Hello! Not much to say today, so I’ll just leave you with the list. As always, if you want to write back with anything–feedback, comments, or just to say hi–feel free to. I’ve been bad with replying promptly, but I do reply. Eventually.
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1. On Systemic Debt - The Daily WTF
This was an interesting post from a blog I rarely stumble upon. It’s about “technical debt” in software programs and systems. Technical debt is the implied cost that comes with choosing easy short-term fixes instead of building a better, long-term solution. The post talks about technical debt in a software program the author worked on, and then extrapolates to talk about systemic, social debt in the USA.
2. How RuneScape is helping Venezuelans survive - Polygon
I used to play RuneScape when I was 9-10 years old, and I loved it. This article both delighted and intrigued me; a growing number of Venezuelans are playing RuneScape to earn a higher monthly salary than they would if working local jobs. It’s sketchy, because they play the game as “farmers” who perform certain boring activities for players in other countries. Gold farming, for example, is against the RuneScape.
3. In Canada, Inuit communities are shaping research priorities - Undark
“Scientists wishing to do research must now consult with Inuit groups — and consider long-neglected local priorities.”
One of the organization’s chief complaints focuses on research funding and decision-making. Most research conducted in Inuit regions occurs with little or no input from Inuit, who are rarely represented on government or university granting bodies. As a result, scientists’ research priorities have skewed heavily to biological and physical sciences, rather than to the social sciences — a bias that is likely to persist now that the region is generally regarded as a window into our collective global future. […] Critical as they are, these facts are often far from top-of-mind for Inuit. “Walk into any community, any hamlet office, and ask to look in the filing cabinet,” said Bell. “They don’t have a file that says ‘climate change’. They have a file that says ‘unemployment’, ‘poverty’, ‘homelessness’, ‘suicide.’ We know that climate change probably negatively impacts all of those issues. But it’s hard to talk to someone about climate change when they’re hungry.”
4. What I love about the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson - Ad Fantastika
Aha, another book review. Brandon Sanderson is one of the best fantasy writers in the world at the moment, and this is a pretty interesting and in-depth review of his series, The Stormlight Archives.
5. The Sacred Ritual of Meals with My Mother - Elle
If you’ve ever played any sport that requires targeting—archery, golf, basketball—you know how accuracy often relies on “follow through.” You cannot just throw, hit, or shoot; you must visualize the follow-through of the object whose trajectory should trace a very specific path. I am beginning to think that leaving food on the altar for the dead is sort of the same thing. Unlike so much in our lives that’s now transactional—housework, childcare, store-bought sushi—the making of food is elemental. It makes the cells that constitute the body and keep us clinging to life. I wonder how many problems in the world can be attributed to this lack of understanding: To make food for others from start to finish is to follow through in our commitment to each other.
6. Our Bookless Future - Claremont Review of Books
This is a review of the book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in the Digital World by Maryanne Wolf and also mentions the book What We Talk About When We Talk About Books by Leah Price. It’s an interesting rumination on the present and future of books. I haven’t read Wolf’s book, but I have read Price’s. What I found funny about this piece is how it pits the two books against each other, even though it needn’t need to.
7. The pleasures and perils of precrastination - Tim Harford
We precrastinators enjoy the benefits of better choice and cheaper reservations; in exchange, we have to be willing to accept that sometimes we will face painful conflicts between new opportunities and prior engagements. At times, we must abandon our plans.
I’m an economist, so that’s fine by me; I’m trained to believe the sunk-cost fallacy is a fallacy. While regular humans tend to obsess about spending that cannot be recouped, throwing good money after bad, we economists can sound almost Buddhist on the topic. Attachment to such sunk costs is the root of suffering.
8. Humanities aren’t a science. Stop treating them like one. - Scientific American
This is a piece from Maria Konnikova all the way back from 2012. The premise is: the humanities aren’t hard sciences where everything can be quantified and measured and thus compared. Therefore, research that attempts to do so is not really doing much at all. She picks an example of a paper that studies the mathematical properties of the social networks in pieces of fiction and mythology. And this is what she says:
It’s simply a timely illustration of a far deeper trend, a tendency that is strong in almost all humanities and social sciences, from literature to psychology, history to political science. Every softer discipline these days seems to feel inadequate unless it becomes harder , more quantifiable , more scientific , more precise . […] Or is it actually undermining the very heart of each discipline that falls into the trap of data, numbers, statistics, and charts? Because here’s the truth: most of these disciplines aren’t quantifiable, scientific, or precise. They are messy and complicated. And when you try to straighten out the tangle, you may find that you lose far more than you gain.
9. A Prophet of Scientific Rigor—and a Covid Contrarian - Wired (soft paywall)
“John Ioannidis laid bare the foibles of medical science. Now medical science is returning the favor.”
Amazingly, he’s earned all this acclaim by dedicating his career to telling the fields of biomedicine (and others, too) how shoddy they are, and how little trust one should have in their published research. […] Almost literally overnight Ioannidis has himself become a case study in how to screw up a medical study. And not just any study: This one concludes that Covid-19 isn’t all that dangerous; that the current lockdowns to prevent its spread are a bigger threat to public health than the actual disease. In other words, Ioannidis’ views on the pandemic sound closer to those of the governor of Georgia than to Anthony Fauci’s.
10. You ain’t seen nothing like the mighty Mike Procter - The Cricket Monthly
Another great piece from Mark Nicholas for The Cricket Monthly. I’m a simple man: I see a new piece from Mark Nicholas, and I read. You may also like When Imran Khan blew me away.
I first saw Proccie live in the 1973 Gillette Cup Final at Lord’s: “From the Pavilion End, Mike [slight pause] Procter,” said the announcer, which sent shivers up my spine. I can hear the words and their tone clearly to this day. He really was a glorious sight and, in the early ’70s, at his fastest and best. His arms worked like helicopter blades and the ball flew at the batsmen as if propelled by machine; it would swing and skid, but when he rolled his fingers across the seam, it would bite and cut. The swerving induckers were the masterpiece, of course, and left even the best groping in the dark.