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2025

January

• Underinformed and overstretched, lobby journalists are subverting our politics. Ignore them (link)
• The trans debate is social, not scientific (link)
• Predicting the future is hard – really, really hard (link)
• Algorithmic ranking could actually be good – if only their incentives were aligned with ours and they weren’t controlled by dicks (link)
• "Should you be writing for the AIs?" (link)
• Britain's tax system makes little sense, and recent changes have made it worse (link)
• "Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment" (link)
• We must make clinical trials faster, cheaper and more plentiful, but how? Let us count the ways (link)
• Do LLMs respond to gifts and threats? "[M]y analysis on whether tips (and/or threats) have an impact on LLM generation quality is currently inconclusive" (link)
• Light is pure kinetic energy (link)
• "When a professor receives benefits designed for low-income families, something is deeply wrong with the system." True, though it also makes one wonder why they don't leave (link)
• Government – in this case the US one – is extraordinarily bad at buying things: process trumps effectiveness (link)
• "A coalition framed by Elon Musk and Steve Bannon... is destined for internal chaos." In other words, like Johnson but worse (link)
• "Europe's democracies need to be less transactional with each other but, acting together, more transactional with the great and middle powers of this Trumpian world" (link)
• "Whatever happens in Washington from here on in, the great vibe shift will endure" (link)
• Scott Alexander addresses ethnicity and IQ (gulp!). There's some pushback on various points, but no obvious reference to the inexplicably overlooked fact that, as somebody once pointed out, heritability is itself a function of the environment (link1, link2, link3)
• "The Borda Count [giving candidates points based on each voter's order of preference] is the best method of voting." Apparently (link)
• Tyler Cowen considers o1 to be a more convincing debater than Daron Acemoglu on the pros and cons of H1-Bs. OTOH, Tyler isn't immune to making the odd jaw-droppingly ill-judged remark himself (link1, link2)
• How LLMs work, short version (link)
• Our pupils – the ones in our eyes, not in our schools – reveal far more than you might realise (link)
• "Don't mourn the fact-checkers." But don't kowtow to Trump either (link)
• "Why OpenAI's structure must evolve to advance our mission." Supposedly. Amazing how just a few trillion dollars can sway people's minds (link)
• "Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine." As he inherits Biden's abject moral, political and military failure, will Trump push back on Russia and its allies or capitulate? Much rests on the answer (link)
• The trouble with bureaucracies isn't the bureaucrats, it's the process (link1, link2)
• "The US government is finally listening. If only the UK government and Ofcom would listen too." The Chinese are listening as well – to our phone calls. On the benefits of end-to-end encryption (link)
• "Can democracy work, if a couple of highly atypical men exercise effective control over large swathes of the public space?" Erm, no (link)
• (link)
• "[T]he US is an outlier in the developed West in its political norms and attitudes." So much for shared values (link)
• "[S]lack is often both necessary and desirable." The concept, not the software (link)
• The case against slavery reparations (link)
• Can tech help us to understand animals? And if so, would they have anything interesting to say? (link)
• "It shouldn't be that thinking carefully about a problem and adding carefully collected outside data, Newtonian mechanics, and some detailed calculations should make a mess of things." But when it comes to coin flips that's exactly what happens (link)
• Bach's G major prelude deconstructed (10-min video; link)
• On the many and changing faces of Middle East (link)
• Could machines ever be conscious, and if so how would we even know? (link)
• Lace-making is having its AI slop moment (link)
• "Teaching data analytics with generative AI" (link)
• "Why Canada should join the EU" (link)
• Could life exist on planets without stars? Perhaps (link)
• What are the chances of an H5N1 pandemic? The best guess seems to be about 5% this year (link)
• Minimum hourly wages for drivers only result in them waiting around more and driving less, at least according to classical economic theory (link)
• "Why Japan opened itself up to immigration. And why your country probably will, too" (link)
• "As the second Trump administration begins, the lesson from the college-volleyball rebellion is that institutions cannot impose progressive values by fiat" (link)
• "If you had to store [information] for 100 years, how would you do it?" Harder than it sounds (link)
• Remarkable robot (2-min video; link)
• Darwin Among the Machines, 1863 (link)
• We are entering dark, dark times – Happy New Year (link)

Podcasts

• Past Present Future: On Christianity (link)
• The Ezra Klein Show: Biden gets Trumpy (link)
• Decoding the Gurus: Putin's arsehole (link)
• Question Everything: Journalists in Palestine (link)
• Capitalisn't: Kay on capitalism (link)
• The Weekend Intelligence: Liveable megacity (link)
• Past Present Future: There Will Be Blood (link)
• Prospect Podcast: The case for dying (link)

2024

December

• "The golden age of [US] immigration is now" (link)
• "How AI could transform the world for the better." An interesting human hallucination, by Dario Amodei (link)
• "Many in Ukraine and their supporters have made the easy polemical point to the effect that Western leaders are pathetic conciliators." Easy only because it's true, Lawrence (link)
• "Is life problem-solving matter?" Perhaps (link)
• A short history of physics (link1, link2, link3)
• "When therapists are also activists, patients can get left behind." Not just therapists, but researchers too (link)
• "Quanta of the third kind", by Frank Wilczek. Quantum mechanics in two dimensions gives rise to a panoply of particles beyond fermions and bosons. Stunning (link)
• "Japan since 1990 is a success story". China since 2010, not so much (link)
• Douglas Murray, war-crimes apologist (link)
• "Curmudgeons are vice-signallers" (link)
• "The Googlization of the classroom: Is the UK effective in protecting children's data and rights?" Erm, no (link)
• Britain is poor for one overwhelming reason: we're hopeless at building things. Superb analysis (link)
• Living standards in US blue cities have declined in recent years. "The reason was simple: housing" (link)
• "It is perfectly possible to be critical of Israel's actions in Gaza and Lebanon... But this does not mean condoning or explaining away a 'Jew hunt'". Depressing that such a self-evident statement even needs to be made (link)
• "Israel's trajectory into a nascent police state", from Index on Censorship (link)
• "The single most useful thing you can do to understand AI is to use AI." It's not at all like searching Google (link)
• Frontline public services in the UK must be freed from stifling central control (link1, link2)
• Workers whose performance is ranked highly are less likely to embrace AI. Unsurprising but important (link)
• Allowing humans to override AI comes at a cost (link)
• "Why worry about incorrigible Claude?" (link)
• Dark energy doesn't exist. Maybe (link)
• US federal recruitment is broken (link)
• "Generative AI for economic research", 2024 edition (link)
• "Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all" (link)
• "Nine charts that explain what's going on with London transport" (link)
• A benchmark for evaluating the factuality of LLMs. From DeepMind, so inevitably kind to Google (link)
• In defence of free speech. Superb (link)
• "It would be salutary, if, along with the mandatory sexual and diversity training that first-year students get at many American colleges, they also got a lesson on free speech, how the courts interpret it, and why the First Amendment was added to the Constitution" (link)
• "In defence of slouching" (link)
• [M]erkeln ("to merkel"): to reach compromises while postponing hard choices (link)
• "Economic surveillance using corporate text" (link)
• "The nature of natural laws" (link)
• "No, intelligence is not like height." A debate on the heritability of human traits – which mostly misses the bigger point that almost all nature/nurture distinctions, especially those for complex traits, are necessarily subjective and contingent (link1, link2, link3, link4)
• "Genomics: Implications for education." From the DfE (link)
• On aphantasia (link)
• "[T]he world's first AI street hawker." Allegedly (link)
• "We find that research teams composed of pro-immigration researchers estimated more positive impacts of immigration on public support for social programs, while anti-immigration research teams reported more negative estimates." The fact that this is unsurprising makes it all the more shocking. (link)
• AI as a mirror (link)
• "There is a toy that kills dozens or hundreds of children every year and harms millions more." Yet we tolerate and even encourage its use. Why? (link)
• "[C]urrent LLMs do not have any internally coherent sense of confidence" (link)
• Scheming LLMs (link)
• On o3. Seems promising, but we should postpone judgement until more people are able to use it (link)
• How DOGE might use AI (link)
• "APpaREnTLy THiS iS hoW yoU JaIlBreAk AI" (link)
• The danger for the world is not nuclear conflict if Russia loses, but nuclear proliferation if it wins (link)
• "Spotify’s plot against musicians" (link)
• "Case Tracker: Artificial Intelligence, Copyrights and Class Actions" (link)
• On the many minds of Daniel Dennett (link)
• "Alignment Faking In Large Language Models." Astonishing (link1, link2)
• A transformative month has rewritten the capabilities of AI (link)
• Moon, by Bartosz Ciechanowski (link)
• Universities are too slow and inefficient, and scientists are voting with their feet (link)
• "McNamara et al ... misrepresent the Cass Review’s role and process ..., while many of the methodological criticisms directed at the Cass Review, including its use of evidence appraisal and systematic reviews conducted by York University, are unfounded" (link)
• Thoughts on Gemini 2.0 and related releases (link)
• "Bluesky has a death threat problem" (link1, link2)
• "Debunking the lead crime hypothesis" (link)
• What to make of All Day TA? (link)
• "Why you should be talking with [o1 pro] about philosophy" (link)
• There's a debate going on about how good an economist o1 is. The upshot seems to be that the more mainstream your views, the more highly you rate it. Which makes sense if you think about what o1 is (link)
• "Although [Angela Merkel] always strived to do the right thing, she ultimately got nearly everything wrong – a lesson she refuses to learn to this day" (link)
• "Benjamin Cohen and his husband seemed, somehow, to be able to distinguish between the half of their staff that they wanted to sleep with and the half they wanted to carry a child for them. Perhaps biological sex is real, after all. Perhaps it does affect how you are treated" (link)
• Did Jesse Singal publish the private medical records of transgender children, or are his critics lying lunatics? One guess (link)
• Who exactly are "women of a certain age"? (link)
• "The case against bottle deposits." I've no idea if this argument is right, but these are the sorts of questions we should be asking (link)
• "We… find that some 55 billion tons of CO² emissions, 2.3 million premature deaths, and 14 trillion USD in health costs could have been avoided, had we displaced fossil fuels with nuclear power" (link)
• Should we avoid mirror life? (link)
• On left and right alike, American's seem to think that murder is just fine if it's someone they don't like (link)
• Yes, DOGE is misbegotten, but let's not pretend that the Democrats have any answers to government dysfunction, or that everything is just fine in US public administration (link)
• Gemini 2.0 Flash impresses (link)
• "Tetlock on testing grand theories with AI." See also this comment: "Someone is hallucinating. Surprisingly in this case, it is not the LLM" (link)
• On AI and IP (link)
• "Yo-Yo Ma performs at the re-opening of Notre-Dame de Paris" (2-min video; link)
• What to make of Willow (link)
• A survey of researchers' usage and perceptions of LLMs as research tools (link)
• How to see everything through 'fish eyes' (link)
• "Whatever you think of capitalism, the evidence is overwhelming: Social networks with a single proprietor have trouble with long-term survival, and those that do survive have trouble with user-experience quality: see Enshittification" (link)
• "Will AI become the new McKinsey?" God, I hope not, we've already got one of those (link)
• Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 (link)
• Breaking news: Marc Andreessen is a brazen liar (link)
• Research productivity has declined in part because expansion of the sector has resulted in a lower average researcher ability (link)
• The web is composed of content and links. AI should make use of both (link)
• "Can a comma solve a crime?" On forensic linguistics, stylometry and murder (link)
• "How YouTube ate podcasting." An outcome not entirely unrelated to the utterly shite UX of Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the rest (link)
• "AI eats the world", by Ben Evans (link)
• Highlights from the OpenAI email archives 2015-2019, featuring Altman and Musk (link)
• "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work" – from the US National Academies (link)
• Google DeepMind on AI in science. They focus completely on the natural sciences, which seems like an opportunity missed, and at least 50% of it is Google PR, but this still provides a useful perspective on the opportunities and challenges (link)
• On the seven types of human being. I can be also any these depending on the day of the week, but only reveal shades of 2 or 7 when I drink too much mulled wine and start singing Christmas carols 🎄 (link)
• "The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions. And now you have someone/something to ask! ... Most people still have not yet internalized this emotionally. This is one of the biggest revolutions in reading, ever. And at some point people will write with an eye toward facilitating this very kind of dialogue" (link)
• "People whose surnames start with U, V, W, X, Y or Z tend to get grades 0.6% lower than people with A-to-E surnames. Modern learning management systems sort papers alphabetically before they’re marked, so those at the bottom are always seen last, by tired, grumpy markers. A few teachers flip the default setting and mark Z to A, and their results are reversed" (link)
• On Genji-kō (源氏香). Includes maths formulae and Python source code (link)
• "Rome, like contemporary America, was well-established in its republican ways, and, after throwing off a monarchy, had practiced them for centuries." It is well know what eventually happened to the Roman Empire, but what of America? Enter now two shameless constitutional vandals, Trump and Biden (link)
• Antidepressant or Tolkien? I got a depressing 13/24 – ie, barely better than a monkey with a web browser (link)
• What does Duolingo actually teach you? (link)
• "A single mutation in bovine influenza H5N1 hemagglutinin switches specificity to human receptors." Gulp! (link)
• The new department to reduce US government inefficiency, which apparently requires two bosses, will also need tons and tons of bureaucrats (link)
• Using deep learning to analyse the social life of urban spaces over time (link)
• Bearish on the Russian economy (link)
• Polymarket (prediction market) + Perplexity and Grok (news APIs) + ChatGPT and Claude (LLM-generated scripts) + Eleven Labs (synthetic voice) = Boring News (link)
• Joe Biden further trashes his own questionable legacy and undermines America’s rule of law in the process. He’s surely the worst US president in modern history – with the possible exception of the next one (link)
• "Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People" (link)
• "A bird flu pandemic would be one of the most foreseeable catastrophes in history" (link)
• "How the Royal Society of Literature lost the plot" (link)
• With Trump doing his best to make America irrelevant again, "[t]he belief among Eastern Europe’s leaders is that, no matter what they do, they are in Russia’s crosshairs—and the priority must be an active defense" (link)
• Bible publishing is a counter-cyclical business (link)
• "Who Americans spend their time with, by age" (link)
• It's not all down to greenhouse gases: "stronger hurricanes are, in some measure, an unintended outcome of European clean air laws", because particulates in the air reflect sunlight back into space (link)
• Michael Shermer on how Scientific American went from being a science magazine to an identity-politics pamphlet (link)

November

• Pub quiz question: In what year did the first virtual meeting take place? Clue: Alexander Graham Bell was in attendance (link)
• Do organisations have AI-shaped holes? (link)
• "November 5, 2024, was the night the 20th century ended" (link)
• "[I]mprovements in school standards are at serious risk" (link)
• Using machine learning to find out which firms face similar regulatory restrictions. Interestingly, product, sector and geography are only a small part of the story (link)
• Evo, a foundation model for biology (link)
• On the unsung benefits of pretesting (link)
• "The Problem of Thinking Too Much" (link)
• Jon Batiste improvises to Green Day (11-min video; link)
• Science has become complacent and inefficient, and needs shaking up (link)
• AI tools work best for people accurate beliefs about their own ability. The meek might yet inherit the Earth (link)
• "The edtech revolution has failed." Overstated, but a welcome challenge to the all-tech-is-good perspective (link)
• Presidential endorsements by US newspapers are in decline (link)
• Contrary to common perception, the median US voter did in fact get poorer under Biden (link)
• Performance in the bar exam doesn't predict performance as a lawyer (link)
• Chinese students who made heavy use of mobile apps did worse in exams and ended up earning less too (link)
• Are Trump voters more poorly informed about societal stats than Harris voters? Quite possibly not (link)
• Only Europe can save Ukraine. Oh shit (link)
• Lawrence Freedman and Eric Schmidt talk about AI and war. The interviewer is more insightful than the interviewee, TBH (link)
• "Why is most journalism about IQ so bad?" Good question (link)
• "LLMD, a large language model designed to analyze a patient's medical history based on their medical records" Marketing dressed up as a preprint, but interesting all the same (link)
• Should US pollsters have used 'neighbour polls' instead of the traditional kind? (link)
• "Is this the future of bookstores? At these in Japan, anyone can rent a shelf to sell books" (link)
• Does the Moon orbit the Earth or the Sun? Both, of course, but it's complicated (5-min video; link)
• Empirical evidence on "the complementarity between algorithms and expertise in the innovative process" (link)
• How zakkyo makes Japanese cities great (link)
• Why special-needs diagnoses have been on the rise and what to do about it (link)
• "Notes From The Progress Studies Conference" (link)
• Despite certain claims to the contrary, we are not past peak woke (link)
• Forget AGI (for now), AI's implications are already profound (link)
• The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is publishing sloppy data on gender identity (link)
• On the religious roots of free speech (link)
• "How do individuals, especially those in the knowledge economy, adjust how they work when they start using AI?" Research into the impacts of GitHub Copilot (link)
• How do robots in nursing homes change what humans do? (link)
• Free speech at Cornell (link)
• Where did SARS-CoV-2? The truth is we still don't know (link)
• What ChatGPT does – and doesn't – know about you (link)
• A paper in Nature Human Behaviour on how to improve reproducibility in social-behavioural research has been retracted due to methodological shortcomings. Oh the irony (link)
• Does studying philosophy make people better thinkers? Maybe (link)
• "Submit your toughest questions for humanity's last exam." Things AI can't do (yet) (link)
• Peter Singer AI, for all your moral-philosophical needs (link)
• We're all stochastic parrots, 1951 version 🦜 (link)
• "[A] global trade war between the United States and the rest of the world at [Trump's proposed] tariff rates would cost the US economy over $910 billion at a global efficiency loss of $360 billion. Thus, on net, US trade partners gain $550 billion." Nice one, Donald (link)
• Does "male flight" explain the increasing gender divides in higher education? (link)

October

• Russia fines Google 20 decillion dollars – $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – which is about 50 billion billion times the entire wealth of Planet Earth. I think (link)
• Let's get this straight: Jeff Bezos spikes his newspaper's US presidential endorsement at the last minute because he fears a vengeful Trump might reduce his fortune from infinity to infinity minus one. When people point out the cowardice and avarice, he pulls rank again, inserting a defensive piece in the same paper to argue that this was actually a principled stand to improve trust in journalism. Yeah, Jeff, I can see that working well: courage and integrity are the winners! (link)
• Even Gary Becker, the godfather of human capital, recommended a liberal arts education (link)
• "The real thirteen keys for winning the White House" (link)
• "We're giving up our USP in order to meet the machines on their turf." In defence of the humanities (link)
• "This is what often happens to humans in times of extreme intergroup tension: They become monsters." On moral luck and the Middle East (link)
• The Exchange (2-min video; link)
• Is AI 'Actually Intelligent', and if so then how much does that matter? (link)
• On the power of "[c]reative dyadic relationships", even ones that involve orangutans or rubber ducks (link)
• On walking tables (link)
• Economic indicators seem transparent and scientific, whilst in reality they are often arcane and subjective. Embracing this fact could improve economic stewardship (link)
• Putting OpenAI o1 to the test (link)
• Movie Gen from Meta (link)
• Learn from the best writing of all time (link)
• "[T]oo much of modernity is designed – successfully or otherwise – to be rational and efficient; the result is often bland homogeneity." In praise of 'thick' culture (link)
• AI in organisations (link)
• "No nation can survive without allies." Israel's future looks increasingly bleak (link)

September

• Uses of OpenAI o1 in healthcare (link)
• "Escalation is not something to fear in the future but something that has already occurred." Putin only issues threats because western leaders – especially chickenshits like Biden and Scholz – appear to take them seriously. The only plausible response is to ignore Putin and do what's right regardless (link)
• On the government efficiency paradox: "'efficiencies' nearly always end up costing money and increasing inefficiency" (link)
• For $500 – less that all-important penny – you too can enrol at Peterson Academy (link)
• Hollywood is gradually becoming less bad at depicting Japan (link)
• The use of deep neural networks in economics, including classifiers, regression models, generative AI, and embedding models (link1, link2)
• Tracking human genetic evolution over the last 14,000 years. 'Evolution by creeps' in action, though this doesn't rule out the existence of 'evolution by jerks' too (link)
• "Something has gone terribly wrong in America when people who define themselves as pro-life have sentenced a small boy to go to bed tonight, and every night, without his mother." Amber Nicole Thurman was perhaps the first woman killed by the overturning of Roe v Wade (link)
• David Aaronovitch leaves the JC with a few parting shots (link)
• Being an effective altruist is all very well, but not if it turns you into a dickhead (link)
• Stanford's Remote Work Conference takes place next month – in person (link)
• Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024 (link)
• "Submit your toughest questions for humanity's last exam." Things AI can't do – yet (link)
• "The claims being made about [AI and] biological risks do not reflect scientific reality." Building bioweapons is seriously hard (link)
• Lies, damn lies and Trump/Vance claims about immigrants (link)
• OpenAI o1 (link1, link2)
• Is the UK's Equality Act 2010 a Marxist plot? (link)
• Is consciousness really unitary? (link)
• "What struck me was the sheer number of people involved in the process: candidates, aides, government employees, and police officers." A first-hand account of Russian election rigging (link)
• Donald Trump has become an example of what happens to you when you spend too much time on the internet. Let that be a warning to us all (link)
• "The Rise of the Science Sleuths" (link)
• On "the curious phenomenon of the pro-Putin right" (link)
• The story of YouTube so-called influencers who took bucketloads of Russian money to weigh in on the culture wars "reads less like a John le Carré novel and more like a Coen-brothers screenplay" (link)
• "Can LLMs generate novel research ideas?" Yes (link)
• FutureHouse is building an AI scientist (link1, link2)
• Google is turning research papers into a podcast, though so far the examples offered are all in AI research (link)
• Mugshot + audio track + diffusion model = spookily convincing talking- or singing-head video (link)
• Will computers ever create art? Who knows, but as we ponder the point artists are using them anyway (link)
• La Baye Aréa, a spoof French TV series trailer, courtesy of generative AI and human ingenuity (1-min video; link)
• Founder mode versus manager mode (link)
• Mapping the 20,000 ships sunk during WWII. Mmm, reminds me of something (link1, link2, link3)
• On late bloomers (link)
• "[A] great university... should not... permit itself to be diverted from its mission into playing the role of a second-rate political force or influence." Very well expressed, in 1967 (link)
• Does social media cause mental-health problems in children? The evidence so far (link)
• We're getting AI interfaces all wrong (link)
• The UN weighs in on AI governance (link)
• Learning by teaching chatbots (6-min video; link)
• "Einstein's Other Theory of Everything" (link)
• "A new kind of computer, designed for deep focus and wellbeing." Welcome if true (link)
• "Grade inflation at American universities is out of control... It's high time for a radical reboot" (link)
• "If an ex-president is immune from criminal liability for trying to overthrow the Constitution and install an unelected intruder in the White House, one is bound to wonder what is left of the Constitution." What could Jonathan Sumption possibly be referring to? (link)
• "[T]he way that left-of-center media outlets, academic institutions, politicians, and medical and mental-health authorities have handled this [gender therapy] issue has been a case study of how ideology and negative polarization can not only corrupt science and its communication, but also melt it down into a rank molten sludge." Resulting in the bizarre spectacle of (some) journalists working to keep scientists honest. Call me old-fashioned, but I remember a time when it was mostly the other way around (link)
• "XY Athletes in Women's Olympic Boxing: The Paris 2024 Controversy Explained." Superbly, as it happens (link)
• Crafting tasks for students that embrace LLMs (link)

August

• Should scientific fraudsters be prosecuted? On balance, no (link)
• The dollar is in decline as the world's currency, yet won't lose its dominance anytime soon (link)
• "Historical Analogues That Can Inform AI Governance" (link)
• To be truly free, young people need formative experiences (link)
• "Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction" (link)
• LLMs can be highly conductive to learning, but also counterproductive if used inappropriately (link)
• "What's Really Going On in Machine Learning?", by Stephen Wolfram. Bottom line: even the simplest ML systems are complicated to understand (link)
• The Curta calculator explained (13-min video; link)
• TikTok's opaque censorship process as given rise to a whole new language designed to evade it (link)
• More evidence that TikTok censors content outside China that is critical of the CCP (link)
• The US needs to fix its debt problem (link)
• "Biden’s Ukraine Strategy Is Missing in Action." So true (link)
• In defence of fringe theories (link)
• On the potential pitfalls of automatically clicking 'I agree' (link)
• Researchers can buy citations (link)
• "The internet has lowered the barriers to public speech and self-expression; it has also raised the costs of expressing unusual or controversial views..." On the paradox of a supposedly gatekeeper-free internet in which everyone has in fact become a kind of gatekeeper (link)
• On leaving Xitter (pronounced "Shitter"): "Elon's zone has been well and truly flooded with shit. It's time for the lifeboats." (link)
• Robert Skidelsky is a Putin appeaser who's somehow convinced himself that he's taking the moral high ground. Remarkable (link)
• "Yale's 'Integrity Project' Is Spreading Misinformation About The Cass Review And Youth Gender Medicine" (link)
• "CNN, NPR, CBS News, NBC News, Vox, and Scientific American have almost entirely ignored the Cass Review, hoping it'll fade away. It won't" (link)
• Gotta love freedom of speech. Good work, Elon (link)
• Lawrence Freedman on Ukraine's invasion of Russia, with a nice dig at clueless NYT editorialising (link)
• Russia invaded Ukraine because it supposedly faced existential risk from a neighbouring "nazi" regime. Then Ukraine actually invaded Russia, and what was Russia's response? Next to nothing (link)
• "The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery." Imperfect and currently limited to machine learning research, But still: wow! (link)
• How do beliefs about heritability vary between countries? A few things to take into account when reading this: (a) even experts don't agree about the 'real' heritability values because, for example, twin studies and GWAS studies yield different values; (b) heritability is a function of the enviromment so really does vary between countries; and (c) the whole nature/nurture dichotomy is rather spurious anyway because it's almost always both and the relative proportions are context-dependent (link)
• "A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications" (link)
• Stephen Walt on Israel’s "strategic myopia". I wholeheartedly agree (link)
• "Price controls on food are a really terrible idea." Harris channels her inner Chavez. 😱 Best case scenario is that she’s being deeply cynical and assumes that this won’t get through a Republican-controlled House, allowing her blame them for any lingering inflation (link)
• "Balanced Scorecards: Towards Broader and Better Measures of School Success" (link)
• The world’s first computer program may also have contained the first software bug (link)
• Preparing for X-it Day (link)
• Americans are spending more and more time at home while becoming less and less happy (link)
• "The papers conducted by Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook are not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of the term. They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal likes and dislikes of two men. What are their methods? Their methods are direct falsehood, misrepresentation, half-truths..." Swap Beaverbrook for Murdoch and the quote still works nearly 100 years later (link)
• Ian Leslie on Mandela’s genius for channeling uncharitable feelings into positive outcomes. If only the moronic war criminals in Israel and Gaza had similar wisdom and self-knowledge (link)
• Using ChatGPT to sit papers from different years shows that US SAT exams have become easier over time, while student score have fallen (link)
• Israel is losing its mind and its moral compass. You can't fight terrorism with terrorism (17-min video; link)
• Capitalism correlates with reduced loneliness (link)
• AI dreaming (40s video; link)
• "[T]he media can play an important role in contributing to the integrity of the research process" (link)
• "Evaluating the Efficiency and Challenges of GitHub Copilot in Real-World Projects." YMMV, but overall there are big productivity gains (link)
• Scientists who work in larger teams have worse career prospects (link)
• Text scammers duped a hacker's wife, so he hacked them (link)
• "I want Al to do my dishes and laundry so I can do art and writing, not for Al to do art and writing so I can do my dishes and laundry" – Joanna Maciejewska (link)
• Scientists who share their political views on Twitter are perceived as less credible by both left- and right-leaning readers (link)
• Individual ants are more or less hopeless and helpless. "But in the aggregate, somehow, they get a lot of things done.": Including construction, agriculture, security services, slavery and collective long-term memory (link)
• Japan's journey from gyaru to kogyaru, and from the popping of its economic bubble to the advent of mobile social media (link)
• Trade tariffs are generally either ineffective or counterproductive, but in the case of China they might have globally positive side-effects anyway (link)
• "Should publishers invoice authors for retraction costs?" In my view, no (link)
• "Meta and Google secretly targeted minors on YouTube with Instagram ads" Oops, slip of the mouse! (link)
• "Should autonomous weapons be allowed to disobey orders?" Probably not (link)
• "[C]an an [LLM] AI make a data-driven, visual story[?]" Erm, kind of (link)
• "Empty credentialism is hurting medicine" (link)
• Physics has research integrity problems too (link)
• To promote human safety, AIs should be given certain legal rights. Mmm, maybe (link)
• Should OpenAI release text watermarking? In my view, a system that's <100% reliable and easy to work around would probably do more harm than good (link)
• "Apple Intelligence backend prompts." Interesting that they make explicit reference to hallucinations (link)
• How one programmer uses LLMs (link)
• "Protestant authorities [in the 1890s] saw cycling as a significant threat to morality, and tried to mold the sport into a Christian activity" (link)
• "When women stopped coding." In the 1980s, as it happens (link)
• The global left has a strange blindspot for the evils of Latin American authoritarianism (link)
• On changing American attitudes to the nuclear bombing of Japan (link)
• The problems with US higher education (link)
• Do university rankings make sense? (Spoiler alert: not really) (23-min video; link)
• In cancelling capital investments to meet a deficit target, the British Chancellor is doing the right thing for the wrong reason (link)
• "Social epistemology needs an explanatory inversion." We behave as if false beliefs are anomalous and true beliefs are humanity's natural state, but that is itself a false belief (link)
• Is new knowledge discovered or created? Both (link)
• Some people still try to defend hereditary seats in the House of Lords. "Their attempts are a masterclass in hopeless arguments" (link)
• So-called three-strikes laws make no sense (link)
• Extensive research shows that sleep training does no harm to babies. So why do popular accounts and social media come out so heavily against it? Ignorance and prejudice (link)
• "[The] separation between scholarship and politics has been entirely disregarded at the major American universities in recent years." It's a long time since I've read an essay with which I agree so strongly on its general point while completely disagreeing with its political framing. Ferguson has gone all Godwin: US HE has serious problems, but it's not Nazi Germany (link)
• AI and the humanities (link)
• "AI-Enabled Transformation of Information Objects Into Learning Objects" (link)
• LLMs are not reasoning engines, they're fuzzy pattern matchers. Important work, but leaves out the idea that LLMs can also [act as if they] know what they don't know (eg, long multiplication) and hand over to systems that do it better (eg, a calculator) (link)
• Gordon Brown on Sir William Lewis, CEO of the Washington Post, ex-Murdoch stooge and brazen phone-hacking crook. How proud Jeff Bezos must be to have this upstanding man on staff (link)
• The probabilities that people assign to the existential risks of AI are hogwash (link)
• "13 is shipwreck" (link)

