I am probably biased as my mother was Irish, one of a large O’Mahony clan who were born in or around Cork. She moved to Dublin in her early teens, crossed the water in 1941, and, a few years later, after meeting a Welshman from Neath, set up home together in Cardiff. Cardiff had a long-established Irish community, one that was good at replenishing itself with fresh blood from the motherland, in tune with the rhythms of economic cycles. I was sent to a Christian Brothers’ school where many of the brothers were Irish exports. In junior school, at least, I can remember having some green plant pinned to my lapels on March 17. I didn’t stand out, many of the other kids were similarly tattooed. If I count my extended family — including my brother — they mainly reside across the water.

Without any grand theory at hand I have always thought there must be something special about schooling in Ireland, even if the supposed benefits are not intentional, nor shared equally. Historically, there are many bad things; this is well known. But if I cast an eye over medics who I judge to write deeply about medicine, there is a disproportionate number of Irish doctors.

Anthony Clare was the first example I came across. I was a wannabe psychiatrist when I was a medical student in Newcastle, and I spent undoubtedly the most enjoyable three months of my undergraduate medical course, in Edinburgh, on an elective on the unit headed by Prof Bob Kendell. For most of this time, since it was summer, there were no Edinburgh students, and so I was viewed by the staff as useful. One of the tragedies of being a medical student nowadays is that you don’t feel useful simply because for most of the time you are not useful. The thousand-year-old laws that guide apprenticeship learning have not so much been forgotten but well and truly trashed.

Clare wrote a wonderful book Psychiatry in Dissent when he was still a Senior Registrar at the Maudsley. Despite the title, it was a calm and measured critique of medicine and psychiatry. Reading it felt dangerous, but more than that, it was the voice of quiet reason and a call to arms. It stands as an example of the difference between a medical education and a medical training. The GMC don’t do the former, nor does the NHS.

Another Irish psychiatrist whose writings I have admired is David Healy. Healy is now in Canada and, as far as I can see, has been blackballed by the UK medical and psychiatric establishment. His three-volume history of Psychopharmacology (The Psychopharmacologists) is a masterpiece. Sam Shuster was the first person to introduce me — over coffee— to how many of the revolutionary drugs that changed medicine in the middle of the last century were developed, but Healy’s scholarship cast it in a larger and richer framework. Healy has done lots of other things, too, and possesses a well of moral courage that puts to shame most of the so-called leaders of the profession.

James McCormick was a professor of general practice at Trinity, in Dublin. I first came across him when he contributed a chapter to Bruce Charlton’s and Robert Downie’s book on Medical Education (The Making of a Doctor: Medical Education in Theory and Practice). I have only recently returned to this book, but reading his chapter is disturbing because it makes you shocked that you can ever have been taken in by the pabulum of the modern world of ‘primary care’ and its apologists. The late and singular Petr Skrabenek found his academic home with McCormick in Trinity. Petr was on holiday in Ireland when the Russian tanks rolled into his hometown of Prague n 1968. Yes, not Irish, but if you read his writings about medicine (check out Wikipedia), and have dipped into Havel and Flann O’Brien, you see he is of that place.

Seamus O’Mahony, a ‘Cork-man’, who used to work in Edinburgh before returning to Ireland, has published two books about medicine. The first — which I haven’t read — is named The Way We Die Now. His more recent book, published in 2019, is titled Can Medicine Be Cured? The full title is Can Medicine Be Cured?: The Corruption of a Profession. You get the message, and the jury didn’t take long to realise which clause required an affirmative verdict.

The book covers a lot of ground, yet the pages fly by. There are chapters on how much medical research is dysfunctional — when it is not criminal; on the corruption of the academy; and the oft hidden problems of combining the practice of science and medicine. He talks about pharma (of course), the invention of disease (there isn’t enough money in treating the sick, we need to treat the non-sick), the McNamara fallacy (data, just data, dear boy), and the never-ending bloody ‘War on Cancer’. He picks apart the lazy confusion between needs, wants, and consumerism, and highlights the fact that the directionless NHS is run by politicians who want to do everything— except politics: they just want to be loved. Meanwhile, the medics tired of the ever faddish evidence-based medicine turned to sentimentality-based medicine allowing ‘empathy’ and superstition to ride roughshod over the ability to reason about the natural world, and their patients. Among doctors and medical students, a facile sense of feeling good about yourself has overtaken technical mastery, allowing all to wallow in kumbaya around the campfire they now pretend to share with their charges. Not so. If doctors were once labelled as priests with a stethoscope, we have cast our tool away.

