Tristan Hodgson

Observations from the comment sections of the Financial Times

Wednesday 26th of August, 2026

I have a bad habit. Others may be addicted to infinite scroll social networks, I find myself in the thrall of a different vice: the comments section of the FT. While the debates in this forum are generally less aggressive than those of the wider internet, I have noticed that the most bitterly debated lines seem to follow a similar pattern. One commenter will bring up a social failing of the UK, and another will reply to point out that everything is fine and that we can't afford to do more. They are entirely talking past each other.

The example that prompted me to write this short blog post was the comments under an article about Burnham's attitude to business, below were some entirely unrelated comments arguing about how horrible it is that the UK has homeless children, then a reply about the cost of caring for the homeless, then devolving into a discussion of the value of providing the state pension for high net worth households.

I bring this up not to diminish the importance of any of these issues; they are all important issues for us to solve, and ones with no correct answer at that. I instead wanted to point out the way in which they were just talking past each other. It seems to me that the issue here is that people are starting from different bases.

About half the people in this debate, seemed to start from an axiom of equality. They often argued in favour of policies that would diminish ownership (most commonly through taxes) to increase social equality because they believe that the role of the state is to ensure that nobody falls too far behind. To them, homelessness is a failing of the state to provide support.

The others seemed to start from an axiom of personal responsibility. They believed that success of the individual belongs to the individual and so any attempt to take any part of that success (again most commonly through taxes) should come with a strong justification for how it will be used. To them the pensioners deserve their pension, regardless of their net worth as partial compensation for the tax they have contributed.

While this is only one example from one quite niche venue, I have started to think more and more about this idea of bases as a model for understanding the world-view of participants in debates more broadly. This links to an idea from Amanda Ripley's excellent book High Conflict* which suggests that when debating people on the right of the political spectrum we should appeal to ideas like duty and personal responsibility whereas for those on the left fairness and equality work better.

In my own life, I've recently started to try to be conscious of people's bases when debating with them. I have seen some success in this approach and it has tended to lead to more productive conversations where both sides get to understand each other's ideas a little better. Perhaps someone could introduce the FT comments section to the idea...

* I think this idea was originally from The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt (which I am yet to read) but is referred to by Ripley in her book.

Performance Modelling of In-Database Sparse Matrix Multiplication

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Write-up

Presentation on Kolmogorov Complexity

I recently gave an eight minute presentation on Kolmogorov complexity for a varied audience consisting of mathematicians ranging from first year undergraduates to professors. Due to the lack of computer science background of the audience I avoided the formalism of turing machines, to focus the talk on the more mathematically interesting aspects, such as the uncountability of the complexity function. I also illustrated the concept of Normalized Information Distance (NID) using a simple example inspired by the work of Rudi Cilibras and Paul Vitányi, demonstrating how we can use translations of the UN Declaration of Human Rights to reveal relationships between languages .

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