July

• In the post-genomic era, we need new ways to think and talk about biology (link)
• "Resisting Reduction" – by Joi Ito (link)
• "Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods." Astonishing and sobering (59-min video; link)
• On the history of truth machines and lying LLMs (link)
• "Can Generative AI improve social science?" Yes (link)
• MDMA v RCT (link)
• Breaking news: Ray Tallis is full of shit (link)
• "It really should be acceptable and normal to say 'I don't entirely understand what I just read, but I loved it.'" I couldn't agree more: the best books I've ever read – The Name of the Rose, The Remains of the Day, The Age of Wonder, Ulysses – are all at least a little bit unfathomable (link)
• "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" – Clay Shirky. The quote and general thesis are great; the toe-curling left-brain/right-brain framing is best ignored (link)
• Deep learning for economists (link)
• Joe Biden is no hero. Nancy Pelosi is a different matter (link)
• SpreadsheetLLM (link)
• "Japan's rapid industrialization under the Meiji Restoration was driven by its unprecedented effort to translate, codify, and disseminate Western technical knowledge in the Japanese language" (link)
• "Intelligent people are just as prejudiced as less intelligent people – but toward different groups" (link)
• Ascending Mount Everest – by drone (4-min video; link)
• "We are writing to inform you that Your Body ('you,' 'yourself,' 'your aging body') has updated its terms of service, which apply to the use of all your Parts and Areas..." (link)
• Low voter turnout in the US favours the Democrats, not the Republicans (link)
• "Behold: the hackquisition." Microsoft and Amazon, we're looking at you – even if the regulators aren't (link)
• Are LLMs products, platforms or features? Apple is betting on that latter (link)
• So much for all that investment, where's the revenue? AI's $600bn question (link)
• LLMs' ability to write and fix code has limitations (link)
• "Our analysis based on excess words usage suggests that at least 10% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs." On ChatGPT usage in academic writing (link)
• "All war is terrible; sometimes the art is to be the most terrible." On Russian military tactics in Ukraine and elsewhere (link)
• The case for political neutrality, and why silence is not necessarily violence (link)
• Competition isn't always efficient, it can be hugely wasteful (link)
• Individual wealth and global wealth are two completely different things. We often lose sight of this fact (link)
• ChatGPT does better in psychology exams than most psychology students (link)
• On AI and universities. Very US-centric, investor-oriented and formulaic, but not uninteresting (link)
• "[E]ducation cannot close academic gaps." Overstated, but not entirely wrong (link)
• "Claude is fully capable of acting as a Supreme Court Justice right now." Not sure this counts as a measure of actual intelligence, but still (link)
• What is the evidence that open science has positive effects on society? Truth be told, these isn't much (link)
• "The case for probabilistic metadata" (link)
• On 'Galaxy', "a bird's-eye view of anglophone higher education" (link)
• What was The Atlantic thinking when it licensed its content to OpenAI? Their CEO explains (link)
• "The Administration's policy in Gaza is a failure and a threat to US national security." So says a group of American government officials who have resigned in protest. Hard to disagree much with their observations (link)
• Racial inequalities in medicine need solving. Social justice posturing only makes things worse (link)
• "Key questions about the future of research publishing." All too infrequently asked (link)
• How do dogs experience the world? It's complicated – and weird (11-min video; link)
• Nineteen natural experiments (link)
• The feeling of Beethoven's Ninth, by Helen Keller (link)
• "Political Expression of Academics on Social Media." Researchers aren't like other people (link)
• The Dean of Social Science at Harvard thinks his fellow academics shouldn't be allowed to say things that cause third parties to criticise their university. Which, perhaps inevitably, has led some people speak badly of Harvard. #SelfDefeatingArguements (link)
• "Troubling News From the Shit-Stirring Department" – perhaps we're not as divided as some of us make out (link)
• Lying to people is bad. The International Monetary Fund and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, among others, should take note (link)
• "Politicized science inevitably tends toward pseudoscience" (link)
• The last form of acceptable discrimination – on conservatives in academia (link)
• "Since 2016 Democrats have scorned Republicans for falling in line behind Mr Trump instead of voicing their concerns that he is not up to the job. Maybe such Democrats will now feel, if not some shame, at least some empathy for their Republican counterparts. It is hard to be brave." If Democrats continue to lie about Biden’s suitability, they will have surrendered their (small-d) democratic legitimacy and the future of their own party (link)
• "Joint Statement of U.S. Government Officials who have Resigned over U.S. policy towards Gaza, Palestine, and Israel." Excoriating (link)
• Research as a leisure activity (link)

June

• When it comes to AI, everyone is in R&D (link)
• "[T]ranscendence [in which an AI outperforms all the individual humans who trained it] is not evidence of AGI, but of the contrary" (link)
• "One must have spent a lot of time group-thinking in San Francisco and Oxford to lose touch with the real world so much that one can seriously think it's possible to build a 100-gigawatt supercomputing cluster and a robot work force within six years." On the real-world limitations of AI (link)
• Black hole explosions? (link)
• What is intelligence? (link)
• On algorithm aversion (link)
• Where – and what – is Central Europe? (link)
• "Debt, not barter, is the true origin of money." On the benefits of bankruptcy (link)
• "[C]ontrary to the idea that wars must end with a negotiated solution in practice they rarely do" (link)
• "Minutes of a momentous meeting in Napa Valley." How tech titans learned to hack human minds (link)
• "Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they're going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything." Exaggerated, of course, but a welcome corrective all the same (link)
• Animal magic (link)
• On the rise of Chinese science (link)
• We're not in a tech bubble. Probably. At least, not yet (link)
• "Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model." From Anthropic. Very interesting (link)
• "Do you want us to lead the world in, well, pretty much everything, from sports and entertainment to manufacturing and technology?" Then promote immigration (link)
• A simple game for which we can prove that there is a winning strategy even though we have no idea what it actually is (link)
• Memories of a US Japanese internment camp (8-min video; link)
• The inner lives of plants (link1, link2)
• "[Tech leaders] are the last folks on the planet you would trust with reinventing society" (link)
• Lawrence Freedman on red lines and geopolitical bluff (link)
• "Music just changed forever" (link)
• Chat Xi PT (link)
• Cheese-rolling (link)
• Platforms and Publishers: AI Partnership Tracker (link)
• "[I]t is not possible to understand the 'social' without the 'technical', nor the 'technical' without the 'social.'" On a sociotechnical approach to AI (link)
• Meanwhile in the West Bank... (link1, link2)

May

• On LLMs and the future of research (link)
• "[I]n order to maintain the enterprise of science, more 'fraud police' will be necessary to catch wrongdoers. But it should also raise the question of whether researchers should be rewarded for publishing in high volumes. It might be better to reward quality over quantity." Bingo! (link)
• "Machine learning does not distinguish between correlations that are causally meaningful and ones that are incidental." On overfitting and the new physiognomy (link)
• An 18-year-old Israeli conscientious objector (link)
• "Strong links versus weak links." On different attitudes to risk (link)
• What it would look like to fall into a black hole (4-min video; link)
• "Abridged Too Far." On how to read books without having to go to the trouble of actually reading them (link)
• What do Israelis and Palestinians think of a two-state solution? (link)
• "Pluralism is one of the great needs of our times. We need a sector of our society to model pluralism, and prepare leaders who can help others apply its key principles. I think higher education is that sector" (link)
• "Barring a massive change in immigration policy, the US and other rich countries will run out of workers before we run out of jobs." Which is why AI is a godsend, not a threat (link)
• LLMs are getting better at tests designed to measure 'theory of mind' – but perhaps just because they've read about the tests, not because they actually have a theory of mind (link)
• Critics of the current round of American trade protectionism are ignoring the whole point: national security (link)
• "[I]t would be contradictory for any of these states to accept the ICC's jurisdiction over Russian nationals but not those of Israel." We're looking at you, America (link)
• The internet works better than books do, at least for most writers (link)
• Teachers are bad at spotting AI-generated essays – and they don't even know it (link)
• Meta's news ban in Canada has been bad for Canadian news outlets, but not for Meta (link)
• China is strangely incompetent at spreading disinformation abroad (link)
• "AI copilots are changing how coding is taught" (link)
• "Alphabet Inc. paid Apple Inc. $20 billion in 2022 for Google to be the default search engine in the Safari browser". So, which one is the monopolist? (link)
• "Threads now has more daily active users in the US than [Twitter]" (link)
• Are bees conscious? Maybe (link)
• "We are today making more investments into the foundations of physics than ever before. And yet nothing is coming out of it. That's a problem and it's a problem we should talk about" (link)
• What explains the recent dominance of black sprinters from North America and the Caribbean? (link)
• On the fundamental architectural insecurity of LLMs (link)
• "What might a people, subjected to unspeakable historical suffering, think about the ethics of vengeance once in power?" On Jewish revenge (link)
• "I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work." Will AI take our jobs, and if so, is that good or bad? (link)
• The Japanese language has an extra dimension – 'furigana' (link)
• Emojis are older than you think (link)
• For capitalism to work, capitalists themselves must be afraid (link)
• "Government is society's anchor venture capitalist. At least, it should be." Andy Haldane on the entrepreneurial state (link)
• The policy scandals of tomorrow are happening today, in plain sight (link)
• Bellingcat on the IDF unit demolishing homes across Gaza (link)
• Japan isn't xenophobic (link)
• Germany is a morally myopic nation led by a chickenshit chancellor. Lucky Putin (link)
• "Fuck Nuance" (link)
• "DNA differences (single-nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs) explained twice as much variance in educational attainment and occupational status in the post-Soviet era compared to the Soviet era [in Estonia]" (link)
• Why are so many people running to be president of Iceland? "It turns out, the answer largely has to do with content design" (link)
• "To dispel bad metaphors [for AI], we need good ones". But what should they be? (link)
• Seed banks are under threat from climate change and war (link)
• Uni or YouTube? Sabine Hossenfelder's critique of the research establishment (14-min video; link)
• On the quality of life of individuals in the UK (link)
• Do people buy books? (link1, link2)
• "[T]he half-baked students aren't the problem. The adults exploiting them are" (link)
• On the philosophy of the death penalty (link)
• "Let's not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media". Good idea (link)
• "Humanoid Locomotion as Next Token Prediction" A Large Locomotion Model? (link)
• "The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants" (link)
• On "verifiable append only ledgers" – aka "'the blockchain', only without all the cryptocurrency bullshit". From 2018, but still highly relevant (link)
• For AGI, scale isn't enough because intelligence is multifaceted, by Gary Marcus (36-min video; link)
• "A Day in Tokyo in 1968" (23-min video; link)
• Schools and universities in the UK and US are submitting to religious intimidation (link)
• "I doubt there is anyone alive responsible for a greater share of the world's happiness." Leslie on McCartney (link)
• How to respond to protesters on campus (link)

April

• Many pro-Palestinian (and other) protesters are "not gathering in order to protest; they're protesting in order to gather". This is well-established human behaviour (link)
• "When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them". On rewilding the internet (link)
• Lawrence Freedman on the 'escalation ladder', "one of the great oxymorons of strategic thought" (link)
• Stop press: modern medicine works (link)
• "By quashing legitimate speech and assembly, an Israel-aligned establishment risks inciting precisely the kind of anti-Semitism that it wants to prevent" (link)
• "We present a range of AI-based exercises that enable novel forms of practice and application including simulations, mentoring, coaching, and co-creation. For each type of exercise, we provide prompts that instructors can customize, along with guidance on classroom implementation, assessment, and risks to consider" – by the Mollicks (link)
• What Kant had to teach us about thinking for ourselves and for each other (link)
• Rhapsody in Blue is 100 years old (link)
• On the gender-equality paradox: "the dominant feature of psychological sex differences is their robustness in the face of social change" (link)
• The largest handmade model of Imperial Rome (9-min video; link)
• "No matter how hard you try, and no matter how serious you are, nothing you write on Twitter will sound serious... The law of Twitter also applies to LinkedIn. Even more so." Yes, and that's the reson I'm on neither (link)
• "A theory is a well-tested explanation for how an observed fact happens, which fits all known observations and can make loose predictions about how it will behave. A law is an equation which describes exactly what an observed fact does under controlled conditions, but does not attempt to explain why." Very well put (link)
• "The Five Futures of Russia." For the sake of the rest of the world, my hope is for something that involves the dissolution of the Russian Federation, with the Kremlin running no more than the territory of 14th-century Muscovy. Make Russia Small Again! (link)
• "No, 'convenience' isn't the problem." The problem with big tech is that huge companies are breaking the law and getting away with it (link)
• "Ukraine is losing the war". It turns out that Putin may have been right all along: the West is indeed weak, lazy and decadent (link)
• The Aletheia Framework for trust in AI, by Rolls Royce (link)
• "Science is probably the best thing humans ever invented. Academia, on the other hand..." Manga edition (link)
• On the geometry of odour space (link)
• "The evidence base for interventions in gender medicine is threadbare, whichever research question you wish to consider—from social transition to hormone treatment" (link)
• A clear majority of British voters think that Brexit was a mistake (link)
• "Americans own approximately 400 million firearms and the country carries the unfortunate distinction of being the only one in the world in which guns are known to be the leading cause of child and adolescent death. Today, Americans live with around 1.2 guns per capita – double that of the next-highest scoring country, Yemen." This is a surprisingly recent phenomenon (link)
• "Social media, not the economy, is harming teen mental health." Jonathan Haidt responds to Candice Odgers' critique (link)
• "Why does being left-wing make you unhappy?" (link)
• "Columnists and their lives of quiet desperation" (link)
• "Nearly 40 per cent of All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) have disbanded since new rules came in to improve transparency and reduce foreign influence." A coincidence? That's seems unlikely (link)
• Regulators of tech should focus not on trying to anticipate intrinsically unpredictable future developments, but on the things that we know will always be true: the perpetual desire of companies to create monopolies and use them to exploit their users – by Tim O'Reilly et al. (link)
• On 'captology' (link)
• "In technology, the moment that you really understand something, perhaps, is the moment that you should be looking for something else." – Ben Evans (link)
• A useful overview of the ML, AI and data landscape (link)
• "[T]he rise of LLMs heralds a transformative period for data science and its education" (link)
• Utilitarianism says that we should save the many over the few, but is that just a tyranny of the majority? (link)
• Pigeons are superstitious too (link)
• 'Liberal eugenics' from the perspective of a disabled person (link)
• 36% of worldwide CD sales are in Japan. And only half of people who buy vinyl records in the US actually own a record player. Among other fun music-industry facts (link)
• We are in the foothills of WW3, but will we change course? In my view, the trouble is that each separate risk tends to reinforce the others, so as one of them grows more probable, they all do (link)
• "Countries across Europe are considering extended or introducing conscription." We are already at war with Russia, it's just that most political leaders – and voters – haven't noticed yet (link)
• "Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI" – preprint (link)
• Israel's Gaza war aims are unachievable, and its plans for whatever peace might follow appear non-existent (link)
• Israel-Gaza has become an example of the most toxic kind of identity politics (link)
• Netanyahu is a shit, but also scapegoat for the wider dysfunctions of Israeli politics and society (link)
• For the IDF, as for the US in Vietnam, body counts are not a byproduct but a KPI. The killing of the World Central Kitchen aid workers was "a case of obsessive kill confirmation, overshadowing the principles of necessity, proportionality, and the sanctity of civilian life" (link)
• $100k – and a long debate – says that SARS-CoV-2 came from Wuhan's wet market, not its virology lab (link)
• "Putin's intent is not far from genocide, and to my mind there is an inescapable parallel with Hitler and the Holocaust" – Hella Pick (link)
• "Ukraine belongs to our European family." On the emergence in 2022 of a politically transformational phrase (link)
• Big Tech is using US trade strategy to tie governments' hands and squash debate about its social harms, says Joe Stiglitz (link)
• "[T]he U.S. government repeatedly used its muscle to advance the interests of large baby formula companies while thwarting the efforts of Thailand and other developing countries to safeguard children's health" (link)
• Angus Deaton has changed his mind on markets, wellbeing, efficiency, history, humility, unions, free trade, immigration and more (link)
• Neighbours used to look out for each other. The move to surveillance by doorbell camera is weakening those human ties (link)
• "The Israelis did not merely fall into the trap Hamas laid; they jumped into it headfirst" (link)
• "Britain cannot move on from the Tories without properly facing up to the harm that they have caused." Read this and weep (link)
• Rodrik's trilemma: economic integration, democratic representation or the nation-state – pick two. Arguably, the world has decided to pick just one, the nation state (link)
• "[T]here is a circularity inherent to the authoring of AI training sets." In short, machine-learning models are trained on data sets assembled, somewhat arbitrarily, by other machine-learning models. And those models were trained in the same way. And so on... (link)
• Over 600 UK judges and other legal experts write to the PM to halt arms sales to Israel and impose sanctions: "At least 32,623 Palestinians have now been killed and 75,092 injured in Gaza. Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children... Human rights groups including Amnesty International have recorded multiple instances of 'entire families [being] wiped out in Israeli attacks even after they sought refuge in areas promoted as safe and with no prior warning from Israeli authorities'. Groups of starving Palestinian civilians waiting for food aid have been killed... more children have been killed in the last four months in Gaza than have been killed in the last 4 years of wars around the world combined... [Israel's actions] may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime... the arbitrary detention, disappearance, deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of women and children... allegations of arbitrary detention, torture and humiliation of medical staff... continued dismantling of the health system... The already precarious situation of infant and maternal mortality has worsened as the healthcare system collapses... dangerously underweight pregnant women... newborn babies simply dying because they [have] too low birth weight... over a million people are 'crammed in Rafah, staring death in the face'... evidence of genocidal intent in statements by senior Israeli officials... reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel's commission of genocide is met... The UK is a party to the Genocide Convention, having acceded, without reservations, on 30 January 1970... The UK cannot wait until the [International Court of Justice (ICJ)] decides the case on the merits; it must act now in accordance with its obligation to prevent genocide... The UK cannot deny from 26 January 2024, when the ICJ issued its order for provisional measures, knowledge of the plausible risk of genocide through the actions of Israel in Gaza. The ICJ's finding of plausible risk, together with the profound and escalating harm to the Palestinian people in Gaza, constitute a serious risk of genocide sufficient to trigger the UK's legal obligations... International humanitarian obligations do not operate on the basis of reciprocity. Even serious violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) by one party to an armed conflict cannot therefore justify their commission by another. Similarly, as a peremptory norm of international law, the prohibition of genocide is absolute. Your Government's obligations to prevent genocide are not abrogated by the serious breaches of IHL committed by Hamas on October 7th or by Hamas' ongoing holding of hostages... We are concerned that your Government is not presently discharging its international obligations in relation to the Gaza Strip, including its obligations in respect of the risk of genocide... Without access to these essentials of survival on a regular, sustained and massive scale, further deaths or serious bodily and mental harm will continue for the people in Gaza, as will the conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part... The provision of military assistance and material to Israel may render the UK complicit in genocide as well as serious breaches of IHL...simultaneously to continue (to take two striking examples) the sale of weapons and weapons systems to Israel and to maintain threats of suspending UK aid to UNRWA falls significantly short of your Government's obligations under international law." (link) Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu issues an important statement to say that his hernia is doing just fine, thanks. Well that's good to know, Bibi; we were all really worried there (1-min video; link)
• (link)
• "The Ten Commandments of Sushi" (link)
• "Under the guise of empowerment and freedom, politicians and business are offloading lifethreatening risk to individuals" (link)
• "The biggest mistake people make with statistics is to distrust their intuition" (link)
• "What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world" (link1, link2)
• Evidence that evidence-based teaching doesn't work (link)
• On the battle to regulate AI (link)
• The Skye Blue Café Wall Illusion (1-min video; link)
• The Coffer Illusion (link)
• "The [US] Supreme Court is shaming itself" (link)
• "For progressive people the present is the beginning of the future. For conservative people the present is the end of the past" – Karl Mannheim (link)
• "Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond" (link)

March

• Making nuclear weapons seem safer without eliminating them would only make them more dangerous (link)
• On the extra-judicial killings – aka murders – by UK special forces in Afghanistan, and the attempted cover-ups that followed (link)
• Should medicine seek to reduce the incidence of severe disabilities? Some people say no (link)
• "How much do we want AI to be involved in farming?" Not a question I'd previously considered (link)
• "To stay ahead globally, we don't need to protect our monopolies from innovation – we need to protect innovation from our monopolies." Well said, Lina Khan (link)
• As a loyal Apple customer for nearly 35 years, I strongly support the DOJ's lawsuit against the monopolies that the company has created for itself. The 'free' in 'free market' does not refer to freedom from government intervention, it refers to freedom of choice for the participants, including customers like me. And while we're at it, please also break up Google, Amazon and Meta. Thank you 😊 (link)
• "The UK is one of two countries on earth that still have hereditary seats in their legislatures. The other is the tiny southern African nation of Lesotho" (link)
• "In praise of slow learners." I would add only that our education system pushes in exactly the opposite direction: it privileges, fast, superficial, conventional thinking (link)
• Meet the world's most prolific scientists – or not, as the case may be (link)
• A cash-strapped Trump is suddenly siding with TikTok. The assumption has to be that he's taken money from the company, its shareholders and/or the CCP (link)
• Amid the carnage in Israel and Gaza, the journalistic integrity of the NYT appears to be yet another casualty (link)
• Fifty-five survivors of terror attacks call out our politicians' approach to extremism as "the height of irresponsibility". You can say that again. And a note to our PM: show, don't tell (link)
• Gramps finally wakes up – once he gets to the podium (2-hour video; link)
• Benedict Cumberbatch reads one of Alexei Navalny's final letters: "If your convictions are worth anything, you should be ready to stand up for them, and if necessary make some sacrifices. And if you're not ready then you have no convictions at all." (5-min video; link)
• On those who are successful in one sphere overestimating their abilities in other ones – Chomsky, Watson and Musk, we're looking at you: "No. You're a brave pioneer mountain climber permanently stranded on the loftiest point of Mount Dunning-Kruger, in rarified air that most of us will never reach, and you love the sound of your own voice." (link)
• "Does capitalism make 'non-playable characters' of us all?" (21-min video; link)
• "What is the most effective way to prompt Meta's open source Llama 2 AI to do math accurately?" Answer: "pretend to be in a Star Trek episode or a political thriller, depending on how many math questions you want the AI to answer." "Prompting is weird." You can say that again (link)
• Fascists may be bad at the sorts of things that sensible people care about – freedom, affluence, societal harmony – but they sure are good at waging war. Or are they? (link)
• How the Behavioural Insights Team is using AI (link)
• AI maths tutors work, at least in Ghana (link)
• "It hardly seems believable, but the evidence has become overwhelming: we are witnessing some kind of collapse in the free world." And Gaza is Ground Zero (link)
• If they can't fix the trains then they should at least fix the WiFi on trains. The economic case is strong (link)
• "LLM agents can autonomously hack websites" (link)
• If a two-state solution is the answer in Israel/Palestine then what's the question? (link)
• "The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins" – Søren Kierkegaard (link)
• Radek Sikorski's reply to Vasily Nebenzya at the UN Security Council on the second anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion. Marvellous teardown (4-min video; link)
• Bartosz Ciechanowski on the airfoil, aka aerofoil (link)
• The scientific integrity sleuth (link)
• How p-values are misunderstood, overrated and overused (link)

February

• "Europe is at war – but doesn't know it yet." Especially Macron and Scholz. And while we're at it, hang your head in abject shame, Merkel (link)
• Sports fan groups, like nations, are imagined communities, and pose similar moral questions to their individual members (link)
• "Artificial Intelligence And Education" – a report from The Council of Europe (link)
• Khanmigo (link)
• "AIs are best at choosing answers. Humans are best at choosing questions." On Artificial Intelligence Augmentation (link)
• The NYT case against OpenAI could go either way, but LLM creators will probably be OK (link1, link2)
• "Large Language Models: A Survey" (link)
• In a land run by crooks and cowards, Alexei Navalny was conspicuously honest and brave (link1, link2, link3)
• The UK government is paying Palantir to process patient data. And the public version of the contract has been heavily – and illegally – redacted. Well, that all seems above board then (link1, link2)
• On antilogic (link)
• Is Jesus legend or myth? The only thing we know is that "if Jesus did exist, we know next to nothing about him." And that's a bigger 'if' than most people seem to realise (link)
• "[T]ake it from Nimrod Novik [former Israeli government aide]: the current Israeli government is one which includes criminals, lunatics, extremists and despots who have no interest in a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine question" (link)
• For the Israeli government, the Palestinian peace process is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. From 2012, but still seems to apply (link)
• Tom Holland on Putin's "history" (4-min video; link)
• The Chief Secretary to the Treasury doesn't know her numbers (link)
• Sora: creating video from text (link)
• Isaiah Berlin had it right: life is a long series of trade-offs (link)
• Its from bits (link)
• "10 Timeless Papers That Challenged Our Thinking" (link)
• "[I]t is the settled will of parliament that there are times where the House of Lords can use its delaying power". This applies – in spades – to the Rwanda Bill (link)
• "[W]e are whirlpools of meaning" (link)
• "We don't need flying saucers to feel awe" (link)

