William Hague has caught the bug for democratic lottery. And he writes about it well. This simple sentence is a nice little microcosm. “Social media companies are poisoning the democratic world with the addictive spread of narrow and intemperate opinions.” Hear hear. Writing a...
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Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call. Darwin himself had proposed that natural selection was a major mechanism of evol...
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https://youtu.be/6uPex480hRU Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below. 00:00 - Introduction and Overview The talk b...
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The biggest winner from the referendum on the weekend is John Stuart Mill. There’s a strand of left-wing orthodoxy these days that deprecates free speech and brands opposing viewpoints as dangerous wrongthink. This firebrand mode of thinking is excellent at producing an engage...
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I find it hard to understand how passionate some folks are about voting Yes or voting No. Not because I do not understand passion, but because the cases for either position are so unconvincing. I am not “barracking” for either side. If the result is Yes I will find it hard to...
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I discover that I don't seem to have cross-posted this old essay previously published in the Mandarin, and since this is my place of record (where I can make notes to myself in the comments of new sources, thoughts or developments) I am doing it now. This is part three of Nich...
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Wikipedia defines 'grey literature' thus: Materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports ( annual , research, technical , project,...
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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="506"] A brilliant illustration of the broad terrain of both concepts. It’s telling (and sad for a left leaning centrist like me) that this comes from the very right wing Claremont Institute . (Though their artist may have got it from som...
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Many of us still venerate books. The evidence says they are not very good at what is supposed to be their primary job: putting new ideas in our heads. We are slowing developing new ways to achieve this old aim. Many of us own thousands of these. They cost too much, too many ha...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aupVJkTnIqY This is one of the best podcast interviews we’ve done. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”. It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire,...
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https://youtu.be/aBTFQ6wwlq8 The more I've thought about sortition or as I call it "representation by sampling" the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to und...
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From my Substack newsletter . Extraordinary images are being detected within the early pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. As you know, the JWST went in search of exoplanets. Anyway at about the same time I was seeking an AI artist to illustrate the phenomenon of...
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https://youtu.be/DxcE_PC5rgc A while back I condensed a bunch of things I have been thinking about into four ideas which I explored with Peyton Bowman in these two discussions . In discussions with philosopher and school teacher Martin Turkis, it occurred to me it would be int...
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One of my favourite podcasts with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope. Hugh has just brought to publication a book written by his father in 1990. But being well ahead of its time, the book was unpublishable. It pursued Aristotle's point that elections installed a gover...
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This post is rather long. If you want a point form summary, scroll down to the bottom. Secondly, this post does not represent the views of anyone else but me. As part of his pre-election platform, the now PM promised to get an aboriginal Voice into the constitution during this...
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This post began as an ad for an artist with traditional and AI graphic design skills. If you want to apply, please be my guest. But the post also presents a nice simplification of a way of thinking. Right now I'm wondering how to illustrate what I call "the off-ramp from reali...
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https://youtu.be/Gb9oSVE1zNs I really enjoyed this week’s uncomfortable collision with reality with colleague Gene Tunny. We covered a lot of ground talking about the use and abuse of the wellbeing agenda. Where does it come from? Why is it taking off as an approach to policym...
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One way to get beneath the surface of what's going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense. I was browsing in one of the few remaining second-hand boo...
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(Cross posted from On Line Opinion) Australians are very mindful of prejudice and discrimination in our community, and rightly so. Yet, many prejudices are so fashionable and pervasive that they go unnoticed. We are blind to some bigotries. I am a member of an ethnic and cultu...
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[caption id="attachment_36685" align="alignright" width="417"] This picture makes the obvious point that if we got an extremely large person to put on extremely large rubber gloves and gave them an extremely large scalpel, there is no end to the good they could do, starting wi...
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I’ve been looking for an explainer of what’s been going on in Chile and, thanks to Brad Delong for pointing it out . Of particular interest was the way a government won 55 percent of the vote and then held a referendum on a new constitution that crashed— as in really CRASHED!...
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The only education I ever got was in history. And what history taught me is wrapped up in the story the premier English speaking philosopher of history of the 20th-century told about detecting the Albert Memorial. I wrote it up here , but the upshot is a point that’s both obvi...
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I've started posting things here that I'm drafting for my weekend newsletter — which you can subscribe to here — so here's another tidbit. This is an excellent podcast featuring an ‘industry expert’ and then someone who’s introduced as an ‘economic genius’ — Tyler Cowan. The i...
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I recommend the first 15 or 20 minutes of this podcast. Defs worth the listen as John Gray explains where he comes from — literally and intellectually and ideologically. His milieu is British working class and he got to Oxford and has been a maverick to all classes ever since....
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https://twitter.com/NGruen1/status/1627142530126184448 The first I saw or heard of Casablanca was at the beginning (and end) of Woody Allen’s “Play it again Sam”. It was many years later I saw the film. I loved it, but mainly because it’s such classic (Hollywood) movie making....
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From this week's Substack of mine. Thomas B. Edsall has an important writeup of research into reducing political polarisation. But to me it seems to be heading in an unhelpfully scientistic direction. Virtually all the researchers quoted examine the causal pathways leading to...
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Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has called bullshit on many of them . What I propose is something far simpler: make...
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