Ben Mann Monthly April 2020: haircuts, not-milk, cheap Amish healthcare, forecasting
Purpose
An index for my memory
A menu of topics for my next conversation with you
A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it
A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable
Experiments and experiences
Barber
I gave one of my housemates a scissor-only cut, except for buzzing the edges. It was easy! I guess I've seen my barber do it enough times that I know the basics. He was satisfied with the service.Not-milk
It's been tougher than usual to keep milk stocked at home since we're trying to limit our trips out of the house. I've tried a few different substitute ideas mostly involving blending various nuts, oils, and lecithin in our blendtec. Cashews, water, and a pinch of salt is the best perf/cost ratio I've found so far! Looks just like milk.Wheat bread
We haven't been able to find white flour anywhere, so I've been experimenting with the laziest possible bread recipe. No-knead in 1 pot works well. We tried to skip the "remove from pot" instruction before baking, but it stuck tenaciously to the sides.
Life updates
Started reading Void Star
Still in work crunch 🏋️♂️
Got SPD clips for my road bike 🚀
Feeling great! Therapy -> biweekly
Started using VSCode for notes
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
A failure, but not of prediction 4/5
Media completely missed the mark predicting the COVID-19 pandemic, overconfidently proclaiming it wouldn't happen
Rather than saying "we should predict better," organizations should be more upfront with probability estimates and what they mean. Even a 10% chance of a global pandemic has very high negative expected value.
There was a semi-joking BMJ article that no one had done RCTs for the efficacy of parachutes when jumping out of planes to satirize the current obsession with evidence-based medicine. It's for this reason that the CDC and WHO recommended against face masks even though they are now widely accepted to be necessary.
The Amish Health Care System 4/5
Amish health care is may be 5-10x cheaper than other Americans!
They have a loophole exempting them from the rest of America's healthcare regulations, and instead use alms to support a social safety net
Factors: comparison shopping, social pressure to spend responsibly, collective bargaining, fewer heroic measures, reliable payment discounts, no suing
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle 3/5
Surprisingly fun ride exploring the lengths high people will go to sate their munchies
Tigertail 3/5
Protagonist can't connect with her emotionally distant Taiwanese immigrant father
Flashbacks to father's youth showed how his culture beat the life out of him and his whole adulthood was formed in response to an offhand comment by his mother; a cautionary tale against living for others
Second gen Americans I watched with said it resonated with them
Cat's Cradle 3/5
A satire of the American military industrial complex that produced the atomic bomb and America's foray into puppet states during the cold war
Highlight: Bokononism, the book's self-aware, fake religion