Today’s Stratechery update from Ben Thompson is about censorship and it is too bad that there is a paywall — email me if you’d like it forwarded — because it is the best overview of our current predicament. Ada Palmer’s Tools for Thinking about Censorship is still the best historical perspective.
❄️ DC public schools are back in session after two snow days and on one hand this is a relief — no one wants to make up extended snow days in the summer — but then most streets are still not plowed and have 0.5 lanes of traffic open making the morning drive a hazard. What is all this equipment for?
January 6, 2025
Much has been written and said about the faults of peer review but one thing I think hasn’t been emphasized enough so I’ll state it here: journal editors need to grow a spine. And they need to grow it in two ways, first by not sending obviously flawed studies out for peer review no matter where they come from, then by saying no to reviewers' unreasonable demands, not taking their comments at face value, and sometimes just not waiting 6+ months for a review to come back before making a decision.
📚 Finished reading: The Notebook by Roland Allen. It starts off strong, with an anecdote about the creation of the Moleskine brand, then goes in much depth about writing during renaissance and the enlightenment, topping it off with a few modern developments like BuJo. The chapters are self-contained and packed with information without being bogged down into too much detail — the Moleskine chapter is a good example of what to expect — at the expense of an overarching “story”. So, this is a collection of vignettes more than a systemic review and categorization of the types of notebooks through history, and that’s fine.
A few higlights:
Michael of Rhodes, a 15th century member of the Venetian navy whose manuscript was the LinkedIn of the day: started of with personal interests, ended up full of useless (at best) and dangerously misleading information meant to impress future employers.
Leonardo Da Vinci had no introspective passages in any of the thousands of pages he wrote down in his many notebooks. Janan Ganesh was right.
The term commonplace arose from the commonplace book and used to mean a striking, exemplary passage in a book, play or speech one should write down and keep. Once commonplace books became popular and writers started including flowery passages with the express purpose of having them written down in the book the public got onto them and the adjective “commonplace” became derogatory. So it goes…
The album amicorum or — and this may remind you of a certain online service — the friendship book made a similar turn, from an exclusive ritual of the educated few in 16th century Dutch universities to an 18th century fad among young women that was looked down upon by the patriarchy. What used to take two and a half centuries now happens in a few short years.
For all the hate X gets, you can still find nuggets of good information, Nassim Taleb and the Taleb-adjacent being a prime example. Here is one such post, from Juani Villarejo, shown here in its entirety for those who would rather not go to X to see the original:
Parkinson’s law says that work expands to fill the available time.
Jevons’s paradox states that every increased efficiency, will raise demand rather than decrease it.
And there is a work asymmetry:
Probably there are many more things you dislike doing than things you like.
Conclusion:
If you allocate time to work, all the time will be filled with tasks to do.
If you make your work more efficient, your time will be filled with more tasks (demands increases).
But by the asymmetry, tasks you dislike doing have more chance to appear than tasks you like.
So when you make your work more efficient your time will always tend to be filled with more tasks you dislike doing.
Corollary: Never ever efficientize (sic!) the things you like doing. Take all the time and enjoy them slowly. They also serve as a defense wall against the things you dislike.
The links and emphasis are mine. For all its pretenses to the contrary X is still a horrible platform for anything longer than 300 or so characters and does not allow for hyperlinks.
A thought for the year, from the aforementioned Prof. Taleb:
Likewise, I don’t read letters and emails longer than a postcard. Writing must have some solemnity. Reading and writing, in the past, were the province of the sacred.
From How I Write, to which I have linked before. Good essays much like good books are worth re-rereading.
January 2, 2025
Here are a few links to start off 2025 (see if you can spot a pattern):
Take this two-hour animation of a candy corn ablaze in a fireplace. This cute video is a simple loop that goes over and over. Certainly, in two hours, there’s got to be sort of Easter egg that happens, right? Maybe Santa comes down the chimney.
Roll over the Engagement Graph, and you’ll see some spikes.
I checked out the spikes. Nothing different happens. It’s the same loop. It’s just people clicking the same spikes that other people did because other people clicked it.
Because humans are humans and nature is nature. Now how many fields of science are made of people analyzing, explaining, narrating and writing millions upon millions of words about an equivalent of these spikes? Microbiome for sure. Much of genetics as currently practiced. Anything that relies on principle component analysis. What else?
The last crusty bread of the year. I’ve only started last year so there is much to learn. One of the thing is: bread flour is called that for a reason and you’d do well to chose it over “all purpose”.
