Pete Miles
LightNews LightNews
banner
petermiles.bsky.social
Pete Miles
@petermiles.bsky.social
3.1K followers 7K following 7.9K posts
Ex- consultant, manager, marketer, engineer. Interested in Complexity, Systems and Collective Intelligence. GSOH (Brit)
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
petermiles.bsky.social
Pete Miles @petermiles.bsky.social · Nov 16
Welcome to Bluesky, the latest operating system for Collective Intelligence on planet Earth.

As short thread on a paper from the Royal Society in the context of innovation, which explains how you fit in.

(For those who participated in the prototype phase, Twitter/X can now be deleted.)
Abstract Innovation is often assumed to be the work of a talented few, whose products are passed on to the masses. Here, we argue that innovations are instead an emergent property of our species' cultural learning abilities, applied within our societies and social networks. Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. We outline how many human brains, which evolved primarily for the acquisition of culture, together beget a collective brain. Within these collective brains, the three main sources of innovation are serendipity, recombination and incremental improvement. We argue that rates of innovation are heavily influenced by (i) sociality, (ii) transmission fidelity, and (iii) cultural variance. We discuss some of the forces that affect these factors. These factors can also shape each other. For example, we provide preliminary evidence that transmission efficiency is affected by sociality-languages with more speakers are more efficient. We argue that collective brains can make each of their constituent cultural brains more innovative. This perspective sheds light on traits, such as IQ, that have been implicated in innovation. A collective brain perspective can help us understand otherwise puzzling findings in the IQ literature, including group differences, heritability differences and the dramatic increase in IQ test scores over time.
petermiles.bsky.social
Oh. That's quite a gap...
savchenkoua.bsky.social Savchenko Volodymyr @savchenkoua.bsky.social · 3h
🇬🇧🇪🇺 Negotiations for the UK to join the European Union's defense fund have failed due to disagreements on the financial contribution Britain would make, - Bloomberg

The EC had sought payments of up to €6.75 billion from the UK, while the UK offered €82 million, which was rejected by Brussels.
November 28, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Pete Miles
peterpaulrubens.bsky.social
Gloom. Despair. Agony. Illustration from America: A Prophecy in 1795 but very current sentiment as well. By William Blake, born on this day in 1757.
November 28, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Reposted by Pete Miles
oh-that-guy.bsky.social
A Street in Venice | John Singer Sargent
November 27, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Reposted by Pete Miles
mrsbettybowers.bsky.social
"My poll numbers have never been better."
November 28, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Reposted by Pete Miles
petermiles.bsky.social
Interesting as usual of course but I feel the need to pick an argument with Sarah Pascoe who suggests that our failure to take climate change seriously may be due to false alarms like the 'millenium bug'.
No recognition that it was a real issue that was actively fixed.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
Strong Message Here - Moral Failure and Deadly Negligence (with Sara Pascoe and Matt Winning) - BBC Sounds
Armando and Sara Pascoe are joined by Dr Matt Winning to discuss the language around COP.
www.bbc.co.uk
November 27, 2025 at 1:29 PM
petermiles.bsky.social
So many questions from this 9-second video...
November 28, 2025 at 7:52 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
therightarticle.bsky.social
The UK-EU Reset Needs Strategic Planning, Not Summit Improvisation
Without careful preparation and raised ambitions, the 2026 summit risks becoming a missed opportunity to inject real momentum into UK-EU relations.
www.socialeurope.eu
November 28, 2025 at 7:39 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
petermiles.bsky.social
"Based on the empirical evidence we now have, the assertion that the electorate shifted right in accordance with Trump's agenda is simply untenable."
The claim that Trump's victory was a clear-cut expression - an immediate manifestation! - of the will of the people always stood in obvious tension with the narrow election result. Based on the empirical evidence we now have, the assertion that the electorate shifted right in accordance with Trump's agenda is simply untenable. Let's look at the picture that emerges from the latest American Values Survey (AVS), for instance. Since 2010, the AVS is conducted annually by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in partnership with the Brookings Institution. It's a high-quality survey that stands out because it is not so much concerned with the day-to-day political business, but aims at exploring the underlying attitudes, values, and shifts in national identity. The latest AVS makes very clear why Trump is so unpopular: His economic policy is judged as a disaster (something basically every serious poll confirms) - and his authoritarian ambitions are widely perceived as acutely dangerous. Even two thirds of self-proclaimed independents, those roughly 40 percent of the electorate who are not registered with either party, view Trump as a "dangerous dictator." A stable majority of Americans - consistently between 55 and 65 percent, according to the AVS - are not only critical of Trump, but also reject core tenets of the rightwing agenda, preferring the vision of a pluralistic liberal democracy instead: They support a right to abortion in most cases and envision a country that is defined by religious pluralism rather than Christian domination; they reject Trump's assault on the modern state and the free university; they believe immigration ultimately strengthens America and demand a path to citizenship even for people who entered the country illegally. On all of
November 27, 2025 at 8:03 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
petermiles.bsky.social
Important corrective here...
thomaszimmer.bsky.social Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 1d
The Myth of a Rightward Realignment

Let’s discard some stubborn misconceptions about Trump’s support and what happened in the 2024 election that are obscuring our understanding of a profound de-alignment of the established order.

