iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I think people are right to say there is a third option, but saying so starts from objecting to the combination of "by any any reasonable stabdard" and "very different from us".

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Great primer for anyone looking to understand the Saxony-Anhalt result and how to properly contextualise it, along with why the BSW is important to the prospects of an AFD government there

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Some reflections on @yuanfenyang.bsky.social's brilliant Rita Hinden memorial lecture hosted by @renewaljournal.bsky.social on ending 40 years of neoliberalism. dysfunctionalprogramming.substack.com/p/embracing-...

dysfunctionalprogramming.substack.com

Embracing Uncertainty

Reflections on the 2nd Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture by Yuan Yang

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

For non-AI folks, abliteration is a technique for removing safeguards from a model. The reason I think the OpenAI cybersecurity stuff is concerning is that open-weight models lag closed-source models in capability by ~6 months, meaning that soon, many attackers could get an uplift in capability

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Great quote from a 100% correct piece. We know all of our models of the world are wrong, but we still have to do research and take action in the world. How do we balance those concerns?

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Oh this is a great piece from @add-hawk.bsky.social making the case that play and games are the meaning of life, drawing on The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits www.ft.com/content/7b95...

Imagine, says Suits, utopia - some future paradise where technology has solved all our practical problems. We have perfect medicine, unlimited energy and boundless resources. What would we do with our time?
We would play games, says Suits, or we would be bored out of our minds. And if playing games is all we do in utopia, then games must be the meaning of life.

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Two brief thoughts on why I think it's still worth keeping LLM use out of introductory programming for stats/data science: - You need to be a good programmer to get good code out of an LLM - You need to be a good programmer to evaluate the code you get out of an LLM

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Very proud of my wife Samira for passing her viva today. Blessed to be married to such an intelligent and accomplished scholar

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

This leaflet format is the British political equivalent of carcinisation

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maybe: annie rauwerda @annierau.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

"why use google?" webpage from 1999

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Abundantly clear that we are in bloc politics and that Labour's strategy should reflect this. Also very clear that ultimate defeat of the far right in the UK will depend on the UK Conservatives reasserting themselves as the main party of the British right.

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

I once got a lift home after canvassing from Ken Skates. He mostly spoke very enthusiastically about theories of Rey's origin from the Disney Star Wars films (think this was before episode 8 came out)

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Because I've been doing some work with it, I've written up an applied primer on optimal transport/transportation theory and its applications to measuring dataset distance: philswatton.github.io/2026/04/08/a... Hopefully of use to someone else! Grateful for corrections on typos or misunderstandings

philswatton.github.io

An Applied Primer on Optimal Transport for Measuring Dataset Distance

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

When I think of the notion of 'living in truth' as expressed in Havel's essay and Carney's speech, responses like this are a choice to keep putting up the sign in the shop window www.politico.eu/article/dona...

politico.eu

Trump threatens to wipe out Iran’s ‘whole civilization.’ EU has no comment.

“Honestly if we reacted every time somebody posted something outrageous online, that is all we would do,” an EU official says.

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Another one of my reports written at the Turing is now available online, which is an informal literature review on AI-generated text detection. A brief thread as I've seen some discussion on the topic ⬇️ Link: www.turing.ac.uk/sites/defaul... 1/5

First part of report cover page containing title saying "Detecting AI-Generated Text" followed by "Informal Literature Review" and the first paragraph of the executive summary.

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

This is a great point: anyone who's not been plugged into AI discourse and encounters contemporary models is going to get Eliza'd into Yudkowski-adjacent views on AI safety

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Think this is basically correct, albeit some are making educated guesses while others are just making guesses.

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Guy who argues this aged well because in formal logic, X->Y is true whenever X is false

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Thomas Prosser @prossertj.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

As promised, here’s my review of No Second Chances by @morganj0nes.bsky.social. Spoiler alert – I really dislike the extreme, anti-democratic and counter-productive People’s Vote campaign. www.thepathnottaken.net/p/fiasco-the...

thepathnottaken.net

Fiasco - the People’s Vote seven years on

A review of No Second Chances: the Inside Story of the Campaign for a Second Referendum

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Great post. I think the biggest examples of this kind of motivated causal attribution on my side of the aisle is the notion that Russian disinfo changed the outcomes of the 2016 EU Ref/2016 US Presidential election. Disinfo is v. concerning for a variety of reasons, but rarely changes vote choice.

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

At some point I really need to bite the bullet and read Statistical Rethinking.

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Think my lastest stuff took the [No, Yes] route -- fun exercise

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

I'm so glad I don't have to live in a world where Matt Goodwin is an MP

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

When reading Suzanne Heywood's biography of her late husband Jeremy Heywood, two things struck me about Brown: 1) The world and not just Britain were v lucky he was PM during the crisis. 2) The humanity of his eulogy to Jeremy, directly addressed to Jeremy's family

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

I should probably write a new essay on something else sometime instead of re-upping this one, but I feel it remains relevant whenever something like the quoted post comes up: renewal.org.uk/blog/public-...

renewal.org.uk

Public Opinion and the Survey Response

Political scientists know that survey responses cannot be taken at face value. For most respondents, most of the time, responses are not the product of deeply held, pre-existing, coherent views on par...

