Posts

July 2026

National Energy Explorer

National Energy Explorer (v2) - can simulations support democratic sense making?

I'm building a serious game of the UK energy system to test the uility of simulations for supporting democracy. You can play with a work-in-progress prototype¹ here: ajamesphillips.com/sims/national-e… (381 words)
serious games simulations sense-making energy data public policy pro-democracy

May 2026

Simulations for Democracy

Through Participatory and Holistic National Planning

I welcome your opinions, questions, push back, or confusion via email or Google docs * update * Thank you all for the feedback so far; I've added these under " Follow On Conversations " below. Th… (1482 words)
v2
pro-democracy sense-making collective flourishing WikiSim design philosophy


Thoughts for Symbiosky on Wikisim and Collective Sense-Making

Thanks to @Symbiosky for these thoughtful questions: How do you want Wikisim to evolve? Who will submit the data, and in what format? GIS data?? What types of questions will be allowed? And what gui… (898 words)
Symbiosky WikiSim collective sense-making

April 2026

An Executable Knowledge Graphs as a Public Wiki

WikiSim contains executable knowledge graphs. This application demonstrates the capability of showing the difference between a knowledge graph and its alternative to discover the main causes of differences between the two perspectives.

With WikiSim I am building a public computable knowledge graph¹ to help support us understand which actions and policies (government or otherwise) are possible from those which are just wishful thinki… (600 words)
v2
WikiSim design philosophy


How much of the UK's built area could be covered in solar panels?

For the National Energy Explorer simulation I'm building I need to know how much area of an urban or suburban grid cell would have south facing roofs. And how much that would produce in terms of elec… (581 words)
sense-making data public policy energy David MacKay Without Hot Air


A New National Energy Game is being made...

After releasing Energy Explorer just before the Covid-19 pandemic kicked off, I've returned full circle to national energy and what better timing than another energy-crisis. The original Energy Explor… (194 words)
simulations sense-making data public policy energy David MacKay Without Hot Air

March 2026

Who's Strengthening Our Democracies - A List of Pro-Democracy Organisations, and Projects

I'd like to find others working in on pro-democracy, pro-sense-making, pro-flourishing: Who's Strengthening Our Democracies - and How Do We Join Forces? Specifically I'm interested in planetary-billio… (805 words)
v2
pro-democracy sense-making collective flourishing


David MacKay: Energy and Information Lecture

Some notes from Cambridge Philosophical Society's event David MacKay: Energy and Information on 27 March 2026.

David at DECC: Impact and legacy. Moira Wallace, Ravi Gurumurthy (NESTA) "Do people have the expertise to do the job?" Numbers not adjectives No vagueness Transparent models & working, not opaque Rig… (242 words)
David MacKay energy information public policy


Updating David MacKay's 'Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air'

Current progress can be found here. My experience of David MacKay was of a brilliant, patient, and kind person who I was fortunate to have had a few wonderful conversations with. Looking back on his… (729 words)
v3
David MacKay Without Hot Air public policy energy inspiration sustainability


We are awash with claims

Would a wiki of claim checking help?

Problem We are awash with claims about how the world works. And very little way to sense checking them quickly. I'm not against these claims per se. I think in the right context they are the way fo… (314 words)
sense-making claim checking data


Conversation Upgrade #5 - UK Gas Prices

When it comes to natural gas I am basically clueless. I know what it smells like,¹ I know where it comes from (ish) but then I read news articles such as this one which claim that the price of gas i… (1287 words)
data public policy energy


Conversation Upgrade #4 - UK Fuel Poverty

Another 2 inadequate policy "debates".

