Guinness, and too much of a good thing
Gerald Durrell’s 100 year anniversary was a few days ago (DOB 7.01.1925). His book, My Family and Other Animals, was one of the very few books I read as an early teen and loved. Later, I went on to delve into some of his brother Lawrence’s very different oeuvre. As I scroll through their Wikipedia entries it is hard to think about Empire, and think about the effects of Empire on so many people (even my wife). How narrow the times we live in have become. Perhaps. But this made me laugh out loud.
In January 1964, [his mother] Louisa died. Durrell was devastated. He began to drink more: he had been advised to drink Guinness to combat anaemia, and began drinking a crate a day, and gaining weight.
Killing people with spreadsheets
Its Time to Break Up Big Medicine
Max Stoller discussing the pernicious role of monopolies in medicine. I used to say that the world will not end in fire or violence but quietly in an Excel spreadsheet.
These kinds of discussions are always done in bad faith, since people who make a lot of money from killing people with spreadsheets like to pretend to be very offended when anyone points out health care is a matter of life and death.
Something rotten in the heart
A single idiot acting alone can cause chaos. But to make a scandal—the kind of horror that sticks in the national memory—you need lots of people to do their job so badly that whole systems collapse; and then you need more people, probably in very senior positions, to engage in sustained dishonesty and smug indifference in order to draw a curtain of secrecy around the whole mess. Consider the case of the Guildford Four.
Nick Davies’s review of Timebomb: Irish Bombs, English Justice and the Guildford Four in Prospect magazine. The truth of the Guildford bombings
Only the paranoid survive
I knew the final sentence of this quote, but not the preceding sentences.
John Gruber remembers a famous aphorism of Andy Grove, the man who built Intel into a dominant corporate giant: “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
via John Naughton
On keeping a silent diary
From the Economist reviewing Mutti’s memoire, Freedom.
Fortunately, Mrs Merkel was assiduous about keeping a diary. Unfortunately, it listed her appointments, not her reflections.
On real teaching
Nice post by John Naughton (whose blog drove my interest in tech — for good and bad). (FORTRAN was my first introduction to computing.)
Tomas Kurtz, a great computer scientist and mathematician has died at the age of 96. Together with a Dartmouth colleague, John Kemeny. He created BASIC, the first human-friendly programming language, and the first general-purpose time-sharing system. He and Kemeny had an idea that was then (1963) pretty radical: “The target (in computing) was research, whereas here at Dartmouth we had the crazy idea that our undergraduate students who are not going to be technically employed later on should learn how to use the computer. Completely nutty idea.” But to make that idea work, they had to design a programming language that was much less austere and arcane than FORTRAN and ALGOL.So they created BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).
The elephant as professor of zoology
The Culture #66: How poets teach poetry
“Gentlemen… are we next to invite an elephant to be professor of zoology?” The question of the Harvard linguist Roman Jakobson, blown like a poison dart at a proposal to appoint Vladimir Nabokov as a professor of literature, is one of the great put-downs of modern academia. But though Jakobson won the battle, he lost the war. In the last half-century, herds of novelists and poets have been welcomed into literature departments, as creative writing began its worldwide rise to academic respectability.
Of course, many would now suggest we invite the expert students into the common room too.
Guerrilla warfare is to be preferred
Claud Cockburn, the original guerrilla journalist – New Statesman
Journalism without idealism is little more than the daily vomit of convenient facts in the service of power and money. It’s a dreary and pitiful occupation, and that’s how much of the public regards it. At the other end of the trade, however, idealistic journalism or “guerrilla journalism” can easily curdle into self-pleasuring smugness – the romanticism of the floppy-haired lone hero, one foot forever hovering by a nearby barricade. Who was it that said more journalists had been ruined by self-importance than by alcohol?
Andrew Marr reviewing Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied by Patrick Cockburn (Claud’s son)
Thought for the day(s)
Here’s where we are – by Henry Farrell
There is a great deal of ruin in a country, and a great deal of capacity to make disaster look like someone else’s fault, as we should know well from recent experience.
