Fad of the day: Longtermism.

Longtermism is an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future. It is an important concept in effective altruism and serves as a primary motivation for efforts to reduce existential risks to humanity.

This is how you reduce existenal risks to humanity: avoid ruin. The rest is gobbledygook meant to dazzle venture capitalists and other sources of funding.

Samuel G Rodriques ⊕ If you were looking for his blog’s RSS feed, you won’t find one listed. Thankfully, NetNewsWire was able to dig up the url. is an inventor, entrepreneur, and author of my favorite blog post so far this year:

Serious drug developers have long since learned not to trust animal models when it comes to predicting the efficacy of a treatment for most diseases.

And also:

There is a phenomenon that all biologists will be aware of, where after working on a new idea for 2 years, you one day come across a paper from 2008 and say, “oh my god, if only I had known this two years ago.” If we want biology to move fast, we need to figure out how to eliminate this phenomenon.

And:

In biology, until recently, it seemed like everyone wanted to be a professor or start a company, i.e., that the only high status thing you could do after your PhD was to become a manager.

Not sure I agree with his prescriptions, but the diagnosis is right!

We watched Gremlins again for the first time in more than 10 years. A few things stood out:

• Apparently, back in 1984 you could be 24 and a Vice President of a bank and it wouldn’t be considered a parody.
• Billy Peltzer is… simple-minded? Stupid? Having an aw-shucks-gee-wheez personality is one thing, but an adult behaving like a grade schooler is just being reckless.
• Mr. Futterman comes accross as someone who would, if he were around today, wear a red baseball cap and vote for Trump. Yet back in 1984 his thinking was that anything foreign was broken by default and inferior to American-made. Today, ⊕ Not my own view, to be clear. it is the US of A that is broken and overtaken by superior Asian and Arab infrastructure. Xenophobia will allways adjust to the current moment.
• Did they shoot the town scenes on the same set as Back to the Future? They did come out within a year of each other.
• Speaking of other movies: the next time we watch I will try and count all the references, obvious and hidden, to other movies. It seemed like every movie Spielberg made until then had a call-out.
• The little green mosters hijacking Futterman’s snow plough as the full Gremlins soundrack blasts for the first time was as thrilling as I remembered it.

It kind of made me want to see Gremlins 2 again, as bad as that sequel was on first (and only) viewing.

For those of you completely off Twitter, it is now in the impossible-to-avoid-Elon-Musk phase, where even if you block his account there will be people re-tweeting, quote-tweeting, subtweeting… if for nothing else then to complain.

Sadly, it is still the go-to place for medical conference updates, and right now there is a big one.

…is $1.5 million.

A few days ago, The Washington Post wrote about two medical students who are also identical twins being accused of cheating. Their school, the Medical University of South Carolina, apparently doesn’t have anyone on staff who is both versed in statistics and willing to participate in an investigation. Enter paid consultants:

The university sent their test scores to a data forensics company, Caveon, which reported that the chances of two tests that similar being completed independently was “less than a person winning four consecutive Power Ball drawings.”

Invocation of forensics is the first red flag (see: Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer). Comparing any real-life probability ⊕ Rule of thumb: if what you are doing professionaly made it into xkcd you should stop doing it. to lottery is the second. The uncertanty of real-life probabilities has little to do with known odds of games of “chance”. Confusing the two leads to the ludic fallacy, or “misuse of games to model real-life situations”. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, 2007.

The twins, now lawyers, sued and won the said $1.5M. Good for them.

The older I get the more I appreciate anything in life that reduces friction. Yes, I could write a quick landing page myself and host it on Github pages for free. But for $5/year omg.lol makes it so much easier (and more esthetically pleasing than I could ever manage).

📺 Wednesday started off strong but quickly devolved into 90210 with a high body count: enjoyable, but not quite living up to the atmosphere of the first episode. It was still worth sticking it out until the end to see Fred Armisen’s Uncle Fester.

📺 Season 2 of The Mysterious Benedict Society: bright colors, quirky characters, upbeat music, and all that in sunny Europe instead of Season 1’s dreary Northwestern US. What is there not to like?