Newsletter 2 August 2023: viral stories; Tesla dash lies; Texas porn blockers; B&N unchained

Newsletter week three, thanks for hanging with me. This week: an essay on COVID’s viral storytellers, how Tesla faked out its drivers (including me), more snarky news takes, people to follow, books to read, and explugation.

Stories are easier to invent and spread than messy scientific truth

David Quammen has been writing books on science, nature, and medicine for decades; there may be no one better qualified to present a sober, clear explanation of even the most abstruse and controversial topics in medicine. So I avidly consumed his piece in The New York Times Magazine on the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. Like any intelligent reader who has followed the story for these last three years, I knew the conventional explanation, that the virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan, China, and had also heard the other theories as well: that it was an escaped bioweapon or an inadvertent leak from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As he writes:

Some contrarians say that it doesn’t matter, the source of the virus. What matters, they say, is how we cope with the catastrophe it has brought, the illness and death it continues to cause. Those contrarians are wrong. It does matter. Research priorities, pandemic preparedness around the world, health policies and public opinion toward science itself will be lastingly affected by the answer to the origin question — if we ever get a definitive answer.

He follows this with a detailed and absolutely straight-down-the-middle retelling of the search for COVID’s origins, with clear explanations of every bit of scientific and genetic evidence, giving each theory its due in turn. As is often the case in science, the data and analysis emerges in a haphazard and confusing way, with bits of evidence favoring one theory and then another. For context, it has taken decades to find the source of other contagions, and for others, like Ebola, the origin is still unproven. Depending on our experience, though, we all have biases. Depending on what you think about China, you’re more inclined to believe that Chinese animal markets are unclean, that the Chinese military is performing bioweapons experiments, or that Chinese virus researchers are experimenting with dangerously enhanced viruses. And in fact, the scariest part of the whole piece isn’t about viruses. It’s about people:

What’s tilting the scales of popular opinion toward lab leak? The answer to that is not embedded deeply in the arcane data I’ve been skimming through here. What’s tilting the scales, it seems to me, is cynicism and narrative appeal. . . .

Most of us don’t reach our opinions by fastidious calibration of empirical evidence. We default to our priors, as Jesse Bloom noted, or we embrace stories that have simple plots, good and bad characters and melodramatic trajectories, and that seem commensurate in scope to the event in question. The process of scientific discovery is a complicated story involving data collection, hypothesis testing, hypothesis falsification, hypothesis revision, further testing and brilliant but fallible humans doing all that work. Scientific malfeasance driven by hubris and leading to runaway trouble, on the other hand, is a much simpler story that goes back at least to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, “Frankenstein.” . . .

Carl Bergstrom is an evolutionary biologist and an author of commentaries on scientific misinformation. He ponders, among other things, how students of science are taught — or at least should be taught — about not just what science says but what science is. I asked Bergstrom about the human affinity for dark theories of big events. . . .

“This is not a contest now, in the public domain, between bodies of evidence,” I proposed. “This is a contest between stories.”

“Yeah!” Bergstrom said. “That’s right.”

Science has awesome tools at its disposal and the smartest minds on the planet. But our brains remain susceptible to whatever stories seem right. We’re stuck in a world of “do your own research” and believe what aligns with our assumptions. Since I tell stories for a living, this scares the crap out of me.

News for authors and others who think

According to an investigation by Reuters, Tesla manipulated the range display on its cars. Starting fully charged, Tesla drivers saw a range in miles that roughly matched the car’s specs, but once the half the charge was gone, the range became more accurate — and declined more rapidly. A team of support specialists in Las Vegas was dedicated to convincing Tesla owners who complained that there was nothing wrong with their cars. I own a Tesla, and until I read this, I had thought I was hallucinating. Can you trust the gauges on your digital devices? Maybe, but maybe not.

Publishers Weekly describes a new law in Texas that requires booksellers and publishers to identify books as “sexually explicit” or “sexually relevant” (link requires subscription). The standard is vague, but restricts sale of such books to schools and libraries. Booksellers, suing, say the law will “cause a recall of many books in K-12 public schools, bans of even more, and the establishment of an unconstitutional—and unprecedented—state-wide book licensing regime that compels private companies and individuals to adopt the State’s messages or face government punishment.” What’s next: porn blockers on internet and mobile services?

Publishers are using book titles and subtitles for marketing, using words like “thrilling” in titles submitted to databases. The Book Industry Study Group is miffed at the resulting data pollution. Even if the books are dirty, please, let’s keep the data clean.

Shockingly, it turns out that the best way to make a bookstore attractive to buyers is to let the employees figure out clever book merchandising displays. It’s less efficient, but more effective. That’s the latest revelation from James Daunt, new CEO of Barnes & Noble, as described in The Wall Street Journal (gift link).

3 people to follow

Scott Monty, former Ford Motor Company executive and purveyor of timely and timeless advice.

Jess Zafarris, radically cool writer of books about word origins and director of content for Ragan Communications and PR Daily.

Maggie Langrick, CEO of the hybrid publisher Wonderwell, spiritual Substacker, and former . . . well, you’ll have to look that up.

3 books to read

Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn’t Feel Like it Should, by Laura Gassner Otting (Ideapress, 2023). A highly entertaining story about the nausea of achieving your dreams — just excerpted by Oprah Daily (and yes, I am so jealous).

The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet, by Jeff Jarvis (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Meticulously researched argument that printed books are just a 500-year anomaly.

Our Common Ground: Insights from Four Years of Listening to American Voters by Diane Hessan (RealClear Politics, 2021). If you ever wondered how in hell the other half of America thinks, these insights from real voters will open your eyes.

Explugation

I ditched a rush $30K book editing job this month because of a really bad fit with the client. Felt good; felt poor. There’s a huge crater in my workload for August; call me if you’d like to fill it.