Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing risks your job, your friends and even your life. So why do it? Financial expert Ray Dirks (played by Jeffrey Wright) exposed one of the biggest corporate crimes of all time - and yet he was the one who ended up in front of the Supreme...
“What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism is inspiring — although as anyone suffering from long Covid can tell you, it is not always true. Sometimes what does not kill you just makes you weaker. Does Nietzsche’s maxim apply...
The Scout Mindset. I eagerly awaited The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef, a superb interviewer and a throughgoing disciple of the path of rationality. Galef is interested in being right, finding the truth, and all the ways in which we mislead ourselves. I was expecting,...
Why parents, politicians and doctors would be wiser to sometimes do nothing. Lady Sale (played by Helena Bonham Carter) was part of a bloody and ignominious British retreat from Afghanistan in 1842. The arrogant colonial invaders had thought intervening in Afghan...
Wrinkles and grey hairs notwithstanding, I must be younger than I had assumed. Sixty per cent of the adult population of the UK have been vaccinated with at least one dose, but your columnist is not old enough to be one of them. Who knew? This means I still have...
Next up is Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset which looks terrific but which I have not yet read. Meanwhile I have curated a list of the best books for thinking about data, and - seperately - some recommendations of twitter people to follow on the subject of maths and in...
How the hunt for a missing teen saw a role-playing game denounced as a demonic and deadly pursuit. When James Dallas Egbert III was reported missing from his college dorm - one of America's most flamboyant private detectives was summoned to solve the case. "Dallas"...
We are now about a year into the ohmygosh-this-is-for-real stage of the pandemic. A time, perhaps, for taking stock of the big decisions — and whether they were wise. To my mind, there were two big calls to be made. The first: was this virus a deadly enough threat to...
Cautionary Tales - why organisations squander good ideas... I've been so pleased at all the kind comments from around the world about the new season of Cautionary Tales. If you haven't sampled it, please do so. I love working on the scripts and the narration, but I'm...