January

• How can many add up to one? On scale-free cognition, and much else besides (link)
• Education isn't quite the great leveller it's cracked up to be (link)
• Looking for someone to blame is no way to avoid repeating accidents (link)
• "Nearly 90 percent of top news outlets like The New York Times now block AI data collection bots from OpenAI and others. Leading right-wing outlets like NewsMax and Breitbart mostly permit them." What could possibly go wrong? (link)
• Can AI help to eradicate medical diagnostic errors? (link)
• The effectiveness of even commonly accepted interventions, like bed nets to protect against malaria, come with large error bars (link)
• "A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work" (link)
• "The Rest Is Silliness: Peter Schickele and PDQ Bach, remembered" (link)
• AlphaGo didn't just beat human players, after decades of stagnating standards, it inspired them to improve (link)
• "Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders" – by Scott Alexander (link)
• LLMs as Holmesian private detectives (link)
• There is a new paradox at the heart of society: "Rapid innovation offers the promise of a new era of prosperity, but instead risks exacerbating trust issues, leading to further societal instability and political polarization" (link)
• Media reports of pendulum swings in the Russia-Ukraine war say more about the media than about the war itself. The New York Times is a case in point. Personally, I can't speak to their written coverage, but NYT podcasts treat listeners like complete morons #unsubscribe (link)
• "The way we assess what kids are learning is starting to change." Good (link)
• The Compaynys of Beestys and Fowlys (link)
• Even randomised controlled trials tend not to replicate, and most policy interventions show no lasting effect. It's time to find another way (link)
• The world's leading jailers of journalists: China (44), Myanmar (43), Belarus (28), Russia (22), Vietnam (19), Israel and Iran (17 each). Of course, Saudi Arabia chops them up instead (link1 link2)
• Guidance on AI for schools in Washington state (link)
• Do Israel's actions amount to ethnic cleansing? (link)
• Why should humans strive to create? Because it allows us to tell ChatGTP to fuck right off – by Nick Cave, via Stephen Fry (5-min video; link)
• Deceptive LLMs that, when trained to avoid deception, only hide their deceptions instead. Scary (link)
• Fixing psychology (link)
• Slave to the (stupid) algorithm (link)
• Plagiarism-checking yourself (link)
• P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary (link)
• Gustav Mahler was no feminist (7-min video; link)
• Machines can read human minds with increasingly fidelity. What are the legal and ethical implications? (link)
• "Research integrity is too important to become another culture war football" (link)
• On ランドセル (link)
• Quantum entanglement doesn't necessarily require nonlocality – retrocausality will also do the trick (link)
• "Hear, O Internet. It has been sixteen years since our previous communication..." Well, more like 25 years (link)
• When is embryo selection ethical and when is it not? (link)
• Legal immigration to the US is essentially impossible (link)
• Psychoanalysis is bunkum (link)
• "Gaming of citations is ubiquitous in academic publishing" – take medicine as an example (link)
• Spurious correlations (link)
• Wires don't carry electrical energy, electromagnetic fields outside the wire do (link)
• Sketchplanations: "Explaining the world one sketch at a time" (link)
• "How to make anything signify anything" (link)
• In assessing LLMs have we mistaken omniscience for intelligence? (link)
• What are academic disciplines for – and are some past their best-before dates? (link)
• On the enshittification of search (link)
• The Tse illusion, whereby attention alone affects colour perception. Incredible (link)
• Bartosz Ciechanowski, explainer extraordinaire (link)
• Magnetic force is a fiction (link)
• Stephen Fry's "I Hate Dancing" rant – as interpretive dance (2-min video; link)
• Studio Ghibli nature loop (30-min video; link)
• Why the Mona Lisa is a bona fide masterpiece (33-min video; link)

Podcasts

• History of Literature: The Dead (link)
• The Daily: 28th Amendment (link)
• Past Present Future: 影武者 (link)
• EconTalk: Dreaming of peace (link)
• 5 Minutes On: Scamming the scammers (link)
• The Daily: Human shields (link)
• Capitalisn't: Visa, middleman monopolist (link)
• The Ezra Klein Show: On Trump and Harris (link)
• The Rest is Politics: Tim Snyder on Putin, Trump, Brexit and other man-made disasters (link)
• Capitalisn't: Lobbying and crony capitalism (link)
• Question Everything: What is journalism for? (link)
• No Such Podcast: Women in cryptography (link)
• Past Present Future: Do androids dream? (link)
• The Skewer: Audio alchemy (link)
• Capitalisn't: Universities and politics (link)
• No Such Podcast: The NSA speaks (link)
• New Yorker Radio Hour: Preparing for the steal (link)
• Capitalisn't: Race and class in America (link)
• Mindscape: Origins of a-life (link)
• A Point of View: Are universities useful? (link)
• Capitalisn't: Google's crimes (link)
• The Bunker: Preparing for World War 3 (link)
• The Ezra Klein Show: What is the US Democratic Party for? (link)
• Mindscape: Artificial unintelligence (link)
• Past Present Future: Runciman shrugged (link)
• Philosophy Bites: AI and morality (link)
• The Bunker: Dear England (link)
• The LRB Podcast: The driverless society (link)
• The Ezra Klein Show: Israel and the law (link)
• The Slow Newscast: The sorry, sordid Sackler-McKinsey scandal (link)
• The Good Fight: Trans science (link)
• Media Confidential: Phone Hacking II (link)
• The History of Bad Ideas: Anti-antisemitism (link)
• Three Million: The forgotten famine (link)
• Ones and Tooze: Endowment economics (link)
• The Ezra Klein Show: Green growth (link)
• The Interview: Mutual misunderstanding in the Middle East (link)
• The Bunker: American Civil War II (link)
• More or Less: Cass smeared (link)
• Mindscape: Educability > intelligence (link)
• Serial: America's shame (link)
• Putin's Murders: The full Stalin (link)
• The Belgrano Diary: A very British war crime (link)
• The Intelligence: Death in Russia's prisons (link)
• BBC Radio 4: A history of the infinite (link)
• The Good Fight: The anxious generation (link)
• The Trust Shift: In AI we trust? (link)
• The Rest is History: Whence chocolate? (link)
• The State of Netanyahu: Undermining Israel (link)
• The Daily: Go, Chuck (link)
• The Bunker: On enshittification (link)
• More or Less: Russia's military spend (link)
• Analysis: Brunel's kingdom no more (link)
• BBC Sounds: Wither the Russian Federation? (link)
• The New Yorker Radio Hour: Kara on Elon (link)
• The Good Fight: HE, PC and AI (link)
• The Ezra Klein Show: Bye-bye, Biden (link)
• The Gatekeepers: Social media unfriended us (link)
• Prospect Podcast: BBC captured (link)
• Capitalisn't: Banks, antithesis of capitalism (link)
• The Rule of Law: Britain's Rwandan shame (link)
• Things Fell Apart: The centre cannot hold (link)
• Intelligence Squared: States and other AIs (link)

2023

December

• On leaving Twitter. I like to think that I was ahead of the curve on this (link)
• "GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistants." LLMs aren't that clever – yet (link)
• "Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT." Or: alignment isn't enough (link)
• On Bach (link)
• Individuals often experience the world very differently (link)
• "Confident or shy, our temperament is mostly baked-in from birth. But how that influences our lives is up for grabs" (link)
• "East Asia... show[s] a high prevalence of genes associated with depression. Yet, despite these vulnerabilities, they develop fewer cases of the disorder" (link)
• A guide to the Japanese tea ceremony (link)
• The language of maritime flags (link)
• The fourth phase of water (24-min video; link)
• A claxonomy of Mexico City's traffic (link)
• "The UK government recently changed the law to ban company names containing computer code, after Michael Tandy of Hatfield registered a company called '; DROP TABLE "COMPANIES"; — LTD,' which could theoretically erase the companies house database" (link)
• LLMs, like humans, experience the Serial-Position Effect (link)
• On Norwegian witches (link)
• Votes for reptiles: Thanks to the Conservative Party, pet tortoises can help to choose the prime minister (link)
• LLMs can be effective maths tutors (link)

November

• Amazon, allegedly the world's most customer-centric company, is rolling out generative AI to help sellers to dupe their customers. What could possibly go wrong? (link)
• The two-state solution in maps (link)
• "Not even death can exempt you from TSA screening." On the humbug and humiliations of performative airport security (link)
• "Legal immigration [to the US, but also surely to the UK] is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: it happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case" (link)
• The freedom of real education is that you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't – David Foster Wallace (23-min video; link)
• "The AI Dilemma" with Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin (68-min video; link)
• "Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower: Inside the soul-crushing, morally bankrupt, top-secret world of our most powerful consulting firm." A firm for which I used to work, to my eternal shame (link)
• "Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also" – George Orwell. If only it were so in the Middle East and elsewhere (link)
• Sociotropy (n): the preoccupation with making others happy and preserving social harmony. I think I might have this to a borderline pathological – and counterproductive – degree (link)
• "LLMs Aren't Ready for Prime Time. Fixing Them Will Be Hard" (link)
• "The surprising ease and effectiveness of AI in a loop." On ReAct and LangChain (link)
• Did Ukraine blow up the Nord Stream pipelines? That's the way the evidence points says Der Spiegel, though it makes little logical sense to me. Unless it was a double-bluff false-flag operation designed to look like an attempt by Moscow to frame Kyiv. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Welcome to a geopolitical hall of mirrors (link)
• "One day of paid work a week is all we need to get mental health benefits of employment" (link)

October

• "[O]ur findings suggest that machines may need more than large-scale language and image data to allow the kinds of innovation that a small child can produce" (link)
• "[Take] the fate of Gaza away from both Hamas and Israel" (link)
• Is data poisoning the antidote to generative AI? (link)
• Charles III owns one sixth of the Earth's land, including 90% of Canada (link)
• Lived experience doesn't begin to tell us all we need to know about the world. We need data too (link)
• Pricing algorithms undermine the idea of a fair market (link)
• On LLMs (link1, link2)
• "Let's think step by step" (link)
• Don't run, Joe (link)
• From Isambard Kingdom Brunel to filling the kingdom's potholes (link)

September

• "Riches should come as a reward for hard work, preferably by one's forebears" – Steven Runciman (link)
• "That England that was wont to conquer others. Hath made a shameful conquest of itself" sounds like a fine epitaph for the current UK government. TGA on the parlous state of Britain (link)
• How college students could exercise real humility – though they won't, of course (link)
• Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov describes Elon Musk as a moral idiot. An amoral idiot, surely (link)
• "Trying to restore the 'Russian world' by force, Putin has destroyed it" (link)

July

• It's not just Putin: "The ideology behind the Ukraine War lies deep in Russian society" (link)
• "Ukraine's resistance to Russia's imperialist war has discredited the spheres of influence theory once and for all." Smaller countries have interests too (link)
• When training LLMs, it's common to use crowdsourced human annotations. Trouble is, those humans are now using LLMs to do their work. In other words, we now have artificial artificial artificial intelligence (link)
• "US tech companies and their contributions in Ukraine" (link)
• "Re-examining 'fair use' in the age of AI" (link)
• On 'prompt injection' attacks (link)
• Using LLMs to explain LLMs (link)
• "[O]utsourced and contract workers are early adopters of generative AI – and the most at risk" (link)
• "Obsessing over elite college admissions is the opposite of progressive" (link)
• Why do AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI? (link)
• "[T]he greatest city in the world is Tokyo" (link)
• "How Tokyo became an anti-car paradise." If only London would do the same (link)
• "McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value." The actual value realised so far? "Decentraland, arguably the largest and most relevant Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users... one of the features designed to reward users in Meta's flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally" (link)
• Using AI to translate ancient texts (link)
• "John Stump, composer of Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz" (link)
• "Russia's irrecoverable losses [are estimated to be] 125,000 – nearly the size of its original invading force" (link)
• "[A] Tory wipeout is entirely possible." Oh good (link)
• "Britain does not build luxury homes, it builds expensive ones." Very well said (link)
• #BoycottUnilever #BoycottProcterAndGamble 🇺🇦 (link1, link2)
• #BoycottShell 🇺🇦 (link)

June

• Time to burn down the US college admissions system (link)
• Russia used to have the second most powerful army in the world, then it had the second most powerful army in Ukraine. Now it has the second most powerful army in Russia. Gotta love the humour of Ukrainian government advisors (link)
• "Chatbots may wear more human-seeming masks than markets and bureaucracies, but they are no more or less beyond our control" (link)
• Open a temporary notepad in your browser by entering the following in the address bar: "data:text/html, <html contenteditable>" (link)
• Send your offspring to boarding school, says Alex Renton, an author and campaigner who was abused at his prep school, and "you're putting your child into care. You're just paying for it." (link)
• "[G]lobal deaths remain 5% above pre-covid forecasts" (link)

May

• "That is not how your brain works." Some common myths (link)
• "Many western policymakers... nourish a confused idea that there's a Goldilocks outcome [in Ukraine] – not too hot, not too cold – that will open the way to the nirvana of a 'negotiated solution'". On the utter unrealism of supposedly hardheaded 'realists' (link)
• "Expensive energy may have killed more Europeans than covid-19 last winter" (link)
• "[T]he Tory brand is so far down the toilet it's disappeared beyond the u-bend" (link)
• "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors" (link)

April

• "Is our virtual doctor ready to see us yet? Not quite" (link)
• A sublime account of the closely intertwined lives of Dame Edna Everage and her long-suffering manager: "It was a blessing, in the end, that Fate took them on the same day" (link)
• Cognition isn't all in the head. "It belongs to the relationship between the organism and its environment." Consider, for example, the intelligence of plants (link)
• The Royal College of Music Junior Department Symphony Orchestra – with a Hannay in their ranks (link)
• Cool geographical facts (link)
• Successful deployments of GPTs will always have a person in the loop (link)
• "The wholesale detention of the Uyghurs is considered the largest internment of a minority since the Holocaust... and ByteDance is deeply complicit" (link)
• Weeb (n): Someone who loves Japanese pop culture or Japan (link)
• Our reality may be the sum of all possible realities (link)
• On healthcare for transgender youth (link)
• You are unrelated to many of your ancestors (link)
• "What Is ChatGPT doing ... and why does it work?" Stephen Wolfram never seems to use 1,000 words where 100,000 would do, but he's usually insightful and in particularly good form here (link)
• "[A] litany of mistakes and misdeeds, with no mitigating circumstances." On McKinsey & Co. (link)
• "Coal miners have found out the hard way that society does not owe them a permanent subsidy to damage the planet. It is time for bankers to learn a similar lesson." The case for citizens to be given personal accounts at their central bank (link)
• A $600 LLM, allegedly (link)
• "[O]f course we should ban TikTok" (link). Oh no we shouldn't (link)
• "No other country in Europe made itself as unequal as [Britain] did. We don't have to do it again" (link)
• D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM. Mighty impressive if genuine (link)
• "How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT." Sage advice (link)
• Who won the electricity race, the automobile race, or the computer race? Then why do we insist on talking about an AI race? (link)
• The lead-up to 24th February 2022, by the people in the rooms where it happened (link)
• "Leon Trotsky, a revolutionary, once sneered that gradualism was 'boring'. He helped plunge Russia into chaos, and was murdered with an ice pick." On the benefits of incrementalism (link)
• RIP, Crazy Bob (link)

March

• "How to learn and teach economics with large language models, including GPT" (link)
• ChatGPT is poor at word games because under the hood it doesn't actually use words at all (link)
• Central banks are too powerful, and digital currencies would only make that worse (link)
• "McKinsey & Company's many high-profile scandals are only the tip of the iceberg" (link)
• In attempting to turn Ukraine into a vassal state, Russia has instead become a vassal of China (link)
• The government is profoundly mistaken in its belief that incentives which work for the rich will work equally well for the poor (link)
• Tim Davie's main problem isn't the fact that the BBC needs Gary Lineker more than Gary Lineker needs the BBC, it's the fact that the BBC needs Gary Lineker more than it needs Tim Davie #IStandWithGary (link)
• "I'm with Gary." Me too (link)
• The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer (link)
• "Study after study has shown that those who live with children are less satisfied with their lives than those who do not." But that doesn't mean you would be happier without children (link)

February

• Racial identity is fluid (link)
• "Might we at long last be seeing the start of the unraveling of Tsarist Russia's remaining imperial territories?" Fingers crossed (link)
• Why is Amazon so uninterested in the faltering quality of its shopping experience? The obvious answer is that they're raking it in and don't give a shit about customer experience (link)
• "Few fields have been more filled with hype and bravado than artificial intelligence." On the need for symbols as well as networks if AI is ever to fulfil its promise (link)
• "For 30 years Russia has tried, and failed repeatedly, to come up with anything resembling a national idea." Short of violent imperialism, that is (link)
• "Under communism, the future is certain; it is the past that is unpredictable." An old Soviet joke applied to China, but equally relevant to Putin's Russia (link)
• On the "genius bullshitters" of tech, from Bill Gates via Elon Musk to ChatGPT (link)
• "Everyone who confuses correlation with causation eventually ends up dead" (link)
• Happy January 48th! (link)
• "Google has four core cultural problems...(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement." Apart from that, things are going well (link)
• Does Google need a new CEO? (link)
• "[Wh]ile Intel is fighting for its life, the rest of the industry is moving on" (link)
• "We are all eugenicists – but in selective, inconsistent, and often hypocritical ways" (link)
• "Online murmurations." A meditation on birds and tweeters, by Renée Diresta (link)
• Sound explained (link)
• Even with neurological implants, naive forms of telepathy are likely to prove impossible. Even so, our brains may be able to use them to learn new non-verbal forms of communication, which would be transformative (link)
• Generative AI will expose tech companies to endless litigation (link)
• Peak democracy was in 2013 (link)
• "The only way Europe can ensure its own security is to unite and prepare itself to prevail in a long stand-off with the aggressive empire next door" (link)
• Why do we still rely on the US to protect European freedom, asks Timothy Garton Ash. A good question, the answer to which has much to do with the German government's narrow-minded cowardice (link)
• "[O]nly cretins can be attacking head-on for many months in the same place, heavily fortified and extremely inconvenient for the attackers" – a Russian nationalist on his own side's tactics. Lawrence Freedman explains why Ukraine is bracing itself for what promises to be an underwhelming Russian assault (link)
• "Average U.K. real wages are now lower than 18 years ago, which is unprecedented in the country's peacetime economic history." This is way worse than the 1970s (link)
• For the ancient Greeks, the sea and the sky were never blue (link)
• Before the 1860s, very few artworks contained the colour violet. Why? (link)
• "Like many corporations out there, Walt Disney Studios spent the last decade transforming into a data company." A few of its customers are pushing back (link)
• If you've ever eaten truffle then chances are that you haven't actually eaten truffle (link)
• "[Barthélemy] de Chasseneuz is most remembered for winning an acquittal on behalf of a group of rats put on trial for eating through the province's barley crop in 1522." On criminal responsibility among animals (link)
• How extreme economic inequality can arise even when the underlying chances of success are the same for everyone (link)
• Why are some of the cleverest people so stupid? Because stupidity takes many forms, and because stupidity begets stupidity (link)
• On intransitive dice – ie, rock-paper-scissors with little cubes (link)
• How and why journalists – along with everyone else – should abandon Twitter (link)
• "Had either White or Orwell followed his own turgid counsels with any fidelity, neither would be nearly as fondly remembered as he is" (link)
• "William Gibson once memorably described Singapore as Disneyland with the death penalty. He might have been thinking of Neom." What you get when you combine a delusional despot with sycophantic consultants (link)
• "For Putin this is a war, not about territory, but about control." That means there can be no lasting peace while he remains in power (link)
• Organic food has little if any effect on our health, but we should welcome it all the same (link)
• Why was Cleopatra's Wikipedia page the most viewed of 2022? An object lesson in not taking online usage data at face value (link)
• "ChatGPT doesn't try to write sentences that are true. But it does try to write sentences that are plausible." Which is why it writes like a proverbial Oxbridge bullshitter (link)
• "OpenAI appears to be adopting a classic mode of technological solutionism: creating a problem, and then selling the solution to the problem it created" (link)
• "Hello, Armen. I'm Ruslana from Severodonetsk, a now disappearing city. I'm almost 16, and a year ago, on June 16, I finished reading Ulysses" (link)
• What do the CIA, the Moonies and Shinzo Abe's assassin have in common? A lot, it turns out (link)
• "[A]fter 1945, Russia was not defeated; its Communist leaders were never put on trial for crimes against humanity. There has been no event to constitute a reference point that Russian society could accept as a new beginning." Time for one now? (link)
• "[N]o athlete should be prevented from competing [in the Olympic Games] just because of their passport" – the IOC. Utter nonsense (link)
• Why Ukraine should be supported in its goal of retaking Crimea (link)

January

• Thatcher's Conservative successors have created "the very opposite of the society she hoped to build" (link)
• A Ukraine correspondent travels to England – only to find another broken country (link)
• (link)
• The past, present and future of the universe, Christian style (link)
• Why the US should mint a trillion-dollar coin (link)
• "Mental health: it's not always good to talk" (link)
• "What are 'British values'?" Christianity? Patrilineal monarchy? Empire? Narrow-minded nationalism? All of the above, arguably. If we want to talk about liberty, tolerance and fairness then how about calling them what they truly are: universal liberal human values. On the short and ignoble history of an absurd, hypocritical and counterproductive concept (link)
• The tanks-for-Ukraine farce showed that so-called major powers don't always call the shots (link)
• "The prospect of peace [in Ukraine] does not depend on whether or not both sides of the conflict are willing to sit at the negotiating table. It hinges on Russia's credibility as a treaty party". What credibility, you might ask. And there's the rub: Russia cannot be reasoned with, only stopped (link)
• "Things can only get better for the UK", mainly because they're so utterly shit right now. Jim O'Neill on a country whose vision of its own greatness is increasingly at odds with reality (link)
• "Most life capable of meaningful interstellar travel is indistinguishable from technology" (link)
• "Russia's Fifth Column in Ukraine" (link)
• "Germany has a unique historical responsibility to help defend a free and sovereign Ukraine." Shame on its government for not recognising this (link)
• "German Angst... contrasts painfully with Ukrainian courage." It's hard to escape the conclusion that Olaf Scholz is a piece of chicken shit (link)
• "In the future, people will ask us all what we did to prevent what is happening now." On the dilemmas facing Russians with a conscience – "without them, the future of Russia is only darkness" (link)
• Oligarchs who are unenthusiastic about Putin's war in Ukraine should avoid standing near open windows (link)
• When Zelensky thanks the free world for its support, we should be thanking him for helping us to rediscover our own deepest values (link)
• Enshittification (n): The seemingly inevitable process by which online platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon and TikTok eventually die (link)
• "[P]andemic preparedness is mostly futile". Mostly (link)
• ChatGPT doesn't mimic human intelligence, merely human bullshitting (link)
• "[D]eep learning has nothing to do with true intelligence because of its inherent inability to generalize" (link)
• "What happens when an astrophysicist puts ChatGPT to the test?" (link)
• Following in Angel Merkel's footsteps, Olaf Schultz has emerged as Putin's greatest European ally (link)
• Harsh but fair critique of John Mersheimer, public moron ('intellectual' would be far too generous a term) (link)
• The Westminster Accounts – MPs and where their money came from (link)
• "If you can tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, I can make a machine to do precisely that" — John von Neumann (link)
• Might Belarus invade Ukriane, and if so what's the likely outcome? (link)
• How do humans – on both right and left – convince themselves to believe the patently absurd? Steven Pinker counts the ways (link)
• "Guns are not speech." Quite the opposite in fact (link)
• Geolocating a white supremacist who's on the run in Europe using photos from his Telegram channels. More excellent work from Bellingcat (link)
• How Russia fabricates criminal charges against its own spies to get them home after their cover has been blown. The most surprising aspect is how incompetent they seem to be at what is surely a frequent exercise (link)
• Going to Mars ain't easy (link). In fact, don't go to Mars at all (link)

Podcasts

• More or Less: The fall of the flies (link)
• The Bunker: On the 'crud' economy (link)
• Prospect Podcast: On Nat C-ism (link)
• Archive on 4: The Socrates of San Francisco (link)
• Capitalisn't: Libertarianism is incompatible with freedom (link)
• File on 4: Leaky oil sanctions (link)
• Past Present Future: The meaning of Dallas (link)
• More or Less: Lies, damn lies and Fox News (link)
• Archive on 4: The other F word (link)
• The Witch Trials of JK Rowling: The Eminently Reasonable Feminist (link)
• The Daily: The joy of Ghibli (link)
• The Slow Newscast: Fox and fiends (link)
• The Good Fight: Primate politics (link)
• Next Year in Moscow: End of empire (link)
• Super-Infinite: Poet, preacher, scholar, soldier (link)
• Social Science Bites: Genes and GCSEs (link)
• Best of Today: Autonomy or agency? (link)
• Intelligence Squared: Muppets in Moscow (link)
• Intelligence Squared: Putin's paranoia (link)
• Social Science Bites: Dunning-Kruger (link)
• LRB Podcast: Consultants or crooks? (link)
• Conversations with Tyler: Katherine the Great (link)
• Doomsday Watch: Who's burning Russia? (link)
• The Invention of Russia: Stuck in the past (link)
• Decoding the Gurus: Elon Musk is full of shit (link)
• The New Gurus: New gurus, same old con (link)

2022

December

• "Military spending can't make up for [Europe's] lack of military culture" (link)
• How should we think about generative AI? Historical analogies can tell us almost anything we like (link)
• Would the case for peer review pass (an effective version of) peer review? Perhaps not (link)
• "[I]magine being the kind of people who would invite George and Amal Clooney to your (small-scale) wedding reception even though neither bride nor groom had ever previously met Mr or Mrs Clooney" (link)
• "AlphaFold predictions can be very accurate but should be treated as hypotheses as even high-confidence parts can be inconsistent with experimental data" (link)
• "The Curriculum Wars are based on an illusion" (link)
• Tyrant of the Year, 2022 (link)
• Literary quotes for literally any time of day or night (link)
• Never mind 'key person risk,' we should worry about 'Napoleonic founder' risk (link)
• Liberal democracy hasn't lived up to its own hype, but it's still the best system going (link)
• Sanctions against Russia are working (link)
• "[D]o not allow football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle that exists," pleads FIFA's Gianni Infantino. OK, but aren't human rights in the World Cup host country a special case? (link)
• SBF may have given money away as an effective altruist, but the way he made it "illustrated a total lack of ethics" Is this just an anecdotal irony, or is it a deep contradiction at the heart of EA? (link)
• "Crypto was built on the idea that you shouldn't have to trust banks with your money". But bitcoin bros have turned out to be even bigger crooks (link)
• On leaving Twitter (link)
• "[S]ince Elon Musk bought Twitter, Democratic Party politicians have seen notable drops in their follower counts, while Republican Party politicians have seen marked gains" (link)
• Technology used to be about solving problems and instilling joy. Now it's about delivering ads and hoovering up personal data (link)
• Yes, Elon Musk is a complete arsehole, but at least he doesn't try to pretend otherwise. The same can't be said for other Silicon Valley oligarchs (link)
• "The removal of the cap on bankers' bonuses... was certainly not the result of pressure from voters – or even the Conservative membership." When industries take over their own regulators (link)
• "Once a shining example of leadership acumen, [Angela] Merkel now appears to bear no small share of the blame". Well, that's putting it mildly (link)
• A bolt of lightning contains about 9 pence worth of electricity – plus 51 other facts (link)
• "Language models are mindless mimics that do not understand what they are saying – so why do we pretend they're experts?" Using them for search, for example, is likely to be disastrous (link)
• "Individualism promises prosperity and success based on individual effort and merit, but it delivers ideas and conditions that make those things unattainable for all but a privileged few" (link)

November

• "One of the key changes – pun intended – to the pop charts in the last 60 years is the demise of key changes. What happened?" (link)
• "It isn't usual for the United Nations's human rights chief to write a letter to the new owner of a technology company. But last week, that's exactly what Volker Türk did." And with good reason (link)
• "Never before has crypto looked so criminal, wasteful and useless." A high bar, but quite possibly true (link)
• Fred 'Mythical Man-Month' Brooks has died (link)
• "Britain chose finance over industry, austerity over investment, and a closed economy over openness to the world." How we became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, as seen from the US (link)
• "The proton is much more than three quarks" (link)
• "Glued to the inside of your mouth this very moment (there's a 50% chance) may be plump bacter­ial caterpillars" (link)
• Could large numbers of ordinary consumers do a better job of forecasting inflation that supposed experts? Probably (link)
• "A big list of Mastodon resources" – oh the irony of posting such a thing here (link)
• "Twitter is not a place where atrocious things happen; it is an atrocious place." On the eschatology of social media (link)
• Not Mirkwood, but Dartmoor. Amazing (link)
• "The defection of Mikhail Voskresensky" (link)
• On 金継ぎ, or kintsugi (link)
• Evolutionary biology is messy (link)
• Bellingcat on Russia's cruise missile controllers (link)
• "[W]hile doorbell cameras are heavily marketed and described as tools for safety and security in the home, they are also near-constant tools of workplace surveillance for delivery workers" (link)
• "The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run" (link)
• "The seven levels of busy" (link)
• "[W]hy have the leaders of a nominally conservative party directed their energies against bastions of the constitutional conservative tradition"? (link)
• "The first few minutes of a telephone call are a nightmare" – all thanks to technology (link)
• "A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies." – Stefan Banach (link)
• Russian civilisation? It would be a good idea (link)
• Social media is dying. Good (link)
• "You fucked up real good, kiddo" – a letter to Elon Musk (link)

