Hello there. How are you, and how was your week? Over here it’s slowly easing into spring, which is marvelous. It’s getting warmer and more sunny, which I’m pleased about. Growing a few plants has got me paying much more attention to the weather than usual, which is a good sign, I think?
As always, I’m writing this just about in the nick of time. I do wonder; when will I make my life easier and write the Kable every week in less frenzy than I currently do? Maybe I’ll never do it and this is the way it’ll be. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the list, and as always, write back if you have anything to say. Just reply to this email.
If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link. Also, if any of the links are paywalled and if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, try opening the link in incognito mode in your browser. This works if the website has a “soft” paywall. If that doesn’t work, you can access the website using a different browser on the same device, or use a different device altogether.
1. Sweden’s ‘Milk War’ is getting udderly vicious
Oatly is a Swedish-founded oat milk company. If you’re wondering what oat milk is, it’s an alternative milk made from oats instead of a nut (almond, cashew, etc.) or a bean (like soy). Oatly is fantastic. You can heat it and make warm chai/lattes. And they’re going toe to toe with the incumbent Swedish dairy industry, and I must say that things are getting quite ugly.
2. Universities shouldn’t just treat mental illness – they should help prevent it too
The last piece from Mosaic that I’ll ever share, and I’m sad about that. Mosaic is closing down, and they were so, so good when they produced new pieces every month. Here Anna Lewis talks about universities in the UK and the US tackling mental health issues. The argument is this: it’s far more beneficial (in terms of student productivity/success) for the university to actively prevent mental illness rather than only deal with it retroactively.
Over the ten years since its introduction, there has been an 85 per cent reduction in the depression rate and a 75 per cent decrease in the anxiety of first-year medical students. And student satisfaction with wellbeing on the course skyrocketed to 81 per cent compared to the national average of 33 per cent.
One of the most astonishing things about his study is what it did to performance. Average scores on the national standardised tests got higher. And the failure rate went down: “It was cut in half,” Stuart says. When they took off the pressure, people did better.
I say this was astonishing. But Slavin doesn’t think the idea of listening to students should be so unusual. “We treat students as if we don’t trust them,” he says. “What does that say about us?”
3. Reading ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war
(paywalled (?): Washington Post)
This piece gave me the chills. Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse Five talks about war and basically, according to me, why humans are stupid to wage it.
One of his legacies is a famous passage in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It’s about planes flying in reverse, where shrapnel flies out of people, back into the bombs and the planes take off backward from their runways, and so on, until everyone is just a baby again. Vonnegut is saying it would be nice if the wisdom learned from a war could be used to reverse engineer the entire thing and keep it from happening at all. That is a lovely thought. Sometimes I think of rewinding time as an intervention.
4. Fermenting Culture
Last year, I read The Noma Book of Fermentation. It’s a masterpiece and it’s written by two people who work at Noma, called the best restaurant in the world. They have a specific fermentation lab, and they do all sorts of things. It’s amazing. Here, one of the authors of that book, David Zilber, is interviewed by Emergence magazine. I enjoyed this interview a lot. My favorite part:
“Culture” and “culture” mean two different things to a biologist and an anthropologist, but in fermentation, they overlap completely.
5. Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals hundreds of thousands of downloads, and that’s OK
Of course, one of the dumb things about the paywall system is that it’s expensive and time-consuming to manage who has access to what information — it’s not a small task to keep information from reaching millions of determined readers from all around the world.
Chris Bourg is right: “let it be a lesson to us for what we should be doing differently.” Elbakyan may have committed the most efficient product theft in history, in terms of list price of stolen goods per unit of effort or expense on her part. Her archive has been copied and distributed to different sites around the world (it fits in a large suitcase). And it was made possible by the irrational, corrupt nature of the scholarly communication infrastructure. Her success is the system’s failure.
6. Science funders gamble on grant lotteries
More academia stuff! The premise is this: a lot of people waste a lot of time working on the various aspects of applying for and assigning academic funding. Would overall productivity be better if we just assigned grant money randomly? I think that we’re finding the answer to that question is: yes. I really love this, because it frees up so much time in the life of an average academic.
7. Introducing Mercury OS
Jason Yuan argues that current-day operating systems (for personal computers) are not conducive at all for people with limited executive function/cognitive load (for example, people with ADHD). So he’s done away with the paradigm of applications and windows (which we take for granted, whether we use Windows/Mac/Linux) to design a new OS, called Mercury. It’s marvelous–and sooo well thought out. The fundamental building blocks that one interacts with are called modules. Put modules together, and you get flows. And that replaces applications/windows.
8. Does Your Box of “Ugly” Produce Really Help the Planet? Or Hurt it?
A few people I follow on Instagram influenced me to start looking into “imperfect” food/produce subscriptions. The idea is that (at least in the USA) a horrendous amount of food goes to waste before even entering a supermarket because of it being surplus, or not meeting some certain requirement. A bunch of companies are trying to close this loop by connecting farms to customers willing to buy and eat “imperfect” food. I’ve signed up, and it looks interesting. If you want updates, lemme know and I’ll tell you how it is.
9. Why Some Doctors Purposely Misdiagnose Patients
(paywalled: The Atlantic)
“Hundreds of people say a Michigan doctor falsely diagnosed them with epilepsy. He wouldn’t be the first to lie to patients about how sick they are.”
The most devious doctors, who will harm their patients to line their pockets, make headlines. But in a way, even honest doctors are incentivized to err on the side of excessive care. Most doctors work on a fee-for-service basis, meaning the more they bill insurance plans, the more they earn. Some states and hospitals are trying to avoid this situation by experimenting with paying doctors a fixed amount per patient. But that, Sparrow said, creates the opposite problem: It means doctors are incentivized to do less. Ideally, in his view, there wouldn’t be incentives either way. “I don’t want a doctor who is richer for treating me more or richer for treating me less,” he said. “I want a doctor who is on a salary.”
10. Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive
Throughout my college “career”, I quizzed. It was fun and challenging, and a number of my close friends are people who I met and bonded with over quizzing. It’s a weird “sport” (even to call it one seems strange) but it’s a delightful one. Samanth Subramanian writes about quizzing for The Guardian , and he does a darn good job of it.
Once, while we were waiting around for a popular annual quiz to begin, a friend remarked that his wife was heavily pregnant; he hoped she wouldn’t go into labour over the next few hours. That would be unfortunate, we agreed. […] “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “If my daughter’s born today, that means she’ll have a birthday party on this date every year. Which means I can never come to this quiz again.”
But at its finest, quizzing today is never about shallow recall; it’s an exercise in nimble thinking, and possibly the only forum where the entirety of your life – everything you’ve ever seen, read, tasted, heard, heard of, or lived through – can be marshalled as pure knowledge. […] The process thrives on freshness and play, and it holds a sense of limitless possibility – of producing many, many things we never knew out of the few things we do know.