I read another news article about the recent increase in cost of fuel heating oil in the UK... which yet again doesn't engage with, or surface the most important facts and figures. It's more non-news… (2053 words)
v3
sense-making conversation upgrades public policy


Time Abundance

Initially I had written: There is plenty of time. One just needs to choose what to spend it on. But no, there is finite time. And yes, one needs to choose what to spend it on. The real challenge i… (141 words)
time philosophy inspiration


Finding Data for Public Policy

The Open Knowledge Foundation hosted an event on The Future of Open Data. It had a range of interesting talks and included some Useful Directories of People and Data: Directory of specialists of th… (467 words)
opportunity data public policy data-driven decision making


Conversation Upgrade #3 - Extra Funding for Same-Day GP Appointments for Urgent Care

Another inadequate policy debate.

The UK government recently announced a £500 million large sum of money increase for funding same-day GP appointments for urgent care. This was also covered in the media including by the BBC: "GPs told… (571 words)
sense-making conversation upgrades public policy


Totally non-Interoperable, Very Important Data

Came across this totally non-interoperable, very important data. It's the US strategic petroleum reserve levels, but it's provided as an image of a spreadsheet 🥲 This looks positively hard to do. Di… (42 words)
public data FAIR data


Looking forward to Wessex Water's Open Data Day 2026

Wessex Water are hosting an Open Data Day¹ next week on 9th-10th March, with the "Stream Challenge Statement 2026" of: How might we, using a variety of data sources, better understand and communicate… (993 words)
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Wessex Water Open Data Day data-driven decision making water industry


Thoughts on "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

Roads Analogy & Rushing Chapter 1, page 3, book page 13. I reflected on the feeling of rushing and comparing oneself to others achievements - partly to avoid meditation.¹ It's clearer to me now how th… (944 words)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance book notes


Human-in-the-AI-loop? Or AI-in-the-Human-Loop?

A thought¹ about the phrase "Human-in-the-AI-loop" and that this feels like we're just hanging on to the outside of this AI hamster wheel / racing car as it tears uncontrollably out of the gates... th… (250 words)
AI sense-making legal

February 2026

Inspiring Skillful Approach to Grief and Anger

Reflections on someone's skilful handling of anger from to a tragic event, and the determination to move beyond it towards forgiveness and peace.

"Chloe Hayman, left, with her mum, Danielle. The 17-year-old died in 2022 after the car she was travelling in hit a cattle grid" from the BBC news article "I hugged my daughter's killer as we cried to… (253 words)
inspiration emotional resilience grief anger forgiveness


AI Determinism for Source Code Generation

LLMs are great plugins for sketching some code. We already have plugins that you put in a high level description and they deterministically produce lower level code: they're called compilers. Comput… (653 words)
AI


Conversation Upgrade #2 - US Gas Turbines

Can one person ever individually know all the relevant factors at once? Could we achieve this if we had better tooling / mediums to support us? Or can we more simply wobble from one partial understanding to the next?

The original thesis The original "conversation" happened in this video by an expert.¹ In that part of the video though they talk about how the US is a world leader in building combined cycle gas tur… (321 words)
sense-making conversation upgrades


UK Policy Lab's Serious Game - Systemic

I've just come across this game and now I'd love to find people to play it with.

I recently came across the UK Policy Lab's serious game called Systemic and it looks really interesting. In particular this meta rule stood out a particularly good sign of the potential for a game to… (147 words)
public policy serious games Policy Lab


AI Test #2 - How Many NHS Visits Are Related to Complications from Patients Seeking Medical Treatment Overseas?

Tiny changes in prompts produced >300% (4x!) change in values.

In this series we continue to compare AI (LLM) output / performance for questions related to understanding and addressing societal planning and public policy. There is not yet any data or estimates… (449 words)
AI tests


Idea: Experience Real World Policy Levers

Reading the about the Modelling Birmingham project and its mention of CAS: complex-adaptive systems For some outcomes, the interdependencies between the contributing variables were so rich that the r… (542 words)
idea experiential sense-making simulations


AI Test #1 - How many UK Neurologists do we need for Multiple Sclerosis?

This is a new series where I'll compare AI (LLM) performance for questions related to public policy.

