🍿 The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop (2024) was not as focused as I would have liked. It had a dash about board game designers, a splash of podcasters and YouTubers in the space, a good dose of the tabletop world championship, some pieces on players' ever-expanding personal collections, and so on, and so forth. All important, all shot in the modern, pleasing documentary style. Of course, when equal space is given to everything the message can only be “board games good”. Fine, but not exactly masterwork cinema.

🍿 Civil War (2024) was not a story about the United States, current events or politics, but rather about war correspondents and their not-at-all-healthy relationship with work. It could have been set anywhere; for added emotional hit — and to highlight the absolute pointlessness of the job — it takes place in and around the stretch of land from New York City to Washington DC.

Journalism is the focus, but of course the inhumanity of man towards man also shines through. Murders are plentiful and senseless. You are never sure who is on which side in any particular set piece, and if indeed there are any sides. The only thing anyone is sure about is that the dictator is circling the drain and that his fall is a matter of days.

This is where the movie can’t escape its Americanness. Couldn’t the same story have been told about something even more petty? Don’t many real-life war correspondents go through worse ordeals for smaller stories? At the end of the day — and take of this what you will — my war-torn Balkan heart found the movie too optimistic, though it tried to put on a veneer of cynicism. For true bleakness, try Lepa Sela Lepo Gore (1996) (eng. Pretty Village, Pretty Flame), a nihilist masterpiece that an inattentive viewer may confuse for a dark comedy.

Stresa is a tiny town just north of Milan, one of many dotting Lake Maggiore. It was for a 3-day conference with much work to do, but some observations could still be had.

• Do not rely on Uber, or any other ride share service for that matter. Taxi drivers are your friends. I am sure ride sharing is fine in Milan, but three drivers canceled my airport pickup shortly after accepting, when they saw I requested a trip to Stresa. This is just 45 minutes from Milan Malpensa, not exactly the end of the world, and the taxi driver had no issues taking me there.
• Actually, the third Uber driver never canceled: he asked me to cancel it myself as he was “having psychological problems”. I took a screenshot and wished him the best.
• I thought I would have an easier time scheduling an Uber ride back to the airport, but no. 8 hours before the 4am drive to the airport a driver was still not assigned. I canceled it and ask a cab driver if he could pick me up. He couldn’t, but a friend of his did, arriving at the hotel right on time.
• I knew I made the right decision when another hotel guest asked me if we could share the ride as I was getting into the car — his scheduled 4am Uber never showed up. So, I will repeat: skip ride sharing and take the taxi (or better yet the train, if not pressed for time or traveling before 6am).
• I stayed in a small hotel with the conference in a much bigger one close by, but both were, I realized, my favorite type of place: opulent turn-of-the century institutions with large marble staircases, very small bathrooms, somewhat musty hallways, and impeccable service. The Fairmont would be the closes US equivalent, though those are slightly more modern and at a lower level of service. In Serbia it is Hotel Moskva.
• The coffee was extraordinary at any place I had it, without the fussiness of r/espresso and other places which insist on recently-roasted premium beans and microgram scales for your shot. And not a paper cup in sight.
• Also: no coffee maker in the hotel room. High standards!
• This is a general recommendation for traveling outside of the US, not about Stresa in general, but never ever accept automatic conversion from local currency to USD when paying by car or withdrawing money at the ATM. Choose local currency and trust that the US bank will take a smaller cut than the locals… for the time being.
• The town was beautiful even with constant downpour, and I will look for excuses to come back.

Burn it.

• BBC: Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time. Big if true, but still at the press release stage. Caveat lector.
• CNN: A surgical team was about to harvest this man’s organs — until his doctor intervened. Concerning. Yes, it is extremely unlikely but the number of these occurrences should be exactly 0 and the system that allows them needs to be rethought.
• NYT: She Held Her Baby for an Hour. Then the State Took Her Away. Harrowing.
• NYT: An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive. A few months old but a good one from Ross Douthat. “In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.” We are doing our small part by introducing our kids to the pre-1980s movies and some very old books.
• FT: The young against the young. From Janan Ganesh, with whom I am — predictably — in complete agreement: “Yes, a house in E8 will cost you now, but if you think that outweighs the invention of the hepatitis B vaccine, you might investigate the option of growing up a bit.”

Gift links for the last 3 — enjoy.

Yesterday, I quoted John Ioannidis’s description of how the pandemic was changing the norms of science:

There was absolutely no conspiracy or preplanning behind this hypercharged evolution. Simply, in times of crisis, the powerful thrive and the weak become more disadvantaged. Amid pandemic confusion, the powerful and the conflicted became more powerful and more conflicted, while millions of disadvantaged people have died and billions suffered.

