Inspired by a trip to see Faust shortly before Christmas. Selling your soul to the Devil is a mug’s game. Not only is the expected outcome (in a mathematical sense) infinitely bad, it is definitely going to be infinitely bad. From the Devil’s perspective, this makes it a fairly poor offering: only a very small number of people are going to be foolish enough to take such a bad deal. But what if instead the Devil offered a deal in…
The City Quiz (Christmas Quiz III) has been added to the Quiz Time App! Free to download and with in-game hints if needed, why not try it out? Created by a talented friend of mine. Go to the App Store to get it now.
What makes a great author? Some would argue that popularity should be the key measure, with best-selling authors the clear champions of the writing world. The public is the true test of what is great and their judgement carries all before it. Others might argue that simple popularity is a bad measure: Agatha Christie or Dick Francis may have sold millions of copies, but their books are relatively simple in structure and arguably lack depth. For such people, the true…
An ‘adversarial collaboration’ between myself and Jim Dickinson goes live on Wonkhe today, debating whether or not student unions are in need of significant reform. I put the case that they are, whilst Jim, one of the best representatives of the student union movement, argues that they’re not. Read the full articles below:
In my latest Conservative Home article I set out why a major reduction in university tuition fees (replaced by teaching grant based on the cost to deliver the coursr) isn’t just the right thing to do for public policy reasons, but makes good electoral sense for the Conservatives as well. Read the full article here: Iain Mansfield: £9,250 fees are bad for students, bad for society, and bad for the Conservatives
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I’ve tried not to give a blow by blow account of the Brexit negotiations. But with riots against Macron in their fourth week in France, our negotiations at an impasse and our government (perhaps) on the brink of collapse, it seems appropriate to draw some of these strands together. Macron Why talk of the riots though? Well, for the simply reason that Macron is the darling of the Establishment, that same coalition of multinational business, highly educated metropolitans, academia, big…
With thanks to liv for posting the meme and for setting me the questions below. For those not familiar, the way it works is that anyone who would like questions can ask for them; they then get set five questions – potentially about anything at all – that the original poster thinks they would find interesting to answer and others would find interesting to read. So without further ado, the questions I was set: 1. Would you rather be notable…
It’s often difficulty trying to estimate probabilities, particularly when there are many different potential futures. Availability bias means we tend to assign a greater weight to the options we’re thinking about, even if they’re actually quite a small sample of the possibility space. Brexit at the moment lends itself to this, with a large number of options opening up in an increasingly unpredictable landscape. Complicating matters is that there are a lot of different paths to many of the options….
I’ve discovered two duplicate answers on Christmas Quiz XIII: 63 and 75 29 and 36 Questions 36 and 75 have been replaced by new clues. Download the updated quiz here.