Parkinson's Link to Gut Bacteria Hints at Unexpectedly Simple Treatment
Social Scientists Are Lazy
Social scientists don't test their theories even when they're fully capable of testing them. I think that's because they're just really lazy.
Commoncog – Cedric Chin: How to Make Sense of AI – Table of Contents
“It is 2026 and AI hype is everywhere. If you’re like most people, you’re probably feeling some fear that you’re falling behind. Perhaps your fellow company operators are talking about successful AI use in their companies, and you’re questioning if you need to retool everything. Perhaps your friends are freaking out about losing their jobs.
Perhaps you’re spending countless cycles trying to predict what’s coming next. This is understandable. Widespread panics are more common during technological revolutions. It feels scary when things are changing so quickly — and in ways that will impact your livelihood and therefore your life.
If there’s anything that we’ve learnt during the Covid years, it’s that humans don’t like uncertainty. Who knows what the landscape of work would look like in a few short years? Nobody does. And yet there is an effective way to make sense of these accelerating changes. With the right frame, you can maintain your equanimity and focus on the right things — that is, only the things that may affect your outcomes.
This doesn’t mean sitting back and passively observing the changes around you. In some ways you’re going to take more action as you investigate the new capabilities of this technology. But you want to be able to investigate without flailing around. You are able to make decisions without the distraction and panic that has claimed so many in the business world.
The ideal response looks like this: you are able to make decisions without being emotionally affected, without feeling FOMO, and without the distraction and panic that has claimed so many in the business world. You will seem oddly quiet and determined, unfazed by any change that comes your way.
You will ignore unfounded AI doomerism and unfounded hype equally; you are able to test assertions and measure outcomes without emotion. Done right, this frame will help you become effective at ‘fast adaptation under uncertainty’, so that you know how to direct your attention and therefore your actions…”
Claude Meets Westlaw and Lexis
Seth Chandler – “Something remarkable has happened in the last few months, and most of the legal academy has not noticed. Anthropic’s Claude—the AI assistant many of us have experimented with for drafting, brainstorming, and analysis—can now directly control a web browser. That means Claude can log into Westlaw or Lexis, run searches, read cases, pull up law review articles and treatises, and synthesize what it finds into polished work product, autonomously, in minutes, while you watch.
Subscribers to this blog already know about tools like Midpage AI, which provides a dedicated connector between Claude and a legal database. I have described Midpage—rightly—as The Killer App. Its technology is sound: it uses modern MCP protocols and direct API calls, which are fast and reliable. A browser agent, by contrast, relies on primitive point-and-click methods developed in the 1970s that depend on visual interpretation of a webpage—something trivial for most humans but slower and more error-prone for computers. That disadvantage, however, is now offset in two important ways.
First, browser access unlocks the far larger compendium of materials held by the legacy giants. Westlaw and Lexis maintain vast repositories of foreign-nation materials, far broader coverage of agency decisions, and enormous collections of secondary sources—law review articles and treatises whose utility one can question in the abstract but that in practice periodically prove invaluable. Second, the pay structure of legal database access works in your favor.
Most ABA-accredited law schools provide Westlaw and Lexis access to faculty and students at no additional charge; there is no marginal cost per query—at least until Westlaw and Lexis move to shut down external agentic AI access to their repositories. Why pay $25 a month for a separate legal database subscription when Claude can navigate the ones you already have? In short, The Killer App is now even deadlier…”
