Wednesday, 19 December 2018
A cultural map of the world?
Monday, 17 December 2018
Houellebecq on Trump
Next in my series of writers on politicians comes this. Short and readable, with thoughts ranging from the military-historical ("the fact is that Americans have always been incapable, practically since aviation began, of carrying out a proper bombing") to the national-civilisational ("I don’t want to play the “licentious Frenchman,” a character I loathe, I’m just pleading for the maintenance of a minimal level of hypocrisy, without which no life in human society is possible"), there is something for almost everyone.
Thursday, 13 December 2018
Alan Hollinghurst on Jeremy Thorpe and "A Very English Scandal"
Here. Hollinghurst is of course playing at his home ground on this topic, but he plays a good innings.
There is something very odd about how larky the whole thing is, and how ready we are to be sympathetic to Thorpe despite the fact that he had so little going for him. It is all very English and about class and charm and so on - yes, yes, of course. But Thorpe does seem to have hired a hitman. Surely that's, well, just a little bit off?
I think Auberon Waugh gets to the bottom of the matter with one of his jokes: "[the gun] jammed, and Newton panicked and drove off. This was the moment that, in Auberon Waugh’s words, “lifted the Scott affair from being of minority, largely satirical interest, to being a matter of genuine public concern.”" The fact is that Scott was not killed - indeed he has survived Thorpe. The jamming of that gun is just so implausible - it would be so groan-inducing if the story were fiction - that it somehow invites us to treat the whole thing as a cosmic joke. (That plus the Barnstaple/Dunstable thing.) But it's not really that funny, is it?
Wednesday, 5 December 2018
Interesting links
A handful of links that are worth your time.
1. Clive Crook on Brexit.
2. The latest "52 things I learned this year" from Tom Whitwell. How about this: "No known machine learning system can reliably tell a bird from a bicycle when a human is trying to trick the system."? Nor a raven from a writing desk, I suspect.
3. Could Taiwan win (or at least draw) a war with China? Isn't defence is always easier (see: Risk).
4. A fun little piece in the Guardian by Hadley Freeman talking about how tricky it is to get one's children interested in Jewish holidays when the secular/Christian ones are going on at the same time: "what we’re dealing with in December is one holiday celebrating the birth of the Christian messiah, and another “celebrating oil lasting longer than it would normally last."" What I found interesting was this: "Like Ross Geller and Jon Stewart, I am a Jew who has had children with a non-Jew, and the pain suffered by Jewish parents like us is particular and poignant. But despite Ross and Stewart’s warnings, I did not anticipate this until my children were born. ... A Jew who marries out of their religion is a Jew who – it is safe to say – takes a fairly relaxed view of religious strictures. ... You’re gonna marry who you want – in your face, Rabbi! But there is something about having children that sharpens the mind. Traditions that used to make you groan with their hokiness suddenly seem weirdly important when you realise, first, they aren’t just about religion but are a connection to your childhood and, second, if you don’t shove them down your kids’ throats, no one else will. The survival of the Jewish faith is all on your shoulders!" I think Jew and Gentile parents alike will recognise the weird shock of seeing the world anew as parents: even small traditions such as avoiding bad language or indecency acquire a new and urgent appeal when children appear. But it's nice to see the Guardian publishing something sympathetic to someone who wants to pass on their religious inheritance to their children, and who finds it difficult to do so in modern society.
5. Evolutionary psychopathology. From the always interesting Scott Alexander. As he points out, it is such a compelling theory, fitting all our (and you will see who is in that 'our' if you read it) prejudices, that we need to be careful of it. "On the other hand, the first thermometer no doubt recorded that it was colder in winter than in summer. And if someone had criticized physicists, saying “You claim to have a new ‘objective’ way of looking at temperature, but really all you’re doing is justifying your old prejudices that the year is divided into nice clear human-observable parts, and summer is hot and winter is cold” – then that person would be a moron."
6. Why is most travel writing so bad? Cowen does not say, but perhaps should, that it can be funny. Bill Bryson combines being informative with being funny.
7. "Dr Muir Wood asked her in cross-examination why she did not simply Google the word "prick" and she answered with admirable succinctness: "Because it would have shown me porn and penises"." From this judgment.
8. There are more witches than Presbyterians in the United States.
1. Clive Crook on Brexit.
2. The latest "52 things I learned this year" from Tom Whitwell. How about this: "No known machine learning system can reliably tell a bird from a bicycle when a human is trying to trick the system."? Nor a raven from a writing desk, I suspect.
3. Could Taiwan win (or at least draw) a war with China? Isn't defence is always easier (see: Risk).
4. A fun little piece in the Guardian by Hadley Freeman talking about how tricky it is to get one's children interested in Jewish holidays when the secular/Christian ones are going on at the same time: "what we’re dealing with in December is one holiday celebrating the birth of the Christian messiah, and another “celebrating oil lasting longer than it would normally last."" What I found interesting was this: "Like Ross Geller and Jon Stewart, I am a Jew who has had children with a non-Jew, and the pain suffered by Jewish parents like us is particular and poignant. But despite Ross and Stewart’s warnings, I did not anticipate this until my children were born. ... A Jew who marries out of their religion is a Jew who – it is safe to say – takes a fairly relaxed view of religious strictures. ... You’re gonna marry who you want – in your face, Rabbi! But there is something about having children that sharpens the mind. Traditions that used to make you groan with their hokiness suddenly seem weirdly important when you realise, first, they aren’t just about religion but are a connection to your childhood and, second, if you don’t shove them down your kids’ throats, no one else will. The survival of the Jewish faith is all on your shoulders!" I think Jew and Gentile parents alike will recognise the weird shock of seeing the world anew as parents: even small traditions such as avoiding bad language or indecency acquire a new and urgent appeal when children appear. But it's nice to see the Guardian publishing something sympathetic to someone who wants to pass on their religious inheritance to their children, and who finds it difficult to do so in modern society.
5. Evolutionary psychopathology. From the always interesting Scott Alexander. As he points out, it is such a compelling theory, fitting all our (and you will see who is in that 'our' if you read it) prejudices, that we need to be careful of it. "On the other hand, the first thermometer no doubt recorded that it was colder in winter than in summer. And if someone had criticized physicists, saying “You claim to have a new ‘objective’ way of looking at temperature, but really all you’re doing is justifying your old prejudices that the year is divided into nice clear human-observable parts, and summer is hot and winter is cold” – then that person would be a moron."
6. Why is most travel writing so bad? Cowen does not say, but perhaps should, that it can be funny. Bill Bryson combines being informative with being funny.
7. "Dr Muir Wood asked her in cross-examination why she did not simply Google the word "prick" and she answered with admirable succinctness: "Because it would have shown me porn and penises"." From this judgment.
8. There are more witches than Presbyterians in the United States.
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Brexit links
I have not read the withdrawal agreement and I don't have any well-developed opinion on it. But here are some links from people who appear to know something about the issue but have different views of it.
1. Bruno Maçães says that "With this deal the UK gets to have its cake and eat it too, just what everyone said was impossible", and links to this piece by Wolfgang Münchau in the FT. Maçães also pointed me to this, again in the FT but this time by Gideon Rachman. The FT is an organ of Remainer-dom, but these pieces struck me as well-balanced. They are generally pro-the agreement.
1. Bruno Maçães says that "With this deal the UK gets to have its cake and eat it too, just what everyone said was impossible", and links to this piece by Wolfgang Münchau in the FT. Maçães also pointed me to this, again in the FT but this time by Gideon Rachman. The FT is an organ of Remainer-dom, but these pieces struck me as well-balanced. They are generally pro-the agreement.
2. On the other hand, the exemplar of sane but very keen pro-Leave thought is Daniel Hannan. Here he makes this point "when the clever and amiable David Lidington urges us to back the withdrawal deal on grounds that “the 52 per cent get control of laws, money, borders + out of CFP; the 48 per cent get closer trade partnership with EU than Canada or any advanced economy + cooperation on police & security,” I really want to agree. // Liders, after all, is more or less taking the line I have been taking over the past two years. A 52-48 vote, as I kept telling anyone who’d listen, was not a mandate for a radical break, but for a phased and partial recovery of powers. When critics complained that we’d be left “half in, half out”, I’d retort that that was pretty much the way the nation had voted, and that there was no dishonour looking for a middle way." This is indeed what Hannan has been saying right from the moment the result came out, and it broadly similar to the view Rachman and Lidington take of the matter. But Hannan comes out against the deal, and he talks more directly to the details of the agreement than Rachman or Münchau. I think it is fair to say that it is the kind of agreement that a Remainer who thought immigration was a big issue in the referendum would reach, rather than the kind of agreement that Hannan and the best kinds of Leaver would reach. On the other hand, I'm sure that if Cameron had achieved what this deal is accused of being, i.e. Remain but with no freedom of movement, he would still be the Prime Minister. Take that as praise or criticism as you think fit.
3. On another note entirely, here is an article in the Irish Times explaining how a no-deal Brexit with WTO rules could work out very nicely for British-Irish border cooperation.
4. Not a short link, but the Government's assessment of the economic impact of Brexit is here. The only point I want to make is that it does not say that Brexit, no matter how hard or no-dealish, will make Britain or British people worse off. This is made clear right at the outset, on page 9: "It is expected that in all scenarios considered in this publication, the economy will continue to grow in the long run. The estimates show the relative impacts of different trading arrangements." The figures that are given in the report are the modelled differences between how much richer we will be in 2035-2036 depending on different assumptions as to trade and migration patterns. This is not a big distinction to homo economicus, who considers losses and foregone gains equably, but it matters to real people. Imagine saying "not working on Saturdays could make you X% poorer!" when you really just meant that someone could be X% richer if they worked on Saturdays. Or think of it more like this: how much money do I have to offer you, to be paid in 2036, to accept a political structure that you either do or do not want now? If you want the structure then I don't need to offer you anything. If you don't want it - if you regard it as akin to a servitude that condemns your grandchildren to the prospect of being conscripted to fight Russia in a war that does not concern you - it's going to take a bit more than a small percentage pay rise in 2036. And bear in mind that I am not promising you that money in 2036, I'm just telling you that it might happen if my assumptions are correct - and, by the way, you know that I favour the outcome I am trying to persuade you to accept. It would be very disappointing if this kind of analysis changes anyone's mind about Brexit.
4. Not a short link, but the Government's assessment of the economic impact of Brexit is here. The only point I want to make is that it does not say that Brexit, no matter how hard or no-dealish, will make Britain or British people worse off. This is made clear right at the outset, on page 9: "It is expected that in all scenarios considered in this publication, the economy will continue to grow in the long run. The estimates show the relative impacts of different trading arrangements." The figures that are given in the report are the modelled differences between how much richer we will be in 2035-2036 depending on different assumptions as to trade and migration patterns. This is not a big distinction to homo economicus, who considers losses and foregone gains equably, but it matters to real people. Imagine saying "not working on Saturdays could make you X% poorer!" when you really just meant that someone could be X% richer if they worked on Saturdays. Or think of it more like this: how much money do I have to offer you, to be paid in 2036, to accept a political structure that you either do or do not want now? If you want the structure then I don't need to offer you anything. If you don't want it - if you regard it as akin to a servitude that condemns your grandchildren to the prospect of being conscripted to fight Russia in a war that does not concern you - it's going to take a bit more than a small percentage pay rise in 2036. And bear in mind that I am not promising you that money in 2036, I'm just telling you that it might happen if my assumptions are correct - and, by the way, you know that I favour the outcome I am trying to persuade you to accept. It would be very disappointing if this kind of analysis changes anyone's mind about Brexit.
Thursday, 22 November 2018
Links you should read
1. Spaceships are now older than aeroplanes were when we flew our first spaceships.
2. There are lots of fake miniatures showing Islamic science that never existed. "The irony is that these fake miniatures and objects are the product of a well-intentioned desire: a desire to integrate Muslims into a global political community through the universal narrative of science." Quite. But are these miniatures showing Muslims the history they wish they had, or showing unbelievers the history they wish Muslims had had?
