Byron Sharp

Are those stem cells or cells from the plant stem?! #pseudoscience

When I was a child our teacher taught us about risk, money and economics in the most interesting way possible: She made us run a pretend farm, as a competition. It was genius, because I still remember it three decades later, which I wouldn't have otherwise. It went like this: Every student had a ‘farm’ on a little piece of paper, with four fields. Every year you had to decide what crops to plant in what fields, and buy them with any available money. Some crops were like wheat; cheap, boring and low-yielding, but dependable. Others were like peas; expensive, super high-yielding if things went right, but unreliable. Get the wrong mix of sunshine and moisture for peas and you'd make a huge loss instead of making bank. We all competed for the most money over a series of ‘years’ and on each year the teacher would roll dice to determine if the weather was hot or cold, rainy or sunny. There were four combinations of weather for your four fields and up to four crops. There was all to play for, and you'd be built-up or broken by the roll of the dice. Some kids played it safe with lots of wheat and no risk. Others bet the farm on peas, peas, peas! Others hedged between sunny crops and rainy crops. With each round, a few of us exited the game and went bankrupt. The eventual winner had taken a lot of risk, but had hedged just a little bit and rode out the bad years. He got lucky, but that's what the game was all about. The teacher could have taught us by lecturing us. She could have gassed on about risk management and economics and market economics and blah, blah, blah… and been ignored by a bunch of teenagers. Instead she made it fun, she made it a competition! And after that short period, a classroom of kids walked out with heads full of strategy, debating how they'd run the farm, who got the most money and how they'd play differently if they did it again. In a little classroom in a Northern English secondary school, a bunch of adolescents had been introduced to capitalism and loved every minute of it! I forgot almost everything else from those years, but that lesson sticks with me. Good teachers really matter. And a little competition goes a long way.

Dr. Frank Mayfield was visiting the Tewksbury Institute when, on his way out, he accidentally bumped into an elderly cleaning lady. To make conversation, he asked, “How long have you worked here?” “I’ve worked here almost since it opened,” she said. “What can you tell me about the history of this place?” he asked. “I don’t know much,” she said, “but I can show you something.” She led him down to the basement under the oldest part of the building and pointed to a small, rusted cell. “That’s where they used to keep Annie Sullivan,” she said. “Who’s Annie?” he asked. The maid explained that Annie was a young girl who had been brought there because no one could control her. She screamed, bit, and threw her food. The doctors and nurses couldn’t even examine her. “I was just a few years younger than Annie,” the maid said. “I used to think, ‘I’d never want to be locked in a cage like that.’ I wanted to help her, but if the doctors couldn’t, what could I do?” “One night I baked some brownies after work. The next day, I put them outside her cage and said, ‘Annie, I made these for you. You can take them if you want.’ Then I walked away, afraid she’d throw them. But she didn’t. She took the brownies and ate them. After that, she was a little kinder to me. I started talking to her, and one day, I even made her laugh.” “One of the nurses saw this and told the doctor. They asked if I’d help them with Annie. So whenever they needed to see her, I went in first to calm her, explain things, and hold her hand. That’s when they discovered Annie was almost blind.” After a year of slow progress, Annie was sent to the Perkins Institute for the Blind, where she learned to read, write, and later became a teacher herself. Years later, Annie came back to Tewksbury to visit and help. The Director told her about a letter he had just received from a desperate father. His daughter was blind, deaf, and thought to be “crazy.” He didn’t want to send her to an asylum and asked if anyone could come teach her. That’s how Annie Sullivan became the lifelong teacher and companion of Helen Keller. When Helen Keller later received the Nobel Prize, she was asked who had most influenced her life. She said, “Annie Sullivan.” But Annie replied, “No, Helen. The woman who changed both our lives was a maid at Tewksbury who once brought a little girl some brownies.”

When filming of The Lord of the Rings wrapped 25 years ago, the horses used for the films were auctioned off. Liv Tyler's stunt double, Jane Abbott couldn't afford to buy the horse she worked with (and fell in love with), so Viggo Mortensen bought it for her. "He just did it because he understood."

