Links from August 2025: book economics; LLMs don’t reason; story in politics; kidneys

Book economics; LLMs don’t reason; story in politics; UK energy pricing; kidneys.

The economics of writing a book
The Bluestocking
Selling books via live events and podcasts “now looks as outdated as a pop star going on tour for free and expecting to make money from CD sales. What people are willing to pay for has changed”.

LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find
Ars Technica
“LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text”. The article also notes that “patching” a model so it can solve something it fails on is an unsustainable work around for the lack of abstract reasoning.

The quiet road to an ugly Britain
The New World
I’d assumed that improving lives would itself be enough in politics. But no: “it is a complete misunderstanding of modern politics to make the basis of your strategy the assumption that steady “delivery” will inexorably generate a reversal of Labour’s fortunes.” Also points to The Death of “Deliverism”, and the need to take “story much more seriously”.

Is Britain’s net-zero push to blame for its high energy prices?
The Economist
By getting rid of coal so quickly, Britain has “already cut emissions by more than just about any rich country”. But the reliance on gas spiked prices when Russian invaded Ukraine. “Now household bills are 20% above the average for the major European economies, and industrial bills 90% higher”. [I thought: “oh, only 20%, that’s not so bad”]. “Britain has also been forced—by geographical misfortune and regulatory folly—to lean on offshore wind, a costlier sort of zero-carbon power”. Compare with The FT on British solar power surges past 2024 total: “Some 14.08 terawatt hours of electricity was produced from solar in Great Britain by August 16, about one-third higher than at this time last year”.

AI executives promise cancer cures. Here’s the reality
The Atlantic

• AI summarisation tools: ‘Instead of Googling for and reading 10 papers, you can ask Deep Research. “Everybody does that; that’s an established win”’
• Co-scientist: “After running for two days, the system returned five relevant and testable hypotheses—and the top-ranked one matched the human team’s key experimental results.”
• Drug discovery: “what AI will do is to help reduce the search space”.

How to look after your kidneys
What’s Up Docs?, BBC Sounds
The 16km of blood vessels in your kidney actively filter the blood. It’s one of those intricate regulatory systems where if it gets out of whack, all hell breaks loose.“People with kidney problems don’t die of kidney failure, they die of heart attacks and strokes”.  Drink. More. Water.