3. John McCain and the POW cover-up.
4. Bruno Maçães on China. When China is top dog, "It will be a world where moral relations will be more important than they are now, where China will feel that it deserves gratitude from other countries, that other countries have to respect the power that China has. It will be very moralized. And finally, it will be very opaque. The ideas of the alignment of transparency, of public reason, public accountability — those won’t be central anymore. This will be a world very similar to the security-clearance levels of the Department of Defense in the United States. Some people will know everything that is happening; others will know only a bit; others will know nothing. It will not be talked about openly in the newspapers. That’s already true, by the way: Someone researching and writing on the Belt and Road has a hard time getting the information we need, and it will only get worse from that point of view." The United States has, by most comparative standards I can think of, a remarkably open political culture. Think of the stimulus that was passed in response to the global financial crisis. This was a huge domestic policy decision. And it was taken in public. You will recall quite how much of the argument about what to do was played out publicly at the time, and how many memoirs and retrospective accounts have been published since. The equivalent Chinese decisions will be far more opaque to the idle observer.
5. This is an unsympathetic review of The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett. "Her personal anecdotes take place in settings like Whole Foods and prenatal yoga class. Even more incriminating is her tendency to lapse into credulous catalogue-speak when describing the brands under analysis. For example, she claims that Marc by Marc Jacobs, the high-end designer’s more affordable diffusion line, “may not be made with the same tailoring or quality of materials as the flagship brand,” but it does “capture the bohemianism and subversiveness that has made the designer so celebrated and revered.” No one would use the word “revered” about a fashion designer who was not speaking for herself."
6. Lucy Kellaway bought a very silly house. But there is an endearingly romantic streak to the story: "When I rang the surveyor to remonstrate, she could not have been clearer: Do. Not. Buy. This. House." It's a nice contrast to her love of excessive tidiness.
7. Where lawyering and film-making intersect.
8. If you haven't been following the 'grievance studies' fake academic papers story, here is a good way in.
2. There are lots of fake miniatures showing Islamic science that never existed. "The irony is that these fake miniatures and objects are the product of a well-intentioned desire: a desire to integrate Muslims into a global political community through the universal narrative of science." Quite. But are these miniatures showing Muslims the history they wish they had, or showing unbelievers the history they wish Muslims had had?
3. John McCain and the POW cover-up.
4. Bruno Maçães on China. When China is top dog, "It will be a world where moral relations will be more important than they are now, where China will feel that it deserves gratitude from other countries, that other countries have to respect the power that China has. It will be very moralized. And finally, it will be very opaque. The ideas of the alignment of transparency, of public reason, public accountability — those won’t be central anymore. This will be a world very similar to the security-clearance levels of the Department of Defense in the United States. Some people will know everything that is happening; others will know only a bit; others will know nothing. It will not be talked about openly in the newspapers. That’s already true, by the way: Someone researching and writing on the Belt and Road has a hard time getting the information we need, and it will only get worse from that point of view." The United States has, by most comparative standards I can think of, a remarkably open political culture. Think of the stimulus that was passed in response to the global financial crisis. This was a huge domestic policy decision. And it was taken in public. You will recall quite how much of the argument about what to do was played out publicly at the time, and how many memoirs and retrospective accounts have been published since. The equivalent Chinese decisions will be far more opaque to the idle observer.
5. This is an unsympathetic review of The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett. "Her personal anecdotes take place in settings like Whole Foods and prenatal yoga class. Even more incriminating is her tendency to lapse into credulous catalogue-speak when describing the brands under analysis. For example, she claims that Marc by Marc Jacobs, the high-end designer’s more affordable diffusion line, “may not be made with the same tailoring or quality of materials as the flagship brand,” but it does “capture the bohemianism and subversiveness that has made the designer so celebrated and revered.” No one would use the word “revered” about a fashion designer who was not speaking for herself."
6. Lucy Kellaway bought a very silly house. But there is an endearingly romantic streak to the story: "When I rang the surveyor to remonstrate, she could not have been clearer: Do. Not. Buy. This. House." It's a nice contrast to her love of excessive tidiness.
7. Where lawyering and film-making intersect.
8. If you haven't been following the 'grievance studies' fake academic papers story, here is a good way in.
9. Why has the elite not adapted to Brexit? Part of the answer is this. Remain is a descendant of the open and outward-looking Britain that built the Empire. Remain is still where you find the people keenest on foreign military intervention. Indeed, I would suggest this as a good acid test for distinguishing among both left-wingers and right-wingers: find the ones who are willing to send in the troops (in a good cause of course, always in a good cause) and you'll find the Remainers. It is not the Leavers who want to go back to the Empire - they tend to want the country to stick to its knitting and sit quietly at home, leaving everyone else quietly in their homes too. It is the Remainers who want to keep a 'seat at the top table' or 'punching above our weight'. If you hear that Acheson quote about Great Britain having lost an empire and not yet having found a role, and it strikes you as profound, then you will be feeling the emotional pull of Remain for the British governing classes. But if it strikes you as a glib piece of nonsense that could apply to Romans, Athenians, Macedonians, Japanese, Khmer, Austrians ...
10. No progress in philosophy? Here is Agnes Callard: "We don’t demand progress in the fields of fashion or literature, because these things please us. Philosophy, by contrast, is bitter, and we want to know what good it will do us, and when, finally, it will be over. It is not pleasant to be told that maybe you don’t know who you are, or how to treat your friends, or how to be happy. It’s not pleasant to have it pointed out to you that maybe nothing you have ever done matters, or that, for all you know, there is nothing out there at all." Is it an empirical question whether it would be better not to do philosophy at all? Philosophers of psychology and psychologists of philosophers will have quite different takes on the matter.
10. No progress in philosophy? Here is Agnes Callard: "We don’t demand progress in the fields of fashion or literature, because these things please us. Philosophy, by contrast, is bitter, and we want to know what good it will do us, and when, finally, it will be over. It is not pleasant to be told that maybe you don’t know who you are, or how to treat your friends, or how to be happy. It’s not pleasant to have it pointed out to you that maybe nothing you have ever done matters, or that, for all you know, there is nothing out there at all." Is it an empirical question whether it would be better not to do philosophy at all? Philosophers of psychology and psychologists of philosophers will have quite different takes on the matter.
11. Placebos. It is obvious once you think of it, but "virtually every clinical trial is a study of the placebo effect". "The placebo effect has been plaguing [the pharmaceutical] business for more than a half-century — since the placebo-controlled study became the clinical-trial gold standard, requiring a new drug to demonstrate a significant therapeutic benefit over placebo to gain F.D.A. approval. // That’s a bar that is becoming ever more difficult to surmount, because the placebo effect seems to be becoming stronger as time goes on. A 2015 study published in the journal Pain analyzed 84 clinical trials of pain medication conducted between 1990 and 2013 and found that in some cases the efficacy of placebo had grown sharply, narrowing the gap with the drugs’ effect from 27 percent on average to just 9 percent."
12. An article which - in the wokest way possible - argues that women and gay people are gullible idiots. "Gullible idiot"? Or "more likely to benefit from the placebo effect and less likely to suffer the unpleasantness of philosophy"?
12. An article which - in the wokest way possible - argues that women and gay people are gullible idiots. "Gullible idiot"? Or "more likely to benefit from the placebo effect and less likely to suffer the unpleasantness of philosophy"?
Friday, 16 November 2018
South Korea
I have recently spent some time in Korea and feel, as everyone
who briefly visits a foreign country feels, that I have a number of penetrating
insights into the people and culture. I will however spare you these insights
and instead share with you some details of my Facebook feed.
Since going to Korea, all the adverts in my Facebook feed are
in Korean, which means that people’s birthday good wishes and ever so fascinating
musings on the true meaning of Brexit are interspersed with videos about
completely different things. And very interesting they are too.
There are adverts for Seoul, washing machines and televisions,
but you can imagine these. More strikingly, I have seen a few adverts for
paternity leave in Korea. Following up on one charming video showing fathers
delighting in looking after babies and small children, I found out that the Korean
Ministry of Employment and Labour runs the papanet4you.kr website, which pushes
paternal involvement in child care and child-rearing. So, for example, here you can see that Korea is comparing its take-up of paternity leave with Nordic countries,
asking the question “Why hesitate to leave” and answering it with information
on what holds fathers back from taking paternity leave – and what the state is
doing to change that, e.g. “Through the
gender equality corporate culture campaign, it announced that it plans to
positively solve the social gaze which obstructs the paternity leave of men!”.
Not that long ago I would have guessed that Korea had similar social mores to
China, but having been there I am now not at all surprised to find that paternity
leave is being promoted.
I have also had adverts for a product that removes smells
from clothes. The smells it mentions are pets, cigarettes, sweat and pork
belly. The woman in the advert is wearing a lot of clothes so I can imagine that the product is very useful for her.
I have had also seen an advert in which a woman finds a spot on her face
and responds by putting on one of these:
The odd thing is that the spot was on her forehead.
There is also this vibrating thing, which does not need to be on the wrist and, it seems, can be placed in
many different positions on the body.
I am relying on Google Translate for the finer details. This is not quite foolproof. For example, in the “Father psychological support” section of the papanet4you website I saw this:
I decided not to watch that video.
Monday, 12 November 2018
Three diverting things
1. 
2. Gore Vidal on E Nesbit: "E. Nesbit’s failure in the United States is not entirely mysterious. We have always preferred how-to-do to let’s-imagine-that. In the last fifty years, considering our power and wealth, we have contributed relatively little in the way of new ideas of any sort. From radar to rocketry, we have had to rely on other societies for theory and invention. Our great contribution has been, characteristically, the assembly line." It's a good line, but it's not true. On the other hand, Vidal's fondness for Nesbit is a surprising point in his favour.
3. You can stay in a real chocolate house.
2. Gore Vidal on E Nesbit: "E. Nesbit’s failure in the United States is not entirely mysterious. We have always preferred how-to-do to let’s-imagine-that. In the last fifty years, considering our power and wealth, we have contributed relatively little in the way of new ideas of any sort. From radar to rocketry, we have had to rely on other societies for theory and invention. Our great contribution has been, characteristically, the assembly line." It's a good line, but it's not true. On the other hand, Vidal's fondness for Nesbit is a surprising point in his favour.
3. You can stay in a real chocolate house.
Sunday, 23 September 2018
Thursday, 13 September 2018
We are doomed
This is an interesting article about a new reason to be concerned about the future of the human race: males will all become infertile.
The article is more interesting than that summary makes it sound. For example, you know about male anatomy, and size, and how men can be worried about - or proud of - the size of a certain part of their anatomy? Well, really we chaps should be getting much more worked up about a different measurement, namely the distance between one's, um, well, you know and one's, well, the other one. Turns out to be an important measurement.
The article is more interesting than that summary makes it sound. For example, you know about male anatomy, and size, and how men can be worried about - or proud of - the size of a certain part of their anatomy? Well, really we chaps should be getting much more worked up about a different measurement, namely the distance between one's, um, well, you know and one's, well, the other one. Turns out to be an important measurement.
Thursday, 6 September 2018
"Davies had already served as interim leader since Davies’ unceremonious ousting back in June ..."
"... , and today Davies revealed that Davies had secured 68% of the vote to see off the challenge from Davies and secure his position as Davies’ permanent replacement". That's Welsh politics for you.
Tuesday, 4 September 2018
Being good at something
This is a piece about the psychology of investing money that starts with a nice comparison. On the one hand, we have Grace Groner, orphaned at 12, lived most of her life alone in a one-bedroom house and worked her whole career as a secretary. She died leaving $7m to charity. On the other hand, we have Richard Fuscone, former vice chairman of Merrill Lynch’s Latin America division, educated at Harvard and University of Chicago. He went bankrupt, telling a judge, "I have been devastated by the financial crisis … The only source of liquidity is whatever my wife is able to sell in terms of personal furnishings." (Turns out he was no good at selling personal furnishings either.)
The writer goes on to say this: "In what other field does someone with no education, no relevant experience, no resources, and no connections vastly outperform someone with the best education, the most relevant experiences, the best resources and the best connections? There will never be a story of a Grace Groner performing heart surgery better than a Harvard-trained cardiologist. Or building a faster chip than Apple’s engineers." His answer is that it happens in investing because investing is about having a good temperament, as Ms Groner turned out to have.
