Day: 2 December 2021

A summary of all the most interesting stories that have appeared about politicians’ efforts to control the virus — and other acts of hubris and folly – not just in Britain, but around the world.

Check out this useful compendium of aphorisms, as compiled by financial analyst Alexander Ineichen. Example: "The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.” – Edgar Fielder

by Edward Chancellor Alexander Ineichen, a Swiss financial analyst, has published a collection of epigrams and aphorism which together constitute what he calls Applied Wisdom: 700 Witticisms to Save Your Ass(ets). This book is intended for investors, but trying to understand the course of the pandemic presents similar challenges to mastering the financial markets – in both cases, there is a great deal of uncertainty, faulty modelling and forecasting, vested interests and a prevailing crowd psychology to contend with. Successful investors are nature’s contrarians and nonfinancial sceptics can learn much from Ineichen’s collected witticisms. The Problem of Forecasting The modern epidemiologist, equipped with complex mathematical models, has much in common with the contemporary economist. Both economists and epidemiologists attempt to forecast an immensely complex system, namely human society, equipped with models and data inputs that are not up to the task. Both face institutional pressures and incentives that produce a conformity of outlook. And when their forecasts turn out to be inaccurate, they suffer no ill consequences. As a result, they often fail to learn from their mistakes. Ineichen says that markets are governed by Gump’s Law, (derived from a line in the movie Forrest Gump), which states that life is a box of chocolates because you don’t know what you’re going to get. When you next encounter someone who ...

We're publishing a guest post on the Daily Sceptic by Dr. Ann Bradshaw, a retired Lecturer in Adult Health Care, about the scandal of the Government's failed efforts to import nurses from Kenya.

In a series of new restrictions, the German Government will ban the unvaccinated from entering 'non-essential' shops, with the Chancellor Angela Merkel calling for the vaccine to be made compulsory.

The National Audit Office has recorded that close to 750,000 GP referrals for suspected cancer received no further attention over the course of the pandemic.

Commercial airline pilots have done so little flying during the past 21 months we may be about to witness a fatal plane crash. That is the message of air accident investigators after a "serious incident" in Scotland.

Scientists believe they have solved the mystery behind the extremely rare blood clots caused by the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

In an original essay for the Daily Sceptic, Kathrine Jebsen Moore draws on the work of Mathias Desmet to explain the willingness of apparently liberal people to scapegoat the unvaccinated for the resurgence of the virus.

Read about an egregious assault on free speech by the Royal Society of New Zealand, which has placed a distinguished biochemist under investigation for... defending science.