Loren King
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lorenking.org
Loren King
@lorenking.org
950 followers 760 following 460 posts
"Ain't all buttons and charts, little albatross"

Dad, professor, marathon swimmer.

Not nearly as smart as @kimdej.bsky.social

@lorenking@mstdn.ca
www.lorenking.org
www.greatlakestrust.org
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lorenking.org
Is MarathonSwimmingSky a thing yet? It is now! Here with Elliot Hasler for the Toronto screening of his wonderful #MaratjonSwimming biopic, #VindicationSwim !

vindicationswimfilm.com
November 14, 2025 at 11:35 PM
lorenking.org
November 9, 2025 at 2:07 AM
lorenking.org
While we're on the laudable theme of no kings no tyrants ...
Cover of James C Scott's Art of Not Being Governed (2009) Trey Menefee, Seeing Like a ‘Sea Gypsy’: An Anarchist History of Hong Kong (2013) add Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (1991)
October 18, 2025 at 7:28 PM
lorenking.org
True, but personally, I do have some training-related reasons for worrying about it, and finding safe plant-based sources ...
Somewhere in the English Channel
October 17, 2025 at 1:50 AM
lorenking.org
Taking out Beatrix for a quick harbour jaunt in light winds. Rolling furler still temperamental. #HamOnt #ThisOldBoat #Northern25
Sailing in Hamilton Harbour.
October 17, 2025 at 12:54 AM
lorenking.org
"if Mokyr’s work is right, then we aren’t going to have a strong economy if we let our colleges and universities go to seed."

I've long thought that related economic work on agglomeration and dynamic information externalities was really at root about the critical role of universities in innovation.
October 14, 2025 at 11:32 PM
lorenking.org
I'm a slave to Strava 🫣
October 14, 2025 at 1:01 PM
lorenking.org
Sure kid, whatever you say.
October 11, 2025 at 8:10 PM
lorenking.org
... yeah, because it's not like economists and epidemiologists have ever considered the complexities of causal inference. But you, menoarenoniceguy1.bsky.social, without reading the paper, have identified the simple yet critical logical flaw in their peer-reviewed analysis. 🙄
October 11, 2025 at 2:05 PM
lorenking.org
End times.
Aggressive California squirrel somehow sends to people to hospital, reported in the Guardian
September 24, 2025 at 7:02 PM
lorenking.org
It's insane that this is where we are, but alas. It's impossible not to marvel at what Nature recently described as "the staggering success of vaccines". Or it should be.
The staggering success of vaccines, by Tara Haelle, Nature Innovations
September 22, 2025 at 9:32 PM
lorenking.org
"That the Trump administration and the MAGA movement are less interested in deliberation and governance than they are in domination and obedience should shape and structure our sense of this political moment."
"Calls for dialogue and discussion — for greater rates of encounter between the professional left and the professional right — make sense when there’s consensus over the character of the overall political order. If we all agree that we are part of a contest of equals — if we take the political equality of all groups and peoples for granted — then we can discuss any number of issues across ideological lines without rancor and needless division. But if the aim of one faction is to dominate all the others — if the explicit goal is to curb the rights of its opponents and force them to submit to conditions of political inequality — then discussion is less useful than a willingness to defend liberal society in the face of tyranny and despotism."
September 21, 2025 at 1:16 PM
lorenking.org
"The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling."
There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”
September 18, 2025 at 12:17 AM
lorenking.org
Money well spent, thanks @bsky.app
August 30, 2025 at 4:59 PM
lorenking.org
Philosophy folk: this isn't what it looks like.
August 30, 2025 at 1:53 PM
lorenking.org
I ask my students where their water comes from? the smart-ass answer is "the tap." Where their shit ends up? Awkward silence. #UrbanWater is the most critically under-appreciated dilemma we will face. Half of the planet's eight billion souls live in and around cities.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
August 8, 2025 at 2:33 PM
lorenking.org
"We players are a rare species. And like any species ..."

Oh come on.
Ryan Gosling's character Jared Vennett in The Big Short (2015): "I never hung out with these idiots after work. Ever. I had fashion friends."
July 31, 2025 at 12:31 PM
lorenking.org
This, but upping the floof beast ante.
My two adorbs dogs, not yet submitted to We Rate Dogs.
July 19, 2025 at 9:52 AM
lorenking.org
I knew he'd be a technocrat, and I get that the Kafkaesque Trump idiocy dramatically constrains plausible options, but I worry that @mark-carney.bsky.social may be a quisling? Disappointing, to say the least. A propos of nothing in particular, I've been revisiting this book ...
July 18, 2025 at 12:40 PM
lorenking.org
You know, JD has been here with us here in Bluesky for a month now, but I'm starting to think he's saving all his banger posts for some other social media platform ... 🤔
July 18, 2025 at 11:20 AM
lorenking.org
"I do remember two questions I posed when we met. The first I had thought almost preposterous: Could he summarize the evolution of imperial Rome in a single sentence? He said he could do it in three words: “Fewer have more.” ..."

