Happy grilling!
🎾 They found him, and they boy ended up getting more than just a hat. Love a happy ending.
A beautiful day in DC, which I have spent running just to stay in place:
All the while evading my progeny’s attempts to rope me into a game of Foresaken, which is apparently what children do these days instead of running around in back alleys and playing hopscotch.
After being away for almost two months, this is my impression of our little corner of DC: fewer people, more police cars, scattered groups of youngsters in camouflage uniforms looking like they’re just happy to be here although not really sure what they were supposed to do, the usual smattering of disheveled people sleeping on the ground and/or park benches, but with fewer belongings packed around them, all of us under the watchful eyes of Dear Leader.
The last 8 or so months have been a series of catastrophes small and large, most of which with delayed effect so that the true consequences won’t be recognized until years from now — if at al, seeing how the crack American news media have TikTok attention spans. Just look at research: grants not being paid out, many more not even being submitted because what’s the use, then people deciding to leave the country, others being kicked out, even more choosing to do their studies elsewhere. None of it will have consequences tomorrow, next year, or even what remains of this decade, but consequences it will have and they will not be positive.
But this is just high-level catastrophizing. The situation on the ground resembles ever more an Armando Iannucci satire that reveals everyone to be an idiot even the so-called serious people in the room. Of course as Kohen brothers have taught us, the stupidest people are also the most vicious.
What I would love to know is whether any American who supports the turn their country has taken for any idealistic reason and not for personal enrichment or opportunism? If this describes you please email me or leave a comment below. This immigrant needs an explanation for why copying petty dictators and making Little Pyongyang out of DC is good for anyone whose office is not in Kremlin.
There are few pieces of advice as misguided as the one to “follow the science”. The most recent example for why that is comes from Tim Nguyen who describes While giving a shout-out to the podcasting grifter Lex Friedman, but I won’t hold that against him.a remarkable set of physics grifters:
We thus have a disturbing truth. Eric Weinstein, the man who waxes poetic about a Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, is a hypocrite willing to use his own influence to squash criticism. Weinstein’s grievances and tale of persecution are frequently invoked to serve his narrative, yet when he receives opposition, he is willing to use his own power to suppress others.
In that way Weinstein seems remarkably similar to a certain other grifter who — setting everything he can control in his own favor — sees everything not in his favor as rigged. This very phenomenon was discussed recently on the Dithering podcast, but was recognized a long long time ago.
🎾 Ladies and gentlemen, behold the US Open’s Jackass of the week. I hope that sweaty unautographed hat stinks up everything in the bag.
Andrew Gelman writes:
One reason why these celebrity scientists have such great stories to tell is that they’re not bound by the rules of evidence. Unlike you or me, they’re willing to make strong scientific claims that aren’t backed up by data.
So it’s not just that Sapolsky and Langer are compelling figures with great stories who just happen to be sloppy with the evidence. It’s more that they are compelling figures with great stories in large part because they are willing to be sloppy with the evidence.
An under-appreciated fact which reminded me of this old post of mine.
There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts. But there is a special anxiety reserved for unread lists of unread things. My reading list had become a totem of imagined wisdom. A shrine to the person I would be, if only I read everything on it.
When I deleted that list, I lost nothing real. I know what I want to read. I know the shape of my attention. I do not need a 7,000-item database to prove that I have taste or ambition.
There’s one quote in the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that sums it up for me. “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort — which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”
I don’t always agree with author Oliver Burkeman about this. I find no meaning in toiling over hand-washing dishes, and am eternally grateful to the inventor of the dishwasher. But as it pertains to Big Tech’s never-ending quest to simplify writing with AI, I wholly agree that the struggle is what makes the process worth anything.
I personally abandoned digital for tracking my projects and tasks because I can think of infinity things I would like to create and get done! My imagination is THAT good and ambitious! Thank goodness for paper, which forces me to edit, thank goodness for the friction involved in recording and transferring thoughts and ideas. It keeps me semi-reality-based.
Out today in Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology: Durability of Response to B-Cell Maturation Antigen-Directed mRNA Cell Therapy in Myasthenia Gravis. It only took 18 months to get here from the pre-print but hey, we were able to get longer follow-up!