicine is under fire for a ‘maintenance of certification’ requirement. Their own tweet didn’t help.":

Frustration among physicians who feel they are being asked to do increasingly more to prove their competency has been building for years and in recent weeks, boiled over for many. At least 12,000 people have signed a Change.org petition, which is open to anyone. Many added their name after the petition’s organizer resurfaced a July tweet in which ABIM suggested their ongoing certification was so easy, doctors could do it while on vacation.

I have been meaning to write about ABIM’s train wreck ever since I signed the petition, but yet again my proscratination has been awarded: Philadelphia Inquirer says everything I wanted to, and then some. Ding-dong…

Back when I had to commute from Baltimore to Bethesda via DC’s Union Station every day (don’t ask) I would obsess about which train car I should enter so that I exit just in front of the right escalator. Yesterday, a Good Samaritan and fellow commute optimizer posted the layouts of every DC metro station to the Washington DC subreddit. If only I could send this back to my 2014 self!

The most fascinating aspect of Tyler Cowen’s interview with Paul Graham is how many times Graham admits to not knowing, in a way that makes you think he may know a bit more than he is letting on. I’d attribute it to his age, but I know many elder doctors and scientists who’d rather die than say there was something they didn’t know.