Posted by Tim Harford

Do you want more Cautionary Tales episodes in your life? Do you want behind the scenes stories and bonus conversations with me? Or do you want to support us in making the show? 

On behalf of the whole team, I’m excited to announce the brand new Cautionary Club on Patreon. Subscribers will gain access to exclusive content every month, including a behind-the-scenes exploration of the details we couldn’t quite squeeze into a recent episode, a bonus conversation between me and one of the team, and a full length Cautionary Tale. 

It’s also going to be a space where you can discuss episodes with other listeners, vote for topics you want to hear about, ask questions, and be the first to hear any Cautionary Tales news.

It’s free to take a look around, and you can join today at patreon.com/cautionaryclub

Our weekly free episodes of Cautionary Tales will continue to appear every Friday, and, if you are a Pushkin + subscriber, you will continue to gain access to exclusive shows from across the Pushkin network. If you are interested in switching your subscription, or have any questions, please email info@pushkin.fm

Code deploy happening shortly

August 31st, 2025 07:37 pm[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)

Per the [site community profile] dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

A return!

August 29th, 2025 08:15 am[personal profile] sporky_rat posting in [community profile] pokestop
sporky_rat: Alfred Bester:B5 looking very amused, text:'*sporfle*" (b5)

Anyone still around in this land of "wow that is so much backed up research, good gravy"?

Posted by Tim Harford

In 1923, legendary navigator Captain Dolly Hunter led a squadron of warships into America’s worst peacetime naval catastrophe. The mission was supposed to be a speed trial, a display of the squadron’s skill. But it ended in a maritime pile-up, with some destroyers stranded on rocks, others sinking fast, and deadly oil leaking into the Pacific Ocean. How?

This episode was originally released on Pushkin+.

The wrong shownotes were originally published for this episode; I apologise for the error. (Come back for the story of Frances Kelsey next week…)

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

CC Lockwood and HC Adamson Tragedy at Honda

Steven M. Casey Set Phasers On Stun

Gary Klein Seeing What Others Don’t

Noah Andre Trudeau “A Naval Tragedy’s Chain of Errors” Naval History Magazine February 2010

Frankie Witzenburg “Disaster at Honda Point” Naval History Magazine October 2020 

Gordon Smith “United States Navy’s Disaster at Honda Point 1923

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

Posted by Tim Harford

Dore and Friedrich make an unconventional couple, united by their contempt for shoes, root vegetables and, above all, society. In 1929 they leave Germany and begin anew on the deserted Galapagos island of Floreana. At first, it feels like a paradise, but soon cracks begin to show. Parasitic fleas, bombastic interlopers, and buried tensions turn their escape into a nightmare. Can they learn to thrive away from civilisation, or will Floreana claim more than their dreams? 

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

The key sources for this episode are Dore Strauch’s 1936 memoir, Satan Came To Eden, and Abbot Kahler’s book Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia At the Dawn of World War II (2024). We also drew on Margret Wittmer’s memoir Floreana: A Woman’s Pilgrimage to the Galapagos (1960).

We consulted various newspapers from the time. Of note are The Republican and Herald (8th October 1932) and The San Francisco Examiner (10th January 1932).

Channel 4’s series Eden: Paradise Lost is available here: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/eden-paradise-lost

Channel 4’s press release about the show was helpful, as was “Bullying, cliques and fistfights: secrets from Eden, the reality show that nobody watched” (The Guardian, 4th August 2017).

Posted by Tim Harford

Can a kind word change your life? I know from experience that it can. More than three decades ago, during the summer vacation at the end of my first year at university, I received a handwritten letter from my economics tutor, the effervescent and much-missed Peter Sinclair.

I’d been planning all along to drop economics in favour of other subjects, but Peter congratulated me on my end-of-year exam results, emphasised that those results were stronger than I might realise, and encouraged me to keep going. I decided to stick with economics after all.

I hope I can be forgiven my double take when I stumbled upon a recent working paper published by two academic economists, Olivia Edwards and Jonathan Meer. Their research answers a simple question: what happens if you do exactly what Peter Sinclair did for me, but on a much larger scale?

