Writes Kate Lindsay in The Atlantic:

Today’s teens are similarly wary of oversharing. They joke on TikTok about the terror of their peers finding their parents’ Facebooks. Stephen Balkam, the CEO of the nonprofit Family Online Safety Institute, says that even younger children might experience a “digital coming-of-age” and the discomfort that comes with it. “What we’ve seen is very mature 10-, 11-, 12-year-olds sitting down with their parents, going, ‘Mom, what were you thinking?’” he told me.

This is exactly the kind of scenario I had in mind when our now-almost–11-year-old was just born. It took a tiny bit of convincing, but neither I nor my spouse had posted any baby photos since then; who knows, the lack of dopamine hits may have contributed to neither of us having much of a presence on Facebook or Instagram.

And before I start patting myself on the back, there are of course negative consequences in that old friends and distant family members back in Serbia probably have no idea what any of our children look like, thereby lessening their psycho-social connections, etc. But that is something a visit or two to the old country will, hopefully, heal.

By the way, the article I just wrote about found its way to me via Artifact, which has become great for discovering interesting content — thank you, clickbait-hunters — but subpar for reading it, even on the iPad. Anxiously awaiting a Reader mode there.

Adam Mastroianni has published part 2 of his three-part series on negotiation, and it is well worth your time. The problem of dividing household chores fits the theme perfectly while also being easily understandable, practical, and — if you haven’t gotten that part of your life sorted out yet — immediately actionable.

In case you were wondering: if we ever had to share chores, my preferrence is for doing the dishes, I am neutral on vacuuming, and you would have to pay me — and pay me a lot — to do laundry and clean the bathrooms. One of the keys of happiness in life, conditional on not being wealthy enough to pay people to do all your household chores for you, is finding a spouse whose preferences do not match your own.

Before getting married I (wrongly) tended to assume the preferences of others matched my own, and that every issue was a distributive one, to use Mastroianni’s terminology. But, of course that cannot be the case, ⊕ Though even now I have a hard time imagining anyone preferring to scrub toilets over loading a dishwasher. which living with a spouse tends to demonstrate quickly and abundantly. The negotiation aspect is one reason of many why dating a (gender-appropriate) copy of yourself would be a bad idea.

Having forgotten my work laptop at home — why oh why is every backpack I have black? — I now have to contend with two bizarro pieces of technology: a Dell laptop running Windows, and, after a long while, the Gmail web interface.

To my surprise, it is Gmail that is indisputably worse! Yikes, what a mess.

Any text about building a better NIH will have my interest, and the Brookings Institute came up with not one such text but eight! To my bemusement, zero of the nine authors responsible have any background in biomedical science. Could that be why some of them were so good?

There is a strong belief among scientists and lay people alike that:

1. more information is always better (it isnn’t)
2. hard numbers are the only valid form of information (they aren’t)

Combine the two fallacies and you get to today’s level of misinformation and self-deception.

It will be 13 years this June since I have left a job teaching histology at the University of Belgrade to start internal medicine residency in Baltimore. And lo and behold, I am back teaching, sort of.

UMBC — University of Maryland Baltimore County to friends — is starting a graduate course on clinical trials. I will be helping out Wilson Bryan, the recently retired Director of FDA’s OTAT (aka “head of cell and gene therapy”), to design and run it. Maybe even do a lecture or two. The two of us talked briefly about the new course on a UMBC podcast, ⊕ This is also where I learned what my title would be. Graduate instructor, apparently. The amount of paperwork required was not commensurate with the title. Oh my, all that docusigning… which is out today.

The course will be an in-person/on-line hybrid, so even those not in the area — and it will be held at UMBC’s Shady Grove campus — may join this coming September. From what I understand, giving people who are not physicians the opportunity to learn about designing, running, and interpreting clinical trials is a rarity, so it will be interesting to see who shows up and where the discussion leads us.

So, 13 years… Different university, different subject matter, but how much could things have changed since then anyway?

Currently reading: The Formula by Albert-László Barabási 📚 which starts off as self-help dreck, but soon switches gears and reassures me that I haven’t made a horrible mistake buying it. The formula for success is mostly randomness, but it’s worth dwelling on the parts that aren’t pure chance.