Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing.

This week: Peter Raven passes away, overestimating (one source of) biodiversity loss, LLMs vs. peer review, zombie ideas are cringe, the Trump administration vs. science, proof that I’m old, …

The essay is five years old yet I have discovered it just now because the author is also the person behind Denote, a marvelous note-taking tool for Emacs. The tone is not as dry as a scholastic text ⊕ [Note: For a Substack version of a similar message I encourage you to check out Experimental History. The most recent post, for example, is a case study of one particular aspect of scientism — zombie ideas. ] but not as entertaining as something one would find on Substack. The message is unambiguous, and rather than rehash it let me quote one paragraph out of many: