Mark Bernstein: Plot I think that Michael Joyce — an MFA-wielding disciple of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — was reacting against a different and more substantial opponent, the Victorian sentimental novel. “Sentimental” in this context has a precise, technical meaning: it refers to art that tries to teach us how we ought to feel. This was a great project of the 19th century: think Dickens and Trollope and Victor Hugo: the purpose of the plot was to show you how a good person ought to think about the world. Modernism saw this use of plot as a chump’s game. (more)

How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them. Cigna sent van Terheyden a letter explaining that it would not pay for the $350 test because it was not “medically necessary.” (more)

Dave Winer: Dev notes for Markdown in RSS. Suppose you've written blogging software that allows users to enter Markdown text (more)

Peter Limberg: Meme to Vibe: A Philosophical Report. The consensus is that the word is an overused catchall, engendering many lazy phrases: the vibes are off, it’s not a vibe, such a vibe, don't doubt your vibe, just vibe, etc. All this vibe talk was getting too much for some. (more)

Simone Stolzoff: Playing a Career Game You Actually Want to Win. After a half-decade of working in tech marketing, I grew disillusioned by the corporate presentations and ad campaigns. I wanted to be a real writer. So I decided to pursue a degree to legitimize my intention. (more)

In new guidance, FDA says AI tools to warn of sepsis should be regulated as devices. The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday published a list of artificial intelligence tools that should be regulated as medical devices, in some cases appearing to expand its oversight of previously unregulated software products. (more)

Peter Limberg: Become Wise in Public. The fastest way to learn is to learn in public. That is what a developer who goes by swyx argues in a short piece, "Learn in Public,” which inspired the learn in public movement. (learning in public) (more)

Metascience (also known as meta-research) is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. Metascience seeks to increase the quality of scientific research while reducing inefficiency. It is also known as "research on research" and "the science of science", as it uses research methods to study how research is done and find where improvements can be made. Metascience concerns itself with all fields of research and has been described as "a bird's eye view of science".[1] In the words of John Ioannidis, "Science is the best thing that has happened to human beings ... but we can do it better."[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metascience (more)

Anton Troynikov: Elite Underproduction. Elite Overproduction is a meme started by Peter Turchin. It's also essentially unworkable on its own as an explanatory social theory, which Turchin himself goes on to clarify; [Turchin] says “stagnating and declining living standards of the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state” are two other critical factors. (more)

Movement to make scientific publishing more transparent, to improve peer review and reproducibility. Make raw data, algorithms/code available. (STM Journal Publishing) (more)

belief/vibe/mindset coming from Thomas Malthus: scarcity, zero-sum game

Zvi Mowshowitz: Escape Velocity from Bullshit Jobs. Without speculating here on how likely this is to happen, suppose that GPT-4 (or some other LLM or AI) speeds up, streamlines or improves quite a lot of things. What then? (more)

book by Martin Gurri about the populist culture war against the elites (more)

Arnold Kling wants a Rule Libertarian-ism. Act libertarianism would mean that at any given moment you are free to do whatever you want, following no rules whatsoever. Rule libertarianism would mean that you are free to bind yourself by undertaking voluntary contractual commitments, to follow a set of rules... My libertarianism is a strong preference for exit over voice (Exit Voice And Loyalty). If my government disappoints me, I want to be able to switch to a different government as readily as I can change cell phone providers, or join a different gym. Another way to make my point is that in a modern society I want lots of Governance, but I want very little of that governance to come from Government. Governance is provided by a rich set of nongovernmental institutions (NGO), as emphasized by Alexis De Tocqueville two centuries ago and Elinor Ostrom more recently. The distinctive feature of government is the absence of a reasonable option for exit. cf Minimal Compact

see Chris Allen

from 2011-08-28-KlingRuleLibertarianism.... Elinor Ostrom (née Awan, born August 7, 1933) is an American political economist.[2] She was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson, for "her analysis of economic governance, especially the Commons."[3] She is the first woman to win the prize in this category. Her work is associated with the NewInstitutionalEconomics and the resurgence of political economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom (more)

Epic's overhaul of a flawed algorithm shows why AI oversight is a life-or-death issue. Epic, the nation’s dominant seller of electronic health records (EMR), was bracing for a catastrophe. It was June 2021, and a study about to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association had found that Epic’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool to predict sepsis, a deadly complication of infection, was prone to missing cases and flooding clinicians with false alarms. (more)

The 15-Minute City Is Having a Moment. In an earlier post, The Coronavirus and the Future of Main Street, I argued for the rebirth of our local neighborhoods, noting that even if people are working from home, they still need to get out of the office (more)

Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk. To better understand how Seattle might become a 15-minute city, I created an interactive map showing walking times to amenities across the city (more)

aka Seattle WA