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 going, and what the future held. That was odd. If supposed experts...
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. Pluralism means that many different ideas are attempted, the economy...
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. So it was with Bad Girl Books, which earlier this year announced plans to open a short distance away from Oxford’s...
In the genius’s playground that was Bell Labs in the 1950s, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, built an outguessing machine. The machine’s task was simple: a human would choose one of two levers, left or right, and the machine would guess which lever...
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. This fruit resembled a gourd, but cut it open and you would find tiny...
It all seems very long ago, but there was a time when David Cameron was most famous for his enthusiasm for behavioural public policy, better known as “nudges”. In a TED talk released a few months before Cameron became the UK’s prime minister, he began by asking, “How...
In a small black box, in a cupboard just out of reach of my desk, I keep one of my few treasured possessions: a set of Oblique Strategies cards, signed by their co-creator, the artist and musician Brian Eno. The cards, each carrying a brief instruction, are a prompt...
In 2012, the creator of the xkcd cartoon Randall Munroe unveiled Up Goer Five — a detailed diagram of the Saturn V rocket, annotated using only the most common 1,000 (sorry, “ten hundred”) words in the dictionary. It was a viral hit, as was the follow-up book, Thing...
Four hundred years ago, in a Stockholm shipyard, work began on Vasa, the pride of the Swedish navy. King Gustavus Adolphus was at war, and gave orders to his shipwrights to build something impressive. In accordance with the king’s instructions, Vasa was ambitiously...