I clicked on a link, and then saw this.

But what a business model

Marcel Proust quote: For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke…

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

Marcel Proust

Crony capitalism (ad nauseam)

Another terrific post from Scott Galloway.

I’m Not Done Yet! | No Mercy / No Malice

The capital structure of private firms is meant to balance upside and downside. CNBC/Trump want to protect current equity holders at the expense of future generations with rescue packages that explode the deficit. They also want to protect airlines, who spent $45 billion on buybacks and now want a $54 billion bailout, disincentivizing other firms (e.g., Berkshire Hathaway) that have built huge cash piles foregoing current returns. [Ed. note: Airlines ultimately received approximately $50 billion.]

The rescue package should protect people, not businesses. From 2017 to 2019, the CEOs of Delta, American, United, and Carnival Cruises earned over $150 million in compensation. But, now … “We’re in this together” (i.e., “bail our asses out”).

He goes on:

Since 2000, U.S. airlines have declared bankruptcy 66 times. Despite the obvious vulnerability of the sector, boards/CEOs of the six largest airlines have spent 96 percent of their free cash flow on share buybacks, bolstering the share price and compensation of management … who now want a bailout. They should be allowed to fail. Bondholders will own the firms. Ships and planes will continue to float and fly, and there will still be a steel tube with recirculated air waiting for you post-molestation by Roy from TSA.

A rationale for the dismal science

Patrick Collison has a Few Questions for Tyler (Ep. 21 — Live at Stripe) | by Mercatus Center | Conversations with Tyler | Medium

TYLER COWEN: Frank Knight once said something wise, maybe overstated, but he said, “The main function of economics was to offset the stupid theorizing of other people.” So it’s very useful as a form of discipline. And economics is a way of thinking — it’s very useful for inoculating you against other kinds of mistakes, even though in some ways, it may be a mistake itself.

Outsourcing student learning

Chegg: a $12 billion headache for academic integrity? | Times Higher Education (THE)

Chegg is a site that provides different types of educational material. But it also has a facility that allows students to fire off a question and get an answer within…well, the timeframe of some online exams.

Cath Ellis, associate dean (education) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney, agreed. While the site was not a typical essay mill – where students pay for someone else to write an essay for them – it “falls squarely into what we have referred to in our research as a ‘place where students outsource their learning’” [emphasis added].

A deeper problem, IMHO, is the impersonal nature of higher education, and the lack of knowledge by the faculty of student achievement.

We travelled so far we hit our start point.

Half a dozen little 2021 predictions about life after COVID-19 | I, Cringely

The pandemic of 1918 was ended by social distancing, hand washing, and face masks. The fact that we forgot at first the importance of face masks shows just how far beyond the Spanish Flu we were able to get in 100 years — far enough to forget how to save our own lives. The current pandemic is receding thanks to social distancing, hand washing, face masks, and vaccines. Vaccines are the technology that wasn’t available in 1918 and are what will keep our total death rate below 1918’s 0.65 percent. By the way, 0.65 percent of 331 million would be 2,151,500 deaths. If we can get out of this thing with only the loss of, say, 900,000 people (that’s my guess) then vaccines will have saved 1.25 million lives.

PE — no, not Pulmonary Embolism, but something as dangerous

Private Equity and Physician Medical Practices — Navigating a Changing Ecosystem | NEJM

Finally, physicians should be aware that private equity’s growth is emblematic of broader disruptions in the physician-practice ecosystem and is a symptom of medicine’s transformation into a corporate enterprise. For some practices, outside investment may help facilitate growth and extend a lifeline that allows them to compete with larger players in an increasingly consolidated market. But this trend may also contribute to practices getting squeezed. As more investors enter health care and drive value creation, it’s worth considering for whom value is being created. How physicians respond — and the extent to which they retain core values in the service of patients — will ultimately determine the ecosystem’s resilience in the face of stressors [emphasis added]

I wish it were so (easy)

The Economist | The race to zero

The most refreshing aspect of this book is its bracing mix of cold-eyed realism and number-crunched optimism. Mr Gates reveals that when he attended the un’s landmark Paris summit on climate change in 2015, he had serious doubts about mankind’s willingness to take on this Herculean task: “Can we really do this?” Even now, after making the case for why the world must do so, and urgently, he wonders if the climate challenge will be harder than putting “a computer on every desk and in every home”.

That is a useful analogy, for the techno-Utopian vision of a global internet seemed as impossible to achieve a few decades ago as solving the climate crisis does now. Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, a pioneering computer firm, once stated flatly: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Yet before long the digital revolution succeeded—because of a happy convergence of top-down forces and disruptions from below.

University rankings as geopolitics

Link

The high-stakes pursuit of bragging rights is distorting universities’ missions, favoring research over teaching and science over the humanities, said Ellen Hazelkorn, director of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

“It’s all about national prestige,” said Hazelkorn, who has written widely about rankings. “Rankings are less about students and more about geopolitics.”

Even less about students

‘Hard choices’ ahead as Spence mulls UCL’s sustainability | Times Higher Education (THE)

But the new president of UCL said that “hard choices” would have to be made about the scope of the university’s activities if it was not to become a 50,000-student campus over the next few years.

UCL’s recent expansion — it had just 17,000 students as recently as 2005 but is now the biggest in the UK apart from the Open University — has been criticised by some scholars over its potential impact on academic quality and financial stability.

This has little to do with education and perhaps even less to do with students.

This graph is from the Economist. The article is titled English higher education’s value-for-money problem. Indeed.

All is not well.

Cal Tech and the eunuchs of science

Catchy title.

Founded (1891) as Throop University [Cal Tech], a coeducational institution for manual training and basic education from fifth grade through college, it reinvented itself several years later as all-male Throop College of Technology (with a mission of intellectual excellence) and then assumed its current name in 1921.

In the 1960s, the undergraduates began lobbying the administration to admit women, believing that this would promote the “humanization of students.” Students complained of a sterile curriculum and social wasteland that created “eunuchs of science.”

After a 1967 national survey of rising sophomores revealed that Caltech students were much less happy with campus life than those elsewhere, an ad hoc faculty committee examined student experiences during their first two years.

The committee soon recommended that Caltech admit female undergraduates, arguing that discrimination against women is “morally unjustifiable.” A student poll in fall 1967 found 79% supported that change, and a month later the Faculty Board voted 50 to 10 to recommend to the administration and trustees to “proceed with all deliberate speed toward the admission of women undergraduates.”

A mouth without a brain: sounds familiar.

Robo-writers: the rise and risks of language-generating AI

In June 2020, a new and powerful artificial intelligence (AI) began dazzling technologists in Silicon Valley. Called GPT-3 and created by the research firm OpenAI in San Francisco, California, it was the latest and most powerful in a series of ‘large language models’: AIs that generate fluent streams of text after imbibing billions of words from books, articles and websites. GPT-3 had been trained on around 200 billion words, at an estimated cost of tens of millions of dollars.

Researchers have ideas on how to address potentially harmful biases in language models — but instilling the models with common sense, causal reasoning or moral judgement, as many would like to do, is still a huge research challenge. “What we have today”, Choi says, “is essentially a mouth without a brain.”

I know a few people like that.

Just 7%

The Economist | Shelter from the storm

At its most basic, the welfare state provides some form of social security and poverty relief. In 1990 Gosta Esping-Andersen, a political scientist, identified three models: market-oriented in Anglophone countries, where the state plays a “residual” role; family-oriented in mainland Europe, where the state and employers play a supporting role; and state-oriented for the Scandinavians, with universal protections and services. The balance between state, market and family shifts over the course of people’s lives, but most take out about as much as they put in (in any year 36% of Britons receive more than they pay in taxes, but over their lifetimes only 7% do).

Not the Mail or the Telegraph, then.

Making progress

I quote from just two of many good letters in the Economist of last week. The first, is the mess that Cummings has bequeathed. The second, how it seems our humanities masters are ignorant about, well, the humanities.

