From the Fall of the Berlin Wall until about a decade ago my animating intellectual question was pretty much, ‘how did a small number of natural sciences become qualitatively more impressive than the social sciences?’ Because I met the late George Smith relatively early in my thinking about this (as an undergraduate), I often formulated this question in terms of evidence; he liked his version of my question as ‘how to turn data into high-quality evidence?’ And his striking answer was (to simplify) that deviations from theoretically significant expectations through theory-mediated measurement were made informative in an iterative process over time in the sciences that succeeded in achieving lift-off. While I was much more interested in the social organization of the sciences than George, I never did much better than he did in answering my own question. But I did make sure his version was published in the best possible form and with full detail (see his ‘Closing the Loop.’)
(This is an updated version of something I posted 20 years ago, on the 20th anniversary, and 10 years ago, on the 30th anniversary, of my friend’s death)
About 43 years and 3 weeks ago the soon-to-be late lamented You and Yours had one of those “off to University” shows, helping parents and about-to-be new undergraduates to understand what the first few weeks of University was going to be like.[1] Although fitting the latter category, I only listened because at the time You and Yours was among my regular listening. One comment struck me, and has stayed with me ever since. A woman in her thirties, commenting on Freshers’ Weeks, said that “in that first week of college you meet people who will be your friends for the rest of your life”.
I was skeptical. And it hasn’t been true for me. I’ve kept in much closer touch with several friends from secondary school than anyone from college (I did meet CB sometime in 1984, but only for a few minutes, and not again till Sept 12, 2001, so he doesn’t count; I’ve recently reconnected with someone else I was close to, but we hardly saw each other for 35 years). My first day at Bedford College was spent almost entirely with a girl called Alison who decided the next day to leave (not, I hope, because she spent the first day with me, but because she was trying to escape her home town of Egham, to which my college suddenly announced it was moving).
But it was also that week that I met Adrian.
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When I posted a piece on the latest failure of the US Navy a while back, I predicted that I wouldn’t be changing any minds. That was one of my safer predictions, confirmed almost immediately by Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Farley declined to respond, saying “whatever his other virtues, Dr. Quiggin is not a serious voice on naval questions”.
I wasn’t surprised by this. Farley is the epitome of the navalist view that serious expertise on the technology of naval warfare is a crucial requirement for commentary, whereas being right is irrelevant.
Given this respect for credentialed expertise, however, I was a bit surprised to see Farley endorse a piece by Bret Devereaux making the claim that “the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy”. You might think that the relevant expertise here included at least some knowledge of both transport economics and the global economy. Devereaux, who is an “ancient and military historian”, has neither. Still, I’m not going to pull academic rank here. Let’s see what Devereaux has to say and how well it stacks up as a piece of economic analysis.
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Chris just let me know that Alan Thornett has died. International Viewpoint has a long obituary here. I doubt The Graun will carry an obit, and The Times certainly won’t.
I got to know members of the Oxford branch of what was then the Socialist Group (a successor of the Worker’s Socialist League, via a fusion with, and then a split from, the International-Communist League), through the Oxford Miner’s Support Group, of which they were the backbone, in the wake of strike’s defeat in 1985. I saw Perry Cullen and Ted Heslin several times a week for the whole of that autumn, and spent less, but quite a lot of, time with Alan; and kept up with them for several years after leaving for the US. Autumn 1985 was when the Workers Revolutionary Party started to fragment, after Gerry Healy’s history of sexually assaulting comrades came to light. (For what it is worth, the SG comrades knew nothing of this, though obviously had experienced serious abuse themselves including, in one case, kidnapping, at Healy’s bidding). The Socialist Group were at that time briefly, and I thought absurdly, hopeful of reconciliation with the less terrible offshoots of the the WRP, so they were in a moment of muted (and unwarranted) optimism.
Nevertheless they were mostly realistic about what it meant to be a revolutionary in the mid-1980’s (or ever, perhaps), and Ted and Perry shared with Alan a dry and self-deprecating sense of humour that doesn’t come out at all in the International Viewpoint obit. We once went to some agitprop performance of a play about the Silesian Weavers Strike, and Ted commented to me “This is going to be awful. I like real plays, and musicals. But, you know, you have to go. For the cause”. Another time, on a particularly rainy day, after 3 hours of shaking tins together, Ted said “You do realise that I’m not going to do any of this after the revolution, right? I want to have an allotment, and enjoy growing vegetables once we actually have communism”.
Alan once told me this about Healy. “For years we were envious of the other groups. Cliff and Grant wrote books, and the IMG had all those intellectuals. But Healy just gave speeches. He was a great, great speaker, but we never really understood what he was saying. So we decided to transcribe some of the speeches, and turn them into books. We did that for about four speeches, and then we pored over them, trying to make sense of them. But we were all working class, uneducated, and couldn’t make head nor tail of them. We just assumed we were stupid, and couldn’t keep up with his brilliance. It was only much later that we realised the problem might have been with him, not us”.
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Having alighted from the bus in an industrial area I’d never been before, I found the right building and descended the stairs. As instructed by email, I rang the doorbell. I was immediately met by the two cutest dachshunds you’ve ever seen. My first words to the Westpac archivist:
“This is already the best archive ever!”
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We have been granted ethical approval by review committees at our institutions.
(A piece I ran in The Guardian)
The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them.
This wasn’t always the case. When the term “artificial intelligence” was coined some 70 years ago, the first mainframe computers (absurdly primitive by modern standards) were viewed with the same awe and concern as the AI agents of the present day. There were even “algorithms” (though the term wasn’t used in that way at the time) that were supposed to pick ideal dating matches.
