Shows
The Jolly Contrarian LifeThe end-to-end principleThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com“I once got all the way from Glasgow to Edinburgh without a ticket. I walked.”— Sid Snot, The Kenny Everett Video Show.“There are more network use-cases in heav’n and earth, Horatio, than are dream’t of in your philosophy.”— Shakespeare, Spamlet I, viAn iron-fisted Romanian“The Bickerings,” ancestral home of the Contrarian clan, is freezing old pile in Squatney Green. It is cold enough, but made worse on account of...
2026-02-2742 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeTraitors, prejudice & how to get promotedReality TV competitions like the BBC’s Traitors offer valuable insights into group dynamics and decision making under situations of uncertainty.Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.For those bewitched by the unravelling convictions of postmasters, LIBOR rate setters and antenatal nurses Traitors is a superb, but unsettling model. It shows how easily we — be we contestants, viewers, witnesses, prosecutors, judges, juries or poundshop Poirots — can be mistaken, even about very obvious things. How inevitably, where the facts and social dynamics before us are inchoate or contri...
2026-02-2037 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby: waiving, or drowning?From all that terror teaches,From lies of tongue and pen,From all the easy speechesThat comfort cruel men,From sale and profanationOf honour and the sword,From sleep and from damnation,Deliver us, good Lord!G. K. Chesterton, O God of Earth and AltarA mystery persists. What is it about this waiver of privilege that so fixates everyone?It is plain, under current rules, Ms. Letby must waive privilege on the topic of fresh evidence, chiefly to determine whether this new material really is “fresh evidence” and, if not, why not, and...
2026-01-2640 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeSatellite of Love: Live Aid, Bad, Bono and the tragic triumph of ironyWelcome to a new experiment in gratuitous discursion about music, culture and modernity.Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.This is a little different that the usual JC fare, and in lieu of any strengths plays to my weaknesses, which is the ability to get utterly sidetracked by the simplest questions.On a train up to see my daughter Antagonista I happened across U2’s album The Unforgettable Fire. A guilty, embarrassing pleasure, but halfway though the six-minute, two-chord epic Bad it st...
2025-12-0654 min
DangerMouth: The Innovation StationS2E01 Ethical ComplexityThe team welcome back DangerMouth regular Jolly Contrarian Olly Buxton to ponder what goes wrong when the fuzzy trail of recent history is brutally cleaved with the sword of justice.
2025-11-131h 16
The Jolly Contrarian LifeA fatal typoSightseeing trips to the iceIn the 1970s New Zealand’s national carrier Air New Zealand began operating “sightseeing” flights to Antarctica. The flights would depart from Auckland, fly south over the remote Balleny Islands and onto the ice continent, passing over Capes Hallett and Adare and from there, down McMurdo Sound to the ice continent. There they would circle for an hour or so, to give passsengers a good look at Antarctica, before turning around. They returned to Auckland via Christchurch in the South Island for a refuelling stop: the airline’s fleet of DC-10 wide-bodied jets did...
2025-10-3144 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentJuries, proof and the appalling vistaTrigger warning: this newsletter assumes readers are of sufficient maturity to understand and not be wounded by cultural references to cocaine, Starsky & Hutch, and physical money made out of paper. Also: these events happened a long time ago. My recollection is imperfect, and I have definitely changed and embellished the narrative to make it a good story.Dirty banknotesShe don’t lieShe don’t lieShe don’t lieCocaine.J. J. Cale, CocaineThere is an urban myth that every bank note in circulation has traces of cocaine on it. Except, it isn’t an urb...
2025-10-1130 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeBetter, stronger, fasterSorry for the lack of news recently — I’ve been tinkering around with a spanner in the underbelly of the great steampunk machine which is the JC. The website’s performance — how quickly it serves pages — had fallen off a cliff. It had even started refusing to serve pages at all. The more I looked into it the more I realised I had to do something. The problem turned out to be twofold:BotsFirstly, bots. There are a lot of random webscraping devices roaming the dark netherworlds of the Grid that just incessantly hit unsuspecti...
