An unexpected diversion that is all heart and no plot — not the most terrible thing in the world, but far from the year’s best animated movie.
Infinite Regress HQ wishes a Happy New 2022 to all those who celebrate. By the time this gets published, it will be January 1, 2022 in all time zones. The earliest someone has wished me a Happy New Year this season was mid-December (!?). Yes, yes, we won’t see each other until the next year, but let’s see the old year out the door before celebrating the new one. I’m superstitious like that.
A big reason Don’t Look Up didn’t sit right with me was its simplistic view of the scientific consensus. “Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists…” bellows Ariana Grande paternalistically.
Meanwhile, qualified scientists from reputable institutions of higher education act as petty and vindictive prima donnas. The linked article is one scientist’s story of having to suffer through years of academic harassment for publishing a paper that rubbed some of her fellow researchers the wrong way. From the abstract:
A naïve researcher published a scientific article in a respectable journal. She thought her article was straightforward and defensible. It used only publicly available data, and her findings were consistent with much of the literature on the topic. Her coauthors included two distinguished statisticians. To her surprise her publication was met with unusual attacks from some unexpected sources within the research community. These attacks were by and large not pursued through normal channels of scientific discussion. Her research became the target of an aggressive campaign that included insults, errors, misinformation, social media posts, behind-the-scenes gossip and maneuvers, and complaints to her employer. The goal appeared to be to undermine and discredit her work.
Goddamn scientists indeed.
March 7, 2020 was a Saturday. I woke up at 8am, which is as late as it gets, since the night before we watched Breathless and The Graduate back-to-back (the 1960s were a good decade for movies). Most of they was spent in visiting friends in downtown DC. They are a family of four in a tiny one-bedroom; we compared notes on where best to stash the extra flour, rice, pasta, and other staples Though not, funnily enough, toilet paper. we stocked up on expecting the inevitable. The inevitable came that night as we were heading out, when Mayor Bowser announced in a late news conference that yes indeed Washington DC had its first confirmed case of Covid-19: a man with no recent travel and no confirmed exposures, which is to say, there was already community spread. We got back to our apartment and closed the door; the next time that apartment would be empty of people again, as it usually had been on weekends and later summer afternoons before the pandemic, was more than five months later.
That was 300 days ago to the day, and as my favorite columnist and fellow millennial Janan Ganesh astutely noted, there were no grand lessons that these 300 days gave me, unless you count confirmation that humans can muddle their way through anything as a lesson. Harambe may have been killed in 2016, but 2020 was his year: a tragic, sensless event where everyone is responsible but no one is to blame — though I may be an exception in thinking this, since 2020 was the year of confirmation bias, the year of suppressing the opposing view points, the year of shaming. To complicate matters some more, it was also the year when crackpots and idiots joined into the Grand Coalition of Stoopid, expressing some points of view that maybe ought to be suppressed, and doing some things for which maybe they should be ashamed. Harambe indeed.
I finished the last year with a post about the great things that happened to me personally as the world stagnated in the 2010s. In the spirit of this year, I’ll finish with a list of failures instead, and I’ll do my best not to make it into a thinly veiled list of successes:
Most of these also make an appearance on my list of blogs. All are recommended, though some of the more prolific ones are best consumed in moderation.
Similarly to Peter Thiel’s key question in Zero to One, Influence revolves around a list of seven: the seven heuristics our System 1 has accepted as a sign that we can agree to something automatically — what Robert Cialdini calls the Click, run response. Actors both nefarious and benign may use them to get wat they want from us. But of course, it works both ways: we can’t learn defense against the dark arts without picking up some of those dark arts ourselves.
As chance would have it, my finishing the book coincided with a family trip to Las Vegas where all of the principles were tried on us in an attempt to sell us a time share scheme. We got our initial hotel room stays at a well-known and renowned hotel chain (authority) at a discount (reciprocity); the sellers wanted to ingratiate with us with a wink here and a compliment there (liking), citing that she, too, was bilingual and raising a bilingual child (unity); we were taken to a room fool of other potential buyers and witnessed one occasion of a 14,000 point plan being sold (social proof); we had only that day to decide on whether we should buy into this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (scarcity), and we kept being reminded how much we spent on vacations anyway (commitment and consistency).
They were good, but the book was better: we thanked them for the offer and graciously declined. It was a $15 investment that saved us tens of thousands of dollars in frivolous expenses. Well worth an ocassional re-read.
Drummer is an online outliner that enables quick, easy, and near real-time posting of text both long form and short — what we used to call blogs back in the good old days of two years ago. Dave Winer created it for his own purposes, but it works beautifuly with just your Twitter account as a login. Here is my page.
As things are still very much in progress, Dave recommended doing daily backups. Sadly, I didn’t, and as of today’s updates a few weeks’ worth of half-baked notes are wiped out from the Drummer server (but thankfully not from the website they helped create). That’ll teach me.
Since posting to that page is on hold until everything is back in order, expect more — dare I say daily — updates here. Managing markdown files is not nearly as intutitive or pleasant to use as Dave’s outliner, but he seemes to be working on an OPML to markdown converter. That will be well worth the wait.
Netflix has a corrupting influence on film makers. Could it be that good art needs constraints?
Witness Don’t Look Up: a two and a half hour movie in which everything is at stake yet nothing happens. As a government farce, it is worse than Burn After Reading; as a disaster movie, it is worse than even Armageddon; and it is much, much worse than Dr. Strangelove by any criteria.
If it was meant to portray our response to Covid it did a terrible job, painting science as all-knowing and the political-buisness cabal as less coherent than your average B-grade movie villain. Spolier alert: (almost) everyone dies at the end, and you (mostly) won’t care.
Good soundtrack, though.
Listen to podcasts long enough and you are bound to develop tastes. After 15-some years, mine are these: conversations over stories, with minimal to no editing, and lasting no longer than a couple of hours per episode. Even within these constraints, the list of podcasts I could listen to is near-infinite. Yet these are the few to which I keep returning:
Previous editions: 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one
Peter Thiel’s thoughts about startups, which I presume every founder past, present, and future has read and internalized.
But I jest. Browse Twitter and you’ll see his seven fairly simple principles of running a successful startup abused, ignored, and misinterpreted, particularly in biotech.
Instead of building a technology that will be useful 20 years from now — the durability factor — technologies are made to solve problems of 20 years ago. Layering optical character recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning over the cruft of hand-written notes faxed back and forth between doctors’ offices comes to mind. Compare and contrast to mRNA vaccines, a technology created more than a decade ago to treat today’s pandemic.
Instead of developing drugs and other treatments with at least 10 times the effect size of current standards of care — principle of technology — the regulatory agencies and markets are overwhelmed by me-too drugs whose marginal benefit requires mammoth trials for any chance of detection.
Instead of vertical integration and ownership of drug discovery, manufacturing, clinical operations and biomarker development within the same organization, with positive feedback loops between all the factors leading to a faster pace — the team prinicple — we get ghost companies made of slide decks and good wishes whose only tangible impact on the world is achieved via Contract Research Organizations.
I could go on: the principles of timing, monopoly, and distribution are also violated early and often in a biotech startup’s lifetime. But then I’d be breaking a principle myself, that of the secret.