A random window that popped up on my Mac yesterday. Nothing on it is selectable, including the traffic light buttons in the top left. Guess I’ll have to restart, like it’s Windows 95.
Some of the best blog posts are rants, and Andrew Gelman just published one, about reckless disregard for the truth. Here is why he thinks the term “bullshit” does not apply:
In my post, I asked what do you call it when someone is lying but they’re doing it in such a socially-acceptable way that nobody ever calls them on it? Some commenters suggested the term “bullshit,” but that didn’t quite seem right to me, because these people seemed pretty deliberate in their factual misstatements.
I disagree. Whether the bullshitter is deliberate should not matter, and many do indeed BS with a specific goal in mind. In the examples he lists those are inflating the impact of a paper and getting paid for expert testimony in favor of big tobacco. Indeed, dig deep enough and you will find hunger for money and prestige to be at the root of much bullshit.
Thomas Basbøll is back writing, with a wonderfully meta-post about why one would want to write at all:
The obvious alternative that I’m heading towards is to seek reasons to write within yourself, rather than in your environment. Write for the clarity it brings or the pleasure it affords. Write because it improves your mind, not the minds of your readers. In the future, as most of the prose we need to get by (the prose that stores and transmits useful information) is produced by machines, we will write for the same reason that we swim, rides bikes, jog, go to the gym.
That is the dream.
A few good links to start the week:
Never have I ever seen a civilian car racing down the National Mall like it’s their own back yard… until now. Summer heat makes people do crazy things.
Fact of the day from FT’s Edward Luce:
America has 120 guns per 100 people against 4.6 in England and Wales. The next highest democracy to America is Montenegro with 39 guns per 100 people — still a third of its level.
Super-excited about our family’s Montenegro vacation in August.
I have mentioned before that I am not a fan of IQ as a measure of anything other than un-intelligence and have linked to Taleb’s short essay on it from way back in 2019. Well, that same year Sean McClure wrote an even more thorough account of why testing intelligence as done today is pseudoscience, and you get to learn much more about models, biases, and the scientific method. Recommended long read.
🎭 The Frankenstein adaptation now showing at the Shakespeare Theatre Company was a well-executed retelling of some of Marry Shelley’s book from the perspective of Drs. unfortunate wife Elizabeth, and boy did the actress portraying her do a masterful job. The only nit to pick was just how whiney Victor Frankenstein was — the play could easily have been 20 minutes shorter if they had cut down on his vacillations — but then it would have been a slightly different play.
Some good links from the past week:
Once a decade, I am obligated to read a book from Eric Topol. Ten years ago it was during a rotation at Georgetown where they were handing around copies of The Creative Destruction of Medicine like candy. Of course, if those books had truly been candy they would have been of the sort that quickly congeals into an inedible hard lump because nothing in The Creative Destruction… aged well.
Well this year Topol has a book out on aging, and if it weren’t for some high-profile endorsments I would not be paying it two cents. But then I saw Nassim Taleb praising its rigor and scholarliness, highlighting as an example that Topol cites multiple trials for each claim. One can hope the trials he cites actually back up the claims, and to confirm that is indeed the case I now have Super Agers on the pile. Kindle version only: physical space in our library is too precious for Topol.
A random window that popped up on my Mac yesterday. Nothing on it is selectable, including the traffic light buttons in the top left. Guess I’ll have to restart, like it’s Windows 95.