The writer goes on to say this: "In what other field does someone with no education, no relevant experience, no resources, and no connections vastly outperform someone with the best education, the most relevant experiences, the best resources and the best connections? There will never be a story of a Grace Groner performing heart surgery better than a Harvard-trained cardiologist. Or building a faster chip than Apple’s engineers." His answer is that it happens in investing because investing is about having a good temperament, as Ms Groner turned out to have.
That got me thinking. In what other fields can ordinary people excel?
First, there is the "occasional touch of genius" category. In Any Human Heart, Logan Mountstuart comments that in golf it is readily possible for the amateur to hit a shot that cannot be bettered. If you get a hole-in-one, with the trajectory of the ball following exactly the curve described in your mind's eye, then Tiger Woods could not have done better. The occasional golfer won't beat Tiger Woods over 18 holes - and certainly not over a tournament. But that chance of tasting the golden fruits of perfection must be part of the attraction of golf. Think of keen amateur divers who occasionally enter the water just right, or snooker players who get a 147 break with no luck involved.
Something similar might be true of telling jokes or making funny comments: once in a while, a group of friends will be reduced to breathless laughter by a well-timed one-liner that no professional comedian could have bettered. Perhaps your funny friend wouldn't be able to persuade a thousand strangers to part with £20 to hear him tell jokes for an evening, but for that conversation, among those friends, there is no one funnier.
First, there is the "occasional touch of genius" category. In Any Human Heart, Logan Mountstuart comments that in golf it is readily possible for the amateur to hit a shot that cannot be bettered. If you get a hole-in-one, with the trajectory of the ball following exactly the curve described in your mind's eye, then Tiger Woods could not have done better. The occasional golfer won't beat Tiger Woods over 18 holes - and certainly not over a tournament. But that chance of tasting the golden fruits of perfection must be part of the attraction of golf. Think of keen amateur divers who occasionally enter the water just right, or snooker players who get a 147 break with no luck involved.
Something similar might be true of telling jokes or making funny comments: once in a while, a group of friends will be reduced to breathless laughter by a well-timed one-liner that no professional comedian could have bettered. Perhaps your funny friend wouldn't be able to persuade a thousand strangers to part with £20 to hear him tell jokes for an evening, but for that conversation, among those friends, there is no one funnier.
Second, there is the "trivial endeavour" category, i.e. activities that can be performed perfectly with a realistic amount of effort. Noughts and crosses is an example: I can confidently say that I - along with any child who has made a serious wet playtime study of the subject - am an unbeatable AlphaGo at noughts and crosses. That just means that I draw with the Fuscones of this world, not that I beat them. But nonetheless there is a small area of human endeavour that I have conquered, a very very small Kilimanjaro.
Not that these endeavours are necessarily pointless. I daresay there are plenty of people who have carefully optimised their daily commutes - which road to cross and when, where to stand on the platform - such that no one can possibly improve on their routes. They are quietly pleased with themselves about it. And why not?
But we are not really answering the original question: are there areas similar to investing, i.e. where there is a set of people doing the activity for a living, and yet an amateur with the right mindset might do it better? Perhaps in fields such as counselling or mentoring. I don't mean dealing with people with psychiatric conditions, but rather tasks outside the purview of medical science, such as consoling the bereaved or gee-ing up the ambitious, steering young adults through career choices or older ones through rocky patches in their personal lives. In these areas, I can imagine that a sympathetic and wise amateur could well exceed the well-meaning but booktrained professional.
Here's a different question: what kinds of variety of excellence are possible? Cowen writes, apropos of the niche for shorter people at the top levels of tennis, "As the logic of meritocracy advances, and the pool of talent is searched more efficiently, perhaps individuals with a clear natural advantage — whether size, smarts, or something else — become a larger percentage of top achievers. Yet those wonderful “natural athletes” will have their weaknesses, just as Shaquille O’Neal had hands too large for the effective shooting of free throws. So a second but smaller tier opens up for individuals who have the smarts, versatility, and “training mentality” to fill in the gaps left open by the weaknesses of the most gifted." Left-handers having a niche in the world of right-handers is another angle on this. And here I return to investing: is it possible that algorithms, with their ideal temperaments, will be the 'tall tennis players' of investing - the perfect 'percentage players' - but leaving a small but profitable niche for the mercurial talents of humans?
Not that these endeavours are necessarily pointless. I daresay there are plenty of people who have carefully optimised their daily commutes - which road to cross and when, where to stand on the platform - such that no one can possibly improve on their routes. They are quietly pleased with themselves about it. And why not?
But we are not really answering the original question: are there areas similar to investing, i.e. where there is a set of people doing the activity for a living, and yet an amateur with the right mindset might do it better? Perhaps in fields such as counselling or mentoring. I don't mean dealing with people with psychiatric conditions, but rather tasks outside the purview of medical science, such as consoling the bereaved or gee-ing up the ambitious, steering young adults through career choices or older ones through rocky patches in their personal lives. In these areas, I can imagine that a sympathetic and wise amateur could well exceed the well-meaning but booktrained professional.
Here's a different question: what kinds of variety of excellence are possible? Cowen writes, apropos of the niche for shorter people at the top levels of tennis, "As the logic of meritocracy advances, and the pool of talent is searched more efficiently, perhaps individuals with a clear natural advantage — whether size, smarts, or something else — become a larger percentage of top achievers. Yet those wonderful “natural athletes” will have their weaknesses, just as Shaquille O’Neal had hands too large for the effective shooting of free throws. So a second but smaller tier opens up for individuals who have the smarts, versatility, and “training mentality” to fill in the gaps left open by the weaknesses of the most gifted." Left-handers having a niche in the world of right-handers is another angle on this. And here I return to investing: is it possible that algorithms, with their ideal temperaments, will be the 'tall tennis players' of investing - the perfect 'percentage players' - but leaving a small but profitable niche for the mercurial talents of humans?
Friday, 31 August 2018
How Human Rights Work
You have probably seen the story about the unmarried mother who, the Supreme Court has just decided, should be entitled to claim Widowed Parent's Allowance after the death of her partner. It's a case about the European Convention on Human Rights (which is not an EU thing, but still European). So is this another case of meddling Europeans interfering with our laws? No.
The facts are these Ms McLaughlin and her partner, John Adams, lived together (apart from two short periods of separation) for 23 years until he died on 28 January 2014. They did not marry because Mr Adams had promised his first wife that he would never remarry. (This reason is described by the Court as "commendable" - see [42]). They had four children, aged 19 years, 17 years, 13 years and 11 years when their father died. He had made sufficient National Insurance contributions for Ms McLaughlin to be able to claim a bereavement payment and widowed parent’s allowance had she been married to him. But she was not. And the Widowed Parent's Allowance was only for people who had been married to (or - before you ask - in civil partnership with) the deceased parent.
So is that unfair discrimination? (More precisely, has there been a difference in treatment between two persons in analogous situations by reason of a relevant status, such as marriage, with no objective justification for that difference?) Well, as the Supreme Court put it, "There is no doubt that the promotion of marriage, and now civil partnership, is a legitimate aim". Moreover, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (ECtHR) has a consistent line of authority that marriage is to be treated differently from co-habitation. Here are some quotations from the ECtHR taken from the judgment at [62]-[63]: "Marriage continues to be characterised by a corpus of rights and obligations which differentiate it markedly from the situation of a man and woman who cohabit"; "However, marriage remains an institution which is widely accepted as conferring a particular status on those who enter into it. The situation of the applicant [an unmarried widow who complained about UK law to the ECtHR in a 2000 case] is therefore not comparable to that of a widow"; "In Shackell [the 2000 case], the court found that the situations of married and unmarried heterosexual cohabiting couples were not analogous for the purposes of survivors’ benefits, since ‘marriage remains an institution which is widely accepted as conferring a particular status on those who enter it’. The Grand Chamber considers that this view still holds true”; and "States have a certain margin of appreciation to treat differently married and unmarried couples, particularly in matters falling within the realm of social and fiscal policy such as taxation, pensions and social security".
So the European law would say that there was nothing wrong with the British law. But in this case, it was the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that said that the British law was incompatible with human rights, despite the Strasbourg jurisprudence to the contrary.
This is not a Brexit story. But it gives a flavour of what 'taking back control' might mean in practice. The Supreme Court is a bunch of pretty confident people who don't shy away from disagreeing with European judges. But they are not necessarily going to disagree with European judges by being less human rights minded.
The facts are these Ms McLaughlin and her partner, John Adams, lived together (apart from two short periods of separation) for 23 years until he died on 28 January 2014. They did not marry because Mr Adams had promised his first wife that he would never remarry. (This reason is described by the Court as "commendable" - see [42]). They had four children, aged 19 years, 17 years, 13 years and 11 years when their father died. He had made sufficient National Insurance contributions for Ms McLaughlin to be able to claim a bereavement payment and widowed parent’s allowance had she been married to him. But she was not. And the Widowed Parent's Allowance was only for people who had been married to (or - before you ask - in civil partnership with) the deceased parent.
So is that unfair discrimination? (More precisely, has there been a difference in treatment between two persons in analogous situations by reason of a relevant status, such as marriage, with no objective justification for that difference?) Well, as the Supreme Court put it, "There is no doubt that the promotion of marriage, and now civil partnership, is a legitimate aim". Moreover, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (ECtHR) has a consistent line of authority that marriage is to be treated differently from co-habitation. Here are some quotations from the ECtHR taken from the judgment at [62]-[63]: "Marriage continues to be characterised by a corpus of rights and obligations which differentiate it markedly from the situation of a man and woman who cohabit"; "However, marriage remains an institution which is widely accepted as conferring a particular status on those who enter into it. The situation of the applicant [an unmarried widow who complained about UK law to the ECtHR in a 2000 case] is therefore not comparable to that of a widow"; "In Shackell [the 2000 case], the court found that the situations of married and unmarried heterosexual cohabiting couples were not analogous for the purposes of survivors’ benefits, since ‘marriage remains an institution which is widely accepted as conferring a particular status on those who enter it’. The Grand Chamber considers that this view still holds true”; and "States have a certain margin of appreciation to treat differently married and unmarried couples, particularly in matters falling within the realm of social and fiscal policy such as taxation, pensions and social security".
So the European law would say that there was nothing wrong with the British law. But in this case, it was the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that said that the British law was incompatible with human rights, despite the Strasbourg jurisprudence to the contrary.
This is not a Brexit story. But it gives a flavour of what 'taking back control' might mean in practice. The Supreme Court is a bunch of pretty confident people who don't shy away from disagreeing with European judges. But they are not necessarily going to disagree with European judges by being less human rights minded.
Wednesday, 29 August 2018
Things that surprised me
1. Britain's carbon emissions are now back down to 1890 levels.
2. "At Fruitlands, a utopian community [Louisa May Alcott’s father] co-founded in the 1840s, root vegetables were initially outlawed because they grew in the direction of hell."
4. "Donald J. Trump State Park is a 436-acre (1.8 km2) undeveloped state park located within the towns of Yorktown and Putnam Valley in Westchester County and Putnam County, New York. The park consists of property that was donated to New York State in 2006 by the now-President of the United States Donald Trump, and is named after him. Maintenance of the park was halted in 2010 due to budget constraints, and the park remains largely undeveloped as of 2015."
2. "At Fruitlands, a utopian community [Louisa May Alcott’s father] co-founded in the 1840s, root vegetables were initially outlawed because they grew in the direction of hell."
4. "Donald J. Trump State Park is a 436-acre (1.8 km2) undeveloped state park located within the towns of Yorktown and Putnam Valley in Westchester County and Putnam County, New York. The park consists of property that was donated to New York State in 2006 by the now-President of the United States Donald Trump, and is named after him. Maintenance of the park was halted in 2010 due to budget constraints, and the park remains largely undeveloped as of 2015."
5. The monastery is being reinvented. Sort of.
6. 4D chess is easier than 2D chess. Easier if you are trying not to lose, that is.
7. Ross Douthat wrote a column comparing the political structure of the modern world to the Harry Potter novels and it is not altogether unconvincing.
Thursday, 9 August 2018
News from around the world
No common theme to these links, except that none of them is terribly cheerful.
1. A family from Syria sought asylum in Norway, and now they are seeking asylum in Poland - to escape the Norwegian child protection agency.
2. In Wales, changing to presumed consent for organ donation made no difference to actual organ donations.
3. "A report released by Canada’s spy agency has warned that New Zealand, one of its closest allies, has been influenced at every level of society by the Chinese government, and that the situation has reached a “critical” stage." More here. (What did I tell you?)
1. A family from Syria sought asylum in Norway, and now they are seeking asylum in Poland - to escape the Norwegian child protection agency.
2. In Wales, changing to presumed consent for organ donation made no difference to actual organ donations.
3. "A report released by Canada’s spy agency has warned that New Zealand, one of its closest allies, has been influenced at every level of society by the Chinese government, and that the situation has reached a “critical” stage." More here. (What did I tell you?)
4. The US "has called for a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia, working in partnership with the United States". Sorry, no that's not news, that was President Obama in 2009 ("SEE ALSO: Obama lauds Putin at Russia talks"). That was then - before 'kompromat' and 'bots' - and this is now: the US will impose sanctions on Russia over the Skripal poisoning.
5. "Saudi Arabia is one of the world's top executioners, but crucifixions - in which the condemned is usually beheaded and then the body put on display - are rare", yet a "man from Myanmar was beheaded and his body put on display on a cross in Mecca on Wednesday". More here (don't worry - no nasty pictures). I wondered whether that was cultural appropriation of a Hellenic/Roman custom, but if so it is a very old one: the Qur'an apparently mentions crucifixion in 6 places, including as an appropriate punishment for some crimes, while Wikipedia informs me that "Most classical [Islamic] jurists limit the period of crucifixion to three days".
6. And now for some photos: first, lovely iPhone photos; and, finally, some relentless, compelling, depressing photos of abandoned Russia.
5. "Saudi Arabia is one of the world's top executioners, but crucifixions - in which the condemned is usually beheaded and then the body put on display - are rare", yet a "man from Myanmar was beheaded and his body put on display on a cross in Mecca on Wednesday". More here (don't worry - no nasty pictures). I wondered whether that was cultural appropriation of a Hellenic/Roman custom, but if so it is a very old one: the Qur'an apparently mentions crucifixion in 6 places, including as an appropriate punishment for some crimes, while Wikipedia informs me that "Most classical [Islamic] jurists limit the period of crucifixion to three days".
6. And now for some photos: first, lovely iPhone photos; and, finally, some relentless, compelling, depressing photos of abandoned Russia.
Saturday, 4 August 2018
Brexit and Trump: fact and philosophy
The headline gives a fair idea of what is below the break. You have been warned.
Friday, 3 August 2018
"If you look at the United Kingdom, I think the policy of prioritizing debating and thinking has failed them"
The headline is taken from here. It reminds me of Tyler Durden's question about being clever: "How's that working out for you?"
Is the headline true? Well, I'd like to debate it and think about it of course.
I hope it's not true, but as Isaiah Berlin posited (and how did the policy of prioritizing debate and thinking work out for him?), maybe all the good things in life don't necessarily fit together neatly. You can have liberty or equality, thinking or good policy.
You might say this: "if you look at 5th century BC Athens, I think the policy of prioritizing debating and thinking failed them". Does that change your view of 5th century BC Athens?
Is the headline true? Well, I'd like to debate it and think about it of course.
I hope it's not true, but as Isaiah Berlin posited (and how did the policy of prioritizing debate and thinking work out for him?), maybe all the good things in life don't necessarily fit together neatly. You can have liberty or equality, thinking or good policy.
You might say this: "if you look at 5th century BC Athens, I think the policy of prioritizing debating and thinking failed them". Does that change your view of 5th century BC Athens?
Thursday, 2 August 2018
Consolation
So. A writer has just seen a temple monkey in Varanasi appear to read a tattered newspaper, then as if in uncontrollable exasperation cast it away and leap to the topmost ledge of the temple, to rest and regain composure. He writes:
"In that parade of utter dissatisfaction with things I became aware of a strong fellow feeling. How often do the papers report some item that seems to demand just such energetic and immediate form of self-release – had one the monkey’s agility – as the only practical means of discharging inward discontents, rage, contempt, despair, at what one reads in the papers. It is better to remain calm; try to remember that all epochs have had to suffer assaults on common sense and common decency, art and letters, honour and wit, courage and order, good manners and free speech, privacy and scholarship; even if sworn enemies of these abstractions (quite often wearing the disguise of friends) seem unduly numerous in contemporary society."
Written, as one might suspect, before the internet became the prompt for discontents, rage, contempt and despair. And all the better for it.
For the shorter term, and in an altogether different register, everything is going to be alright.
"In that parade of utter dissatisfaction with things I became aware of a strong fellow feeling. How often do the papers report some item that seems to demand just such energetic and immediate form of self-release – had one the monkey’s agility – as the only practical means of discharging inward discontents, rage, contempt, despair, at what one reads in the papers. It is better to remain calm; try to remember that all epochs have had to suffer assaults on common sense and common decency, art and letters, honour and wit, courage and order, good manners and free speech, privacy and scholarship; even if sworn enemies of these abstractions (quite often wearing the disguise of friends) seem unduly numerous in contemporary society."
Written, as one might suspect, before the internet became the prompt for discontents, rage, contempt and despair. And all the better for it.
For the shorter term, and in an altogether different register, everything is going to be alright.
Monday, 30 July 2018
You should click these links if you ...
1. ... remember the BBC Radiophonic workshop.
2. ... wonder whether researchers' findings about the differences between liberals and conservatives are wrong.
3. ... want to know what cyber-war would really look like. "Marines suddenly owed hundreds of thousands of dollars on credit lines they had never opened; sailors received death threats on their Twitter feeds; spouses and female service members had private pictures of themselves plastered across the Internet; older service members received notifications about cancerous conditions discovered in their latest physical. ... Obviously decision making will be hampered if important decision-makers have to spend time in a crisis convincing policemen that there is actually no hostage crisis in their house, finding a way to pay for lunch now that their credit cards don't work, or investigating the rape threats being sent to their teenage daughters' Instagram."
"It is trivially easy to find an American's address, ruin their credit score, steal their investments, use their social media or email accounts against them, and generally ruin someone's life through digital means. America's two greatest rivals (Russia and China) do not hesitate to harass, beat up, or intimidate American personnel. But stories of this type are very rare. Why is this? It isn't because they lack the capacity. They have it now. If they are not regularly harassing Americans today, it most likely because they do not want Americans to be better prepared for the conflict of tomorrow. "
4. ... read this sentence "I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by [Donald Trump's] skill as a strategist and tactician" and want to know more (seriously, it's in the FT).
5. ... are missing links to things written by Zadie Smith and want to read a good one (and not set in north-west London, either). (Quick review of Swing Time: really good in lots of details - not just the joke about the working-class girl and the Argos catalogue, but also her clean kitchen and tasty food - but we need more of a plot. Funnily enough, the short story linked to above gives me hope, albeit in a depressing way, that the life that people like Smith lead might start involving the kind of jeopardy from which good plots can emerge.)
6. ... wonder what happened to Toby Young after all that.
7. ... want to see the world's most perilous church (it's in Ethiopia).
8. ... remember 1988 - here's a reminder of what it looked like:
9. ... want to know what awful punishment I have redacted from the following passage: "A doctor has been [...] for carrying out euthanasia on a 74-year-old woman with dementia, despite her resistance. // The woman refused a cup of coffee containing a sedative and when she struggled, the doctor asked her husband and daughter to hold her down so she could insert a drip containing the lethal injection."
10. ... would like to read a classic libel law-avoiding tabloid article about President Macron.
11. ... or wonder why "Tunnels that were a mere 14 degrees Celsius in the 1900s can now have air temperatures as high as 30 degrees Celsius on parts of the tube network."
2. ... wonder whether researchers' findings about the differences between liberals and conservatives are wrong.
3. ... want to know what cyber-war would really look like. "Marines suddenly owed hundreds of thousands of dollars on credit lines they had never opened; sailors received death threats on their Twitter feeds; spouses and female service members had private pictures of themselves plastered across the Internet; older service members received notifications about cancerous conditions discovered in their latest physical. ... Obviously decision making will be hampered if important decision-makers have to spend time in a crisis convincing policemen that there is actually no hostage crisis in their house, finding a way to pay for lunch now that their credit cards don't work, or investigating the rape threats being sent to their teenage daughters' Instagram."
"It is trivially easy to find an American's address, ruin their credit score, steal their investments, use their social media or email accounts against them, and generally ruin someone's life through digital means. America's two greatest rivals (Russia and China) do not hesitate to harass, beat up, or intimidate American personnel. But stories of this type are very rare. Why is this? It isn't because they lack the capacity. They have it now. If they are not regularly harassing Americans today, it most likely because they do not want Americans to be better prepared for the conflict of tomorrow. "
4. ... read this sentence "I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by [Donald Trump's] skill as a strategist and tactician" and want to know more (seriously, it's in the FT).
6. ... wonder what happened to Toby Young after all that.
7. ... want to see the world's most perilous church (it's in Ethiopia).
8. ... remember 1988 - here's a reminder of what it looked like:
9. ... want to know what awful punishment I have redacted from the following passage: "A doctor has been [...] for carrying out euthanasia on a 74-year-old woman with dementia, despite her resistance. // The woman refused a cup of coffee containing a sedative and when she struggled, the doctor asked her husband and daughter to hold her down so she could insert a drip containing the lethal injection."
10. ... would like to read a classic libel law-avoiding tabloid article about President Macron.
11. ... or wonder why "Tunnels that were a mere 14 degrees Celsius in the 1900s can now have air temperatures as high as 30 degrees Celsius on parts of the tube network."
Friday, 27 July 2018
Great television
This is an interesting article considering the question of whether any of the wonderful TV series of recent years will endure. Here are a couple of thoughts from it:
"Take, for instance, The Wire. A relatively compact series at 60 episodes over five seasons, the show would take about two-and-a-half days to watch from start to finish, assuming one forgoes sleep. ... But what else could you have done with those 60 hours? ... I could finish War and Peace (21 hours and 15 minutes), Don Quixote (16 hours and 16 minutes), Moby-Dick (12 hours and 36 minutes), and still have plenty of time to squeeze in Crime and Punishment (7 hours and 3 minutes). Alternatively, I could read much of Kingsley Amis’s and Graham Greene’s fiction—the stuff worth reading, anyway—in roughly the same span of time.
What about movies? With 60 hours, you could watch the entirety of Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre—and then watch it again to pick up on all the nuances you missed the first time around. You could watch the first 27 entries on the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American films of all time (more, if you skipped some of the lengthier, plodding works like Gone with the Wind). You could watch the last quarter-century or so of films to win Best Picture at the Oscars. You could take a tour through world cinema, watching the best of Akira Kurosawa and François Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson and Michelangelo Antonioni.
You could undertake any of those horizon-expanding artistic adventures—or you could watch one program that ran for a few years on HBO."
"'A movie, no matter how perfect, is a compact, finite experience that begins and ends over the course of the same evening. Watch it again and again, and you may notice something new each time, but the story itself will not change, nor will the character arcs. Even the greatest of films is a one-night stand, where a TV series is a relationship—between the creators and the characters, and then between the characters and the audience—that can last years, with changes both subtle and inescapable along the way.'
This is true enough. But it’s only true in the moment. It’s only true while the show in question is a going concern, while we are watching in real time, while we are experiencing a program as a community, while we use it as a way to kill time with the coworkers in lieu of discussing the weather, while we hop online to hash out each and every moment from the preceding hour of programming to mine details from the text and speculate on what will happen next. As soon as a television series ends, it becomes a movie that’s dozens of hours long, almost always a piece of content too lengthy to think about consuming again, since there are so many other dozens of hours of new experiences out there."
I would add this. The comparison is often made between high-quality TV series and those Victorian novels that were originally published in serial form. But novels are a lot more dense than film or television: the best comparison I can imagine is between the book and the 1981 TV series of Brideshead Revisited, as faithful a transposition of book to film as could ever reasonably be hoped for: the book is about 320 pages in the Penguin paperback, while the series is 11 hours long.