By definition, “blue skies research” is driven by curiosity, without any obvious practical implications (“Blue skies ahead”, February 6th). Yet the aim of Britain’s new Advanced Research Projects Agency is to develop proposals that give a payout to the economy. The left field nature of paradigm-changing scientific discoveries and their long path to being actually applied mean that no manager at arpa would understand the impact of such research. Who, for example, would have predicted that understanding blood-clotting in the horseshoe crab would end up protecting our drug supply from bacterial contaminants, including covid-19 vaccines?

Professor Brian Stramer, the author of the above, quotes a beautiful phrase from the father of modern neuroscience, Ramon y Cajal, who, in 1897, noted the preoccupation with applied research and ignorance of the “mysterious threads that bind the factory to the laboratory” [emphasis added]. If you know anything about Cajal’s work, the metaphor does not surprise.

The second letter is from Professor Jonathan Michie, who, if I am correct, has first hand familial experience of the example he quotes.

Your ingredients for innovation include “good education” (“How to make sparks fly”, February 27th). Quite so. “Good” should mean broad based, crossing disciplinary ranges, and lifelong. This needs stressing, as governments too often take a narrow view, emphasising skills training, stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and education ending at age 18 or 21. When Britain faced its ultimate stem-based challenge, breaking the Nazi codes at Bletchley, which included developing the world’s first digital programmable computer, researchers were recruited from across the disciplinary spectrum.

On bending the knee

The Economist | The pain of displacement

I always read the Economist by starting with the obituary. Last week’s was about Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian poet. The prose was fitting, too.

As a lover of freedom, he could not join a party or pledge allegiance to anyone: all you need to make a tyrant, he wrote, “is a single bend of the knee”.

“I rubbed the leaf of an orange in my hands/As I had been told to do/So that I could smell its scent/but before my hand could reach my nose/I had lost my home and become a refugee.”

On being the right size

On being the right size

In the early 20th century, big companies were synonymous with efficiency. In the late 20th century they were synonymous with inefficiency.

Paul Graham, The Refragmentation, 2016

Student loans (again)

The latest estimates on the loan system from London Economics suggest that 53.9 per cent of the money loaned out will be written off, 88.2 per cent of graduates will still be paying when the 30-year write off kicks in, and 33 per cent of graduates will never make any repayment. With several years of sluggish growth now forecasted, and a long road ahead for the post-Covid recovery, graduate repayments are likely to fall further in coming years, giving the Treasury even more reason to worry about the unique way it funds higher education — particularly as demand for universities continues to increase while the costs per student are rising.

GP land

David Oliver: We can support primary care without blaming hospital doctors | The BMJ

Primary care (GPs and other practice staff—notably nurses) does around 90% of NHS patient contacts for about 10% of the budget and an annual budget of around £155 (€179; $217) per patient on the practice list. A 2019 study in The BMJ compared 11 high-income countries and found that UK GPs saw patients at twice the speed of those in the other nations. Surveys show an average of 41 patient contacts a day, and 10% of GPs see 60 or more.4

The number of GPs barely grew during 2010-15, and the Nuffield Trust has reported nearly 2000 fewer permanent, qualified GPs in 2020 than in 2015 despite a growing population and demand. Community nurse numbers have also fallen, and social care and local government budgets have been cut. The UK has some of the lowest numbers of hospital beds per capita in the world, and ever increasing activity means ever faster patient transfers into the community and more pressure to keep patients at home.

It will get worse before it gets better. Scrub that. Not in my lifetime. Scrub that. Perhaps it will not get better. (This is before you add in all the ‘professional’ and ‘technical’ debt the NHS has accrued over the last thirty years.)

Quelle surprise!

Union condemns Liverpool’s ‘rank and yank’ science cuts plan | Times Higher Education (THE)

Scientists at the University of Liverpool face being made redundant based on research grant income and citation impact scores, a union has claimed.

The institution is poised to cut 47 research jobs from its Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, with compulsory redundancies due to be made after voluntary severance packages were rejected.

The cuts are being made as part of Project Shape, which aims to realign the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences “in order to help tackle the extreme health inequalities and unmet health needs in the Liverpool city region”.[emphasis added].

Speechless.

A truly fluent narrative.

Squandering trust is no route to a ‘Global Britain’ | Financial Times

True, the [Global Britain] plans include some eye-catching proposals for new military technologies in the spheres of cyber, drones and space. These are largely chaff. Whitehall insiders say that overall, the document offers a fluent narrative largely detached from real strategic purpose [emphasis added].