Failures were inevitable, and blame-shifting became routine. “The computer made a mistake” was the 1960s equivalent of “your email must have gone to junk”. Gradually, however, we realised that the problem was not with the computer but with incorrect information fed into it or badly written programs invoked as a result.
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People here often ask me what part of England I grew up in, which isn’t a particularly easy question – I was born in the north, but then lived in South Wales and then various place in the South all of which were west of London. Oxford is sort of familiar to everyone (though not my part of it), Aylesbury to no-one, and Slough… well, on Friday the person I was chatting with stole my usual line, which is “The British version of The Office is set in Slough, and that tells you a lot about the place”. He told the leader of our research project that she should watch the British version because it is much better than the American version.
Personally, I think the British version is, indeed, brilliant. Because of that I was excited to watch the first few episodes of the America version when it came out, and found it almost unbearable. I expected it to fail, as I think most sitcoms that move from the UK to the US do. In fact, though, it transformed itself and succeeded. And I admired the writers and the star, Steve Carell, for understanding how to make that happen.
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These days, methodological nationalism is finally sparking a heated debate in philosophy. A flurry of new papers has recently been published in open access: Baycan, 2026; Beaton, 2026; Milioni, 2024; Sager, 2021; Ujlaki, 2026. Naturally, some of them question the relevance of the critique of methodological nationalism to political philosophy. As I myself argued that nationalism is a cognitive bias (that is, a factor that systematically distorts judgements), let me explain why I believe it is a cognitive bias that heavily affects the ethics of migration.
There is a simple method to detect and weigh bias in philosophical debates about justice (Dumitru, 2023). It has three steps: [click to continue…]
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I’m mostly a descriptivist when it comes to the meaning of words. If everyone uses “literally” to mean “figuratively”, that’s fine by me. Same if there is no likelihood of confusion, as with “aggravate” for “annoy” as well as “exacerbate”. But that still leaves me plenty of room to gripe about the way in which words are used, so it’s time for a good old whinge.
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Books that complain about the state of universities, written by university members, are probably as old as the institution itself. And if there is one institution that needs – and should be able to provide – self-reflection, it is universities. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to comment on a new addition to this genre, Long Live the Ivory Tower, by historian Klaas van Berkel (currently only available in Dutch). It made me think, once more, about a question that I’ve long been chewing on: how to preserve the right balance between functional differentiation and coupling of institutions in modern societies?
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Responding the gloominess of recent posts, I thought I’d try a piece that’s more optimistic about Europe, if not about the US. It’s a mashup of a couple of recent Substack newsletters.
The New York Times has a thumb-sucker about the rise of the European far right, which would greatly mislead anyone not up with the facts. The picture is one of inexorable advance, citing parties such as “the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats and the Reform U.K. party of Nigel Farage.”
The New York Times doesn’t mention that:
- The right-wing coalition of which Wilders was part collapsed when he withdrew support and lost the subsequent election. Wilders’ party split and is competing with two other far-right parties, also in opposition.
- The right-wing Swedish coalition, which had promised the Sweden Democrats a role, was defeated at the recent election, with the SD vote declining.
- Farage’s Reform party has also split, and Farage himself is now massively unpopular.
There have been more consequential losses than this. The most successful far-right government in Europe, that of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, was crushed in elections earlier this year, and the party is now splitting. Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) lost office in 2023 and has now also split.1
Other successes have turned sour for the far right. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, a successor to various neo-fascist parties, won elections in 2022 and has held together since then. But the government hasn’t delivered much of the far-right agenda, beyond stunts like a recently announced ban on burqas in schools. The Finns Party’s participation in a right-wing government (in Finland, obviously) has seen a big loss of popularity.
Europe isn’t out of the woods yet. A victory for the National Rally in the French election next year would pose some significant problems. But compared to the defeats listed above, the fact that the German AfD might form the government of a small German state is not a big problem.
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The story of last week, which will certainly return, is the threat to the survival of humanity (and maybe all life on Earth) from artificial intelligence. I don’t know how real that threat is and find it hard to think about, but I am worried that even if humanity survives, AI will be a means of endless tyranny, with all hopes of human freedom extinguished.
Much of political philosophy over the past three centuries or so has consisted in elaborating a picture of what it means for a society to be one of free and equal human beings, and the implicit self-understanding of most of our societies has been to have that as our imagined collective destination, perhaps delayed by practical concerns and by deep and unresolved questions about what it would mean, about who is included in the scope of freedom and equality (and who not). When John Rawls wrote about an overlapping consensus or when Joseph Carens discussed shared democratic values or even when Habermas outlined the conditions of an ideal speech situation, they were pointing to possibilities unrealized in our actual societies but implicitly acknowledged as the promise of the future. And radical critique of our societies, such as articulated by Marxists or anarchists, did not so much renounce the aspiration to freedom and equality but argued that the desire for it that capitalism and modernity called forth would inevitably be frustrated within an actual society that reproduced domination and exploitation: that liberal society failed to keep its own promises, which would instead be realised by a socialist alternative.
But now we find ourselves on the edge, or perhaps over the edge, of a descent into a world where such visions of freedom and equality are unimaginable and where, to borrow a cliché, resistance is simply futile. The herald of this predicament was Edward Snowden, who revealed how comprehensive a monitoring of individual thought and action was possible in the world of the internet. Anyway it has turned out that, for most of the population, privacy is something they are perfectly happy to sacrifice, just so long as the algorithms end up being better tuned to the satisfaction of our wants and desires. And progress is no long measured in terms of our liberation from various forms of oppressions but rather in the ever increased abilities we have to acquire and consume, even if that comes at the expense of the natural and physical basis of our very survival.
[click to continue…]
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