Posts

March 2026

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-makingconversation upgradespublic 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 dataFAIR 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… (459 words)
Wessex WaterOpen Data Daydata-driven decision makingwater industry


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 some, albeit it too few, conversations with. Looking bac… (555 words)
v2
David MacKayWithout Hot Airinspirationsustainability


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 Maintenancebook 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)
AIsense-makinglegal

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)
inspirationemotional resiliencegriefangerforgiveness


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-makingconversation 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 policyserious gamesPolicy Lab


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

In this series we compare AI (LLM) output / performance for questions related to public policy.

There is not yet any data or estimates available for the number of number of NHS visits due to complications from patients seeking medical treatment abroad. ¹ ² ³ When I asked LLMs for estimates I rec… (426 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)
ideaexperientialsense-makingsimulations


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)
WikiSimdesign 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)
motivationdemocracysense-makingWikiSim

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)
WikiSimdatadesign 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… (2239 words)
sense-makingconversation 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-makingconversation 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-makingreferences


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)
democracysense-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 makingopportunity 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.
WikiSimMathsJam