Lord Darlington. What cynics you fellows are! — Lord Darlington. What cynics you fellows are! Cecil Graham. What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.] Lord Darlington. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Cecil Graham. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd…

A cynic’s definition of a value investor: someone who seeks to buy at 40 cents a business that is worth a dollar and to invest in a… — A cynic’s definition of a value investor: someone who seeks to buy at 40 cents a business that is worth a dollar and to invest in a business that is able to charge a dollar for what is worth 40 cents. What does a value investor do when, walking around…

I recently came across a post on the Bogleheads.org Forum. — I recently came across a post on the Bogleheads.org Forum. Lauretta — why people like online anonymity never ceases to boggle me (sorry!) — referred to an article of mine on MOI Global, resulting from the combination of two posts here and here. She was struck by a line in…

Unsurprisingly, my test came out negative. — Unsurprisingly, my test came out negative. Before getting the result, I had called the Ipsos MORI helpline to see if they could give me more information about the test and its accuracy. I must not have been the first one to enquire about accuracy, because the helpful operator had a…

A positive effect of the coronavirus pandemonium has been the bare exposure of the naïve view of science as the repository of certainty… — A positive effect of the coronavirus pandemonium has been the bare exposure of the naïve view of science as the repository of certainty. …

Nothing epitomises the world’s stunned unpreparedness for the fearsome escalation of the coronavirus pandemic better than the lingering… — Nothing epitomises the world’s stunned unpreparedness for the fearsome escalation of the coronavirus pandemic better than the lingering dispute about the appropriateness of mass testing. Until recently, the main objection to mass testing had been a practical one: a scarcity of RT PCR test kits, combined with the complexity and…

With Italy in lockdown and London about to follow, let’s see what we can say in our framework about the coronavirus pandemic. — With Italy in lockdown and London about to follow, let’s see what we can say in our framework about the coronavirus pandemic. Funnily enough, the Blinded By Evidence paper starts with a virus. You hear about it on TV and worry you might have it. So you take a test…

By the time I started writing my DPhil thesis, I had pretty much come to the conclusion that academic life was not for me. So I decided to… — By the time I started writing my DPhil thesis, I had pretty much come to the conclusion that academic life was not for me. So I decided to try and see what it was like to work in the City, and got a summer job at James Capel. Subsequently bought…

(Sorry — a few complicated months) Speaking of best books I have ever read, a more recent one is David Wootton’s The Invention of Science. Wootton does a marvellous job explaining mankind’s transition from a worldview based on authority to one based on evidence. As reprised in Steven Pinker’s latest…