Posted by Cliff Pervocracy

As a former competitive debater and a veteran of many, many Internet debates, I want to share some of my favorite clever comebacks against transphobic talking points. These are just suggestions, of course; feel free to rephrase them in your own words.


They say: “What is a woman?”
Best response: Give a trans woman that makeup you bought and never used. Teach her how to use it if she doesn’t know. Tell her she looks beautiful. Mean it.

They say: “Aren’t you just reinforcing gender stereotypes?”
Best response: Buy gender-affirming clothing and hygiene products for trans people in need via the Transhealth wish list. (Or you can send them items directly, but ask first, they have limited storage space.)

They say: “Why are you letting children make irreversible decisions that they’ll regret later?”
Best response: Send a message of hope and affirmation to trans youth via the Southern Equality Project.

They say: “God made you to be a man/woman.”
Best response: Participate in an online or in-person support group hosted by Keshet (Jewish) or MASGD (Muslim) or Transmission Ministry Collective (Christian) or IQBC (Buddhist).

They say: “LGB people will lose all the progress they made if they don’t drop the T.”
Best response: Organize a day in the park or a movie night with your gay, bi, trans, and otherwise queer friends. Bring snacks.

They say: “There’s only two genders. It’s science.”
Best response: Enroll in the PRIDE study, the first long-term national health study of LGBTQIA+ people. It’s produced a huge amount of science supporting LGBTQIA+ health, and guidelines for healthcare providers to better care for us. They take privacy seriously and have a Certificate of Confidentiality and an organizational commitment to shield their data from legal demands, including from the federal government.

They say: “You’re mentally ill.”
Best response: “If you ever need to talk about serious stuff or just vent, I’m here and I’ll listen and I won’t judge,” to a trans friend who’s not quite close enough to know if that’s something they could ask of you.

They say: “This new social media trend has gotten out of hand.”
Best response: Browse the Digital Transgender Archive and educate yourself about the long and rich history of gender diversity.

They say: “Thank God Trump is finally doing something about this madness.”
Best response: Get into local politics. I mean yeah, sure, call your reps if there’s a chance in hell of them listening, but the places you really can make yourself heard are the town hall, the school board session, the city council meeting. Here’s some important advice on how to more effectively advocate for trans people in these settings.

They say: “It’s not surgery, it’s mutilation.”
Best response: “Do you need a ride home from the hospital? I can come check on you and bring you meals while you’re recovering,” to a trans person planning surgery.

They say: “I hate trans people.”
Best response: “I respect and support trans people.” Not to them. To everyone else. To your coworkers and your classmates and your neighbors and your friends and your Internet friends and anyone you can safely say it to.

They say: “You’re ruining your body.”
Best response: Log off for the night, eat, drink, stretch, read a chapter you love in a book you love, and go to bed on time for once. Caring for the community includes caring for yourself.


tweets from @weedcatholic: "if u r transgender u have to live. if u accomplish something else then good. if u accomplish nothing else then good. but u have to live. despite what u might say, if you're transgender it's because u want to live"


you say: hey cliff this post sure sounds all wise and noble but I caught you yelling “well it’s not my problem you go poopie in your pants if everyone on earth doesn’t perform pink and blue at your fucking pleasure, poopiepants” at some rando republican on another site like twenty minutes ago
my response: personal growth is a process

Posted by Tim Harford

This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday.

In the final days of the Sixties, The Rolling Stones join forces with other rock legends to plan a free concert at Altamont that will rival Woodstock.The “bad boys of rock” don’t have the best relationship with the police, so they think of another option for security: The Hells Angels. They’re both anti-establishment, they’re both counterculture: what could possibly go wrong? 