O’Mahony writes well. I particularly liked his metaphors that are familiar to anybody brought up in Catholicism even if they left the bus before it (and they) returned to the terminus. A few examples:

The decadence of contemporary biomedical science has a historic parallel in the mediaeval pre-Reformation papacy. Both began with high ideals. Both were taken over by careerists who corrupted these ideals, while simultaneously paid lip-service to them. Both saw the trappings of worldly success as more important than the original ideal. Both created a self-serving high priesthood. The agenda for the profession is set by an academic elite (the hierarchy of bishops and cardinals), all the day-to-day work is done by low status GPs and hospital doctors (curates, monks). This elite, despite having little to do with actual patient care, is immensely powerful in the appointment of doctors.”

The Czech polymath and contrarian Peter Skrabanek (1940–94) taught these skills at Trinity College Dublin medical school during the 1980s and early 1990s, and lamented that “my course on the critical appraisal evidence for medical students can be compared to a course on miracles by a Humean sceptic for prospective priests in a theological seminary”.

And on attending a consensus conference of medical experts in Salerno (you only have a consensus when there bloody-well isn’t any…).

I found a picture online of the experts gathered at Salermo, and was reminded of a fresco in the Sistine chapel depicting the first Council of Nicea in A.D. 325. The council was convened by the Emperor Constantine to establish doctrinal orthodoxy within the early Christian Church. The industry-sponsored get-together in Salerno had similar aims.… The aim is expansionist: the establishment of a new disease by consensus statement, the Big Science equivalent of a papal bull. Non-coeliac gluten sensitivity has been decreed by this edict, just as papal infallibility was decreed by the first Vatican Council in 1870.

As for the sick and needy

Meanwhile, the sick languish. The population are subjected to more and more screening programs (for breast cancer, cervical cancer, colon cancer, high blood pressure, cholesterol levels etc.), but if they become acutely ill and need to go to hospital, it is likely that they will spend hours on a trolley in an emergency department. When they are finally admitted to a ward, it is often chaotic, squalid and understaffed. Hospices have to rely on charity just to keep going, and have so few beds that ten times as many people die in general hospitals than hospices.

And, as for David Cameron (lol!) and his plans to fund cancer drugs that were rejected by NICE, well, he was a nice (not NICE) guy, and he was on the side of the people. O’Mahony points out that this money alone would have funded all UK hospices for over a year.

Populism doesn’t cure cancer, but it trumps justice, evidence and fairness every time.

Along with Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, O’Mahony’s book deserves to become a classic. Buy it and read it. Just don’t turn it into a multiple-choice exam. A brave medical school might even add it to the freshers’ pack — well, I can still dream.

The photo, facing towards Kerry, is from Penglas, a mainly Welsh hamlet in West Cork.

Machines #1: A crisis of connoisseurship

The Economist | Computer says no

Conventional scholarship involves the study of aesthetics, style and historical records. The oeuvre of a great painter has traditionally been defined by a scholarly panel that maintains a definitive catalogue of the artist’s authentic works. The Corpus Rubenianum, for instance, is an Antwerp-based body that adjudicates the work of Peter Paul Rubens; it reveres the legacy of Ludwig Burchard, a German-born expert who died in 1960. Yet such scholarly deference can be excessive: many of Burchard’s attributions have turned out to be mistaken, as the Rubenianum has quietly acknowledged. “There is no question that more scientific examination is needed” to clean up the Flemish master’s oeuvre, says Kasia Pisarek, a Polish-born British art scholar, whose doctoral thesis traces what she calls a crisis of connoisseurship.

Machines #2: A crisis for pollers

Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images | Scientific Reports

Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals’ political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ… Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.

