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3 stars
Poison Pill | Truly Adventurous
22-minute read
Theresa arrived at the hospital in a coma. Stanley died shortly thereafter. Doctor Kim was dumbfounded. He had just seen these two young adults a couple hours earlier and they’d been completely fine. Faced now with two dead young people, a third he couldn’t revive, and a family wondering which of them would be next to die, he sprang into action, ordering the remaining family members hospitalized as a precaution. Suspecting botulism, he sent the paramedics back to the Janus house to gather up anything ingestible: food, coffee grounds–whatever anyone might have eaten or drank. He also told the first responders to bring in the contents of the medicine cabinet. To Kim, the most vexing aspect of each case was that no one had exhibited any symptoms prior to collapsing. It was as if they’d all been struck by a kind of invisible lightning.
[...]
Far from Chicago, nearly three weeks after the mayhem began, an eager, 28-year-old Kansas City homicide detective named David Barton sat down in his living room to watch the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Like most cops, he’d been following the Tylenol case from a distance while attending to local crimes in Kansas City. Neither Chicago police nor the FBI had figured out a motive for the poisonings, nor had they made much progress in terms of a suspect, save for the apparent hoaxster Richardson. On the set, Rather announced there’d been a new break: a surveillance photo from the Walgreens where Paula Prince bought her poisoned bottle that was taken at the moment of purchase. In one of the aisles in the background there was a bearded man wearing a white lab coat whom police thought might be Robert Richardson. Anyone who recognized him was urged to contact local authorities.
When the surveillance photo came up on screen, Barton leapt from his seat and began shouting to his daughter: “That’s him, the bastard! That’s him!”
He’d never been more certain of anything in his life. Except Barton had never met a man named Robert Richardson. The man in the photograph, he was sure, was James William Lewis, a former Kansas City grifter and the prime suspect in a gruesome murder and mail fraud scam whom Barton had been after for years. Only now he had a beard. The next day Barton and his colleague Billy Moore were on a plane to Chicago to meet with Tylenol investigators. They brought with them two boxes related to the Kansas City crimes that were so large they had to purchase separate seats for them. Those boxes told a spine-chilling tale.
Status, class, and the crisis of expertise | Conspicuous Cognition
10-minute read
When voters are asked to “trust the experts” or “follow the science”, these requests have symbolic significance. They ask some humans to grant prestige to other humans—to acknowledge that others know better than they do.
Moreover, the expert’s gift of knowledge is not presented in the context of reciprocity and equality. The scientist, the academic, the fact-checker—they do not expect to learn anything from ordinary voters. Whether on tariffs, pandemic policy, climate change, vaccines, or the nature of gender, the public is, at best, treated as the passive beneficiary of other people’s epistemic charity. They are there to be informed, educated, and enlightened.
Seen in this light, the populist celebration of “common sense” over expert authority also enacts an exhilarating status reversal. It frames ordinary people—those without educational credentials—as the real source of knowledge and wisdom. It creates the conditions for epistemic equality. It says that there is no need to accept assistance from fancy intellectuals with fancy degrees—and so no need to grant them status.
Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics? | Vox
10-minute read
Even among the rising generations’ academic elite, reading books is an increasingly niche hobby. According to a recent report from The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch, many students at America’s most selective colleges now lack the capacity (or at least, the wherewithal) to read a book cover-to-cover.
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For Mir and Garfinkle, America’s reversion to “orality” underlies much of today’s political dysfunction. In their telling, print media laid the foundations for liberal democracy. Now, as deep reading declines, the electorate’s commitment to pluralism, objectivity, universalism, individual rights, and the rule of law is swiftly receding.
The analogies between ancient oral cultures, as described by Ong, and today’s digital one are striking. And it’s reasonable to fear that scrolling TikTok doesn’t prepare a voter for rational self-government as well as reading the New York Times does.
This said, writers are liable to overestimate the social harms of our own cultural marginalization. And I suspect that Mir and Garfinkle are doing precisely that, when they blame the decay of American liberalism on the erosion of “deep literacy.”