2025-10-0338 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby: you had to be thereThe investigation into the actions of Lucy Letby, the trial process and medical experts continues to face scrutiny and criticism, much of it ill-informed and based on a very partial knowledge of the facts and totality of evidence presented at court and at the Court of Appeal.This case has been rigorously and fairly tested through two juries and subsequently scrutinised by two sets of appeal court judges. Lucy Letby’s trial was one of the longest-running murder trials in British criminal history with the jury diligently carrying out their deliberations for more than 100 hours.It...
2025-08-2932 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeSystem glitchNormal accidentsIn 1999, organisational sociologist Charles Perrow wrote the masterly book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. In it, Perrow proposed that certain complex human systems — the Three Mile Island nuclear power station was his prime example, but there were others — are so complex and the interaction of components so tightly coupled that certain modes of operation cannot be anticipated nor, if they happen, effectively stopped before they spin out of control. Therefore, from time to time, systems like this will suffer catastrophic failures. Meltdown at Three Mile Island was unavoidable. It was only a matter of when...
2025-08-1555 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentWaiver of privilegeThis is a follow on piece from Lucy Letby: waiver of privilege? It is mainly about waiver in a criminal context. The rules around waiver are more developed in the civil cases, since waiving privilege there is not quite as catastrophic to life, liberty and freedom, so it does happen.A document or communication is “once privileged, always privileged”. The principle that a client should be free to consult his legal advisers without fear of his communications being revealed is a fundamental condition on which the administration of justice as a whole rests. Legal professional privilege is the...
2025-07-2957 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby — the judge’s directionIn his summing up, Mr Justice Goss instructed the jury that they did not need to be sure precisely how Ms. Letby murdered the infants, as long as they were sure she did:“If you are sure that someone on the unit was deliberately harming a baby or babies you do not have to be sure of the precise harmful act or acts; in some instances there may have been more than one. To find the defendant guilty, however, you must be sure that she deliberately did some harmful act to the baby the subject of the co...
2025-07-2141 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby: confirmation biasTake the following hypothetical scene, which describes Lucy Letby’s experience at the Countess of Chester Hospital:Internal investigationA hospital experiences a cluster of deaths and collapses materially in excess of its usual rates for such events.Staff notice a particular nurse was present during an abnormal proportion of the collapses.Concerned at the possibility of foul play, hospital management investigates the collapses, focusing on those where the nurse was present. Those where she was absent are removed from the cluster.The investigation is widened to include other un...
2025-07-0943 min
Double Jeopardy - UK Law and PoliticsLucy Letby: Will She Waive Privilege as UK Prosecutors Widen the Net?The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is reviewing new allegations against Letby herself, alongside claims of corporate failings that could amount to corporate manslaughter. As police investigate, questions are mounting about accountability at the highest levels of the health system and beyond. As police escalate their investigation into the National Health Service (NHS) leadership, three former senior managers at the Countess of Chester Hospital have been arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter.
Focusing on one of the most high-profile legal cases in recent memory to broader political issues in Britain from the legality of Israel and US...
2025-07-0942 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby and behavioural profilingA leopard goes to the doctor.“Doc,” he says, “You gotta help me. Whenever I look at my wife, I see spots.”The doctor looks at him for a minute and says, “Well, what do you expect? You’re a leopard.”“I know that, Doc. But I’m married to a zebra.”Healthcare serial murder enquiries are unusual in that they generally start without specific evidence of wrongdoing as such. Suspicion generally arises from an unusually large cluster of unexpected deaths. From there, prosecutors work backwards towards a perpetrator.Their job is made harder by two inconvenient fac...
2025-06-1339 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby: The ludic fallacyIn his book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents the “ludic fallacy”: the mistake of applying unvarnished theoretical probabilities to real-world scenarios.Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.Here is his example:You have a fair coin which, on the last 99 flips, had come up “heads”. Assuming it is a fair coin, what is the probability of it coming up “heads” on the 100th flip?Professor of statistics: Easy: 50%.Professional gambler: Come on, chump, it is 100%. What are the odds...
