My new article is out.

The problem isn't that academic scientists sometimes lie. The problem is that their peers don't care when they do. When scientists are caught making up fake data, universities sweep it under the rug. There are too many examples at the top. 1/

https://twitter.com/palladiummag/status/1819377127386484843

After letting fraudsters run wild for about 25 years, and putting them in charge of major labs and departments, academia has now trained a generation of scientists who mostly don't care about truth very much. 2/

At Bismarck Analysis we’ve had a fairly easy time hiring excellent analysts. This surprises a lot of people. Here’s how we do it. 1/ There’s three pieces to our hiring success. The first is that we’ve maintained a public presence online and through in-person communities so the right people can find us. This is important but it’s not special, lots of people are better at this than we are. 2/

I see lots of people assuming that the health establishment's anti-mask crusade was a Noble Lie to keep the masses from using up valuable masks.

But why assume this? A pervasive yet uncoordinated conspiracy seems way more complicated than just "they were wrong".
1/ "But Ben, experts would never make such an obvious and boneheaded mistake!"

Look these are largely the same people who saw an exponential curve with a low absolute value and decided this meant everything was fine and the biggest problem was that people might "panic".
2/

You can learn a lot about a culture by reading their fiction and noticing what they take for granted.

In honor of the season, let’s look at A Christmas Carol.
1/ The thing people overlook in A Christmas Carol is the depth of Scrooge and Marley’s friendship.
Scrooge is this horrible old loner who everyone hates… except Marley, his business partner, who *comes back from the dead* for Scrooge.
2/

1 like = 1 extremely sensible cold take. 1/ Economic prosperity depends mostly on a society’s ability to produce physical goods. Factories and railroads are more fundamental than loans or interest rates.