New post: Idiot Wind
mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/idio...
What Trump’s pointless war against Iran tells us about the US government, the UK political right and the mainstream media in both countries.
To elaborate on this a little in a health economics context: I do some work on the effectiveness of algorithmic prediction on pt outcomes. Identifying both mechanisms and outcomes is an *incredibly* complicated process, not least because patients are always being intervened upon. >
#statsky #episky
Where have all the comments gone?
For decades, the American Economic Review regularly published formal comments — papers that replicate, reassess, or challenge earlier AER articles.
In our latest blog post, we show: they’ve nearly disappeared.
New post: Budgets are about much more than fiscal sustainability
mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/02/budg...
The impression that the OBR forecast sets fiscal policy is because politicians and the media have ignored or downplayed other key aspects of what fiscal policy should be about.
This is stenography, not news reporting. The BBC ought to provide some context, such as putting the scale of the changes which Reform claim are possible into context. This omits the major policy of revoking ILR and deporting legal migrants at unprecedented scale.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
New post: How Labour makes fighting right wing populism harder
mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/02/how-...
'Tilting left' won't help. Labour has lost much of its base not so much because it hasn’t been left wing enough in economic terms, but more because it has sounded and acted in an illiberal way.
Interviewers were paid per interview, not per hour, so they nudged respondents to skip those questions. Make the question less burdensome, train or monitor interviewers, or (radical idea) pay them properly and missing friends reappear. 3/
Psychologists following a third-variable control strategy that may be best described as "sequential."
New post out:
We have a guest post today from the excellent @dsquareddigest.bsky.social.
"Build the Rail! Save the snails!"
Or how we don't need to sacrifice the environment to speed up our mad planning processes.
(Free to read)
open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/b...
I've written about the UKRI funding situation and the 'buckets' explainer, looking in detail at QR, STFC and Quantum. www.ersatzben.com/p/the-bucket...
in evolutionary games, equilibrium chooses you
Weekend plug for my new personal post: Why does regulation often feel so toothless?
Sometimes regulators are just useless, but more often the problem is that governments don’t give them the tools or the powers to deter bad behaviour
Today we’re looking back at Episode 165: ‘Dark Star’ by the Grateful Dead.
Cocking in at 4.5 hours long, Andrew delves into the career of the American rock band - but also the historical and cultural context.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and via the website: 500songs.com/podcast/epis...
A reminder to the news media: “conflicting accounts” is what you say BEFORE the incontrovertible video evidence appears. After that, your job is to ask why one side is lying, not to repeat the lie and pretend no one knows the truth.
The BBC coverage is absolutely terrible.
It leads on "sharply contested narratives"
It has a dramatic skew to the US government
It has posted the video but has failed to report on what it shows: it shows the US govt account is untrue
What a Long Strange Trump
It’s Been
Uncle Don’s hair has nary a touch of grey, but he and Epstein shared the women, shared the wine. And his “new” right-wing boogie? It’s a hand-me-down.
by Maureen Dowd
So this is sort of fascinating because on the one hand obviously the Roman imperial senate was a shadow of what, say, the Senate of the third and second centuries BC had been, but at the same time it was a pretty crucial component of imperial governance into the third century.
You can see some of these stereotypes - the simple, morally pure countryside vs. the morally compromised, inauthentic city - play out in Greek and Roman literature.
So this is a very old idea that recurs regularly.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
This paper finds poetry is a universal single shot jailbreak for LLMs. Systems built to stop prosaic attacks fail when the request is phrased in verse arxiv.org/abs/2511.15304
When asked, most people (72.4%) living near lynx in Norway say they LIKE living with lynx. Just 8.3% say they dislike lynx. In Scotland, where we're currently denied the opportunity to live near lynx, the majority of people WANT to see lynx reintroduced.
The automated problem factory!
A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.
Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."
Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫
sometimes an Oxford comma can make all the difference
Haha, this from the New Yorker is getting passed around the math dork community. I did a comic about this kind of thought a few years ago: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/commut...
"it's always the fault of the migrants. Except when it isn't."
Colin from Portsmouth thinks we should blame immigrants for things before they even happen.
