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, [Note: 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:
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, [Note: 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.
📺 Season two of Slow Horses: even better than the first! But with better time management we didn’t have to stay up past midnight this time around.
Side note — it is always nice to see ex-Yu actors playing the Soviets, even though a BCS accent can hardly pass for Russian.
Finished reading: Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand 📚
Funny that a book about our entire planet would present the best case for localism outside of Nassim Taleb’s work — I must try to replicate his situational awareness survey in a separate post (select questions: Where is North? What are the 5 most common native birds where you live? Which ones are migratory? How far down do you need to drill to get to water? etc.) The case for why nuclear energy may be preferable to renewables is also strong.
It does, however, endorse some decidedly un-talebian techniques like transgenic crops and glyphosate pesticides. As with any speculative nonfiction, x% will be trash, and as time passes more and more will be revealed as such.
🍿 The Hound of the Baskervilles has had many shots at the silver screen, but the 1988 version made for the tube and starring the canonical Sherlock Holmes is yet to be topped — even with Brett being visibly bloated and sluggish from the lithium he started taking the year before.
A one-two punch today for the journal Science, which while not at the very top of my to-read publications is still the “S” in CNS and therefore, I guess, important.
Punch one: trying to be more woke than the Pope; punch two: actually being — and this should come as no surprise — quite bigotted in practice. Want to submit a paper from your gmail address, you foreigner? Off with yer head.
NB: I do think small-s-science has a noise problem and have written as much. But has playing whack-a-mole ever been a good solution for anything? Or should we change incentives by removing publication count as requirement for promotion in academia and — even more importantly — clinical medicine?