Wyclif's Dust

Training AI will take longer than you think

Are we on our way to superintelligence wiping out humans by 2027? Or are we in a bubble of hype? My take:

Oct 17

3

What we talk about when we talk about "ancestry"

Political decisions versus scientific descriptions; ancestry versus ethnicity; ancestry proportions versus individual variants

Oct 14

9

4

The Palestine plan

It shows how much the West has changed since Iraq

Oct 12

6

5

Immigration and anti-semitism in Britain

Economists tend to be pro-immigration, and to think of people as following their self-interest.

Oct 8

5

2

🍾🍾 Thought bubbles: cancelling people is fine 🍾 there are too many researchers 🍾 Plato's wheel of fortune 🍾 AWOL political science 🍾🍾

Short pieces from the windmills of my mind, about pile-ons, political science and Plato

Oct 3

4

10

September 2025

The hidden world our parents give us

An intuitive reason I disbelieve the "parents make no difference" thesis

Sep 24

16

Adam Smith’s second big idea

Liberalism is challenged by gains from scale

Sep 22

6

July 2025

If you want to increase fertility, look at how religions do it

People may want to increase fertility for different reasons.

Jul 23

4

1

We should measure effect sizes on substantively important scales

Why I'm still not a polygenic score nihilist

Jul 12

9

3

What are behavioural polygenic scores for?

Warning: technical.

Jul 2

4

Why I am not a polygenic score nihilist

Here is a good, very comprehensive introduction by Scott Alexander to the debate about missing heritability. This post is much shorter and is going to…

Jul 1

21

9

June 2025

A way to think about scientism

All just data journalists with pretensions

Jun 5

6

1