Machines #3: A crisis in a company

Paul Taylor · Insanely Complicated, Hopelessly Inadequate · LRB 21 January 2021

Last year, Google’s work on natural language processing was the subject of a piece co-written by Timnit Gebru, one of the leaders of its ‘ethical AI’ team. The article expressed concerns about the work’s carbon footprint — the extraordinary scale of computation involved means that the carbon dioxide emitted in training Transformer is equivalent to 288 transatlantic flights — and about the way it looks at language. Because it is trained on text that Google harvests from the internet, its calculations reflect the way language has been used in the past or is used now. The problem isn’t just that its outputs therefore reflect our biases and prejudices, but that they crystallise them and, because the programs are inscrutable, conceal them. The paper also discusses the opportunity cost involved in pursuing this approach …

Google’s response was to shoot the messenger, sacking Gebru and then claiming she had resigned. Given that one very dangerous aspect of AI is that it amplifies the already extraordinary power of a very small number of massive corporations, this authoritarian behaviour is alarming. On the other hand, one of its immediate effects has been to galvanise workers at Google into forming a trade union.

Celtic feelings… I know thee well.

The ‘Ulysses’ trial still resonates 100 years on

When Ulysses eventually found a publisher — in Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare & Co in Paris — in 1922, it was promptly banned in the UK until 1936. In the US, its publication was finally legalised in 1933, after a long campaign by Morris Ernst, legal counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, against efforts by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and others. Judge Woolsey, delivering his opinion on United States vs One Book Called Ulysses, stated his defence of Joyce: “In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.”

Celtic words

Cartographers of Stone and Air | by Colin Thubron | The New York Review of Books

Tim Robinson, an English writer, died from Covid-19 in April at the age of eighty-five. For more than forty years he made an intensive study of the region that many conceive as Ireland’s heart: Connemara.

His words:

History has rhythms, tunes and even harmonies; but the sound of the past is an agonistic multiplicity. Sometimes, rarely, a scrap of a voice can be caught from the universal damage, but it may only be an artefact of the imagination, a confection of rumours. Chance decides what is obliterated and what survives if only to be distorted and misheard.

Irish placenames dry out when anglicized, like twigs snapped off from a tree. And frequently the places too are degraded, left open to exploitation, for lack of a comprehensible name to point out their natures or recall their histories.

No free lunch

Arianne Shahvisi | No such thing as a free lunch · LRB 12 January 2021

The UK’s free school meals programme ensures that children from deprived households get at least one meal a day and costs the government £600 million a year. (‘Eat Out to Help Out’, which ran for just a month and subsidised restaurant meals, cost £849 million.) According to the Sustainable Food Trust, malnutrition costs the UK £17 billion a year, as well as leaving people desperate, miserable, reduced to bellies with a few accessory organs.

STEM stupidity

Stupid | No Mercy / No Malice

Mark Zuckerberg is what happens when you replace civics with computer science.

Eureka… if not the bath

New Year Monday Note. | Jean-Louis Gassée | Jan, 2021

In the shower, all ideas look good.

Post-modem

Universities challenged: critical theory and culture wars | Financial Times

A comment about the above article:

As a full professor in a similar situation, a humanities department in a British teaching factory (sorry major research university) I completely agree with Musidorus.

Girl-talk

The Economist | Awesome, weird and everything else

Ironically, some old gender stereotypes may now be helping girls. When girls are toddlers they are read to more than boys. Their fathers are five times more likely to sing or whistle to them and are more likely to speak to them about emotions, including sadness. Their mothers are more likely to use complex vocabulary with them. Most of this gives girls a leg up in a world that increasingly prizes “soft skills”. Girls still have less leisure time than boys, but nowadays that is primarily because they spend more time on homework and grooming, rather than an unfair division of chores. And in the time left for themselves they have far more freedom.

The one good thing about COVID-19 is that it’s good for nature and the environment and dolphins,” says Sarah, “but I wish it wouldn’t kill so many people in the process.”

COVID-19 aware

David Hume — Wikipedia

He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735 that “there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books”. He did not graduate.

Nor did I ever submit my PhD. As David Hubel once said, the great advantage of an MD degree was (then) being able to avoid having to gain a PhD credential.

