Paul Nightingale

Very impressive!

🚨Replication alert🚨
I'm pleased to announce that my replication of Moretti (2021) is now accepted as a comment at AER.

I find ten issues in the paper. My comment focuses on two major problems; in the appendix, I document eight (relatively) minor problems.

1/

Read this a second time. It's really good

Dan Wang's "Breakneck: China's quest to engineer the future" is as good as people say.

Useful to read it with Dunkelman's "Why Nothing Works". Which is also really good on the US

And for background Paul Sabin's "Public Citizens" is a wonderful history of changes in the US.

Stupidology | William Davies The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as...

Really enjoyed this piece by @will-davies.bsky.social on Trumpian "stupidity", which thrives when judgement is outsourced to financial markets and digital platforms, and makes the panicked 2016 discourse about post-truth politics seem altogether quaint www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...

"TAE is a very curious fusion company: It has promised that its fusion power plant is just over the horizon for over 25 years."

www.fusionconclusion.com/how-taes-fus...

Good ranty thread on "framing" nonsense

Britain's AI bear case A handful of troublingly plausible ways the next decade could not go Britain's way

This is a really excellent piece on the risks to Britain of falling failing to figure out how to thrive over technological shock of next decade from @archiehall.bsky.social

notes.archie-hall.com/p/britains-a...

The One Political Bias To Avoid More Than Any Other Motivated Causal Attribution

We explain political change using totally different causal models if we approve of outcome of not:

1. Change we like is organic, bottom-up genuine expression of public demand

2. Change we dislike is artificial, top-down result of manipulative elite

I’m calling this Motivated Causal Attribution

We're thrilled to announce the Ctrl-Z Award, a US$2,500 prize for researchers “who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record."
Covered by @nature.com today; read more here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/03/10/a...

In a complex society no interesting social theory is 100% true. But regulatory capture seems to come close.

I've met people who are against the mechanism of agriculture and they have other "interesting" political views. Scary.

Worth it for the sentence “AI might displace some coders, but it won’t make priests redundant”

A History of Operation Breakthrough Many who look at the high and rising cost of housing see the problem as fundamentally one of production methods; more specifically, that homes could be built more cheaply if they were made using facto...

Nice new piece by Brian Potter on what went wrong with Operation Breakthrough, including this kind of scary anecdote: open.substack.com/pub/construc...

Energy security rests not with the US but in the North Sea We must be able to keep the lights on and our houses warm without relying on the goodwill of Donald Trump

What does the new crisis in the Middle East mean for UK energy policy, particularly the North Sea? Me in @theobserveruk.bsky.social

observer.co.uk/news/busines...

On Strategists and Strategy: Collected Essays, 2014-2024 - The Military Journal On Strategists and Strategy: Collected Essays, 2014-2024 is a curated volume by renowned military historian Sir Lawrence Freedman that examines modern warfare, strategic thought, and foreign policy ov...

On Strategists and Strategy: Collected Essays, 2014-2024 is a curated volume by renowned military historian Sir Lawrence Freedman that examines modern warfare, strategic thought, and foreign policy over the last decade.

Wild that the top sociology journal doesn't require computational replication or open data.

There is a tsunami of fake social science research coming for us, and the American Sociological Association doesn’t care There are so many red flags that this system is sending up, crying out for the scholarly research enterprise to defend itself. Sadly, reader, that does not appear to be happening.

I wrote it up here, with a picture of a mockingbird, and links to data and code.
/2

Connecting job seekers online with “buddies” who already managed to find a new job significantly increases their employment probability and their earnings, from de Koning, Muller, Belot, Engels, Fouarge, Keer, Kircher, and Phlippen www.nber.org/papers/w34912

Your regular reminder that the UK is in fact a high trust society and anyone who implies it isn’t is either selling you a pup or has bought one.

This is important for understanding the UK now and in the future and the prospect of a new zero sum politics.

Part of the issue is a lack of growth. A recent study showed that cohorts who experience more GDP growth in their lifetimes are more likely to trust the government and have positive perceptions of their living standards. academic.oup.com/qje/advance-... In Britain, such voters are dying out

Interested in research policy, supporting early career researchers or helping research potential donors for Humanities and Social Science research? Check out these positions at the British Academy. #Skystorians

The EU’s proposed Industrial Accelerator Act marks a break with the old reflex of openness at any price? Brussels wants demand steered toward low-carbon goods made in Europe—using procurement and subsidies not just to decarbonise, but to defend industrial capacity. 1/2

Journopoclypse! Yeah, na. I don't think so

Good post by @joshgans.bsky.social on why the scientific publishing system will not collapse from the rise of AI-supported research. open.substack.com/pub/joshuaga...

Partner of sitting Labour MP among three arrested on suspicion of spying for China Exclusive: Trio arrested by counter-terrorism police understood to also include partner of a former Labour MP

Concerns with China's approach to political engagement here in the UK, and vulnerabilities to it in our political system, just aren't going away:

Interesting thing about the UKRI funding diagram: the research councils are invisible with their programmes now (maybe?) inputs to funding bucket outcomes. Disciplines not the organising principle, but pieces of delivery channels. That’s the enormous structural shift. Universities better catch up

Full house for David Byrne.

Highgate must be empty.

NEW: Haowen Zheng, Robert Andersen, Anders Holm, Kristian Bernt Karlson, "Is College Really “the” Equalizer? New Evidence Addressing Unobserved Selection." sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

Can drones be stockpiled? Europe wrestles with weapons dilemma Finland struggles to replicate cold war-era artillery depots for high-tech weaponry that rapidly turns obsolete

Recommend this piece on drones. The speed of innovation/obsolescence means you can’t take a traditional stockpiling approach. So how do you build supply chains that could deliver huge numbers of the latest drones at speed when you need them?
What is the UK approach?
www.ft.com/content/b5ee...