George Bernard Shaw stood in Stalin's USSR in 1931, watching millions starve to death, and declared there was no famine at all. The Nobel Prize-winning playwright didn't just stay silent about the horror unfolding around him. He actively promoted the lie that would help Stalin cover up one of history's greatest atrocities. Shaw toured Ukraine during the height of the Holodomor, when Soviet grain requisitions had stripped peasants of every scrap of food. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 3.5 million Ukrainians. Shaw saw the empty villages, the skeletal survivors, the mass graves. Then he signed a public letter praising Stalin's "remarkable progress" and told Western journalists that reports of famine were capitalist propaganda. Why would an intelligent man become Stalin's useful idiot? Shaw believed in central planning with religious fervor. He thought brilliant intellectuals like himself could design society better than millions of individuals making their own choices. When confronted with central planning's inevitable result (mass death), he chose to lie rather than admit his ideology killed people. Shaw preferred beautiful theory to ugly facts. Shaw deliberately used his celebrity status to give Stalin cover while Ukrainian children died of starvation. He returned to Britain and spent years defending Soviet policies, even as refugee testimonies and photographic evidence exposed the genocide. The man who wrote about moral awakening in "Pygmalion" had abandoned his own moral compass entirely. Free market economists warned that socialist calculation was impossible, that without prices and property rights, economies would collapse into chaos and death. Shaw dismissed these warnings as bourgeois nonsense while standing ankle-deep in their vindication.

“Not just one of the many good cultures and societal systems — not a culture on par with others — but, thus far, the best system of civilization humanity has ever had.” — The West Is Good, @tonymmorley, @NRO nationalreview.com/2026/05/the-we… 🗽

Remember Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman who spent 8 years on death row after being accused of “blasphemy” for drinking water from a Muslim’s cup. Asia was working in the fields with her Muslim coworkers. She got thirsty and went to fetch water from the well, where she took a drink with an old metal cup she had found. That’s all it took. Christians are considered dirty and impure in Islam, and she was accused of attempting to contaminate the Muslims’ water just by drinking from their cup. She was sentenced to death by hanging. The governor of her province voiced opposition to the verdict and was assassinated by his own bodyguard. When she was finally acquitted in 2018 due to international pressure, tens of thousands of Muslims rioted, demanding her immediate execution. A local poll found that 10 MILLION Pakistanis would personally kill her if given the chance. Just for drinking water from a Muslim’s cup. Her lawyer had to flee the country. And after months in hiding, she was finally able to escape Pakistan and received asylum in Canada. This is Pakistan, where non-Muslims live under the constant threat of death. The more I learn about this country, the more it just feels like ISIS with a formal government.

The data show a pronounced decline in global inequality over the past few decades, driven largely by rising prosperity in poorer countries. Progress slowed sharply during the pandemic, but the gains accumulated before the crisis were not undone. humanprogress.org/a-reality-chec…

RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 being retired really is a big deal. It was by-far the most mentioned scenario in the last two IPCC impacts and vulnerability assessment reports (WGII). A large fraction--probably a majority--of scary climate news headlines from the last decade come from studies using it. Current policies are still headed for >2C, there are climate-sensitivity developments to watch, and there's lots more work to be done to solve the climate problem. But retiring 8.5 is a major shift in climate impact science.

Absolutely

Congratulations to Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's Dr Cathy Nguyen on being invited by Professor Paul Harrigan and Associate Professor Lara Stocchi to join the Australasian Marketing Journal as Associate Editor.

Antisemitism is not a Jewish problem. It is Australia’s problem. Alexandra Smith who is not Jewish has written a powerful piece of her personal experience confronting the scourge of antisemitism.

More capitalist countries have lower income inequality, not higher. High income inequality is caused by cronyism which goes hand in hand with highly regulated markets. Welfare states also lower inequality, but you need free markets wealth to have generous welfare states.

Neat! Community Notes *do* seem to work. They reduce the number of reposts for posts that get them, cutting down on their reach and limiting the spread of misinformation!

