Out now: my debut novel, Revealed Preference. Superficially, it's a country house mystery, but really it's an excuse for dodgy word reconstructions and silly jokes about mating behaviour and preference falsification. Available on Amazon.

Also this terrific chart. All from: epoch.ai/publications/the-pl…

I still think the fire metaphor for AI is underused: "Is fire good or evil?" That's a weird question "Should we give everyone access to fire?" Yes, so they can cook and heat their homes "Should we give everyone flamethrowers?" Probably not "Should we give everyone firebombs?" Definitely not "Should we require companies that produce enormous combustion reactions to do so safely?" Obviously yes “Should we wait until the city burns down to establish a fire department?” Obviously no, and we should also build in safeguards like smoke detectors

Logicians joke as a plot device

Posted the third part in my series on collective action problems on substack - why dominant assurance contracts don't increase expected revenue. lattimer.substack.com/p/domi…

I asked GPT-5.6 Sol to create the most Claude-y possible parody image and what it came up with is pretty great and dead-on.

We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65. We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life". You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets. I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long. My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite. TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.

The average “literary” novel today reads like a LinkedIn post with sex scenes.

It's impossible to convey the ease and simplicity of pre-GUI computers to someone that didn't experience it.

A couple days ago a founder sat thinking silently for a minute and fifteen seconds before answering a question I asked. (This is an estimate, because I only started timing him after about thirty seconds.) One of the smartest founders I've met too.

For those following me from my Letby post, I do have a novel coming out. Not much stats in it, sadly, but one of the characters is an econometrician. Excerpts at revealedpreferencenovel.com

Those interested in my post on the Letby case may be interested in my short review of jury verdicts in high-profile murder cases. Very few not guilty verdicts, and none without a significant steer from the judge. themanworthwhile.wordpress.c…

This is a top piece of work by Timothy Lattimer on the competing probabilities and likelihoods in the Letby case. If for nothing else, explaining the difference between “probability” and “likelihood”! themanworthwhile.wordpress.c…

Something like this in Kingsley Amis or somewhere, but the cup of tea conveys a sense of urgency, I feel.

Men don't necessarily notice much about clothes and stuff. Writers pretend otherwise, because they need their characters to have rudimentary observational skills. But it's much funnier when they don't.

I've posted in substack on collective action problems. Part 2 in a series of why collective action is so hard and what can be done. open.substack.com/pub/lattim…

Great to see Esperanto article in the Guardian. As a child, I very briefly did some lessons via mail order (on flexidisc!) and still intend to learn it one day theguardian.com/news/ng-inte…

What economists say: If you had a choice between £50,000 or a 50% change of £1,000,000, what would you choose? What most people hear: If you had a choice between £#,### or a ##% chance of £##,#,.#*#!?, what would you pick?

First five-star review! Proud moment.