Rad Geek People's Daily

There are two kinds of problems in the world: strong-link problems and weak-link problems.

Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link problems by making the weakest links stronger, or by eliminating them entirely.

. . .

It’s easy to assume that all problems are like this, but they’re not. Some problems are strong-link problems: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters. Like music, for instance. You listen to the stuff you like the most and ignore the rest.

. . .

Figuring out whether a problem is strong-link or weak-link is important because the way you solve them is totally different:

When you have a STRONG-LINK problem:

• Increase outliers/variance/weirdness because you’ll benefit from having more very good things
• Don’t gatekeep because you might accidentally keep the best out
• Ignore the worst
• Improve the best
• Accept risk, because the downside doesn’t matter.

When you have a WEAK-LINK problem:

• Decrease outliers/variance/weirdness because you’ll be harmed by having more very bad things
• Gatekeep because it keeps the worst out
• Improve the worst
• Ignore the best
• Avoid risk, because the downside is all that matters

. . .

Science is a strong-link problem.

In the long run, the best stuff is basically all that matters, and the bad stuff doesn’t matter at all. The history of science is littered with the skulls of dead theories.

. . . Here’s the crazy thing: most people treat science like it’s a weak-link problem….

— Adam Mastroianni, Science Is A Strong-Link Problem
Experimental History, 11 April 2023

By A.E. Stallings, from POETRY (May 2020); recently featured on Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the day podcast.

Daedal

To build a labyrinth it takes
A twisted mind, a puzzled art,
A fractal branching of mistakes.

Drag out the shovels and the rakes,
The spirit level, sacred chart.
To build a labyrinth it takes

Shadows, stones, a way that snakes
And ladders to its shaky start;
An average mazing of mistakes,

The kind that everybody makes,
Set random intervals apart.
To build a labyrinth it takes

Dead ends that seem like lucky breaks,
The paths of bats that weave and dart
Through limestone caverns of mistakes.

The shaken Etch A Sketch awakes
A lost child buried in its heart.
To build a labyrinth it takes
Some good intentions, some mistakes.

— A.E. Stallings (2020)
Daedal, in POETRY (May 2020)

Reading: Katherine Dee, No, Culture Is Not Stuck, at Wisdom of Crowds (4 October 2024).

The idea that culture is stagnating, as Ted Gioia puts it — or that it’s stuck, as Paul Skallas says — isn’t new. Neither is the observation that there’s something different about how bad things are in this particular moment. The cultural malaise is palpable and cross-generational. The complaints are more than just old man yells at cloud. Everyone feels it.^[1]

Consider film and television, an easy target for cultural pessimists, and for good reason. The signs of decay are hard to ignore. . . .

. . . If you complain about these trends, the responses you’ll get typically fall into two camps. One sympathizes with you, but offers only a resigned How are you just now noticing? The other dismisses your concerns as a symptom of aging. There’s plenty of great music, movies, literature, and fashion, and if you don’t like it, that’s your inability to keep up.^[2]

Both responses miss something important, though. They both assume that what we know as “culture” is the only type of culture that could ever exist.

There’s a third possible response, and that’s that there’s a new culture all around us.

We just don’t register it as culture. . . . We’re witnessing the rise of new forms of cultural expression. If these new forms aren’t dismissed by critics, it’s because most of them don’t even register as relevant. Or maybe because they can’t even perceive them.

— Katherine Dee, No, Culture Is Not Stuck
Wisdom of Crowds (4 October 2024).

1. ^[1][Everyone? Nah. Come on. —R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][For what it’s worth, this latter is actually the response I’m most often inclined to give when I hear this kind of stock complaints about, say, television and film: I don’t even know what people are talking about, unless it’s just to say that they’re tired of going to the movies and so can’t be arsed to find movies to go see. If you’re tired of superhero movies or Star Wars series or whatever, well, that’s fine; don’t watch that stuff. There’s a ton of weird, non-franchised, stylistically varied and highly idiosyncratic movies and series coming out every year. You don’t have to be some hipster bastard digging through the bottom of search results to find it; just make the effort to go to an arthouse theater or watch the foreign films up for an Oscar this year or whatever. Last year’s Best Picture nominees were wildly divergent, artistically ambitious, ranged from quietly meditative reflections on midlife regret to alt-Victorian Living Dead Girl picaresques and practical-effect atomic bomb explosions, and more or less all were completely different from the sort of genre pictures that the Stuck Culture bellyachers routinely and absurdly claim to be all-devouring and inescapable. I take Katherine Dee’s point in this essay that there’s also a lot of other stuff to look at; but it also just seems like the core complaint about stuckness hardly ever really reflects the real range of activity in the cultural medium alleged to be stuck. It’s not even prima facie compelling after a moment’s thought about what you could find in fifteen minutes’ worth of looking. —R.G.]↩

Reading: J.D. Tuccille, The People Cheering Brian Thompson’s Murder Can’t Have the Medical Utopia That They Want, today’s issue of The Rattler, for Reason.com (11 December 2024).

The assassin’s fans–and the legal system has yet to convict anybody for the crime–are moral degenerates. But they’re also dreaming, if they think insurance executives like Thompson are all that stands between them and their visions of a single-payer medical system that satisfies every desire. While there is a lot wrong with the main way health care is paid for and delivered in the U.S., what the haters want is probably not achievable, and the means many of them prefer would make things worse.

Unlimited Care… Free of Charge

It is an old joke among health policy wonks that what the American people really want from health care reform is unlimited care, from the doctor of their choice, with no wait, free of charge, Michael Tanner, then of the Cato Institute, quipped in 2017.

The problem, no matter how health care is delivered, is that it requires labor, time, and resources that are available in finite supply. Somebody must decide how to allocate medications, treatments, physicians, and hospital beds, and how to pay for it all. A common assumption in some circles is that Americans ration medicine by price, handing an advantage to the wealthy and sticking it to the poor.

Today, as everyone knows, health care in the US can be prohibitively expensive even for people who have insurance, Dylan Scott sniffed this week at Vox.

The alternative, supposedly, is one where health care is universal, with bills paid by government so everybody has access to care. Except, most Americans rely on somebody else to pay the bulk of their medical bills just like Canadians, Germans, and Britons. And while there are huge differences among the systems presented as alternatives to the one in the U.S., third-party payers–whether governments or insurance companies–do enormous damage to the provision of health care.

. . .

. . . Concerns about rising costs, demand, and finite resources apply just as much when the payer is the government. . . . You have to wonder what those so furious at Brian Thompson that they would applaud his murder would say about the officials managing systems elsewhere. None of them deliver unlimited care, from the doctor of their choice, with no wait, free of charge. Some lack the minimal discipline imposed by what competition exists among insurers in the U.S.

. . .

. . . Policymakers need to understand that the key to affordable health care is not to increase the role of health insurance in peoples’ lives, but to diminish it,” Cato’s Singer concluded.^[1] . . . Those examples point to a better health care system than what exists in the United States–or in most other countries, for that matter. They’re probably not the whole answer, because it’s unlikely that one approach will suit millions of people with different medical concerns, incomes, and preferences. But making people more, rather than less, responsible for their own health care, and getting government and other third-parties as far out of the matter as possible, is far better than cheering the murder of people who supposedly stand between us and an imaginary medical utopia.

— J.D. Tuccille, The People Cheering Brian Thompson’s Murder Can’t Have the Medical Utopia That They Want
The Rattler, for Reason.com (11 December 2024).

1. ^[1][In a white paper that Tuccille referred to earlier in the article: Jeffrey Singer, a surgeon and senior fellow with the Cato Institute, wrote in 2013. The third party payment system is the principal force behind health care price inflation. —R.G.]↩