Author of Revealed Preference, a whimsical comedy about preference falsification. Excerpts on website.
Berkshire, England
Joined May 2026
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Out now: my debut novel, Revealed Preference.
Superficially, it's a country house mystery, but really it's an excuse for dodgy word reconstructions and silly jokes about mating behaviour and preference falsification. Available on Amazon.
Timothy R Lattimer retweeted
Today’s Guardian finds it "astonishing" that Russell Brand, convicted of one count of rape and three sexual assaults yesterday, was “embraced as a serious social commentator” when he returned to Britain in 2013. Embraced by whom, sorry?
The paper gives its own role in promoting brand Brand one single line, noting he had already written columns for it. Yesterday’s big Guardian piece on TV insiders said "Brand’s case has led to difficult questions for the BBC, Channel 4 and the production companies that worked with him." Hilarious...
On an unrelated note Russell Brand's 137 written contributions to the Guardian are still online - 17 of which are after 2013 and which concluded in February 2015.
Long after the Andrew Sachs voicemails, the paper ran his opinion on Thatcher the day after she died, ran a GQ awards column over a large chunk of the front page in September 2013, and ran his column blaming Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death on “extremely stupid drug laws.” Not to mention the fawning praise from Owen Jones and the entire Labour establishment, including the now-Prime Minister...
Today’s piece also sniffs that critics lavished praise on his memoir, quoting its tale of Brand trailing a classmate 200 miles to Wigan as an early warning sign.
That particular book was serialised in the Guardian.
In October 2014 the paper put on a ticketed Guardian Live event, with Owen Jones interviewing Brand. It was broadcast live from the Emmanuel Centre.
That day Jones penned a piece in the Guardian attacking the “all-too-smug, seen-it-all-before snottiness” aimed at Brand. Two months later George Monbiot named him a hero of 2014, calling him “the best thing that has happened to the left in years”.
Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor from 1995 to 2015, claimed in Prospect Magazine in 2023: "I only met him once, when he was writing a popular football column for the Guardian, along with the occasional commentary piece." Funny, seeing as the football column was pre-2010 and there is a photo of them snugly on the sofa together at the Guardian’s morning conference in August 2013...
Timothy R Lattimer retweeted
I haven't been on this site for a bit.
But I haven't seen anyone share the photo the New Statesman staff staged in 2013 of Russell Brand as Christ, and themselves as his disciples. It seems to have been scrubbed from the web.
It made me angry then and it makes me angry now.
Post #4 now available in my newsletter. This includes the Jester's Tear itself - a mathematical inequality that explains Price's Law and everything else that's wrong with the world.
lattimer.substack.com/p/buck…
Replies to this are interesting and betray a complete misunderstanding of what intelligence is. Intelligent people are capable of dealing with a much higher level of uncertainty, because uncertainty is mentally taxing: it requires you to keep two different concepts in your head at once.
The rush to judgement on the basis of gut instinct, gossip or herd mentality is not the sign of an advanced mind.
Timothy R Lattimer retweeted
Even in the rarified world of virtuoso violinists, her bow technique is extraordinary.
She is playing the original bowing used by Paganini when he performed this.
🌷🎻N. Paganini Caprice no. 5 | Sumina Studer
Timothy R Lattimer retweeted
I still think the fire metaphor for AI is underused:
"Is fire good or evil?" That's a weird question
"Should we give everyone access to fire?" Yes, so they can cook and heat their homes
"Should we give everyone flamethrowers?" Probably not
"Should we give everyone firebombs?" Definitely not
"Should we require companies that produce enormous combustion reactions to do so safely?" Obviously yes
“Should we wait until the city burns down to establish a fire department?” Obviously no, and we should also build in safeguards like smoke detectors
Posted the third part in my series on collective action problems on substack - why dominant assurance contracts don't increase expected revenue.
lattimer.substack.com/p/domi…
Timothy R Lattimer retweeted
I asked GPT-5.6 Sol to create the most Claude-y possible parody image and what it came up with is pretty great and dead-on.
🤖 Made with AI
Timothy R Lattimer retweeted
We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65.
We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life".
You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets.
I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long.
My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite.
TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.
Timothy R Lattimer retweeted
The average “literary” novel today reads like a LinkedIn post with sex scenes.
It's impossible to convey the ease and simplicity of pre-GUI computers to someone that didn't experience it.
Timothy R Lattimer retweeted
A couple days ago a founder sat thinking silently for a minute and fifteen seconds before answering a question I asked. (This is an estimate, because I only started timing him after about thirty seconds.) One of the smartest founders I've met too.
For those following me from my Letby post, I do have a novel coming out. Not much stats in it, sadly, but one of the characters is an econometrician. Excerpts at revealedpreferencenovel.com
Those interested in my post on the Letby case may be interested in my short review of jury verdicts in high-profile murder cases.
Very few not guilty verdicts, and none without a significant steer from the judge.
themanworthwhile.wordpress.c…
This is a top piece of work by Timothy Lattimer on the competing probabilities and likelihoods in the Letby case.
If for nothing else, explaining the difference between “probability” and “likelihood”!
themanworthwhile.wordpress.c…
Timothy R Lattimer retweeted
This is a top piece of work by Timothy Lattimer on the competing probabilities and likelihoods in the Letby case.
If for nothing else, explaining the difference between “probability” and “likelihood”!
themanworthwhile.wordpress.c…
