🍿 The Wild Robot (2024): beautifully made, needlessly violent. Crazed chases and shootout spectacles push out a sweet children’s story. Too bad.
You wouldn’t be able to tell it from my recently published posts, but I am in a list-making mood. I have made an end-of-year list of podcasts since at least 2018 (possibly earlier) and more recently I have been making beginning-of-year lists of books I may read. Here is the one for this year and — spoiler alert — I did not follow the list. Regardless, it has been a useful practice and any book lists this time of year are more than welcome.
But anti-recommendations also work! Unlike straight up recommendations — a person you trust saying that something is good — anti-recommendations can get complex and to me more interesting. A still straightforward form is a trustworthy person saying that something is not worth your time. But how about someone you hold in low regard telling you about their favorite books?
Well, I hold one Eric Topol in low regard. Hints of why are here and here, and the short answer is that he is — much like Neal DeGrass Tyson — the stupid person’s idea of a smart person, and a doctor to boot. If a trend is a few years past its peak you can be certain that Topol is pitching his idea about it to a publisher, using third-order book digests about the idea as his source material.
So I was absolutely delighted when he published a list of his favorite books of 2024: flags don’t get much redder than that. Of course Yuval Harari’s new book was one the list — not a fan of his, either — and though I have never heard of the other books or authors, something dramatic will need to happen for me to change my perception of them as derivative dreck. Ars longa, vita brevis.
What makes this especially valuable is that these are mainstream books. An anti-recommendation is only valuable if it is a book you would at least consider and for better or worse these are the books in consideration. The flip side is also true: the most valuable recommendation is for an Amazon Kindle samizdat. For a fun mental exercise, please imagine what it would take for the likes of Topol to do this. Neither could I.
Here is another mental exercise: what if an unreliable person published a list of their least favorite books? Would those two minuses add up to a plus? Probably not: there are many ways in which a book can be bad and even if there was a weak signal for a book’s quality in that list it wouldn’t be enough to overcome the noise of thousands of books vying for attention.
Finally I should note that the delight of dunking on X made me miss the more important point: that any list of books published in 2024 is also a list of books to avoid in 2025, because there is no stronger signal of transiency of an idea than it getting oversized attention. The Lindy effect is real so unless you have a friend who is in the merciless writing business and needs a friendly reader, save your time and read old books.
Man-made things don’t get better on their own, and without care and attention will in fact get worse. A post from Patrick Collison on X about important historical novels is a good example, not just because of the topic (19th century novels had more complex language, more intricate themes and had more respect for the characters than their modern counterparts) but also, well, just look at the teXt itself: a supposedly text-oriented platform has no formatting, no links, and is an insult to the eyes. Enshittification in action.
Updated the now page for the first time in two months, with a list of board and dice games we played this week. It is more than I’ve played since, well, this time last year!
I’m familiar with Adam Mastroianni’s thesis that science is a strong-link problem — here is at least one mention on this blog — and I am certainly familiar with the recently uncovered shenanigans in Alzheimer’s disease research, but I never thought to connect the dots in the latter refuting the former. Well, paleontologist Matt Wedel did just that:
I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute. In general I’m very sympathetic to Adam Mastroianni’s line “don’t worry about the flood of crap that will result if we let everyone publish, publishing is already a flood of crap, but science is a strong-link problem so the good stuff rises to the top”. I certainly don’t think we need stronger pre-publication review or any more barrier guardians (although I have reluctantly concluded that having some is useful). But when fraudulent stuff like this does in fact rise to the top in what seems to be a strong-link network — lots of NIH-funded labs, papers in top journals (or, apparently, “top” journals) — then I despair a bit. Science has gotten so specialized that almost anyone could invent facts or data within their subfield that might pass muster even with close colleagues (even if those colleagues aren’t on the take, he said cynically — there is a mind-boggling amount of money floating around in the drug-development world).
There is indeed. Lots more at the link, mostly about paleobiology, ending with these wise words:
So if you want to do good work — in this metaphor, to be at the top where the good science floats (eventually, alongside a seasoning of not-yet-unmasked bad science) — then I think you have to be aware that other cells exist, and occasionally peer into them, if for no other reason than to make sure you don’t accept an idea that’s already been debunked over there. And you need to read broadly and deeply in your own cell — there’s almost certainly valuable stuff you don’t know because the relevant works are stuck to the bottom of the pot. Go knock ’em loose.
📺 Ars Technica’s list of best television in 2024 goes on and on (and on, and on). This is why I barely watched anything this year, and most of what I did see were Modern Family reruns.
Thagomizer, “the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurian dinosaurs”, is a word that made the most unusual jump from a cartoon panel into scientific texts. I recently learned of another word that is making a similar jump: hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, a faux Latin word to describe a made-up condition — fear of long words.
The wikipedia article shows to references, one reviewed by a Doctor of Psychology and a cursory internet search shows one more, “medically reviewed by an MD”. How these people approved these articles to come out and validate hippopoto… as a medical condition is beyond me. I heard about the word from my 2nd-grader who in turn heard it from her science teacher (who, I assume, gets her own scientific information on TikTok), so the damage is real. This phobia doesn’t exist, people, and if you do get symptoms listed here upon exposure to a long word, well, here is another word for you.
But here is the twist: the likely origin of the word as noted on a BBC website is this poem of the same name by one Aimee Nezhukumantathil (sic!) and you should click and read the whole thing but this is how it starts:
On the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students Don’t be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester schedule
is chopped off or probably misspelled—
or both. I can’t help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels
to fan some air into the room of a box
marked Instructor…
I empathize. This should be a real word! But unlike the thagomizer which was a real part of actual dinosaurs there is no medical condition equivalent to “fear of long words”. So let’s please find a better definition for it.
📚 Finished reading: Order without Design by Alain Bertaud, which is more of a textbook for urban planners than something one would read in their spare time but still managed to grab my attention and change my mind on a few things. Bertaud makes the case for organic, bottom-up growth of cities in the style championed by Jane Jacobs while at the same time noting the costly second-order effects of NIMBY-ism, 15-minute-city projects, public-transport-for-its-own-sake movements and other causes taken up by modern-day Jane Jacobs wannabes. So yes, I am now more skeptical of both 15-minute cities and public transport. Caveat lector.
I have been reading Order without Design for the last few weeks — it’s a dense book! — so it is complete coincidence that its author Alain Bertaud was on EconTalk as a guest the same week that I finished it. Bertaud talked to to Russ Roberts once before, back in June 2019. I haven’t listened to either episode yet but they’re on the list.
🍿 Krampus (2015) is comedy-horror fun for the entire family with great practical effects and a clear, if simple, message. Will watch again, this time next year.