In this morning’s EconTalk, the guest Kevin Kelly mentioned Upstract as a web page he goes to every day. An old fashioned news headline aggregator with no adds that you can personalize for a small fee? Sign me up!
If Mad Men gave you any kind of 1960’s nostalgia, watching Boston Strangler on Hulu will be a good antidote: dour people living dour lives in dark, musty apartments. It’s no wonder that all those concrete toombs sprang up in the same decade.
Interviewing academics, professionals and other experts, The Popperian Podcast is a monthly podcast where Jed Lea-Henry looks into the philosophy and life of Karl Popper.
The latest episode, about medical discovery, pairs nicely with Against Method.
Today’s WaPo:
The Washington Post and KFF surveyed one of the largest randomized samples of U.S. transgender adults to date about their childhoods, feelings and lives.
There is, of course, no such a thing as a randomized sample. Samples are random, trails are randomized. Let’s not present opinion polls as high science.
Not two months have passed since I declared (in Serbian) that we should ban cars — which, yes, is the same sort of hyperbole that something like defund the police was, but that is why I am not a politician — and I have discovered a treasure trove of like-minded podcasts and Twitter accounts. And now that DC has, for better or worse, Mostly for the worse, as written, and I say this even as someone who has gained the right to vote thanks to the bill. allowed non-citizens to vote, I may get to do something about it!
It was while watching the third loop of a video of Jack Callaghan, a 28-year-old man from Newcastle, running a steamer back and forth over his bedsheets that I realised I agreed with one of the commenters: yes, this also brought me “peace and joy”.
So begins a (paywalled, sorry) FT article on people earning a good bit of money from posting housekeeping tips to social media: #cleantok, #cleanfluencers, apparently. It reminded me of Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts, my favorite book to pick up and read at random, and for the same reason all these people are watching a guy clean out a microwave with half a lemon and some water: peace and joy.
The article goes on to describe some spring clean routines for homes of various sizes, including — it is the Financial Times, after all — some they euphemistically call big and stately. This spring we will be moving house, not cleaning it, but I’ll keep browsing through Home Comforts for peace, joy, and some semblance of a plan for spring cleanings to come.
Nothing beats repetition for reinforcing concepts. This week’s episode of EconTalk began with Megan McArdle describing the Oedipus trap, but ended with a discussion on science and policy that echoed concerns raised in Against Method.
Science is a good servant but a vicious master, and “just following the science” is a recipe for all sorts of disasters.
Finished reading: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend 📚
A well-made case for why capital-s-Science is not the answer to all of the world’s many ills, and why it should be separated more from politics and policy, and less so from church. Pair it with Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
On the off chance anyone reading this also knows the language formerly known as Serbo-Croat, now called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin… or simply naš (“our”) language: the few writings I have, going back to 2010, are now on micro.blog.
Consolidation FTW!
Currently reading: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend 📚, and I will post about it soon as it is at least a thought-provoking if not a great book, but I came across this biography of Imre Lakatos who was Feyerabends frenemy and to whom he dedicated the very book I’m reading, and I have to say it is one of the most entertaining encyclopedia entries Being a nerd kid in the 1990s without broadband internet, that is a lot of encyclopedia entries! I have laid my eyes on.
About their collaboration in particular:
It is quite clear that Lakatos and Feyerabend were engaged in a self-conscious campaign of mutual boosterism, leading up to a planned epic encounter between a fallibilistic rationalism, as represented by Lakatos, and epistemological anarchism, as represented by Feyerabend. As Feyerabend put it “I was to attack the rationalist position, Imre was to restate and defend it, making mincemeat of me in the process”
Fun!