We are currently in California, visiting my sister in Modesto for a few days, then making a brief stop in San Francisco before returning home. This would normally mean a break in posting, but the combination of the 3am wake-up for out flight out and just plain vanilla jet lag had me wide awake at an ungodly hour, so you get a normal-ish week-in-review post.
Me on Substack:
— Email, Social Media, and Toxic Flattening: Part of the reason we believe “everybody” is working unreasonably long hours is the same effect that leads us to believe big groups of people on the Internet believe self-contradictory things.
— Ability, Inclination, and Conversation Killers: Prompted by a piece in Slate, a look at my least favorite back-handed compliment, “You’re a scientist? Wow, you must be really smart, I could never understand that.”
— On Substack: Some meta musings about this platform and how we just keep repeating dumb shit that happened on ScienceBlogs back in the day.
Links Dump:
— The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair, by Kathryn Paige Harden: Another go-round with the debate over standardized testing in college admissions.
— What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists by Sabine Hossenfelder: I’m very impressed by Sabine’s decision to constructively engage with the folks who email any public-facing physicist with their personal Theories of Everything.
— Why So Many COVID Predictions Were Wrong, by Jerusalem Demsas: This week in “Reasons I’m Glad I Don’t Work in Social Sciences.”
— Why You Should Trust Trust and Distrust Distrust, by Rob Henderson: It’s time for some game theory, and surprisingly, people maybe suck less than you may think.
— The Brooklyn Subway Shooting Does Not Confirm Your Priors, by Jeff Maurer: A pretty good take on the thing where partisans try to use whatever horrible thing just happened as proof that they were right all along, when real horrible events aren’t that neatly categorizable.
— Our culture is creating a generation of doomsters and gloomsters, by James Pethokoukis: A call for encouraging more positive thinking, backed with some evidence that things don’t suck that much.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
I’m on my Chromebook, which makes it a little annoying to deal with image files, so you’ll have to do without for this week.
Psuedo-Random Song of the Week:
Absolutely obligatory.
I doubt there will be anything else this week, but this has at least killed enough time for the hotel breakfast service to start, and will let me close a whole bunch of tabs when we get home next week. Here’s the traditional button:
And if you have enthusiastic recommendations of awesome things to do in or near Modesto, CA, I’d be happy to hear them in the comments: