Nassim Taleb wrote about how he writes:

The common fallacy is that if you want people to read you in the future, you must project something related to the future, focused on the contemporary and be as different from the past as possible –say by populating your work with space machines, high technology, and revolutionary ideas. My U.S. publisher still tries to squeeze modern art on the cover when I am looking elsewhere.

No, no; it’s the exact opposite. If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the contemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.

But there is also this:

Another discovery I made then, and to which I have been adhering until the present. If you consider writing a creative endeavor, then avoid practicing it in mundane matters as it may both dull your vitality and make it feel like drudgery, work. I find it painful to write outside of my books (or mathematical papers) –and immensely pleasurable to write in book form. So I limit my emails to one or two laconic (but sometimes incomprehensible) sentences, postcard like; the same with social media posts that are not excerpts from books. There is still such a contraption called a telephone. 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.

Not to belabor the point, but I too have found pleasure in writing articles of a certain length — and it’s not the length of a book! To each their own.

🍿 The Boy and the Heron (2023) was the weirdest Miyazaki movie we’ve seen, and the competitions is strong. It starts with the misleading title (the original How Do You Live would have made more sense), continues with the heron’s terrifying transformation, and ends with bizarre fantasy world building.

The best explanation I can think of is that most of the movie was the boy’s fever dream after a self-inflicted wound to the head. I’ve had dreams where strange twists made perfect sense and in which I acted as if I knew what was going on. It is best, then, to squint and follow the dream logic without worrying too much about the mechanics. The message in that case is clear: there is malice in all of us, but let’s not allow it to carry us away. Not original, but important.

Janan Ganesh, telling it like it is:

The hardest thing to convey about modern politics to intelligent readers, who tend to assume that ideas drive events, is the tribal shallowness of it. People take a certain position because the opposing side doesn’t.

He is writing about foreign policy, but applies just as well to masks, vaccine mandates, approach to tech, etc. which gets us to the package of sometimes incompatible beliefs you can expect to get from either side.

Dave Winer has some good advice:

I’m often tempted to offer advice to the parents, but I won’t offer it unless asked, except this. If you have children, there’s a good chance one or more of them will not have children, and you should love them the same, and provide models of acceptance while they’re growing up, by bringing childless people into your home, so the kids know that this is one of the legitimate choices in life, offering proof that you won’t love them any less if they go down that path. And here’s the hard part, imho, for people with children – keep that promise.

Good quote today from Adam Mastroianni’s latest newsletter:

When I see someone salivating over the idea of a Science Gestapo, I have to marvel at their faith that authorities only ever prosecute guilty people.

Applies more broadly than science, of course.

Andrew Gelman has a new — and free — textbook out, Regression and Other Stories. From the cover:

Many textbooks on regression focus on theory and the simplest of examples. Real statistical problems, however, are complex and subtle. This is not a book about the theory of regression. It is a book about how to use regression to solve real problems of comparison, estimation, prediction, and causal inference. It focuses on practical issues such as sample size and missing data and a wide range of goals and techniques. It jumps right in to methods and computer code you can use fresh out of the box.

Between that, his Bayesian Data Analysis and many other freely available lectures and books, has there ever been a better time for high school students bored out of their minds by the pedestrian curriculum? But I am now just projecting to myself from 20-some years ago — I am sure high school students of today would rather spend time on their PS5, and my past self would probably have joined them. (↬Andrew Gelman)

Reviewing my notes I saw the phrase “rigor mitigation”. This is, of course, a failure of autocorrect and a reason why analogue is better than digital. But I’ve been exposed to corporate speak for so long that for a moment I thought it may have actually meant something.

A few interesting links:

• Why we should all be hopeful
• Insulin is an abomination: Recent bad news about food (note: I disagree with the conclusion, and this is why)
• Timing, and here’s the Wikipedia page on Elaine May
• Spain’s other victories (after a recent trip, I tend to agree)