š ASB Partners Nuggets
This is a short weekly email that covers a few things Iāve found interesting during the week.
Interesting Links/Reads
Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution (bold and italics are my own to highlight what I found particularly interesting)
The Pattern What They Say About the Jews Russ Roberts on Antisemitism
This weekās EconTalk is with David Deutsch, the distinguished physicist at Oxford University. Deutsch has a theory about how the world looks at Jews which he calls The Pattern.
David Deutsch is an atheist. I am a religious Jew. There is a strong theme in the Jewish Bible that Jews will not have it easy once the Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed and Jews are scattered throughout the world. For a believer, it is hard not to wonder whether the Pattern is part of the mystical fabric of the way things are. And just as there is this seemingly non-rational way much of the world has of seeing the Jew as worthy of being harmed simply for being a Jew, there is an equally non-rational way the Jew throughout history has stayed connected to the Jewish family and the Jewish religion despite the persistence of the Pattern and the violence that at times comes along with it.
Just as Jew-hatred and the pattern of justifying violence against the Jew has risen since October 7 and spread way beyond Israelis to the wider diaspora, so has the interest and commitment and connection to Judaism and Israel grown among Jews and those who gladly stand by our side. This too makes no sense. Why embrace something that endangers you and your children? The world is a mysterious place and for some reason or no reason at all, Jews are often at the center of these mysteries.
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, starting with the recent Oliver Sacks debacle. Here is one excerpt:
ā¦as my George Mason University colleague Bryan Caplan suggests, trust literatures, not individual research studies. By a āliterature,ā I mean the collective work conducted by many researchers, acting in decentralized fashion, to publish and circulate the results that will best persuade other researchers.
Second, treat research articles, or their popular media coverage, as possibilities to put in your mental toolbox rather than settled truths.
Literatures are more trustworthy than individual articles because they reflect a collective effort to establish reliable results. A supposed correlation gets refereed and scrutinized dozens of times, or maybe hundreds of times. If you have a new hypothesis, other researchers have a chance to make their names by knocking it down. There are also more eyes watching, in case real-world experience delivers results at odds with what a particular theory had been postulating. Or maybe there was a simple mistake in writing the computer code behind the paperās result. Literatures contain a variety of different ways to come to a particular conclusion, and you can see whether they end up pointing in the same general direction.
You may not have time or the background to master a complete literature on a research topic, but these days you can send well-written prompts to GPT 5.2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5, or Gemini 3.0 for some very good summaries of any literature you want. Furthermore, you can cross-check across these different AI models for additional reliability.
This is useful advice which is rarely heeded, and learning how to interpret a research literature is one of the most important skills in intellectual life.
3.Inmates could escape jail on drones (Times of London).
Podcast/Videos
I hope you enjoyed it.
Adam