The ground is clearly being laid for the future of vast leisure predicted by Keynes. All we need are the robots.
"Take, for instance, The Wire. A relatively compact series at 60 episodes over five seasons, the show would take about two-and-a-half days to watch from start to finish, assuming one forgoes sleep. ... But what else could you have done with those 60 hours? ... I could finish War and Peace (21 hours and 15 minutes), Don Quixote (16 hours and 16 minutes), Moby-Dick (12 hours and 36 minutes), and still have plenty of time to squeeze in Crime and Punishment (7 hours and 3 minutes). Alternatively, I could read much of Kingsley Amis’s and Graham Greene’s fiction—the stuff worth reading, anyway—in roughly the same span of time.
What about movies? With 60 hours, you could watch the entirety of Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre—and then watch it again to pick up on all the nuances you missed the first time around. You could watch the first 27 entries on the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American films of all time (more, if you skipped some of the lengthier, plodding works like Gone with the Wind). You could watch the last quarter-century or so of films to win Best Picture at the Oscars. You could take a tour through world cinema, watching the best of Akira Kurosawa and François Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson and Michelangelo Antonioni.
You could undertake any of those horizon-expanding artistic adventures—or you could watch one program that ran for a few years on HBO."
"'A movie, no matter how perfect, is a compact, finite experience that begins and ends over the course of the same evening. Watch it again and again, and you may notice something new each time, but the story itself will not change, nor will the character arcs. Even the greatest of films is a one-night stand, where a TV series is a relationship—between the creators and the characters, and then between the characters and the audience—that can last years, with changes both subtle and inescapable along the way.'
This is true enough. But it’s only true in the moment. It’s only true while the show in question is a going concern, while we are watching in real time, while we are experiencing a program as a community, while we use it as a way to kill time with the coworkers in lieu of discussing the weather, while we hop online to hash out each and every moment from the preceding hour of programming to mine details from the text and speculate on what will happen next. As soon as a television series ends, it becomes a movie that’s dozens of hours long, almost always a piece of content too lengthy to think about consuming again, since there are so many other dozens of hours of new experiences out there."
I would add this. The comparison is often made between high-quality TV series and those Victorian novels that were originally published in serial form. But novels are a lot more dense than film or television: the best comparison I can imagine is between the book and the 1981 TV series of Brideshead Revisited, as faithful a transposition of book to film as could ever reasonably be hoped for: the book is about 320 pages in the Penguin paperback, while the series is 11 hours long.
The ground is clearly being laid for the future of vast leisure predicted by Keynes. All we need are the robots.
Wednesday, 25 July 2018
Tobacco
People in Britain used to smoke a lot. And even people who didn't smoke would inhale a lot of cigarette smoke too. That doesn't happen any more.
We all know how bad smoking is for your body. Sure enough, in line with the decrease in smoking, we get better health outcomes. E.g., "For males, lung cancer AS incidence rates in the UK decreased by 31% between 1993-1995 and 2013-2015", says Cancer Research UK.
But what about nicotine? "Nicotine is frequently used for its performance-enhancing effects on cognition, alertness, and focus. A meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory", says Wikipedia.
The UK population was widely exposed to a drug with life-shortening but cognition-enhancing effects. Just as we see the public health benefits of a decline in consumption of that drug, shouldn't we also see the public-cognition detriment?
Here's some evidence. "The IQ levels of young people have been steadily falling for the past few decades, according to new research. The decline is believed to have begun following the generation born in 1975, and indicates that the slow rise in intelligence observed over much of the 20th century has come to an end", says The Week, citing The Times. That "slow rise in intelligence" - in line with the slow increase in the prevalence of smoking, both active and passive?
We used to swim in a river of performance-enhancing drugs that has now slowed to a trickle. It's worth thinking about what that means. (and adding in changes in the amounts of alcohol and caffeine consumed as well). If you think that, say, political discourse has become more stupid, perhaps it's because people have become more stupid? Do you ever hanker after the days when sensible centrist policies came out of smoke-filled rooms? Perhaps the smoke in those rooms was doing an important job.
We all know how bad smoking is for your body. Sure enough, in line with the decrease in smoking, we get better health outcomes. E.g., "For males, lung cancer AS incidence rates in the UK decreased by 31% between 1993-1995 and 2013-2015", says Cancer Research UK.
But what about nicotine? "Nicotine is frequently used for its performance-enhancing effects on cognition, alertness, and focus. A meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory", says Wikipedia.
The UK population was widely exposed to a drug with life-shortening but cognition-enhancing effects. Just as we see the public health benefits of a decline in consumption of that drug, shouldn't we also see the public-cognition detriment?
Here's some evidence. "The IQ levels of young people have been steadily falling for the past few decades, according to new research. The decline is believed to have begun following the generation born in 1975, and indicates that the slow rise in intelligence observed over much of the 20th century has come to an end", says The Week, citing The Times. That "slow rise in intelligence" - in line with the slow increase in the prevalence of smoking, both active and passive?
We used to swim in a river of performance-enhancing drugs that has now slowed to a trickle. It's worth thinking about what that means. (and adding in changes in the amounts of alcohol and caffeine consumed as well). If you think that, say, political discourse has become more stupid, perhaps it's because people have become more stupid? Do you ever hanker after the days when sensible centrist policies came out of smoke-filled rooms? Perhaps the smoke in those rooms was doing an important job.
Friday, 13 July 2018
A miscellany of links
1. Soft power.
"Know how we gittee free? Cudjo tellee you dat. De boat I on, it in de Mobile. We all on dere to go in de Montgomery, but Cap’n Jim Meaher, he not on de boat dat day. It April 12, 1865. De Yankee soldiers dey come down to de boat and eatee de mulberries off de trees. Den dey see us and say, “Y’all can’t stay dere no mo’. You free, you doan b’long to nobody no mo.’ ”
Oh, Lor’! I so glad. We astee de soldiers where we goin’? Dey say dey doan know. Dey told us to go where we feel lak goin’, we ain’ no mo’ slave."
This fascinating account, from one of the last slaves smuggled into the US, had difficulty in finding a publisher because it was written as it was spoken (as you can see). But it's so vivid this way: you can almost hear the voice of the man, watching the Yankees eating their mulberries, and being told he was now free.
Why are Democrats so keen on Russia? (That is taken from here.) Good to see that we're not forgotten.
2. An interesting and depressing account of one (successful) man's student debt, combined with his family's debt. "Or was it my fault for not having the foresight to realize it was a mistake to spend roughly $200,000 on a school where, in order to get my degree, I kept a journal about reading Virginia Woolf? (Sample passage, which assuredly blew my mind at the time: “We are interested in facts because we are interested in myth. We are interested in myth insofar as myth constructs facts.”)" What price can you put on being able to translate the Dream of the Rood into the modern vernacular? ($200,000, it seems.)
3. The diversity con - a left-wing critique of "diversity". I'd frame a lot of the points made quite differently from the author, but it's well worth reading, and it also fits in nicely with the points I was making about the capitalism of modern feminism. Cui bono is not the only question to ask about politics, but it's not one to forget.
4. Lovely pictures of Ivan Kupala Night celebrations. Nothing to do with politics. And yet politics so terribly saturates culture nowadays that, as I look at the photos, I can almost see them being used in an advertising campaign for the Belorussian equivalent of Brexit.
"Know how we gittee free? Cudjo tellee you dat. De boat I on, it in de Mobile. We all on dere to go in de Montgomery, but Cap’n Jim Meaher, he not on de boat dat day. It April 12, 1865. De Yankee soldiers dey come down to de boat and eatee de mulberries off de trees. Den dey see us and say, “Y’all can’t stay dere no mo’. You free, you doan b’long to nobody no mo.’ ”
Oh, Lor’! I so glad. We astee de soldiers where we goin’? Dey say dey doan know. Dey told us to go where we feel lak goin’, we ain’ no mo’ slave."
This fascinating account, from one of the last slaves smuggled into the US, had difficulty in finding a publisher because it was written as it was spoken (as you can see). But it's so vivid this way: you can almost hear the voice of the man, watching the Yankees eating their mulberries, and being told he was now free.
6. Signs of the times: Build-A-Bear causes havoc with discount deal. "Build-A-Bear Workshop was offering UK customers a chance to buy any bear, which can cost up to £52, for the price of their child's age.// At Leeds' White Rose Shopping Centre police were called when queues of "about a mile long" formed." From my limited familiarity with Build-A-Bear, I do not find this surprising.
7. A brilliant list of things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union, including "waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality", "promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out" and "Henry Kissinger visits sometimes for some reason".
8. Sam Leith on Lee Child. Worth it for the two sentences he quotes from Child.
Wednesday, 11 July 2018
Lawyers for the modern world
Some people think that lawyers are a fusty lot, a bunch of old-fashioned so and sos who use obsolete words like 'fusty' long after everyone else.
Think again! The Law Society is addressing a very current concern by releasing this best practice video showing how to navigate issues of consent in today's hook-up culture.
Think again! The Law Society is addressing a very current concern by releasing this best practice video showing how to navigate issues of consent in today's hook-up culture.
Monday, 9 July 2018
Five interesting links
1. Chinese business entertainment. Every bit as bad as you suspect. E.g., "one of my sources was unsympathetic after an American friend, working with a sole colleague, was on the brink of hospitalization following a banquet with Hunanese officials. “What an idiot,” she said, “Bringing only one other person to drink with the government!”" and "“Sometimes everyone strips off and you lie around naked together in comfortable rooms. The lower ranking members of the group then serve the other ones food and drink. On other occasions, we got high together, took off our shirts, and danced around in a circle holding hands,” one Western observer commentated, preferring anonymity." There is worse stuff at the link.
2. The Spanish Inquisition? Lovely people. "Well, for a start, the jails of the Inquisition were universally known to be hygienic and well maintained. They were neither built nor run as places of punishment. The standard of care that inmates received was high enough that prisoners held by the Crown would often petition to be moved to Inquisition jails. There are recorded cases of criminals committing public heresy with the express purpose of being held and tried by the Inquisition, rather than the secular courts."
3. Do you remember Obama's Kill List? It's still going strong. Here is an account of a court case by a US citizen who thinks that the United States government has tried to kill him five times. He'd like it to stop.
4. Labour is no longer the party of the working class. You knew that, but here are some background statistics you might not have known: the "2017 Labour Party rule book, a 91-page document, contains 26 mentions of “gender”, 41 of “BAME” (black, Asian and minority ethnic), 43 of “ethnic”, 11 of “race”, two of “black” and “Asian” respectively, but only two of “class”"; "The proportion of working-age men without qualifications who were not active in the labour force increased from 4% in the mid-1990s to 30% today. Poor white British children do worse in school than any other ethnic group. In 2016, 75% of the suicides reported in the United Kingdom were men. The suicide risk for low-skilled men, particularly those working in the construction industry, is three times higher than the male average.". This is from the Economist, which adds some unusually forthright comment: "The public-sector middle class is huge despite decades of wolf-crying about the destruction of the middle class. ... The universities have dangerously over-expanded (while also perfecting the art of teaching their students that the West is based on exploitation, patriarchy and other injustices). ... Whatever the problems with British productivity in general the country is doing a brilliant job of mass-producing an alienated “intelligentsia” that will provide a Corbyn-style Labour Party with the votes that it needs to win the next election."
5. Are you a bit unsure about Bayesian probability? This is the clearest explanation I have seen. Take this on statistical significance: "If a researcher shows me data that would only occur one time in twenty if geography didn’t matter to hospital waiting times, then I’ll become a firm believer in the “postcode lottery”, because the idea was reasonably plausible to start with. But if a researcher shows me data that would only occur one time in a 1,000 if the position of Jupiter were irrelevant to British election results, I’ll respond that this leaves the idea of a Jovian influence on the British voter only slightly less crazy than it always was."
2. The Spanish Inquisition? Lovely people. "Well, for a start, the jails of the Inquisition were universally known to be hygienic and well maintained. They were neither built nor run as places of punishment. The standard of care that inmates received was high enough that prisoners held by the Crown would often petition to be moved to Inquisition jails. There are recorded cases of criminals committing public heresy with the express purpose of being held and tried by the Inquisition, rather than the secular courts."