Not so Nobel after all
A Nobel for the big big questions – by Noah Smith
On top of that, I also have some additional criticisms of the Econ Nobel.The science prizes rely very heavily on external validity to determine who gets the prize — your theory or your invention has to work, basically. If it doesn’t, you can be the biggest genius in the world, but you’ll never get a Nobel. The physicist Ed Witten won a Fields Medal, which is even harder to get than a Nobel, for the math he invented for string theory. But he’ll almost certainly never get a Physics Nobel, because string theory can’t be empirically tested.
The Econ Nobel is different. Traditionally, it’s given to economists whose ideas are most influential within the economics profession. If a whole bunch of other economists do research that follows up on your research, or which uses theoretical or empirical techniques you pioneered, you get an Econ Nobel. Your theory doesn’t have to be validated, your specific empirical findings can already have been overturned by the time the prize is awarded, but if you were influential, you get the prize.
Which takes you back to Keynes: it’s all about thinking about what other people are thinking which in turn…
On being paid by two masters
Cross with what I took at humbug I fired off a response to the Guardian. They ran with it.
The argument is made by some that MPs working in second jobs is a good thing because such professional expertise enriches parliament (Geoffrey Cox missed winter fuel votes while working abroad in second job, 11 October). There is a simple solution. When I was a clinical professor at a UK university, I was allowed to engage in private practice on the condition that I donated all such earnings to my principal employer (the university). I suggest Geoffrey Cox does likewise.
The State we are in
James Butler · ‘This much evidence, still no charges’: On the Grenfell inquiry
James Butler on the Grenfell inquiry in the London Review of Books.
The fire at Grenfell tower on 14 June 2017 killed 72 people, 18 of them children. Most died from asphyxiation after inhaling toxic smoke from the cladding on the block, which acted like a coat of petrol on the walls. Some died leaping from the building. Families died together, huddled under beds, having been told to stay where they were. Disabled residents died waiting for a rescue that never came. Every death was avoidable. Every death was the result of choices – acts of negligence, carelessness, contempt, incompetence and deliberate deceit – made by individuals, corporations and elected officials. The residents had the right to expect their landlord, in this case a subsidiary of local government, to ensure their homes were safe. They had the right to expect their government to enforce safety rules and to identify and combat fraud and malpractice by suppliers and fitters. Instead, those in power at every level abdicated their responsibilities.
Resilience (past tense)
All in the last couple of weeks: I read that it is quite possible that one or more universities may go bankrupt, and students may have to transfer to another city (think of the practicalities of that); I learn that a large 300,000 patient GP service went bankrupt with only a day’s notice given to any of its patients, nor a clear plan for what was going to happen to them; and I experienced my own corporate Edinburgh dental practice closing with ten days notice (only in many cases, I was one of them, the email didn’t get sent out). The suggested alternative practice is not even in Edinburgh.
All of these things were, I think, unimaginable a generation ago. Finance, and in particular, short term finance, destroys all before it.
We may have passed peak obesity
We have known for several years from clinical trials that Ozempic, Wegovy and the new generation of diabetes and weight loss drugs produce large and sustained reductions in body weight. Now with mass public usage taking off — one in eight US adults have used the drugs, with 6 per cent current users — the results may be showing up at the population level.
While we can’t be certain that the new generation of drugs are behind this reversal, it is highly likely. For one, the decline is steepest among college graduates, the group most likely to be using them.
There has been a tendency in some quarters to view taking drugs to lose weight as cheating, not virtuous, not the way it’s meant to be done. But here’s the thing: it works. And I suspect that when we look back at charts of obesity rates in generations to come, there will be inflection points in the 2020s to prove it.
Time will tell.
Just not enough sick people
Eli Lilly considers testing weight-loss drugs on people who are not overweight
Eli Lilly is considering testing its blockbuster weight-loss drugs in people who are not overweight but are at risk of weight gain, in an early sign that the drugmaker may look to broaden the rollout of the medications beyond obese patients.
