Innovation Roundup (( by Hamid Ghanbari, MD ))
A newsletter about innovation, technology and empathy in medicine (10-13-21)
Hi Everyone,
Here is the best of what I have been reading and writing this week. I hope that you enjoy them as much as I did.
Hamid
Department of Reading
A Revolution in Creativity: On Slow Writing
We should lichenize our writing. And in this, I mean, challenge all the ways we are influenced to rush our composition, to push against capitalism’s engine insisting a kind of efficient production of creative works. Instead, how can we, as writers, contest the urge to produce at real or imagined external timelines?
A common view is that self-knowledge is special, and immune to error, because it is gained through introspection – literally, ‘looking within’. While we might be mistaken about things we perceive in the outside world (such as thinking a bird is a plane), it seems odd to say that we are wrong about our own minds.
Why Judaism - A great article on why we still need religion in modern life
Navigating that journey without a religious tradition is like trying to cross open country without a path: you can do so, but you’ll do lots of stumbling and very likely lose your way.
This is all in keeping with the current liberal project’s moral goal, which is creating lives devoid of any unchosen obligations and absolutely rife with chosen identities of fanciful and recent coinage. The problem is that it’s the unchosen obligations—or the obligations chosen but whose downstream responsibilities cannot be unchosen—that will give us the only real meaning in life. Family, children, our hometowns, our childhoods, our ethnic identity (if we have one), or the chosen-but-undoable commitments—marriage, joining the military, that company we start, religious faith—are the defining obligations where our selves really play out.
1. Physics advances, discovering infinity beneath the finite.
2. The finite is constrained by the infinite beneath it
3. A singularity is an infinity in which the logic of the infinite is suspended.
4. The response to a singularity is a greater infinity.
5. Physics makes the finite a consequence of a logic of the infinite.
Department of Innovation
Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science- this paper makes a very bold claim that more papers in a field may actually lead to less progress. Very thought provoking
The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas.
Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon. Scholars in fields where many papers are published annually face difficulty getting published, read, and cited unless their work references already widely cited articles. New papers containing potentially important contributions cannot garner field-wide attention through gradual processes of diffusion. These findings suggest fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas.
Department of Digital Health
commonly reported metrics may not have sufficient sensitivity to identify improvement of machine learning models and propose the use of a comprehensive list of performance metrics for reporting and comparing clinical risk prediction models.
Podcast
This is another example of why the Lex Fridman podcast is one of the best podcasts out there. This is tour d force on Nihilism and its antidote in modern life. Pair it with Sean Kelly’s book on the same topic.
Department of Productivity
A little known secret about me is that I like watching ridiculousness in hotels when I travel. I did not realize that it makes up 60% of all MTV programming and Rob Dyrdek is one of most interesting and productive businessmen out there. This is a great podcast and tweet storm summary that describes his process.
Summary via tweetstorm
A productive day starts with a good night sleep. This is a quick guide from the great Andrew Huberman
Album of week
Kind of Blue- Miles Davis
This is probably one of the greatest Jazz Albums of all time. Hard to believe Coltrane, Davis and Hancock were all in the same band1
Art of the week
The Promenade - Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841 - 1919) 1870
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Talk Soon,
Hamid