3. Do you remember Obama's Kill List? It's still going strong. Here is an account of a court case by a US citizen who thinks that the United States government has tried to kill him five times. He'd like it to stop.
4. Labour is no longer the party of the working class. You knew that, but here are some background statistics you might not have known: the "2017 Labour Party rule book, a 91-page document, contains 26 mentions of “gender”, 41 of “BAME” (black, Asian and minority ethnic), 43 of “ethnic”, 11 of “race”, two of “black” and “Asian” respectively, but only two of “class”"; "The proportion of working-age men without qualifications who were not active in the labour force increased from 4% in the mid-1990s to 30% today. Poor white British children do worse in school than any other ethnic group. In 2016, 75% of the suicides reported in the United Kingdom were men. The suicide risk for low-skilled men, particularly those working in the construction industry, is three times higher than the male average.". This is from the Economist, which adds some unusually forthright comment: "The public-sector middle class is huge despite decades of wolf-crying about the destruction of the middle class. ... The universities have dangerously over-expanded (while also perfecting the art of teaching their students that the West is based on exploitation, patriarchy and other injustices). ... Whatever the problems with British productivity in general the country is doing a brilliant job of mass-producing an alienated “intelligentsia” that will provide a Corbyn-style Labour Party with the votes that it needs to win the next election."
5. Are you a bit unsure about Bayesian probability? This is the clearest explanation I have seen. Take this on statistical significance: "If a researcher shows me data that would only occur one time in twenty if geography didn’t matter to hospital waiting times, then I’ll become a firm believer in the “postcode lottery”, because the idea was reasonably plausible to start with. But if a researcher shows me data that would only occur one time in a 1,000 if the position of Jupiter were irrelevant to British election results, I’ll respond that this leaves the idea of a Jovian influence on the British voter only slightly less crazy than it always was."
Thursday, 28 June 2018
Feminism and capitalism
This Ross Douthat piece is interesting. He sets out how American feminism has consistently resolved its internal disputes - disputes over issues such as surrogacy ("now only eccentric conservatives notice the weird resemblances between California-style surrogacy practices and the handmaids and econowives of Gilead") and pornography - by adopting the logic of capitalism.
Take a current dispute: feminists "were, and are, divided over prostitution, but it’s pretty clear that the version of feminism that supports the rights of sex workers to sell their bodies in the marketplace has the intellectual momentum."
I'd add another example: maternity leave. It's not a particularly feminist or left-wing idea on this side of the Atlantic that new parents, particularly mothers, should be allowed a few months off work when they have a new baby. It's the sort of common sense idea that anyone - social conservatives, fans of breast-feeding, feminists, responsible employers, just people - can get behind. You can get a debate going by talking about some 'extreme' Scandinavian 2-year period, or wondering about how very small businesses cope, or asking whether women on maternity leave should really be accruing holiday - but you're unlikely to find anyone who favours the US model. (Wikipedia: "The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 ... mandates ... 12 weeks unpaid leave to mothers for the purpose of attending to a newborn or newly adopted child. However, the act does not attain universal coverage as it includes several limiting stipulations. In order to receive maternity leave, employees must work in a firm of 50 or more employees, maintain employment with the same business for 12 months and have accumulated at least 1,250 working hours over those 12 months. As of 2012, 59% of American employees were eligible under the FMLA. // The FMLA is the only law that addresses family leave.")
American feminism seems to be more concerned with the (non-business-affecting) issue of whether people's genitals should restrict their choice of lavatories than by the (distinctly business-affecting) issue of maternity leave and maternity pay. But which issue is more likely to make a discernible improvement on the lives of women?
Indeed, this is a feature of American left-wing political thought that extends beyond feminism. Take immigration: there is a left-wing tradition, based in trade unionism and economic protection that seeks to reduce immigration, and a left-wing tradition, based in universalism and anti-nationalism, that seeks to increase it. Guess which tradition won? The one that big business and capitalism favour - i.e. free movement of labour.
One might go even further. Let's be terribly cynical and Marxist about it. Imagine those cigar-chomping capitalists were designing a set of political debates to suit themselves. Wouldn't they want them to consist of both right-wing and left-wing arguments for things they want (open borders, abortions rather than maternity leave) accompanied by loud and angry arguments about trivia to distract people from any economic left-wingery?
It's worth remembering that just because you are woke and right-on and progressive and all the rest of it, you are not necessarily any more antipathetic to capitalism than a crotchety old right-winger who forgets that he can't use that phrase about the woodpile any more. Equally, if you are a social conservative, it's worth remembering that capitalism is not necessarily your friend.
Take a current dispute: feminists "were, and are, divided over prostitution, but it’s pretty clear that the version of feminism that supports the rights of sex workers to sell their bodies in the marketplace has the intellectual momentum."
I'd add another example: maternity leave. It's not a particularly feminist or left-wing idea on this side of the Atlantic that new parents, particularly mothers, should be allowed a few months off work when they have a new baby. It's the sort of common sense idea that anyone - social conservatives, fans of breast-feeding, feminists, responsible employers, just people - can get behind. You can get a debate going by talking about some 'extreme' Scandinavian 2-year period, or wondering about how very small businesses cope, or asking whether women on maternity leave should really be accruing holiday - but you're unlikely to find anyone who favours the US model. (Wikipedia: "The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 ... mandates ... 12 weeks unpaid leave to mothers for the purpose of attending to a newborn or newly adopted child. However, the act does not attain universal coverage as it includes several limiting stipulations. In order to receive maternity leave, employees must work in a firm of 50 or more employees, maintain employment with the same business for 12 months and have accumulated at least 1,250 working hours over those 12 months. As of 2012, 59% of American employees were eligible under the FMLA. // The FMLA is the only law that addresses family leave.")
American feminism seems to be more concerned with the (non-business-affecting) issue of whether people's genitals should restrict their choice of lavatories than by the (distinctly business-affecting) issue of maternity leave and maternity pay. But which issue is more likely to make a discernible improvement on the lives of women?
Indeed, this is a feature of American left-wing political thought that extends beyond feminism. Take immigration: there is a left-wing tradition, based in trade unionism and economic protection that seeks to reduce immigration, and a left-wing tradition, based in universalism and anti-nationalism, that seeks to increase it. Guess which tradition won? The one that big business and capitalism favour - i.e. free movement of labour.
One might go even further. Let's be terribly cynical and Marxist about it. Imagine those cigar-chomping capitalists were designing a set of political debates to suit themselves. Wouldn't they want them to consist of both right-wing and left-wing arguments for things they want (open borders, abortions rather than maternity leave) accompanied by loud and angry arguments about trivia to distract people from any economic left-wingery?
It's worth remembering that just because you are woke and right-on and progressive and all the rest of it, you are not necessarily any more antipathetic to capitalism than a crotchety old right-winger who forgets that he can't use that phrase about the woodpile any more. Equally, if you are a social conservative, it's worth remembering that capitalism is not necessarily your friend.
Thursday, 14 June 2018
Grenfell Tower
The Grenfell Tower fire happened 1 year ago. This is an almost uniformly excellent article/edition of the LRB about it.
You don't need me to tell you that the fire itself was awful. I didn't read all of the sad bits towards the beginning of the piece. Maybe you can.
I found the account of the aftermath both less emotionally wearing and also more interesting. There are interesting echoes of the Sharon Shoesmith affair in the cavalier, panicky, headline-grabbing treatment of local government by central government. K&C and various Tory councillors come out of it well; central government comes out much less well.
But for this blog post, I want to show you some bits about the aftermath that I found most shocking.
"‘Nobody said “no” to anybody,’ one of the department heads told me. One survivor said he needed a pram for his one-year-old. ‘We said: “No problem: dozens have been donated.”
“No,” he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’"
Well, that's just a pram, you say. Yes, it is - but it's also an example of a wider pattern of behaviour.
"‘But the council as a whole,’ I asked. ‘Did they help you?’
‘Yes, they did,’ she said. ‘Any time we needed money – for a PlayStation, an Xbox, they bought them for us. They sent keyworkers. I read this stuff, people are unpleasant with what the council did, but for me they did it all.’ Karen and her boys lived in a local hotel for four months, paid for by the council, before accepting a brand new flat off High Street Kensington. Though she had rented privately in the tower, after the fire she was made a permanent social housing tenant. Her flat cost £1.2 million on the open market. She won’t have to begin paying rent or utility bills until July 2019. ‘It’s a relief,’ she said.
‘If this had happened in another country,’ I asked her, ‘do you think the response from the authorities would have been better?’
‘Well, if it happened in my country, in Lebanon,’ Karen said, ‘we would have been thrown on the streets, for the dogs.’"
‘Yes, they did,’ she said. ‘Any time we needed money – for a PlayStation, an Xbox, they bought them for us. They sent keyworkers. I read this stuff, people are unpleasant with what the council did, but for me they did it all.’ Karen and her boys lived in a local hotel for four months, paid for by the council, before accepting a brand new flat off High Street Kensington. Though she had rented privately in the tower, after the fire she was made a permanent social housing tenant. Her flat cost £1.2 million on the open market. She won’t have to begin paying rent or utility bills until July 2019. ‘It’s a relief,’ she said.
‘If this had happened in another country,’ I asked her, ‘do you think the response from the authorities would have been better?’
‘Well, if it happened in my country, in Lebanon,’ Karen said, ‘we would have been thrown on the streets, for the dogs.’"
Of course I am glad that this country is rich enough and generous enough to provide more lavishly for Karen than what she describes as her own country. But does something not strike you as odd about all this? Let me put it this way. The article also quotes the Daily Mail reporting that "The wealthy Tory councillor who was in charge of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment has fled his £1.3 million home after allegedly receiving threats from angry residents". The "wealthy" live in (or flee) £1.3m homes (Daily Mail valuation) while the "poor" live in £1.2m homes (open market valuation): and the poor also get free PlayStations, Xboxes and a couple of years with no rent. If this is what Tory Kensington & Chelsea is like, who do you vote for if you want austerity and inequality?
Well, that's just £1.2m, you say. Yes, it is - but ...
"‘So, with this particular family,’ a senior housing officer said, ‘the government got itself into such a situation that the government itself had to find a two million pound property for the family. They live there now. And of course when other families heard the story they were like, “Where’s my two million pound house?” ... Almost all the residents I spoke to brought this up with me. One of them printed off a list from Zoopla of four properties near Westbourne Grove at two to three million pounds each, and she wrote ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, and ‘four’ beside them in order of preference. She gave it to her keyworker and imagined the council would go ahead and buy one."
"‘So, with this particular family,’ a senior housing officer said, ‘the government got itself into such a situation that the government itself had to find a two million pound property for the family. They live there now. And of course when other families heard the story they were like, “Where’s my two million pound house?” ... Almost all the residents I spoke to brought this up with me. One of them printed off a list from Zoopla of four properties near Westbourne Grove at two to three million pounds each, and she wrote ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, and ‘four’ beside them in order of preference. She gave it to her keyworker and imagined the council would go ahead and buy one."
Read it and weep.
The world today
1. Have you ever wondered what is happening to music nowadays?
Well, classical music being is being weaponised: "“[D]espite a few assertive, late-Romantic exceptions like Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff,” notes critic Scott Timberg, “the music used to scatter hoodlums is pre-Romantic, by Baroque or Classical-era composers such as Vivaldi or Mozart.”" And it's being ruined in other ways too - see the link. Meanwhile, pop[ular] music is unimportant.
Of course, there is that kind of music that is associated with gangs. But the more you look into it, the more interesting it gets. I tried investigating Stormzy. The music is better than I thought it would be. But also more varied: it turns out he has written a hymn, which he performed at a funeral. Remember that the world is always bigger and more complicated than you think.
2. This is how you prevent war nowadays, with a video and Donald Trump telling you to "Think of it from the real estate perspective".
