“…the sheer amount of regulation is so voluminous that if I had to actually read the guidelines that they want us to know about, I would never again be able to submit a grant”.

In communist Russia, the grant writes you!

Silly me, it’s not Russia, it’s the US of A.

Uniquely, the gun industry has legal immunity from the effects of its products. Imagine if pharma companies were shielded from the consequences of bad drugs or automakers from faulty engines. The same rules must apply to Smith & Wesson, American Outdoor Brands and other gun manufacturers.

The FT’s Editorial Board misses to note that, unlike drug toxicity and engine breakdowns, committing mass murder is the sole intended purpose of automatic and semi-automatic weapons. America is no stranger to regulation: you may not, for example, cut people’s hair without a state-issued license. That people of any age can just walk into a store and buy a weapon of mass destruction is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such.

To get yourself in the right frame of mind before reading this book, try watching a few optical illusion videos. There is no reason to think our visual cortex is any dumber than the rest of the brain — in fact, quite the opposite. That our inference can be so easily fooled in a domain which is supposedly our strong suit is humbling.

Our statistical inference is even worse, so a short book or two on statistical numeracy should be in everyone’s library. Gerd Gigerenzer’s Calculated Risks can be that book for most people. The assumption, easily defensible, is that “most people” will get more use out of understanding frequentist rather than Bayesian probability. After all, most probabilities people are bombarded with — your chance of dying from breast cancer with and without screening, the chance of your neighbor being the killer given a positive DNA match (you know, the day-to-day stuff) — is frequentist.¹

The only reservation to wholeheartedly recommending Calculated Risks to everyone is that it falls into the category of “blog post books”, if you believe that most non-fiction books should, in fact, have been just blog posts. Or, since blogs are out of vogue, a 15-minute YouTube video may do. Or perhaps a single sentence: use natural instead of relative frequencies (e.g. 1 in 10.000 instead of 0.01%). Let your faulty cortex fill in the rest.

📚 Calculated Risks was funnier than you’d expect from a book about statistical (in)numeracy. It’s healthy to laugh in the face of our inadequacies.

A massively biased and, ultimately, underwhelming account of jobs that even people performing them think shouldn’t exist. It is biased because David Graeber’s sole source of information — beside his own flowering mind — were his Twitter followers. More precisely: his followers' self-imolations in prose sparked by the short essay which popularized the term. So you get not only a self-selected sample of young middle-class professionals discontent with their jobs, but also the attempts of that sample to connect with their anarchist idol. A fun game to play while plodding through these accounts — accounts which, by the way, take a full half of the book — is to spot the embelishments. There are many, and some even Graeber marks as such.

As for underwhelming, well, the book’s purely descriptive nature wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t skin-deep. Graeber comes frustratingly close to asking some interesting questions; ⊕ In no particular order: Should we be worried about AI taking our livelihoods if most jobs are irrelevant anyway? How much of what doctors do is bullshit, and are they aware of it? Is the private sector just as bad as the government in real-to-bullshit job ratio, or are some companies better than others, and is that reflected in their market value? Are there any signs of de-bullshitization in countries that experimented with Universal Basic Income? alas, that would have required too much research. Instead we got fan mail copypasta and cheap digs at the corporate culture. So it goes…

📚 Bullshit Jobs ended up being copy pasta of David Graeber’s fan mail. Too bad, as the premise is as relevant as ever.

He was stage-ready and planning to tape a pair of performances in Los Angeles. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, shuttering entertainment venues across the nation. At almost the same time, Macdonald’s monthly visit to the hospital revealed that the original cancer, multiple myeloma, had metastasized into myelodysplastic syndrome, which can often lead to acute leukemia. The diagnosis left Macdonald and Hoekstra spinning and unsure of the next steps. Except for one thing: Whatever happened, Macdonald wanted to make sure his material was shown.

There are some great moments in this Washington Post article about Norm Macdonald’s last few years and his last comedy special (available on Netflix starting May 30th), but I couldn’t help noticing a factual error in their description of his medical condition. Macdonald’s multiple myeloma didn’t metastasize to MDS, but was most likely the consequence of prior myeloma treatment. High-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation can cause therapy-related MDS, which is difficult to treat, impossible to cure, and has median overall survival of 18 months.

So why even give this treatment, if a known toxicity is an even deadlier cancer? Because randomized controlled trials showed that people with myeloma who received it lived longer than those who didn’t. And one day, hopefully soon, a randomized trial will show that some other, less toxic treatment is even better than autologous transplantation. Which is to say, it is auto transplant and not randomization that we should strive to send to the dustbin.

📷 Seriously?