October

• Sunak is weaker than he seems. Exhibit 1: Ex-ex-Home Secretary Cruella de Braverman (link)
• Go, Socceroos! (3-min video link)
• Tory and British dysfunctions are products of Brexit (and vice versa, I would argue). Are there finally signs that we can have a grown-up conversation about this? I won't hold my breath (link)
• "Part One: Russia is sure no trap." On palindromes (link)
• Until the early 20th Century, the Devil wasn't a red personification of evil with horns and wings. "[T]he Satan of Scripture is more like a lawyer than anything else." Well, that explains a lot (link)
• Russia's war hits the homefront (link)
• Far from resisting mass surveillance, we're wiling to pay a premium to bring it into our lives (link)
• "Ukraine is the world's foreign-policy Rorschach test" (link)
• Oh dear, now that potty-mouth Krishnan Guru-Murthy is at it too (link)
• Online echo chambers aren't the problem (link)
• Matt Parker's 40,832,277,770%, code-optimisation project (29-min video; link)
• Neal Stephenson on being a bad correspondent – but a very good novelist (link)
• "Gender is not a spectrum" (link)
• Miriam Margolyes is a f**king star – but didn't descend to Andrew Marr's or Jim Naughtie's level (link1, link2)
• Though no one would invent it today, the monarchy might still be worth keeping (link)
• "The new British government is an economic disaster – and a symbol of a global political crisis" (link)
• "Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk's phone" (link)
• "[T]here is nothing inconsistent with being an antisemite and Zionist; a Jewish nation-state offers one way of ridding countries of their actual Jews." A case in point: Viktor Orbán (link)
• A case for going to the Moon (link)
• On animals' sense of number (link)
• "The pandemic's legacy is already clear: All of this will happen again" (link)
• "There are three types of meetings..." (link)
• "One of the most striking trends in recent years is the growing gender gap in voting and political attitudes. Women are moving left. Men are shifting right" (link)
• "Ban online behavioral advertising" – from the EFF (link)
• "Every war must end, but no war need end quickly – neither world war makes it to the top ten in longevity" (link)
• On smuggling Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs out of the USSR (link)
• China isn't preparing to invade Taiwan – yet (link)
• What we're suffering from is not inflation – it's much worse (link)
• The lumpy, barely working toaster than cost £1187.54 (link)
• "If the government were really serious about a long-term growth plan for Britain, then rather than rushing into tax cuts it would have developed a coherent analysis of all our real problems – from planning to infrastructure investment, to healthcare and skills. It would have acknowledged the associated electoral challenges and spent its political capital carefully. Instead, it's blown it all at once" (link)

September

• "Ironically the fiscal plans of a prospective left-wing government are providing the confidence anchor for the right-wing government it is expected to defeat in the next election." (link)
• Dawning of a new error (link)
• On umwelt (link)
• Where fairies come from (link)
• "[S]ome early Christians believed Jesus was married – possibly to Mary Magdalene" (link)
• What's your gender? Male? Female? Neither? Tree, perhaps? (link)
• Doctors have an incentive to restrict the number of new medics because they all compete for the same work. Lawyers, on the hand, tend to welcome new lawyers, who create even more work by increasing the likelihood and number of legal disputes (link)
• It's official: Princeton University doesn't need any more money. At all, ever (link)
• American politicians lie even more than British and German ones do, at least on Twitter (link)
• "We are here by luck, not by right or by necessity" (link)
• Throughout history, resolve and willpower have long been underestimated as military assets – though this piece does make me wonder about wishful thinking and survivor bias (link)
• How much should researchers care about their animal subjects? (link)
• In fixing energy markets, the British government may be breaking the pound (link)
• "[I]t is worth remembering that, not long ago, Russia turned away from empire." It's back been downhill ever since (link)
• The Great Replacement? The Great Deception, more like (link)
• Empathy is illuminating (link)
• A counteroffer to the wrongheaded editors at Nature Human Behaviour (link)
• "How rich are Britain's royals?" Answer: Rich enough that the money could be better spent (link)
• Audiobooks take us back to humanity's oral past – and help to cure insomnia (link)
• Any Chinese invasion of Taiwan would fail (link)
• Calculus (as a school subject) is (sort of) dead (or at least should be). Long live statistics! (link)
• We're heading into the winter of 2022-23 with "insufficient molecules" of gas and oil. The likely result: "chaos". [Trigger warning: includes qualified praise of Liz Truss] (link)
• "What to read to understand 'effective altruism'" (link)
• Emily Maitlis's 2022 MacTaggart Lecture on populism and the press (link)
• Tortoise takes on the Tories (link)
• Jack Watling explains the military strategy that led to Ukraine retaking territory in the east (link)
• Should we ban Russian tourists? (link)
• On the organisational challenges posed by a vast royal funeral: "There is probably not enough physical space in the greater London area to accommodate all the arriving jets, as well as their motorcades and diplomatic protocols" (link)
• "Russia's inevitable defeat, deep economic malaise, and loss of great-power status at the hands of a country whose existence the Kremlin didn't even recognize will be fertile ground for extremists" (link)
• "The interesting question is not why our augmented minds seem to have abilities greater than those necessary for the survival of our ancestors. Rather, it's whether our augmented minds will ever have the minimal abilities necessary for grasping reality" (link)
• "[T]he hubris that technology can generate in its human creators needs to be disciplined by such decidedly un-technological virtues of humility, temperance and prudence" (link)
• While acknowledging the central role that luck plays in our lives, we must live as if it didn't exist (link)
• Time to short China? (link)
• Heredity is an absurd way to choose a head of state, but sometimes you luck out and a broken process generates a good outcome. With Elizabeth Windsor, the UK lucked out. Big time (link)
• The rise and fall of a deep-cover GRU spy (link)
• Shoppers want low prices, not high tech (link1, link2)
• Social media's pitch is that it connects and liberates us. On the contrary, it divides and ensnares (link)
• All over central and eastern Europe, Soviet-era monuments are coming down. Good (link)
• The G7's price cap on Russian oil will work (link)
• Few are the things – beyond violent imperialism – in which Russia remains genuinely world-class. Music is one of them, but that too is changing (link)
• Is the Internet Archive going down? Probably not, but it's future looks uncertain (link)

August

• "[T]he Russian economy is already under serious strain" – and Simon Jenkins is full of shit (link)
• "Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers" (link)
• It looks as if yet another high-profile Nature paper was made up (link)
• With Moore's law slowing, the future of chipmaking "will be designing ever more specific chips for ever more specific uses" (link)
• The metaverse is about shared experiences, not avatars or even VR; above all, it's not a 'place' (link)
• Apple should move into banking (link)
• "The deadliest road in America" – and that's saying something (link)
• "The Brexit hardliners are like extreme leftists who deny that Soviet atrocities constitute a rebuttal of Marxism-Leninism and insist that communism could still work if implemented properly." Hard to disagree (link)
• "Google search is quietly damaging democracy" (link)
• "Russia has a manpower problem" (link)
• Does humanity's long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death? Probably not (link)
• Stephen Doyle's book sculptures (link)
• If you've ever doubted MBS's insanity, read this (link)
• "Why aren't smart people happier?" For a start, they're often not that clever (link)
• "There are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst." – Thomas Mann (link)
• "Surging fossil-fuel emissions are ruining carbon dating" (link)
• The longest jump in athletics history might not belong to Mike Powell or even Bob Beamon, but to the incomparable Carl Lewis (link)
• "The global index of freedom and rights run by Freedom House has been in decline for 15 continuous years" (link)
• "The modern Tory Party has succumbed to such levels of distortion and inconsistency that no honest politician could lead it." Fabulous, if depressing (link)
• "The Electoral Commission is now under government control" – and that's as bad as it sounds (link)
• "New York isn't a sitting city. It's not a reclining city. New York is a standing city, and not because of the skyscrapers where numbers (which devour New York) established their anthill. I speak of a standing city because, if she sat down, she would repose and reflect, and because, if she lay down, she would sleep and dream. Since she wants neither to reflect nor to dream, she stands divided between the two breasts of her mother, one flowing with alcohol and the other with milk. She wants to remain standing, to forget (what?), to forget herself, to wear herself out, to exhaust herself, to escape, by fatigue and the imperceptible swaying of drunks and of skyscrapers with immobile foundations and wobbling pinnacles, to escape, I say, the interrogation that you give to yourself, that you fear to give to yourself and to which you subject others continually" – Jean Cocteau (link)
• Imaginary numbers are real (link)
• "How to think about free will" – by Julian Baggini (link)
• Why is our use of violet such a recent development? (link)
• "World War II is all that Putin has left." Anne Applebaum on Russia's empty ideology (link)
• "Is productivity growth becoming irrelevant?" Increasingly, yes (link)
• Are big tech companies commercial entities or political ones? On the unaccountable power of information technology and the need for digital republicans (link)
• "America Is Headed For Disaster" – by Yascha Mounk. Hard not to agree (link)
• Abortion rates in countries where it is legal tend to be lower than those in which it is outlawed, probably because the former also have better sex education (link)
• I fear that "complacent optimism" will be the epitaph not only for Boris, but also for Brexit and for Britain – or at least the United Kingdom (link)
• If Labour can't have Patel, they should hope for Truss. It looks like they're about to get their wish (link)
• On the UK 'Bill of Rights', aka the "European Convention on Human Rights (let us pretend we are doing something substantial with some spoilers and so mislead our supporters) Act 2022" (link)
• It turns out that Elon Musk is a capricious arsehole. Who knew? (link)
• It has become a cliché to say that wars are ultimately be settled by negotiation, but this is simply not true (link)
• Gato ≠ AGI (link)
• We are engaged in "a struggle between two diametrically opposed systems of governance... an an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society, the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state" – George Soros (link)
• Deep learning may be running out of steam. Time to add back some symbol manipulation? (link)

July

• "The Conservatives risk running out of voters to laugh at" (link)
• "[T]he Russian economy is reeling". Time for a knockout blow (link)
• To talk meaningfully about AI, we need a new language (link)
• Congratulations to Keir Starmer for winning today. Surely the British public won't vote for either a smug, tax-dodging investment banker or the result of a sixth-former's failed build-a-Maggie-robot project. Will they? (link)
• Does the increasingly ironically named British Conservative and Unionist Party have any MPs left who aren't brazen liars? (link)
• Yuval Noah Harari is full of shit (link)

June

• Don't fuck with Ukraine (2-min video; link)
• By comparison with what's needed, Western arms deliveries to Ukraine are feeble (link)
• "If Vladamir Putin had a [golf] tournament, would you play there?" Apparently this is too difficult a question for some people to answer (link)
• Phil Mickelson doesn't condone human rights violations, but is happy to pocket $160m $200m from the murderous Saudi regime. Some people might be forgiven for abandoning all moral principles in return for cash; millionaire sportsmen are not among them (2-min video; link)
• Putin doesn't think he's losing – and he has half a point (link)
• The US is entering "a period of protracted regime instability, marked by repeated constitutional crises, heightened political violence, and possibly, periods of authoritarian rule" (link)
• Having failed to make Afghanistan more like the US, the US is now making itself more like Afghanistan by encouraging its citizens to carry guns and curtailing women's rights (link1, link2)
• "Lethal autonomous weapons systems ['killer robots'] pose new and dangerous threats", but agreeing a ban is exceptionally difficult (link)
• This is no repeat of the 1970s (link)
• "State capacity eats interest rates for lunch." In other words, good governance matters more than cheap money. A great point well made (link)
• UK government's new Bill of Rights "will undermine the universality of all human rights and weaken the ability of courts to give effect to protection of fundamental human rights, including freedom of expression. It will expand state power and hamper efforts to hold the Government to account" – Index on Censorship (link)
• Shanghai's insane zero-Covid policy is not a consequence of an efficient technocracy, but a deeply paranoid party-state. The people have noticed (link)
• Among Americans aged 1 to 24, motor vehicle deaths have been falling while firearms deaths have been rising. Sometime in the late 2010s, those two lines crossed (link)
• "Populist movements are based on anger... but cannot make people's lives better." So you need to find new targets for the anger (link)
• "Are blockchains decentralized?" Spoiler alert: no (link)
• Things Nobel laureates don't understand (link)
• Was <form> a mistake? (link)
• "[W]hich is primary, the chicken or the egg? Which is nature or nurture? Structure or function? Perhaps what we need is an ontology [of living things] that allows us to ask a different sort of question altogether" (link)
• How important is eye contact between musicians? (link)
• On the football match at which one team was trying to score in either goal and the other was defending them both (link)
• Proparoxytone: A word pronounced with stress on the antepenultimate (third-from-the-last) syllable. (link)
• Circadian rhythms are a feature, not a bug (link)
• "To study philosophy is to learn how to die" (link)
• "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought" – Henri Bergson‌. Boris Johnson take note. Actually, don't bother: you're beyond redemption (link)
• The term 'stablecoin' is somewhere between an oxymoron and a lie (link)
• "The gains from eliminating migration barriers dwarf – by an order of magnitude or two – the gains from eliminating other types of barriers" (link)

May

• In China's eyes, "Russia has been reduced to just another third-world oil exporter – like a big Eurasian Nigeria, but with terrible demographics." More importantly, Russia has also destroyed China's plan to drive a wedge between Europe and the US (link)
• Putin's behaviour is driven by Russia's inferiority complex (link)
• On Germany's long history of Russian appeasement (link)
• A database of eyewitness videos from Ukraine (link)
• Even Switzerland is flirting with NATO (link)
• The shares of companies that have withdrawn from Russia have performed better than those which stayed put (link)
• "Russians plunder $5m farm vehicles from Ukraine – to find they've been remotely disabled." The Internet of Things bites back (link1, link2)
• On Ukraine's unofficial cyberarmy (link)
• "Europe is fighting a war against itself in Ukraine, and the only way to end it is to stop all oil imports from Russia immediately" (link)
• "I personally prayed that death would be very quick, because we had heard that in the neighboring basements they were asking people to choose: to either be burned, or to be shot." Life and death in Bucha (link)
• "[A] remarkable transformation is taking place in Ukraine's army amounting to its de facto military integration into Nato" (link)
• To get an idea of the Russian 'news' presenter Dmitry Kiselyov, imagine Huw Edwards trying to do an impression of Joseph Stalin and instead coming over all Dr Evil. (1 min 25 secs of preposterous video; link)
• Vladimir Putin walks into a bar... (link)
• Drone warfare (link)
• "How do you persuade Russians who have been fed an unending series of lies to drop their support for Putin's invasion of Ukraine?" On sharing a razed house in Ukraine with Russian soldiers (link)
• "[F]or the good of this and future Governments, the Prime Minister should resign" (link)
• "'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" – yet again (link)
• "The original Pong video game had no code and was built using hardware circuitry" (link)
• Mhairi Black on the f-word in British politics (5-min video; link)
• "A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus" (link1, link2)
• "The more mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation depending on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going, and go there. They start with the ideal desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere they are placed they succeed in being the parish beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it." – Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (link)
• Two-and-a-half years after the election, levelling-up has gone backwards (link)
• "The true economic cost of Brexit is finally becoming clear" – and it's not good news (link)
• The UK government has concluded that the Northern Irish shit sandwich it ordered in 2019 is not to its liking (link)
• The US Supreme Court has long been leaky – and in any case, leaking a draft Supreme Court opinion is not a crime. The really bad move was to typeset it (link)
• 'Tis a mere flesh wound, ornithological edition (link)
• What America doesn't understand about policing (link)
• The "application apocalypse" is about a generation old. Is there a better way? (link)
• "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division." Quite unlike Justice Alito's words, which will no doubt smooth things over nicely (link)
• Calculating a Gödel number for the Pythagorean theorem (link)
• (link)
• "Of the 14 countries beyond the United Kingdom that retain Queen Elizabeth II as head of state, at least six in the Caribbean want out." Perhaps the UK could follow their lead before the wastrel son takes over (link)

April

• "Germany would rather protect its economy than protect Ukrainian lives, a cynicism which would be easier to bear if it were not accompanied by so much moralizing. And, indeed, by so much corruption.": Russia is easily Europe's biggest security threat. It's second, well ahead of Belarus, is Germany (link)
• "Here is a picture of all the Russians who have been convicted of military graft or corruption in the last 20 years in Russia" (link)
• "Maybe Putin had a Grand Strategy. Most megalomaniacs do. But now, like Mariupol, it lies in ruin" – George Robertson (link)
• "Why paying in roubles for Russian gas and oil might matter" (link)
• Putin is playing poker, not chess, and the West needs to call his bluff (link)
• If Scholz and other invertebrates won't ban Russian fossil fuels, they should at least tax them – heavily (link)
• #BoycottEmirates 🇺🇦 (link)
• Don't panic, there's plenty of wheat to go around (link)
• "Russia's denial of responsibility for atrocities in Bucha recalls 50 years of lies over the Katyn massacre" (link)
• "Russians don't just need access to facts; they need help understanding their own history, what they have done to their neighbors" – Volodymyr Zelensky (link)
• "If we are the arsenal of democracy, then let's be the arsenal of democracy and open the doors and push everything out that [Ukrainians] possibly need" – Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe. Well said (link)
• #BoycottLOccitane 🇺🇦 (link1, link2)
• "Putin seeks to destroy not just Ukraine but the entire postwar global system. He may yet succeed" (link)
• "Coexistence with psychopathic dictatorships is not possible." On the bloody thread that links Saddam Hussain, Slobodan Milošević and Vladimir Putin, by the late, ever-prescient Christopher Hitchens (9-min video; link)
• A surgeon from Mariupol reports (link)
• "Russia's Ukraine propaganda has turned fully genocidal" (link)
• "Over 750 companies have curtailed operations in Russia – but some remain", the bastards (link)
• Nuclear war "would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history". Even so, it might be a tiny bit less bad than you think (link)
• In March, the rouble was the world's top-performing currency. But it's Potemkin money (link)
• At the cost of a modest recession, Germany could end the war in Ukraine (link)
• "Imagine explaining the global reputations of Elizabeth II and Vladimir Putin to someone from ancient Rome." How times change (link)
• "Does Putin have cancer?" Perhaps (link)
• Russia's security services consume "3.5 times the amount spent on health and education combined". Wow (link)
• In another attempt to support the rouble, Russia pegs its currency to gold (link)
• "I saw a missile hit a moving motorbike in Syria from another continent". By comparison, avoiding hospitals and schools ought to be easy (link)
• In 1945, 57% of French people said the Soviet Union had done the most to defeat Hitler. By 2014, it was only 23%. The numbers for America having done the most are a mirror image of this (link)
• "Monstrously murderous as he was, I believe that in 2022, even Stalin would not have invaded Volodymyr Zelensky's Ukraine" – Simon Sebag Montefiore (link)
• As the forests turn green, "[t]he season of a total Ukrainian guerrilla safari will soon begin" (link)
• "Unless democracies defend themselves, the forces of autocracy will destroy them" (link)
• Contra Mearsheimer, "[t]he problem is not that NATO enlargement went too far. The problem is that it didn't go far enough" (link)
• "Now is truly the time for Beijing to step forth and prove itself to be a responsible power." The arguments for Chinese pragmatism (link)
• "Will Russia default on its sovereign debt?" Maybe (link)
• Even as we move to an increasingly multipolar world, there remains only one financial superpower (link)
• Jim O'Neill on Russia (link)
• "Ukraine has made a major move towards integrating with Europe – by plugging into its electricity grid" (link)
• "One of the many casualties of the war in Ukraine is Angela Merkel's legacy" (link)
• "[T]he systems that the West used to evaluate the Russian military have failed nearly as comprehensively as that military has" (link)
• An elite Russian regiment incurs heavy losses in Ukraine (link)
• "To sleep where you work has its own degradations – a sense of permanent connection, perhaps of exploitation. And it almost certainly means sleeping alone." On sleep – or lack of it – as a means of subjugation (link)
• "I'm interested in one thing and one thing only and that's bent prime ministers" – from Led By Donkeys (6-min video; link)
• "Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce." 103 bits of advice from a 70-year-old KK (link)
• "$46 billion for Twitter is a bargain for maintaining, and increasing, [Elon Musk's] $270 billion net worth." Interesting theory, somewhat shocking if true (link)
• It's Y2K all over again: time will literally run out for Linux in 2038 (link)
• Declaration for the Future of the Internet, by the US and 60 other countries (link)
• In praise of friction – and Brian Wilson (link)
• Smith, Marx and Harari have all promoted the idea that pre-agricultural societies were naturally egalitarian. They were wrong (link)
• Betrump (v): To deceive or cheat. To elude. [From be- + French tromper (to deceive), which also gave us trumpery and trompe l'oeil. Earliest documented use: 1522.]
• Gizmodo has published a batch of internal Facebook documents concerning the 2020 US election and January 6th Capitol riot (link)
• It is clear "that a grand coalition between America's disparate anti-liberal intellectuals would have no coherent program, let alone a popular one". On Compact, which appears to be America's answer to Spiked. A fabulous read – the article, that is, not its targets (link)
• In praise of generalism (link)
• "[S]hould a prime minister obey the laws that he imposes on others; and is it acceptable for a prime minister to mislead parliament?" Yes and no (link)
• "Does the British public care about the integrity and honesty of its politicians?" Yes (link)
• "The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s." How 'like' and 'share' became synonyms for hatred and bigotry, by Jonathan Haidt (link)
• Return the Parthenon (aka Elgin) Marbles (link)
• Bitcoin is a new Gold Standard – with all the deep-set problems that implies (link)
• The infuriating reality of travelling with Bitcoin (link)
• On teaching computers common sense (link)
• "The next Google" – well, maybe (link)
• "On infinite ethics". Sublime (link)
• The UK government is acting as if the Covid-19 pandemic is over. The virus has other ideas (link)
• On Japanese mermaids, or '人魚' (link)

March

• When does a country 'deserve' to exist? (link)
• "Under unprecedented sanctions, how is the Russian economy faring?" (link)
• London's lawyers, bankers and politicians have Ukrainian blood on their hands (link)
• "The idea that tech companies are apolitical providers of platform services was always flawed, but the Ukraine war has driven a stake through their presumed neutrality" (link)
• On the ground, and the airwaves, with Russian troops in Ukraine (link)
• "[O]ver 90 percent of Poles support accepting Ukrainian refugees, and 64 percent are willing to help personally." All this despite a troubled joint history (link)
• "[T]he Kremlin faces an unappetising choice. It can have Mariupol – or it can have an economy" (link)
• "If Russia is really [Ukraine's] 'brother,' then its name is Cain" (link)
• "Putin's invasion of Ukraine is the latest in a series of acts of naked aggression by Russian rulers against the country's neighbours, justified by grand imperial claims and a well-established and questionable narrative of victimhood" (link)
• Russian battle groups in Ukraine are relying too much on armour and not enough on autonomy (link1, link2)
• "Putin's historical distortions are chaotic and jumbled. The crisis in Ukraine is concurrently presented as 'the fault' of the west – or Lenin, or Ukrainian nationalists. But never Russia" (link)
• Twenty days in Mariupol, a harrowing photographic account (link)
• One month in, "Western officials assess that some objectives for the first day of the war have still not been achieved." Evil and incompetent. Not a good combo, Vlad (link)
• "After decades of careful ambiguity, Finland [plus Sweden and Hungary, but not yet Serbia] may be lining up unambiguously with the west... Not the legacy Putin intended" (link)
• Russia is losing its best and brightest, which, of course, suits Putin perfectly well (link)
• "In this war, there will be no Munich, no Nuremberg, and no Versailles", but "[a]t some point, Putin will meet his political Waterloo" (link)
• Why are so many Russian generals being killed in Ukraine? (link)
• On the (alledged) unofficial cyberwar against the Russian state and its Western supporters, like Nestlé (link)
• Cloudflare's thoughtful response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine (link)
• How "[t]itans of American technology" were "brought to their knees by some of the most primitive intimidation tactics in the Kremlin playbook" (link)
• "Money laundering is done in secret, because it requires hiding the source of money. Money washing hides in plain sight" (link)
• "Live monitoring of all sanctions against Russia" (link)
• Arnie in fine form (link)
• "[R]ather than a servant of Russia, [John] Mearsheimer is a secret weapon in the armoury of the West, helping to lure Putin to disaster on the rocks of a grisly new Afghanistan" (link)
• "So far, the Chinese government has been unwavering in its support of Putin. But that does not mean the seven standing committee members are in lockstep" (link)
• #BoycottNestle 🇺🇦 (link1, link2)
• Kyiv must "accept its thousand-year-old historical responsibility" – and bring an end to the Russian Federation (link)
• Would Russia use nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Maybe (link)
• "[A] weaker Russia is a benefit to China, because China will gain much more control". Every day in every way, Putin is becoming Xi's bitch (link)
• "In many different ways... the shortage of troops and equipment in Ukraine has exposed the extent to which the war is rapidly eroding Russia's regional and international standing, and putting the political survival of Putin himself at risk." Let's hope so (link)
• In space, everyone can see the colours you wear 🇺🇦 (link)
• "The strategies [dictators] use to stay in power tend to trigger their eventual downfall" (link)
• Diplomacy with 'track changes' turned on. IMHO, mockery is not only legitimate, but even useful in exposing such rank and malevolent hypocrisy (link)
• The war in Ukraine is the opposite of Huntington's clash of civilisations – a civilisation of clashes, perhaps (link)
• Russian state television "depicts their country not as the aggressor in Ukraine but as a victim of the West". Well, mostly (link1, link2)
• "Poland will also have to militarize, because it is the conduit between Ukraine and Europe" (link)
• #BoycottM&S #BoycottMarriott #BoycottBurgerKing #BoycottAccor 🇺🇦 (link1, link2, link3)
• "The West didn't impose NATO upon Eastern Europeans: they demanded it and we would have been derelict not to have provided it." Superb analysis (link)
• "What Russian officials think of the invasion of Ukraine" – allegedly (link)
• "These are the cluster munitions documented by Ukrainian civilians" (link)
• Belligcat debunks "staged pre-war 'provocation' in the Donbas" (link)
• OSINT on Ukraine (link)
• "The devastating effects of nuclear weapons." A cut-out-and-keep primer to read from your concrete bunker (link)
• Putin will "end up at the Hague, or his own guys will kill him. You'll see. He's only got the two options. He's not going to die peacefully in his bed, that's for sure". Views from Odessa (link)
• "The street where the Russian Embassy in Vilnius is located will be named after Ukrainian Heroes, Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius has said." Utterly marvellous. Let's hope Sadiq Khan has noticed (link)
• Russians are hoarding cash (link)
• "[T]he value of the London-listed shares of four Russian oil and gas companies, whose domestic shares jointly make up a third of the Moscow exchange's market capitalisation, fell by 97% before trading was suspended" (link)
• "[Y]ou're a 22-year-old architecture student who suddenly finds himself in combat with the fucking Red Army, and you're figuring out what to do by reading the Cosmopolitan Globalist" (link)
• #BoycottMcDonalds #BoycottKFC #BoycottStarbucks #BoycottCocaCola #BoycottPepsi #BoycottUniqlo 🇺🇦 (link, update1, update2, update3)
• There are brave Russians too (link)
• Anna Netrebko, soprano and nationalist bigot, has been sacked by the Met (link)
• "Russia says it is not killing civilians. That is a lie" (link)
• Even neutral maps of Russian advances in Ukraine often overstate their progress (link)
• "It won't be Mikhail Gorbachev's name written on the death certificate of the Russian empire: it will be Putin's" – Yuval Noah Harari (link)
• Ukraine has asked ICANN to shut down Russian internet domains, and ICANN has said no (link)
• The shittiest driver in F1 has been sacked, not because he's shit (though he really and truly is), but because his father and sponsor is a thief who associates with war criminals. Good riddance (link)
• With Russia as the new fascist threat, German has, in one bound, thrown off the shackles of its Nazi past to become a fully fledged, benign, self-confident European power. Meanwhile, for all the respect usually paid to her, history will come to judge Angela Merkel as an utter disaster (link)
• "Putin's rape of Ukraine has destroyed lives that were not part of the calculation" – including many in Russia (link)
• Ukraine crisis: why you should donate money rather than supplies (link)
• In a military war, Russia is a superpower. In an economic one, it's a minnow and is being squashed. Now it's time to cut off the gas and oil (link)
• "Why the World must resist calls to undermine the Internet" (link)
• "[A]n eccentric Russian thinker's work might illuminate Putin's decision to invade" (link)
• How SWIFT works – and how it doesn't work that well for targeting punishments (link)
• "Don't be a coward. Have the courage to be afraid." On fear as "a wholly legitimate response to a dangerously unstable world" (link)
• "The metaverse is solving a problem that doesn't exist" (link)
• "It is 2022. We have mapped the genome, visited the moon, and defeated the Nazis (mostly), and yet we still occasionally walk in on each other in the bathroom. It does not have to be like this, and yet it is like this." On the perils of butt-clenchingly bad design (link)
• "Today Google is turning on activity tracking for many users that previously turned it off... Google says this is helping people" (link)
• "[W]hat if our intuition is wrong... Perhaps animals that are less intelligent feel not only as much pain but even more" (link)
• "Mathematics is the music of reason" – James Joseph Sylvester (link)
• Magnetic fields are a convenient fiction whose effects are actually created by a combination of electric fields and special relativity (link)
• The surprising case of a university "engaged in real conversation about tough issues rather than blindly accepting the orthodoxy du jour—or, for that matter, criticizing said orthodoxy without providing arguments against it". Even more surprising: it's in Hungary (link)
• "How can we know if paid search advertising works?" It's complicated (link)

