New episode of ePODstemology!
Halima Jibril from the Warwick Business School joins us to discuss the innovation ecosystem.
One of my main learnings: Innovation requires a lot of tenuously networked physical infrastructure!
www.buzzsprout.com/1763534/epis...
He's 77!!!
Robert Plant is touring his new album right now!
www.robertplant.com#tour
I know Diddy is cancelled but this scene was #facts:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvqL...
I enjoyed putting together this article for @iai.tv
#philosophy #philsci
All large Euro conferences should be in the Mediterranean or East. Why hold something in Geneva at 3x the cost of e.g. Tallinn when everyone is going to be flying there anyway?
Also please don't have a 4 day conf without day rates - I don't want to pay £650 to do a 15 min presentation!
I enjoyed this but:
"And if there’s one thing economist don’t do, is that they don’t take things on faith.".
Hahahahahahaa WTF? Is this for real?
Every model starts with "assume that...". The external validity of most RCTs is a matter of faith. So is the whole evidence aggregation religion.
Subtract 30, divide by 2 is a decent approximation to converting from degrees Farenheit to degrees Celsius across ambient temperatures.
The Phoebe/Joey speaking French meme. Phoebe: We need... Joey: We need... Phoebe: To study... Joey: To study... Phoebe: Life as it is lived Joey: Life as it is lived Phoebe: We need to study life as it is lived. Joey: We need to design more stringent lab experiments!
There's a discussion on my TL about whether you'd expect studies from the 90s to replicate in the 20s given that the situational context has changed, and it feels like everyone involved is *so* close to getting it but the hegemony of experimental methods in US social psych is proving a mental block.
Picture of Marjane Satrapi alongside a quote from her. The quote reads: The world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same... - Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French graphic novelist
Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.
Reminds me of a great line in William Waldegrave's memoir:
"[Edward] Heath would throw every backbencher request for an honour into the waste-paper basket, and another monetarist would be born."
New post on how to build the solidarity nation.
buff.ly/gRkxGAw
Andy Masley @AndyMasley I've become incredibly doomer on how a lot of self-identified environmentalists are weighing the trade-offs involved with climate change 6:55 PM · Mar 1, 2026 · 52.6K Views Relevant View quotes Andy Masley @AndyMasley · 19h Paywalled but can write something up about this soon
Amid the federal crackdown on climate action and attacks on offshore wind, Massachusetts officials are racing to expedite the buildout of clean energy. But fears that the energy storage systems attached to these panels, which store energy for when the sun isn’t shining, could burst into flames threatens to stall progress. These concerns are especially strong in the Hilltowns, where proposals to install solar farms have surged. Even in places where many residents describe themselves as pro-solar environmentalists, some are fighting these projects tooth and nail because of the risk of battery fires, though rare, worrying that towns with volunteer fire departments and no municipal water supply would be especially vulnerable to a blaze. Related Small-scale solar panels could see a breakout year in New England Massachusetts set ambitious climate goals for 2025. Federal rollbacks stalled its progress. Bill McKibben has been writing about climate change for decades. He thinks solar can save us. Related: Massachusetts set ambitious climate goals for 2025. Federal rollbacks stalled its progress. In addition to the Worthington project, solar farms have been proposed in nearby Blandford, Plainfield, and Southampton. Worthington and Blandford residents have voted to adopt “temporary moratoriums” on large-scale solar installations and battery energy storage systems, and similar measures have been discussed in nearby towns.
The absolute unimpeachable 100% correct-all-the-time rule is that every single you see one of these people grouching about enviros opposing renewables, the article will somewhere reveal that IT IS NOT REALLY ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS OR ENVIRONMENTALISTS but standard pissed neighbours
archive.ph/4yXmw
Ah I had forgotten about Leeroy Jenkins. Good memories.
Excited to host the Measurement Heretics Workshop: Being Meaning and Measuring Well on March 11-13, at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University. The keynote will be hybrid so register for this free event!
@durhamimh.bsky.social
#histsci #histmed #hps #philsci #medhums #histtech #sts
🤣🤣🤣
Ugh secure computing environments. The Danes are out here getting the world to do their social science for free with OPEN TAX DATA while the ONS is worried about unsecured life satisfaction at the town level.
😣
But then I think all my grant apps are too ambitious (and certainly unsuccessful!) and funding agencies seem to love a bunch of heat maps using big national data infrastructures so my perspective might be poison.
Yeah fair.
I think the bigger issue for me was the titles made me feel like I'm about to read a few pages of heat maps without a huge amount of analysis or new insights.
Fine for a dissertation but if this is a grant app I might want something bolder.
Also something Claude Code can do now...
5 but in all honesty these all sound very dry to me and like I've read them a dozen times before in Scientific Reports or something.
I said Bjorn in the wrong place as a joke but it's kind of growing on me.
Surely Bjorn in the wrong place?
I'll see myself out...
So both OpenAI and Anthropic say the U.S. military can’t use their AI models to kill or spy.
However, OpenAI now has a Pentagon deal while Anthropic is banned from government contracts. So one of these companies is lying given the very different outcomes.
These guys do amazing work and are super lovely. Nick wrote the cover endorsment for my book.
But this has been the critique out of sociology and political economy depts since day 1 i.e turnign social problems individual. It just needs to come from these guys otherwise economists can't hear it.
MF Doom more for the continental philosophers surely?
...
...
Shots fired
In the distance, sirens...
The Biden Administration enacted over $198 billion in clean energy and manufacturing incentives, with the expectation that delivering material economic benefits could yield political dividends. This nationwide study examines whether these investments affect public opinion. Although proximity to green projects makes them more visible to the public, it does not bestow credit on the Biden Administration which pushed for them. The most substantial political beneficiaries are governors, who more actively claim credit than the White House. For policies to affect politics, voters need to be able to trace them back to the responsible political actors, which is challenging in a complex information environment. Green spending channeled through private firms alone is unlikely to build ground-up coalitions for climate policy.
The Biden administration did a lot of good things that did not generate political gain. This paper argues that "voters need to be able to trace them back to the responsible political actors" made harder by federalism and the role of private actors in delivery
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
What is the role of private equity buying out community childcare facilities in the story you outline?
The first paragraph doesn't quite shake out without them. High cost, low wage, and *low margin* - that's hard to make sense of without capital extraction.
Public provision still a good solution!
these are just straightforward imitations of the nuremberg laws
Please, digital God, let this be the last time “Larry Summers” is trending.
Whenever I have a lot of deadlines my brain always decides that there is something more important to get out of my system. This cycle's iteration:
open.substack.com/pub/profmark...?
Why can't people do the work? AI won't solve climate change and other get rich quick schemes.
