So, we are fine tearing down the beautiful old Penn Station, but want to preserve the concrete tomb that was built in its stead? Worse than preserve: turn it into a greenhouse? Modern architecture is bonkers.
My brand image is, admittedly, diffuse and weak. My Twitter bio is “saboteur of narratives,” and few people can say for sure what I’m about, other than vague things like “thinker” or “dumb fuck.” And that’s how I like it. My vagueness makes me hard to pigeonhole, predict, and capture.
For this same reason, I’m suspicious of those with strong, sharply delineated brands. Human beings are capricious and largely formless storms of idiosyncrasies, so a human only develops a clear and distinct identity through the artifice of performance.
Try watching the transformation of Nikocado Avocado without extrapolating it to everyone on social media.
Andrew Bosworth (a.k.a. Boz):
Sarcasm “works” because it alludes to a critique without ever actually making it. It shifts the burden of substantiating the criticism as an exercise for the audience and further suggests that if they don’t already understand it then they are deficient. Making a critique implicit is an unassailable rhetorical position. The most socially acceptable response for the group is to go along with it, as you have given them nothing specific to challenge. And if someone does challenge it you can simply demur and say it was “just a joke.”
Last year I tried to explain why I didn’t care much for sarcasm. Boz makes a more cogent (and infinitely more readable!) argument.
Lily Lynch compares Serbia and the USA in a (paywalled) Patreon post:
“I’m stunned by how comparatively apolitical Americans seem, even, strangely, those who pay attention to politics. There’s still something of an extracurricular quality to them. In Serbia, politics feel much heavier and closer to everyday life. There’s something tense and suffocating about it. And with that pressure lifted here, I feel that a lot of space has been freed up for me to think about other things.”
There are many reasons why I myself left Serbia a decade ago, but this was the main one: unless you move to the countryside to keep bees and heard goats, you have no choice but be infused with (highly toxic) national politics.
But if and when I do pivot to making chèvre, going back to Serbia would not be out of the question.
So, we are fine tearing down the beautiful old Penn Station, but want to preserve the concrete tomb that was built in its stead? Worse than preserve: turn it into a greenhouse? Modern architecture is bonkers.
Donald McNeil, formerly of the New York Times, wrote a primer on the monkeypox outbreak which is well worth the 10 minutes' reading time. The bottom line: not great, not terrible. For now.
“This was an ambitious report recommending all sorts of ways to reform government, but no one was given a mandate and timeline to actually carry out the recommendations.”
Thus ends every attempt to reform administrative burden of research, according to the Good Science Project.
📚 The last paragraph of the last chapter of Fooled by Randomness, and I can’t read it without thinking about Norm Macdonald.
“The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology was an 8-year effort to replicate experiments from high-impact cancer biology papers published between 2010 and 2012.”
Out of 193 experiments from 53 papers, only 50 (26%) were successfully reproduced, and in those the effect sizes were 85% smaller on average. Scientists at Bayer did the same thing 10 years ago, with identical results: only 20-25% of experiments reproduced.
With foundations like this, it is amazing that there has been any progress in the clinic.
“Lazy columnists rest a sweeping argument about political ideology on a tossed-off missive they heard one random person (not a public figure) utter online.”
Lazy journalism is a dominant negative mutant, destroying any benefit good journalism (like Warzel’s column!) brings.
📚 On regression to the mean in Fooled by Randomness. Beware the uncontrolled phase 2 data, especially ones with surprisingly large effect sizes.