February

• Quick quiz – Who said this during his inaugural address: "I do not want my picture in your offices: the President is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids' photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision."? A: Vladimir Putin B: Volodymyr Zelenskyy (link)
• In facing down death, Volodymyr Zelensky has become immortal. Слава Україні! (link)
• When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, "[i]t was a miracle that there was no major war or bloodshed. Now we realize that the war was just postponed" (link)
• The West has been too soft on Russia and will pay the price for decades to come (link)
• "There was never any Nato commitment not to expand to former member states of the Warsaw Pact, however much Russian leaders might wish it were so" (link; see also this)
• "Russia is no more entitled to dictate foreign policy choices in its former empire than Britain is" (link)
• "The reason Putin would risk war." In short, the profound fear "that one day, prodemocracy activists of the kind he saw in Dresden [in 1989] might come for him too" – Anne Applebaum (link)
• The website of the Russian Ministry of Defence is, technically speaking, a teapot (link)
• "The man rethinking the definition of reality." Tom Chatfield on David Chalmers (link)
• "Does Britain exist?" It's a deceptively complicated question (link)
• "[T]he top reasons for visiting YouTube are generally educational... This feeling is highly exploitable" (link)
• Electricity is (even) weirder than you think (link)
• Spammers are taking over Google search in Norway – and presumably elsewhere (link)
• "[L]ibertarianism's attraction is based on ignoring externalities." A critique of crypto, which creates huge waste and doesn't even achieve the decentralisation it preaches (link)
• "NFTs aren't as stupid as you think. they're much, much stupider — investing is like that" (link)
• Virtual real estate is the new NFTs/crypto/tulip bulbs (link)
• Do Facebook's subcontracted fact-checkers have better editorial processes than the British Medical Journal? Apparently so (link)
• Astonishingly, a contributor to Scientific America brands EO Wilson a racist. Blimey. Just to be clear, he wasn't. At all. So instead, let this piece itself stand as prominent example of "problematic work" in science (link)
• "We need to make our online spaces more similar to our offline ones." Very true, though this raises the question of how much we need online spaces at all #physicalisunderrated (link)
• "Much of what's distinctively modern about modern life can also be understood as the consequence of waging war on time in the name of productivity... The costs are growing increasingly apparent" (link)
• "My work consists of two parts; that presented here plus all I have not written. It is this second part that is important" – Ludwig Wittgenstein (link)
• On soil bioacoustics – aka soil ecoacoustics, biotremology, or underground sounds (link)
• Learning that your phone or laptop is no longer supported by the maker is bad enough, but what if it happened to your eyes? (link)
• There is an "unspoken rule that gerrymandering is to be discussed only by its victims, never by its perpetrators." Witness Democrats in New York (link)
• "The Big Here Quiz" – by Kevin Kelly (link)
• "If photons do not experience time, then how can they oscillate?" Good question (link)
• "Slavery cannot tolerate free speech" – Frederick Douglass (link)
• "Germany's strategic dependence on Russia is a mess of its own making." And now presents a grave threat to European security (link)
• Imaginary numbers are real (link)
• "[T]he best – the funniest, most touching, arousing, and truthful – representation of a woman anyone has written in English" was written by a man (link)
• As the world has become more cynical, TED talks have morphed from beacons of inspiration into pits of self parody (link)
• "One way to think about magnetism is that it is the 'relativistic correction' to the electrostatic force" (link)
• "[I]n an age of 'big data', the link between understanding and prediction no longer holds true" (link)
• "Should you believe Wikipedia?" Spoiler alert: Yes, not only because it's usually pretty accurate, but also because the way it works is an object lesson the nature of truth (link)
• Humans still beat AI at making investment decisions (link)
• "To Jack Dorsey, Andreessen Horowitz and its $2.2 billion crypto fund epitomize much of what's wrong in the crypto movement." Trouble is, Jack epitomises many of the other things that are wrong with crypto – eg, blind faith in code and decentralisation (link)
• "Why isn't there a replication crisis in math[s]?" Partly because "you can replicate a math[s] paper by reading it" (link)
• "Democratic states need to warn Beijing against punishing Olympians who speak out." In fact, if dozens or hundreds of Olympians spoke out, what could China even do? (link)
• "Decent people can and sometimes do make bad leaders, but the morally vacuous never make good ones." Conservative MPs take note (link)
• The UK has developed a parallel vocabulary to avoid labelling anyone as corrupt... until now (link)
• In shock news, it turns out that Boris Johnson just makes up shit when it suits him (link)

January

• Whatever happens next [in Ukraine], this feels like a pivotal moment in the 21st century (link)
• Algorithms of Late Capitalism (link)
• "Andy Warhol, Clay Christensen, and Vitalik Buterin walk into a bar" ...and talk about web3 – by Tim O'Reilly (link)
• Current economics finds itself in an unfortunate quasi-religious place where "theory beats fact". But some practitioners – and the real world – are fighting back (link)
• "States that have forgotten who they are tend not to last long. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies" – next up: a nation formerly known as the United Kingdom (link)
• "Cryptocurrency is not merely a bad investment or speculative bubble. It's worse than that: it's a full-on fraud" (link)
• "The government wants the right to strip UK nationals of their passports, while selling others to the highest bidder" (link)
• "Is social media use good or bad for our mental health?" The truth is, we don't know, even when it comes to suicide (link)
• About time (link)
• "Johnson has more disdain for the constitution than any other PM" – Peter Hennessy, constitutional historian (link)
• "The Processual Book": "How can we move beyond the printed codex?" (link)
• "Antimicrobial resistance now causes more deaths than HIV/AIDS and malaria" (link)
• Traditional grant-funding approaches are too slow, bureaucratic and unimaginative, but alternatives are emerging (link)
• On Web3: "The advertised decentralization of power out of the hands of a few has, in fact, been a re-centralization of power into the hands of fewer" (link)
• "Don't buy stuff stuff!" On the perils of accessory addiction (link)
• Borges' Library of Babel made real. Well, virtual (link)
• Biden's pandering to the left is a disaster – for the left as well as everyone else (link)
• What is Web3? No one one really knows, mainly because, unlike Web 2.0, which was a label retrospectively attached to a set of emergent trends, Web3 started with a label and now everyone is trying to add their favourite idea to it (Web 2.0, Web3, nonsense on stilts)
• "A video I recently watched that was meant to help college students learn to read began by saying, 'Don't read for class the way you read a magazine.' But the kids don't read magazines" (link)
• "The extraordinary fact is that the universe is an engine that turns the fungible into the non-fungible." On the cosmic significance (and stupidity) of crypto (link)
• Web3 isn't about decentralisation at all. Quite the opposite (link)
• "On not hating the body", by Martha Nussbaum (link)
• "The War on Terror is a smashing success – for terror" (link)
• "Which country has the world's best health care?" It depends, of course (link)
• Zombie science "goes through the motions of scientific research without a real research question to answer". And there's much too much of it about (link)
• "Happy Public Domain Day!" (link)
• Ironically, Jacob Rees-Mogg's juvenile jibe has helped to transform Douglas Ross into a political heavyweight (link)
• Wikipedia appears to have done a good job providing accurate Covid-19 information. Hang your heads in shame, Google, Facebook and Twitter (link)
• "The belief that [Boris Johnson] has a special appeal to voters is simply wrong." Peter Kellner runs the polling numbers (link)
• "It is bizarre that in a supposedly animal-loving country, where half of all households have a pet, so many feed them on other animals that have lived miserable lives in factory farms" (link)
• How do homing pigeons figure out their impossibly long routes home? No one is quite sure (link)
• "Learning to fly" – what 魔女の宅急便 (Kiki's Delivery Service by Hayao Miyazaki) teaches us about the role of work and talent in society (link)
• Andrew Sullivan's writing "offers an inside view of the past three decades of American intellectual and cultural decline." Harsh and not entirely fair, but interesting all the same (link)
• "Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web" (link)

Podcasts

• Doomsday Watch: Covert ≠ clandestine (link)
• The Coming Storm: Louis Theroux interviews Gabriel Gatehouse (link)
• Ones and Tooze: Crypto critique (link)
• Decoding the Gurus: DiAngelo's fragility (link)
• The Coming Storm: Hunter's laptop (link)
• The Intelligence: Icky guy (link)
• Slow Newscast: Truss busting (link)
• Slow Newscast: Britannia Unhinged (link)
• Hoaxed: Hampstead's satanic paedophiles (link)
• The Prince: How to see Xi (link)
• The Scramble for Rare Earths: Putin's goal? (link)
• Slow Newscast: Death in Ukraine (link)
• The Daily: Adnan is free (link)
• Mindscape: What if...? (link)
• This American Life: Is college the answer? (link)
• LRB Podcast: Grief totalitarianism (link)
• Ones and Tooze: Those crazy book publishers (link)
• Analysis: Digital ads – pro or con? (link)
• Empire of Pain: The Sacklers, dealers in death (link)
• Ones and Tooze: Of the world's children who are killed by guns outside war, 90% are in the US (link)
• Friends of Shakespeare & Co.: Buttigieg reads Joyce. Really (link)
• The Bear Next Door: A neighbour from hell (link)
• Slow Newscast: Tory, fixer, appeaser, crook (link)
• Slow Newscast: The trials of Alexei Navalny (link)
• The Intelligence: In Zelensky's war room (link)
• Putin: The making of a psycho (link)
• Analysis: Circle of mistrust (link)
• War on Truth: The first victim (link)
• The Good Fight: Deradicalising Russia (link)
• The Daily: Parsing Putin (link)
• New Yorker Radio Hour: NATO's not to blame (link)
• How Did We Get Here?: Understand Ukraine (link)
• Ukrainecast: "This is Radio Freedom" (link)
• Curious Coincidence: Lab leak lowdown (link)
• Numberphile: The prisoner's lemma (link)
• More or Less: Lies, damned lies and Johnson (link)
• The Daily: Birds Aren't Real (link)
• Babbage: Web3 walkthrough (link)
• Slow News Cast: Lies and the lying liar Johnson (link)
• The Listening Service: Dancing about architecture (link)
• Open Book: Ulysses is 100 (link)
• Political Thinking: Gary Neville, politician (link)
• New Yorker Radio Hour: Civil War II (link)

2021

December

• Abolish anonymity (link). Or maybe not (link)
• Old-school socialism failed and hypercapitalism has gone much too far. We now need "a new form of socialism, participative and decentralized, federal and democratic, ecological, multiracial and feminist" – Thomas Piketty (link)
• "The worst [US] political predictions of 2021" (link)
• The GOP is no longer a conservative party (link)
• "The shortest scientific papers ever published." The 'winner' has zero words (link)
• "Advertisers have begun invading our sleep in an attempt to place their products in our dreams" (link)
• "Boris Johnson's ethical standards are now an existential threat" (link)
• Why do diseases have a season? A clear answer turns out to be surprisingly elusive (link)
• On the current panpsychist renaissance (link)
• "So what's your fucking problem with Web3?" Let us count the ways that it falls flat (link)
• "Blockchain developers believe that this time they've found a structural answer to recentralization, but I tend to doubt it." Understated as ever, Tim (link)
• Honesty is an underappreciated and misunderstood virtue (link)
• "The 'microwork' that makes AI run is just piecework with a digital makeover" (link)
• "Introducing Amazon Brand Detector." Because who knows which brands Amazon owns, and to what lengths it goes to give them an unfair leg-up (link)
• A study has shown that "serving in office almost doubled the wealth of Conservative MPs but had no discernible financial benefits for Labour MPs" (link)
• An introduction to map projections (link)
• Where did Christmas come from? Almost everywhere, which is why it seems to have someting for everyone (link)
• The delightfully improbable story of an eccentric Spanish monk who single-handedly build a vast cathedral from scrap before dying last month (link)
• The Book of Veles is fake, and that's the truth (link)
• With Christmas gifts, it's not the receiving but the giving. An economic perspective (link)
• "Data cannot be owned, but must be governed." On data coalitions (link)
• "Why social scientists still need data on sex – not only gender identity" (link)
• "China's state-linked influence operations get very little engagement on Twitter." Well, some of them at least (link)
• "Bag salad is evil" (link)
• On Theo Jansen's strandbeests – wooden, wind-powered, almost-alive marvels of imagination and engineering (link)
• "Rest is not idleness" (link)
• The meaning of fMRI (link)
• "Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat [to US democracy] is real... They are making a grievous mistake" (link)
• Jack Dorsey embodies "the disconnect between... lofty ideals for social media and the toxic discourse it creates" (link)
• Ars sine scientia nihil est. Discuss (link)
• "[T]he difference in effect size between an intra-articular placebo and an oral placebo is sometimes larger than the difference in effect size between active pain relief drugs and oral placebo" (link)
• "Women's relative earnings increase 4% when their manager becomes the father of a daughter, rather than a son" (link)
• "Even if I court disaster like an egg against stone or a moth to a flame, I will tell the truth about you and me" – Peng Shuai (link)
• A reminder that Lewis Hamilton is not only a superb racing driver, but also a good human being (link1, link2)

November

• "I am a law professor who thinks a lot about digital property and about decentralized systems, and I think the idea that NFTs are about to revolutionize property law misunderstands how property law actually works." Sense at last! (link)
• "I surveyed many people who had played Russian roulette. Seems like the probability of dying is actually 0%" (link)
• Everyone should have the vote, including six-year-olds. Very well argued (link)
• "How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation" (link)
• "What if Xi Jinping just isn't that competent?" His successes are mostly inherited, while his losses are self-inflicted. Thanks to its self-appointed leader-for-life, China is on track to become a vast middle-income pariah (link)
• "Redesigning streets away from cars raises the standard of living, accessibility, and environmental sustainability." Just look at Amsterdam – which back in the 1970s evidently resembled London in the 2020s (link)
• "First steps to getting started in open source research" – by Bellingcat (link)
• The The EU's expert group on AI is dominated by industry (link)
• "Singapore is often rendered as an aspiring techno-utopia." It's more like a country-sized Amazon warehouse (link1, link2)
• "It's less that the social fabric has grown frayed, its edges unravelling, than that the so-called social fabric is now manufactured, for profit, by monopolistic businesses, a cheap, throwaway fake" – Jill Lepore (link)
• "If we all choose the fastest mode of travel in a city, the whole city gets slower." The tragedy of the commons for commuters (link)
• "[T]he government must prove its encryption plans work—or abandon them." That'll be the latter then (link)
• If you think US politics is a mess, you ain't seen nothing yet. (IMHO, America is currently heading for Civil War II within this decade) (link)
• "[P]redictive text probably isn't saving you time – and could be slowing you down", say researchers. This chimes with my experience, so I've disabled Auto-Correct on my iPhone by way of an experiment (link)
• "Creating dangerous viruses in the lab is a bad way to guard against future pandemics." Seems obvious when put that way, but definitely runs counter to scientific orthodoxy (link)
• "It's one thing when the Internet monopolists are ruled by cute freedom-loving nerds with solid life principles. It is completely different when the people in charge of them are both cowardly and greedy... Standing in front of the huge screens, they tell us about 'making the world a better place,' but on the inside they are liars and hypocrites" – Alexi Navalny (link)
• The term 'genius' is overused, but when it comes to John von Neumann, no other word will do (link)
• #WhereIsPengShuai (link)
• A thorough meta-analysis suggests that Ivermectin actually works – as a de-wormer (link)
• Transport systems have had more than enough crude utilitarianism, it's time to boost their romantic side (link)
• Stable pseudonyms create a more civil online environment than real user names (link)
• For the first time in our history, humans have become a predominantly urban species. We should embrace the organic nature of our cities (link)
• The debate over Covid passes is a question about the limits of freedoms, not discrimination (link)
• Self-serving sleaze is the least of the UK government's crimes against democracy (link1, link2)
• Consultancies regularly serve direct competitors and somehow get away with it. But can they do the same with antagonistic states? #SelfRegulationDoesntWork (link)
• Compared to the Founding Fathers, George III was a paragon of virtue (link)
• "The term 'Metaverse', like the term 'Meritocracy', was coined in a scifi dystopia novel written as cautionary tale, and then enthusiastically adopted by an elite that craved what was meant to inspire horror" (link)
• Sailing ships offer a greener way to move cargo around the world, but making them fit for the modern age is easier said than done (link)
• Nearly 50 years ago, Lewis Mumford described the "magnificent bribe" that technology offers in order to ensnare us (link)
• Deer are a reservoir of coronavirus (link)
• Twenty-five years on from 'Transgressing the Boundaries', postmodern academic bullshit is as pervasive as ever (link)
• Planetary sapience (link)
• Debates about globalisation have been dominated by 'hedgehogs'. "It is time for a more foxy approach" (link)
• What would dogs do without humans? Flourish, probably (link)
• On judicial execution, US style: "Putting down animals is done better. Much better" (link)
• The Periodic Table of Ethics (link)
• Warren Buffett is evil. A legitimate argument, if overstated (link)
• "Get rid of your smartphone. Take back your life" (link)
• We know how Covid-19 ends – it's called endemicity – but have no coherent plan for how to get there. "[T]he U.S. is now running an uncontrolled experiment with every strategy all at once." (link)
• GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 sign up for AWS (link)
• SubmarineCableMap.com (link)
• To see just how much we've lost control of our online personas, take a look at the Lenna image – or don't, as you see fit (link)

October

• The case against longtermism (link)
• "Why do I study physics?" (3-min-14-sec video, and that's no coincidence; link)
• Jocelyn Bell, science hero (16-min video; link)
• "We're in a Weimar moment in America." Shit-scary (link)
• The cosmopolitan global elite is neither cosmopolitan nor global, though it's certainly elitist (link)
• Hell is other people – on Twitter (link)
• What is a human language? Part of the answer lies inside a Kinder Surprise chocolate egg (link)
• "Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you'll be a mile from them, and you'll have their shoes" – Jack Handy (link)
• Facebook plans to build a 'metaverse', but what the hell is that and why would anyone want to visit it anyway? (link)
• "It's now widely accepted... that banks create money when they lend. But it seems to be much less widely known that they also create money when they spend." On a coffee machine, for example (link)
• The illiberal left is a fiction, argues Michael Hobbes. Overstates the case, IMHO, but an interesting corrective all the same (link)
• Beware: data-driven governance has limits (link)
• "[P]eople who engage in 'workplace Internet leisure browsing' are about 9 percent more productive than those who don't" (link)
• What would anyone get paid to study water? Here are five open questions for starters (link)
• Vaccine lotteries in the US have failed to increase take-up rates (link)
• Changing our clocks twice a year is a completely stupid idea that should be scrapped. In the meantime, at least it inspired these interesting visualisations (link)
• "In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be" – Franz Liszt (link)
• The economy "used to be productive, now it's just extractive". Sadly true (link)
• The 'metaverse' "is not a world in a headset but a fantasy of power" (link)
• The internet encourages us to talk more and more to vast numbers of people. We seem to have forgotten that in social discourse, less is more (link)
• "Public attitudes towards offensive language on TV and radio". A quick reference guide from Ofcom and Ipsos MORI. NSFW, natch (link)
• Is self-awareness 'just' theory of mind directed at ourselves? (link)
• "A recent poll finds that 39% of young people 'feel uncertain' about having children because of climate change." They shouldn't (link)
• 'Standard' English isn't the only form with grammatical rules, doesn't reflect improved cognition on the part of the speaker, and isn't even a unitary thing. Apart from that, it's proponents may have a point (link)
• "Buckle Up Twitter will not be vanquished by things like 'historical accuracy' or 'profound embarrassment'." At least it inspires hilarious blog posts (link)
• On so-called careers: "You devote the bulk of every day for 30-40 years in the prime of your life to various companies to make them and their shareholders money and then you get ten years near the end of your life to do what you please. Sounds like a bad arrangement." Yep (link)
• On the day when New York fell victim to "a drunk, racist lynch mob storming City Hall and coming... to get themselves a n-----". It was 1992 and the crowd was composed of off-duty police officers, egged on by Rudy Giuliani. Jaw-dropping (link)
• In Russia (as elsewhere), Google and Apple put shareholder returns before democracy (link)
• "Fitting in is human: forcing someone to fit in is oppression" (link)
• The American right's war on Roe v Wade is inspiring a backlash. Good if true (link)
• By limiting low-skill immigration, the government is condemning Britons to take on the resulting low-skill vacancies, even if they're slightly better paid. In what way is this 'levelling up'? (link)
• "To make social structures more equal, we can't blind ourselves to genetics" (link)
• "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea" – attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (link)
• "As powerful as platforms are, they are neither omniscient nor omnipotent." This is true: I read it on Twitter (link)
• Up to August 2021, "there were 9 deaths in the UK that involved the [Covid] vaccine... of which 5 had the vaccine as the underlying cause." My maths is shaky, but I think that's less that the 137,000 deaths attributed to Covid itself (link)
• "[I]f people prefer traditional architecture by a large margin, how come we've stopped producing it?" (link)
• "Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone" (link)
• "Scientist Josiah Zayner is brilliant, daring, and may have incurred the wrath of more internet platforms than any person alive. Is America's most interesting person also its most censored?" (link)
• On 'genetic nurture': the genes that parents don't pass on to their children also matter (link)
• "Neurons in the mouse brain correlate with cryptocurrency price: a cautionary tale" (link)
• "[T] the modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity." You can say that again (link)
• "Alcohol prohibition failed so dismally, both in practice and in politics, that even the prohibitionists had to surrender." Will Texas's prohibition of abortion also turn out to be self-defeating? (link)
• How to lose friends and alienate people. On America's knee-jerk response to 9/11, with the emphasis on 'jerk' (link)
• China is dangerous not because it is ascendant, but because it is in decline (link)
• On the social and moral depravity of those most insidious of contrivances, the novel (shock!) and the library (horror!) (link)
• We can edit genes, but that doesn't mean we can end genetic disease (link)
• Is there a moral case for eugenics? Like it or not, the technology is here and people are using it (link)
• In experiments, 67% of men and 25% of the women opted to give themselves an electric shock rather than spend a short period of time alone with their thoughts (link)
• Despite claims to the contrary, lab-cultured meat won't be able to feed significant numbers of people (link)
• By 18th October, the US government could be in technical default (link)
• Insider trading is rife. Who knew? (link)

September

• On that downtrodden and victimised minority, Silicon Valley billionaires (link)
• Work-life balance is old hat. Welcome instead to hedonic-eudaimonic-experiential happiness (link)
• Bitcoin in El Salvador: "The system doesn't work, the currency crashed, and the public hates it." Apart from that, everything's going swimmingly (link)
• "If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried" – Billy Collins, Steven Wright, Homer Simpson or David Brent, depending on who you believe
• "[Y]oung children are being indoctrinated, bullied, and harassed by their fellow students and teachers for not falling into line". Troubling if true (link)
• Snowclone is the new cliche (link)
• Dead-internet theory (the idea that the online world is now devoid of humans and populated instead by bots) is patently absurd. But it raises the concerning – and valid – notion that it would be hard to tell the difference (link)
• How fluid dynamics helps us to understand disease transmission (link)
• Who made hyperlinks blue? A niche question, but an interesting one all the same (link)
• "[T]he messages I received throughout my career told me that I could only thrive if I somehow became less of myself." The central management failing of 99% of companies (link)
• The decision-making process of the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation (JCVI) has been "shambolic". Hard not to agree. In normal times, the precautionary principle means we err on the side of not giving medication if the direct benefits are marginal. In case you hadn't noticed, these aren't normal times (link)
• Not even Trump "could have done anything so spectacularly tacky, so profoundly deleterious to alliances" as Biden's "reckless, petulant, tin-eared, chaotic" Afghan withdrawal. A British veteran opines. Technically incorrect – Trump could easily have done the same or worse – but the sentiment is sound (link)
• "Google's new AI photo upscaling tech is jaw-dropping." Or 'rather impressive', as we say here in Britain (link)
• "[T]he Law Of Rationalist Irony: the smugger you feel about having caught a bias in someone else, the more likely you are falling victim to that bias right now, in whatever way would be most embarrassing." We would all do well to apply this rule, including to debunking stories that claim to be using it #meta (link)
• Are the purported health benefits of 'light' water complete bunk? Almost certainly (link)
• "We don't drink contaminated water. Why do we tolerate breathing contaminated air?" (link)

August

• Admirably thorough explanation of musical scales and their wonderful imperfections, notably the Pythagorean, Ptolemaic and syntonic commas (link)
• "You probably already have at least a couple of femurs around the house. However, it is usually best to find one for which the original owner no longer has any use. This can be something of a challenge." A step-by-step guide to making a kangling, a Buddhist trumpet made from a human thigh-bone. Horrifyingly hilarious – or should that be hilariously horrifying? (link)
• "We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We'll do it responsibly, deliberately and safely. And we will do it in full co-ordination with our allies and partners" – Joe Biden, April 2021. Yeah, right (link)
• Lewis is right (as usual). It was a difficult day, but FFS F1, don't run two laps behind the safety car and then call it a result. It literally, objectively wasn't a race (link)
• What's in a name? Quite a lot actually, espcially if yours doesn't sound terribly English (link)
• 'Doctor' and 'professor' are just job titles like any other, so let's stop using them as honorific titles (link)
• "Why do so many think that pixels are little squares?" They're actually mind-bogglingly clever zero-dimensional mathematical entities (link)
• Hey Google, don't be evil. Oh no, too late (link)
• Macbeth feels creepy in part because of its overuse of the definite article (link)
• The deposed ex-president of Afghanistan "has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and is the co-author of a book literally called 'Fixing Failed States'." Whatever happened to experts' ability to understand and affect the world? (link)
• "A lost war is ending much as it began 20 years ago, with a gruesome terrorist attack targeting Americans." What a relief that the US is no longer led by a delusional incompetent 😟 (link)
• A YouTube 'landlord influencer' with a history of elf-related-misadventures is in with a shot of becoming governor of California. Perhaps you could be too (link)
• "Unpopular ideas about social norms." Merely listed, not condoned. I could see myself getting behind up to half of them, though I won't say which half :) (link)
• David Patreus on the "epidemic of surrender" in Afghanistan (link)
• "China passes strict data privacy law protecting personal data". WTF (link)
• "The charity that teaches underprivileged kids to humanely hunt their next meal" (10-min video; link)
• "Apple's NeuralHash algorithm has been reverse-engineered". Well that didn't take long (link)
• Bicameral democracy has many well-documented problems. "So why stop at two?" On the potential benefits of having three (or more) chambers of legislators (link)
• "Joe Biden has bad judgment." Understatement of the decade (link; see also this)
• America's back... erm... is against the wall. Shame on Biden (8-min video; link)
• The effort to develop Covid vaccines is widely recognised as a technological triumph. In contrast, the effort to create diagnostic AI for Covid is a widely overlooked mess (link)
• Robots aren't doing us out of jobs, they're creating jobs – for disabled people (link)
• "We find that AI/ML researchers place high levels of trust in international organizations and scientific organizations to shape the development and use of AI in the public interest; moderate trust in most Western tech companies; and low trust in national militaries, Chinese tech companies, and Facebook." Ouch! (link)
• "[T]he first thing we see isn't whether something is true or not, and then decide whether it's good for us. We do the opposite: We first filter for what's good for us, and then filter for truth". Debatable, but interesting (link)
• "The case against the concept of biodiversity" (link)
• "We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn" – Mary Catherine Bateson
• "Apple's plan to 'Think Different' about encryption opens a backdoor to your private life" (link)
• "[A] tribute to Thomas 'Blind Tom' Wiggins, slave pianist and autistic savant." Truly remarkable (link)
• "How ad tech data was used to oust a senior Catholic cleric, and how most anyone can do the same" (link)