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
Everything you thought you knew about King George III is wrong | Now It's History
8-minute read
Roberts is a conservative historian on a mission. His biography convincingly challenged standard depictions of King George III. He was not the “Royal Brute” of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, nor the “tyrant” of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.
I Tried Magic Mushrooms for My Mental Health. Here’s What Happened. | 5280
16-minute read
Around the same time, Grigsby had his first psychedelic experiences as a student at the University of Kansas, where he tried out to be the Jayhawks’ kicker but didn’t make the team. During one undergrad trip, Grigsby remembers his mind entering a “flow state” that seemed to connect to a deeper, less-self-conscious version of himself. Grigsby went to his university’s recreation center and began shooting free throws. “I couldn’t miss,” he told me.
I met Grigsby this past spring at his 12th-floor CU Denver office off Speer Boulevard, where the professor’s psilocybin research group had just been given a suite of rooms. The expansion seemed a tacit nod to the cancer study’s early popularity and the promise of more funding and research. So far, the team had conducted around 30 “dosing sessions” for Stage 3 and Stage 4 cancer patients at the medical center in Aurora, and Grigsby’s inbox overflowed with potential patients offering their minds for research.
Grigsby has sharp features, crystal blue eyes, and long white hair pulled into a ponytail that runs partway down his back. “People see me and say, ‘Oh, I get it,’ ” Grigsby joked of his interest in psychedelics. After college, he worked for a time as a cement-truck driver, then as a carpenter. But his free-throw-shooting memory lingered: He wanted to know how that transformative state might peel back the strains of everyday life.
Secret Russian Intelligence Document Shows Deep Suspicion of China | New York Times
7-minute read
In public, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says his country’s growing friendship with China is unshakable — a strategic military and economic collaboration that has entered a golden era.
But in the corridors of Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., a secretive intelligence unit refers to the Chinese as “the enemy.”
This unit, which has not previously been disclosed, has warned that China is a serious threat to Russian security. Its officers say that Beijing is increasingly trying to recruit Russian spies and get its hands on sensitive military technology, at times by luring disaffected Russian scientists. The intelligence officers say that China is spying on the Russian military’s operations in Ukraine to learn about Western weapons and warfare. They fear that Chinese academics are laying the groundwork to make claims on Russian territory. And they have warned that Chinese intelligence agents are carrying out espionage in the Arctic using mining firms and university research centers as cover.
The threats are laid out in an eight-page internal F.S.B. planning document, obtained by The New York Times, that sets priorities for fending off Chinese espionage. The document is undated, raising the possibility that it is a draft, though it appears from context to have been written in late 2023 or early 2024.
Original link | Archive.is link
Are you stuck in movie logic? | Useful Fictions
6-minute read
Have you ever noticed just how much of the drama in movies is generated by an unspoken rule that the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well? Instead of naming the problem, they’re forced to skirt around it until the plot makes it impossible to ignore. It’s the cheapest way to build effective drama, but if you don’t fully dissolve yourself in the movie logic, the whole time you want to scream, “can’t anyone just talk about what’s happening directly?!”
At least five interesting things: Anything but protests edition (#65) | Noahpinion
7-minute read
I generally prefer not to include pieces like this with multiple topics, but there's a lot of interest here:
Why is the U.S. government so hard-working, honest, and efficient? Probably because people have been worried about waste, fraud, and abuse for over a century, and so there have been repeated major efforts to make government more efficient. An example is Bill Clinton’s “reinventing government” initiative in the 1990s, which cut lots of federal jobs and reduced red tape and regulation.
By the time Elon & co. arrived on the scene, the low-hanging fruit of government efficiency had been picked.
[...]
I actually think we can learn something from China’s example. Ten years ago, China decided they wanted to be at the frontier of a handful of sectors: drones, semiconductors, EVs, solar cells, etc. And for those sectors, they did a combination of protection alongside a lot of public investment…If we’re serious, we need to do something similar. The Inflation Reduction Act was one effort to basically jump-start the clean-energy and EV industries. The CHIPS and Science Act was trying to revitalize semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. We could do a lot more of that. We could turn the salvation of Boeing into a national project.
