Michael Story ⚓

Making Forecasting Useful at @swift_centre. I like big dogs, fast boats, and old stones 🇬🇧🇺🇲🇰🇪🇧🇪🇺🇲🇫🇷🇬🇧🇷🇺🇬🇧🇹🇼🇬🇧

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

This is an argument for a class system, or other means of maintaining a range of subcultures. You get reservoirs of different sets of norms to draw on which might be adaptive to particular circumstances without needing to deal with defectors

[Guy @nosilverv]

People CORRECTLY mistrust 'weird' (i.e. "off-distribution") people bc normative social behavior is p good all things considered. If someone defects from that their behavior prob mass gets flatter AND there's TONS more ways to be V BAD than to be v good → lower EV → Mistrust.

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

@johnpmerrick @s8mb It’s tricky to navigate this stuff because there are many people speaking whose motivation for joining the debate is an obsession with a specific delivery mechanism or management style rather than blockers, outcomes, and consequences for living standards which Sam focuses on

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

A great read by someone whose thinking I admire

[Ben Southwood @bswud]

I wrote an incredibly navel-gazing essay for the Institute of Economic Affairs about what I think, where my views come from, and how they have developed over time.

I actually wrote it a year ago, but it has come out today and I am so old that I have barely changed in that 12 months.

Learn:

- How I became a wild-eyed obsessive as a teen
- What ideology I consider myself to have
- Why I don't think that the difference between 'state' and 'market' matters all that much
- The reason I am obsessed with the infrastructure delivery mechanisms of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s

https://t.co/4e4tdauA7a

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

Part of the trouble is that councils can't do very much about local issues because their budgets and decision making are largely controlled by courts and central gov. You can't choose to cut SEND taxis and spend on potholes instead. So why not just vote in an expressive way?

[Ed West @edwest]

Become ungovernable https://t.co/HouyVK13Gb

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

@natesiggard Sounds amazing! Any plans for videos etc?

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

Sad that these people are so lost in a fog of entitlement that they forget the purpose of research spending: to benefit from the research! Not to employ people who’d otherwise have nothing to do

https://t.co/tMeAuLUNGB

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

One thing to consider is how judicial activism and interpretation (currently mostly progressive left but that could change!) will interact with these rules. In Australia courts are staring to put people in de facto marriages with earlier tripwires in cases of egregious behaviour

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

In Australia, being a forever boyfriend is illegal: couples are allowed to live together unmarried for a maximum of two years. As they reach 24 months they either have to break up or the state de facto marries them, with no possibility of opt out.

https://t.co/bYU7CMb2oV

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

A two year limit on unmarried cohabitation means even if you were unlucky enough to be strung along a couple of times, you’d still be able to exit and repartner in good time. And obviously knowing there’s a two-year deadline probably sharpens decisions early on in dating too

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

@KushnerAvi right it's a "de facto" marriage. That's what de facto means

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

Fantastic work by the BBC here.

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

Undervalued as an explanation for dysfunction: opposition to better outcomes from those who have little material stake in the issue but value how nice the inefficient methods and processes make them feel and will aggressively defend them. NetZero, NHS, housing all examples

[Louis Mosley @louismosley]

2/7

The piece attacks a peer-reviewed study showing Palantir’s NHS software improves hospital theatre use.

The BMJ tells its readers the author "works at Medact, a health justice charity."

Medact is not a generic health charity. It is THE lead UK campaign organisation demanding this exact Palantir contract — the £330 million NHS Federated Data Platform deal — be scrapped.

Its March 2026 briefing urged NHS hospitals to "disobey" NHS England and reject the platform.

The BMJ commissioned a piece attacking Palantir from a campaigner whose organisation is publicly campaigning to cancel the very contract under attack — and disclosed her only as a "health justice charity" worker.

That isn't disclosure. That is concealment.

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

Something Seven Up and Harry Potter have in common is a window into traditional UMC British life as part of the story. It’s what foreign people generally most enjoy about Britain and is often under-served to them by other cultural producers

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

This documentary is weirdly famous in Taiwan. I had more people ask me about it there than any British cultural product other than Harry Potter

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

Here’s a Taiwanese teacher writing for a Taiwanese audience about her time working in a British school, using the Seven Up documentary as a jumping off point

https://t.co/MOni2pgRut

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

This documentary is weirdly famous in Taiwan. I had more people ask me about it there than any British cultural product other than Harry Potter

[Scott Bryan @scottygb]

ITV has announced 70 Up, the documentary following contributors every seven years, is to come to an end.

The director Michael Apted died in 2021. The Up film series has aired since 1964. Final episodes this year.

[Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory]

The difficult tension with this is that enormous amounts of our elite human capital and resources are deliberately devoted to *preventing* housing, energy and infrastructure.

Try and build a house and capable and well-funded council officials and housing prevention activists will mobilise. Energy generation is captured by people who care much more about generating electricity in an emotionally and politically satisfying way than getting cheap power to homes. Every attempt to build reservoirs, train lines is sued into the ground and delayed for decades even if it happens. So our structural advantages are actually powering our poverty

[Tom Harwood @tomhfh]

It's whats so frustrating about living in Britain.

This country could be far, far richer by just applying the sort of econ 101 you would expect an international delegation to offer to a sub saharan African country: energy, housing, infrastructure.

We've already got the difficult stuff that is desperately hard to create from scratch: elite human capital, excellent universities, social trust, weirdly good global biotech/finance/insurance etc.

It's the trivially easy stuff that we continually studiously avoid.