KPIs

The crisis within Britain’s care system | Financial Times

From a review of Madeleine Bunting’s Labour of Love in the FT.

Bunting deplores the marketisation of care, in which looking after others is reduced to a commodity requiring specific outputs. (I was reminded of the nurse who, within minutes of my mother’s death, handed us a feedback form on which we were apparently to rate her handling of my mother’s closing moments.)

On Human Remains and NHS management

The Economist | Straight talking

Other changes are required to end the gobbledygook that plagued the previous regime. We will no longer have a “human resources” department: our employees are people, not resources. That section has been renamed personnel.

A few years back I read how the hospital I worked in considered FY1 doctors ward resources. They would not work for and learn from a particular group of more senior doctors (this after all is supposed to be an apprentice system) but be a generic utility for whatever patients were placed on that ward. At once, all we know about learning, security and safety was thrown out the window. As one of my colleagues told me, based on his experience of having to treat a senior hospital manager, many know next to nothing of how medicine works. This form of competence inversion is known as Putt’s law.

Putt’s Law and the Successful Technocrat

“Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.” Putt’s Corollary: “Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion.” with incompetence being “flushed out of the lower levels” of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual technology while those without technical competence move into management…”

Bullshit

The Economist | The wisdom of Scrooge

The Christmas Economist was in fine form — at least, better than the state the UK finds itself in.

Today almost everything is the opposite of what it pretends to be. Companies claim that they are devoted to advancing gay rights, promoting multiculturalism or uniting the world in a Kumbaya sing-along, when they are in fact singlemindedly maximising profits. Chief executives claim that they are ever-so-humble “team leaders”—in homage to another great Dickens invention, the unctuous Uriah Heep—when they are actually creaming off an unprecedented share of corporate cash. Private schools such as Eton claim that they are in the business of promoting “diversity” and “inclusivity” even as they charge £42,000 a year. Future historians seeking to sum up our era may well call it “the age of humbug”…

 

Whether the purveyors of this sanctimonious guff actually believe it, or whether it is cynical doublespeak, is immaterial. Either way, spin doctors, sycophants and so-called thought leaders pump noxious quantities of it into the atmosphere. The nation is in desperate need of a modern-day Dickens to clear the air. Until one emerges, Britons should repeat his great creation’s Christmas mantra in every season: “Bah, humbug!”

COVID

UK COVID-19 public inquiry needed to learn lessons and save lives – The Lancet

It is hard not to be moved nor not be angry on reading the editorial in this week’s Lancet, written by three members of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group.

The UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has previously suggested that an immediate public inquiry into the government’s handling of COVID-19 would be a distraction7 or diversion of resources in the fight against COVID-19. We have long proposed that quite the opposite is true: an effective rapid review phase would be an essential element in combating COVID-19.

An independent and judge-led statutory public inquiry with a swift interim review would yield lessons that can be applied immediately and help prevent deaths in this tough winter period in the UK. Such a rapid review would help to minimise further loss of life now and in the event of future pandemics. In the wake of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster on April 15, 1989, for example, the Inquiry of Lord Justice Taylor delivered interim findings within 11 weeks, allowing life-saving measures to be introduced in stadiums ahead of the next football season.

I will quote Max Hastings, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard, and a distinguished military historian, writing in the Guardian many years ago. He was describing how he had overruled some of his own journalists who had suspected Peter Mandelson of telling lies.

I say this with regret. I am more instinctively supportive of institutions, less iconoclastic, than most of the people who write for the Guardian, never mind read it. I am a small “c” conservative, who started out as a newspaper editor 18 years ago much influenced by a remark Robin Day once made to me: “Even when I am giving politicians a hard time on camera,” he said, “I try to remember that they are trying to do something very difficult – govern the country.” Yet over the years that followed, I came to believe that for working journalists the late Nicholas Tomalin’s words, offered before I took off for Vietnam for the first time back in 1970, are more relevant: “they lie”, he said. “Never forget that they lie, they lie, they lie.” Max Hastings

Two of Hasting’s journalists at the Evening Standard were investigating the funds Peter Mandelson had used to purchase a house.

