This episode is available exclusively to Pushkin+ subscribers and members of the Cautionary Club.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher] [Patreon]

Further Reading

On the Zenith Foundation experiments

Goodfellow, L. D. (1938, reprinted 1992). A psychological interpretation of the results of the Zenith Radio experiments in telepathy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121(2), 130–144. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.121.2.130

William Poundstone Rock Breaks Scissors (in the UK, How to Predict the Unpredictable)

Stacy Horn “ESP Games and Academic Politics”

Royal Gazette and Colonist Daily, Thursday October 7 1937

On Louisa and JB Rhine, and ESP Cards

Seymour Mauskopf and Michael McVaugh The Elusive Science (1980)

Feather, S. R. and Ensrud, B. (2018). Joseph Banks Rhine. Psi Encyclopedia. Last updated: 30 April 2026.

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie “How One Man Used a Deck of Cards to Make Parapsychology a Science” Atlas Obscura 27 December 2016

Rhine, J. B. & Rhine, L. E. (1927). One evening’s observation on the Margery mediumship. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 21 (4), 401-421

“Doyle Declares Margery Genuine” New York Times 5 March 1927

Massimo Polidoro “A Telepathy Investigation” Skeptical Inquirer Sep/Oct 2018

“Tomorrow, I will be going across channels with zero views, going into their chat, and pumping people up.” But it might not end up quite how you expect… Amygdala, a short film by Joe Edmundson Foot and Stella Harford.

Interested in tabletop roleplaying? The Dice Exploder podcast is my absolute favourite, offering endlessly original, stimulating and creative discussions of different game mechanics.

Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, has a substack, The Kinetikon – all about movement, with Caspar’s customary grace and wisdom.

Africa Harford also offers a substack, Elementary, My Dear, exploring the theory and the history of chemistry.

The Runnign Channel have produced a moving documentary about Jess Furness’s attempt to run 42 marathons in a year, in honour of what would have been her late brother’s 42nd birthday. Simple, affecting and inspiring. (Even if I think they have slightly glossed over how hard a single marathon is…)

In 1980s Southern England, intricate crop circles are appearing overnight, and people are desperate for an explanation. Could humans really create something so complex without anyone spotting them? The truth is out there! Actually, the truth is right here. The problem is getting people to believe it.

Members of the Cautionary Club have access to all episodes ad-free, monthly bonus episodes, monthly behind-the-scenes video conversations, and our newsletter.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher] [Patreon]

Further Reading

This script relied on Rupert Sheldrake’s account of The Crop Circle Making Competition, alongside an article by the Wessex Sceptics and personal correspondence from Matt Ridley; contemporary reporting in outlets such as Time magazine; and four books – Round in Circles: Physicists, Poltergeists, Pranksters And the Secret History of the Cropwatchers, by Jim Schnabel; Circular Evidence: A detailed investigation of the flattened swirled crops phenomenon, by Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado; Crop Circles: Signs of Contact, by Colin Andrews; and Crop Circles: Conclusive Evidence? by Pat Delgado.

Craig Anderson, Mark R. Lepper and Lee Ross describe their research on risk-taking firefighters in Perseverance of Social Theories: The Role of Explanation in the Persistence of Discredited Information, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Anderson’s reflections on vaccine hesitancy are found in Psychological processes underlying denial of science-based medical practices, co authored with Sara Prot. 

It’s fair to ask, though, how much pluralism does the modern economy really give us? A foolish question, in some ways. In his modern classic The Origin of Wealth (2006) the economist and complexity theorist Eric Beinhocker estimated that at least 10 billion distinct products and services were available in a major urban economy such as New York City, compared with a few hundred available to a traditional hunter-gatherer society. The variety is staggering. Some would say it is overwhelming.

And yet, isn’t it a familiar complaint that everywhere seems to look the same? Walk down a shopping street in Manchester or London, Munich or Copenhagen, and the similarities are as striking as the differences. Big brands are everywhere, and not just the classics such as McDonald’s and Starbucks. Newer chains such as Five Guys and Blank Street seem to spread with remarkable speed.

The independent offerings are a bit samey, too: hipster cafés increasingly seem assembled from the same flat-pack kit. Even the cornucopia of digital content is filtered through a few platforms: Audible for audiobooks, Spotify for music, YouTube for video and Kindle for ebooks.

