Liquor choices for difficult times.
One of my guilty pleasures is the New York Times' wedding announcements. Yes, it is often about which Goldman Sachs vice president is marrying which daughter of a (choose one: name partner at a national law firm, Goldman Sachs managing director, senior government official, wealthy industrialist, director of an important cultural institution), but those are fun ones - how do you make awkward drunken hookups at a bar catering to the bored and rich sound "romantic"? I don't know, but they do it about 3 out of every 4 weeks. The ones with the old people are my favorites, because those stories are always more unusual. Sometimes you can find ones about some really insufferable young people where the author's contempt for the subjects bubbles through and those are great, too.
At work, I'm an "analyst" of some flavor. Today I found myself daydreaming about analytical methods generally, and how shitty the actual "analysis" that some of us do at work is. Like when I think about the product that should come out of good analysis broadly, it should be the result of deep and genuine curiosity, reflection, and draw on information from a lot of different sources. The stuff that gets put out at my office tends to be boilerplate - it's often filling in boxes on a form, more or less. There's more hubris than curiosity, nobody considers any alternative hypotheses, and quantity can be counted, so it's rewarded over quality. Since I do so little work, I'm not sure how much of this is my fault, but to the extent that I'm trapped in my job, I wouldn't mind seeing it change.
