My dear mother-in-law, Margaret Hall Collins, is 102 years old today!
And still sharp as a tack, prayerful, attentive to the needs of others. She’s a very special lady.Thomas Pynchon, from liner notes for an album of Spike Jones music (1994):
Nowadays, when everybody knows everything and nobody takes any text seriously, it’s hard to remember how it felt once to share a public world not as contaminated by the terminally wised-up irony that has come to pervade our own lives.
Even more true today.
How ‘Tiny Shortcuts’ Are Poisoning Science:
By itself, failure to replicate does not necessarily indicate, and certainly not prove, scientific fraud. Empirical results can vary for many reasons. However, replication analyses usually show that replicated effect sizes are, on average, systematically smaller and often statistically insignificant. If 90 percent of replications deviate from the original article in one direction that is less favorable to what the authors wanted to demonstrate, then these deviations are not innocent random errors or acts of nature. If the deviations were random, they would cancel each other out, and their mean would be close to zero. Instead, these deviations indicate that many published results were likely tweaked, manipulated, or fabricated.
Tweaking is potentially more damaging to science in the long run than data manipulation and fabrication. That might be hard to believe, since tweaked empirical results are likely to have smaller effects on the fabric of science than cases of data fabrication and manipulation. But the cumulative effect of tweaking can still be larger than that of data fabrication and manipulation because these strategies are rare, whereas tweaking is common.
I wrote about my two essays in the new issue of the Hedgehog Review, both of which are about human obligations.
I do not need these books. I do not need these books. I do not need these books.
The dek here is exactly right: “Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours.” They’ll protect their own IP with every resource available to them and steal ours without a moment’s hesitation.
Today I was dicing a ham steak for risotto and dropped a few pieces on the floor, which Angus vacuumed up. Here he is a minute later, looking for all the world like Oliver Twist in the workhouse: “Please, sir, may I have more?”
Daring Fireball: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’:
You read two paragraphs and there’s a box that interrupts you. You read another two paragraphs and there’s another interruption. All the way until the end of the article. We’re visiting their website to read a f***ing article. If we wanted to watch videos, we’d be on YouTube. It’s like going to restaurant, ordering a cheeseburger, and they send a marching band to your table to play trumpets right in your ear and squirt you with a water pistol.
No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this. The print edition of The New Yorker could not possibly be more respectful of both the reader’s attention and the sanctity of the prose they publish. But read an article on their website and you get autoplaying videos interspersed between random paragraphs. And the videos have nothing to do with the article you’re reading. I mean, we should be so lucky if every website were as respectfully designed as The New Yorker’s, but even their website — comparatively speaking, one of the “good ones” — shows only a fraction of the respect for the reader that their print edition does.
This is why my primary use for chatbots is searching the web — getting the information I need without having to traverse ad after ad, video after video, popup after popup. The periodicals I value the most — the Economist, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement — I subscribe to in print. Print resists enshittification; the web embraces it.
Richard Beer, Tresham’s Triangular Lodge (1971)