Maybe we shouldn’t be complaining about this. Andy Warhol celebrated it: “You know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too . . . All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

Still, “all the Cokes are the same” is hardly a manifestation of the glorious pluralism I celebrated last week. Does this apparent monoculture reflect a corporate conspiracy, or a flattening of our own tastes, or is there some more subtle process at work?

One answer comes from data scientist Lauren Leek, who was recently flat-hunting in The Hague. “Every flat I scrolled, in a city I barely know, I already recognised: the same refinished parquet, matte-black taps, rewilded pot plant on the same windowsill,” she wrote. “Same with the café near every place I’ve lived, flat white and exposed brick and oat milk assumed.”

It was as though “everywhere is converging on the same few templates, and I’m exactly who those templates were optimised for”. One possibility is that Leek is in her own perfectly crafted filter bubble, shown exactly what she wants to rent, to buy, to drink, and happy enough with the results, even if they are a little unsettling. If she stepped away from what her phone was recommending, she’d see plenty of very different offerings.

But perhaps the personalisation filter is not just shaping what Leek sees, but shaping the world? Leek has in mind a simple algorithm: “predict what people want, show them more of it, watch what they pick, update”. That could describe YouTube or Spotify, but the physical world, too: if Gail’s or Pret A Manger runs an algorithm to decide where to locate, and the algorithm spits out a range of streets that look like they should have a Gail’s or Pret on them, then it’s easy to see how everywhere starts to seem the same.

This process can produce a kind of converging feedback loop: algorithmic predictions smooth out the world. This then makes it easier for the algorithm to predict what people will do. And the better the algorithm’s prediction, the more similar everything becomes.

The simplest form of this model failure would be a YouTube autoplay that directs you to a slightly more popular cousin of the video you’ve just watched. After that, in turn, a slightly more popular choice again. Leave the loop running and eventually every autoplay is an endlessly looping Baby Shark, the cultural black hole from whose gravitational pull nothing can escape.

(YouTube, of course, tries to avoid this. There is a countervailing risk, in which every recommendation becomes edgier and more extreme. These are tough technical problems; it is not always easy to be an algorithmic overlord.)

Ultimately, though, we should not reflexively blame the algorithm. Algorithms can be changed if they are not producing the desired results. The deeper trade-off here is an ancient one: should businesses stick with a proven formula for success, at the risk of missing out on something even better? Or explore the unknown?

It is not just entrepreneurs and managers who need to wrestle with this “explore-exploit” trade-off. We all do. Pop into a McDonald’s or a Blank Street, buy a ticket for yet another Marvel movie, and you’re almost guaranteed a certain minimum quality.

But take a risk — an independent bistro, an art-house movie, the local wine — and you might get something that is better than good. Or worse. The less willing we are to take a risk, the more safe options we are likely to be offered.

The trade-off depends on individual taste, of course, but it also depends on some well-understood variables. The time-horizon matters. If you’re visiting somewhere new for three days and you find a great restaurant, it might be a good idea to stick with it. If you’re in town for months — or years — then it’s worth casting the net more widely, even though you’ll likely chew through some grim menus.

The cost of experimentation matters, too. Aspiring writers can try all sorts of things out on Substack without asking publishers, readers or themselves to take the risk involved in a full-fledged book. The Dan Browns and Sarah J Maases of the world might prefer to stick with writing, printing and selling in a form that readers demonstrably want to buy.

If the variety of the modern economy really has diminished, that would be because the trade-off between exploring new options and exploiting old recipes has changed, either for businesses or for us as consumers. Why might that be?

Surely not because experimentation is more expensive. And not because time-horizons are short, given that real interest rates even now remain lower than they were in the 1980s and 1990s.

Maybe the question is based on a false premise, then. Maybe the modern economy is more varied than ever.

I hope so. Because if not, the most plausible explanation for being surrounded by familiar brand names and cookie-cutter stylings is simply that we are being given exactly what we want. Maybe we, like Warhol, are delighted that all the Cokes are the same, and all the Cokes are good.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 9 September 2026.

I’m running the Oxford Half Marathon in October in support of a very good cause and in memory of my mother. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

One hundred years ago, on 16th February 1923, the Tomb of the Pharaoh Tutenkhamun was officially opened. Disturbing the remains of the Egyptian pharaohs is known to incur a deadly curse, so why did a team of archeologists still risk inciting the wrath of King Tutankhamun by entering his burial chamber? And how many of them met a premature end for their impudence?

