I've spent a couple of weeks in London and a couple of weeks travelling through Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy. 9 towns in 13 days, spending every evening with old friends, working from 1st class train carriages, hiking wine terraces, climbing down into small Italian towns and jumping straight into crystalline water---if I was an influencer I'd be an EU maximalist influencer, train maxxer, or Michel of Montaigne proselytiser. Then coming back to London and celebrating Arsenal's first title in over 20 years over a weekend that still feels surreal. That London energy!

I strongly recommend Interrail. Something like 45 quid a day for unlimited first class travel. It's four years now that I've been doing it hasn't got old yet. Inquire within for trip ideas. Or join me next time!

I will be in London for the rest of June (let's hang out!) and then interrailing Warsaw -> Kraków -> Czechia -> Austria -> ??? -> London from 30 Jun till 12 Jul.

Building a BEAR

I am finally finishing a big batch of metascience work and hopefully moving back to working on some other ideas. Despite working more than usual throughout May (that's another benefit of trains!), my backlog is still where it was a month ago, mainly because I got distracted by putting together an online release for BEAR, a meta-database of research results.

There's much more to come, but the basic functionality is now in place. In about three clicks you can get an organised, cleaned-up set of 800,000 experiments from the Cochrane database; or a few million p-values from PubMed; or sets from a dozen influential metascience papers; etc.

Why? My elevator pitch is that a lot of consensus about research standards (e.g. "psychology studies have low power", "publication bias is everywhere", "most social science research doesn't replicate") is built on pretty narrow sets of data. The idea is that we should be able to test these propositions on more systematised and more heterogeneous sets of data and see how far their conclusions extend. I'll have a couple of longer blog posts out on that soon.

And in random stats news, a simple blog post on whether 1:1 randomisation is a good idea.

Kultur/Nietzsche (?!) corner

After finishing The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny I've been reading about China and British jurisprudence, but I haven't got around to writing any of my micro-reviews. China made me want to read about cybernetics, technocracy and planning, so maybe I will have a micro-essay on that next month.

When I was in New York, we went to the Roerich Museum with Andrew. He wrote about it on his blog, if you haven't heard of the guy, I recommend clicking the link. It also made me wonder of the role he played in the Rite of Spring, which made me stumble on this nice article: The Rites of Roerich - Mike Jay

London theatre: I went to the opening night of Glengarry Glen Ross at Old Vic and it was better than expected. If you've seen the movie, you will enjoy this.

However, times being what they are,¹ it's been another month where I haven't been able to open my fridge without encountering Nietzsche discourse.² I've seen a mini-essay in The Point about Nietzsche vs techno-optimism, as well as Helen Lewis butchering it. As is often the case, Scott Alexander has a longer and more thoughtful take on these things.³

None of them are probably worth your time, as it's not really about Nietzsche; it's about warped projections of his ideas into the present culture wars. Nevertheless, it's been on my mind.

The following sentiment is not original, but I think it still doesn't get said enough: I feel strongly that all of the self-professed, or at least alleged, lovers of the super-man, Elons and Andreessens and various screed typists, are just power fabulists, grown-up Star Wars kids, with reductive agendas that absolutely pervert any real notion of transcending our condition, making it all about efficiency and avoidance of that which is painful and scary. Instead of a lateral movement, some fake dichotomies of power and powerlessness, fantasies of control. It amuses and depresses me.

(BTW, speaking of hobgoblins of little minds, next month I will write about my most embarrassing, abhorrent habit.)

And yet, cards on the table, cause I just feel like staking my claim here: I am a Nietzsche enthusiast in many ways, at least what little I understand of it. I find the ressentiment compelling as a theory. In applied terms, I like the notion that you should have a positive agenda, which includes doing things in a principled way. I dislike people who are suspicious of doing anything because they think of actions as status games. I believe in judging actions and not the purity of intent. So I guess I will (finally) also be reading Nietzsche later this year and trying to make sense of it. Uh oh.

I actually don't know why I ended up talking about this.