3. Teenage relationships nowadays: only in America? Only in the Park Slope white-parent community? I find it hard to imagine that kind of behaviour becoming widespread, but then I am terribly old and set in my ways. Some completely different - but also very weird - American young person sexual behaviour is here: "Is it possible for two people to simultaneously sexually assault each other? ... The one important thing you need to know about the case is that according to the lawsuit, a woman has been indefinitely suspended from college because she let a man touch her". (I have left the final word out of that quotation, but without changing the meaning.)
Well, classical music being is being weaponised: "“[D]espite a few assertive, late-Romantic exceptions like Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff,” notes critic Scott Timberg, “the music used to scatter hoodlums is pre-Romantic, by Baroque or Classical-era composers such as Vivaldi or Mozart.”" And it's being ruined in other ways too - see the link. Meanwhile, pop[ular] music is unimportant.
Of course, there is that kind of music that is associated with gangs. But the more you look into it, the more interesting it gets. I tried investigating Stormzy. The music is better than I thought it would be. But also more varied: it turns out he has written a hymn, which he performed at a funeral. Remember that the world is always bigger and more complicated than you think.
2. This is how you prevent war nowadays, with a video and Donald Trump telling you to "Think of it from the real estate perspective".
3. Teenage relationships nowadays: only in America? Only in the Park Slope white-parent community? I find it hard to imagine that kind of behaviour becoming widespread, but then I am terribly old and set in my ways. Some completely different - but also very weird - American young person sexual behaviour is here: "Is it possible for two people to simultaneously sexually assault each other? ... The one important thing you need to know about the case is that according to the lawsuit, a woman has been indefinitely suspended from college because she let a man touch her". (I have left the final word out of that quotation, but without changing the meaning.)
Monday, 28 May 2018
Some recommended links
(1) Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho! enfant terrible! - is almost a conservative ("With my ideology I’m considered borderline conservative now") and sounding a little like he's auditioning for the American version of Grumpy Old Men: "there were no helicoptering parents, I barely saw my father and we rode bikes and played in other neighbourhoods, like the Canyons above Los Angeles. We didn’t have cell phones; our parents didn’t monitor us. No parent of mine came to a dress rehearsal of the school musical and posted about it on Facebook. I could barely get my parents to come, and that was normal. My parents took us to the movies they wanted to see. There wasn’t this kid culture." There there, Bret: we all have Facebook friends who share too much.
(2) Are you a hoarder? The official way to find out is here.
(3) "Here’s something interesting: the sky is dark at night. No, you say. Never. But, then, why is it dark? It is filled with billions of billions of stars, so many in fact that at every point in the sky one shines. We are surrounded by beacons of nuclear fusion which emit light that can travel uninterrupted in the vacuum of space for millions of years. If in every direction there is a star, everywhere should be burning white. But we see pinpricks in the dark. Is this not odd?" More here.
(4) Interesting people who think differently (not altogether differently from each other, but differently from most people): Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Dominic Cummings.
(5) Nixon. What a guy! "Arthur Garfield Hays of the generally left-wing American Civil Liberties Union sparred good-naturedly with Nixon, whose fairness, he said, “confirms my faith in the American system of government”. ... [Later, in the 'Checkers' speech] “In thirty minutes”, a Time magazine reporter concluded, “by the exposure of his personality, he had changed from a liability to his party to a shining asset. He had established himself as a man of integrity and courage.” Eisenhower himself changed his mind about his running mate. “Well that boy’s got a lot of courage”, he remarked." Oh, and he did some bad things too.
(6) "Those people (you know the ones) keep banging on about how they are being silenced and you can't anything any more and it's PC gone mad - but they are talking non-stop, so it must be rubbish." You've heard the argument. Here's the counter-argument.
(7) Women's magazines of the past: "In the February 1901 issue of Ladies Home Journal, on a single page between a portrayal on the “Life of an English Girl” and a feature asking, “Is the Newspaper Office the Place for a Girl?,” the then-obscure American architect Frank Lloyd Wright published plans for a home “in a prairie town.” It might seem like a strange host for architectural plans, but Ladies Home Journal frequently featured them, amid Rubifoam toothpaste ads, tips on what to do with cheese, serialized romance novels, and journalistic muckraking. It makes sense: Architecture is the foundation of home life, a matter largely relegated to women then—and still today, like it or not." More (about open-plan living - "Today’s homes are far larger than their predecessors, and yet they often boast fewer types of spaces" - not women's magazines) here. Is that an unusual place for architecture? Not really. A lot of what used to be architecture is now interior design. Do ambitious architects design domestic houses for middle-class families any more? If they did, I don't see why the plans wouldn't feature in a magazine with diet plans and true-life crime stories.
(8) A freediver dancing. Don't try this at home.
(9) China's communists fund Jacinda Ardern's Labour Party Forget about Russia, guys.
Thursday, 17 May 2018
A new Leviticus?
"Tusked animals will be banned from flying, but miniature horses will not.
The ... banned creatures list [is] to include amphibians, spiders, goats, snakes, "non-household birds", or any smelly or unclean animal.
Reptiles, hedgehogs, insects, and rodents are also banned ..."
The ... banned creatures list [is] to include amphibians, spiders, goats, snakes, "non-household birds", or any smelly or unclean animal.
Reptiles, hedgehogs, insects, and rodents are also banned ..."
Tuesday, 15 May 2018
Four film reviews
I've taken a couple of plane flights recently so I've watched some films (adapted for the airline) on a little screen, occasionally interrupted by seatbelt-related announcements. Here are the benefits of my thoughts on four of them that you might have seen advertised.
1. The Last Jedi. Tedious and poor. I’m not saying that the Star Wars Universe is particularly worthy of respect, but if you are making a Star Wars film then I think you ought to respect what has gone before. Even leaving aside the new apps that have been installed on the Force (inter-planetary 3D film projection and weird telephone functionality, I kid you not), did I really see Princess Leia swimming through space? I am certain that I saw one spaceship fly very slowly over another one so that it could "drop" its bombs (drop! in space!) in the right place. And it turns out that you can destroy big spaceships just by ramming them at lightspeed: why did no-ever do that with any of the various Death Stars that have had to be destroyed in the other films? Why was Supreme Leader Snoke sometimes very clever and sometimes just a moron? Indeed, why did any of the people do any of the things that they did? Why did no one have a consistent character? Why why why why why? I overcame difficulty sleeping the other night by reminding myself of what happened in this film. Now, I am afraid, is the time to withdraw any benefit of the doubt from the Star Wars films. Stop watching them and let the series die.
2. Molly’s Game. Not a bad film, but an entirely unnecessary one. Woman runs illegal gambling game; woman pleads guilty to charge of running illegal gambling den; woman receives non-custodial sentence for charge to which she has pleaded guilty. That's it. All of that is padded out with Aaron Sorkin dialogue, which I could parody but won't bother. Reminds me of black and white films I used to watch for no reason when bored: perfectly well made film, but utterly trivial.
3. Darkest Hour. At best, Churchill’s Greatest Hits set to soaring music. Mostly it is just Gary Oldman doing an impression of Churchill, in between pouting from Lily James and flouncing from Kristin Scott Thomas. It also has a cringingly awful bit in the middle when Churchill boards a tube (that takes forever to go the one stop from Embankment to Westminster) and exchanges Macaulay quotations with the multi-ethnic Cockneys of 1940s London. There are also lots of posh people who can't say their Rs. Also a completely unnecessary film, and a far less imaginative idea for a Churchill film than, say, Churchill (the one about his doubts over D-Day and increasing irrelevance compared to Eisenhower). Again, there is nothing actually wrong with the film (except for the bit on the tube).
4. Downsizing. Pick of the bunch by a long way. This is a surprisingly ambitious film and well worth a watch. The trailer suggests that it is a satirical comedy about social class in America starring Matt Damon. That's certainly part of it. But it's a lot more than that. It's not laugh-out loud funny, on the whole, and it's a bit like two films squashed into one (in the same way that Brideshead is a bit like more than at least two books squashed together), but it's got a lot going for it. See it if you think you might be interested in any of these: thoughts on Tesla-style saving the world by having cool stuff; an unambiguously positive representation of an evangelical Christian; no representation without taxation; how to tell if you are Noah, or just a regular guy; very small people talking through megaphones to normal size people.
1. The Last Jedi. Tedious and poor. I’m not saying that the Star Wars Universe is particularly worthy of respect, but if you are making a Star Wars film then I think you ought to respect what has gone before. Even leaving aside the new apps that have been installed on the Force (inter-planetary 3D film projection and weird telephone functionality, I kid you not), did I really see Princess Leia swimming through space? I am certain that I saw one spaceship fly very slowly over another one so that it could "drop" its bombs (drop! in space!) in the right place. And it turns out that you can destroy big spaceships just by ramming them at lightspeed: why did no-ever do that with any of the various Death Stars that have had to be destroyed in the other films? Why was Supreme Leader Snoke sometimes very clever and sometimes just a moron? Indeed, why did any of the people do any of the things that they did? Why did no one have a consistent character? Why why why why why? I overcame difficulty sleeping the other night by reminding myself of what happened in this film. Now, I am afraid, is the time to withdraw any benefit of the doubt from the Star Wars films. Stop watching them and let the series die.
2. Molly’s Game. Not a bad film, but an entirely unnecessary one. Woman runs illegal gambling game; woman pleads guilty to charge of running illegal gambling den; woman receives non-custodial sentence for charge to which she has pleaded guilty. That's it. All of that is padded out with Aaron Sorkin dialogue, which I could parody but won't bother. Reminds me of black and white films I used to watch for no reason when bored: perfectly well made film, but utterly trivial.
3. Darkest Hour. At best, Churchill’s Greatest Hits set to soaring music. Mostly it is just Gary Oldman doing an impression of Churchill, in between pouting from Lily James and flouncing from Kristin Scott Thomas. It also has a cringingly awful bit in the middle when Churchill boards a tube (that takes forever to go the one stop from Embankment to Westminster) and exchanges Macaulay quotations with the multi-ethnic Cockneys of 1940s London. There are also lots of posh people who can't say their Rs. Also a completely unnecessary film, and a far less imaginative idea for a Churchill film than, say, Churchill (the one about his doubts over D-Day and increasing irrelevance compared to Eisenhower). Again, there is nothing actually wrong with the film (except for the bit on the tube).
4. Downsizing. Pick of the bunch by a long way. This is a surprisingly ambitious film and well worth a watch. The trailer suggests that it is a satirical comedy about social class in America starring Matt Damon. That's certainly part of it. But it's a lot more than that. It's not laugh-out loud funny, on the whole, and it's a bit like two films squashed into one (in the same way that Brideshead is a bit like more than at least two books squashed together), but it's got a lot going for it. See it if you think you might be interested in any of these: thoughts on Tesla-style saving the world by having cool stuff; an unambiguously positive representation of an evangelical Christian; no representation without taxation; how to tell if you are Noah, or just a regular guy; very small people talking through megaphones to normal size people.
Wednesday, 9 May 2018
The end of good free journalism?
The web has been the most amazing thing to happen to people who like reading journalism.
Only a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to imagine that, without leaving your desk and without paying a penny, you could read vast swathes of the newspapers and magazines of the world. Now, it seems only natural that all the news, opinion, jokes, investigations, cartoons, columns, photographs, videos and other paraphernalia of the modern media are immediately accessible to me, give or take a paywall or two here and there. Even foreign language publications can be given the auto-translate treatment by my browser. The world is my legible oyster.
Be grateful for this wonderful opportunity and enjoy it while you may: it can't go on forever and Megan McArdle explains why.
Only a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to imagine that, without leaving your desk and without paying a penny, you could read vast swathes of the newspapers and magazines of the world. Now, it seems only natural that all the news, opinion, jokes, investigations, cartoons, columns, photographs, videos and other paraphernalia of the modern media are immediately accessible to me, give or take a paywall or two here and there. Even foreign language publications can be given the auto-translate treatment by my browser. The world is my legible oyster.
Be grateful for this wonderful opportunity and enjoy it while you may: it can't go on forever and Megan McArdle explains why.
Saturday, 5 May 2018
A Chinese person reads Gone With the Wind
Fascinating. E.g., "Li responds that Ashley is the biggest villain in the piece ..."