One morning, Peter Mandelson rang me at the Evening Standard. “Some of your journalists are investigating my house purchase,” he said. “It really is nonsense. There’s no story about where I got the funds. I’m buying the house with family money.”

I knew nothing about any of this, but went out on the newsroom floor and asked some questions. Two of our writers were indeed probing Mandelson’s house purchase. Forget it, I said. Mandelson assures me there is no story. Our journalists remonstrated: I was mad to believe a word Mandelson said. I responded: “Any politician who makes a private call to an editor has a right to be believed until he is proved a liar.” We dropped the story.

Several months later

…when the Mandelson story hit the headlines, I faced a reproachful morning editorial conference. A few minutes later, the secretary of state for industry called. “What do I have to do to convince you I’m not a crook ?” he said.

I answered: “Your problem, Peter, is not to convince me that you are not a crook, but that you are not a liar.”

The default, and most sensible course of action, is to assume that the government and many of those who answer directly to the government have lied and will continue to lie.

Canadian’s tolerance of mediocrity

Where Health Care Is a Human Right | by Nathan Whitlock | The New York Review of Books

An article discussing Canadian health care with echoes of the UK’s own parochial attitude to health care (and don’t mention Holland, Germany, France, Switzerland…).

How do such gaps and problems persist? Part of the problem, ironically, is the system’s high approval ratings: with such enthusiasm for the existing system, and with responsibility for it shared between federal and provincial or territorial governments, it’s easy for officials to avoid making necessary changes. Picard sees our narrowness of perspective as a big obstacle to reform: “Canadians are also incredibly tolerant of mediocrity because they fear that the alternative to what we have is the evil US system.” Philpott agrees that Canadians’ tendency to judge our system solely against that of the United States can be counterproductive. “If you always compare yourself to the people who pay the most per capita and get some of the worst outcomes,” she told me in a recent Zoom call, “then you’re not looking at the fact that there are a dozen other countries that pay less per capita and have far better outcomes than we do.”

The longest lasting health care corpotation in the world

Holy See – Wikipedia

The Holy See is thus viewed as the central government of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, in turn, is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world.[8] The diplomatic status of the Holy See facilitates the access of its vast international network of charities.[emphasis added]

The antithesis of science, is not art, but politics

There is a famous quote ( I don’t have a primary source) by the great Rudolf Virchow

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale.”

I know what Virchow was getting at, but if only.

Kieran, Please Come Over For Gay Sex

Excellent summary of recent discoveries in human evolution by John Lanchester in the LRB¹. Lucid writing. When I worked on the evolution of skin and hair colour, I was always puzzled about the way a single find of skeletal remains could pivot a whole narrative of how we got here. N-of-1s, are tricky. In recent years many remains have been discovered and, amazingly (because it is amazing), using DNA we can literally spy on the past, not quite in real time, but in a way that when I was a medical student would have seemed like science fiction.

Another thing that I never understood was why these remains were often found in caves. Is that where the action was? John Lanchester put me right — to an extent.

In the case of the Neanderthals, the sense of distance and the sense of strangeness are stronger; empathy seems both more necessary and more remote, harder to access. I have stood at the site of a Neanderthal shelter at Buoux in the South of France and been hit by an overwhelmingly strong feeling of remoteness, the idea that these people, these similar-but-different humans, were so far from anywhere human and place-like that they must have been hiding from something. Their very existence — we now know there were only a few tens of thousands of Neanderthals alive at any one time — seems contingent and marginal. What were they trying to get away from?

But that’s bollocks. That sense of remoteness, of distance from and hiddenness, are a side effect of humanity’s planetary domination: the only places where traces of the deep past remain are places we haven’t built over or crushed underfoot. There could be Neanderthal remains all around where I’m writing this, but I live in London and those traces, if they ever existed, are long and permanently lost. We find evidence mainly in caves because they’re the only places where remains haven’t been washed away by time and the human present. This is the same reason the far past continues to make news: we are constructing knowledge from scraps and fragments, and big new discoveries have the potential to rewrite the story.