This classic episode was first released in November 2021.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher] [Patreon]

Further reading and listening

Roger Luckhurst’s book, The Mummy’s Curse , is the perfect guide to every angle of the tale. Nigel Blundell’s The World’s Greatest Mistakes gives a vivid tabloid-style version, and Snopes described and then fact-checked the tale of the Unlucky Mummy. Skeptoid covers and debunks various explanations for the curse.

The Mesmeromania incident is covered in detail by Christopher Turner for Cabinet Magazine. Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler set it in wider context in their fascinating book Useful Delusions.

Charle’s Duhigg’s story about Target and the pregnant teenager is in the New York Times Magazine.

Academic studies on placebos, nocebos, and the BMJ article about the mummy’s curse:

Howick, J. Unethical informed consent caused by overlooking poorly measured nocebo effects. Journal of Medical Ethics. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:07126ead-92c8-4b82-87b2-7e677aaf98b5

Colloca L, Miller FG. The nocebo effect and its relevance for clinical practice. Psychosom Med. 2011;73(7):598-603. doi:10.1097/PSY.0b013e3182294a50

Nelson MR. The mummy’s curse: historical cohort study. BMJ. 2002 Dec 21;325(7378):1482-4. doi: 10.1136/bmj.325.7378.1482. PMID: 12493675; PMCID: PMC139048.

It was not the colour scheme that worried me, nor even the narrow-seeming niche, but the fact that Oxford is blessed with so many bookshops already. On the 15-minute stroll from Bad Girl Books to the Oxford institution Blackwell’s, the bibliophile risks being distracted by The Last Bookshop, an Oxfam second-hand shop, The Last Bookshop (another one — surely they can’t both be the last one?), and the Blackwell’s science-fiction, manga and games branch, heaving with its own lavish selection of romantasy titles.

Attempting to avoid all that will only lead you into a capacious Waterstones, another Oxfam bookshop and the independent bookshop-café Gulp Fiction. Flee to Oxford’s northern district of Summertown and you may fall into the gravity well of a generously proportioned branch of Daunt Books. And all that is before we mention the elephantine online competitor, Amazon.

I note all this not to prompt tears of rage and envy if you are reading this in a book desert, but to point out that Bad Girl Books was clearly doomed from the start to be a vanity project that would drain the life savings of the naive proprietor Starlin Marot.

On opening day, however, customers were literally queuing down the street. On day two, customers were still queuing down the street. I left town for a couple of weeks, and when I returned, things were different: the queue management system had improved, and the line now stretched down a side street.

It turns out that authors of books such as Death’s New Pet, Heavensent & Hellbent, Web of Vows and Vengeance and A Kiss of Hammer and Flame have been showing up each summer weekend to participate in a Mini Summer Romantasy Festival. Despite the heat, customers couldn’t get enough. Bad Girl Books was off to a flying start.

I am pleased to have been proved wrong. It is a delight to discover how many different enthusiasms exist in the world. I am not buying what Bad Girl Books is selling, but that is not the point: others are purring with satisfaction, and that’s good enough for me. (Also: like me, romantasy readers are nerds. It is great to see nerds well served.)

But there is a broader point here, too. If Oxford had a committee in charge of approving new bookshops, I would be overqualified to serve on it, being an author, book enthusiast and professional economist. And if I had been on that committee, I would have patiently, patronisingly explained that there was no business case for Bad Girl Books and the business plan should be rejected.

Thankfully there is no such committee, leaving the proprietor free to make her foolish decision — or to demonstrate that the decision was not so foolish after all. A thriving economy allows people to take their own risks, follow their own dreams and make their own mistakes.

Marot is not the first Oxford entrepreneur to be underestimated by an Oxford economist. William Morris began his business career running a bicycle-repair shop on High Street, before moving into the manufacture of automobiles. As ever-larger manufacturing plants were built in Cowley, east Oxford, the economic historian Edwin Cannan — who taught at the London School of Economics but lived in Oxford — was opining in 1927 that he could not imagine where the demand would come from.

I stumbled upon Cannan’s concerns in John Kay’s The Truth About Markets (2003), which suggests that a key feature of the market economy is missing from most economics textbooks. Those textbooks tend to describe an allocation mechanism where prices ensure that supply equals demand, and competitive pressure pushes those prices down to the point where they equal the cost of production. That description is not wholly wrong, but it leaves out a lot. For Kay, much of what a market economy does well can be described with the phrase “disciplined pluralism”.

By pluralism, he means that many different ideas can flourish. Pluralism is vital in a world where the right way forward is never obvious. There is no committee of experts to decide whether Marot should be able to launch yet another bookshop, or whether a bicycle-repair boy will ever find enough customers for his newfangled motor cars.

