One of my all time favourites.

The sad demise of a 250-year experiment in ‘government of the people by the people’?

Provocative new post from Youyou Wu on the @rorinstitute.bsky.social substack. What happens when AI peer review does a surprisingly good job? open.substack.com/pub/research...

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

A quite extraordinary thread.🧵 Not exactly a secret that the Sun is a mouthpiece for the racist right, but the sheer extent of its misrepresentation & lying here is mind-boggling. The Sun's relationship w the truth (it has no interest in it) now feels close to Nazi rag Der Stürmer in 1930s Germany.

Christ this is all so very tiring.

Free speech latest from the USA

Review: The AI Paradox: Virginia Dignum **** - Brilliant assessment of the problems and opportunities arising from the AI paradox (see review for definition), despite reading to much like a government report. popsciencebooks.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-... #bookreview #AI

Gutted I was too late to get a ticket for this show. www.theguardian.com/music/2026/m...

“To all influencers and other tax exiles in Dubai, the tax authorities wish you a safe return to France”

Good riddance to January and February. Roll on Spring!

“The Bafta episode reveals the limits of many people’s imagining of diversity.” My @theobserveruk.bsky.social column, already online, and today in print: observer.co.uk/news/columni...

Does Farage also propose to exempt people who lose the vote from taxation?

People are drowning in disinformation on a social media site run by a Fellow of the @royalsociety.org

19 Feb: Board of Peace 28 Feb: Bored of peace

If this gets confirmed – or even just becomes widely believed – then it's safe to say all kinds of chaos are going to break out.

Agree with this. Seems to me people who voted Green voted for hope and community, while likely recognising that the party doesn’t yet have a serious programme for government.

what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"

Several canvassers say the *settlement* reforms (make over a million voters wait 10-15 years for settlement, not 5, is a top of mind concern for those affected & friends, family A basic fallacy in Home Office citing more in common polling on asylum reform - a different issue - and net migration

Radiohead is demanding that the Trump administration take down a pro-ICE promotional video featuring a version of its song “Let Down” without permission. Full statement from the band:

Really interesting rumination on the power dynamics between government and powerful tech/data companies. Focused on the Trump/Anthropic stand-off but the implications seem wider to me.

A problem that is not confined to the US borders but infecting the whole world

This is a great paper by Carl Bergstrom and Kevin Gross. I have offered some reflections on the paper in @bionieuws.bsky.social (in Dutch) bionieuws.nl/vicieuze-cir.... I think we may need more radical solutions than the ones suggested by the authors! @cwtsnl.bsky.social @rorinstitute.bsky.social

This has to be one of the most despicable comments ever from a losing candidate. Divisive, conspiracy theory crap.

Rolled out my old trope last night about how dismal it is that economists keep banging on about opportunity cost when the real magic of economics is gains from trade. Similarly in politics we should move away from competition over scarce resources to cooperation to create more opportunities for all.

Nothing says entitled elite more clearly than “if I lose, it must have been a fix”.

Look forward to the Spectator commissioning pieces from Maxwell’s victims.

NEW POST from @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy on the @rorinstitute.bsky.social substack taking a closer look at the point of no return in research funding processes. open.substack.com/pub/research...

We are pleased to announce two new Core Partners: ZonMw, the Dutch Organisation for knowledge and innovation in health and well-being, and @britishacademy.bsky.social, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences: researchonresearch.org/rori-welcome...

Review: The AI Paradox: Virginia Dignum **** - Brilliant assessment of the problems and opportunities arising from the AI paradox (see review for definition), despite reading too much like a government report. popsciencebooks.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-... #bookreview #AI

Excellent FT piece about drone warfare and defence against it in Ukraine: ig.ft.com/ukraine-kill...

Small Prophets is a gem of a show. Just wonderful. No notes.

Looked at from the EU's side, this is actually quite funny.

Hard and soft.

The scientist friends of Jeffrey Epstein could also do with a roadmap for moral competence. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

And see the film.

Hey @nature.com - you're a week out of sync. Just got an email alert for the 25th Feb issue that lists the contents of last week's Nature. You been playing with wormholes again?

Always a joy to find a piece by Kathryn Schulz in the latest New Yorker. This article (nay, meditation) on Richard Holmes’ new biography of Tennyson is quite wonderful. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Slava Ukraini!

Looking forward to lots of lively metascience discussion on the new @rorinstitute.bsky.social substack. Read my inaugural post to find out what we’re up to.

Just tried to use the eConsult service to make a GP appointment and halfway through it asked me how long I’d been having trouble with my breasts… I mean, I know I could do with shedding a few pounds, but come on!

Hey @royalsociety.org - this mass murder was done a man you continue to honour and celebrate as one of your fellows.

Looking forward to lots of lively metascience discussion on the new @rorinstitute.bsky.social substack. Read my inaugural post to find out what we’re up to.

I would strongly recommend the authors read Virginia Dignum's The AI Paradox (my review due next week but you can get a feel from the Amazon page amzn.to/4aNn7r7) which makes it pretty clear that AI's intelligence can not sensibly be considered human level.

The very question conflates cognitive ability with access to data ("the question is how deep the extraction goes"). It is trivial to make a machine appear human with enough compute and enough training data. The promise of machine 'intelligence' is laser-focused, domain-specific, SUPER-human ability.

This is a thoroughly good idea. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Question to which the answer is yes, according to the authors. Yet some of the arguments feel weak to me. Is that just my prejudice? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Amazing. Carry a donor card folks. Live life to the full.

This is a huge testament to the power of local journalism and @londoncentric.media's work. Bravo. open.substack.com/pub/londonce...

Finished reviewing a paper today. I did it by reading the paper, thinking about it and then writing my report. All natural intelligence. No artificial additives.