Author How To Make The World Add Up (UK) / The Data Detective (US). Cautionary Tales podcast. Undercover Economist at the FT. BBC More or Less. Views my own.
Oxford
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Tim Harford retweeted
Cautionary Tales - When Muhammad Ali Met Henry's Hammer
timharford.com/2026/09/cauti…
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Tim Harford retweeted
Random is as random does
timharford.com/2026/09/rando…
(Photo: the Diaconis coin flipping machine.)
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Tim Harford retweeted
"They should have thrown away their graphs and hired a science-fiction writer."
as.ft.com/r/64dd41f6-297a-4f…
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Tim Harford retweeted
How a broken arm improved my French - with @DavidEpstein
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Tim Harford retweeted
AI can forecast the future. Should we let it?
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Tim Harford retweeted
Why the story of the Vegetable Lamb was believed
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Tim Harford retweeted
Cautionary Tales - Talent, Time and Money: The Curse of General Magic
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Tim Harford retweeted
“Never stay for a long time in one place... When you stop somewhere... things start to stick. When you go from one place to another, you are cleaning yourself.” photographer Josef Koudelka, quoted in @casparhenderson 's new substack.
thekinetikon.substack.com/p/…
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Except, I'm not using the tool. Alphabet is just cramming the result above the Google search results. And the results are nothing like as good as 60% accurate.
That's because these are probabilistic tools being asked to perform deterministic tasks. They are accurate about 60% of the time.
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My tweet was less about how to do the task, and more about what happens when I tried to use a well-established tool (Google search).
Also - isn't the very high failure rate interesting? 'Sometimes makes errors' is one thing. 'Always makes errors' is something else.
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I've been checking the source of quotes for my forthcoming book, and the performance of Gemini is extraordinary. I paste the quote into Google, and Gemini will barge in with the wrong answer over and over again. It's not an occasional thing - it's reliably wrong. Very odd.
Twice in past week I've pasted quote into Google to check the source, and Gemini has barged in with the wrong answer. CS Lewis quote from The Seeing Eye (1967) was placed in The Screwtape Letters (1942). Alfred Loftus quote (1857) attributed to Austen Layard (1849). Gemini 0/2.
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A reader writes re: Game Therapy UK, 'An innovative, evidence-based approach to address social isolation, trauma and aid recovery'.
Not my area but my instincts are (as @SlyFlourish has often said) that simply by forging connections, RPGs save lives:
game-therapy.co.uk/
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