https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?p=CAD6536215675 Pepsi twice ended up in court after promotions went disastrously wrong. Other big companies have fallen into the same trap - promising customers rewards so generous that to fulfil the promise might mean corporate...
Has the economic clock started to run backwards? The defining fact of economic history is that, over time, humans have been able to produce vastly more of whatever goods and services they value. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith had no doubts that the foundation of...
A few weeks ago Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and I sat down to talk about "what do the numbers mean?", courtesy of the Cambridge Festival. The conversation is now online - enjoy! I am popping with delight at the news that I have been shortlisted for Journalist of...
https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?p=CAD6536215675 How assuming others understand exactly what we are thinking gets people killed. Why were soldiers on horseback told to ride straight into a valley full of enemy cannon? The disastrous "Charge of the Light Brigade" is...
In 1928, Karl Jansky, a young radio engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, began researching static interference that might obscure voice transmissions. Five years later, after building a large rotating antenna and investigating every possibility he could think of,...
The New Yorker reviews "The Data Detective" - a wonderful essay from Hannah Fry titled What Data Can't Do. Go for the anecdote about Tony Blair, stay for the phrase "insidious Kahnemanian swap". Book of the week: Math without Numbers by Milo Beckman. I picked this up...
https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?p=CAD6536215675 The height of stupidity is being too stupid to know you are stupid... and it's more common than you think. The hijackers of flight 961 wanted its pilot to fly them to Australia - and wouldn't listen to his pleas that...
It isn’t often I receive an email that makes me smoulder with rage. This one did, which was strange since it was perfectly polite. My correspondent wanted to know why he wasn’t allowed to meet his friends indoors for coffee. They were in their early seventies and...
What Conspiracy Theorists Don't Believe. I was delighted to be commissioned by The Atlantic to write about why indiscriminate doubt is at least as damaging as indiscriminate belief - and in particular, that a fruitful way to think about conspiracy theorists is not by...