More precisely, no committee of experts has veto power. A new start-up, whether the product is romantasy books or bicycles, will probably have to convince somebody — a family member, a bank manager, a group of enthusiastic backers on Kickstarter — to risk some cash. But a well-functioning economy will offer many such options to many budding entrepreneurs, even if it does not offer limitless funding to everyone.

This is no mere theoretical idea. IBM turned down the chance to fund Chester Carlson’s brainchild — the photocopier. No matter. In the end, Carlson found somebody willing to take a risk and the result was the Xerox Corporation. Many other projects, from Google to The Beatles, were rejected before finding a backer who mattered.

Pluralism sounds fun, but Kay also emphasises the importance of discipline. Pluralism means trying many ideas; discipline means closing down the ideas that do not work before they consume too many resources. Evolution by natural selection achieves pluralism through the mixing and mutation of genes, and discipline through the brutal process of survival of the fittest.

A market economy achieves pluralism through rules and laws that do not forbid new businesses, along with a financial system that funds a variety of them. It achieves discipline through competition and, sometimes, the bankruptcy courts. No matter how much your financial backers like your business idea, it will not last long if it does not also appeal to some customers. An investment bubble can loosen the discipline and postpone the reckoning, but not for ever.

At a time when the performance of the British economy leaves a lot to be desired, policymakers should keep the idea of disciplined pluralism in mind. In a healthy economy, there must be ways for new business ideas to be born — and for failing ideas to die.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 2 Sep 2026.

I’m running the Oxford Half Marathon in October in support of a very good cause and in memory of my mother. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

Before he became Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay was known as the “Louisville Loud-mouth”, as famous for his sharp taunts and poetic put-downs as he was for his skills in the ring. In 1963, Clay arrived in England to take down beloved British Heavyweight, Henry Cooper. Clay is the clear favourite, but the showdown will be remembered as one of boxing history’s most shocking battles, changing both men forever and showing what it really means to win. 

This episode was originally released to members of the Cautionary Club, and Pushkin+ subscribers.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher] [Patreon]

Further Reading

Ali. A Life Jonathan Eig. 2017

Henry Cooper: A Hero For All Time Norman Giller. 2012 

Ali in Britain Michael Tanner 1995

Time “Prizefighting: Murder on the BBC.” Friday, June 28, 1963

Guardian “Observer picture archive: Cassius Clay in London, 30 May 1963” Sat, 1 June, 2019

The Long Win: The search for a better way to succeed. Catherine Bishop. 2020.

The legend related in William Poundstone’s book How to Predict the Unpredictable (2014) (in the US, Rock Breaks Scissors) is that nobody ever beat the machine over an extended run, with one exception: Shannon himself. As the machine’s algorithm was simple and elegant, he was able to mentally emulate it and play the opposite of whatever he knew the machine would predict.

How did the machines work? The logic was simple: both took notes of how their opponent behaved. For example, if you’d won a couple of times in a row, did you usually ride your luck by sticking with the same choice or did you tend to switch? The presumption was that no human plays randomly. We all have certain habits or instincts. No supercomputing was required: Shannon’s machine had just 16 bits of memory. We humans are not hard to read.

An even simpler exploit is the double-tailed coin. Any scoundrel with such a coin can decide any disagreement by offering to toss it, then calling “tails”. But even if he offers his mark the opportunity to call the toss, he will probably win, because people will call “heads” more often than not.

One of the first academics to figure this out was Louis Goodfellow, who in the late 1930s recruited volunteers to write down a series that reflected an imagined set of coin tosses. Seventy-eight per cent of his participants began their sequence with “heads”.

In a larger dataset — originally gathered in an effort to study telepathy (a story for another day) — Goodfellow found that more than 20 per cent of participants either chose the sequence HHTHT or HHTTH. Other random-seeming sequences beginning with heads were also popular, such as HTTHH and HTHHT. Few people favoured anything beginning with tails, and the least popular sequence was TTTTT, chosen by about one person in 600. Any mathematician can tell you, however, that there are 32 possible outcomes of tossing a coin five times, and each of the 32 is equally likely.

Fifteen years later, Alphonse Chapanis, a pioneer of ergonomics, asked volunteers to take an hour or so to fill a large grid with thousands of random digits. Analysing the results produced some striking observations. The 10 least popular adjacent combinations of digits, in order, were: 66 99 00 11 33 44 88 22 77 55. And the 10 most popular? 32 43 21 76 65 10 31 87 86 54 — something about the human brain likes descending couplets, it seems. In a truly random sequence, 66 is just as likely to appear as 32, but what seems random as we scribble it down is anything but. Such regularities can be exploited by an outguessing machine, a conman, even a password guesser.