New piece:
The Myth of a Rightward Realignment
Let’s discard some stubborn misconceptions about Trump’s support and what happened in the 2024 election that are obscuring our understanding of a profound de-alignment
steady.page
November 27, 2025 at 8:03 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
benansell.bsky.social
The government figuring this out slowly over the coming two years is going to be quite something to behold.
 James Bowes @jamesbowes01.bsky.social · 1d
I think the government meant to cut net migration but have accidentally overshot the target by a lot. They haven’t realised this yet.
November 27, 2025 at 4:14 PM
petermiles.bsky.social
Don't think of an elephant!
November 27, 2025 at 2:05 PM
petermiles.bsky.social
Interesting as usual of course but I feel the need to pick an argument with Sarah Pascoe who suggests that our failure to take climate change seriously may be due to false alarms like the 'millenium bug'.
No recognition that it was a real issue that was actively fixed.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
Strong Message Here - Moral Failure and Deadly Negligence (with Sara Pascoe and Matt Winning) - BBC Sounds
Armando and Sara Pascoe are joined by Dr Matt Winning to discuss the language around COP.
www.bbc.co.uk
November 27, 2025 at 1:29 PM
Reposted by Pete Miles
reformexposed.bsky.social
Petition: Call a public inquiry into Russian influence on UK politics & democracy

Nearly at 70k, sign and share!

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74...
Petition: Call a public inquiry into Russian influence on UK politics & democracy
We are concerned about reported efforts from Russia to influence democracy in the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere. We believe we must establish the depth and breadth of possible Russian influence campaig...
petition.parliament.uk
November 27, 2025 at 6:32 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
duncanrobinson.bsky.social
Starmer and Reeves run probably the most economically left-wing government of past five decades and yet bleeding support to its left thanks to dumb strategy www.economist.com/britain/2025...
November 27, 2025 at 8:58 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
anneapplebaum.bsky.social
The war will end when Russia stops fighting. Therefore, pressure has to be put on Russia, so that they stop believing that they will win. Why is that so hard to understand?
November 27, 2025 at 1:49 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
mattukernow.bsky.social
November 26, 2025 at 8:33 PM
petermiles.bsky.social
Important corrective here...
thomaszimmer.bsky.social Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 1d
The Myth of a Rightward Realignment

Let’s discard some stubborn misconceptions about Trump’s support and what happened in the 2024 election that are obscuring our understanding of a profound de-alignment of the established order.

New piece:
The Myth of a Rightward Realignment
Let’s discard some stubborn misconceptions about Trump’s support and what happened in the 2024 election that are obscuring our understanding of a profound de-alignment
steady.page
November 27, 2025 at 8:03 AM
petermiles.bsky.social
Anyone know how they plan to implement the per-mile charges for electric and plug-in hybrid cars? (Starting in 2028.)
November 26, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Pete Miles
kipwilliams.bsky.social
35 years ago or so, I saw a trade paperback collection of office humor. That is, the corpus of anonymous "you want it WHEN?" type gags that circulated by fax, photocopy, mimeo, ditto, hectograph, and carved rock from employee to employee. I've never seen another copy of the book.
November 26, 2025 at 3:42 PM
Reposted by Pete Miles
stokel.bsky.social
AI will boost the economy, the OBR forecast, except... "Our analysis suggests AI will likely provide a smaller boost to productivity growth over the next five years than the ICT revolution did before 2008."
November 26, 2025 at 12:21 PM
Reposted by Pete Miles
iwriteok.bsky.social
OpenAI says they aren't liable for the suicide of a user their chat bot urged to kill himself because suicide is a violation of the TOS
gerritd.bsky.social Gerrit De Vynck @gerritd.bsky.social · 2d
Additionally, OpenAI argues its not liable because Raine, by using ChatGPT for self-harm, broke its terms of service
November 26, 2025 at 4:43 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
martinnutbeem.bsky.social
Does anyone use apps or services to provide live captions or a transcript during IRL meetings/Events?

Hit me up with your recommendations, you could save me a lot of time.

Thanks in advance.
November 26, 2025 at 11:53 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
drrjwarren.bsky.social
‘Brexit isn’t in the past. It is present in every overstretched council budget, every cancelled infrastructure project, every school without enough teachers, every struggling business wondering how to cope with higher costs and lower demand.’
mikegalsworthy.bsky.social Mike Galsworthy @mikegalsworthy.bsky.social · 4d
Rachel Reeves says there’s a “hole” in the public finances.

A new decade-long Brexit study explains it:

a 6–8% hit to GDP – that's £180bn-£240bn a year – means less tax, less investment and less money for everything else.

Brexit made Britain poorer. Much poorer.
New: Boris Johnson’s ‘Brexit Titanic success’ was half right
Nearly ten years on, the first full assessment of Brexit confirms what millions warned: Britain made itself poorer
eastangliabylines.co.uk
November 24, 2025 at 8:04 AM
Reposted by Pete Miles
thejohnrylands.bsky.social
New exhibition ‘Cottonopolis: The origins of global Manchester’ is now open. Explore how 18th century Manchester was transformed into a manufacturing powerhouse and the centre of Britain’s booming cotton industry.

📅Visit Wednesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm. Free entry.
November 26, 2025 at 9:10 AM