Christopher Hitchens: ”In 1786, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Tripoli, shores of Tripoli. Ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery. We estimate 1.5 million European and American slaves taken between 1750 and 1815. Jefferson and Adams went to their ambassador in London and said, why do you do this to us? The United States has never had a quarrel with the Muslim world of any kind. We weren't in the crusades. We weren't at war with Spain. Why do you do this to our people and our ships? Why do you plunder and enslave our people? The ambassador said very plainly, Mr. Abdul Rahman said, because the Quran gives us permission to do so, because you are infidels, and that's our answer. Jefferson said, well, in that case, I will send a navy which will crush your state, which he did. Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy. It's a lie to say so. It's a masochistic lie, and it excuses those who are the real criminals, and blames us for the attacks made upon us.”

Remember when Mr. T sang this Mother’s Day song? No? Let me refresh your memory. 🎶🎶🎶

Imagine if we had blocked farm automation to protect agriculture jobs.

Before Keanu Reeves became a Hollywood star, he worked as a reporter for CBC and covered a teddy bear convention in 1984. The footage somehow makes him even more likable.

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived. Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear. His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range." The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence. Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it. Chess works that way. Most things do not. Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read. There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on. A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked. The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different. Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore. He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport. The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers. The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career. Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding. Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science. The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway. Match quality matters more than head start. A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose. The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath. The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was. If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in. You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

The Gestapo had a name for their worst nightmare: "The Limping Lady." They distributed sketches of her across occupied Europe with a terrifying order: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." What the Nazis didn't realize was that the master strategist they were hunting was a woman from Baltimore with a wooden leg. Her name was Virginia Hall, and she would spend the war proving that being underestimated is the greatest weapon a soldier can have. Virginia didn't start out as a spy. She wanted to be a diplomat, but the U.S. State Department rejected her twice. First, because they didn't want to hire women, and second, because she lost her left leg in a hunting accident. She didn't let the tragedy stop her. She nicknamed her prosthetic leg "Cuthbert" and moved to Europe. When the war began, she volunteered as an ambulance driver. By 1941, she was working for British intelligence. She was the first female agent sent into France. To get past the Germans, she pretended to be a reporter for the *New York Post*. She was a ghost. She ran a massive network of resistance fighters, organized escapes for downed pilots, and gathered secrets on German troops. Even with a heavy, 8-pound wooden leg, she could change her identity in seconds. One day she was a young radio operator, the next she was an old milkmaid with a hunched back. The Nazis were blinded by their own prejudice. They couldn't imagine a woman—especially one with a disability—could be so effective. Historian Craig Gralley noted that "None of the Germans, early in the war, necessarily thought that a woman was capable of being a spy." But the net eventually began to close. The notorious "Butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie, realized who she was. In 1942, Virginia had to run. She chose the hardest path possible: a three-day trek across the frozen Pyrenees mountains on foot. As she struggled through the deep snow, she sent a message to her bosses in London. "Cuthbert is giving me trouble," she wrote, referring to her leg. The headquarters, not realizing Cuthbert was a prosthetic, sent a hilarious and blunt reply: "If Cuthbert is giving you difficulty, have him eliminated." She made it to Spain, then back to England, but she refused to stay safe. She joined the American OSS and went back into France in 1944. This time, she looked like an old woman. She dyed her hair grey and shuffled through villages, all while organizing 1,500 resistance fighters. By the time D-Day arrived, Virginia Hall was acting like a guerrilla general. She didn't just watch the enemy; she fought them. She ordered her team to blow up bridges and derail trains to stop the German army from reaching the beaches of Normandy. When the war ended, she became the only civilian woman to receive the Distinguished Service Cross. President Truman wanted a big ceremony, but Virginia refused. She said she was "still operational and most anxious to get busy." Virginia Hall spent her life being told "no." She was told she couldn't be a diplomat because she was a woman. She was told she couldn't be a soldier because she had one leg. She ignored everyone and became the most feared woman in the world. Often, the very thing people think makes you weak is exactly what makes you unstoppable.

I'm sorry, but this is simply lovely, and I've no time for those who'll inevitably sneer at it as "Paddingtonism", or whatever. Like it or not, this is the version of Britain most British people identify with. Good on his M the K for participating, too.