I haven’t done a link roundup in a while, which is weird, because I’ve been reading a lot of great stuff. Here are three pieces I’ve read lately that I think are worth checking out.
Jay tweeted the link to this study over at MetArXiv, which was a mind blower for me. I knew that science has replicability problems, but I didn’t know the extent to which different researchers, when given the same data and hypotheses, can come to different conclusions. The implications for this are massive.
Thorough roundup of pandemic issues over at Tablet Magazine. This is kind of a “greatest hits” for those of us who’ve been following the alternative narrative from the start of this thing, and as with most things pandemic-related, there are differing interpretations of data (which is now much more relevant to me after reading the paper above). At this point, I don’t think anyone is interested in being swayed. There’s too much of people’s identities invested in this thing. However, you’re probably wrong about most of the things you believe to be true at any given time (so am I), and it’s worth reading this with that in mind. The whole article isn’t wrong. The number of deaths of children in SE Asia is worth pondering by itself. It’s known that C-19 doesn’t kill kids outside of complete anomalies. It seems a bit grotesque to me that the health policies put forth in wealthy countries resulted in the deaths of children in poorer countries. Tough pill to swallow, but important to think about.
This piece by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic is a beautiful and honest summation of one person’s complete addiction to social media, and how that addiction stole one of her great passions in life: reading. I’ve been reflecting on this for some time, and it seems to have no good answer. I want to leave social media, but when I have done so in the past, I have disappeared off the radars of my friends and readers. It’s like trying to quit opium when everyone lives in the opium den.
Broken River Blog 