I vaguely remember learning about The Curator’s Code from Marco Arment’s blog and sharing his lack of enthusiasm: I still don’t quite grasp the difference between “via” (ᔥ per the Code) and “hat tip” (↬). But 10 years later, why not give it a shot? ↬Tedium.

By the way, if you — like me — have been wondering why the Brain Pickings RSS feed has gone silent, well wonder no more: two years ago it had a rebrand and is now The Marginalian. Being otherwise preocupied at the time I must have missed it.

And if you’ve never heard of Brain Pickings before, well, you’re in for a treat. ↬Tedium.

Economists are prone to making hypotheses about other fields that make perfect sense to them and others outside of the field, but that can be easily refuted to anyone with an iota of relevant field-specific knowledge. And not just economists. This very sentence is, in fact, one such hypothesis.

But to get to the point: Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution wrote a post titled Left Digit Bias in Medicine which excerpted his WSJ review of Random Acts of Medicine which is a book about “The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health”, which is, believe it or not, part of the title. ⊕ I hate, hate, hate what book titles have become. This is the literary equivalent of the Amazon product name trash recently discussed on ATP. SEO for books as an externality of Amazon’s dominance — who would have guessed?

Now, I haven’t read the book yet, and the WSJ is behind a paywall, so I only have the excerpt to go by, but it is long and it is sufficient. I won’t quote from it — 4th level of abstraction would be too much — but I will copy the figure and make a few comments. You should read the blog post itself, it is good.

1. This is the biggest and the most obvious regression discontinuity I have seen, and it has a reasonable explanation. Kudos.
2. Age is plotted as a continuous variable. This is not how doctors see the patient’s age in their medical record. It is shown as an integer, not a fraction, so someone who is a day shy of their 40th birthday will look just the same as someone who just turned 39. And if the guidelines say you should do something for a 40-year-old but not for a 39-year-old, that’s what most doctors — let’s hope — will do.
3. This is therefore not left-digit bias.
4. While the date of birth is also part of the medical record, it is rarely if ever looked at by MDs — except just prior to an invasive procedure that requires a timeout. It is often checked by nurses prior to administering medications, and they are often the ones who will note that an inpatient’s birthday is coming up.
5. Tabarrok has buried the lead in his blog post. Regardless of the cause, the discontinuity is there and can be used as pseudo-rendomization for a natural experiment of the effect of “testing for heart attacks” (I will guess by that the others meant an ECG and troponin levels) on outcomes. The entire last paragraph of the excerpt is about that, and I 100% endorse the idea.

Chris Arnade wrote a delightful little story from Japan after a few not so great experiences, and it’s great, you should read it, but what really got me nodding was when at the end he meets a young couple at the airport and they start telling him about the cool places they’ll see in Tokyo, and

I wanted to tell them though, slow down, stop trying to maximize your experience by checking off a list and maximize your experience by letting stuff happen naturally, and connecting with people.

It may be a matter of age because a few decades ago I was that young couple, solo edition, but, as the solo became a 2+3, slowed down by necessity, and lo and behold the best experiences on trips were not the ones we planned but the ones we got while looking for a restroom in Richmond for a just-out-of-diapers toddler, let’s say.

So yes, it’s a cliche. Slow down. Take it all in. Don’t overthink and overplan. ⊕ But do think and plan. Everything in moderation: another good cliche. But you know what? It’s true! Even more so when the young’uns are under pressure to deliver that perfect shareable shot.

One of the biggest culture shocks international visitors have when coming to the US — myself from 15 years ago included — is the tipping culture. Sure, I would round up the bill to save myself from carrying coins, or if I was feeling particularly generous leave a small bill or two, but it was neither expected nor required back home. So I cheered when DC voters passed Initiative 82 which would eliminate the “special” minimum wage for tipped workers — a whooping $5.05 per hour — as a step towards one day abolishing tipping altogether. Of course, some people are not happy about the consequences.

An update on room-temperature superconductivity from Derek Lowe:

I am guardedly optimistic at this point. […] This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.

Hurray for interesting times.

If you want my eyes to glaze over while reading your cold email — provided it even made it through SpamSieve — please make sure to:

• misspell my name
• use HTML, preferably with varying colors and font sizes
• mention a 10% discount if I ACT NOW

As obscure public intellectuals go, Rao is fairly well known online, but every day, somebody’s born who’s never seen The Flintstones, and the man does have a knack for packaging phenomena both permanent and ephemeral into digestible mental models which you can use again and again. Sure, you could check out his official New Reader guide — and there is some match between that and the list below — but doesn’t a bespoke list on an even more obscure personal blog make it more adventurous?

• The Gervais Principle, which should have been a book (and is much better than his only actual book). You will never look at office dynamics the same way again.
• The Cactus and the Weasel, the extension of the hedgehog and the fox dichotomy which made me fall in love with 2x2s, and also realize that I was a fox trying to fit in with a crowd of hedgehogs.
• The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, wherein he coined the syntagm “premium mediocre” which perfectly captured the 2010s esthetics
• A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars, which made me want to spend as little time as possible on social networks in general, and one social network in particular, which is a good thing!
• The Internet of Beefs, which finally made sense of the ridiculous back-and-forths which were so common on Twitter X.
• Against Waldenponding, which earned him an invite to the best podcast out there, and which is also the reason I am writing this, having recently been reminded of Rao’s work.

Enjoy the multiple branching rabbit holes!