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“Mathematics will need to develop a research culture that can accommodate AI as a partner. This will involve journals that require verification, hiring and tenure arrangements that reward exposition and checking, and collaborative practices for the verification of proofs. Checking and explaining AI-generated mathematics must count as original intellectual labor. The stronger AI becomes, the more valuable this human expertise will be.” – Daniel Kipnis, Wall Street Journal ($) June 16th, 2026 | Leave a comment
 I came across this post by Brivael Le Pogam on X:
M. Le Pogam goes on to politely describe two other errors that his interlocutor is making regarding how the richest person in the world got that rich, and how an astonishing percentage of the the poorest people in the world have been lifted out of absolute poverty in my lifetime. His post is well worth reading for the eloquence of his arguments. But there is another, quite separate reason to give it your attention. You see, Brivael Le Pogam never actually wrote “I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it.” He wrote, “Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent.” The thought behind them was in French, but the English words I read and admired for their eloquence were written by a computer program. Over the last couple of years we have quietly reached and passed the point where automatic translation is, for most practical purposes, invisible. June 13th, 2026 | 15 comments
“An amateur sleuth is singlehandedly demolishing dangerous scientific groupthink”, writes Matt Ridley in the Telegraph:
For too long, many people held back from denouncing these perversions of the scientific method for fear of “damaging public trust in science”. This, of course, allowed the bad practices to continue and spread. I trust science as much as ever, but as Musa al-Gharbi pointed out in his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production”, what is often labelled as the loss of public trust in science is more accurately described as a loss of public trust in scientists. If you, reader, are an honest scientist who wants to regain that trust, then you need to be less collegiate. Matt Ridley continues,
June 9th, 2026 | 19 comments
The Wikipedia entry for apophasis, the rhetorical technique of raising an issue while claiming not to mention it, says,
From an article by Oliver Wright in yesterday’s Times called “Louis Mosley: Our critics are putting ideology over patient safety”:
I do not wish to divert attention from the many legitimate concerns about the use of Palantir’s data-gathering software – originally developed for police and military use – during the Covid pandemic and in other civilian contexts, so I won’t even mention what a hypocritical rabble-rouser Zack Polanski is. April 4th, 2026 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
This letter appeared in today’s Guardian:
This is a good argument against digital ID in itself and is also likely to work well in the public sphere. I welcome any blow against digital ID, and I sympathise with Ms Rodrigues, but I must acknowledge that there is a problem for libertarians here. As the letter says, the UK’s old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) landline phone network is in the process of being replaced. This link takes you to the government guidance page on “Moving landlines to digital technologies”. The government and the phone companies present this transition to “Digital Voice” as being un upgrade for which we should be grateful. It is not an upgrade for me and I am not grateful. Compared to some, I am not badly affected, but I have lost the convenient ability to dial six digits instead of eleven for a local number, and, more worryingly, Digital Effing Voice doesn’t work when there is a power cut, which we have fairly often. For those who live in rural areas, such as the writer of the above letter, it will be much worse. A friend of mine lives in Scotland, has very poor mobile signal at the best of times, and regularly experiences days-long power cuts due to snow. That’ll be fun when the landline doesn’t work. Next year’s papers will be full of stories about old people in isolated houses who died because they could not call for help in an emergency. This change is not being done for the benefit of the customers. It is being done because the “new digital technologies using the internet such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Digital Voice or All-IP telephony” cost less to run than the old technologies. What to do? If I was a socialist or a big-state Conservative, I would immediately say that the old copper phone lines must be maintained despite the expense in order to protect the vulnerable and to keep the system working in the face of attack or disaster. As a minarchist, I might be able to say the same, but given that the actual socialists in power and the big-state Conservatives who preceded them have not taken that route, when I have no doubt that they would have been happy to trumpet that they were doing so, I would guess that the extra expense of maintaining the old system must be insupportable. Or am I wrong? March 16th, 2026 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available — and still have a cold, raw egg. This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it. […] The proposal to replace gas and nuclear with wind and solar reverses the direction of every successful energy transition in human history. It moves down the density ladder, deliberately, and hopes for the best. That is what I mean when I say current energy policy is in a head-on collision with physics. Read the whole thing. March 5th, 2026 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
And here is where Britain’s particular brand of suicidal virtue-signalling becomes lethal. The Liberal West, and Britain most zealously, has spent fifteen years chasing Net Zero with the fervour of a medieval flagellant. We’ve shuttered coal, dithered on nuclear, blanketed the countryside with unreliable windmills, and now face the grim prospect of energy rationing. The National Grid’s own forecasts admit that data centres alone could consume 7-10% of UK electricity by 2030, and that’s before the real AI boom hits. Microsoft, Google, and the rest are already scrambling for power purchase agreements that dwarf entire cities. Yet our political class still preens about “green leadership” while quietly preparing the public for blackouts and sky-high bills. February 12th, 2026 | 85 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The auto industry’s gamble on electric cars has turned into a catastrophe”, reports the Telegraph.
