IHME has just published their latest Global Burden of Disease study in the Lancet with *2,779* listed authors. This piece describes how their very loose authorship criteria distort metrics and artificially inflate contributors’ citation counts:

Donna Haraway: “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”

The lineup looks incredible. Sad that I won't be able to go!

Happy New Claude Day to those who celebrate

A favorite John Searle meme, in his memory

Research active faculty teach classes that are significantly closer to the knowledge frontier.

There should be a moratorium on calling for "systemic change" unless the person calling for it can plausibly prove that they know how to change systems. Which would of course involve answering the question of why they haven't just changed the system already.

Russell Ackoff: “The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers.”

"It's more and more perilous to be generic in any way--to be a generic writer, or to be a generic person, a generic thinker. Because the machines are very good at analyzing [generic models]. There will be a much *higher* premium on cultivating your own distinctive, inimitable voice."

Podcast on how Taylor Swift’s engagement represents a crisis for both her songwriting and the popular conception of how love relates to marriage.

nihilism is cowardice.

A little bit of good news: NIH has caught up with previous years' funding levels. Their staff deserves tremendous respect.

"The closed society represented a perennial moral possibility, whose roots are found in every human soul. In its most common expression, the closed society levels a familiar accusation: that the open society is immoral because it jeopardizes the very possibility of living a virtuous life."

Waymo data from 95M miles finds an 80% reduction in injurious crashes and, esp. noteworthy, a 92% reduction in pedestrian injuries. There should be some real moral urgency behind the wide-spread implementation of self-driving cars (and I mean good systems like Waymo's, not Tesla's FSD).

It seems like people are increasingly using multiplication to indicate a magnitude of diminution: like “20 times smaller than” our “15 times less than”. Isn’t that what we have fractions for? “One twentieth the size” and “one fifteenth of” are so much cleaner.

Let the PetSmart point float!

I think my cats would call each other just to hiss and then hang up.

“As philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, the current media environment is like a ‘dictatorship of emotion’ in its ability to torrentially stir up energy and then dissipate practically overnight.”

Current AI models are pretty terrible at Baba Is You, making it an excellent benchmark for future models. (In all fairness, I'm also terrible at Baba Is You.) arxiv.org/pdf/2407.13729

If you’ve been fascinated by the recent UAP videos / testimonies, you might also find this interesting, about the detection of glints of light from earth orbit prior to Sputnik.

This is so 2008-coded to me.

It's likely possible to slow aging through medications because evolution didn't optimize for longevity and the fitness landscape around it is relatively unexplored. Really enjoyed these insights from Jacob Kimmel on the Dwarkesh Podcast:

This faux cover of "Rock Lobster" by System of a Down is so catchy.

“Technophobia has a body count.”

“Pessimism is now a shortcut to intellectual respectability, like using orchestral strings in a pop song or filming in black and white.”

My understanding is that authors own the copyright on the text (including post-review edits), but that journals own the copyright to the *formatted* text. Uploading a preprint style text (rather than a copy of the journal article itself) to PubMed Central is therefore just fine.

The Cracker Barrel rebrand kerfuffle seems well suited for Baudrillard's perspective: "Cracker Barrel is not pointing to a remembered Americana; it directly generates the feeling of Americana through its simulation of old-timey-ness. [I]t was always already a corporate simulation of country life."

Borges: “I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.”

I think we need to distinguish between AI psychosis of a worshipful type and AI psychosis of a despairing type. The former gets much more attention, but I think there are a lot of people entering actual and deep depressions over the fact that other people like to experiment with AI.

Really internalizing the notion that outcomes are highly unpredictable and only very loosely related to intentions is a way to be both optimistic and rational

Marshall McLuhan: "Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment."

Wiley definitely has the best article submission system. Far nicer to work with than the miserable Manuscript Central. Wiley even has animated confetti when you finalize your submission.

Arnold Toynbee (via @jposhaughnessy.bsky.social): “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”

Is there a possible LLM chatbot that's so charming that it should be illegal? Sort of the interactive equivalent of "The Entertainment" from Infinite Jest.

The new trend on Tumblr is making fun of Bluesky

"The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” -Daniel Dennett

There needs to be a plant-based conveyor belt sushi restaurant.

I've been reading "I Know Who You Are", about how the author used genetic genealogy to catch the Golden State Killer. What's stuck out to me is how the public reaction wasn't to celebrate this, but to fight law enforcement access to DNA sites. And I thought I couldn't be angrier at Luddites!

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is one of the things that made me fall in love with Los Angeles, and it’s recovering from a recent fire. If you’re able to donate to this monument to weirdness, now’s a great time! (Donation site linked in the story)

Gemini 2.5 Pro does this really off-putting thing where it writes most of its initial responses as if they were news stories, including my location as if it were a dateline. Can’t we just talk like normal people? All the other LLMs can do it.

H-index is an interesting metric, but i think it needs a couple improvements: 1) some kind of normalization for overall rate of scientific publication (higher rate = higher P(citation)) 2) some adjustment for proportion of papers with first or senior author status

People outside of academic research are SHOCKED by this. I am, sadly, not.

“People often wonder why so many unthoughtful people end up in gov’t. The answer is easy: Politicians do not win elections to make policies; they make policies to win elections. What’s most persuasive to voters [is] whether it narrates a story that confirms what they see and believe.”

Received a review request that began, “Dear Data Scientist Hendrix.”

Patrick McKenzie: "I think some of the general reaction and the general understanding of things as ‘cringe’ is one of the ways the system protects itself - to describe as deviant the behavior of describing the system."

One way that I like to think about agency is as the realization that everything is customizable. Want to change how websites look? Build a plugin. Shirt fits weird? Tailor it. Article you want to read doesn’t exist? Write it.

🤔

Just got some bone conduction headphones, and they feel much more… transhuman than AirPods. Partly it’s because they’re so much comfier. Maybe my ear canals are especially delicate, but I max out at maybe an hour with AirPods Pro.

On the indispensability of markets. “The program assigns points for each type of kill: 20 points for damaging and 40 for destroying a tank; and 6 points for killing an enemy soldier. A new online marketplace […] will allow troops to convert those points into new equipment.”

Had to explain the phrase "phone it in" to someone much younger than me today. Is it a dated phrase? Dunno, but as I was looking up the origin of the phrase, I stumbled on this article, which points out some an almost cruel-seeming contrast in meaning between two very similar sounding phrases.