Uncategorized

This is the second post in a series. The others are here and here The Crow strategy in post 1 was wildly successful. The effort to flip the RMT’s success in its economic goals into wider political ones, however, saw mixed results. Gall argues that Crow may not have realised how much easier it was…

I think I might make this a regular feature just to get rid of the things. Here are some documents from my downloads folder: Between 24% and 30% of US electors, with 95% confidence, were exposed to fake news during the 2016 election campaign. Nearly all of this was pro-Trump, and it accounted for 2.6%…

A quick Cambridge Analytica thought. Especially since the C4 broadcast, they look a lot like traditional American election ratfuckers, doing the sort of thing that Karl Rove used to get up to. I would enter a caveat here. As there is a ratfucker playbook, so there is a counter-playbook. You have squads of lawyers standing…

The modern era has had several attempts at adopting a so-called nomad science as a meta-theory of everything. Here is a list. Most of them were completely terrible. From 1900 to 1939: Race Science From 1910 to 1960: Psychoanalysis From 1930 to 1980: Marxism From 1950 to 1980: Cybernetics From 1975 to today: Postmodernism From…

A couple of recent experiences. First up, I was at Mediapart’s 10th anniversary celebrations over the weekend. At one of the panel discussions, a very important journalist was speaking very passionately about the possibility of someone changing an algorithm and this having consequences for real people in the real world. Well, yes; that’s like you,…

Chris Dillow is for some reason defending “Tory dilettantism” via an appeal to Michael Oakeshott’s “Rationalism and Politics”. Not surprisingly, I disagree. The problem is that Oakeshott’s notion of practical wisdom is meant to be grounded in just that: practice. One thing experts tend to do a lot of is practising their particular specialisation. That’s…

Flipchart discusses a bunch of polling that suggests that not everyone fits into a standard left-right spectrum but MPs usually do, and quotes this YouGov slide (from 2015). He goes on to make a fairly familiar case that the public really want to break with The Two Liberalisms. This is a collection of tropes pulled…

The blog has, per Pingdom report, missed exactly one check this month for 3 minutes of downtime. The previous downtime was in the first week of January, when it was offline for several hours as I carried out major maintenance. During this streak we had the 7000 unique traffic dump on this post. This is…

I have been blogging quite a lot about Ronald Coase and the problems of outsourcing but this is ridiculous. DHL announced in November that it had been appointed alongside QSL to manage the supply and distribution of food products and packaging for more than 850 KFC outlets in the UK. DHL said it would manage…