The for-profit system of academic journal publishing was created by Robert Maxwell, who also happens to be Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad. Along with other tidbits, the linked article does a good job highlighting the ways in which scientific publishing is a principal-agent problem:

You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. … then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.

Andrew Gelman writes, “I’m curious what your readers would think of my post on Seth and his diet which I used to believe in but no more.”

Soothing Sounds for Baby

More arguments on the FDA from Maxwell Tabarrok: Contra Scott on Abolishing the FDA and Surgery Works Well Without The FDA.

Ada Palmer: Tools for Thinking About Censorship

If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would.  If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time.  The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.  Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.

How to be More Agentic

That’s some good illegalism: Activists vow to keep installing guerrilla benches at East Bay bus stops (h/t ACX)

Some potato riffs thoughts from Lee S. Pubb: Superstarch Me, Part 2

Epistemic Hell – Roger’s Bacon

Announcing the SoS Research Collective:

We (the founding gardeners Roger, Dario, and Sergey) have always conceived of Seeds of Science as a kind of research project, with the journal serving as the first of several “experiments”. You could think of our research questions as the following: 

(1) Can people outside of academia make valuable contributions if given the proper platform and support?

(2) Can we create new organizational structures that promote greater creativity and diversity of thought in science?

Nearly 2.5 years after we “planted” our first seed of science, we have some preliminary answers. 

(1) Yes.

(2) Yes.

More stove innovation: Our First Step Towards the Home of the Future

Argument: You Don’t Need Health Insurance

Claims: “The theory of natural selection was first laid out before Darwin by a shipbuilder worried that logging was selecting for scrubby and crooked trees (as apparently happened in China?)”