September 29, 2025

Monday links, old and new

  1. Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
  2. This will lead to widespread depression.
  3. This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
  4. Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
  5. The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
  6. Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
  7. We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
  8. Art can help us heal.

Indeed.

September 28, 2025

This year’s macOS and iOS updates have been disastrous. My M1 MacBook Air is slowed down to a crawl, with sound completely broken. I need two extra taps to do anything on the phone. And for what? An inconsistent, superfluous anti-user interface effect made for TikTok and Instagram, not humans.

🍿 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.

Notes on (taking an Uber in) Stresa

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.

Burn it.

A digital interface displays a lock screen customization view with the options to Cancel or Done. “Done” is barely visible because of low contrast.

September 27, 2025

Weekend links, MSM edition

Gift links for the last 3 — enjoy.

September 26, 2025

House of quicksand and fog

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.

September 25, 2025

Thursday links, in which I take a look at the not so distant past

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

September 24, 2025

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)