You also may need to protect these sectors with policies like tariffs. But that’s a targeted set of protections, sort of like the tariffs the Biden administration put on things like EVs and solar cells and semiconductors from China last year. And you need to combine that with huge government investments, commitments to public purchasing, investments in universities, bringing skilled talent from overseas, expanding the H-1B program. There’s lots and lots of things you can do…
Letting free trade rip is an easy policy. Putting up giant tariffs is an easy policy. Figuring out some middle path is hard. Deciding what sectors to invest in and protect is hard. Doing the work to build new industries is hard. But this is how great nations lead.
Mysterious Ancient Humans Now Have a Face | New York Times
3-minute read
When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new kind of human 15 years ago, she had no idea what it looked like. There was only a fragment of a pinkie bone to go on.
The fossil chip, found in a Siberian cave called Denisova, looked as if it might have come from a 66,000-year-old relative of today’s humans, or maybe a Neanderthal. But Dr. Fu, then a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and her colleagues found DNA in the fossil that told a different story. The bone had belonged to a girl who was part of a third human lineage never seen before. They named her people the Denisovans.
In the years since, Dr. Fu has helped to discover more Denisovan DNA: in teeth and bone fragments from the Denisova cave, in the sediment of a cave floor in Tibet and even in people living today in Asia and the Pacific — evidence of interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago.
But without clues from a skeleton or a skull, the physical appearance of these humans remained a mystery, said Dr. Fu, now a geneticist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. “After 15 years, people want to know, who are the Denisovans?”
Now she can put a face to the name.
Original link | Archive.is link
China's industrial policy has an unprofitability problem | Noahpinion
6-minute read
How can these mighty world-conquering automakers be skating on the edge of bankruptcy when the government is pouring so many subsidies and cheap loans into the auto industry? The answer is simple: China’s government is paying its car companies to compete each other to death.
The Chinese government pays a ton of different car companies to make more cars. Chinese banks, at the government’s behest, give cheap loans to a bunch of different car companies to make more cars. So they all make more cars — more than Chinese consumers want to buy. So they try to sell some of the extra cars overseas, but foreigners only buy a modest amount of them. Now what? Unsold cars pile up, prices are cut and cut again, and all the car companies — even the best ones, like BYD — see their profit margins fall and fall.
[...]
So this is the scenario where China’s industrial policy ends up backfiring. Subsidies and cheap bank loans dished out to high-quality and low-quality companies alike could flood the market with undesired product, spurring vicious cutthroat price wars, destroying profit margins, exacerbating deflation, and generally making the macroeconomic situation worse. And then China’s government could double down by trying to protect employment, by never halting subsidies for companies that fail.
The Reverse Matilda Effect | Rob Henderson's Newsletter
3-minute read
Society tends to view activities that men do as being more valuable, and activities that women do as less valuable.
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This has resulted in an ironic system in which people (perhaps unconsciously) view male-dominated activities as inherently more valuable and traditionally female activities are inherently less valuable. They then encourage girls and women to pursue "male" activities but do not express the same level of excitement to encourage boys and men to enter female-dominated jobs.
[...]
A recently published study found experimental evidence that showcasing women's contributions seems to make STEM fields less attractive to male and female high school students.
A Friendly Appeal to the Unconvinced | Bet On It
3-minute read
So Dr. Pangloss is deeply wrong: The status quo is nowhere close to being the best of all possible worlds. The incurious response to this admission is to shrug, “So government intervention is counter-productive in some important ways. Instead of condemning government and praising free markets, let’s fix these specific shortcomings.” The curious response, in contrast, is to wonder: “Why does so much multi-trillion-dollar counter-productive government intervention persistently prevail?” Out of all the possible diagnoses, Social Desirability Bias is the most cogent. What other slogan approaches the insight of: “Markets do the good things that sound bad. Governments do the bad things that sound good”? The best cost-benefit analysis in the world wouldn’t convince Americans to open their border with Mexico, or San Franciscans to give skyscraper construction a green light. And while keyhole solutions could win over a few thoughtful opponents, solid majorities would roll their eyes. Why? Because the main determinant of policy is what sounds good, not cost-benefit analysis – and keyhole solutions sound bad.
