Ben Vincent, DPhil

YouTube video by Cool Worlds Podcast We Need To Talk About AI...

If you’ve previously written off LLM’s as hype-based hallucinators, you might be forgiven, based on the early models.

But that view isn’t accurate any more. Current versions are seriously impressive. Pay attention to what us scientists and coders are reporting.

youtu.be/PctlBxRh0p4?...

This is the End of the US Global Monetary System | Prof Steve Keen Get more from Prof Steve Keen on Patreon

Relevant and interesting…
www.patreon.com/posts/148768...

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth: Why Our Mental Models of the State are Broken There is a common cognitive trap: you feel you understand how something works, until you are asked to explain it. Psychologists call this the illusion of explanatory depth (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002)…

Here’s a post I wrote about The Illusion of Explanatory Depth drbenvincent.medium.com/the-illusion... (but also sneaks in some #mmt)

Not an Economic Question but a Question about Economics Why Can’t We Discuss MMT?

Not an Economic Question but a Question about Economics
open.substack.com/pub/susanbor...

When I hear “LLMs are just guessing words,” I think “Bayes is just arithmetic.” True at one level - yet it misses the emergent capabilities.

Scotland’s Economics Festival is a unique, public-facing celebration of economic thinking – designed to challenge, inform, and inspire. Edinburgh 19th- 21st March 2026. www.scoteconfest.org/. Tickets are available now. Speakers include 🎤

Introducing: The Bayesian Marketing Analytics Course by PyMC Labs.

Stop guessing if your ROI is real or just market noise. Master uncertainty-aware decision rules and causal inference in a course led by #PyMC lead practitioners.

Join our February cohort: dub.link/AHtL0NY

Amazing 🤩 Will try to review and provide input as family holiday time allows.

It’s not yet in CausalPy, but I’m hoping @nathanielforde.bsky.social might implement it in 2026 🤞

It’s a complex topic, with multiple schools of thought. But MMT seems the most engaged with empirically understanding the actual mechanics of how money works.

Commercial Banks Money Versus Government Money - Which is 'Top Dog'? What Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) reveals about bank money, government money and the interaction between the two

MMT has a different view compared to the standard story open.substack.com/pub/mmt101/p...

I’m not convinced by the fractional reserve story. Commercial bank money comes with a corresponding liability so there’s no net increase in the private sector.

There’s also high powered central bank reserve money. But you are right, there are layers and hierarchies of money, so it’s not like so money comes from the central bank. But I’m absolutely not convinced governments need to go and find money before they can spend it.

Genuine question. Where do you think money comes from?

You may be interested in CausalPy, a package focused on so three major quasi experimental methods. Feature requests, bug reports welcome.

causalpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

My EV does 3.1–4 miles per kWh and my off-peak rate is 8.5p/kWh. That’s about 2.13–2.74p per mile in electricity.
Add the new 3p/mile tax and it jumps to 5.13–5.74p per mile – more than doubling my running costs (about 2.1–2.4× higher).
Punishing EV’as is a bizarre policy choice.

Note on household analogies

The very first thing the Prime Minister does is use the household budget metaphor.

A metaphor - this report into BBC coverage - said could be "easily misleading."

Why is the government trying to mislead the country?

#CausalPy 0.6.0 adds Bayesian Propensity Score Enhancements!

Flexible spline adjustments, improved joint modeling, and an example notebook make scoring more robust, showing how design thinking complements #Bayesian estimation.

🧩Try it on Github: dub.link/9jkcRao

🚀 #CausalPy 0.6.0 is live!

A key highlight: the new Prior class, enabling fully custom #Bayesian priors and advanced setups like spike-and-slab or synthetic control models.

More flexibility, more transparency, better causal modeling.

🧩 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗚𝗶𝘁𝗛𝘂𝗯: dub.link/QrkzW8C

Enough with the mental retardation. All this balancing the books nonsense is based on a stupid “government as a household” analogy. It doesn’t work like that - we have a fiat currency which the government is in charge of issuing. We’re not in a gold standard any more.

Nice. Would also be interesting to see by country, given the generation mix. E.g. in the UK we’ve got a decent amount of annual generation from wind and solar which aren’t shown on that infographic.

Well, the MMT’ers would point out that taxes don’t fund spending. The govt issues the currency, so you _could_ reduce energy bills and still fund things as you were before.

Random data viz. Solar generation from our modest array. From May 2023 onwards.

I've finally got around to curating a selection of films about the #climate crisis 🎥

There's lot of mediocre climate films out there, but for me these stand out head & shoulders above the rest 🎞️

They make excellent resources for classrooms, lecture halls, or community cinema's 🎬

Thread:🧵Plz RT

YouTube video by LoM Russell Napier, "Money Creation in Peace and War".

Lost like this is going to be interesting. This guy knows more than me, no doubt, but at 7m 7s he says something which seems totally wrong. That there is no government money, only private bank money 🤨

youtu.be/GKvSMtqhccw?...

I’m not 100% sure, but I think he’s spoken on this before, saying that rejoining doesn’t necessarily require giving up the £

YouTube video by James Rosier Fun With Emojis - Sectoral Balances

Every time the chancellor or the media mention fiscal black holes, I just can’t help think about this video which explains it in a way that a 5 year old would understand.
#sectoralbalances

youtu.be/mtDzC3i9i6A?...

The government issues sterling. It’s not a problem.