My essay on the Ghost of Descartes was written by cannibalising a longer, not quite finished essay entitled "Cartesian vices, Copernican moments". In writing something else, I find myself wanting to refer to another part of it, so I'm hastily topping and tailing the relevant s...

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There have long been scientists who were celebrities in their own time. Galileo, Keppler, Goodall, Linneus, Cousteau, Darwin, Smith, Leeuwenhoek, Da Vinci, Ibn Khaldhun, Curie, and many others in the last 800 years were followed and admired. They in many ways performed their s...

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Every now and again I'm asked to contribute to The Mandarin as part of their Brains Trust . Here's my latest contribution in seeking to answer this question: Where is the boundary between their designated public duty and the apparent expectation by some ministers that it’s ok...

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[caption id="attachment_34023" align="alignright" width="452"] Heydon Dyson Dyson Heydon is hard at work.[/caption] A quick follow up on my " May the farce be with you " article on how the oligarchy got George Pell off on charges of sexual molestation. One that Graham Young ra...

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Here is a new paper from Imperial College , this time by a team with David Miles, Mike Stedman, and A drian Heald, looking into the implicit cost per QALY that the UK spent via lock downs and other repression policies. They use a somewhat different methodology from mine , esti...

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There are 5 aspects of the covid-19 pandemic I really did not see coming, all pointing to a phenomenon that European sociologists of a century ago spent their whole lives describing, coming up with theories about crowds and their behaviour - theories now largely forgotten. Sch...

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[caption id="attachment_33982" align="aligncenter" width="593"] I don't know about this hierarchy, but I do like the idea that the most important foundation is self-honesty.[/caption] Below is an essay I wrote in late 2018 but it wasn't published on the Mandarin till a year ag...

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If you, like me, believe our collective hysteria is needlessly causing the world tens of millions of deaths and enormous unhappiness , you surely need a bit of humour to keep going. So let’s view the whole crisis via a different lens and share the brilliance of UK government c...

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Find below the video of a seminar for the Australian Institute for Progress done a few weeks ago detailing the basic cost-benefit view of the current pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TS2DE-D1TA The slides of this presentation are here: Presentation CBA Covid May 2020...

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