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
The idea of governments as public ventures with a public purpose and some degree of public voice—what the Mayflower Compact called a “civill Body Politick”—took a long time to claw its way back into existence. Most people in the developed world have been living in a civill Body Politick, or something that aspires to be one, for several centuries. I won’t overstate how successful this experiment has been, but it’s the reason we have police forces rather than vigilantes, and safety nets rather than alms thrown haphazardly from horseback by men in tights. Most of the scholars are profoundly wary: They foresee an erosion of transparency, a disregard for individual rights, and a concentration of power among an ever smaller group of wealthy barons, even as the bulk of the population is relegated to service jobs that amount to a modern form of serfdom. For their part, theorists on the techno-libertarian or neo-reactionary fringe, observing from egg chairs in the Sky Lounge, see all these same things, and can’t wait. As in medieval times, the affluent withdraw behind barriers. If it were built today, Windsor Castle would be described in the sales prospectus as a “privately governed residential community.” In the 1990s, when the economist Robert Reich began writing about “the secession of the successful,” some 3 million American housing units were lodged inside gated communities, which protected a population of about 8 million. Today, gated communities encompass 14 million housing units. On its website, a real-estate company in Florida earlier this year asked readers, “Is a Moat Right for You?” It was an April Fools’ joke, but not a very good one, because modern moated residences already exist. Perhaps the most exclusive gated community in the world is actually an island—Indian Creek Village, in Biscayne Bay, Florida, with 89 residents (including Jeff Bezos, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner) and a perimeter-security radar system designed by the Israeli company Magos. Officers in speedboats intercept anyone venturing too close.
July 17, 2025 at 11:14 AM
lorenking.org
Your periodic reminder that Marc Andreessen is a deeply unserious person.
July 12, 2025 at 9:48 PM
lorenking.org
This is not Kennedy and Khrushchev saving face publicly while making concessions behind the scenes. This is not Chamberlain selling out the Czechs to buy Britain time. Trump is a contemptuous fool, and surrounds himself thus. @emmettmacfarlane.com is right. No appeasement. Disengage.

bit.ly/4kmOZ8e
Globe and Mail: "Canada ‘caved’ to Trump’s digital services tax demands, White House says" (30 June 2025) Prime Minister Mark Carney “caved” to Donald Trump when he told the U.S. President during a Sunday phone call he would be scrapping Canada’s digital services tax on foreign tech giants, the White House said Monday. Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s chief spokeswoman, told a press briefing Monday that Mr. Carney telephoned Mr. Trump to inform him that Ottawa would be cancelling the tax, two days after Mr. Trump threatened to walk away from trade talks and impose retaliatory tariffs over the levy, and one day before the first payment of the tax was meant to be collected. “It’s very simple: Prime Minister Carney and Canada caved to President Trump and the United States of America,” Ms. Leavitt said. “The President made his position quite clear to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister called the President last night to let the President know that he would be dropping that tax.”
July 1, 2025 at 12:04 AM
lorenking.org
Day 12 or so of JD Vance being "thrilled" to be here to "engage" with all of us in "common-sense political discussion and analysis." Also day 12 or so of his social media team mailing it in and not understanding the assignment 🤔
June 30, 2025 at 5:00 PM
lorenking.org
Measured takes from @jacobtlevy.bsky.social and @chrisneill.bsky.social on the Carney team's DST play. Sequential rationality might not help us playing chicken with a prat doing the bidding of morons, zealots and assholes (e.g. Navarro, Miran, Miller) ... a fun new meaning for "cursed equilibrium" 😖
Erik Eyster and Matthew Rabin, "Cursed Equilibirum" in Econometrica (September 2005): "There is evidence that people do not fully take into account how other people's actions depend on these other people's information. This paper defines and applies a new equilibrium concept in games with private information, cursed equilibrium, which assumes that each player correctly predicts the distribution of other players' actions, but underestimates the degree to which these actions are correlated with other players' information. We apply the concept to common-values auctions, where cursed equilibrium captures the widely observed phenomenon of the winner's curse, and to bilateral trade, where cursedness predicts trade in adverse-selections settings for which conventional analysis predicts no trade. We also apply cursed equilibrium to voting and signalling models. We test a single-parameter variant of our model that embeds Bayesian Nash equilibrium as a special case and find that parameter values that correspond to cursedness fit a broad range of experimental datasets better than the parameter value that corresponds to Bayesian Nash equilibrium." Bryan Skyrms from his wonderful chapter on commitment and modular rationality in The Evolution of the Social Contract (Cambridge 1996) at p. 41, questioning the effort to build commitment, as a moral maxim, into our (explanatory) theories of rationality.
June 30, 2025 at 4:28 PM