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading

Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day by Joel Selvin

LIFE Rides With Hells Angels, 1965

A Long Strange Trip, Dennis McNally

Hell’s Angels, Hunter s Thompson

Keith Richards on Keith Richards, ed Sean Egan

Keith Richards, Victor Bockris 

Life, Keith Richards 

Mick Jagger, Philip Norman

Stone Alone, Bill Wyman

Old Gods Almost Dead, Stephen Davis

Don’t look back: The story of Altamont, the rock festival that the ’60s wants to forget. Geoff Edgers, Washington Post 21 Nov, 2019

The Rolling Stones Disaster at Altamont: Let It Bleed. Rolling Stone January 21, 1970

The long strange saga of the Grateful Dead and the Hells Angels. SF Gate, June 2022. 

Tappin, B., Van Der Leer, L., & McKay, R. (2017). The heart trumps the head: Desirability bias in political belief revision. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General146(8), 1143-1149. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000298

Posted by Tim Harford

A radical thought experiment transforms the lives of a new breed of philanthropists, as they follow the logic of altruism to extraordinary lengths. The most famous convert to the Effective Altruism movement, Sam Bankman-Fried, is either a humanitarian hero, or a con artist at an astonishing scale, or most bafflingly, both.   

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading

The definitive account of Sam Bankman-Fried’s astonishing career arc is Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. This episode also relied on sources including Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s profile of Will MacAskill in The New Yorker, The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism, and contemporary reporting in outlets including Rolling StoneVox, the BBC and CNBC. Will MacAskill’s book is called What We Owe The Future, and Peter Singer’s essay is Famine, Affluence and Morality

Posted by Tim Harford

You’re not imagining it. There is something shallow about modern life — a sense that traditional virtues, from craftsmanship to professionalism to loyalty, have somehow been hollowed out. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in the 21st century and believe that the world is a far better place in 2025 than it was in, say, 1975.

Still, there is something amiss. You can see it in long-term trends such as the demise of communities built around fishing, mining or manufacture, and in more recent calamities such as the internet’s descent into a hellscape of fraud, manufactured anxiety and AI slop. You can see it in serious matters such as the sewage flowing into the Thames, the decay of high streets or the precarity of many modern jobs. You can see it in more trivial worries such as the way each new casual dining concept so quickly goes downhill. You can see it in the fact that every single one of these social ills is intimately connected to commerce.

There is no shortage of books to consult on the matter. This hollowing out has been explored in works as varied as Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and Cory Doctorow’s forthcoming Enshittification.

But for the deep analysis, turn to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, published in 1981. MacIntyre articulated an utter disenchantment with three centuries of moral philosophy all the way back to the Enlightenment, and argued that it was hardly a surprise that modern society itself lost its way. He argued that clear thinking and virtuous action couldn’t be unmoored from a social context — it had to be embedded in a community with shared values, goals and practices. His fellow philosophers found the book impossible to ignore.

MacIntyre died in May at the age of 96, which prompted me to turn back to a piece of his writing (in the 1994 essay “A Partial Response To My Critics”) that has stuck with me for decades: the tale of two fishing crews.

One crew is “organised and understood as a purely technical and economic means to a productive end, whose aim is only or overridingly to satisfy as profitably as possible some market’s demand for fish”. The crew members are motivated to work hard, innovate and hone their skills, because that way lies profit. The other crew has developed “an understanding of and devotion to excellence in fishing and to excellence in playing one’s part as a member of such a crew”. This excellence is about skill, to be sure — but also about character, social bonds and courage. These fishermen are risking their lives and are dependent on each other. And, adds MacIntyre, “when someone dies at sea, fellow crew members, their families and the rest of the fishing community will share a common affliction and common responsibilities”.

The values of this second crew are what we seem to be losing when a private equity group “rolls up” hundreds of small independent vets; or when an old-fashioned private partnership such as Lehman Brothers becomes a publicly traded company; or when a business embraces a mission statement that could equally describe the aim of any other business.

Try this: “Our objective is to maximise value for our shareholders by focusing on businesses where we have market leadership, a technological edge and a world competitive cost base”. Any guess as to the industry? It could be anything, so it means nothing.

