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…
Read More A minimal intellectual history of our timesNote, 15th January 2019: A similar study to the one quoted here has been retracted after someone attempting to replicate the result found a bug in the authors’ code. This one has not, but it is probably worth bearing in mind. Retraction Watch coverage. So how might one of those CA campaigns work? Here are…
Read More Network structure, fake news, and why nice people don’t go NaziA 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,…
Read More Three recent experiences and some cowsI have no idea if this is original, but I was thinking about the Keynesian theory of investment while doing something else and it occurred to me that you can explain it in terms of pre-funding or post-funding. The Modern Monetary Theory people think this distinction, applied to banks, has really important consequences for monetary…
Read More Pre-funding and post-funding investmentsChris 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…
Read More Practice, babyI’ve been saying for a very long time – back to 2006, I think, but the earliest TYReference I can find is that the difference among European countries that hopped into Iraq with both feet and those that didn’t is the difference between those who had independent satellite imaging and those who didn’t. This is…
Read More WhooshFlipchart 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…
Read More Algo Kitsch, Again: Salience vs CoherenceThe 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…
Read More peering at the dipstickSo what about that Office for Students and the twat, then? I promised Paul Bernal off the twitter a blog post, and here it is. The thing is, it wasn’t just the ‘social media vetting’ that was the problem with Toby Young. Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about him knew he was wholly inappropriate…
Read More Everyone Hates the Phone Company: The Purpose of the Office for StudentsI 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…
Read More Pants On Fire: John Major and the crisis of the state