Suppose that hundreds of rock fans are driving to the Glastonbury music festival. At some point each driver reaches an intersection where the road signs have been vandalized. As a result, there is uncertainty as to whether to turn left or right. Each driver has some private information, perhaps a dim drug‐clouded recollection from the previous year, which gives her a 2/3 chance of picking the correct direction. The first car arrives at the intersection, and turns right. The second car arrives, and also turns right. The driver in the third car has seen the first two cars turn right, and although his private intuition tells him to turn left, he figures it is more likely that his own intuition is wrong (1/3) than that both the preceding cars went the wrong way (1/9); so he turns right as well. A similar calculation is performed by each subsequent driver who can see at least two cars ahead. Every car ends up turning right.

In this scenario, there is a 1/9 chance that all the rock fans get lost. Let us suppose that if that happens, the festival is cancelled. Had there been a dense fog, preventing each driver from seeing the car in front (thus reducing information), then, almost certainly, approximately 2/3 of all the fans would have reached Glastonbury, enabling the festival to take place. Once the festival starts, any lost fan can hear the music from afar and find their way there. - We could thus have a situation in which reducing information available to each driver increases the chance that he will reach his destination. Clear weather creates an informational cascade that leads to an inefficient search pattern.

• We blame someone for something. If it's worth doing that for someone(s), then the something is blameworthy.


• Blame is useful because it points out the causes of problems, and the agents who should mitigate those causes to prevent the problem from happening.


• Pointing out the causes of problems is necessary to develop our understanding of the problem. Developing our understanding of the problem is necessary to develop the most adaptable and useful solutions to it.


• Pointing out which agent should mitigate the cause is useful because it tells us who should implement the solution.


• It's better to blame negligence than e.g. the laws of physics, because negligence is easier to change.


• We blame agents for actions, and negligence is inaction. However, "to be negligent" is an action.


• If it's not a big problem, we don't usually try very hard to assign blame, if at all; even if we assign it in our own heads, we often don't then act on it and e.g. tell the person we blame to change their behaviour.

1. Stir-fry some vegetables, and if you want, some meat. It's better to chop things up small. Don't add soy sauce or anything like that, just oil and biomatter (and herbs if you like).


2. Make stock. Ideally matching the stir-fry, i.e. if you've made chicken stir-fry, make chicken stock. If you've just made vegetable stir-fry, make vegetable stock.


3. Add uncooked rice to the stir-fry. Mix it in really well and make sure that the rice is properly coated with the oil. Add more oil if you need to.


4. Pour the stock into the stir-fry until you've about covered it. You know when you normally cook rice, you put it in water? Here you're putting it in stock instead.


5. Add some pecorino or grana padano cheese, crumbled/chopped up into little chunks, and stir it in. A decent block of grana padano runs for about 2 quid at the supermarket and you don't even use very much of that.


6. Cook, stirring, and keep testing the rice until it's cooked.