It is a simple question: "How many neurologists do we need in the UK, to deliver clinical care for multiple sclerosis according to NICE guidelines?" and it has a simple answer: 65 As of 16th Feb… (348 words)
AI tests


What is WikiSim?

WikiSim is not like any website I know of. The best description I've got so far is "WikiSim is a public space for data and simulations - a Wikipedia for imagining futures that actually add up"... I'm sure there's a better way to describe it and I'm open to suggestions!

What is WikiSim? My problem with answering this question is that WikiSim is not like any other website I know of. This makes it hard to describe succinctly.¹ I am now² calling WikiSim "a public spa… (2735 words)
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WikiSim design philosophy


Who's Strengthening Our Democracies - and How Do We Join Forces?

I want us to collectively flourish; for that to happen our democracies require good leadership, informed citizens, and active work to renew and upgrade our democratic sense-making.

I quit a PhD in biotech 15 years ago to explore how to use the web to improve our collective sense-making and decision making. At the time many people either laughed at me or were shocked but I was f… (834 words)
motivation pro-democracy sense-making WikiSim

January 2026

Connect or Collect Data?

Icebreaker One.org's approach is to connect to data. Should WikiSim connect to data rather than collect it?

Icebreaker One (IB1) aims to make trusted data more available to organisations and people by focusing on governance first. This is a good approach and a laudable goal, and I wish it was already in pl… (1160 words)
WikiSim data design philosophy


Conversation Upgrade #1 - GBP to EUR exchange rate around Brexit

TLDR: validating claims in conversations is hard without good tools & data. Data is sometimes hard to find, or hard to make sense of as our online tools / mediums do not allow for quick calculations, visualisations and validations to be performed.

The original conversation The original conversation happened in the comments section of an opinion article about the UK Labour government's recent budget changes. Whilst I thought upgrades could be f… (2246 words)
sense-making conversation upgrades


Conversation Upgrades

All conversations have a seed of something interesting, but not all reach their full potential. Some instead devolve into name calling ad hominem attacks, straw man arguments, motte-and-bailey doctri… (360 words)
sense-making conversation upgrades


What are good conversations?

A first pass at mapping out what makes good conversations

We live in democracies, they work when we have good conversations. I don't think it's controversial to say that we are not having good conversations about many important topics. This is a function of… (510 words)
sense-making

December 2025

Sub-citations for efficient recall and validation of references

We already use sub-citations for books and legal documents, why not academic / scientific papers?

A flood of unstructured data in PDFs During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was fortunate to be employed by CCI to analyse data from Covid-19 diagnostic EUAs (Emergency Use Authorisations… (1175 words)
sense-making references


Thoughts on "What can one person do?"

@nonzerosumjames.bsky.social just published What can one person do? It's a good article and questions what we should do when faced with the challenge of tyranny, of an oppressive state. Do we put ours… (51 words)
pro-democracy sense-making


Thoughts on "Dear ACM, you're doing AI wrong but you can still get it right"

*edit* on re-reading this it sounds a bit curt, rest assured it's not meant to be! I think Anil's article is great, I'm just curious & being brief. @anil.recoil.org posted "Dear ACM, you're doing AI w… (71 words)
AI


Opportunity / Problem Statements Repository for Collective Flourishing

*edit* you can see and edit the latest version of this doc on WikiSim. -- why is this proposal on WikiSim? Data, calculations, simulations, proposals and narratives relating to how we could organise a… (80 words)
sense making opportunity statements


How to unify conflicting perspectives - v2

Some initial thoughts on how one or more people can unify their conflicting perspectives.

"What is both a rectangle and a circle?" Mahomed Hussein asked me. Was it a trick question? "Nope". Ok?... that's a head scratcher! And the solution to this question is found by moving from a lower… (410 words)
sense-making

November 2025

WikiSim at BigMathsJam 2025

A transcript¹ of a BigMathsJam presentation in November 2025 about WikiSim.
WikiSim MathsJam