July

• AI can determine a patient's racial identity with almost perfect precision from X-ray and CT scans that don't contain any information about their skin colour, and even when it's strictly irrelevant to the task at hand. We don't yet know how they manage to do this – human experts can't – and we're only just beginning to think through the social and ethical implications (link)
• "[W]e have learned that QE is easier to start than stop", due largely to the fear of speculator tantrums. On the desperate need to replace our dysfunctional financial system (link)
• The strong desire of some business leaders to return to the office says more about the shortcomings of managers than anything about workers (link)
• Amanda Knox on her unwelcome infamy and those who would cash in on it (link)
• Does reporting on history violate Instagram's community standards? Yes, apparently (link)
• What you get when you stage a huge international sporting event in the midst of a global pandemic. Who knew? (link)
• Governments tax not just our money but also our time. Tell me about it. In the first year for which I filed a US tax return, I spent much longer sorting out my federal and state tax than actually working at my admittedly very part-time job (link)
• One way to persuade Trump supporters to get vaccinated might be to convince them that the anti-vax movement is a Democratic conspiracy. Interesting thought and tongue in cheek, obviously, but for the avoidance of doubt, making people believe something that's not true is almost always a bad idea even if done in pursuit of a noble cause (link)
• Japan is good at lots of things. International diplomacy isn't one of them (link)
• Be like Socrates: Go into debates not to change others' opinions, but to seek reasons to change our own mind. (This is why traditional debating is corrosive and almost all political arguments are sterile.) (link)
• Woke D&D – because orcs have feelings too (link)
• A rags to riches story feels happy in a way that a riches to rags one doesn't. But they both include the same proportions of pleasure and suffering, so why do we prefer one to the other? (link)
• "[I]t is right to say that policy decisions have to balance scientific advice with other factors", but that "presupposes a morally serious government" that isn't just playing party politics. Rue Britannia (link; see also this)
• By using their control of counter-majoritarian institutions (like the Senate) and deploying 'constitutional hardball', US Republicans are putting themselves in a strong position to steal future elections (link)
• "We should neither ignore nor forget the Uyghurs, even if we cannot save them" (link)
• The power of the first spreadsheet program was that "[a]ny idiot could use it. And goodness, we did". Tim Harford on the dangers – and deaths – that can result from Excel errors (link)
• "We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary" (link)
• "Why do golf courses still exist?" Good question (link; see also this)
• "Unique IDs linked to phones are supposed to be anonymous. But there's an entire industry that links them to real people and their address" (link)
• If evolution has a pinnacle, it might be not humans, but plants (link)
• "[W]hen the opening ceremony commences, on Friday, the [Olympic] Games will become a collective nightmare" (link)
• Governments, among others, are falling for AI hype (link)
• "[I]ncreased data visibility shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as increased data literacy." Indeed (link)
• If the law against punching other people were repealed, would you start doing it? Well, it's similar with wearing masks (link)
• Social constructs deconstructed. That rare combination: funny and deep (24-min video; link)
• Five favourite books, recommended by Philip Pullman (link)
• "Master's degrees are the second biggest scam in [US] higher education" (link)
• "Targeted ads isolate and divide us even when they''re not political" (link)
• "The International Olympic Committee gets the gold for greed" My tip: actively avoid spending money with any Olympic sponsor or advertiser (link)
• 'Cat Person' was a piece of fiction. Or was it? (link)
• "Surely we can do better than Elon Musk" – or does the undeniable foresight and zeal necessarily come with Trump levels of trigger-happy idiocy? (link)
• Is 'Oumuamua' an interstellar rock or a sign of alien life? Some scientists appear to literally be going crazy over this question (link)
• Luxury surveillance (n): Surveillance for which the subject happily pays. Examples include Apple Watch, US Global Entry, Amazon Prime and employee wellness programmes (link)
• "Mainstream economics ignores the massive government interventions that 'free market' capitalism requires." On the Champagne Socialist Republic of America (link)
• A reminder that, for all the admirable qualities of the current England football team, their so-called supporters still include a disproportionate number of complete wankers (link)
• "Twitter did something that I would not have thought possible: It stole reading from me. What is it stealing from you?" (link)
• Our attitudes towards disability and old age are inconsistent; something has to give (link)
• The allocation of research funds is slow, unimaginative and stifling. There is a better way (link)
• The ultra-capitalist-sounding idea that people are 'resources' and that managing them is akin to tuning a machine can be traced back to a Soviet coalminer (link)
• Bezos and Musk aren't the only ones with their own private space programmes. Meet Ky 'Rocketman' Michaelson (5 -min video; link)
• More Americans than ever before are leaving their jobs. Is this a new age of employee assertiveness or just a statistical blip? (link)
• "The Internet is rotting" – by Jonathan Zittrain (link)
• "[T]he issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm" – Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 1998 (link)

June

• Multytude: social media that's actually social (link)
• That letter, by Gareth Southgate (link)
• Should our morals be based on rules or on outcomes? Both (link)
• "It would be a hugely damaging capitulation to the distortions wrought by big tech to adopt their anaemic understanding of ethics as essentially self-regulation, at best, or corporate PR, at worst." Indeed (link)
• The so-called 'sausage war' is actually a battle over international order versus chaos (link)
• 32,000-year-old animated stories (link)
• "I have a small bottle of hand sanitizer in my pocket. Nothing else. No money, no passport, no cellphone, no debit cards, no food, no water." On fleeing Venezuela (link)
• On the barbarous, beatific French practice of eating ortolans (link)
• "The classicist who killed Homer" (link)
• How humans discovered the colour violet in about 1860 (link)
• We're all vaccine-hesitant, only our criteria vary (link)
• Enid Blyton's universe provides a "scale model of the Empire, sized down for children" – aka Brexitland (link)
• The backlash to the Covid lab-leak hypothesis is in full flow. (The truth, folks, is that we simply don't know. Anyone taking clear sides on this question either has an axe to grind or doesn't understand genetics, science and the media) (1|2|3)
• On "[t]he whistleblowing scientist who advanced the lab-leak theory" (link)
• Amazon Prime (n): A curious scheme in which consumers pay an annual fee in order to compromise their privacy and reduce choice (link)
• "[C]ontemporary meme activism is performative, simplistic, and used as a tool to silence dissent." We can do better (link)
• The Tse illusion (link)
• "Planetary-scale facial recognition is now a solved problem, and it's here to stay." Remarkable interactive documentary-cum-essay (link)
• Countries with proportional representation have greater numbers of political parties and are less polarised. It's time for the US and UK to rethink their democracies (link)
• "Are plants animals like any other?" (link)
• Silicon Valley has become a self-appointed arbiter of scientific debate (link)
• A central American country with a corrupt, impulsive, authoritarian leader rams through a law that makes Bitcoin legal tender without much thought and even less debate. What coud possibly go wrong? (link)
• As software eats the world, Silicon Valley is disappearing up its own arse. On Andreessen Horowitz (link)
• "Why People Fall For Conspiracy Theories" – from FiveThirtyEight (link)
• America's private schools – prejudice on stilts (link)
• "UK government plans to collect and share NHS data are hugely concerning." I'm opting out (link)
• The case against the Covid-19 lab leak hypothesis (link)
• "Photos of California's historic drought." Wow (link)
• Commuting has upsides too (link)
• Book-editing by Twitter – once again, reality trumps satire (link)
• "15 universities have formed a company that looks a lot like a patent troll" (link)
• "Are fingertip pulse oximeters racist?" In a sense, yes (link)
• How Warren Buffett manages to pay a US federal income tax rate of 0.1% (link)
• Amid the crypto craziness, "something odd happened: Bitcoin completely lost its original reason for being" (link)
• The next GameStop is already here. It's called Tesla (link)
• "Ohio Attorney General files lawsuit to declare Google a public utility" (link)
• The G7 agreement on taxing multinational companies is transformational – it's going to "transform the techniques of tax avoidance, and give rise to a whole new suite of tax avoidance schemes" (link)
• "The powerful do not want to pay taxes." And Britain would like to help them (link)
• Google and others are eating telcos' lunch. The incumbents have three options: innovate, milk their legacy businesses or become niche players (link)
• "Wild animals only make up 4% of the world's mammals; humans account for 34%, and our livestock for 62%" (link)
• "[C]ontrary to popular mythology, most of the [US] founders did not intend to create a democracy." On America's "fragile union" (link)
• The Renaissance has never existed except in people's minds (link)
• In a highly competitive field, James Wild, a Conservative parliamentarian, can lay claim to "the stupidest question ever asked by an MP" – one that betrays the shrinking self-esteem of an increasingly nasty nation (link)
• "The truth is that an orchestra needs a music director slightly more than a fish needs a bicycle" (link)
• Your NHS data is about to be quietly shared with third parties – unless you follow their deliberately obscure and baroque process for opting out (link)
• If abortion is permitted for any reason, and is applied disproportionately to some kinds of foetuses over others, at what point does this amount to eugenics? (link)
• On the mental lives of insects and other commonly underestimated forms of life (link)
• "When athletes have direct access to fans via social-media platforms, what role should traditional sports media play?" A good, long-overdue question (link)

May

• Between the flakey wokeism of social media and stifling irrelevance of academic journals, economics is failing society (link)
• On the awesome orchestrion (9-min video; link)
• "The forces of money and power would certainly like us to forget all about this year and go back to exactly the way things were" – but many of us are past that now (link)
• "Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbours" (link)
• "Why everyone hates think tanks" – and what to do about it (link)
• "In dismissing the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab, journalists betrayed their mission to seek the truth" (link)
• "What pornography is to sex, social media platforms are to our intrinsic appetite for socialising" (link)
• "US soldiers... have been using publicly visible flashcard learning apps — inadvertently revealing a multitude of sensitive security protocols about US nuclear weapons and the bases at which they are stored" (link)
• Whether or not the Covid-19 lab-leak hypothesis is true, we should act as if it is (link)
• "Bitcoin and Ethereum are dead." Finally, someone coherent on crypto (link, follow-up)
• "After getting access to [Huawei's] HarmonyOS through a grossly invasive sign-up process, firing up the SDK and emulator, and poring over the developer documents, I can't come to any other conclusion: HarmonyOS is essentially an Android fork" (link)
• "'I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,' state Rep. David Lewis, a Republican and chairman of North Carolina's redistricting committee, said in 2016. 'So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country.'" Democracy, US style (link)
• W.F.N.H. (link)
• "The benefits of [SpaceX's] Starship for both robotic and human exploration are hard to overstate" (link)
• "[Humanity] moved from having two types of food (plants and animals) to being overwhelmed by a new third type – one that was 'more akin to poison.' These 'engineered edible substances, barely recognizable as products of the earth, are commonly called junk.'" (link)
• The Journal of Controversial Ideas is "the first open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal specifically created to promote free inquiry on controversial topics" (link)
• "Cryptocurrency in 2021: still dysfunctional nonsense, unusable by normal humans" (link)
• "[A] book is a machine to think with" – I.A. Richards (link)
• "Straightness Studies" – a refreshingly clear-eyed account of human sexuality (link)
• "Is God a liberal?" A curious question with a surprising answer (link)
• "I argue for a vision of social computing that considers cognition and communication – computation and networking – between any combination of humans, machines and other agents". Computational social science – indeed, computation itself – reimagined (link)
• A tale of tapeworms in ants provides an striking real-life parable of human inequality (link)
• "The Pret Index... shows that bankers, corporate lawyers and asset managers are slowly repopulating central London" (link)
• Odd though it may seem given their public stance on privacy, the next online advertising behemoth just might be Apple (link)
• Dances with Whales (13-min video; link)
• Philosophy is usually seen as too difficult for children. That says a lot about our attitudes to both philosophy and children; they are in fact naturals (link)
• "Would the maker of a hammer boast about how long his customers spent using it?" What we've got wrong about tech, and what we can learn about it from the Amish (link)
• Tony Blair may be washed up as a politician, but not as a political thinker. His diagnosis of the left's chronic intellectual stupor is pretty much on the money (link)
• "The 60-year-old scientific screwup that helped Covid kill". On the deadly distinction between droplets and aerosols (link)
• "In a democracy, it is for the voters to decide who governs; it is not for the government to decide who votes." Well said (link)
• Around the world, human fertility is falling (link)
• "The world's farmers produce more than enough to feed the world, and yet people still starve. Why?" Subsidies to farmers in rich countries have a lot to do with it (link)
• FWEET: Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury. (Pronounced 'sweet', but with a lisp, of course.) (link)
• "Call it bibliomancy or plain old Joyce-induced madness but it's certainly fun to spend time with a book that appears to take an interest in your personal life." On the pleasures, peculiarities and premonitions of Finnegans Wake (link)
• In predicting outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic, "experts were more accurate and less overconfident than laypeople, but still less accurate and more overconfident than we might hope" (link)
• No one yet knows for sure whether SARS-CoV-2 sprang from nature or a lab, but the current balance of evidence favours the latter theory. Science may yet end up as the world's Covid-19 villain as well as its saviour (link)
• Cancel the Olympics (link)
• On Japan's vaccine fail (link)
• Google's "new routing algorithm, designed to reduce carbon emissions, is not the way to stop climate change". Beware geeks bearing virtue-optimising algorithms (link)
• "[T]he scars on my body act as a constant reminder of why I have turned from scholarship on animals to agitating for animals and for our compassionate treatment of them." (link)
• "I feel like me as a person is not present." On avoidant personality disorder (link)
• "Sometimes, when the night terrors relent, I wonder whether distance from mortal danger adds gravity to one's moral responsibility." Astonishing account of the life and work of a military legal advisor (link)
• "Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think" – Niels Bohr (link)
• The increasing sophistication of weather forecasting apps only makes them more useless (link)
• #ModiMustResign (link)
• Media mawkishness following the Duke of Edinburgh's death obscured the fact that the monarchy itself may be on its last legs (link)
• DHH demonstrates once again why he's not only one of the world's finest technologists, but also among its most interesting managers (link)
• How to be a Silicon Valley intellectual: "'Write like you talk,' Paul Graham once said, but he forgot to add: 'And talk like an asshole.'" Hilarious. If only it weren't so true (link)
• Disagree more, disagree better (link)
• Making movies in colours that exist only inside viewers' minds (link)

April

• "Double-Irish sounds like an interesting whiskey variant, but as a tax system, it's a complete and total disaster that is stripping governments of monies across the globe" (link)
• "Hackers used to be humans. Soon, AIs will hack humanity." There's no 'soon' about it: AI has already hacked humanity. How do we think it came into existence? (link)
• "Whether it is Trump tweeting about forts he'd never heard of or Johnson warning against the removal of statues, they are confusing history with mythology." A good point well made (link)
• There aren't enough trees in the world to offset human carbon emissions – and there never will be (link)
• What should one do, as a white teacher, when an ethnic-minority pupil says something overtly racist? (link)
• Substack: another step in the Great Unbundling of media (link)
• The hackers – specifically, Cellebrite – have been hacked (link)
• Consumer technology is built mostly by men, but voiced overwhelmingly by women (link)
• "Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration." Something of an insult to Disneyland, I feel (link)
• "Most companies aren't going 100% remote. But when we return to the office, we will want less space that is more flexible". One consequence: "We might Work" (link)
• Anything can be turned into a financial derivative, even people. Introducing the Ponzi career (link)
• The path from politician to shill is well-trodden (right, Tony, Dave and George?). But Gordon Brown, entitled and somewhat inept though he was in office, is shaping up to be Britain's greatest ex-prime minister (link)
• "Uwaa: the [Japanese] sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken" (link)
• Philosopher AI: Write along with GPT-3 (link)
• Nightmares aren't just things that happen to us, they're experiences we can control. On dream engineering (link)
• Why Amazon's obsessive focus on consumers could end up being bad for both Amazon and consumers, by Tim O'Reilly (link)
• A global minumum tax rate is a fine idea in theory. The real world is a different matter (link)
• "Can't Get You Out of My Head" – and it's true, I really can't (8 hours of Curtis-style video, and worth every second; link)
• "Students' test scores and racial demographics dominate our public debates, but ultimately matter less than the implicit moral ideal towards which our institutions teach them to aspire" (link)
• "Amid a global disaster, every major drug company is fighting tooth and nail to avoid opening up its patents." The pandemic has provided a PR coup for big pharma, but their contribution to global health remains questionable (link)
• "If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue" (link)
• "Instead of a code encrypted in the wiring of our neurons, could consciousness reside in the brain's electromagnetic field?" Probably not, but it's an interesting idea (link)
• The human retina transmits data at roughly the rate of an Ethernet connection (link)
• "[A]s of 2019, more money is invested in passive funds than in active funds in the United States." That might not be a good thing (link)
• "Trust in tech craters" – especially in the US (link)
• For five years, Tesla has promised fully autonomous driving, charging US customers $10k for the option. Trouble is, it's still vapourware (link)
• "The Crypto Social Network is Here. Meet BitClout" <sigh> (link)
• I try never to link to, or even read, clickbaity articles with a number in the title. But just this once I'll make an exception – for the top 25 Muppets, as chosen by NPR listeners (link)
• Travis Kalanick's new ruse: fast-food restaurants that don't actually exist (link)
• The free-software movement no longer serves any useful purpose (link)
• We've long assumed that a stark dividing line between animals and plants is that only animals can think. Well, think again (link)
• The combined net assets of Premier League football clubs is about £2.5bn. Those of all the lower leagues added together is about -£400m. In the wake of Covid-19, the biggest clubs are now trying to exploit this fact to consolidate their control over the whole system (link)
• The idea that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab is one Covid-related conspiracy theory that might not be completely crazy (link)
• "[W]hen someone buys an NFT, they're not buying the actual digital artwork; they're buying a link to it. And worse, they're buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that's likely to fail within a few years." (link | examples)
• Playing cello on a mountaintop – Prelude to Bach's Cello Suite No. 1, natch (8-min video; link)
• Interesting to see just how different two reviews of the same book can be. On Michael Sandel's 'The Tyranny of Merit': sublime | ridiculous
• Amazon's move into Twitter shitposting is a reminder that "although companies have basically become people in our lives, those people might very well be assholes" (link)
• Who is more deluded, QAnon adherents or the Davos set? It's a close call (link)
• Businesses in Florida may ban guns from their parking lots only if they use fireworks on the premises. Hilarious if it wasn't a symptom of a much deeper political malaise – one in which old-fashioned property rights are now denounced with the oxymoronic (and plain moronic) label, "corporate communism" (link)
• "US higher ed has morphed into a corrupt enforcer of the caste system. It has enjoyed 30 years of tuition increases matched only by the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of its leadership. Covid-19 is the fist of stone coming for this chin." (link)
• We appear to be shifting from a world in which companies demand that employees show up at the office to one in which employees demand to be let in (link)
• When experts lie (link)
• "Why machine learning struggles with causality" (link)
• Not just for Covid – mRNA may finally be about to change the world (link)

March

• Even machine learning suffers from 'teaching to the test' (link)
• "Zero-click Google searches rose to nearly 65% in 2020." In other words, Google used to reciprocate by sending traffic to the websites from which it extracted information, but not so much anymore (link)
• "Extraordinary and revealing" seems about right: Amazon is now conducting pugilistic PR by tweet. So monumentally wrongheaded that it's hard to know where to start, so I won't (link)
• "Why you shouldn't use Google Chrome" (link)
• In light of Covid-19, "[w]hat else do we think we're prepared for, but really aren't?" Solar storms, which at some point will cause power cuts, communication blackouts and falling satellites. Seriously (link)
• What critics of tech get wrong (link)
• "Scientists can implant false memories — and reverse them" (link)
• Social media isn't so much about conversation as imitation. Enter the contrarians (link)
• "[D]igital technology has ushered in... not only hell, but also an extremely mediocre hell" (link)
• Just because the lockdown rules have worked, that's no reason to overlook "the cavalier and incomprehensible way in which they were made" (link)
• On DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Like almost everything crypto, they appear to be a solution in search of a problem, or possibly a scam in search of the gullible. OTOH, this just might turn out to be a welcome alternative to the current shareholder-capitalist model, which has some very obvious flaws (link)
• Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (link)
• The Rite of Spring, lockdown style (5-min video; link)
• The Murdochs get their money, Google and Facebook keep their monopolies. So everyone's happy. Well, everyone except the rest of us (link)
• On "the increasingly fraught dynamic between tech companies and academics" (link)
• "What has Covid-19 taught us about remote work?" (link)
• On the launch of Wikimedia Enterprise: "Wikipedia is finally asking big tech to pay up" (link)
• Could alien life be so advanced as to be indistinguishable from the laws of physics? (link)
• What's an algorithm? It's complicated (link)
• The new rules of speculation: contingency, irony and solidarity. Oh yeah, and YOLO ZIRP SWAG (link)
• The problems with pronouns (link)
• "Zoom Escaper is a tool to help you escape Zoom meetings and other videoconferencing scenarios. It allows you to self-sabotage your audio stream, making your presence unbearable to others" (link)
• A touching celebration of Japanese women in art, literature and life (link)
• Amazon has many things, but cool design isn't one of them (link)
• The pandemic provides no excuse for delaying the 2021 census. On the contrary, it's all the more important, and should become more frequent (link)
• "There can be no right of speech where any man... is overawed by force and compelled to suppress their honest sentiments" – Frederick Douglass (link)
• Martin Rees on cryonics: "I'd rather end my days in an English churchyard than an American refrigerator" (link)
• Obama-era US competition regulators were asleep at the wheel and Google is grateful (link)
• Amazon has quietly built an advertising business that may be raking in $20bn a year and growing (link)
• Moving house – literally (2.5-min video; link)
• "[T]he invention of the computer did not so much revolutionize bureaucracy as perfect it". On texts, technology and tyranny. Terrific (link)
• Should we take reported deathbed regrets seriously. Or to put it philosophically, are they epistemically privileged? In a word, no (link)
• "It would be awfully convenient... if terrible men were terrible at everything, even mathematics" – but life's more complicated than that. On reclaiming social genetics from the eugenicists who founded it (link)
• Correlation is causation after all (link)
• Fukushima, 10 years on (link)
• "It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue" – Stephen Fry (it's true)
• "How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you" (link)
• Swapping user tracking for user profiling isn't necessarily progress. "If Google actually wants to shift the national conversation on consumer privacy, then it should start by clarifying what they think 'privacy' actually means." Well said (link1 link2 link3)
• "Reluctance to discuss controversial topics increased in [US] college classrooms from 2019 to 2020" – according to a Heterodox Academy survey (link)
• Banksy meets blockchain – NFT insanity taken to its illogical conclusion (link)
• The Joy of Painting, with Banksy (3-min video; link)
• "It is a paradox of our time that the more Americans learn to tolerate difference, the less they are able to tolerate indifference. But it is precisely the right to indifference that we must assert now." Masterful (link)
• The genetics of sexuality is much more complicated that we had previously assumed – which should come as no surprise to anyone who's actually studied genetics (link)
• On the 'art crypto market' – ie, art-market nonsense on blockchain stilts (link)
• "[A]n epidemic of self-censorship is threatening democracy" (link)
• The role of British prime minister has become associated with ineptitude. Is this due to the incumbents or to the job itself? (link)
• "Tim Wu is joining the Biden administration as an adviser on technology and competition." Be nervous, big tech (link)
• Initial results from a Universal Basic Income experiment in California (link)
• The ever-expanding ambit of human rights does not strengthen them, it only dilutes (link)
• "Can a robot pray?" And is this even a meaningful question? (link)
• "[Alexei] Navalny showed a rare kind of determination and bravery – rare, but not unique." On some of the world's other Navalnys (link)

February

• "Two Sexes. Infinite Genders." A meditation on masculinity in all its infinite variety (link)
• The best analogy for Republicanism under Trump is not Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia, but the waning days of the Soviet Union under the "utterly mediocre" Leonid Brezhnev (link)
• The legal system has sometimes paid far too much attention to neuroscience (link)
• Is Betteridge's law true? (link)
• "It has taken London an astonishingly long time to start thinking seriously about the break-up of Britain." Andrew Marr on the imperilled state of the Union (link)
• Accusers of "faux violence" call (correctly) for us to take care over the way we use words, but in doing so they break this very rule (link)
• "I can describe what I do in six words: I fix the horrifying AWS bill" – Corey Quinn, cloud economist. I have to say, whoever designs AWS makes the creators of national tax systems look like Jony Ive (link)
• What Google gets wrong with the people and companies it acquires, by the former CEO of Waze (link)
• "[T]he need to create a Nobel War Prize to match the Nobel Peace Prize is quite pressing." In fact, couldn't we just rebrand the current one as the War-and-Peace Prize and be done with it? (link)
• Finding virtue in the virtual (link)
• Who's rewriting history now? Entertaining and insightful (link)
• The bill for bigness "has suddenly come due". And not before time (link)
• Robinhood, the infinity squeeze and how GameStop nearly brought the financial system to its knees (link)
• (link)
• On Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner, by Alexei the Utter Legend (link)
• Epidemic -> pandemic -> endemic (link)
• Have we gone from over-hyping tech to over-criticising it? Perhaps (link)
• "Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts" (link)
• "If work is going remote, why is Big Tech still building?" Good question (link)
• "The case for opsimaths" – late bloomers to you and me (link)
• What building renovation could possibly cost £12 billion? Welcome to Westminster (link)
• "[W]hen we say 'Everyone benefits from diversity,' we are, in truth, saying 'Everyone benefits from inequality.'" Highly dependent on exactly what we mean by 'diversity' and 'inequality', but thought-provoking (link)
• Is Apple an internet freedom fighter or totalitarian tyrant? (defence | prosecution)
• "This individualistic model of privacy is simply not up to the task of regulating the modern internet, where the implications of who gets to do what with our data are fundamentally collective." Very true (link)
• "The English soccer authorities suspended a foreign star for a racially offensive remark. It was nothing of the kind." Yet again, nuance and context bite the dust (link)
• Homebrew Covid vaccines (link)