The article goes on to mention EV-related losses and potential losses incurred by Stellantis, General Motors, Ford, Porsche and even Tesla.
But fear not, our forward-thinking and tech-savvy government is on the case. Er…
In January, the government’s Gambling Commission introduced yet another set of restrictions on gambling advertisements to stop people being enticed into making wagers they cannot afford. In most cases, I’m all for people – and industries – taking responsibility for their own choices, including the choice to gamble. But given that the government’s view is that gambling promotions that are too tempting should be banned, maybe it should refer itself to its own commission. In fact, the pressure placed on auto makers to switch to electric by both this and previous governments went well beyond high-pressure advertising and into coercion. February 9th, 2026 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
Preston Stewart has some interesting reportage about Russia being abruptly cut off from Starlink. Whilst this is fascinating from a technical and military point of view, it also brings into focus the sheer power of one man for good or ill… Elon Musk. February 6th, 2026 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Away from the perma-misery of politics, wars, regulatory nonsense and so on, I came across this article on the Substack of the Rational Optimist Society (with a name like that, it is not a place to go for the doom-scrollers): “Housing is arguably the most broken industry in the world, with tough competition from healthcare and education. It’s a gigantic market that affects us all,” writes Stephen McBride. He argues that firms such as Cuby Technologies are doing for housing what shipping containers did for transportation and global trade, with massively positive effects. Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM). It’s a standardized, portable factory that turns homebuilding into a predictable manufacturing process. I can see that acronym MMF, in this context, getting the same visibility as SMR for “small modular reactors”, and tapping into the same idea of using economies of scale, mass customisation and fiendishly clever computer tech to produce lots of useful, not eye-wateringly expensive things for our homes, power generators, whatever. And I can see, in time, how this fits with still-developing tech such as 3-D printing (which has been around a while). It will of course give some folk the vapours, such as those in the construction trades, much as happened with other disruptive changes. But if, for example, ageing and other forces squeeze labour market supply of people in such trades, then business models such as the MMF one, able to churn out homes, will have a lot of appeal. Plus new jobs can be created around design and all the associated, value-add opportunities that can arise. One aspect of all this is that if it lives up to the billing, the precision with which homes are built will be very high. Also, there is an appeal, is there not, for the likes of Elon Musk in figuring out how to efficiently produce things for spacefaring and the settlement of Mars. I can bet he is following all this closely. Final thought – for places that have suffered a devastating loss of housing (such as Southern California exactly a year ago because of the fires), being able to produce attractive homes at scale for people seems to have a lot of appeal. And, er, that’s where the horrible politics comes in. To date, only a fraction of the number of houses lost have been replaced. That is a shameful state of affairs, and one for which the local politicians deserve to pay a high price.
January 18th, 2026 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is a real tweet from the European Commission:
This is an excerpt from a scholarly article about the history of Islam:
– Joseph Schacht, quoted by Wael B. Hallaq in Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed? If you think that the ability of the European Commission to recognise when something has reached a point where no improvement is possible is good enough to allow it to safely close the door of ijtihad on charger cable design, consider the evident fact that none of the multiple people in the Berlaymont building over whose desks the draft of that tweet must have passed knew enough history to veto that title. December 26th, 2025 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 21st, 2025 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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