I was introduced to MacIntyre’s ideas not by my philosophy tutors, but by the economist John Kay. In The Truth About Markets (2003), Kay quotes MacIntyre’s description of the fishing crews, and then asks a question: which crew would make more money?

MacIntyre assumed the answer was depressingly self-evident: the profit-maximising crew will be an unstoppable force, which is why modern commerce is so corrosive. Organisations that offer the riches of friendship, community, loyalty, craft and professionalism are sure to be driven out of business by the relentless economic logic of the profit-maximiser. They make money, and destroy what really matters.

But do they really make money? Kay argues that narrow profit-maximising is often a failure, even by its own denuded standards.

A 1972 Harvard Business School case study examines a real-world example of MacIntyre’s profit-maximising fishing crew. The Prelude Corporation, the largest lobster producer in North America, aimed to become the General Motors of the fishing industry. It went bankrupt shortly after the case study was written.

Lehman Brothers is another example — was it really more successful after jettisoning the traditional structure in which the capital at risk was provided by partners who best understood the business?

A third example is the chemical giant ICI, which in 1994 published that vacuous mission statement about “market leadership”. A titan of 20th-century British manufacturing, it faded and, in 2008, was absorbed and broken up by a Dutch paint company. Perhaps ICI would have done better had they paid less attention to making money, and more attention to making chemicals.

This should not really surprise us, as Kay explains in The Corporation in the 21st Century (2024). To be solidly profitable, companies need some kind of competitive advantage. That might rest on network effects, intellectual property or even political connections. But it might equally rest on a trusted brand and well-worn habits of making the right kind of decision, quickly. In other words, profitability can rest on shared values, goals and practices too. An organisation that MacIntyre himself might admire, one that has developed the right kind of culture, may well be more attractive to customers, more appealing to potential employees and simply more effective at doing all the things a particular business in a particular industry must do.

Consider the Financial Times itself. I dare say everyone involved in the business prefers to be paid, and the FT aims to be profitable. Yet we didn’t come here with the hope of printing money; we came with the aim of printing newspapers. If the FT’s entire operation, day to day and top to bottom, was predicated on maximising profit, this would be a different newspaper. It is not obvious that it would be a more profitable one.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 June 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy How To Make The World Add Up.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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Rebuilding journal search again

June 30th, 2025 03:18 pm[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
alierak: (Default)
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Posted by Tim Harford

George Price is on a mission to prove that human kindness is real. He’s seen the latest research suggesting any altruism is ultimately selfish and finds it deeply depressing. George decides to learn the mathematics he needs to prove that research wrong, and throws his career, and life, into the quest for complete kindness.  

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading

This script relied on Oren Harman’s biography of George Price, The Price of Altruism, and Ullica Segerstrale’s biography of Bill Hamilton, Nature’s Oracle, along with Hamilton’s own autobiographical recollections introducing a collection of his scientific papers, Narrow Roads of Gene Land; Steve Frank’s article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, George Price’s Contributions to Evolutionary Genetics; and James Schwartz’s obituary of George Price, Death of an Altruist.

Posted by Tim Harford

Can we “nudge” our way to a higher rate of economic growth? In a recent speech, David Halpern argued that we should at least try. Halpern was the founder of the Behavioural Insight Team (BIT) that was so enthusiastically championed by then UK prime minister David Cameron, so it is no surprise to find him suggesting that policymaking informed by behavioural science might raise the UK’s growth rate. But is he right?

Behavioural public policy has come to mean two distinct things. The first is a recognition that people do not necessarily conform to the simple model of human behaviour in an economic textbook. For example, workplace pensions could be set up for anyone who decides to opt in, or for everyone who decides not to opt out. The distinction seems trivial, yet in a real-world setting full of fallible real-world people, the change in the default option makes a huge difference to what people actually choose.