First, note that no one person or thing (or a few countable ones) was responsible for the transformation, but rather that it was a natural property of the system. Then note that the pandemic sped up (or “hypercharged”) the system’s transition to its (breaking) endpoint. The American clinical trial ecosystem is even closer to its breaking point than science overall, and for the same reasons: its postulates make it untenable, and the influx of ZIRP-conjured pandemic-stamped money hypercharged the transition to this.

People go looking for ways to speed up clinical trials like they would for speeding up house construction. They ask: what is one key piece of legislation — the parking and zoning requirements of clinical research — that could either be tweaked or removed to break open the damn, so that trials would be as fast as they were in the 1960s? And why won’t the clinical trial hobbits tell us what those obstacles are, so that we can crush them?

But there is no one, or two, or two dozen such obstacles, the serial removal of which could speed up trial design, approvals, execution and readouts. The clinical trial path does not have boulder problem. Boulders would in fact be great: at least you can, while climbing over or making a 3-day detour around, fantasize about crushing them.

No, the problem with the path is that it runs through quicksand while being covered by a dense fog. Move too fast or stand in place and you die; move too slowly and you don’t get anywhere. Not that you know where to go: with all-encompassing fog you can only see five inches ahead anyway. There is not much time to think about anything else when you are in that kind of a quagmire, and how exactly would you imagine dealing with the fog? Drive it away with a big fan?

By “quicksand” I mean the moral, ethical and physical safety risks inherent to any clinical trail ⊕ This is why every introductory course on the topic must start with the ignominious history of experimenting on humans… and the systems we developed to deal ⊕ …immediately followed by a description of Institutional Review Boards and other regulatory matters. with them.

By “fog” I mean that much of the deliberation is not a matter of legislation but of opinion, values, principles and — the most loaded of words — comfort of people sitting on these IRBs and in the regulatory agencies. Depending on comfort level of individual members a question on whether a trial can proceed may take much deliberation or none at all. We can hardly know our own minds, and good luck about reading other people’s.

This is why I am skeptical that uncovering the FDA’s records would be of help to anyone but historians: the people who wrote them and interpreted them are no longer in play; different brains run the show, and the archives won’t reveal their thought process. Sure, sometimes there is one person sitting there that makes things worse than they should be, by being too slow, or thoughtless, or obstinate. But is “find better people” a tenable solution, when those people could be doing anything else, and with more reward of all kinds?

The pandemic hypercharge made everything worse. In addition to wading through quicksand while blinded by fog you now have to deal with many, many invisible neighbors elbowing you in the chest and kicking you in the groin, some intentionally, some out of carelessness, confusion, or not knowing any better. IRBs are overloaded and so are the regulators. What difference would any legislative change make?

Except, of course, it is to abolish one or both. It would lift the fog, sure, but would need a new kind of system to avoid making everyone sink to the bottom of the ethico-moral pit. Tearing down institutions is easy, building them is hard, as we see one but not the other being played out under our inattentive eyes.

• Julie Segal: Nassim Taleb — and Universa — Versus the World. Says Taleb “How many people in the United States own a house without insurance on the house? The way they [critics of tail hedging] look at it, you won’t buy a house if the insurance is expensive. No, you would buy a smaller house. Insurance is not an option.” From September 2020.
• Samantha Rose Hill: Where loneliness can lead. “The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves. By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power. And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right.” From October 2020.
• John PA Ioannidis: How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science. “There was absolutely no conspiracy or preplanning behind this hypercharged evolution. Simply, in times of crisis, the powerful thrive and the weak become more disadvantaged. Amid pandemic confusion, the powerful and the conflicted became more powerful and more conflicted, while millions of disadvantaged people have died and billions suffered.” From September 2021.
• Justin EH Smith: Permanent Pandemic. “The old will eulogize all that’s been lost, while the young, lacking memory, will begin to draft visions of what should come next.” From May 2022.

All via Instapaper, which has been ever reliable in its role as a saucer.

Patrick Collison made a travel website:

It’s surprisingly hard to find good travel writing online. Upon landing someplace, you can peruse Wikipedia, but what else should one read? Below is a compendium of recommended pieces.

There is a single entry on “the Balkans” and it was fun to read if too simplistic. On the other hand, there are many references to Chris Arnade’s writing, so I hope that at least some of the other links are in that ballpark. (ᔥTyler Cowen)