Friday, 4 May 2018
Do you need a body architect, food artist, cultural hacker or fashion futurist?
You know how it is. You want to get your hands on a maverick "working on the bleeding edge of the arts, science and technology". Someone with a "healthy disregard for the impossible". You know, a "Sustainability Provocateur" or a "Paper Hacker". Someone like Amish Futurist, the Digital Prophet & Techno Skeptic, or Marshmallow Laser Feast, the Mixed Reality Mavericks, Digital Storytellers & Tech Artists. The Grand Dame of Eating Experience herself, Marije Vogelzang, might spring to mind, or LJ Rich, the Tech Evangelist, Sound Hacker, Synaesthete and NASA Datanaut.
But how do you find these people? Worry no more. Just click here and you can get in touch with all these people, and more besides.
Sunday, 29 April 2018
Human brain-parts transplanted into mice
"Last week, Rusty Gage and colleagues at the Salk Institute announced that they had successfully transplanted lab-grown blobs of human brain tissue into mice. Gage’s team grew the blobs, known as brain organoids, from human stem cells. Once surgically implanted into rodent brains, the organoids continued growing, and their neurons formed connections with those of the surrounding brains. It was the first time such transplants had worked: Until now, organoids had only ever been grown in dishes."
Read all about it here.
Read all about it here.
Friday, 27 April 2018
I Told You So
"The leaders of North and South Korea have agreed to work to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons after holding an historic summit.
The announcement was made in a joint statement by Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in following talks at the border.
The two also agreed to push towards turning the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953 into a peace treaty this year." So says the BBC.
Well, I did predict this, didn't I?
If all this were happening on Obama's watch then we'd be talking about a second Nobel Peace Prize. But because it's Trump doing ...
The announcement was made in a joint statement by Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in following talks at the border.
The two also agreed to push towards turning the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953 into a peace treaty this year." So says the BBC.
Well, I did predict this, didn't I?
If all this were happening on Obama's watch then we'd be talking about a second Nobel Peace Prize. But because it's Trump doing ...
Tuesday, 24 April 2018
Jordan Peterson reviewed by an actual psychiatrist
With plenty to say about CS Lewis too. (With a little more here.)
Friday, 13 April 2018
Good people doing their best
This article is about raising "gender neutral" or, more likely “gender open,” “gender affirming,” or “gender creative" children. Theybies.
I came across the article from someone who thinks that this is a Bad Thing. I'm not so sure and I want to explain why.
I came across the article from someone who thinks that this is a Bad Thing. I'm not so sure and I want to explain why.
Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Vignettes of Progress
1. In 1779 construction began on the world's first cast-iron bridge. It's in England and spans the Severn Valley. English Heritage is doing it up at the moment. Here's something I've learned from English Heritage's magazine:
What was possible for the UK in the 1770s is not possible today.
2. The Royal Society was formed in 1662 as the "Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge". It is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. In1665, it published the first issue of Philosophical Transactions, the world's longest-running scientific journal.
Nature published an article in its 8 March 2018 edition on the role of women in the Royal Society and its publications. As you might imagine, it is not an altogether happy story.
But my attention was drawn to this detail:
It seems that data on the Royal Society's editorial records from 1662 to 1990 is readily available because it was written down on paper, but from 1990 it is inaccessible because it has been put on computer.
3. Here is the beginning of an agenda I recently received because I am an elector in the ward of Farringdon Without, part of the local government of the City of London.
Cracking stuff, eh? Oyez! Wardmote! Holden here this day!
The agenda covers the usual kind of local government stuff ...
... before ending in the style it started:
Thanks Beadle! You can be sure that thereof fail shall I not.
Is there a serious point to all this? I think so.
Some people regard these traditions as harmless fun, like the Royal Family: it's something for tourists, a chance for fancy dress, a little bit of tradition, doesn't mean anything, does it?
On the other hand, some people get quite worked up about things like the Royal Family. They see them as symbols of an irrational adherence to feudal traditions that fetishizes class divisions and unjustified deference; something that reveals a deep-seated love of the past, a sick kind of nostalgia for 'happier' days of the Empire, Glorious Isolation (don't mention Brexit!) and so on; in short, something that holds Britain back. If we didn't have 'beadles' and 'wardmotes' with people shouting 'oyez' and 'God save the Queen' then perhaps we could reality in the eye, and turn our attention to real achievements like iron foundries, science and progress for women.
I think those people are on to something. I think they are wrong, but they see a little more of the truth than people who just treat the whole thing as harmless nonsense.
It is not stupid to think that one of the reasons that the Royal Society was a big deal from its founding and has continued as a prestigious organisation to this day is because it is precisely that, i.e. Royal. And perhaps the UK's ability to make vast iron arches would have been maintained if there were a Royal Iron Works. The patronage of royalty - and all the other manifestations of tradition - sprinkles a bit of stardust onto human endeavours as diverse as cutting edge scientific enquiry and hearing updates on the progress of Crossrail.
Or imagine having a relaxed evening with a few friends, in a Pizza Express or Nandos or what have you, and at the end of dinner someone stood up and said, in all seriousness, "Ladies, Gentlemen: the Queen!". It would be incongruous precisely because toasting the Queen - and the Queen herself and the whole edifice of royalty - comes laden with a certain gravity, unearned or not, that changes the dynamic of everything it touches. A toast like that can anger republicans - it could be a provocation. It's not just words or something for tourists.
So, given that that stardust and gravity exists, I don't think it is stupid to think that that it might be working to retard a country rather than advance it. It's an idea explored in the Gormenghast books, perhaps inspired by the Forbidden City. It's an empirical question.
However, the evidence, it seems to me, supports royalty, beadles and all the rest of it.
Let's take local government. The City of London is clearly doing something right. The successors to Dick Whittington mayor themselves over the world's most attractive financial centre ('despite Brexit').
And constitutional monarchy seems to work too. There are about 200 countries in the world, and Wikipedia tells me that there are 43 monarchies and it lists 36 constitutional monarchies. Which are the most successful countries? Disproportionately, they are constitutional monarchies. Of the top 20 countries in the Human Development Index, most are constitutional monarchies, including both number 1 (Norway) and number 20 (Luxembourg). In fact, the exceptions to the 20 countries are the interesting ones. They are, in order, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore, Ireland, Iceland, the US, Hong Kong, Korea and Israel. Of those, 4 were under the British Crown and one was under the Danish Crown within living memory. Moreover, if you look down the list you will see some indications that monarchies have the edge generally. Take an area of the world, the Caribbean, say, or south east Asia: you might reasonably prefer the Bahamas and Thailands of the region to the Haitis, Cubas, Vietnams and Myanmars.
In short, it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a successful republic on any scale for any great length of time. The US and Switzerland are often regarded as pretty odd places by outsiders: I'd suggest that they have to be in order to manage the mere feat of surviving.
Is there then a trade-off between political progress and social progress? Is there any reason to think that if your country has an unusual degree of interest in who is related to a man who won a great victory at Hafrsfjord (near Stavanger, if you're interested) in 872, or in the exact words used by some Englishmen writing a constitution in the eighteenth century, then it might also be more interested in gender equality and healthcare reform? I don't know, but perhaps there is. Progress requires a stable platform to build on, we might say, or maybe a sense of familiarity and comfort provided by tradition gives people the confidence to experiment in other areas of life. Sometimes what seems to be progress is a 1990s computer system that isn't as good as pen and paper.
At least, let us agree that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Fix the Iron Bridge and the Royal Society's attitude to women, by all means, but don't throw them away. And hereof fail not!
What was possible for the UK in the 1770s is not possible today.
2. The Royal Society was formed in 1662 as the "Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge". It is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. In1665, it published the first issue of Philosophical Transactions, the world's longest-running scientific journal.
Nature published an article in its 8 March 2018 edition on the role of women in the Royal Society and its publications. As you might imagine, it is not an altogether happy story.
But my attention was drawn to this detail:
It seems that data on the Royal Society's editorial records from 1662 to 1990 is readily available because it was written down on paper, but from 1990 it is inaccessible because it has been put on computer.
3. Here is the beginning of an agenda I recently received because I am an elector in the ward of Farringdon Without, part of the local government of the City of London.
The agenda covers the usual kind of local government stuff ...
... before ending in the style it started:
Thanks Beadle! You can be sure that thereof fail shall I not.
Is there a serious point to all this? I think so.
Some people regard these traditions as harmless fun, like the Royal Family: it's something for tourists, a chance for fancy dress, a little bit of tradition, doesn't mean anything, does it?
On the other hand, some people get quite worked up about things like the Royal Family. They see them as symbols of an irrational adherence to feudal traditions that fetishizes class divisions and unjustified deference; something that reveals a deep-seated love of the past, a sick kind of nostalgia for 'happier' days of the Empire, Glorious Isolation (don't mention Brexit!) and so on; in short, something that holds Britain back. If we didn't have 'beadles' and 'wardmotes' with people shouting 'oyez' and 'God save the Queen' then perhaps we could reality in the eye, and turn our attention to real achievements like iron foundries, science and progress for women.
I think those people are on to something. I think they are wrong, but they see a little more of the truth than people who just treat the whole thing as harmless nonsense.
It is not stupid to think that one of the reasons that the Royal Society was a big deal from its founding and has continued as a prestigious organisation to this day is because it is precisely that, i.e. Royal. And perhaps the UK's ability to make vast iron arches would have been maintained if there were a Royal Iron Works. The patronage of royalty - and all the other manifestations of tradition - sprinkles a bit of stardust onto human endeavours as diverse as cutting edge scientific enquiry and hearing updates on the progress of Crossrail.
Or imagine having a relaxed evening with a few friends, in a Pizza Express or Nandos or what have you, and at the end of dinner someone stood up and said, in all seriousness, "Ladies, Gentlemen: the Queen!". It would be incongruous precisely because toasting the Queen - and the Queen herself and the whole edifice of royalty - comes laden with a certain gravity, unearned or not, that changes the dynamic of everything it touches. A toast like that can anger republicans - it could be a provocation. It's not just words or something for tourists.
So, given that that stardust and gravity exists, I don't think it is stupid to think that that it might be working to retard a country rather than advance it. It's an idea explored in the Gormenghast books, perhaps inspired by the Forbidden City. It's an empirical question.
However, the evidence, it seems to me, supports royalty, beadles and all the rest of it.
Let's take local government. The City of London is clearly doing something right. The successors to Dick Whittington mayor themselves over the world's most attractive financial centre ('despite Brexit').
And constitutional monarchy seems to work too. There are about 200 countries in the world, and Wikipedia tells me that there are 43 monarchies and it lists 36 constitutional monarchies. Which are the most successful countries? Disproportionately, they are constitutional monarchies. Of the top 20 countries in the Human Development Index, most are constitutional monarchies, including both number 1 (Norway) and number 20 (Luxembourg). In fact, the exceptions to the 20 countries are the interesting ones. They are, in order, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore, Ireland, Iceland, the US, Hong Kong, Korea and Israel. Of those, 4 were under the British Crown and one was under the Danish Crown within living memory. Moreover, if you look down the list you will see some indications that monarchies have the edge generally. Take an area of the world, the Caribbean, say, or south east Asia: you might reasonably prefer the Bahamas and Thailands of the region to the Haitis, Cubas, Vietnams and Myanmars.
In short, it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a successful republic on any scale for any great length of time. The US and Switzerland are often regarded as pretty odd places by outsiders: I'd suggest that they have to be in order to manage the mere feat of surviving.
Is there then a trade-off between political progress and social progress? Is there any reason to think that if your country has an unusual degree of interest in who is related to a man who won a great victory at Hafrsfjord (near Stavanger, if you're interested) in 872, or in the exact words used by some Englishmen writing a constitution in the eighteenth century, then it might also be more interested in gender equality and healthcare reform? I don't know, but perhaps there is. Progress requires a stable platform to build on, we might say, or maybe a sense of familiarity and comfort provided by tradition gives people the confidence to experiment in other areas of life. Sometimes what seems to be progress is a 1990s computer system that isn't as good as pen and paper.
At least, let us agree that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Fix the Iron Bridge and the Royal Society's attitude to women, by all means, but don't throw them away. And hereof fail not!
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