2025-05-2129 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeJC update: format, AI, negotiable cows and Law Commission consultationsRadio: live transmissionYou may have noticed in recent months that a few JC newsletters have been breaking out into audio format. I’m on Spotify. I won’t deny this has been a personal ambition for a while now. With Substack, it is surprisingly easy to go nationwide.My personal preference for “discretionary content” these days — how I read for pleasure, that is — is audio: like everyone I spend all the time at work reading, usually off a screen, my eyes are going bung, so for pleasure I would much rather listen to audiobooks, and podcasts...
2025-05-1628 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby: how the charges were selectedPrelude: A daycare centre in New ZealandPeter Ellis was a childcare worker in Christchurch, New Zealand. A creative, flamboyant and somewhat uninhibited character, Ellis loved his job, put a lot of energy into programme planning, and would entertain children with elaborate puppet shows and somewhat provocative productions, sometimes to the point of being “risqué and outrageous”. Ellis had worked at the daycare centre for several years and was popular with children and parents alike.In 1991 a parent made a complaint. Her child had remarked that he did not like “Peter’s black penis”. An investigati...
2025-05-0929 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby: strikingly similar?Show me a man who believes in conspiracy theories and I’ll show you someone who has never organised a surprise party.—Lee Harvey Oswald.The constant presenceOrdinarily, when a defendant appears on 22 counts of things like murder, there is a wealth of compelling evidence: eyewitnesses, fingerprints, incriminating forensics and related corroborations that point not just to murder, but to the defendant, specifically, committing each one.Ms. Letby’s case seemed quite different. The evidence largely focused on whether, in each case, there had been a crime at all. Expert eviden...
2025-05-0527 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeGift cards, bills of exchange and cinema economics: it’s all about the popcornRecently, as thanks for a minor accommodation, I received a Vue cinema gift card. Though it was a generous and thoughtful gesture for a trifling matter on my part, I did what most people do when given gift tokens: I stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Having recently come to try to use it — not part of the anticipated run of things, as we will see —rr I was surp...
2025-05-0519 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby: the insulin smoking gunThe test results showing that insulin had been given to them was the only piece of concrete evidence of criminality throughout the whole of the prosecution’s case. It was the closest thing they had to a smoking gun and became the keystone for their case as a whole.Johnson’s argument ran that if the jury could agree that Letby had deliberately poisoned two babies, they could also reasonably conclude that she had harmed others using different methods, even if the evidence for those were less concrete. In the event, the insulin cases were the first on w...
2025-04-0629 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy Letby: The Handover Notes“Lucy Letby Conspiracy Theorists are Wrong”, Liz Hull, Daily Mail, July 5, 2024.R v Letby, Court of Appeal Judgment, 2 July 2024.Rachel Aviv’s, New Yorker investigation of 13 May 2024.Lucy Letby: initials of babies noted in diary on dates of alleged attacks, court told, The Guardian, 17 April 2023. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com/subscribe
2025-04-0415 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeLucy Letby: The Handover Notes“Lucy Letby Conspiracy Theorists are Wrong”, Liz Hull, Daily Mail, July 5, 2024.R v Letby, Court of Appeal Judgment, 2 July 2024.Rachel Aviv’s, New Yorker investigation of 13 May 2024.Lucy Letby: initials of babies noted in diary on dates of alleged attacks, court told, The Guardian, 17 April 2023. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com/subscribe
2025-04-0415 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeCryptonomicoinHello everyoneFollowing a sequence of minorly unfortunate but quite improbable incidents — at one point JC wondered whether he was in an episode of Game For A Laugh — there won’t be a fully thought-out newsletter this week. But I offer a couple of thoughts about Bitcoin, seeing as I have been updating the JC’s prime brokerage section and Bitcoin has finally crossed that magical US$100,000 threshold. It got me to thinking about the parallels between Bitcoin and our old friend Archegos.What goes up?There are plen...