Dave Ricks, Eli Lilly’s chief executive, told the Financial Times that the drugmaker behind Mounjaro and Zepbound was drawing up plans to study its anti-obesity medications among people with a body mass index (BMI) that does not classify as overweight.
He said: “Maybe the cut-off point of [a BMI of] 27 we use in northern Europe and the US for entry into the studies isn’t appropriate. Maybe we should use [a BMI of] 25. Long term, should we look at health maintenance? Maybe we will.”
This is the standard pharma playbook. You have to treat the well as the pool of sick people is not large enough for quarterly earnings reports. Interesting to see if they will fund the studies with hard endpoints (i.e death) over several decades — when the patents have long expired. Of course not.
Money for nothing
John Lanchester · For Every Winner a Loser: What is finance for?
In his indispensable guide to the current condition of the financial industry, Other People’s Money, published in 2015, John Kay talks about the state of the UK banking sector, whose assets then were about £7 trillion, four times the aggregate income of everyone in the country. But the assets of British banks ‘mostly consist of claims on other banks. Their liabilities are mainly obligations to other financial institutions. Lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services – which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank – amounts to about 3 per cent of that total.’
That’s finance. The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another and for every winner, on every single transaction, there is an exactly equivalent loser.
The point bears repeating. There are other ways of getting rich, and in our society the classic three ways of making a fortune still apply: inherit it, marry it, or steal it. But for an ordinary citizen who wants to become rich through working at a salaried job, finance is by an enormous margin the most likely path. And yet, the thing they’re doing in finance is useless. I mean that in a strong sense: this activity produces nothing and creates no benefit for society in aggregate, because every gain is matched by an identical loss. It all sums to zero. The only benefit to wider society is the tax paid by the winners; though we need to remember that the losers will have their losses offset against tax, so the net tax benefit is not as clear as it might at first seem.
The sad state of UK higher education
The next five years will be worse for English universities than the past five years have been. And the five after that could be worse still.
The above is a quote from Alison Wolf (Baroness Wolf of Dulwich) writing in the Times Higher Education in 2015. The title was revealing: Can higher education’s golden age of plenty continue? For me 2015 did not seem an age of plenty. I took up a permanent post in 1990 in Newcastle, and over the successive decades became inured to year-on-year reductions in funding that directly supported student teaching. Research relied on external grant money without any funds for pilot or left field ideas. Core academic infrastructure was stripped, and less money flowed to the shop floor. Class sizes went up, and universities became increasingly impersonal — not just for students but for staff. Clinical academics felt like unwanted guests in the wider university and few now would recommend anybody following in their footsteps unless they had private incomes or they were both extraordinary and lucky. Fibs became more and more common.
University academic leasers have been dealt a poor hand by successive governments, but with notable exceptions — think Louise Richardson at St Andrews and then Oxford— they have been a dull bunch who have played fast and loose with the categorical imperative that for many of us provided the fundamental justification for publicly funded higher education.
So not a fair test then?
John Lanchester · For Every Winner a Loser: What is finance for?
Digression: a highly satisfying, bizarre and under-reported finding published on arxiv.org last year showed that this is exactly the same probability you get from tossing a coin. You may have been brought up to think that the probability of a coin landing heads or tails is exactly equal with every toss. That, amazingly, turns out not to be true. A coin flipped energetically and caught in mid-air is 2 per cent more likely to land on the side that was facing upwards the last time. The principles at work appear to be aerodynamic: airflow around the tossed coin makes it by a fine margin more likely to repeat the previous toss than to contradict it. By their own admission some of the richest people on the planet earned their fortunes on the basis of the same odds you get by tossing a coin.
The rest of article is brilliant, too. Worth the annual subscription to the LRB.
