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)

I'm Installing Chap for ChatGPT https://github.com/jepler/chap (more)

Welcome to the 15-minute neighbourhood: Intensification key to city's official plan. Ottawa's revised official plan aims to create a community of "15-minute neighbourhoods" that will transform the capital into North America's most liveable mid-sized city while planning for a population that will eventually double or even triple. (15-minute city) (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

Conspiracy Theorists Think Walkable Cities Are Really Open-Air Prison Dystopias Now. Recent attempts to reduce commute times to 15 minutes and make cities more walkable have led to waves of weird conspiracy theories about an encroaching police state that must be stopped at all costs. (more)

The Pandemic Emptied Europe’s Cities. What Will Bring People Back? City life came to a standstill from London to Berlin when the coronavirus struck. Now worries of a lasting exodus are pushing urban authorities to address long-festering problems. (more)

The 15-minute city isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just a bad idea. Wouldn’t it be lovely to find most of what you need within a short walk of home? Advocates call it the 15-minute city and want everyone to enjoy this lifestyle. Opponents call it a conspiracy to trap people in their “urban village” by blocking roads and breaking up cities. (more)

The 15-Minute City: Where Urban Planning Meets Conspiracy Theories. In 2012, Portland, Ore., adopted a plan for “20-minute neighborhoods,” in which residents could live within a half-mile of amenities such as grocery stores, parks and elementary schools. (more)

Paris’s mayor has a dream of ‘the 15-minute city’. They’re very hard to find now, even in dense cities (the average New Yorker now spends around 43 minutes getting to work, and that’s not on foot). (more)