How an interlocking set of ordinary human cognitive biases can give rise to enduring conspiracy theories — It will be decades before sufficient time has passed for a truly dispassionate account of the events that comprise the SARS-CoV2 period, which for the sake of brevity will in the remainder of this article be referred to as the SC2P. There are so many vested interests and the generic…

Why the United Kingdom’s defense spending is hopelessly unfit for purpose — Systems tend to perpetuate themselves, and so nations that have a reasonably long history tend to perpetuate various myths and social structures long after those myths and structures have ceased to have utility. …

Why laissez-faire is misguided — Evolution works by means of organisms adapting to their environments over long spans of time through the gradual accumulation of traits arising by chance from DNA copy-errors. It’s obvious from this that our primate-centric notions of “morality” have no relevance to how the wider world actually works. Indeed, as scientists…

How our astonishing technical sophistication enables people to embrace crude simplistic ideas — We humans are the product of a long evolutionary history going back many millions of years, to long before our particular branch of the primate tree split off from the branch that would later give rise to our close cousins the monkeys and the chimpanzees. Our brains have been shaped…

Governments continue to expand into more and more areas of life as we expect more and more — The simple question what is government for? is, surprisingly, not often asked. We take for granted our governments in much the same way as we take for granted electricity and telecommunications. Yet, just like these two services, government is the result of thousands of decisions and the actions of hundreds…

Why having a great product vision is not enough to build a viable business — In between starting and running my own companies, I consult in order to generate income without the kinds of stress that come from being in charge of everything and perpetually balancing on a knife-edge between success and failure. Often I consult to global corporations, but I’ve also done a lot…

Once we begin to understand how evolution has shaped us, we can see that many interactions we have with others may feel personal but are really just the result of hardwired patterns of behavior — Although we often think of evolution as being driven primarily by factors like ecosystem and predation, the reality is a bit more complex. As Darwin realized, sexual selection is right up there with the aforementioned pressures and for social species in particular this results in a great many behaviors oriented…

Life in a tiny dual Principality nestled in the Pyrenees between France and Spain — For those who’ve never heard of Andorra before, it’s a small country located in the Pyrenees nestled between France and Spain. It’s the world’s only dual Principality, nominally controlled by the French President and a Spanish bishop but in reality governed by a small group of politicians who until 2012…

Contrary to the complacent narrative promoted by Western journalists, Russia’s invasion is not collapsing and Ukrainian victory is not inevitable — In late February 2022, Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin ordered a massive invasion of peaceful neighboring Ukraine with the intention of overthrowing the pro-Western Zelensky administration and installing a pro-Kremlin puppet regime. Ukraine’s former, and now disgraced, president Yanukovych may have hoped to sit atop such a regime and thereby present…