That old world
Europe’s economy is a cause for concern, not panic
But as America’s population has risen by a quarter since 1994, while ageing Europe’s has grown far less, the two economies are in fact somewhat closer in terms of income per person than they were at the time of Bill Clinton and Jacques Delors. Factoring in working hours, which are both shorter and on a steady decline in the eu, leaves European workers with even less to blush about. Put very simply, the French and their neighbours toil a third less than Americans, earn a third less, and are a lot more tanned by the end of August.
When I worked in France, in Pierre Chambon’s lab in Strasbourg, Gallic pride was taken in the ability to publish ‘big’ papers before the competitors in the USA and take all of August off.
Posted on Journée internationale de la Francophonie
On the importance of not achieving anything
Psychology Lost a Great Mind – Nautilus
At a dinner one night, a first-year graduate student noted how he preferred his new intellectual freedom to the pressure for immediate results he had endured in industry:
“I like coming home at the end of the day not having accomplished anything.”
John replied, “Young man, you have a bright future in academia.”
Steve Pinker writing about John Tooby who died earlier this month.
The Crumbling of a World Order
The New Age of Tragedy – New Statesman
Good article, with contributions from Robert Kaplan, Helen Thompson and John Gray.
Helen Thompson
Faith that creative human agency can triumph over nature’s limits has been a central feature of most modern political projects, not least liberalism. Missing the fact that technology cannot create energy, this conviction has long proved overly sanguine. Those who assume that the political world can be reconstructed by the efforts of human will have never before had to bet so much on technology over energy as the driver of our material advancement.
We are now a long way removed from the revolutionary hopes of the 19th and 20th centuries that the transformation of collective life would mean the complete development of all natural resources and an end to scarcity
Robert D Kaplan
To keep from destroying ourselves in this Malthusian world, we will have to husband fear without being immobilised by it. We cannot assume that technology will come to the rescue of every dilemma. The Ancient Greeks argued that no man is lucky until he is dead, since catastrophe can befall any of us at any moment. To carry that over into humanity at large, we should not assume that catastrophe cannot befall us at any moment or in any historical period. That is, we will need to think tragically in order to avoid tragedy. And precisely because our civilisation is rubbing up against limits of resources and space, such tragic thinking is more vital than ever before. (Robert D Kaplan)
Yet, it is less in evidence. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer in Britain are technocrats in spirit and background, and technocrats assume there is a solution to every problem, which leads to a certain arrogance. Meanwhile, the American political elite is more ideological than ever before, and this leads to another form of arrogance; the world’s problems will not go away if only all of humanity became democratic – as the American elite seems to believe.
I fear that the elites in both Britain and the US will have to learn about tragedy the hard way, by actually living it, due to their failures in seeing it ahead of time.
From the editorial:
Mr Kaplan’s recent book The Tragic Mind is an attempt to grapple with his past support for the Iraq War, which led him to suffer clinical depression for years afterwards. Having visited Fallujah in 2004 and found anarchy far worse than Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, he concluded: “I had failed my test as a realist… I helped promote a war in Iraq that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
It’s bleak out there.
Gosh, Mr Raab: how terrible
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite · Puny Rump: Sick Notes · LRB 13 April 2023
In a debate on the Labour government’s plans for National Insurance in 1946, Beveridge said that it ‘did frankly send a chill to my heart to realise that it was contemplated that the only way in which most people would get their sickness benefit would be through the post.’ Working through friendly societies would guard against malingering, but it would also make the system more humane: ‘I am not going to say a word … to suggest that civil servants are not human … But while civil servants are perfectly human, the unfortunate fact is that anything as big as the civil service, merely because of its size, tends to become inhuman.’
Gosh, Mr Raab.
Blat: the British way.
Blat, the Soviet art of getting by, comes to Britain | The Economist
But it is also corrosive. Blat compounded the inefficiencies of the Soviet system and rendered its boasts ridiculous. It does the same in Britain. Nine in ten dentists have no space for new nhs patients, yet the nhs website boldly declares that it will “provide any clinically necessary treatment needed to keep your mouth, teeth and gums healthy and free of pain”. This is fiction fit for a May Day banner. Blat is a declaration of distrust in a system that only sometimes does what it promises. To queue is to be taken for a fool. Better to shed that English reserve, and push to the front.