2024-12-1516 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeTrolley Problem is an audio version of last week’s newsletter.Original article on the JC is here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com/subscribe
2024-12-0621 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeBitcoin is VeniceThis article started as a review of Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers’ remarkable Bitcoin is Venice, but I got carried away and began ruminating about the philosophy of not just cryptocurrency but money, capital and social organisations generally.Bitcoin is Venice raises important, deep questions about the financial system. It asks us to consider fundamentals: What is money? What is debt? What is capital?That is a valuable exercise. I’m not persuaded Bitcoin can slip the surly bonds of human social organisation in the way the authors think it can: in particular, the need for...
2024-10-181h 14
The Jolly Contrarian LifeDesktops, metadata and filingThe desktopIn 1973, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center released the “Alto”. This was the first personal computer equipped with a “graphical user interface” (GUI) — computing with pictures — instead of the traditional “character user interface”.If potential users — bowler-hatted bureaucrats who didn’t use computers at all — were to be persuaded to give up their card catalogue systems, typing pools and reusable manila envelopes and instead stare at a screen all day, the system would need to look as familiar as possible.And so, to lessen the cognitive burden, Xerox came up with a visual metaphor. The A...
2024-09-3023 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentLucy LetbySerial murderers of any kind are vanishingly rare in Britain. Wikipedia lists fifty-five, since 1600. But so are miscarriages of justice. Wikipedia lists fifty-four, since 1255.Both narratives are highly improbable. Of all the explanations we might offer for the unusual spike of incidents in 2015 and 2016, as a matter of “prior probabilities” they are the least plausible: all else being equal, it is highly unlikely there was a serial murderer at work in the Countess of Chester Hospital. But, one having been convicted, all else being equal it is highly unlikely her conviction was a miscarriage of justice. This is w...
2024-09-2152 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeLucy LetbySerial murderers of any kind are vanishingly rare in Britain. Wikipedia lists fifty-five, since 1600. But so are miscarriages of justice. Wikipedia lists fifty-four, since 1255.Both narratives are highly improbable. Of all the explanations we might offer for the unusual spike of incidents in 2015 and 2016, as a matter of “prior probabilities” they are the least plausible: all else being equal, it is highly unlikely there was a serial murderer at work in the Countess of Chester Hospital. But, one having been convicted, all else being equal it is highly unlikely her conviction was a miscarriage of justice. This is w...
2024-09-2152 min
The Jolly Contrarian on Crime and PunishmentProsecutor’s tunnel visionThe collection of biases and cognitive gin-traps that can lead prosecutors — those who “prosecute” a particular theory of the world — to stick with it, however starkly it may vary from available evidence and common sense.So named because it is often literal prosecutors, of crimes, who suffer from it. This kind of tunnel vision has led to notorious miscarriages of justice where innocent people come to be convicted notwithstanding clear and plausible alternative explanations for their ostensible “crimes”.A review of the background, some famous cases, and the three phases of tunnel vision.The text for...
2024-09-1653 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeProsecutor’s tunnel visionThe collection of biases and cognitive gin-traps that can lead prosecutors — those who “prosecute” a particular theory of the world — to stick with it, however starkly it may vary from available evidence and common sense.So named because it is often literal prosecutors, of crimes, who suffer from it. This kind of tunnel vision has led to notorious miscarriages of justice where innocent people come to be convicted notwithstanding clear and plausible alternative explanations for their ostensible “crimes”.A review of the background, some famous cases, and the three phases of tunnel vision.The text for...
2024-09-1653 min
DangerMouth: The Innovation StationEpisode 19: We fought the Law and the Law wonSpecial guest Olly Buxton (A.K.A. "The Jolly Contrarian") leads Mikey and Darrell through the ossified entrails of the Legal Establishment in our first outing into its echoing dusty halls. The Law is an edifice so vast, so powerful and so ancient that waves of changes bounce ineffectually off its granite walls.
Even granite does not last forever.
Rest assured that despite the dark tones of formality, we remain steadfastly jolly throughout.
Olly is as well read as Darrell (i.e. off the scale) and is an excellent font of future enlightening t...
