Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. The Math Melee

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published a superb, exhaustive, and mostly balanced article on a behind-the-scenes battle about how math should be taught in California high schools. The conflict has been fierce, pitting teachers against PhDs against parents against lawmakers. At the center is Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor whose advocacy for a new math framework has stirred up critics and champions alike:

Boaler is fighting for what she calls a more inclusive way of teaching, armed with influential research. To the K-12 teachers who agree that math isn’t just for “math people,” that memorizing times tables should be replaced with real-world problem-solving, the Stanford professor is a “beacon of hope,” as one educator put it. But Boaler is a divisive figure. She has at times misinterpreted studies and made bold assertions with scant evidence, experts say, empowering skeptics who fear that her proposals would water down math and actually undermine her goal of a more equitable education system.

2. Long COVID May Be Fading

“Long COVID is neither as common nor as severe as initially feared,” writes Jeff Wise in Slate. He reviews the scientific literature and concludes that the much-predicted tsunami of Long COVID has failed to arrive:

Long COVID is an unusual condition not only in its kaleidoscope of symptoms but also in the fact that it hadn’t been identified initially by doctors who encountered similar sets of symptoms in their patients. It was, rather, described by COVID patients themselves who, in the early months of the pandemic, found themselves mysteriously unable to get better. The complaints of early “long-haulers” were then picked up and amplified by activists, whose lobbying persuaded the government to allocate more than $1 billion in research funds. “Long COVID has a strong claim to be the first illness created through patients finding one another on Twitter,” researchers Felicity Callard and Elisa Perego wrote in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

Wise takes Long COVID seriously. But when he looks at New York State disability claims, he doesn’t see it playing a significant role in public health. “The most recent data, from March 2022, shows that only about 5 claims for Long COVID were being granted per month out of about 3,000 disability claims in the entire state.”

3. Slow Plane to China

 Alex Tarbarrok describes the FAA’s decision 50 years ago to limit commercial aircraft speed to Mach 1 as “one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history”:

This speed limit has naturally distorted the development of civil aircraft. For fifty years, the aviation industry has worked to improve subsonic aviation. Commercial passenger aircraft are safer and more economical today than they were in 1973, but they are no faster. If we had propagated the rate of growth in commercial transatlantic aircraft speeds that existed from 1939 to the mid-1970s, we would have Mach-4 airliners by now. But the overland ban put an end to all that. It made small supersonic aircraft, which need to fly shorter overland routes, essentially illegal, closing off the iteration cycle that could drive progress in the industry.

Historical footnote: Alexander Butterfield, the FAA Administrator who made this decision, also installed Richard Nixon’s tape-recording system in the White House.

4. Very Short Attention Spans

While most of this month’s Congressional hearings on TikTok focused on China’s ability to access user information, music historian Ted Gioia believes the threat is more subversive. He argues that it changes our relationship to time:

 I’ve often mocked this platform in the past for its bite-sized videos—the most popular length is 21 to 34 seconds. But the sad truth is that these numbers actually overstate the level of engagement. Most users scroll rapidly through their videos, and don’t wait for the end—even if it’s just a few seconds away.

The situation is so bad that TikTok has talked about a 6-second goal to its advertisers. That’s a big deal because so many users swipe before that point. When 3 million people watched a 6-second Ryanair ad on the platform, marketeers shouted hosannas from the rooftops. This was a huge victory.

5. Hummer Rolls (Quietly) into Town

Over the last week, the reviews of GM’s much-anticipated, all-electric, 9,000-pound Hummer SUV have started rumbling in. So far, they’re decidedly mixed. But nothing beats the opening paragraph of Road and Track:

 The 2024 Hummer EV SUV Edition 1 is so many different things. A status symbol. A lab experiment for genuinely impressive technology that will trickle down through the GM product lineup for years to come. A king of Hammertown that rules with an electrified fist. An eco-friendly vitamin stuffed into a 4.5-ton pork chop with a bag of tricks that will impress members of both the off-road and gated communities. A Model X inside a body built on the Liver King’s nine ancestral tenets of steroid use.

6. Office for Lease

This month’s stress over the stability of regional banks overshadows a much larger financial threat: the glut of commercial office space. The Financial Times examines the evidence:

Offices are seen as the area of biggest risk after tenants cut back on space to reflect the popularity of working from home following pandemic lockdowns. Vacancy rates have risen in each of the top 25 markets since 2019, according to rating agency Moody’s. In San Francisco, the worst-hit city, almost 19 per cent of space was unoccupied at the end of 2022, up from 5 per cent three years earlier.

Odd Lots, a Bloomberg podcast, has an extensive, anxiety-provoking discussion on the topic.

Websites Worth Reading

The Chat GPT List of Lists: Mind-Blowing Use Cases

MacRumors: An AR/VR headset from Apple?

Midjourney: An AI Image Gallery

Feeds We Follow

@rowancheung: Old photos compared with today

@bryanhpchiang: Detailed thread on global value chains and trade

@george__mack: Aviation expert on Ukraine war