They can also be exploited by lazy students. Author William Poundstone offers a few tips to brute-force your way through multiple-choice tests. If you have no idea what the answer is on a true-false question, guess “true”. And if you know what the answer to the previous question was, guess that this time it will change. Offered four options, go for “B”. Always choose “all of the above” or “none of the above”, if available — they are disproportionately likely to be the correct answer. None of these methods guarantees success, but they do improve your odds because most setters of multiple-choice questions are more predictable than they realise.

If you really need a random sequence, then don’t ask a human. One alternative is to ask a machine to generate the randomness — but be careful. In 1980, the Pennsylvania “Pick 3” lottery was rigged by staff at the TV studio where the draw was televised. Every number except the 4 and 6 balls was weighted with a judicious addition of latex paint, meaning that when the fan was switched on to blow the lightweight balls around, all the 4 and 6 balls floated to the top. Alas for the conspirators, the heavy bets on 4-6 combinations coupled with the portentous winning number 666 were enough to raise suspicions.

Almost the same story played out in the digital realm more recently, when an IT expert at the Multi-State Lottery Association admitted introducing a backdoor to the software that generated lottery numbers: while it was usually random, on certain dates it would produce random-seeming numbers that he could predict.

Computer cryptography relies on having a large number that cannot be guessed, and the best way to have an unguessable number is to make it random. Unfortunately, this is harder to do than one might imagine, and several computer systems — most notoriously Sony’s PlayStation 3 — have been hacked because the attackers figured out how the “random” number was being produced.

If lottery machines — physical or digital — can be rigged, and humans are incapable of inventing truly random sequences of numbers, it is tempting to resort to the good old-fashioned coin toss. Not so fast. Persi Diaconis, celebrated both as a mathematician and magician, has found that a coin toss is, in general, a 51/49 proposition in favour of finishing the same way up that it started. To illustrate the idea further, Diaconis built a coin-tossing machine. Insert a coin heads-up and the machine will flip it nicely in the air — to land heads-up every time.

This is no mere theoretical problem. At the International Congress of Mathematicians this summer, maths author and YouTuber Matt Parker and friends ran a stall in which maths-curious members of the public could try tossing a coin. Parker promised to give $1,000 to anyone who managed to toss 10 heads in a row — a fun challenge to prompt people to explore what an unlikely outcome really felt like.

Alas, it wasn’t as unlikely as he had imagined: having been forced to hand over the $1,000 prize twice on the first day, Parker looked at the accumulating data and realised that the entire distribution of coin flips was unexpectedly biased towards strings of tails or strings of heads. The effect was stronger than Diaconis had predicted, perhaps because many of Parker’s coin tossers were rather young and unable to reliably flip coins high enough to rotate much. Parker’s solution: on the second day of the conference, he switched to dice. The pattern of results reverted to something much closer to pure randomness . . . whatever that is.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 August 2026.

I’m running the Oxford Half Marathon in October in support of a very good cause and in memory of my mother. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

Last week, Cautionary Tales described the rise and fall of General Magic, the startup with too much money and too few constraints. Was General Magic really doomed from the start, and what does its fate tell us about AI, drug discovery and our love lives? David Epstein, author of Inside The Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, joins Tim to make the case for loving limitations.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher] [Patreon]

Other accounts suggested that when the fruit ripened, the result was a full-fledged lamb, or something very like it, attached to the stem of the plant by an umbilical cord. The lamb would graze near its roots, but when all the grass within reach had been consumed, the Vegetable Lamb would die.

Readers with a solid grasp of botany may already be aware that there is no such thing as a Vegetable Lamb. Indeed, there was likely no such person as Sir John Mandeville — his celebrated travelogue was written by persons unknown, and based heavily on previous works, including that of Odoric.

Yet this did not stop stories about the Vegetable Lamb from circulating, and being believed, among the cognoscenti of Europe for centuries. Baron von Herberstein, an ambassador to Russia nearly two centuries after the Mandeville travelogue became popular, confessed to being sceptical before becoming a believer after many “people of credence” told him they’d seen and tasted the delicious plant-animal hybrid.

“It took nearly four centuries after Mandeville’s writings appeared for European botanists and biologists to recognise the Vegetable Lamb as a myth,” write Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall in The Misinformation Age (2019).

