I have linked to a Conversation with Tyler (Cowen) in a while because most of them have to date been bland (Nate Silver? Seriously?) but the most recent one with Kyla Scanlon was compelling. She is a 27-year-old book author and… popularizer of economics (?) who writes on Substack and makes videos.

Michael Lopp wrote something yesterday in the useful-not-true category:

[…] I liked to describe humans in stark, clever ways. This often took the form of a “THIS or THAT” black-and-white structure, but I was 100% clear that the answer to humans was a hard-to-define grey area. My job was to get you to think, not to define every possible configuration of human behavior.

Derek Sivers had a similar idea:

Use what you learned from jigsaw puzzles. Start with the edges. Come up with extreme and ridiculous ideas that you’d never actually do, but are good for inspiration and finding the middle.

They are writing about different settings — Lopp about figuring out what’s already there, Sivers about creating something new — but the approaches are similar: to get to the grey area, first figure out the edges. This also tends to be my approach, but it is not how many people think and if you are to avoid painful misunderstandings better have a preamble ready.

Today’s Chris Arnade Walks the World newsletter features a guest post by Lilly Lynch, whose writing I’ve followed on and off for almost a decade now. Georgia has never been on my list of must-visit countries, and is even less so now after reading her post. So it goes…

🚂 I have just completed a too-long Ipsos survey about Amtrak and felt that this was the right emoji to use. Living in DC and traveling often to New York and Boston I dream of a high-speed train, the kind Japan has had for 60 years, zipping through the East Coast. Acela is not it: boarding is haphazard, the seats are grimy, the food is an embarrassment and I could tolerate all of that if not for the 70–80 miles per hour it averages. By comparison, average speed of Shinkasen trains is 150–200 mph. Sad.

Matthew Yglesias had a good writeup of the topic a few years ago, and of course nothing has changed since then except for Amtrak getting an additional sheen of “sustainability” that will make them want to change even less. The Ipsos poll even asked me about “land cruises” — slow rides through scenic routes with stops for sightseeing — but did not mention high-speed rail at all. The questions revealed Amtrak’s priorities: wallow in mediocrity, hide behind low carbon emissions and don’t give a rat’s ass for improving service.

From Axios, PowerPoint’s comeback:

Gen Zers and millennials are using the software to prepare whimsical presentations on niche topics, dating history or vacation destinations for their friends and family.

Tight Five Pub, a sports bar in D.C., hosts PowerPoint parties where locals gather to present silly, heartwarming and informative slideshows on esoteric interests.

I haven’t been pessimistic about kids these days, until now.

Halloween is nigh. This year, our eldest decided to dress up as a plague doctor, and looking through costume options reminded me of one of the worst pieces of doomscrolling churnalism that proliferated after covid. It is titled Get Ready for the Forever Plague, by one Andrew Nikiforuk, “an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more”. ⊕ Of course, back in March 2020 he was just “an award-winning journalist who has been writing about the energy industry for two decades”. So it goes.

Such is the nature of echo chambers that he continues to write, putting out articles like this month’s As COVID Surges, the High Price of Viral Denial. At first glance they are meticulously sourced, a hyperlink to a peer-review journal underlining each claim:

COVID can even whittle away your intelligence. A recent New England Journal of Medicine study looked at the memory, planning and spatial reasoning of nearly 113,000 people who had previously had COVID. Almost all had significant deficits “in memory and executive task performance” regardless of the variant.

Alas, the linked NEJM article says no such thing. In fact:

Participants with resolved persistent symptoms after Covid-19 had objectively measured cognitive function similar to that in participants with shorter-duration symptoms, although short-duration Covid-19 was still associated with small cognitive deficits after recovery. Longer-term persistence of cognitive deficits and any clinical implications remain uncertain.

And as for the “regardless of the variant” claim:

The largest deficits in global cognitive scores were observed in the group of participants with SARS-CoV-2 infection during periods in which the original virus or the alpha variant was predominant as compared with those infected with later variants.

Crucially, the control group was people with no documented covid infection; we have no idea how covid-19 compares to other coronavirus infections, other viral infections in general, and even any illness requiring hospitalization. Staying in the ICU takes a toll regardless of what put you there, and last I checked covid has been putting fewer and fewer people in the hospital, let alone the intensive care unit.

This is a common theme for most covid-19-related research. Here, again, is Nikiforuk’s latest article:

No COVID infection is completely benign because each infection plays a role in deregulating the immune system. Even a mild infection, as one recent study noted, can increase “autoantibodies associated with rheumatic autoimmune diseases and diabetes in most individuals, regardless of vaccination status prior to infection.”

Two things here. One, autoantibodies associated with a disease do not imply a disease: I myself have had high titer for antibodies associated with Sjogren’s syndrome for more than a decade without ever having symptoms of the disease (how I found out about those antibodies is a story for another day). Two, note that the study compared autoantibody levels of three groups of people: those with long covid and persistent neurologic and fatigue symptoms (“neuro-PASC”), covid convalescents, and healthy controls with no known exposure. Ideally it would have included people with non-covid “neuro-PASC” and/or convalescents of other, non-covid viral infections. But at the very least it should have mentioned prior similar research in other viral diseases and put the findings in context of other viruses and hypothesis for autoimmunity. Presented like this, SARS-CoV-2 is a celestial bugaboo unchained from other parts of reality — no wonder that the lab leak hypothesis is so tempting!

Because there are two things that could be happening here. Either a humanity-ending event occurred somewhere near the end of 2021 and we are living a somewhat prolonged but inevitable decline in which so many people will have symptoms of long covid that civilization as we know it will end (queue “the Forever Plague”). Or maybe, just maybe, we experienced a once-in-a generation spread of a new virus — new to us but something humanity has had to deal with throughout its existence — at a time when we have the means to analyze its genome, our genome, its proteins, ⊕ Kudos to the Nature group of journals for their SEO. our proteins, the cells it infects, our cells responding to the infection, the microbiome, the food, the water, the air, the animals and yes, even art. And all that without the context of other viruses and other pandemics.

Some light weekend reading, from beautiful to ugly:

• A Madonna Who Shows the Beauty in Going Overboard
• Italian mannerism, David Lynch, and Lars von Trier
• The News Systems of Survival
• It’s Time to Talk About America’s Disorder Problem
• The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think