Tim Harford

Not at all, even if there was snark intended I think its a fair question.

I resisted ranting about it (I hope you'll indulge me now), but in general I don't much like the economics commentariat. As best I can tell, "respectability" seems to mean something like "modal economic views + left of center politics." There are of course some exceptions, e.g. occasionally the economist or WSJ, but it leads to some notable blind spots.

For example, Switzerland experienced mild deflation in a good economy 2012-2017, but it wasn't until 2023 or so that articles started coming out that questioned where the 2% inflation target came from [0] and whether deflation could ever be a good thing [1]. This was despite respectable research from at least 2004 that explored the possibility of "good" deflation [2].

Tim, like many in the commentariat, was writing about inflation in 2019 [3]. The title of this essay is "Why inflation is good for us," and discusses the merits of inflation without any real discussion of cases where deflation could be good. At the end, he even raises the idea of a 4% rate target, which is a tad funny knowing the political mood on inflation 2021-24.

My point, really, is that I suspect I know most of his opinions without reading much of his work. He's hardly unique in that regard, but it bothers me. When looking for interesting opinions I'd probably look elsewhere.

[0] https://www.cfr.org/blog/history-and-future-federal-reserves-2-percent-target-rate-inflation-0

[1]…

I find your certainty about something you appear to know nothing about mind boggling. Every crash is a deficiency of sorts, so let’s just tell Airbus to build planes that don’t crash! Easy! Let’s just have peace instead of war! Obvious!

It is not sufficient to point out “obvious deficiencies”, one must also point out possible improvements. As other posters (with more patience than I can muster) have pointed out, it is not obvious how to improve this. Putting a lock in place to prevent movement of the lever adds another level of complexity that can itself fail. This is well known and has been extensively studied (a classic paper is No good deed goes unpunished: Case studies of incidents and potential incidents caused by protective systems [0]).

Listen, for example, to this episode of “Undercover Economist” Tim Hartford’s Cautionary Tales [1] (though the example given might itself be problematic [2]).

Airplanes are extraordinarily safe already (look at the amazingly low accident rate, given those fallible, sometimes even negligent and incompetent people that fly them).

Contrary to your facile assertion “There is lots of room for improvement”, there are very few obvious improvements. Change something and you might prevent one accident but enable another one.

As an example: terrorists enter the cockpit. Easy, obvious: lock the door! Ok. Suicidal pilot locks out the other pilot and flies into a mountain. Easy, obvious: unlock the door. GOTO 10. It’s not obvious. These are…

A chief tool used by industry to deceive was to cast doubt on independent science and scientists. A popular book on misuse of statistical methods, one that I'd read and liked myself, How to Lie With Statistics, turns out to have been part of that effort, as detailed by Tim Harford in his own book, How To Make The World Add Up

https://timharford.com/books/worldaddup/

The ultimate cautionary tale here is Darrell Huff’s 1954 classic, How to Lie With Statistics. Huff’s book is clever, insightful, and impish, and it may be the best-selling book about statistics ever written. It is also, from cover to cover, a warning that statistics are all about misinformation, and that one should no more believe in them than in stage magic. Huff ended up testifying at a Senate hearing that the evidence linking smoking and cancer was as spurious as the evidence linking storks and babies. His unpublished sequel, How to Lie With Smoking Statistics, was paid for by a tobacco-lobby group.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/the-conspiracy-theorists-problem-isnt-what-they-believe/618285/

People are very well aware that the war over what is truth and real continues to be fought. And that it is not merely corporations engaged in it, as control over truth and perception is at the heart of power. "All warfare is based on deception."

https://suntzusaid.com/book/1/18/

As a hint, if one side has a long record of lies, and another a long record of honest relations and owning their…

Software engineers who have had to deal with spreadsheets being used inappropriately. Spreadsheets are an extremely powerful tool, but they have limits. Their accessibility is part of what makes them so ubiquitous, but it also means people get comfortable and start using them beyond their limits.

Spreadsheets (Excel ones in particular) are great and presenting tabular data and they're mediocre at most other things including crunching numbers, taking notes, storing computational data, providing user interfaces, and much more. It's often okay to use a sub-optimal tool, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

A recent HN post[0] highlighted an example where Excel was being used to keep track of large-scale contact tracing data for covid in the UK. Excel is a mediocre database. It has hard limits on cell sizes and row/column counts among other things. They ran into one of those limits and lost track of 16K positive cases because of it.

From my own experience, I've had to deal with repositories containing tens of thousands of Excel spreadsheets. They were used to capture verification data. Excel files are large and difficult to parse with scripts, which was bad enough. But the worst part was that Excel doesn't really have a syntax or schema, so users editing the spreadsheets would frequently create changes to the table layouts which would have to be accounted for as edge cases in scripts. I'd be lucky to even recover data from half the files using automation. I even…

Funny enough ... I just listened to this 2021 podcast episode https://timharford.com/2021/05/cautionary-tales-fritterin-away-genius/ that goes into some of what you're talking about (of course, it's different - but still amusing to me that the general topic is very similar)

Being a "chronic project starter" is not inherently bad

It may be "bad" or or may not be "bad"

I, likewise, tend to get bored with the middle parts between "idea" and "finalization"

I'm really good at architectural-type stuff - big picture, planning, design, pricing, etc

And I'm really good at detail stuff (get that bar chart 5 pixels further left, and 10% shorter)

The middle (ie really boring parts) ... not so much - I can (and do) do them: but they are distinctly not my favorite :)

The only way that has worked for me to move from "project starter" to "releasing projects" is to have an outside deadline imposed - whether it's needing a new chicken coop before the chicks are big enough to move from the mini coop, or something else: I personally need a hard cutoff from the clock to help me get there

Otherwise ... it just sits on the pile of "I'll get a round tuit"

> software quality doesn't appear because you have good developers. It's the end result of a process, and that process informs both your software development practices, but also your testing. Your management. Even your sales and servicing.

If you only take one thing away from this article, it should be this one! The Therac-25 incident is a horrifying and important part of software history, it's really easy to think type-systems, unit-testing and defensive-coding can solve all software problems. They definitely can help a lot, but the real failure in the story of the Therac-25 from my understanding, is that it took far too long for incidents to be reported, investigated and fixed.

There was a great Cautionary Tales podcast about the device recently[0], one thing mentioned was that, even aside from the catasrophic accidents, Therac-25 machines were routinely seen by users to show unexplained errors, but these issues never made it to the desk of someone who might fix it.

[0] https://timharford.com/2025/07/cautionary-tales-captain-kirk-forgot-to-put-the-machine-on-stun-2/