📚 I’ve just finished reading a preview of Useful Not True from Derek Sivers, and you can too if you click on that link. It is a slight book that very much deserves to be a book and not a blog post — I can’t wait to get a hold of a hard copy.

Sivers takes the aphorism that all models are wrong, but some are useful — well-known to statisticians and, increasingly, scientists of “hard” sciences — and applies it to mental models. At least that is how I read it: he never mentions the aphorism by name and stays clear of explicitly aligning himself with any particular school of thought. I wouldn’t expect anything else from the author of How to Live.

The stated intent is to introduce the reader to reframing as a way to — and this is now my interpretation — decrease anxiety, increase agency and lead a more purposeful life. It does that splendidly. So well, in fact, that I plan on buying a dozen or so to give out as presents this holiday season (apologies if I have now spoiled the surprise). There is some selfishness there: conversations would be so much more fruitful if we didn’t have to preface everything we said with “I believe that…” and other true but not very useful verbal ticks.

Last week’s EconTalk with Marty Makary featured several topics relevant to zombie medicine. One was a zombie’s return to the world of the living, with hormone replacement therapy for women not being as bad as we thought, particularly for preventing hot flashes in early menopause (before age 60). The other was the emergence of a new zombie: removing ovaries to prevent ovarian cancer when it is now thought that most ovarian cancers arise from the Fallopian tubes, not the ovaries themselves. I wouldn’t call it a full blown zombie just yet as there is an ongoing randomized controlled trial comparing the two approaches and who knows, its results may kill the old practice outright.

📚 Finished reading: The Friction Project by Robert I. Sutton, one of those books that should have been a blog post. The fluff is a rapid-fire succession of case studies that are too brief to be memorable but too detailed to be quickly filed away. Just listen to the podcast episode and skip the book.

🍿 Inside Out 2 chose not to emphasize phones and social media, even though it is a story about the anxiety of a 13-year-old girl. It was the right choice to make, timeless over topical, with real-world stakes being delightfully low for all the turmoil inside Riley’s head. That’s puberty.

DC and its suburbs have some of the worst drivers in the country (see r/MarylandDrivers), and this post from Dave Winer reminds me why: no sense of personal car space. The demographics of people trying to kiss my bumper are similar to what Dave encountered, too: middle-aged women and elderly men.

M. John Harrison writes about agency:

For one thing, “main character” is a foundational pillar of storification; & the storification of everything has led directly to the Babel we live in now. The least fiction can do, now that everything–from “news” to science–is presented/exploited as story, is to destorify itself. & that’s before you get to consciously fake news & science.

One reason I liked his books is that this perspective comes out very clearly. Now only to destorify science…

From the Institute For Progress-supported newsletter, Macroscience:

Last year, IFP brought together some of our closest friends and collaborators to put together a podcast series that would serve as a beginner-friendly introduction to metascience.

The result? “Metascience 101” – a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement. We investigate why building a genuine “science of science” matters, and how research in metascience is translating into real-world policy changes.

So far so good. First guests?

Journalist Dylan Matthews sits down with economist Heidi Williams and IFP co-founder Caleb Watney to set the scene.

Bah-rump. Episode two?

OpenPhil CEO Alexander Berger interviews economist Matt Clancy and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison to talk about whether science itself is slowing down, one of the key motivating concerns in metascience.

A journalist, an entrepreneur, two economists and a policy wonk gather around the fireplace to talk science. What seems to be missing is actual scientists. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

And if your retort is that few if any scientists have metascience as there full-time field of study, well, are any of the above doing it full time? I am sure the discussions will be brilliant — I will write up updates as I listen along — but the start looks a helluva lot like an echo chamber. Hope I’m wrong!

(↬Tyler Cowen, because who else. He will also be a guest in a future episode.)

John Carroll, the founder of Endpoints News has stage 4 Merkel cell carcinoma and quite a story to tell:

If I had stayed at Valley Baptist and been treated with chemo, I likely would have seen Merkel cell carcinoma rear back up within a few months, putting me on a statistically short path to the grave.

[…]

My case manager said that if I wanted to leave they would have to arrange a transfer. But I already had the lay of the land from the small army of assistants and nurses who kept the hospital on its rickety track. A nurse told my wife and I — sotto voce — that as we were headed into the weekend, that could take days.

You should just go, she said quietly.

My wife drove the get away car after I signed the AMA (against medical advice), and a friend in the industry helped text my way into MD Anderson as we made the six-hour trip north.

At the other end of that journey was immunotherapy, from a company that Carroll disparaged as a journalist. So it goes…