Links for January 2026
When you can predict accurately the posterior function, transformers converge to Bayesian inference. Superforecaster epistemology has demonstrated its utility, and in my view resolves the long-running rationalism vs empiricism debate in philosophy.
Declining fertility appears to be driven less by increasing rates of childlessness, and more by families with kids having fewer. Type in “birth rates” or “fertility” in the search bar of my newsletter, or get an LLM to summarise what I write about the topic, and you'll see that it's more complicated than “liberal vs conservative, feminist vs traditional”.
The debate was settled ages ago: tomatoes are a vegetable!
Commercial incentives and Enlightenment culture even optimises word count! The beauty of capitalism can be found in the places we least expect.
Is the idea of the brain as an information processor compatible with emergent complexity? This article argues such.
Increasingly I'm growing sceptical of the idea that nature vs nurture can be easily decomposed into binary, mutually exclusive categories. We have pretty convincing evidence (at least for model organisms) that nurture somewhat affects genetic inheritance.
Holographic string theory allows for more dimensions of quantum gravity.
A new golden age for mathematics? Even if, as Terence Tao argues, the benefits will accrue disproportionately to the low-hanging fruit space, this is significant progress.
My name (in both Irish and English spellings) appears to be rising in popularity each year.
Carlsberg was one of the first industrial research labs. In the quest to minimise people getting sick from a pint, the pH scale and our discovery of the structure of proteins followed. How many other discoveries are a function of the invisible hand? This is why capitalism drives growth: the allocation and information aggregation arguments are important, yet ultimately it drives innovation and human capital development too.
So (broadly speaking) liberals read, old conservatives watch TV, and young conservatives watch YouTube and listen to podcasts? How many podcasts are essentially a trendy revival of conservative talk radio?
I would happily sacrifice the welfare state for open borders any day of the week.
Racial sectarianism still plays an important role in American politics, and indeed was an underrated driver of wokeness as civil rights. Then liberals (credibly, on the abortion issue) started to make a conscious effort to appeal to women, hence the growing partisan gender gap, and the shift in focus of wokes towards feminism? Same with gay marriage, attracting LGBT folk, and adopting gender ideology? Conservatives, reliant on religious evangelicals, cannot shift to a more socially liberal stance, so culture wars generate polarisation? An interesting equilibrium to model…
Despite the social media narrative. The reported mental health crisis is largely an illusion of expanding definitions and self-diagnosis in my view.
Union busting as abundance? If abundance converts liberals to free-market economics, then a liberal innovation becomes in effect a conservative coup in the marketplace of ideas.
It may be time to do the equivalent link for Substack posts I've read in due course…