An ode to regulation

Guardrails | No Mercy / No Malice

People have always been stupid, and everyone is stupid some of the time. (Note: Professor Cipolla’s definition is people whose actions are destructive to themselves and to others.) One of society’s functions is to prevent a tragedy of the commons by building safeguards to protect us from our own stupidity. We usually call this “regulation,” a word Reagan and Thatcher made synonymous with bureaucrats and red tape. Yes, Air Traffic Control delays and the DMV are super annoying, but not crashing into another A-350 on approach to Heathrow, not suffocating as your throat swells from an allergic reaction, and being able to access the funds in your FTX account are all really awesome.

The NHTSA is one of the many boring state and federal agencies critical to a healthy society. Before the Food and Drug Administration, the sale and distribution of food and pharmaceuticals was a free-for-all. The Federal Aviation Administration is the reason your chances of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 3.37 billion. Next time someone tells you they don’t trust government, ask them if they trust cars, food, pain killers, buildings, or airplanes.

Amen.

Peer review

Shakespeare’s First Folio assembled the world’s greatest literature from TheEconomist

In 1612 the founder of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library had even warned against collecting play-texts: worthless “baggage books”.

No freeman (or woman) is free if judged by their peers. [JLR]

No tracksuits here

Mary Quant launched the clothes that made the Sixties swing from The Economist

Not just because they could playfully imitate men, by borrowing men’s tailoring and their cardigans, but mostly because mini-dresses freed them to move. She designed them, she said, to be alive in. More important still, high hemlines, paired with opaque tights, let girls run for the bus in order to get to work. You could never run for the bus in a Dior dress. In Quant, women felt they could leave the house and dare a different life.

Not like Everest at all

Phyllida Barlow had a lifetime of adventure making art | The Economist

Why do humans make sculpture? George Mallory is supposed to have said he wanted to climb Mount Everest simply because it was there. Sculpture’s special power, by contrast—the reason why Phyllida Barlow made sculpture at all—is that it isn’t there. That was where her adventure began.

More airline/pilot vs medicine/doctor metaphors

Cait Hewitt: ‘I hope the era of aviation exceptionalism is over’ | Financial Times

This year, the British government proudly unveiled an “ambitious” plan to make airports in England net zero by 2040. Only one problem: the target does not include the actual flights, which account for 95 per cent of airports’ emissions.

But Rishi Sunak’s government champions “guilt-free flying”: its so-called Jet Zero strategy is built on “ambitious” assumptions of future technology. Here Hewitt, mild-mannered, stretches to exasperation. “If you went to the doctor as a smoker, and said, ‘What shall I do?’ And the doctor said, ‘I think you should carry on with your 40-a-day habit, because I’m a very optimistic person, I believe in future there’s going to be some technology that will allow us to replace your lungs.’ Would you describe that person as ambitious or just completely reckless?”

UK exceptionalism

The UK accounts for 2 per cent of global manufacturing and 2 per cent of global R&D. You’re not a science superpower if you do 2 per cent…You can’t go around claiming that in seven years’ time the UK is going to be a climate leader or leader in green tech, it just doesn’t make sense

The British economy needs to follow a policy of improvement, not a policy of chest-beating and claiming to be on the cusp of transformative breakthroughs.

David Edgerton, the historian of science and technology, quoted in The New Statesman 14-20 July 2023 page 143

UK Academia

UK universities set to secure big cut in pensions bill | Financial Times

Comment by shug4476 in response to the above article

Academia…. has become a profession for the rich and the desperate.

Too true. Hard to recommend.

Rees’s law of education

(After a John Hennessy quote that the time to assess a Stanford degree is ten years (or more?) after graduation).

Any real education is incapable of a robust widely accepted psychometric assessment of the sort that will satisfy a professional regulator.

Another formulation:

If you can reliably assess knowledge within a standardised and regulated framework it is not education.

Call my agent

Friday 7 July, 2023 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1

(The following via John Naughton — link above. Original report in the Irish Times)

Fintan O’Toole on RTE’s slow-rolling crisis.

JN: RTE is Ireland’s national broadcaster and it’s now embroiled in an epic crisis because of revelations about its chaotic management, casual ethics and undercover payments to a leading broadcasting celebrity named Ryan Tubridy. The trigger point for the crisis was the discovery of undercover payments made to Tubridy during the Covid lockdown to compensate him for reductions in his non-broadcasting income caused by the pandemic.

JN: Since public money is involved, the Republic’s legislators opened hearings on the matter, which meant that from Day One my fellow-citizens have been enthralled (and increasingly enraged) by daily revelations about the managerial chaos, ineptitude and arrogance that prevailed in the country’s leading media organisation.

JN:From the outset, though, Tubridy maintained an air of high-minded detachment. All of those non-disclosed payments had been negotiated by his agent, Noel Kelly, disclosed to the revenue authorities, and the tax due on them had been duly paid. “Nothing to see here: any questions see my agent” was the general tenor of his responses.

JN: This pose has exasperated Fintan O’Toole, Ireland’s leading opinion columnist, and he penned a terrific column about it the other day. Like most of his stuff it is hidden behind the Irish Times’s paywall, but since I pay through the nose for a subscription I think it’s time some of his high-octane indignation got a wider airing. So here goes…

He starts with a story about Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s greatest poet since Yeats.

In 1981, Seamus Heaney wrote to his American agent, Selma Warner, about the fees she was demanding for readings by him on US campuses. He was angry because they were too high.

Heaney was not yet quite as famous as he would become, but his reputation was already very considerable and he was a mesmerising performer of his own work. Warner had started to ask for $1,000 for a reading – the equivalent of about $3,300 today.

Heaney’s complaint was that this was too much money:

“I do not wish to be a $1,000 speaker. Apart from my moral scruples about whether any speaker or reader is worth anything like that, I do not wish to become a freak among my poet friends, or to press the budgets of departments of literature at a time when the money for education is drying up in the United States.”

Which later brings him (FO’T) to Tubridy:

Let’s not succumb to “my agent made me do it” stories. Agents, however colourful and assertive, are intermediaries: these deals were done between RTÉ and Tubridy.

It was Tubridy’s job to have the “moral scruples”. Kelly is not his Father Confessor – he’s his attack dog. It is always up to the conscience of the client as to whether the dog should be called off before he bites off any particular pound of flesh.

Remember Johnson’s line: no official told me having a piss-up was against the law.

To be a daisy

Who could not love the fact that a “daisy” gets its name from being the “day’s eye”, because the flower opens in sunlight?

Why does the commonest verb in English—“to be”—have the wildly irregular conjugation am-is-are-was-were? Nobody would design such a verb, and indeed no one did. It is in fact a mash-up of three proto-Germanic roots, one of which produced am-is-are, one of which yielded was-were (replacing the past tense of the am-is group, in a process called suppletion), and one resulting in be itself.

It is the duck-billed platypus of verbs, an odd hybrid of features.

But just as evolutionary biology explains the platypus, historical linguistics shows how the three verbs piled up on each other.

Johnson in the Economist