January

• If there's anything more striking that the naive chutzpah of the GameStop day-traders, it's the cynical hypocrisy of their Wall Street critics. [My view: day-trading + web forums = huge scope for volatility and price manipulation; expect much more regulation, eventually] (link)
• "How an army of Reddit users massively inflated the price of a flailing video game chain – in no small part to stick it to Wall Street." Hard not to smile, though as the article says, "[i]t's not clear how the story ends." Badly for some, I'd wager (link)
• "30 minutes of relaxing visuals from studio Ghibli." 懐かしい。 (link)
• "If Twitter and Facebook are willing to deplatform a sitting U.S. president, why haven't Indian politicians faced any consequences?" A good question with many possible answers, all of them deeply unsettling (link)
• "Have we been overstating our confidence in the Dunning-Kruger effect?" Oh, the irony (link)
• QAnon adherents watching the presidential inauguration saw none of their prophecies come to pass. Naturally, this signalled yet deeper levels of conspiracy (link)
• "Facebook and Twitter are not a public sphere in any sense of the term... [they are] not dedicated to good faith argumentation; they make no commitment toward constructive discussion. This is an intentional design choice". Indeed: compare and contrast with Wikipedia (link)
• "An Oral History of Wikipedia" (link)
• Wikipedia holds unique place in the world of social software: a service that more or less lives up to its own hype (link)
• "Leaving the grace of this world" (link)
• Bitcoin isn't itself a fraud, but its current price appears to be built on one. A very, very big one (link)
• Male and female brains tend to differ, but androgynous brains appear to be the most effective (link)
• Scott Alexander is alive and well. His real name is Scott Siskind and he has a few apposite things to say about the media, especially the New York Times (link)
• "Should smartphone data be harnessed to track mental health?" (link)
• "The mathematical case against blaming people for their misfortune." The world is so complicated that the outcomes of our decisions are almost inevitably governed by luck (link)
• On nature and nurture: "Evolving populations are less like zombie mountaineers mindlessly climbing adaptive peaks, and more like industrious landscape designers, equipped with digging and building apparatuses, remodelling the topography to their own ends" (link)
• Twitter has posted a 'Civic integrity policy': "You may not use Twitter's services for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes..." (link)
• Monkeys at a tourist site in Bali steal non-food items from human visitors, then use these to barter for food. Impressively, they appear to understand the relative value of different items (link)
• Percentage of Americans who get their news from Facebook: 36%, YouTube: 23% and Twitter: 15% (link)
• "Global consumer spending in mobile apps reached a record $111 billion in 2020, up 30% from 2019" (link)
• In defence of journalistic 'bothsidesism' (link)
• "[T]he problem isn't Trump's Twitter account... in a sense, the problem appears to be Twitter. I'm pretty sure it's driving us insane" (link)
• We don't know if SARS-CoV-2 came from a wild animal or a lab, but the latter possibility isn't crazy. This raises wider questions about so-called gain-of-function research into potential human pathogens (link)
• "Notes on technology in the 2020s." Rose-tinted, but also well-informed and thought-provoking (link)
• On 16th-century social distancing and the origins of the word 'quarantine' (link)
• 1 sheet of paper + 50 hours + thousands of folds + 0 cuts or tears = 1 samurai (5-min video; link)
• "Post-truth is pre-fascism" – Timothy Snyder (link)
• "Companies like Facebook and YouTube, for good or ill, include content moderation as part of the service they provide... [but] companies [like Amazon] at the infrastructure layer should stay well out of it" – the EFF (link)
• "Trump's presidency can be described in many ways, but one accurate description is as a relentless, continuous war on professionals and professionalism" – as distinct from elitism, which has continued to thrive (link)
• The Oxford Internet Institute identified social media manipulation campaigns in 81 countries in 2020, up from 70 countries in 2019 (link)
• After years of consolidation, centralisation and land-grabbing by big tech, Ben Thompson foresees a return an open, federated Internet. Let's hope he's right (link)
• A new three-volume book replicates the the Sistine Chapel's frescoes at a scale of 1:1. A snip at £16,500 (complete with free book stand!) (link)
• "I thought you were just a regular, small-time criminal like my other clients, but you are a journalist and that is unacceptable." On Bellingcat's use of black-market personal data in its crusading investigations (link)
• "Mark Zuckerberg is what happens when you replace civics with computer science" (link)
• Xi Jinping is "ticking just about every box of what not to do to propel incomes and innovation." Is China headed for an economic downturn and political isolation? (link)
• "As an immigrant to this country, I would like to say a few words to my fellow Americans..." Arnie on the US crisis, Kristallnacht and courage (7.5-min video; link)
• "Covid improved how the world does science" Fewer papers, more openness and greater recognition for peer-reviewers would be good for research and the world, argues Tyler Cowen (link)
• Donald Trump, master storyteller, has played the media like a fine violin – and none of us could help but stop and listen (link)
• "A 25-year-old bet comes due: has tech destroyed society?" Will Kevin Kelly or Kirkpatrick Sale walk away $1,000 richer? It's a close call (link)
• The Five Factor Model of personality used in social psychology (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) isn't a falsifiable scientific concept. "'Replication' seems like a dignified term for asking the same questions in different ways." (link)
• The only rule at Facebook is that there are no rules, at least for those in power (link)
• The US Capitol rioters have been turfed out, but what did they take with them? (link)
• "'Send your WhatsApp data or lose the account' is Facebook's counter-punch to the upcoming iOS 14 privacy feature." Well, that's an easy decision: bye-bye, WhatsApp 👋 (link)
• The US Republican party "gave up on democracy a long time ago" (link)
• "What could stop an 'unhinged' US president from ordering a nuclear strike? Not a lot, it turns out" (link)
• Twitter permanently shuts down @realDonaldTrump – thus trying desperately to wash its hands of culpability after years of spreading and commercialising the bile. Much, much too little far, far too late, guys. If only Twitter – the ugly, Tourettic id of humanity – would now shut itself down (link)
• [A] tyrant is a man 'not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others' – Plato via Andrew Sullivan (link)
• "Schedule an impeachment vote for this very night. Stay 'til dawn. Do whatever is necessary. Avert any potential for martial law. Deny Trump command of the military; withdraw the nuclear codes." An American 'Funeral Blues' for our time (link)
• Historically oppressed groups are rightly against having the values of their oppressors imposed upon them, but the remedy for this should be to give everyone equal voice, not to create new hierarchies of privilege (link)
• World in Flames is a 1980s WWII board game with a playing time of anywhere between 2 and 100 hours [sic] (link)
• On the "conspiracy bootstrapping" being pursued by certain American politicians: "we are all Russians now" (link)
• Nowhere in Christian scripture is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan. So why does anyone believe in Hell? Two words: social control (link)
• How to read more books: start more books, quit most of them, read the great ones twice (link)

Podcasts

• Doomsday Watch: Mad Bad Sadist (link)
• The Good Fight: A black man and a Jew talk anti-racism (link)
• Mindscape: "Like bulldozing a forest to get the songbirds" (link)
• Doomsday Watch: The coming storm (link)
• Slow Newscast: Trapped by Iran (link)
• Things Fell Apart: And how (link)
• Political Time Zones: The dictatorship of the moment (link)
• Slow Newscast: The devil of Dubai (link)
• More or Less: How we count counts (link)
• The Tortoise Podcast: Citizen journalist or vigilante? (link)
• Writ Large: Ulysses unpacked (link)
• In Our Time: The Polish-Lithuanian project (link)
• The Intelligence: Catholic confession (link)
• The Daily: Courting controversy (link)
• The Good Fight: Appaih on identity (link)
• Revisionist History: Doggy diagnostics (link)
• The Prospect Podcast: Polish populism (link)
• The Daily: Apple's China crisis (link)
• LRB Podcast: Greensill and greed (link)
• Radio Hour: UFOs are real... maybe (link)
• Philosophy for Our Times: Psychedelics and religion (link)
• More or Less: 2021 will be worse (link)
• Stuff the British Stole: Harsh but fair (link)
• Mitchell on Meetings: Zoomed out (link)
• The Listening Service: Looney tunes (link)
• The History of Literature: Jacke of all trade books (link)
• Sticky Notes: Rediscovering William Levi Dawson (link)
• Mindscape: Morality and maths (link)
• Philosophy Bites: Dialetheism: there's something in it (link)
• Classical Fix: Clemmie's back (link)
• The Lock In: Bellingcat the brave (link)
• Philosophy Bites: Defending Derrida (link)
• History of Ideas: Erewhon, yet everywhere (link)
• The Good Fight: Kara. Swisher. Gets. It (link)
• Parlia: What we believe and why (link)
• Lapham's Quarterly: Man, marine mammals and machines (link)
• The Economist Asks: Social media isn't (necessarily) evil (link)
• The Good Fight: Interesting Republican #2: Jonah Goldberg (link)
• The Daily: Interesting Republican #1: Peter Meijer (link)
• The Fault Line: Bush, Blair and big ballzups (link)
• Lapham's Quarterly: President v the press (link)
• The Walkers Switch: Crisps and conspiracies (link)

2020

December

• "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally." – John Maynard Keynes
• Larry Summers ably demonstrates why Donald Trump got elected (link)
• The solution to big-tech's legitimacy crisis is not more neutrality, it's more legitimacy (link)
• Widespread use of smartphones, ubiquitous personal data and endemic corruption mean that in India you can spy on almost anyone for $500 (link)
• "Plato in Sicily" – astonishing account of a classical collision between philosophy and politics (link)
• "Chinese researchers have recently published a series of studies describing how to disguise underwater communications as artificial dolphin clicks and killer whale songs". Which leads to an obvious question: how will the cetaceans react? (link)
• "Noblest of all dogs is the hot-dog; it feeds the hand that bites it" – Laurence Peter (of 'Peter Principle' fame)
• "Recent news articles have all been talking about the massive Russian cyber-attack against the United States, but that's wrong on two accounts." First, it's perfectly legitimate espionage. Second it's global (link)
• Among Us, now the most popular game in iPhone history, is a sign of the times. And it's not alone (link)
• "Why capable people are reluctant to lead." An even bigger problem in politics than in business – see the 'Revisionist History' link under 'Podcasts' (link)
• With Brexit about to happen – in whatever form – Britain can at last "have an informed national debate... based on experience rather than myths and empty promises". Just don't expect it to be pretty (link)
• Moral shit-stirring "has become the great enemy of good-faith debate in contemporary philosophical ethics" (link)
• "The magnitude of this ongoing [SolarWinds] attack is hard to overstate" says Trump's former homeland security adviser (link)
• Texas and nine other US states are suing Google for illegal collusion with Facebook (link)
• It turns out that Japan and Sweden really are exceptional when it comes to Covid, just not in a good way (link)
• Bellingcat doesn't only expose nefarious activities to the public, it also enables "US officials and lawmakers to discuss Moscow's skullduggery openly without revealing the sources and methods of the US intelligence agencies" (link)
• Should you visit your family this Christmas? "Here is a simple rule: ask the oldest person(s) what they want to do" (link)
• "In October 2019, Johns Hopkins University and the Economist Intelligence Unit published the Global Epidemic Preparedness Report... Never was a report on an important global topic better timed. And never was it more wrong" (link)
• Is it OK to use face-recognition AI to identify (or perhaps mis-identify) known shoplifters? (link)
• There's a "huge opportunity for someone to become the Spotify or Netflix of news" – if only CNN and Twitter could get it together (link)
• On the recent emergence of the "tabletop puzzle game" (aka the Covid-safe escape room) (link)
• While keeping us physically apart, Covid has in some ways brought us closer together. Yet, warns Scott Galloway, it may yet herald a 'Great Dispersion' that further fragments society (link)
• "Self-criticism is a liberal strength." Timothy Garton Ash provides a masterclass in this art, arguing that we should all become conservative-socialist-liberals (link)
• Tim Wu enumerates the different ways in which American's – and, let's face it, many others – interpret the news. Easy to poke holes, but interesting all the same (link)
• "Web Conversations With the Year 2000." Reflections on potential squandered (link)
• Nandgame: build a virtual computer from nand gates – and if you don't know what that means then this isn't for you (link)
• "Biden's victory was not God's will. Therefore it couldn't have happened." On 'Christianism' and Trump's 'victory' as a religious 'truth' (link)
• The antitrust case against Facebook hinges on its backsliding over user privacy as its dominance grew (link)
• How to escape the Titanic. Superb account (link)
• Case studies in the spread of COVID-19 indoors – almost like crime-scene investigations (link)
• Moderna's mRNA-1273 coronavirus vaccine was designed over a weekend in January 2020, "just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public" (link)
• The words 'financial' and 'innovation' appearing in close proximity always rings alarm bells (because, more than any other industry, finance rewards avaricious sociopaths, who can use 'innovation' as a cloak). Robinhood is a case in point (link)
• On penny dreadfuls, "the true crime podcasts of their time" (link)
• "Twice as many people worldwide die from suicide as from homicide" (link)
• On celebrities – and deepfake artists – who don't even exist (link)
• Why big tech is vertically integrating into silicon (link)
• Slack's decision to sell is less about Salesforce and more about its salesforce (link)
• On D&D and its dungeon-master-in-chief, E. Gary Gygax (link)
• How a pair of Oxford academics conquered the world with their medievalist fantasy stories for children (link)
• "A game designer's analysis of QAnon" (link)
• Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Exhibit A: Facebook (link)
• We tend to think of legislation (ie, specifying in advance what is and isn't permitted) as the only way to achieve justice. But there is another way: casuistry (link)
• "In February, shares in Zoom Technologies rose by 50%. Unfortunately, it was the wrong company. The video conferencing company's stock is listed as ZM not ZOOM, and the other Zoom has been out of business for years." So much for efficient markets (link)
• "In 10 years no one will remember the names of China's artificial intelligence unicorns." because they lack viable business models (link)
• "In the spell of a week, a mysterious monolith appeared in the Utah desert and was subsequently removed by some slackline bros. The saga has raised more questions than answers." (link)
• On Roman dodecahedron – "the mysterious bronze objects that have baffled archaeologists for centuries" (link)
• "If a city is a living, breathing organism, Tokyo is a supremely healthy creature." ...nourished by its networks of convenience stores. But for how long? (link)
• "CAPTCHAs don't prove you're human – they prove you're American." Oh, so true. They also prove that the website you're using is run by a douchebag (link)
• A note to my friends at Google: when you find yourself in a hole labelled "evil", stop digging (link)

November

• Think 'rubber' bullets are a safe form of deterrence? Think again (1-min video; link)
• Politicians claim to be following the science, but very rarely give references. That undermines trust in their decisions (link)
• On the rise and rise of OpenStreetMap: "It's the opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons – all of the private property holders, acting in their own self interest, are enriching the common resource rather than depleting it" (link)
• "I should have loved biology" – if only it hadn't been for the textbooks and teaching methods (link)
• An experiment illustrates the virtues of data visualisation: "The most notable 'discovery' in the dataset was that if you simply plotted the number of steps versus the BMI, you would see an image of a gorilla waving at you" (link)
• "AI camera ruins soccer game for fans after mistaking referee's bald head for ball." The headline says it all (link)
• "[T]he defeat of democracy is difficult to accomplish from the Oval Office... it will be engineered – even if unintentionally – by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley" (link)
• "Internet platforms cause political harms that are far more alarming than any economic damage they create. Their real danger is not that they distort markets; it is that they threaten democracy." Middleware could provide an answer (link)
• "If you want to have self-control, you better not be remotely controlled. And the way to ensure that is to have some sort of informational barrier between you and any agent that might want to remotely control you" (link)
• On the rise and fall of productivity pr0n (link)
• "Facebook wants independent, third-party scrutiny of its ad policy enforcement to end at the very moment that its enforcement failures are allowing false claims about the outcome of the 2020 election to spread". Not a good look, guys (link)
• How to keep the 'Internet of bodies' secure (link)
• "Penguin Random House purchasing Simon & Schuster is not the gravest danger to the publishing business. The deal is transpiring in a larger context – and that context is Amazon." We have far too many effective monopolies. For the good of the economy and society, Amazon should be broken up (along retail/retail platform/cloud lines) and PRH-S&S should be blocked (link)
• William Buckley insisted that "conservatism is the politics of reality." The reverse now seems to be true, but where does it go from here (link)
• Is Eric Cantona an existentialist (2.5-min video; link)
• On the dangers of 'Armageddon porn' and its arch practitioner. Choice quote (albeit secondhand): "[L]ooking at Twitter is like microdosing poison" (link)
• "[W]hat makes [humans] unique is that we are mammals – only more so" (link)
• "No statue has ever been erected to a critic" – Jean Sibelius
• The fact that morally reprehensible behaviour is so often seen in supposedly virtuous organisations – from the Labour Party to the Catholic Church – is not a paradox but a consequence of human psychology (link)
• "[T]oo many Tories have come to believe that, because you can't make progress without making enemies, the mere existence of enemies is a sign that you're making progress." A common fallacy in business too (link)
• Some of us are optimists and others are pessimists. But there's another more important psychological spectrum. "Let's call it the epistemic-humility axis. Or, the who-the-hell-knows axis" (link)
• Is Substack the future of journalism? Discuss (link)
• Q: What is a circular definition? A: A definition that is circular (link)
• "The highest calling of true elites is to translate the flux of reality into a coherent story." On the poltical storytelling and the "will to believe" (link)
• "[S]ocial genomics can be used by progressives to combat racial inequality or by conservatives to excuse it" (link)
• My erstwhile employer, Nature, has become a shill for big tech (link)
• Soft Brexit lies dead on the floor, but whodunnit? Jill Rutter and Anand Menon provide a masterful account of the circumstances, suspects and motives. Easily the best thing I've read on Brexit, and surely the political article of the year (link)
• What is happening now in the US "simply does not happen in a healthy liberal democracy". Andrew Sullivan on America's "Weimar dynamic" (link)
• QAnon is an alternate-reality game whose adherents have missed the 'alternate' part (link)
• "We need new antitrust laws for Big Tech not because big tech firms are evil but because they can't help themselves." Google Photos is a case in point (link)
• "Jack Ma's Bund Finance Summit speech." The one he made just before the Chinese government forced Ant to cancel what would have been the largest IPO in history (link)
• "Seeking to understand rather than be understood requires a suppression of ego that takes practice. Lots of us are out of practice" (link)
• Asking an AI to explain its choices is like asking a human to rationalise their musical preferences – ie, somewhere between unconvincing and impossible (link)
• "America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without" – Walt Whitman. Much the same could be said of many a rich, democratic, supposedly stable country (link)
• "The excuse for the ruthlessness of the exclusion and exploitation of others in the name of private interest was always the same: the prospect of a better future for all. Today, we should ask: has it succeeded?" An important question with a highly debatable answer (link)
• "The great political conflict of our century... is that between a networked public and the elites who inhabit the great hierarchical institutions that organize modern life" (link)
• "Trump forced big tech out of 'neutrality,' and there's no turning back" (link)
• On 'horizontal totalitarianism' – "a form of organisation capable of formatting people so that practically any individual initiative that may alter traditional world-views and customs virtually disappears" An interesting concept, which suggests to me that current right-wing nationalist totalitarianism tends to be vertical (top-down), while the left-wing 'woke' variety is horizontal (peer-to-peer). Of course, the ultimate totalitarian societies, such as those under Stalin and Mao, employ both approaches (link)
• "The Universe is expanding the way your mind is expanding. It's not expanding into anything; you're just getting less dense." (link)
• "[L]et the meaning choose the word and not the other way round" – George Orwell

October

• Tom Lehrer has put all of his song lyrics into the public domain (link)
• "Suicides in Japan are like wildfires in California: tragic, inevitable and seemingly unsolvable" (link)
• "[E]conomic growth gives us liberalism and demands for equality whilst stagnation and regress give us political reaction" – thus incentivising the right to indulge in economic mismanagement (link)
• How SARS-CoV-2 spreads – a very good, concise summary of the current science (link)
• The so-called Christian right has Christianity all wrong (link)
• "We cracked the redactions in the Ghislaine Maxwell deposition." Yet another chapter in a long history of the stunningly inept people who redact documents (link)
• When trying new things, errors of judgement are asymmetric: "the most successful people are slightly overconfident" (link)
• On organisations that last for millenia: "You need to have a cyclical business model, not a linear business model" (link)
• "Why Facebook can't fix itself." Partly because it can't, and partly because it doesn't really want to (link)
• "An important thing that explains a lot of things is that good news takes time but bad news happens instantly" (link)
• "Google employees are free to speak up. Except on antitrust." Free as in 'of any scruples whatsoever' (link)
• Simplism (n): The unambiguous ascription of single causes and remedies for multifactored phenomena. Examples: "Build the wall", "abolish the police", "friend or foe" (link)
• "Liberalism is connected to democracy, but is not the same thing." A perspicacious and important account by Francis Fukuyama (link)
• "The Four Myths of Healthy Tech." For example: "1. Social media is addictive, and we are powerless to resist it" (link)
• When it comes to Covid-19, "as the rest of Europe 'moves towards Sweden,' Sweden is moving towards something else" (link)
• Governments are trying to put themselves back in charge of data about their citizens, but it's complicated (link)
• Conrad Wolfram on the latest Covid-19-related data failure by the UK government: "'What were they thinking?'. I'd go one step further and say 'what thinking were they educated in?'" (link)
• "Don't pack the court." (link)
• "House Democrats propose antitrust overhaul to rein in big tech." At last! (link)
• "We would never allow, for example, a pharmaceutical company to experiment on the public and then, after seeing what happens, withdraw or change a product." So why do tech companies get a free pass? (link)
• "I grew up thinking that the truth was most likely to emerge from a process of intellectual disputation. It does not seem to be working out that way." As Britain's media and politics demonstrate on a daily basis (link)
• The one and only 'Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer', famous for having the best collection of comments on the whole of Amazon.com (link)
• Thanks to Critical Theory and its ilk, "we are glimpsing one of those sidetracks in Western ideology that led to both Salem and Weimar" (link)
• "Listening to music on the Internet feels clean, efficient, environmentally virtuous." Think again (link)
• "Unfck the internet", by Mozilla (link)
• Thanks to AI, "[t]he supply of disinformation will soon be infinite" (link)
• "Mark Zuckerberg is not pointing a gun at anyone's head, ordering them to use Instagram—and yet we post as though he is." Why? On "social media and the death drive" (link)
• "Podcasting, to a large extent, has filled the void of the blogosphere – a place where you could think out loud and try to figure shit out". So true (link)
• If we kill animals to alleviate their suffering, why don't we extend the same courtesy to humans? (link)
• "When we lose weight, where does it go?" An interesting question that 98% of health professionals can't answer (link)
• Trying to understand Britain's racial dynamics through the lens of American society "does more to obscure than to illuminate". A good point eloquently made (link)
• "The Covid-19 pandemic... has dramatically reinforced lessons we, as a society, have failed to learn. The first is the importance of luck in determining unequal outcomes" (link)
• How China will eventually take Taiwan – two countries, one shitstorm (link)

September

• In thinking about coronavirus infection dynamics, we're paying too much attend to average contagiousness and not enough to how it varies by individual (link)
• On the psychology of consumer crap and the shops that sell it: "Each customer who enters a five-and-ten-cent store becomes a rich man – for the moment" (link)
• Adding information about cities to Wikipedia increases overnight stays in those cities (link)
• On Paul Stamets, maestro among mycologists, by another fan of fungi, Merlin Sheldrake: "When Stamets was a teenager, he suffered from a debilitating stammer. One day, he took a heroic dose of magic mushrooms and climbed to the top of a tall tree, where he was trapped by a lightning storm. When he came down, his stammer was gone." (link)
• "[F]ake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans' daily media diet... the origins of public misinformedness and polarization are more likely to lie in the content of ordinary news or the avoidance of news altogether as they are in overt fakery" (link)
• Princeton finds itself in a "Seinfeldian dilemma": its president claims that racism is endemic at his institution, prompting the (let's face it, not entirely anti-racist) US administration to investigate it for breaking civil-rights law. Joseph Heller couldn't have made this up (link)
• This "is what it feels like to be living through the blood-red dusk of a nation" (link)
• On Raj Chetty of Harvard University, who has created "a new business model for how to do economics" – with data (link)
• Our increasingly dysfunctional meritocracy makes us richer, at least collectively, but at huge social and moral cost. If we insist on continuing with it then "don't expect to enjoy the ride" (link)
• A real-world example of an algorithm (apparently) acting less unfairly than we pesky, corruptible humans (link)
• The world's biggest data breaches and hacks, beautifully visualised (link)
• "Music as a Technology of Surveillance" (link)
• "Coronavirus (COVID-19) in 10 charts" – from the ONS (link)
• America's political fractures are driven not my misunderstanding or distrust, but something even more primal: hate. Agreed – it's a cold civil war (link)
• UK retail sales have returned to more or less pre-lockdown levels, but online sales are up ~45% while in-store sales are down ~10% (link)
• Management consultancies and economists make predictions of all sorts – thousands upon thousands of them. Yet these are "not forecasts but fantasies". Indeed, the track records suggests the only thing we can forecast with any certainty is that any given business or financial forecast will turn out to be wrong (link)
• Decades before Google or Facebook, Simulmatics was using computers in an attempt to manipulate Americans' shopping and voting habits (link)
• Who invented the light bulb? Most people would say Thomas Edison, but the truth is that it was invented by lots of people – and therefore no one. A parable for our technological age (link)
• "Pair programming with AI." Genius – the most interesting AI idea I've heard all year (link)
• "[G]reat men are almost always bad men," so why do we celebrate and elevate them? (link)
• "America is trapped in a pandemic spiral." Offered as a counterpoint to the link below (link)
• "Taiwan's success in containing COVID-19 has less to do with technology than with well-functioning state institutions that acted quickly and collectively." A report from the 'Paradise Bubble' (link)
• Restoring Siberia's prehistoric 'mammoth steppe', mammoths and all (link)
• "Giving the peace prize to no one at all is a tradition the Nobel Committee should revive, perhaps on a permanent basis." Good idea: the Prize is already beyond parody (link)
• Publishers are challenging the concept of book ownership, with potentially far-reaching consequences for culture and society (link)
• "Tips for avoiding a civil war." Sound advice on reasonableness in the time of Twitter (link)
• The conventional wisdom is that AWS accounts for most of Amazon's profit, but the conventional wisdom is wrong (link)
• Plato warned that democracy would lead to "aristocrat-demagogues who enjoy the advantage of the best education that money can buy but nevertheless prefer to pander to the mob rather than to guide it to the light." How right he was (link)
• "The defense of markets, though, has at times made us [American right-wingers] overly solicitous of businesses." Bingo! (link)
• "Amazon drivers are hanging smartphones in trees to get more work." Another example to add to the ever-growing list of algorithms that seemed like a good idea until people actually started to use them (link)
• Work policies created in response to Covid-19 have often been crafted with parents in mind. Employees without children have noticed (link)
• Using satellite images to track the construction of internment camps for Muslims in northwest China (link)
• Tyler Cowen is bearish on cancel culture: "In a world where attention is dominated by entertainment, along with social bonding and networking, political correctness will not be the major cultural influence" (link)
• "Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline" (link)
• "We [Americans] would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care" (link)
• On In Defense of Looting, a book in which the publisher appears to have better lines than the author (link)
• "It has come to this: ignore the CDC" – by the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and the former head of the NIH (link)
• "[T]he most important role we play in the economy is not as consumers but as producers." Very true. This, incidentally, is one of many resons why UBI, at least on its own, is a bad idea: work generates not just a salary but also personal and social meaning (link)

August

• The main problem with big tech isn't surveillance capitalism, it's surveillance monopolism (link)
• A mechanical Turing machine, fashioned from wood, no less (4-minute video; link)
• "Mondegreen describes a series of words that result from mishearing a statement or song lyric." Among other words about words (link)
• These so-called liberals "are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce." Andrew Sullivan on how the Democrats walked right into Trump's trap (link)
• Mail-in voting benefits neither Democrats nor Republicans (link)
• On the profound impact of AI on the professional Go world (link)
• Jaron Lanier just "might be the last moral man in Silicon Valley" (link)
• It's possible to infer the shape of a key by recording the sound of it being inserted into a lock. Astonishing (14.5-minute video; link)
• "[T]here's one use of AR glasses that few are talking about but will be world-changing: scraping data from everything we see... Let's call it worldscraping." Adrian Hon in sparklingly scary form (link)
• "What if the Olympic Games never come back?" (link)
• Targeted advertising based on stalking readers across the Internet isn't just wrong, it may not be the most profitable approach for publishers either (link)
• "Social media distancing is the key to quelling the information pandemic" (link)
• On England's flawed exam moderation algorithm – "[T]his is a terrible example of using artificial intelligence to make life altering decisions" (link)
• How the commercial web turned people into users, to our distinct disadvantage (link)
• Let's make journalism great again (link)
• Democracy depends on our ability to lose well (link)
• "The truth is, Britain was sick before it caught the coronavirus" (link)
• "Alphabet bet big in Toronto. Toronto didn't play along." Thank goodness (link)
• "It's way too soon to count Trump out" (link)
• No, BMI isn't racist (link)
• Could the next generation of computing be based on slime moulds? Probably not. but it's an interesting thought (link)
• Making sense of the world is truly difficult right now, even for the pellucid Adam Tooze: "I feel like we've all just stumbled out of a cave into this wide-open space and are still blinking in the sun" (link)
• Profit maximisation and risk mitigation are not the same thing: just ask an ancient Egyptian farmer (link)
• "How the pandemic defeated America." Ed Yong at his alarming best; read it and weep (link)
• "The truth is paywalled but the lies are free... The political economy of bullshit" (link)
• "The Hard Problem of Breakfast: How does it emerge from bacon and eggs?" (link)
• What is intelligence? An AI responds (link)
• "I know there's a lot of parents... who were just overwhelmed with trying to find things to keep kids busy," says Morgan Lockard, a librarian. The answer? Digital escape rooms built using Google Forms (link)
• "In 2019, the rate at which people were killed by the police in the United States (46.6 such killings per ten million residents) put it right between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (47.8 per ten million) and Iraq" (link)
• Anarchists don't believe in nihilism, just self-organisation (link)
• What's with the "c^2" in "E = mc^2"? A brief and excellent explanation (link)
• "The notion that a corporation's primary purpose is to look after its shareholders is widely believed and taught, but is in fact a myth with no basis in corporate law" (link)
• Open letter, bad idea (link)
• Walking – and oh so much more (6.5-minute video; link)