2024-05-241h 20
The Jolly Contrarian LifeReports of our death are an exaggeration, Pt 2The report of my death was an exaggeration.—Mark TwainIn 2017, then-CEO of Deutsche Bank John Cryan thought his employees’ days were numbered. Machines would do for them. Not just back office grunts: everyone. Even, presumably, Cryan himself.[1]“Today,” he warned, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have robots behaving like people”. …This recording will be linked to the premium article here.Here it is on substack: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to...
2023-11-2428 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeReports of our death are an exaggeration Pt 1The report of my death was an exaggeration.—Mark TwainIn 2017, then-CEO of Deutsche Bank John Cryan thought his employees’ days were numbered. Machines would do for them. Not just back office grunts: everyone. Even, presumably, Cryan himself.[1]“Today,” he warned, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have robots behaving like people”. …This recording will be linked to the premium article here.Here it is on substack: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to...
2023-11-1816 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeThe future of work part 2The debate chuntered on, recently coagulating around an unlikely, tearful graduate whom we got to know as “TikTok Girl”, confiding to her followers the exhausting experience of having to commute, work a whole eight-hour day and then commute home again.“I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and I am in person, and I am commuting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with...
2023-11-1218 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeThe Future of Work, Part 1In its abrupt dislocation, lockdown was a sort of miniature Burgess Shale — a sudden, dissonant punctuation in a long, flowing, paragraph of commercial consensus. A rare chance to “beta-test” alternative ways of conducting commercial activity.It would be a shame to waste it, or pay no heed to the lessons it offers….This recording will be linked to the premium article here.Here it is on substack: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com/subs
2023-11-1216 min
The Jolly Contrarian LifeOrg Charts and what they don't tell usDer Teufel mag im Detail stecken, aber Gott steckt in den Lücken.“The Devil may be in the detail, but God is in the gaps.”—Büchstein, Die Schweizer HeulsuseOrg chart/ɔːg ʧɑːt/ (n.)A formal portrait. A still life. A glib schematic that tells you everything you don’t need to know about an organisation, but which it treats as its most utmost secret.The org chart purports to order the organisation, placing everyone in a fixed, hierarchical relation to everyone else and joining them with reporting lines...
2023-11-1215 min
The Optimised LawyerOlly Buxton - Author of The Jolly Contrarian - Disrupting the legal industryAuthor of The Jolly Contrarian, Olly Buxton, sits down with Electra to talk about the inspiration behind his writing, quirks in the legal profession, redesigning contracts and disrupting the legal industry.
2021-11-1544 min
Common Ground with Jane Whitney002: Is the Party Over? Rebuilding the GOPWhat happens to Trumpism after Trump, whenever that moment comes? Although the GOP establishment remains firmly in President Trump’s thrall, many traditional Republican constituencies are fleeing the party. The conventional coalitions that once came together to power both the Republican and Democratic national parties are splitting apart as the president casts aside political principles, defies political orthodoxy and sells his personality. That’s turned political angst into the national malaise and left many at both ends of the political spectrum feeling disenfranchised, in effect, politically homeless. “Conversations On the Green” will expl...
2019-07-011h 09Common Ground with Jane Whitney002: Is the Party Over? Rebuilding the GOPWhat happens to Trumpism after Trump, whenever that moment comes? Although the GOP establishment remains firmly in President Trump’s thrall, many traditional Republican constituencies are fleeing the party. The conventional coalitions that once came together to power both the Republican and Democratic national parties are splitting apart as the president casts aside political principles, defies political orthodoxy and sells his personality. That’s turned political angst into the national malaise and left many at both ends of the political spectrum feeling disenfranchised, in effect, politically homeless. “Conversations On the Green” will expl...
2019-07-011h 09
80,000 Hours PodcastRob Wiblin on the art/science of a high impact careerToday's episode is a cross-post of an interview I did with The Jolly Swagmen Podcast which came out this week. I recommend regular listeners skip to 24 minutes in to avoid hearing things they already know. Later in the episode I talk about my contrarian views, utilitarianism, how 80,000 Hours has changed and will change in the future, where I think EA is performing worst, how to use social media most effectively, and whether or not effective altruism is any sacrifice.
Subscribe and get the episode by searching for '80,000 Hours' in your podcasting app.
Blog post of the...
2018-06-081h 31