CROSSPOST: DAN DAVIES: Snobby About Excel
Dan Davies has his finger on something important here. It is not, at root, about "AI". It is about work. The spreadsheet first escaped from the finance department and colonised the world. “Serious” professionals had a simple rule: you could tinker in Excel for your own use, but anything real and public had to be rebuilt, checked, and owned by somebody. To transgress this was to make trouble for yourself: cf. Reinhart and Rogoff. “Excel-slop”—the undocumented workbook on a shared drive, with circular references, brittle links, and magic numbers—was what you produced if you did not expect to be accountable when things went wrong. People who wanted to do good work learned not to live that way. Davies’s point is that we are now replaying that history at higher speed and greater scale…
<https://backofmind.substack.com/cp/187112388>
The canonical references for Reinhart-Rogoff are:
Borwein, Jonathan & David H. Bailey. 2013. “The Reinhart-Rogoff Error—or How Not to Excel at Economics.” The Conversation, April 22. <https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646>.
Herndon, Thomas, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. 2013. “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff.” Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) Working Paper 322, University of Massachusetts Amherst, April 15. <https://peri.umass.edu/wp-content/uploads/joomla/images/WP322.pdf>.
Reinhart, Carmen M. & Kenneth S. Rogoff. 2010a. “Growth in a Time of Debt.” American Economic Review 100:2 (May), pp. 573–78. <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.100.2.573>.
And:
Davies, Dan. 2025. “Toward a Sensible AI-Skepticism”. Back of Mind. January 29. <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/toward-a-sensible-ai-skepticism>.
Davies, Dan. 2023. “Art in the Age of Swiss Cheese”. Back of Mind. June 9. <Back of Mind. January 29. >.
Davies, Dan. 2023. “Ideas at the Back of Your Mind”. Back of Mind. March 14. <Ideas at the back of your mind>.