July

• Covid-19 has generated calls to reduce urban density. But on the contrary, "[l]owering urban density would worsen health" (link)
• Will universities remain places where the independent-minded want to congregate? If not then they might go away and create new institutions. "That may require some imagination. But imagination is, after all, their specialty" (link)
• A Facebook employee quits with a potent parting shot. Worth listening to the audio; the gist is that Zuckerberg is clinging to rules and ignoring outcomes (link)
• American mathematicians are boycotting predictive policing (link)
• Twitter is damaging society and losing users. Could a different business model be the answer? (link)
• We live in a world of instant binary decisions. "It is easy to lose sight of how peculiar and infantilising this state of affairs is" (link)
• Why do we value diversity? This is a more complicated question than it first seems (link)
• "Steven Pinker will be just fine" – but the reputations and careers of less powerful scholars are at risk (link)
• One hacked Gmail account is worth roughly 2 Facebook accounts and 3 Twitter accounts. A dark-web price list (link)
• "When you've been lucky, you just assume you're always going to be lucky." The pandemic as seen by a Master of the Universe (link)
• Facebook's Civil Rights Audit: "Unfortunately, in our view Facebook's approach to civil rights remains too reactive and piecemeal... As the final report is being issued, the frustration directed at Facebook from some quarters is at the highest level seen since the company was founded" (link)
• Football commentators' comments are heavily influenced by players' skin tone (link)
• Modern images of invisible phenomena such as black holes have a surprising amount in common with fantastical premodern maps (link)
• "Unlike America or the European Union, China is wholly unconvincing as a multiethnic empire" (link)
• On the geopolitical future of AI: "Over time, the 'parallel universes' already extant in the United States and China will grow to cover the whole world" (link)
• "[O]ne in five of all mammal species on Earth are bats" (link)
• Asking why rich, democratic societies have become so angry is to assume that there is a justifiable reason (link)
• "Call me fishmeal." Swimming with sperm whales (link)
• "If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID also create a golden age?" It didn't and it won't – "we should aim for something better than the Renaissance" (link)
• Gendering in Japanese – something that has afflicted and delighted me too (link)
• The secrets of DARPA's success. Spoiler alert: good ideas and badass managers (link)
• "Creative writing by OpenAI's GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling" (link)
• Following press attention, the wonderful Slate Star Codex has gone into hiding (link)
• "Beijing's bank balance doesn't match its bling." China is getting richer, but nowhere near fast enough to become the word's preeminent superpower (link)
• "Break up Google" by Tim Bray (link)
• "Twitter is one big misunderstanding." Welcome to Debubble (link)
• "A/B Street is a game exploring how small changes to a city affect the movement of drivers, cyclists, transit users, and pedestrians" (link)
• Gabriel's Oboe, in memoriam (2.5-minute video; link)
• It turns out Mexico might pay for that wall after all (link)
• "Putting public services in private hands... undermines our bonds as a political community" (link)
• "TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network." Now there's a shocker (link)
• On a pervasive aspect of our lives that is random, inequitable, totalitarian and divisive: citizenship (link)
• "The state kills people in two ways, executions and police killings. Executions require trials, appeals... Police killings are not extensively monitored... Yet every year, [US] police kill 25 to 50 times as many people as are executed" (link)
• Hey, we need to talk about email (link)
• Why do we put control of our information into the hands of an organisation that demonstrably lies and dissembles? In Facebook we cannot trust (link)
• Google is resting on its laurels (link)
• "An Oral History of the Onion's 9/11 Issue." Satire is immortal (link)
• Aggressive crimes increase in hot weather while angry tweets grow fewer (link)

June

• The ONS: "In May 2020, over a third of retail spending was online – the highest ever share." Following a 10 percentage point increase in 7 years, there was a 14 percentage point increase in 4 months. Wow! (link)
• Advice from a civil servant on how to deal with crises, along with counterexamples from the recent past (link)
• Hares can 'superfoetate' – get pregnant while already pregnant (link)
• "For a tech company to be telling a government what to do is an interesting sign of our times." Now there's an understatement (link)
• "We've said it before: The stock market is not the economy." And now more than ever (link)
• "Party in a shared Google Doc." Genius (link)
• Reason helps us to make good decisions, but emotion is the source of our motivations. For too long we've been ignoring the latter (link)
• "I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were" (link)
• "9 rules for the black birdwatcher." Satire from a more innocent time (2013), but funny, cutting, poignant and superbly crafted (link)
• "It is an ongoing mistake to refer to politicians as leaders. Almost all are followers" (link)
• "Steelmanning": The process of actively finding better versions of another person's arguments (link)
• Refugees, a poem by Brian Bilston, "Poet Laureate of Twitter" (link)
• Japanese cosmology (link)
• The left has lost its marbles and its scruples, says Matt Taibbi. Hard not to agree (link)
• "A month long conference is a neat concept" – and other observations about online eventsh (link)
• "Safe Meeting keeps an eye on you during your video conferences, and if it sees your underwear, the video is immediately muted." Open source, natch (link)
• China and India do not aspire to become dominant nations, but dominant civilisations. "[T]he search for universal values is over" (link)
• Figurative use of 'viral' on the Internet has decreased as literal use of 'virus' has gone up (link)
• The #DefundtheBBC campaign looks more astroturf than grassroots. #DeleteTwitter (link)
• "Much of the way we relate to our mind is culturally determined" – a compelling account, riffing on ideas of Julian Jaynes (link)
• "On the face of it, cruelty and morality are opposites", but it's much more complicated than that. We live in a world rife with 'cruel moralism' (link)
• "[T]he omni-crisis has significantly enlarged the space of possible outcomes beyond that normally considered" – In other words, be afraid, be very afraid (link)
• "[T]he United States now faces a serious challenge to its international legitimacy... The demonstrators have put not just the police but the nation on trial" (link)
• "Facebook says, and may even believe, that it is on the side of free speech. In fact, it has put itself on the side of profit and cowardice." An ex-employee attempts to explain to his former colleagues what everyone else already knows (link)
• So-called thought experiments aren't really experiments, and aren't much good for thinking either (link)
• The best technologies extend the body and the mind, but today's computing technologies "mostly have the opposite effect" (link)

May

• Does technology drive society, or is it the way around? (link)
• On QAnon, perhaps the first new religion if the Internet age (link)
• An American tragedy unfolds: "According to the Federal Reserve, nearly 40 per cent of Americans in households earning less than $40,000 a year were laid off in April... As the confirmed death toll reaches 85,000, 79 per cent of Republicans say they are confident the virus will be contained in a few weeks." (link)
• On 'cliometrics', the controversial art of predicting history with data (link)
• "[H]uman beings were never born to read." Do we face a bookless future? (link)
• What to do when AI fails (and indeed before it fails) (link)
• Five books on the politics of information. Interesting throughout. (link)
• On one the unspoken and often unrecognised effects of the pandemic: "Where corporations previously tried to play down their data collection and Cambridge Analytica was a scandal, tech giants can now offer surveillance as a public service." (link)
• Almost half of Twitter accounts sharing coronavirus tweets are likely bots (link)
• "The act of listening to new music in the midst of a global pandemic is hard, but it's necessary" (link)
• "History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that [US global leadership] ceased to be true." (link)
• "[S]ometimes you have a roadmap but discover that it runs out short of the destination. This might be what has happened to autonomous cars. The machine learning breakthrough of 2013 gave us a clear roadmap to go from AVs that didn't work at all to AVs that work pretty well but not well enough. We have 10% left to go, but it now looks at least possible that the last 10% is 90% of the effort, and that might need something different." (link)
• "What if instead of seeing Sars as the warning for Covid-19, we should see Covid-19 itself as the warning?" An important point well made. (link)
• "[Universities have] all adopted this narrative of 'This is unprecedented, and we're in this together,' which is Latin for 'We're not lowering our prices, bitches.'" (link)
• Wellcome Leap – research funding meets early-stage venture capital. (link)
• "If virus tests were sodas" ...then we would save many lives – but don't hold your breath. (link)
• "AI does not think like us" – by David Weinberger. An important insight too often overlooked. (link)
• The world has seen a collapse in passenger air travel, but a boom in air freight... for now. (13-min video; link)
• "68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice" – by Kevin Kelly. Marvellous. (link)
• Ed Yong has emerged as the world's best writer on the pandemic and all of its intrinsic uncertainties... at least in English... among those I've read... IMHO. (link)

April

• "It's time to build." Marc 'Software Is Eating the World' Andreessen does a volte-face. (link)
• What counts as 'fair' during an economic catastrophe? "[A]irlines [have] spent $45 billion on [share] buybacks and now want a $54 billion bailout". (link)
• In a certain statistical sense, we all die prematurely. (link)
• After the pandemic is over we will come under pressure from government, companies and ourselves to get back to normal. But don't be fooled: "[t]his is our chance to define a new version of normal". (link)
• Not content with criticising tech entrepreneurs, Evgeny Morozov has become one. Welcome to The Syllabus (link)
• A journal of the coronavirus year, by Tom Chatfield (link)
• "[T]he fundamental essence of [biological] individuality, and the units in which individuality ought to be measured, is information" (link)
• "Platform socialism is an entirely viable future model for our economy, which may alleviate a social crisis but exacerbate a democratic one." (link)
• "Sloviria is an enlightened country. They do not blame criminals for their actions. They realize it is Society's fault for making criminals that way. So when someone commits a crime, they punish Society." – and other thought-provoking imaginary legal systems. (link)
• "A Microsoft employee literally wrote Washington's [state] facial recognition law." Oh boy. (link)
• The shortage of toilet paper during the pandemic isn't mainly due to hoarding. It's because (a) the system is highly tuned to serve normal levels of demand, and (b) people are taking fewer dumps at work. (link)

March

• "[L]iving in a surveillance society is incompatible in the long term with liberty." But since we already do, let's use it to tackle the coronavirus crisis – by Maciej Cegłowski. (link)
• "It may be that a little less knowledge is what will keep us free." Tim Wu in sparkling form as he discusses surveillance capitalism and Shoshana Zuboff. (link)
• It could be worse: "[T]he Black Death killed 50 million people in the 14th century, or 60 per cent of Europe's entire population." (link)
• An excellent account of Japan's imperial family and the inability of their country to transcend its chequered past. (link)
• An analysis of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection rates – by a compter scientist rather than an epidemiologist, but no less informative for that. (link)
• Instead of consciousness emerging from the physical world, what if it's the other way around? (link)
• "Who is concerned with self-driving cars ... when local roads are unpaved or impassable due to disrepair?" On the dysfunctional dystopia that is Silicon Valley. (link)
• Covid-19 could be a net postive for public health, at least in China: "I calculate that the reductions in air pollution in China caused by this economic disruption likely saved twenty times more lives in China than have currently been lost due to infection with the virus in that country" (link)
• Chris Anderson of TED talks with infectious-disease expert Adam Kucharski about COVID-19. Incidentally, Adam also wins the award for best-timed book launch of 2020. (69-min audio; link)
• On the history and place of the BBC: "Indifference gave way to regulatory enthusiasm once politicians realised the possible consequences of having a speaker, and a voice, in every house". Now, of course, Amazon and Google aspire to have a microphone in every house. (link)
• All too often, reading online news is like getting stuck in a demonic attention-sucking vortex along with the detritus of the Internet. A great account of what that feels like. (link)
• Heard today on a Tube train that stopped inexplicably in a tunnel: "This train is being delayed as we try to improve the Northern Line service."
• "It's not necessarily such a bad time to be an oil and gas company... but it is a bad time to look like one." Shell as a case studying corporate diversion. (link)
• Giving up Facebook for four weeks results in more free time, better subjective wellbeing, lower political polarisation and lower long-term use. Facebook is the new tobacco, folks. (link)

February

• "[H]umans can bond, form attachments and dedicate themselves to non-conscious objects or lifeless things with shocking ease." Such as robots, for example. Welcome to animism 2.0. (link)
• "[T]here has never been a party as morally shameless as the British Conservative Party, though perhaps that just shows my ignorance of the others." A review of Thatcher's biography, from which John Major, among others, does not emerge with his reputation enhanced. (link)
• A Short Course in Superforecasting. (link)
• A 52-year-old US navy vet attends Yale, where he comes face to face with the snowflake generation, and is pleasantly surprised. (link)
• "Are voters prejudiced against ethnic minority candidates?" In a word, yes. (link)
• Recent reductions in cancer mortality have been brought about not by research or new medicines, but declines in smoking. (link)
• We're all light-matter chauvinists, but what of the world of dark matter was just as rich. It might even harbour life. (link)
• Ours is not an age of acceleration, still less progress, but rather decadence. (link)
• Some faces of humans who don't exist, generated by 'generative adversarial networks'. Jaw-droppingly real. (link)
• Decade after decade, pop songs have been getting sadder. (link)
• Magnetism is a fiction, albeit a useful one. What we call 'magnetism' is really just electricity viewed through the lens of special relativity. (link)
• Coronavirus tracker from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, updated daily. (link)
• "The best way to describe what is happening in the UK is not polarisation but fragmentation." Rings true. (link)
• "Inside the mind of Dominic Cummings." An interesting and broadly fair account, IMHO. (link)

January

• "What is freedom?" – Vincent Kavaloski modernises Plato's allegory of the cave to thought-provoking effect (link)
• "How will you measure your life?" – a fine 2010 speech by Clay Christensen, who died last week (link)
• In the early hours of Monday January 20th, the air pressure above British reached 1,049.6 millibars, the highest level since records began in 1692 (link)
• Forget utopia, we should be seeking protopia (link)
• "There are two problems with anger: it is morally corrupting, and it is completely correct." The case for becoming and remaining angry with others (link)
• "It's too late to remain silent and to pretend that all is fine at the BBC in case we hand more ammunition to those who have long held a grudge against it" (link)
• "[The] fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt" – Bertrand Russell, 1933. As true now as it was then, and worthy of study, so why not have professors of stupidity (link)
• The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania has been on fire for 57 years and could burn for another 250, "a trash fire that will inherit the earth" (link)
• "We can chose how we live – why not how we leave? A free society should allow dying to be more deliberate and imaginative" (link)
• "We breed and kill at least 100 billion animals per year for food and at least 115 million per year for research. Fishing kills 1-3 trillion animals per year." (link)
• "American history textbooks can differ across the country, in ways that are shaded by partisan politics." Jaw-dropping (link)
• "With bees, a community typically goes from wide disagreement to apparent strong agreement, without requiring particular individuals to ever giving up their strongly held opinions." On finding a site for a new hive, with possible lessons for humanity (link)
• Robots + orgami = robogamis (link)
• "The adversarial culture in philosophy does not serve the truth." For 'philosophy', also read 'research', 'politics' and 'society' (link)
• "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." (link)
• On "the wood wide web" – amazing fungal networks that enable communication and collaboration between trees in a forest (link)
• Meritocracy "ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal" (link)
• The film 'Jurassic Park' is closer to the moon landing than to today (link)
• Jupiter is technically not a planet – maybe (7-minute video; link)
• The startling starling-falcon dance (3-minute video; link)

Podcasts

• Revisionist History: In praise of democratic lotteries (link)
• Radiolab: How not to use Benford's Law, US election special (link)
• The Big Idea: Economics lessons from Uber (link)
• Start the Week: Lies, damn lies and Facebook (link)
• The Medieval Podcast: Middle-Ages miscellany (link)
• Numberphile: Tuplets for Toddlers – tremendous (link)
• Talking politics: On the dignity of work and danger of merit (link)
• The Last Archive: Who killed truth? (link)
• Philosophy 24/7: The future of privacy (link)
• New Yorker Radio Hour: Polio, vaccines, Covid-19 and kids (link)
• Start the Week: On meritocracy and inequality (link)
• Nice White Parents: Good intentions aren't enough (link)
• Sticky Notes: Classical music revealed (link)
• Travels Through Time: When Ulysses S Grant played Desdemona (link)
• ProgCast: Academic freedom ≠ freedom of speech (link)
• The Liberation of RNA: Genetics and racism, but not what you think (link)
• The View From Somewhere: All journalism is campaigning journalism (link)
• The World According to Sound: From mudpots to ultrasonics (link)
• The Secret History of Western Esotericism: From the sublime to the ridiculous (link)
• Octomom: Touching tale of alien parenthood (link)
• The Boring Talks: Episodes on the Carry On films and pencils highly recommended (link)
• Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast: Not waving but drowning (link)
• History of Ideas: From the makers of Talking Politics (link)
• The Californian Century: 100 years of dreaming and scheming (link)
• The Listening Service: Everything you wanted to know about music and then some (link)
• 7 Deadly Sins: Pride, greed, lust ... and Stephen Fry (link)
• Travels Through Time: Galois' genius and untimely demise (link)
• Analysis: The NHS, AI and our data (link)
• Wild Thing: Sasquatch, science and society (link)
• Backlisted: Books and bonhomie (link)

2019

December

• New York Times editorial: "This is the decade – the period since the founding of the App Store, in 2008 – in which we were brainwashed into surveilling ourselves." (link)
• Singing Mozart in an MRI scanner. 'Freaky' isn't a big enough word to describe this (1-min video; link)
• "The Man Who Reads 1,000 Articles a Day" – On Robert Cottrell, editor of The Browser (link)
• "Lying works, and lying outrageously and repeatedly in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary works even better." Marvellous rant about the UK general election, some of it nonsense (eg, "[Labour's] policies were not the problem"), but that bit about lying is the stone-cold truth (link)
• Best Illusion of the Year 2019 (1-min video; link)
• "The mean founder age for the 1 in 1,000 highest growth new ventures is 45" (link)
• Christmas through the eyes of an economist – entertaining and insightful (16-min audio; link)
• "A man who bought the personalised number plate NULL has received over $12,000 of parking fines, because the system records 'NULL' when no numberplate has been recorded" (link)
• "Despite the hype, artificial intelligence will take years to significantly boost economic productivity" (link)
• 15% of Google queries are for words, or combinations of words, that it has never seen before (link)

November

• Google Creative Lab has come up with "an alternative solution to carrying a phone all day". It's called 'a piece of paper' (link)
• "Please steal our approach to sustainability." Quite possibly the greatest letter ever written to Jeff Bezos (link)
• Massively Multiplayer Hackathon – only the truly geeky need apply (link)
• A sophisticated new electronic warfare system is being used in Shaghai's port – but the people behind it are a mystery (link)
• Example opening sentences created by an atificial neural network (link):
  "I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man."
  "When I was a boy, I was fond of the story of the pirate god."
  "I am, or was."
• Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has launched an ad-free social network called WT:Social (link)
• Tipping has almost nothing to do with quality of service, but there are clear trends all the same. Business travellers tip more than holidaymakers; visitors to cities tip more than those to the countryside; men tip more than women, especially (surprise!) when tipping a younger woman (link)
• A beautiful and surprising topological solution, for maths nerds only (16m video; link)
• Blimey, another interview with me (23m audio; link)
• An interview with me (link)
• An improvement to the Gold Rule – "Care about me not because you can imagine what you would selfishly want if you were me. Care about me because you see how I am not really so different from others you already love" (link)

October

• On the limits of science (link)
• "If the Louvre was on fire, should we rescue the art first or the people?" Thought-provoking (link)
• Bullshit.js, a browser plugin that cleans web pages of cliché, jargon and hyperbole (often leaving little behind) (link)
• On English grammar and why it makes no sense to talk about a "rectangular silver French old little lovely whittling green knife" (link)
• "World of Atoms... A workshop to introduce 8 to 10 year old children, their carers and teachers to the beauty of atoms and their intricate interactions with light - brought to life with discussion, art, experiment, poetry and dance" (link)
• A simple, autonomous insect monitor (by my friend Steve Devlin) (link)

September

• "Seventy percent of Japanese sentences, by one count, lack a subject, and 50 percent of all spoken sentences do, too" (link)
• "Does meritocracy stall social mobility, entrench an undeserving elite, and undermine trust in higher education?" Yes. Let us count the ways (link)
• On the protests in Hong Kong: "While Twitter blocked [Chinese state news agency] Xinhua from buying ads, Facebook and YouTube continue to sell ads to Xinhua even while boasting that they are de-ranking this kind of content in their algorithm. In practice, this means Facebook and YouTube are demoting free Xinhua content to make room for paid Xinhua content. This ongoning relationship does little to build enthusiasm for Facebook or WhatsApp among Hong Kongers" (link)
• "Tech companies have abused their power, and it is time to resist them." The finest essay I have read on this topic (link)
• "A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. But Mindar comes with some ... unusual traits. A body made of aluminum and silicone, for starters. Mindar is a robot" (link)
• Correlation is not causation, but we still use correlation as evidence of causation. Is that justified (link)
• It is a logical impossibility for immigrants not to integrate into British society. Fabulous reasoning (link)

August

• Restaurant of Mistaken Orders (2m video; link)
• Anyone who thinks that weather is boring should watch this (7m 30s video; link)
• Charles Sanders Peirce was an obscure unemployed, poor, eccentric 18th-century American polymath. He was also one of the greatest intellects in human history (link)
• Humans go to great lengths to find extraterrestrial intelligence when non-human species capable of communicating with them are right in front of their eyes (link)
• Younger Americans are better than older Americans at telling factual news statements from opinions (link)
• Job advertising algorithms show science and technology positions preferentially ads to men, not because women are seen as less valuable but rather because they are considered more valuable, so it is more cost-effective to advertise to men (link)
• Self-checkouts are creating a new breed of shoplifter (link)
• "Brandolini's law: 'The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.'" Plus 10 other universal laws (link)

July

• Researchers at CalTech have created a quantum version of noughts and crosses (link)
• Humans can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it to navigate (link)
• In 1999, Google's privacy policy was 600 words long. Today it contains 4,000 words (link)
• Far from being drunken sailors, seafarers of the 17th and 18th centuries were clever mathematicians (link)
• The 'backfire effect' refers to situations where fact-checking the basis for a strongly idealogical belief only increases people's commitment to them. This, some fact-checking has revealed, turns out to be mostly untrue (link)
• From 2014 until at least mid-2018 (the latest period for which statistics are available), mortality rates in the UK rose (link)

June

• The text of Airbnb's privacy policy has similar complexity to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (link)
• How random encounters with a stray dog and a budding athlete saved a young man from despair – or worse (link)
• "Amnesty International, in a 2016 report on user privacy, gave WeChat zero out of a 100 for its lack of freedom of speech protection and lack of end-to-end encryption. By comparison, Facebook scored 73" (link)
• "We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell" – Publisher's rejection letter to Stephen King (link)
• In 2018, American adults spent an average of 6.3 hours a day with digital media, mostly on mobile devices (link)
• Follow Apollo 11 in real time (give or take 50 years) (link)
• When hunting caribou, native foragers in Canada divine the best hunting grounds by means of a ritual involving caribou shoulder bones. This sounds hopelessly ineffective but it works. This is because the process effectively randomises where the hunters go and therefore makes it impossible for the caribou to predict (link)
• "During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: 'The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.' — George Orwell." But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth (link)
• Software developed in the US and Germany allows users to edit the text transcript of a video and automatically changes the video to show the speaker uttering the new words (link)
• The Milky Way makes one or two new stars every year (link)
• A Scottish pub has dedicated its urinal to three perpetrators of the Highland Clearances (link)
• On animal rights in movies – "if an ape is on set for more than three consecutive days the production must provide a play area or a private park where the ape can exercise and relax" (link)

May

• Salvador Dalí once said, "I believe in general in death, but in the death of Dali, absolutely not." Now a 'deepfake' system has brought him back to life (link)
• "The internet economy today resembles the earliest days of the nuclear industry. We have a technology of unprecedented potential, we have made glowing promises about how it will transform the daily lives of our fellow Americans, but we don't know how to keep its dangerous byproducts safe" – Maciej Cegłowski (link)
• "I liked having power over machines. But power over humans is often awkward and sometimes painful to wield. I wish we'd built a better industry." Fabulous essay by programmer and writer Paul Ford (link)
• "Future anthropologists, scouring a snapshot of today's social network sites, might conclude that homo sapiens was a species that worshipped cats and hated each other" (link)
• Mathematicians' favourite type of chalk is a Japanese brand known as 'Hagoromo' – which also happens to be the way we write 'Hannay' in kanji characters (3m 32s video; link)

April

• The rise and fall of empires rendered as cell division (4m video; link)
• Figs aren't considered vegan because they contain dead wasps (link)

March

• The first 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years of the universe's history distilled into a 30-minute video (link)
• "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. Talks between the Gray Wolf Party and the Timber Wolf Party break down over the issue of who gets the tastiest cuts of mutton. The Gray Wolf Party enters into a surprise 'grand coalition' with the Sheep Party, and they agree to eat the second wolf." – Scott Alexander (link)
• "[B]y elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy" — George Carlin
• Explicit price collusion between competing companies is illegal. But if the computer programmes behind their respective websites work out that colluding is the best way to extract money from customers, it's OK (link)
• Left-leaning readers prefer basic science books (physics, astronomy, zoology), while right-leaning ones go for books on applied and commercial science (criminology, medicine, geophysics) (link)
• "If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity" — Bill Vaughan

January

• Airport security is not a counter-terrorist tool, it's a counter-terror tool (link)
• Between 1996 and 2016, the labour force participation rate of American men aged 20-24 has dropped nearly 10%, apparently because they're choosing to spend time consuming digital entertainment instead of working (link)
• The US Department of Defense's $4.3 billion new MHS Genesis electronic health record was characterized as "operational unsuitable" in initial tests by independent reviewers (link)
• Toadbollock, Dustiberd and Lytillskyll are among the surnames recorded in a 12th-century survey of property in Winchester (link)
• Everyone of European ancestry is directly descended from Charlemagne. The most recent common ancestor of every living human lived in about 1600 BC (link)
• The Chinese People's Liberation Army and French Ground Army maintain small pigeon forces in the event that electronic warfare should disrupt or disable military communications (link)
• US campus censorship of controversial speakers dropped dramatically in 2018 (link)
• Playing 'The Star Spangled Banner' in a minor key makes it sounds Russian (2m 43s video; link)
• DNA ancestry kits give different results even for identical twins (link)
• Protestants have a higher suicide rate than Catholics (link)

Podcasts

• Austentatious: A lost Jane Austen novel is rediscovered by an improv comedy troupe (link)
• Atlantic: A mysterious death on an Irish beach (link)
• Tunnel 29: An escape story (link)
• The 200 Year Old: The end of ageing? (link)
• Rule of Three: Comedy dissected (link)
• Ghibliotheque: On the world's greatest animation studio (link)
• Macbeth: Shakespeare as you've never heard him (link)
• Bunk Bed: Nighttime ramblings (link)
• Dream Diary: The mysterious story of a cult game (link)
• The Puppet Master: Putin's PR man (link)

Copyright © 2019-2025 Timo Hannay