Neat phrase. Cock-up, as usual.

Via John Naughton’s newsletter, I learned that Jonathan Sternberg died. I did not know him, having only come across his name in Tara Westover’s book Educated and in the LRB. There are also some words about him on the Cambridge Faculty of History page. Both sets of quotes say a lot about education when it is practiced by a master with a pupil keen to learn.

Tara Westover:

‘I am Professor Steinberg,’ he said. ‘What would you like to read?’

‘For two months I had weekly meetings with Professor Steinberg. I was never assigned readings. We read only what I asked to read, whether it was a book or a page. None of my professors at BYU had examined my writing the way Professor Steinberg did. No comma, no period, no adjective or adverb was beneath his interest. He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence, a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction.’

‘After I’ve been meeting with Professor Steinberg for a month, he suggested I write an essay comparing Edmund Burke with Publius, the persona under which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay had written the Federalist papers.’

‘I finished the essay and sent it to Professor Steinberg. Two days later, when I arrived for our meeting, he was subdued. He peered at me from across the room. I waited for him to say the essay was a disaster, the product of an ignorant mind, that it had overreached, drawn to many conclusions from too little material.’

“I have been teaching in Cambridge for 30 years,” he said. “And this is one of the best essays I’ve read.” I was prepared for insults but not for this.

At my next supervision, Professor Steinberg said that when I apply for graduate school, he would make sure I was accepted to whatever institution I chose. “Have you visited Harvard?” he said. “Or perhaps you prefer Cambridge?”…

“I can’t go,” I said. “I can’t pay the fees.” “Let me worry about the fees,” Professor Steinbeck said.

And from Regius Professor Christopher Clark:

Jonathan said that there are three phases in learning how to teach history:

‘Phase 1: you learn the history.

Phase 2: you learn to teach the history.

Phase 3: you learn to teach the people.’

To be supervised by Jonathan was an illuminating and, for some, life-changing experience.

As a teacher, Jonathan was something of a cult figure, both as a lecturer and as a supervisor. There was a sense of occasion around a Jonathan Steinberg lecture. One felt grateful to be in the room.

Teaching is much degraded in many modern UK universities. It remains the greatest multiplier — to use a concept from economics— of human flourishing.

Only now do I get it.

Michael Chabon writing in the NYRB in eight years ago:

[The Film Worlds of Wes Anderson | by Michael Chabon | The New York Review of Books](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/03/07/film-worlds-wes-anderson/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Saturday%20Longread%20215&utm_content=Saturday%20Longread%20215+Version+B+CID_6bde7e16baa8a5fb9813ae90820b9f63&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Keep%20reading)

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”

There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.

Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.

For some reason — COVID of course — I keep coming back to perhaps the greatest vaccine success ever: the eradication of smallpox (here, here and here). But the figures quoted by Scott Galloway make you sit up and notice both the magic — and value — of science.

Values in America – Scott Galloway on recasting American individualism and institutions | By Invitation | The Economist

International bodies are immolated. Consider the World Health Organisation. Mr Trump’s decision to pull America out of the WHO in the midst of a pandemic (reversed under President Joe Biden) was galling, particularly as the WHO is responsible for one of humanity’s greatest public-health accomplishments: the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s. To appreciate the magnitude of this, Google images of “smallpox” and glimpse the horror that once killed millions each year. It was a victory for co-operative, state-funded projects and it cost a mere $300m. By one estimate, America, the largest contributor, recoups that value every 26 days from savings in vaccinations, lost work and other costs. [emphasis added]

On long hair and being irrevelant

Thirty years ago[now 40], scientists who studied climate change, and I am one of them, tended to have long hair and very colourful socks. We were regarded as harmless but irrelevant. But the serendipitous investment in their work revealed processes that we now recognise as threatening the future of human society, and the successors to those scientists are playing a crucial role in assessing how we need to adapt.

Geoffrey Boulton

I think you could see the same dress sense in the golden ages of molecular biology and computing.

Another snippet from a wonderful article (and previous aside).