Does that sluggishness reflect the failure of a particularly medieval mindset, or does it have lessons to teach us today?

Consider some slightly more recent cases. James Lind, a Royal Navy surgeon, is celebrated today for discovering that citrus fruit cured scurvy, after running a primitive clinical trial in 1747. The only trouble is that he did no such thing.

Lind conducted a trial all right, but it made next to no difference to anyone’s perception of citrus fruits. Both before and after Lind’s trial, they were thought by some sailors to be helpful, but Lind’s work made little impression. His Treatise of the Scurvy (1753) is a mass of confusion, although the brief description of the trial nearly 200 pages in is clear enough. Lind ended up recommending a boiled citrus syrup, and this proposal was widely ignored — which is no great shame, since boiling lemon juice destroys vitamin C and thereby renders it useless as a cure for scurvy.

Citrus fruit was embraced by the Royal Navy half a century later, and not because of a clinical trial but because it was recommended by a high-status doctor, Sir Gilbert Blane. Still later, the “limeys” lost confidence in the cure. Stale, badly stored lime juice contains almost no vitamin C but, in the age of steam, ordinary sailors rarely got scurvy anyway because voyages were quick and regular refuelling stops were required. Polar expeditions were another matter, and in the late 1800s were frequently struck by scurvy despite the use of (stale) lime juice.

At the same time, germ theory was emerging and the idea that scurvy was something to do with citrus fruit began to seem quaint. As a result, Robert Falcon Scott was advised by medical experts that scurvy was caused by toxins called ptomaines, and his Antarctic expeditions were afflicted by scurvy more than 150 years after Lind’s “discovery”. Ptomaine poisoning is no more a real explanation for scurvy than the Vegetable Lamb is a real animal.

Ninety-nine years ago, the Korean newspaper Jungoe Ilbo published a story titled “Strange Harm from Electric Fans”, warning that having a fan running too close to you might cause death as you choked on your own carbon dioxide. (It won’t.) For decades, Korean newspapers continued to run articles about people dying in the presence of fans, whether or not there was any reason to believe the fan was to blame.

Why do we believe things that aren’t true? Two fashionable views are that we believe falsehoods because of political polarisation, or that we believe them because of emotional triggers such as fear, lust or greed. That explains why the political party faithful are willing to believe almost any smear about the hated enemy, while closing their eyes to wrongdoing on their own side — and why people will send money to strangers on the internet claiming to be Nigerian princes.

But neither tribalism nor greed explains the beliefs that your desk fan could kill you, that citrus fruit doesn’t prevent scurvy and that somewhere in Asia lambs grow on trees. Nor do they explain why these false beliefs persisted for so long.

For O’Connor and Weatherall, the point of the Vegetable Lamb story is that most of what we believe, we believe because everyone around us believes the same thing. From the belief that fresh vegetables are good for you to the idea that the Earth is basically spherical, our worldview reflects the worldview of the society in which we live.

The world can be a confusing place. Seeing white fluff bursting from cotton plants for the first time, it is not surprising that Europeans perceived a resemblance to lamb’s wool. Sailors on fast-moving steamships derived no antiscorbutic benefit from stale lime juice — and needed none.

When reality supplies us with signals that are mystifying (white fluff on a plant) or inconsistent (with or without lime juice, scurvy may or may not develop) or long-delayed (cigarettes dramatically raise your risk of lung cancer) it is hardly a surprise that we turn to each other for information.

Or we may turn to the experts, who will sometimes have a clearer view of what is going on. (Not always: Scott’s advisers were fretting about ptomaine poisoning.) Yet we still have to decide who we should regard as having relevant expertise. That might be a scientist, or a YouTube influencer, or Wikipedia, or the output of a large language model — but in any case we will take cues from others as to who counts as “persons worthy of credit” and who does not.

“Most of us get our false beliefs from the same places we get our true ones,” write O’Connor and Weatherall. It is a sobering thought.

I draw three lessons. First, if most of our beliefs are handed to us by the society in which we live, it is vital that our society itself values truth and truth-telling. Second, it is never a bad idea to stop and think for a moment about what other people tell you.

And third, contact with unfamiliar views is healthy. What eventually punctured the Vegetable Lamb myth was that every time Europeans journeyed to Asia in search of the creature, the locals found the whole business hilarious.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 19 Aug 2026.

I’m running the Oxford Half Marathon in October in support of a very good cause and in memory of my mother. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.