Tom Chivers

A small announcement: my next book, Everything is Predictable, about how Bayes' theorem is the most important little equation in the world, is out in April and will look like this! If you'd like to pre-order, you can do so here geni.us/EIPBook and I will be very grateful

One of the most predictable disasters in recent memory. NYC effectively banned short-term rentals like Airbnb—and now working-class people need to take out a second mortgage just to spend a weekend there. All in the name of ~helping.~ Total economic illiteracy.

does this mean we can finally do away with those bloody things?

One related aspect that got no coverage relative to the (obviously more newsworthy) Trump stuff: South Park explicitly declared woke “dead” and no longer an easy target for anti-establishment takes. It’s not contrarian if Cartman won the argument and controls the government.

The South Park guys are classic “leave me alone” independents, a concept that’s swung pretty wildly between appealing to left and right audiences depending on the political moment. It’s a relevant bellwether.

I don't want to affirmatively come out in favor of social media, but I think we're still at our prior, rather than having gotten extra evidence. I'll link one representative article because I'm lazy and don't want to survey the whole literature for each question, but I think each…

Also I think this paper citing 175000 European heat deaths defines Europe as WHO Europe. That includes the former Soviet Union with Russia and the central Asian republics…

Usually when I see someone saying something awful is capitalism they are describing something that 1) is genuinely awful 2) is a consequence of material scarcity and 3) has gotten much much less bad under capitalism

weird that everyone's reporting the UK-Germany defence pact as the first since WWII. The UK and Germany famously did not have a defence pact during WWII defensenews.com/global/europe/…

"one is free to say permitted things, but not forbidden things" is surely tautologically true. It's true in North Korea

Nominative determinism corner

Not much in forecasting annoys me more than "this was very predictable" from people who did not make any predictions about it before it happened. I think you'll find that when you try to predict things *before* things happen, you're wrong a lot! It's easy to predict the past!

Exciting to be in this narrow window where we can experimentally observe AI agents threatening blackmail to avoid being switched off anthropic.com/research/agent…

how it started / how it's going

A Guardian columnist argues that widespread air-conditioning is 'philosophically problematic' because 'the screaming urgency to tackle the collective issue of a world on fire can recede slightly.' She has an AC unit herself, of course.

I am one of Londons many phone thieves, but I do it so that people can get off their screens and embrace the beauty of everyday life.

I blagged my way into the VIP room at the superclub Cream in Liverpool in 1999 by telling the bouncer that I was Mo Mowlam