Crooked Timber

I start with characterizing a term, ‘Humphreys opacity’ (or, if you prefer, ‘epistemic opacity’):1 this involves the inability to surveil the steps of a process from a known input to a known desirable (or truthful, useful, beautiful, etc.) output in a timely manner to the decision-maker or responsible agent. (For more on the origin and nature of this characterization, recall this post.) In what follows, I set aside to what extent such Humphreys opacity is the effect of features of physical…

For the first time in history, the country in which I live – the Netherlands – has issued a Code Red alert due to the heat. Code red is only issued when the environmental circumstances are such that there is a significant risk of “destabilising of society”. I can only remember that we’ve had this for very severe storms in the past. Today, we have it for heat. In Utrecht, it’s right now 37 degrees Celsius, but due to high humidity levels, it feels like 40. In the South-East of the Netherlands,…

There’s long been a disconnect between concerns about the massive impact of AI data centres on electricity demand and claims by Sam Altman and others that the impact is really modest. Ed Zitron recently posted a summary of OpenAI’s 2025 accounts which helps to clarify things a bit. In short, if you look at actual electricity demand needed for current AI use, it’s small. And that doesn’t change if demand grows at high but plausible rates. On the other hand, if you look at what is needed to…

One Spring Monday in 1852 around thirty gold buyers gathered for the evening at Mrs Black’s Royal Hotel in Bathurst, which was (and is) just on the other side of the Blue Mountains from Sydney. Probably not ordinarily the most collegiate of petty capitalists, the gold buyers gathered to debate the role of the local branch of the Union Bank of Australia in undercutting their business. The bank had begin purchasing gold at a slightly higher rate than individual gold buyers could do, bringing…

Sorry I’ve been offline for so long. I’m back. For now, anyway. Among other things I’ve been writing a little bit about what it was like for me being a teenager involved in left wing politics at the beginning of the 80’s. This is the first (and far the longest) of a series of reminiscences that were prompted by a casual conversation with one of my excellent graduate students. Feel free to ignore! If you like them, I’ll also be posting them on a substack. Here goes: We moved to Oxford in the…

I was doing a deep dive into early Canadian history, because reasons, and found a couple of fun stories to share. Because hey — this Sunday is National Indigenous Peoples Day!The Bad OverwinterSo a recurring thing in early Canadian history was the Bad Overwinter. A group of Europeans — usually French — would show up in Canada with a shipload of trade goods. They would hang out with the Indians for a bit, and then would decide to leave some guys behind over the winter. Maybe they wanted to have…

Sometimes people that know and like each other, and that would never employ snark with each other, can still talk entirely past each other online. Carlo Ludovico Cordasco (Sheffield) wrote a fruitful and prudent sub-stack post (here) on the ‘longstanding debate on AI and deskilling.’ As he notes it was prompted by my Kvetching about a 2 June announcement by The University of Chicago’s President that it has a contract with Anthropic to give all of its students, and all of its staff and faculty,…

The SpaceX IPO, valuing a motley collection of dubious business at over a trillion dollars, marks the abandonment of the Efficient (financial) Markets Hypothesis, one of the zombie ideas I criticised in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Not only do financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately, but the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying. This was prefigured by the rise of Bitcoin and other forms of crypto. Revealingly, no…

Jerry Cayford at Three Quarks Daily has written a piece responding to the near-farcical “jungle primary” in California where it appeared possible at one point that both of the candidates making it through to the general election might be Republicans. The proposed response is to allow the top five candidates through to the general election, which would be run under Ranked Choice Voting. Here’s the conclusion: Final Five Voting emerges as the single most powerful way to address political…

Last week, because of a combination of bad planning (my bad) and endless delays (Deutsche Bahn’s bad), I arrive very late in a hotel in Berlin. I had to ring the doorbell. The guy at the reception started giggling the moment I came in, which irritated me at first (did my hair look so funny, after all these hours on the train?). But he quickly reassured me that it wasn’t about me. It was about the fact that he had pressed the button for the daily closing of the system about ten seconds before I…

Google maps said it would take 2.5 hours to drive from our place in the Blue Mountains to Hill End. Maybe we’re slow. And sure, we stopped to check out nearby gold mining village Sofala on the way. But we left home shortly after 8am and arrived at Hill End in time for us to claim early seats at the micro-pub for lunch. That was pretty good timing actually, though no thanks to the Google lady. The purpose of this day trip was nerdy, for Hill End might have a reasonable claim to be Australia’s…

One my betes noires have been in the news lately. First up, Jonathan Haidt, who’s been annoying me since at least 2012, when I was critical of his bothsidesism on the culture wars. At the time, he was a concern troll, posing as a liberal worried about other liberals who were, he claimed, misunderstanding Republicans. Whereas liberals thought of Republicans as bigots and misogynists, concerned with preserving their own position in racial and gender hierarchies, Haidt explained that they actually…

Mostly I leave Sunday photography to our colleague, the estimable Chris Bertram. Still, this Sunday I was walking the dog in the hills above my town. (“My town” being a modest community of a couple of thousand people in the rolling countryside of northern Bavaria.)[copyright me, yesterday]And by the side of a grassy meadow, I stopped to photograph this pretty little yellow flower: [they

Academics, especially in the humanities, produce texts, and they teach students to produce text. This is a standard assumption, often taken for granted, and maybe not too surprising in times in which productivity is a supreme social norm. Think of the relief – by students and faculty alike – when a text has been submitted before the deadline. Think of all the praise for writers and texts that goes around in our fields (“prolific,” “rigorous,” “accessible,” …). Think of the proud social media…

Last week Australia’s central bank (Reserve Bank of Australia, RBA) raised interest rates. Again. Political economists have been talking for decades about the RBA’s tendency to redistribute wealth from the bottom upwards. But now it seems most people understand that the latest interest rate rises requires ordinary people to hand over more of their cash to their bank, to get it out of circulation and bring down inflation. Asking whether superannuation or taxes could also be used for the purpose…

That’s the actual name of the paper. Isn’t that great?Here’s a prologue: a post I wrote a while back about the Portuguese Man-o’-War. (It’s kind of long — I was new to CT back then, and still figuring stuff out). To summarize: the Portuguese Man-o’-War is a large jellyfish-type creature. And when I say “large”, I mean they can grow as big as a large cat, with stinging tentacles dangling for many meters beneath and around them. They’re carnivores, feeding on fish and small invertebrates. Their…

“I admire the many federal prosecutors across the country who have chosen to resign rather than carry out illegal or immoral orders. To my knowledge, no department head, dean, or other administrator at Texas A&M has taken any meaningful action to defend academic freedom.”—Martin Peterson Today’s post was prompted by two recent news items: first, by the announcement that Martin Peterson, currently professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, will be moving to Southern Methodist University…

I said a while back that nobody’s going to Mars any time soon. Which is true. But that doesn’t mean Mars isn’t interesting! Mars is very interesting.So today’s paper is about Mars. Okay, it’s about a moon of Mars. TLDR: one of Mars’ moons may periodically tear itself apart, turn into a system of rings around the planet, and then put itself back together.You may recall that Mars has two small moons, Deimos and Phobos. Emphasis on small; they’re about 12 km and 20 km across, respectively. They’re…

Back in the 1980s, I was (among other things) a writer and singer of satirical folk songs. Going to the National Folk Festival in Canberra at Easter, I caught up with old friends and was reminded that I had produced a book of my songs. Returning home, I dug out a copy, and decided to scan it. You can download the result here (big file) A lot of the songs were topical and are now very dated. But the theme of the title song is one that, sadly, never gets old (true also of the Irish original) Here…