A concise summary of the riddle of induction.

New paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: we apply linguistic tools to sperm whale vowels.

The result: sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them.

We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels.

Finally finished up a blog post on estimating Bradley–Terry models using brms.

www.m-flynn.com/posts/2025-1...

It just undersells that there are other ways to achieve an appreciation of complexity than parsing the intricacies of the Odyssey.

The contrast case is not education without literature, it's education by PowerPoint and cheat sheet...

The Left Case for Great Books | The Point Magazine A great-books model at the undergraduate level is, in fact, so consonant with Freire’s radical critique that it represents a far better path forward for a left-wing vision of education than virtually ...

I like this one: thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Suggests the causation is strongly mediated. The mediation structure also makes it harder for the "empiricist" to establish clean attribution.

More anecdotally, i think the complexity point holds water i.e. the ability to absorb complexity matter

Meanwhile in Dublin - @dubcitycouncil.bsky.social insists on "pruning" trees to take them back to stumps.

No idea what their logic is but I have a few guesses

Nutpie: state-of-the-art mass matrix adaptation for HMC
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/20/n...

Great product! Thanks for your work.

This is a great recommendation!

Hat tip @danielsaunders.bsky.social

Thanks for the reminder. He was hand down the best thing I read in that school.

He's was a founder in something, something though... so, ya know, why split hairs.

I buy it.

Will never forgive them for that!

Once identified, these conditions suggest how we should design for robust collective decision making patterns in both organisations and agentic-architectures.

Hope to see you there!

This is not a talk about AI agents, but it indirectly probes the conditions required for useful truth-apt aggregates of agent opinion.

Python Ireland March 2026 Meetup, Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup **Talk: Skill Estimation, Agents and the Condorcet Jury theorem.** The Condorcet Jury Theorem promises that groups are smarter than individuals — add more voices, get clos

Really looking forward the Python March-Meet-up in Dublin. I'll be speaking about Skill Estimation with IRT models in @pymc.io

We'l gauge skill and aggregate votes over agents to stress test the Condorcet Jury Theorem.

👉 Meetup Link: lnkd.in/d4bgGyAk

👉 Link to initial work: lnkd.in/dQ9TfFsa

Same group that killed the library bar iirc...

The Left Case for Great Books | The Point Magazine A great-books model at the undergraduate level is, in fact, so consonant with Freire’s radical critique that it represents a far better path forward for a left-wing vision of education than virtually ...

"a great-books model at the undergraduate level is, in fact, so consonant with Freire’s radical critique that it represents a far better path forward for a left-wing vision of education than virtually anything else currently on offer in the US" thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Ah, don't knock the philosophy degree. Yglesias is not our best.

Bambi, PyMC...

Similar idea in the game God of War. Kratos carries around the chatty head of Mimir

This was fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

I don't have any answers, but i tried to work through some of these ideas with the condorcet jury theorem as the happy limit case:

Surprisingly easy to break the ideal conditons unfortunately: bsky.app/profile/nath...

A sensitivity plot of majority accuracy achieved by 30 votes when group think is at play. Even extreme and implausible "treatment" effects only slowly push towards accuracy.

The piece draws on James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State" and @add-hawk.bsky.social 's steller work on value capture.

So, it mixes 18th century mathematics, contemporary anthropology and some philosophy, but if you've been thinking about organisation design or democracy you might find it useful.

The modeling suggests the problem is structural and hard to escape once established. I stress test these effects of groupthink and provide a sensitivity analysis to gauge how it might be disrupted.

There are no easy answers here.

The core question: what role does individual skill have when organisations optimize for "alignment" through culture fit, standardized training, shared AI tools?

How quickly does our collective wisdom plateau, and is this problem compounded by shared tooling and homogenised information diets?

The Legibility Trap

New blog post: The Legibility Trap - Why Organizations Fail in Lockstep

I stress test the Condorcet Jury theorem with Bayesian Item Response models and @pymc.io

Highlighting the role and importance of diversity in collective decision making

nathanielf.github.io/posts/post-w...

Book cover of Mike Davis's Prisoners of the American dream.

Maybe this one

Thanks owed to @juanitomedinart.bsky.social and others at @pymc-labs.bsky.social for the review and maintaining suc a great open source pacakge.