Once you blame Social Desirability Bias for government failure, the idea of pragmatically fixing government’s specific shortcomings sounds like wishful thinking. The problem is not specific, but systemic.
1 star
MIT student prints AI polymer masks to restore paintings in hours | Ars Technica
1-minute read
MIT graduate student Alex Kachkine once spent nine months meticulously restoring a damaged baroque Italian painting, which left him plenty of time to wonder if technology could speed things up. Last week, MIT News announced his solution: a technique that uses AI-generated polymer films to physically restore damaged paintings in hours rather than months. The research appears in Nature.
Kachkine's method works by printing a transparent "mask" containing thousands of precisely color-matched regions that conservators can apply directly to an original artwork. Unlike traditional restoration, which permanently alters the painting, these masks can reportedly be removed whenever needed. So it's a reversible process that does not permanently change a painting.
The Gentle Singularity | Sam Altman
5-minute read
Given the source, of course to be taken with a grain of salt:
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.
[...]
In the 2030s, intelligence and energy—ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen—are going to become wildly abundant. These two have been the fundamental limiters on human progress for a long time; with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything else.
The secret British language that was used to outwit the Nazis | BBC
5-minute read
In Jersey, we call this a veil'ye," she explained during a mid-show break, handing me a bowl of bean crock, a traditional, hearty island stew. "It's an evening of singing, music and storytelling, where people read, perform and share memories. Before radio and TV, a veil'ye was how people socialised. Every village had them. They were part of life. But the tradition died out, so we decided to bring them back. And of course, we couldn't do that without Jèrriais."
[...]
Since then, a concerted campaign has been made to bring the language back from the precipice. From 1999, when L'Office du Jèrriais was formed, the language has enjoyed a rapid resurgence. Over the last decade, the development of an education programme means all Jersey children can learn the language at school. Adult courses and language cafes have allowed older residents to learn the basics or brush up their vocabulary. Road signs and visitor sites are all now multilingual (in English and Jèrriais) to increase the language's visibility. And people all over the world have begun to rediscover the language, using L'Office du Jèrriais' online learning website, Learn Jèrriais, as well as language platforms like Linguascope and uTalk where Jèrriais has also been made available. Encouragingly, there was a huge uptick in interest during the Covid-19 pandemic.
What explains the liberal-conservative happiness gap? | Silver Bulletin
5-minute read
Still, arguably that SBSQ buried the most interesting finding, which is that conservatives have much higher self-reported mental health than liberals. It’s a wide gap: according to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES) — a very large sample survey (60,000 respondents) that provides the opportunity for highly detailed demographic analysis — among people who report “excellent” mental health, conservatives outnumber liberals 51-20. But liberals outnumber conservatives 45-19 among those voters who say they have “poor” mental health:
When Earth iced over, early life may have sheltered in meltwater ponds | MIT News
3-minute read
The scientists found that eukaryotes — complex cellular lifeforms that eventually evolved into the diverse multicellular life we see today — could have survived the global freeze by living in shallow pools of water. These small, watery oases may have persisted atop relatively shallow ice sheets present in equatorial regions. There, the ice surface could accumulate dark-colored dust and debris from below, which enhanced its ability to melt into pools. At temperatures hovering around 0 degrees Celsius, the resulting meltwater ponds could have served as habitable environments for certain forms of early complex life.
Who Really Invented Basketball? The ‘Human Calculator’ Thinks He Knows. | New York Times
6-minute read
The official story is that Dr. James Naismith invented basketball in Springfield, Mass., in 1891. But what about the teenager tossing cabbages in upstate New York a year earlier?