We all have trapdoors in our life
Metamorphosis — a magical memoir of a life in pieces | Financial Times
We all have trapdoors in our lives,” says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on the opening page of his memoir, Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces. His own trapdoor opened on a visit to a neurologist’s office in 2017. Sometimes, as he points out, we escape: the car swerves, we turn away from an argument. The terrible moment eventually comes for us all, though, and we are “on the trapdoor when the lever is pulled”.
From a review.
Its madness…
Its madness…
Former US mental-health tsar calls for a care overhaul
A kidnapper holds a psychiatrist and a cardiologist hostage. He pledges to release the one who has done most for humanity — and shoot the other. The cardiologist explains that drugs and procedures in her field have saved millions of lives. The psychiatrist begins ruminatively: “The thing is … the brain is the most complicated organ in the body.” “I can’t listen to this again,” says the cardiologist. “Shoot me now.”
This is one of the jokes that Thomas Insel, former head of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), scatters through early chapters of Healing, his probing analysis of what has gone so wrong with the treatment of people with mental illness in the United States.
Another telling quote
US prisons hold ten times as many people with severe mental illness as do state psychiatric hospitals.
And you thought it was just the Russians who spoke like this?
Augar response: ‘highest earners benefit’ in student loan revamp | Times Higher Education (THE)
The DfE also said ministers would be announcing “almost £900 million of new investment in our fantastic HE system over the next three years”, including “£300 million of recurrent funding and a total of £450 million in capital funding over the next three years to support high quality teaching and new state of the art facilities, which we will ask the Office for Students (OfS) to distribute through the Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG).
“This funding will be used to drive up provision that the nation needs, including science and engineering courses, courses to support the NHS, and shorter degree alternatives focused on developing the right skills for our dynamic economy. [emphases mine]
Fan-bloody-tastic
Life force
“Oh, to be 80 again!”
A comment from just a few years back.
Edward Osborne Wilson, who wrote extensively on ants and popularized the field of sociobiology, died on 26 December 2021 at age 92.
The poverty of learning
Homeschooling has revealed the absurdity of England’s national curriculum – Prospect Magazine
Part of the problem is that “knowledge” has been incorrectly defined as “grammatical concepts.” Children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce tells me he has done readings in primary schools where the teacher says afterwards: “Now class, let’s identify the wow words, connectives and metaphors that Frank is using here.” This is not the fault of teachers: “I see amazing work all the time,” he says, “but it’s in the teeth of what they’re asked to do—they’re having to gouge moments out of the day and twist the curriculum to be able to do it.”
Cottrell-Boyce believes the value of listening to stories is being missed. “It’s a strange thing for a writer to say,” he tells me, “but I think we really overvalue writing”. A lot of the writing that’s done in the classroom is to create some physical entity that can be assessed. It has no intrinsic value apart from the testing—and kids know that.” [emphasis added]
I was just going to say: some people seem to hate children — and it is not the teachers. But it is more than that: some people just seem to hate the idea of childhood.
The thing to be known grows with the knowing
A climber’s story evokes classic mountaineering literature | The Economist
Though most celebrated mountaineers have been men, many of the best books about climbing are by women. Ms Fleming pays tribute to perhaps the greatest of all mountain writers, Nan Shepherd, the Scottish author of “The Living Mountain” (written in the 1940s but not published until 1977). Part memoir, part Buddhism-inflected meditation, Shepherd’s work influences both Ms Fleming’s prose and her approach to mountain life. “The thing to be known grows with the knowing,” Shepherd thought, a conviction reflected in Ms Fleming’s attitude to the mountains she scales. “We shape the rock,” she says, and “the rock shapes us”. [emphasis added]
A motto not to be confused with learning outcomes.
UK science policy
The government thinks if you pump up UK science with a verbal diarrhoea of optimism – it can somehow become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Andre Geim of the University of Manchester