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

This thread is a very instructive of example of why the short form video is such a negative thing for our information environment, not least because many of those who see the video are unlikely to see it!

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Thomas Prosser @prossertj.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Smiling because my book with @ghostofchristo1.bsky.social is out today! In Beyond Woke and Anti-Woke (Bristol University Press), we examine the emergence of social justice ideology. Unlike polemical accounts, we use an analytic approach and academic theories and methods. More 👇

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Fear of the machine's impact on work dates at least to the Luddites, but nonetheless fascinating to come across something like this from JFK's 1960 presidential campaign:

A JFK campaign poster with a picture of a machine with a face and several arms. An alarmed worker looks on. The text reads "If Automation takes over your job... who will you want in the White House?"

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Benjamin Lauderdale @benlauderdale.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Nick Vivyan, Chris Hanretty (@chanret.bsky.social) and I have a new book out: “Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice”. The core of the book is making the argument that citizens’ views about political issues neither reduce to an ideological orientation nor to a lack of substance. (1/10)

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William Cullerne Bown @williamcb.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Fascinating thread on the enduring influence of Red Vienna’s scientific worldview.

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Read this earlier today and it's a great and thoughtful piece. Too much discourse among the left on AI has fallen into a lazy hostility largely disinterested in the technology. This piece is a real antidote

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Materialist vs post materialist values (though I don't think anyone sees it as sacrosanct??)

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Had no idea how interesting Alexandre Kojeve was as a personality. Some highlights: - Admitted to putting his opinions under Hegel's name - Sent a philosophical treatise to Stalin during WW2 - Had an affair w/ a married woman, her brother-in-law concluded she was right www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Jonathan Rée · We are all layabouts now: Kojève v. Hegel

Alexandre Kojève described his book on Hegel as ‘very bad’, and he had a point. His take on the Phenomenology of...

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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 27/01/2026

If you want to know what actual political academics think of Matt Goodwin you can read quite a lot of their thoughts in this profile of him I wrote in 2024 (free with registration) www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-m...

thenewworld.co.uk

Matt Goodwin’s fall into the abyss

How a once respected academic embarked on a “sad, depressing journey of radicalisation”

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

As others have said, this is brilliant in its clarity and its willingness to articulate an argument. Couldn't help but think of recent discussions on the lack of thought in British political life while reading it open.substack.com/pub/paulwell...

open.substack.com

The Carney doctrine

Open comment thread on the PM's Davos speech

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Mark Carney's speech really is terrific: full text is here and very much worth your time.

paulwells.substack.com

The Carney doctrine

Open comment thread on the PM's Davos speech

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

The same is true of Britain and the longer we take to act on this reality the more painful it will be

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Absolutely fantastic piece. Mitchell is an all too rare voice of reason in the discourse around the intelligence of LLMs and other ML models

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Vicente Valentim @valentimvicente.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

It is central to the process of far-right normalization that, as these parties grow, they are able to attract more politicians with political experience and skill—often at the expense of mainstream right parties.

Excerpt from "The Normalization of the Radical Right" (OUP 2024):

"At the politician level, surfacing affects the calculus that politicians make when deciding whether to run for election. Under the latency equilibrium, potential radical-right candidates often refrained from running on a radical- right platform because they perceived that it was not very electorally viable. As the radical right becomes successful, however, they are likely to update these perceptions. They may realize that, unlike what they had thought, one can be electorally successful while running for election on a radical-right platform. The consequence is that, after skilled political entrepreneurs enter the political arena on a radical-right platform, other (often lower-ranked) politicians will be willing to follow suit.

A final implication of the surfacing phase concerns the skill of radical-right politicians. The difficulty in recruiting under the latency equilibrium reduces the average skill of radical-right politicians. After surfacing, however, more politicians are willing to join the radical right. In the previous phase in the process (activation), the skilled political entrepreneur joined a party whose politicians were typically less skilled. Now, in the surfacing phase, it becomes easier for the radical right to recruit more politicians even outside of leadership positions. More mid-level elites join the party, which increases their average skill, and also makes it easier to subsequently recruit skilled leaders again."

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Looking forward to the @williamcb.bsky.social take on this: publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5901/ld...

Cover page of a house of lords report titled 'Bleeding to death: the science and technology growth emergency'

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

In the Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton highlights the fact that fascist regimes were essentially uneasy Alliances between fascists and traditional conservative elites. This often resulted in tension between the leadership and party. RR not necessarily fascist etc etc

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

I think I'm surprised by Jenrick's plan to defect, in that: a) I'd assumed Jenrick's game plan was to wait till May and challenge for the leadership b) I can't imagine Jenrick being content with playing second fiddle to Nigel c) Reform's ascendancy is not nearly as guaranteed as it currently looks

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

From Robert Paxton's 'Anatomy of Fascism': 'Fascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their "mobilising passions", and try to co-opt the fascist following.'

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Would be interesting to see non-coalition govts included in this.

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Phil Swatton @philswatton.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

I think this is true, but to a point - algorithms are designed, and different design decisions are available.

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