The second is that new policy ideas are worth testing rigorously, ideally through randomised controlled trials. There is nothing particularly “behavioural” about this idea, but such trials have tended to provide strong evidence that behavioural economics is worth taking seriously, and so the advocates of randomised trials often tend to be the same people as the advocates of using ideas from behavioural economics.

So, could more psychologically realistic, rigorously evaluated policy lead to higher economic growth? It might. The trouble is that the kind of policies in question tend to be rather small in scope. For example, a decade ago BIT ran an experiment that revealed people tended to miss fewer appointments with the NHS if they were sent timely text message reminders explaining that each missed appointment typically cost the NHS about £160.

Taking the BIT numbers at face value, such well-aimed texts could prevent more than a million missed appointments and save about £220mn a year. Nobody could object to that, but saving £220mn — about £3.25 per UK resident — is not a growth strategy.

One approach, then, is to focus on scaling up that sort of experimentation so that schools, hospitals, police and prisons endlessly keep finding improved ways to do things, delivering better results for less. Discovering a new hack like those text messages would be nice. Discovering one a month would be nicer. Discover one a week, and the growth numbers might actually start to improve.

Cabinet minister Pat McFadden may have had this in mind last December when he announced a small fund to support a “test and learn culture” in government. A good idea, but not a new one. Ubiquitous, evidence-based learning and improvement is essential, but it would have been good to hear McFadden explain how his proposal would advance the “test, learn, adapt” approach advocated by the Cabinet Office back in 2012.

So far, behavioural insights and rapid experiments have been solution-producers looking for problems. If one growth strategy is to find and solve thousands of small problems, an alternative is to start with the biggest problems and ask if behavioural science can help.

In the UK, those problems include: poor skills education, especially for people not bound for university; bad infrastructure; low business investment; a long tail of unproductive firms; and burdensome planning restrictions.

A behavioural approach might offer some hope here. For example, Halpern praises the apprenticeship levy, which effectively levies a tax on businesses to fund apprenticeships, but offers a tax rebate to those that spend the money on their own training schemes.

This seems — and is — more fussy than a simple tax break for training, but is structured to take advantage of our tendency to compartmentalise money into arbitrary categories depending on how we plan to use it. The technical term for this is “mental accounting”. The quintessential example is the person who keeps one jar for rent money, a different one for food, another for savings, and a fourth for having fun. The apprenticeship levy harnessed mental accounting by suggesting to firms that they had a chunk of training money sitting in a jar, and if it wasn’t spent the government would take it. (The Treasury, says Halpern, was caught by surprise at how effective the scheme was.)

A similar approach might be used to encourage firms to invest in capital. Or, to take advantage of an old idea from Nobel laureate Paul Romer, the government could write a law allowing industries to vote for a sector-wide compulsory levy that would fund relevant R&D. The widget industry could collectively vote for a 1 per cent levy on all widget firms, which would fund research projects chosen by each firm, with fruits available to every firm in the sector.

Romer’s idea is a clever piece of economic engineering, but it also makes psychological sense: it funds the public good of innovation, while giving each firm the sense of ownership of a pot of money, and real control over where it goes.

More broadly, Halpern wants to use this idea of mental jam jars to build support for investment. Perhaps a new tax, or a cut in day-to-day spending, would seem less painful if the benefits were explicitly earmarked as investments for the future of the nation.

As for infrastructure and planning, I do not know. Maybe what is called for here is not behavioural science, but leadership.

Yet on the subject of leadership, Halpern does hint at another interesting approach: perhaps the government should be a little more upbeat? There is much more to an economy’s performance than Keynes’s “animal spirits”, but there is ample evidence to suggest that animal spirits do matter.

Businesses are more likely to invest when they feel confident, and while some of that confidence will depend on hard facts about policy and the economy, some of it is really just vibes. It would probably be good politics for Keir Starmer and his team to start sounding a bit more cheerful about the UK’s prospects. It might be good economics too.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 30 May 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy How To Make The World Add Up.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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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