Tim Harford
FollowThe latest interviews, podcast appearances, and blog posts from Tim Harford, updated daily.
Liberated by technology (again)
Isaac Merritt Singer was an unlikely feminist. While married to Catherine for 30 years, he had 10 children with another partner (Mary Ann) and seven with a third (also called Mary).
The problem with P(doom)
Will the robots kill us all? Hard to say. As the Dude wisely opined in The Big Lebowski, “a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous.
AI can forecast the future. Should we let it?
In the 1980s, the psychologist Philip Tetlock was struck by the fact that highly respected, highly credentialed geopolitical analysts often disagreed quite fundamentally about how the cold war was…
Cautionary Tales – What’s the Frequency, Zenith? The Great Telepathy Experiment
Every Sunday, in 1937, people all across American tune in to a strange broadcast. The Zenith Foundation is attempting an ambitious parapsychology experiment to test whether telepathy is real.
Some weekend recommendations
A miscellany for your delectation. “Tomorrow, I will be going across channels with zero views, going into their chat, and pumping people up.” But it might not end up quite how you…
Is the modern economy a bit… samey?
Last week’s column, with the aid of a pink romantasy bookshop, discussed the way a healthy economy offers “disciplined pluralism”. Discipline means that sooner or later, uneconomic ideas fail.
More or Less - Is the UK state pension really the lowest in Europe? - BBC Sounds
Tim Harford investigates UK pensions, Russia’s GDP and heatwave deaths.
I was wrong about Bad Girl Books
There are some ideas so self-evidently bad that as you see the seeds being sown, it’s all you can do to restrain yourself from staging an intervention.
Random is as random does
In the genius’s playground that was Bell Labs in the 1950s, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, built an outguessing machine.
Why the story of the Vegetable Lamb was believed
Of all the wonders witnessed by Sir John Mandeville, a 14th-century English knight, none was more astonishing than the “wondirfulle” fruit of a tree he encountered on his travels in India.