CNN writes about Surgeon General’s advisory on parental health:
The advisory describes how mothers and fathers now work many more hours than in 1985 but also spend many more hours every week on primary child care — and that doesn’t count their total time spent with children. “Demands from both work and child caregiving have come at the cost of quality time with one’s partner, sleep, and parental leisure time,” the advisory says. The strain is even greater on parents caring for aging parents or other loved ones.
Can confirm. The advisory itself is a quick read, well worth checking out.
📺 Bodkin (2024) is the clearest example yet that Netflix has a deeper problem than just its flat style: they are deeply, thoroughly, undeniably unoriginal. To make a slightly comedic murder mystery they took the concept from Only Murders… (podcasters!), credits from Afterparty (2D!) and soundtrack from The White Lotus (all that whooping and whistling), then added a good dose of completely uncalled-for Ireland bashing, a plot that meanders without making sense, background drama that seemingly raises stakes only to be resolved deus ex machina, and some ridiculous cold open intro patter that again tries to mimic Only Murders… in suspenseful and mysterious vibes but can at best arouse only slight discomfort to the banality of it all.
What a way to waste Siobhán Cullen and David Wilmot, who were the only reason I stuck through all seven episodes.
Not one week after I first wrote about zombie medicine, this happened:
From "The Use of Ice in the Treatment of Acute Soft-Tissue Injury: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials", which showed marginal benefit in ankle sprains and no benefit in soft tissue injuries… 20 years ago. Good example of Zombie Medicine https://t.co/NWkWomY6U4 pic.twitter.com/L0sGgvSkds
— Miloš Miljković (@miljko) August 25, 2024
So many examples out there: icing injuries, treating mild fevers in kids, Paxlovid. Someone really ought to collect these and write a book.
Back in 2008, Tyler Cowen wrote about the stupidity button, in response to some rabble-rousing rhetoric:
When I see people writing sentences of this kind, I imagine them pressing a little button which makes them temporarily less intelligent. Because, indeed, that is how one’s brain responds when one employs this kind of emotionally charged rhetoric.
As you go through life and read various writers, I want you to keep this idea of the button in mind. As you are reading, think “Ah, he [she] is pressing the button now!”
I’ve pressed that button myself many times, and always regretted it.
David Perell’s podcast “How I Write” underwhelmed in the beginning, but a year in he got my attention. The episode with Ben Thompson of “Stratechery” was stellar — with a guest like Ben how could it not be — but I didn’t expect to like this episode on copywriting as much as I did.
As seen in some regulatory documents I have been reviewing:
… which is submitted herewith and incorporated herein by reference…
And now I’m looking for a good book that could explain how legalese came to be, because surely there was a reason “which is submitted and incorporated here” wasn’t sufficient.
When I first saw Patrick Collison’s “vague tech cannon”, the preponderance of biographies and Silicone Valley histories seemed like too much navel gazing. Tanner Greer had a more charitable perspective:
To study the great men of a community’s past is to study what greatness means in that community. That I think is half the purpose of these biographies of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Feynman and Oppenheimer, Licklider and Noyce, Thiel and Musk. These books are an education in an ethos. Such is the paıdeía of the technologists.
Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Feynman — yes. But Thiel and Musk?
Daniel Frank writes about agreements and disagreements:
There’s something to be said for the blissful ignorance of not knowing every opinion held by every person in our lives and for spending less time dwelling on divisive topics. If you got along well with your work colleague until you discovered their view on topic X, then maybe discussing topic X isn’t wise.
Right! That’s one way to avoid condemnation games.
In their excellent but unfortunately titled book Ending Medical Reversal, Adam Cifu [Note: Dr. Cifu talked to Russ Roberts recently, in one of the best episodes of EconTalk so far this year. Dr. Prasad’s interview with Russ was also quite good, though the topic was not my cup of tea. ] and Vinay Prasad note the practice of “medical reversals”, which is a tendency of medicine to reverse practice — or self-correct — once evidence suggests that something that was thought to work actually doesn’t. Typical examples are starting prophylactic anti-arrhythmics after a heart attack, using estrogen to treat symptoms of menopause and performing kyphoplasty to treat vertebral compression fractures. [Note: The RCTs that led to reversals are: CAST, Women’s Health Initiative and ACTRN12605000079640, and guess which one of these was done in New Zealand. ] For each of those, there was a randomized controlled trial that showed no benefit — or, even worse, more harm — of the intervention compared to placebo. And presto, medical reversal was official and doctors around the world stopped doing what they now knew was harmful.
Just kidding: it took years to stop those practices, and kyphoplasty/vertebroplasty is still being performed, in select cases, based on little to no evidence. There is a long tail of doctors who either don’t believe RCTs in general, or don’t know about some of those in particular, or what is most common know and believe in RCTs when they affect someone else’s practice but find a million faults in those that investigate their own bread and butter. These doctors perform what I’d like to call Zombie Medicine, a term inspired by Lisa Feldman Barret’s Zombie Ideas (↬Andrew Gelman): [Note: Incidentally, “Zombie Medicine” would have made a much better book title than “Ending Medical Reversal”. Add a subtitle (Zombie Medicine: How Doctors’ Inertia and Bad Science Harm Patients and Waste Billions) and you have a best-seller. Maybe for the second edition? ]
Zombie ideas abound in our culture, nibbling away at the brains of their victims. The mistaken belief that vaccinations cause autism — a celebrated zombie idea — is responsible for rising rates of vaccine-preventable diseases. The belief that a person’s personality type, assessed by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), predicts job performance is another zombie idea that continues to lure otherwise capable managers into making decisions that benefit neither employees nor their companies.
But inertia to a big, unexpected medical reversal isn’t even the most common type of zombie medicine. There are some undead concepts so ingrained that a million RCTs couldn’t reverse them: the belief that atelectasis (partial lung collapse, common after surgery due to immobility) causes fevers (high body temperature, common after surgery due to infection, transient bacteraemia, and general inflammation), that early cancer detection is an absolute good, that Vitamin C cures anything other than scurvy, that vitamin D prevents anything other than osteoporosis and rickets. And it’s insidious, for I bet every reader will have felt a pang for at least one of these concepts. (“Wait, why does he think this is zombie medicine when I know it’s true!?”) That’s how zombie practices become undead: with a sliver of doubt, a shimmer of hope, a dollop of wishful thinking.
And on the very edge of zombification sit tempting ideas that have greater than 99% chance of being false, but that you know will never truly die: that mTOR inhibitors can prolong human life spans, that with enough sequencing we will find genetic causes of most diseases, that the gut microbiome influences anything other than gastrointestinal health and quality of stool. This kind of zombie medicine adds another item to the list of harms: opportunity cost in both money and time.
The first step in addressing a problem is to identify it, the second is to name it. Now comes the time to make lists.
📚 Forty books that comprise the Vague Tech Canon, per Patrick Collison:
Linked are those I wrote about, starred are the ones I’ve read, daggered are the ones already on my pile and double-daggered are the ones that got on it thanks to this list. There is a single ‡ entry — the list had too much navel gazing for my taste. (ᔥTyler Cowen)