Edwards and Meer are at Texas A&M University, which has a large online introductory course in economics. Thousands of students enrol in the class — it is compulsory for many — and most of them are not planning to major in economics.

Since 2017, one of the instructors in the Texas A&M economics programme has emailed the best-performing students — roughly the top 10 per cent of the class. These emails praised their achievement, referred to them as top performers, noted that they had an aptitude for economics and encouraged them to sign up for further classes. Edwards and Meer were rerunning my own experience, but with hundreds of students each year.

The results were not trivial. Students just above the cut-off for receiving the email were about 40 per cent more likely to enrol in the follow-up intermediate microeconomics course — the chance of doing so rose from just over 20 per cent to just under 30 per cent. It’s remarkable to see such a trivial action — a nice email — having such a transformative effect, even if that transformation lasted only one semester.

Should we believe this result? There is a long and not wholly encouraging tradition in the social sciences of finding minor-seeming interventions that are supposed to unlock life-changing benefits. Many have later proved overblown or illusory.

The most notorious may be “power posing”, touted by one of its discoverers, psychologist Amy Cuddy, as “a free no-tech life hack”. This is the idea that taking a couple of minutes to adopt an expansive pose can boost your confidence and your performance in a job interview. This was a hugely influential idea in the world of business, but many psychologists now doubt the effect. Cuddy’s original co-author, Dana Carney, says “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real”, and that further research on the subject is a waste of time.

Another fashionable idea to emerge from psychology is that of the “growth mindset”. This idea starts with an obvious truth, which is that people get better with practice. From that truth comes a suggestion: maybe we should encourage children to think about skills they can develop, rather than treat them as people who either have talent or don’t. Mindless praise — “You’re so clever!” — might induce them to avoid difficult tasks, which might reveal they are not so clever after all. Instead, encourage children to work hard and reflect on how they might improve.

That’s all reasonable enough, but the growth mindset is easy to oversimplify and easy to oversell. Breathless claims have been made about how encouraging the right mindset can transform children’s prospects, but when the UK’s Education Endowment Foundation funded a rigorous trial of the approach a few years ago, it found disappointing results. The trial trained teachers in the approach and then gave schoolchildren two hours a week of mindset workshops for eight weeks. This admirable-sounding programme made no detectable difference.

So if weeks of mindset classes seem to make no difference, why should we believe that the encouraging email was so decisive in encouraging so many students to stick with economics?

It’s worth considering another successful intervention, one I described not long ago in this column. Researchers at BIT, the former “nudge unit”, have run large randomised trials revealing that patients are 25 per cent less likely to miss NHS appointments if they receive a text message pointing out how much it might cost the health service if they don’t show up.

Like the encouraging emails, these text messages are a tiny intervention that makes a substantial difference. Why? It may be because the text messages share another quality with the emails: they are well timed, well aimed, and informative.

The aim matters. The emails weren’t sent to everyone in the introductory economics class, but just the top 10 per cent. The text messages weren’t blasted out to every patient in the NHS database, but only to those with appointments. In a world full of generic messages, there is a power in being specific.

Providing information might matter, too. At least a quarter of the economics class at Texas A&M were awarded A grades, so the students receiving the email were being told something they probably did not know: that they were among the best of those A students. The BIT research on NHS text messages found that they were much more effective when they told people how much a missed appointment cost — a surprisingly high figure of £160.

Timing might be the most important difference of all. The text message reminders didn’t need to change anyone’s personality or habits. They just needed to change one imminent act. Similarly, the emails encouraged pupils to sign up for one more class, not to reimagine their life goals.

The most famous and most effective “nudges” remain those that have focused on getting people to sign up for pensions.

Several different tactics have proved effective, but a key to their success is that unlike quitting smoking or going to the gym — or adopting a growth mindset — you may only need to sign up for a pension once.

By all means say kind things to everyone you meet. It will make life more pleasant for all concerned. But when those kind words also contain some insight and are spoken to the right person at the right moment, that is when the magic happens.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 24 July 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

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Emptied of expectation. Relax.

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