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joelinbh.bsky.social
JoelGinBH
@joelinbh.bsky.social
770 followers 280 following 540 posts
Beagle walker. A Yooper in Maine. Hockey goalie. Amateur tinkerer. Dabbler in many other topics, including behavioral economics, history, statistics, and home renovations. Personal account

Work account: https://bsky.app/profile/jhgrabermdibl.bsky.social
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joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. Another important, but likely depressing read.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
📚📖💙
Cover of Owned by Eion Higgins
December 7, 2025 at 8:33 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. I need something a bit less triggering again.
#books
#booksky
#everyoneshouldreadmore
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Cover of Beaverland by Leila Philip
October 28, 2025 at 1:00 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. An unfortunately topical read.
#books
#nonfiction
#booksky
#everyoneshouldreadmore
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Cover of Science Under Siege by Michael Mann and Peter Hotez
October 5, 2025 at 1:03 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. I’ve had this book for some time, meaning to read it. With the author’s recent passing, its time has come.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
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Cover of The Game by Ken Dryden
September 15, 2025 at 12:59 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. A short read that covers two lectures from a critical thinker in the philosophy of science.
#books
#nonfiction
#booksky
#science
#philosophy
#everyoneshouldreadmore
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Cover of A World of Propensities by Karl Popper
September 13, 2025 at 9:17 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. Back to nonfiction and technology/science.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#eveyoneshouldreadmore
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Cover of Built by Roma Agrawal
August 30, 2025 at 2:56 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. One of my rare forays into fiction.
#books
#booksky
#fiction
#everoneshouldreadmore
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Cover of The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
August 14, 2025 at 3:10 AM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. Given that MP was directly mentioned in “We are What We Eat,” it seems a good follow up.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
📘📖📚💙
Cover of You are What You Eat, by Michael Pollan
July 30, 2025 at 2:24 AM
joelinbh.bsky.social
That bed was hands down my best purchase in the last year.
July 27, 2025 at 12:46 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Ben is a part of your pack! 🐶❤️👍🏻
July 26, 2025 at 9:36 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. Time for a bit of a change of pace, so to speak.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
📚📖💙
Cover of “We are What We Eat” by Alice Waters
July 26, 2025 at 3:01 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. It feels like a good follow up to and extension of Ways of Being.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
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Cover of Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
June 22, 2025 at 2:23 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
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Cover of Ways of Being by James Bridle
May 26, 2025 at 12:04 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. Back into the history of mathematics.
#books
#booksky 📚
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
📘📚💙
May 17, 2025 at 4:35 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. Time to read some regional history again.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
📚📘👍🏻
Cover of Boiling Off: The Story of Maple Sugaring in Maine by John Hodgkins
May 4, 2025 at 12:22 AM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. It seems sadly topical and appropriate.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
📚📘📖💙
Cover of The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science by Peter J. Hotez
April 25, 2025 at 12:22 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Here is one of the reading materials for that course
April 18, 2025 at 12:23 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. I usually like to switch topics in consecutive books, but this seems like a very obvious and logical follow up to Weapons of Math Destruction
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
Cover of AI Snake Oil by Arvind Naranayan and Sayash Kapoor
April 10, 2025 at 2:54 AM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Timeline cleanse with AFM* photos. 🐶🐈‍⬛
*animal family members
Sleeping senior beagle Regal senior kitty lounging
April 9, 2025 at 12:27 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
This is a really strong and comprehensive history of that time. It was quite a bit more than The Jungle, though that of course helped
April 2, 2025 at 1:54 AM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
#everyoneshouldreadmore
Cover of “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil
March 23, 2025 at 1:55 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Seriously, why wouldn’t I be all of these?
March 15, 2025 at 6:38 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Next off the shelf. More economics in the form of a classic short essay.
#books
#booksky
#nonfiction
Cover of “Other people’s money and how the bankers use it,” by Louis D. Brandeis
March 15, 2025 at 1:50 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Here is still another @mandotar.bsky.social , but this is a direct quote from a previous work, Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis. While it’s written about economics, I think you’d agree it’s applicable to almost any other field.
In practice we all start our own research from the work of our prede-cessors, that is, we hardly ever start from scratch. But suppose we did start from scratch, what are the steps we should have to take? Obvi-ously, in order to be able to posit to ourselves any problems at all, we should first have to visualize a distinct set of coherent phenomena as a worthwhile object of our analytic effort. In other words, analytic effort is of necessity preceded by a preanalytic cognitive act that supplies the raw material for the analytic effort. In this book, this prean-alytic cognitive act will be called Vision. It is interesting to note that vision of this kind not only must precede historically the emergence of analytic effort in any field, but also may reenter the history of every established science each time somebody teaches us to sel things in a light of which the source is not to be found in the facts, methods, and results of the pre-existing state of the science. [p. 41]
February 22, 2025 at 2:01 PM
joelinbh.bsky.social
Here’s another passage for you @mandotar.bsky.social. (Again, written almost 30 years ago!):
The act of measurement always involves some interaction and interference with the reality being measured. This generalized Heisenberg principle is especially relevant in economics, where the measurement of a success index on which rewards are based, or taxes calculated, nearly always has perverse repercussions on the reality being measured. Consider, for example, the case of management by quantified objectives applied to a tuberculosis hospital, as related to me by a physician. It is well known that TB patients cough less as they get better. So the number of coughs per day was taken as a quantitative measure of the patient's improvement. […] Coughing steadily declined as doses of codeine were more frequently prescribed. Relaxed patients cough less. Unfortunately the patients got worse, precisely because they were not coughing up and spitting out the congestion. The cough index was abandoned. The cough index totally subverted the activity it was designed to measure because people served the abstract quantitative index instead of the concrete qualitative goal of health. Perversities induced by quantitative goal setting are pervasive in the literature on Soviet planning: set the production quota for cloth in linear feet, and the bolt gets narrower; set it in square feet, and the cloth gets thinner; set it by weight, and it gets too thick. But one need not go as far away as the Soviet Union to find examples. The phenomenon is ubiquitous. In universities a professor is rewarded according to number of publications. Consequently the length of articles is becoming shorter as we approach the minimum publishable unit of research. At the same time the frequency of coauthors has increased. More and more people are collaborating on shorter and shorter papers. What is being maximized is not discovery and dissemination of coherent knowledge but the number of publications on which one's name appears.
February 21, 2025 at 2:22 PM