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“Compared to the average European country, Britain today has a backlog of 4.3 million homes that are missing from the national housing market as they were never built. This housing deficit would take at least half a century to fill even if the Government’s current target to build 300,000 homes a year is reached. Tackling the problem sooner would require 442,000 homes per year over the next 25 years or 654,000 per year over the next decade in England alone.”
Paul LaFarge: “Appearances are everything, and if that’s true, then there is good reason to observe them carefully. If you know the difference between a big-supermarket receipt and a small-supermarket receipt, you know more about the universe than the Zoroastrian mystic who has spent his whole life determining whether the Earth is guarded by three rings of demons or by five.”
William Davies: “The most important thing about feedback isn’t whether it’s positive or negative, but that you get it in the first place, and sustaining a constant feedback loop requires constant vigilance and work. […] The online influencer’s fear isn’t negative reactions, but that ‘engagement’ drops. In a cybernetic context, the individual or organisation that receives no feedback has ceased to change or evolve, and is to all intents and purposes dead.”
Scott Alexander: “Good conspiracy theories have lots of convincing-sounding evidence in their favor, and may sound totally plausible to a smart person reasoning normally. When people shrug off conspiracy theories easily, it’s either because the conspiracy theory isn’t aimed at them - the equivalent of an English speaker feeling smug for rejecting a sales pitch given entirely in Chinese - or because they’re biased against the conspiracy theory with a level of bias which would also be sufficient to reject true theories.”
