Literature review
“What does it mean to understand how a scientific literature is put together?”, Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen
In just about any scientific literature, there is an undercurrent of tacit knowledge which is not very directly expressed in any of the published pieces. That knowledge may cover the following issues, among many others:
1. How the rules of the conversation operate, and how a body of literature on a question coheres.
2. Why certain papers and methods are not taken seriously any more (you don’t generally find outright refutations of them).
3. Which results and papers are taken how seriously. Citations metrics help here, but not nearly as much as you might think.
4. What kinds of results and methods would be required to induce researchers to move to a new conclusion.
5. Why/when one paper pointing in a particular direction doesn’t prove much of anything, and why people don’t do things a certain way.
Roman concrete
“The Discipline of Assent”, The Bristlecone, Ned Resnikoff
The Meditations have taken their place alongside Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in airport bookshops as a sort of practical guide for corporate warriors, but the original text was probably never meant to be read. In Hadot’s account, Marcus used the act of writing the Meditations as a sort of, well, meditative exercise: a spiritual practice intended to remind their author of the Stoicism’s basic ethical precepts, so that he could better internalize and embody them.
Taken on those terms, what emerges from the Meditations is not a series of rules you can rigidly follow in order to become preternaturally tranquil, but something much more human. Marcus Aurelius, like anyone, suffered. Despite believing in the Stoic doctrine that one should always greet events as if one had willed them, there is no doubt he had some experience with the great chasm between hope and reality. And in contravention of Stoicism’s apparent indifference to human attachments, Marcus made the greatest mistake of his reign by elevating his clearly unfit son Commodus to the purple.
Under construction
“A building boom fueled by corruption is changing the face of Baghdad”, The Washington Post, Louisa Loveluck and Mustafa Salim
“One million dollars will barely buy you anything there these days,” said Raad al-Shimmari, a real estate broker in the upscale district of Zayouna. “Who is the land for? It’s not for ordinary people anymore, that’s for sure.”
Sometimes he wonders whether his grandchildren will able to afford a house of their own. “Surely they won’t,” he mused. “No one will.”
Legends of rock n’ roll
“In search of Van Halen’s brown M&Ms”, Snack Stack, Doug Mack
Beyond that, there’s no way the M&Ms were a useful signal once they became well-known as a test. … Think about this: the M&M test was essentially a meme in 1980. Even people who weren’t fans of Van Halen surely knew them as The Rockers Who Don’t Like Brown M&Ms. Venues anticipated it and made light of it and gave interviews before the concerts to show off their efforts to carefully remove the candies. It was a running joke.
The problem, of course, is that if everyone knows about your top-secret line item, it’s no longer an effective way to ensure people are paying attention. If anything, the brown M&Ms probably became an easy way for a venue to show Van Halen that they’d read the contract carefully, even if they hadn’t, in a neat inversion of the “clever band tries to fool the venue” narrative that emerged with Roth’s autobiography in 1997.