Bollocks, as he says. As for my title, well, the best mnemonics at medical school tended to be rude. Lanchester writes

If you’re having trouble remembering the sequence of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, I can recommend the mnemonic ‘Kieran, Please Come Over For Gay Sex.

In truth, mnemonics never did much for me.

‘Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love’. And Hwyl…

The above was the title of a book by Leo Abse, the Labour MP for Pontypool when I was growing up in Cardiff. I do remember my parents mentioning his name, although I am not certain what their views of him were. As the Economist writes.

A little after 10pm on Monday July 3rd 1967, just as most sensible Britons were turning in for the night, the member for Pontypool was warming up. Leo Abse (pronounced Ab-zee) had been working the tea rooms of the House of Commons all day, charming and cajoling his fellow MPs in his rococo tones—a little flattery here, a white lie there. Now he slipped into the chamber, turning heads as always in spite of his short frame. Settling in his usual perch on the Labour government’s benches, his mischievous eyes darted about the place, searching out both his “stout fellows” and his foes. If his bill were ever to get through, tonight was surely the night.

His bill, printed on the green pages each MP clutched, was plain enough: that, in England and Wales, “a homosexual act in private shall not be an offence provided that the parties consent thereto and have attained the age of twenty-one years”

Abse what a colourful character in all sorts of ways. His WikiP entry gives you some flavour. His second marriage was to Ania Czepulkowska, in 2000, when Abse was 83, and she fifty years younger. A bust of him was unveiled in 2009 at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, but his nomination for a seat in the House of Lords had been vetoed by Margaret Thatcher. What would you expect?

1. The title of the article is Twenty Types of Human: Among the Neanderthals and he is reviewing Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £20, August, 978 1 4729 3749 0 ↩

Originality is usually off track

How mRNA went from a scientific backwater to a pandemic crusher | WIRED UK

For decades, Katalin Karikó’s work into mRNA therapeutics was overlooked by her colleagues. Now it’s at the heart of the two leading coronavirus vaccines

By the mid 1990s, Karikó’s bosses at UPenn had run out of patience. Frustrated with the lack of funding she was generating for her research, they offered the scientist a bleak choice: leave or be demoted. It was a demeaning prospect for someone who had once been on the path to a full professorship. For Karikó’s dreams of using mRNA to create new vaccines and drugs for many chronic illnesses, it seemed to be the end of the road… ”It was particularly horrible as that same week, I had just been diagnosed with cancer,” said Karikó. “I was facing two operations, and my husband, who had gone back to Hungary to pick up his green card, had got stranded there because of some visa issue, meaning he couldn’t come back for six months. I was really struggling, and then they told me this.”

Karikó has been at the helm of BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine development. In 2013, she accepted an offer to become Senior Vice President at BioNTech after UPenn refused to reinstate her to the faculty position she had been demoted from in 1995. “They told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality,” she said. ”When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.’”

Being at the bottom of things

Knuth versus Email

Donald Knuth is a legend amongst computer scientists.

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study. [emphasis added]

On retirement:

I retired early because I realized that I would need at least 20 years of full-time work to complete The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), which I have always viewed as the most important project of my life.

Being a retired professor is a lot like being an ordinary professor, except that you don’t have to write research proposals, administer grants, or sit in committee meetings. Also, you don’t get paid.

My full-time writing schedule means that I have to be pretty much a hermit. The only way to gain enough efficiency to complete The Art of Computer Programming is to operate in batch mode, concentrating intensively and uninterruptedly on one subject at a time, rather than swapping a number of topics in and out of my head. I’m unable to schedule appointments with visitors, travel to conferences or accept speaking engagements, or undertake any new responsibilities of any kind.

On Keeping Your Soul

John Baez is indeed a relative of that other famous J(oan) Baez. I used to read his blog avidly

The great challenge at the beginning of ones career in academia is to get tenure at a decent university. Personally I got tenure before I started messing with quantum gravity, and this approach has some real advantages. Before you have tenure, you have to please people. After you have tenure, you can do whatever the hell you want — so long as it’s legal, and you teach well, your department doesn’t put a lot of pressure on you to get grants. (This is one reason I’m happier in a math department than I would be in a physics department. Mathematicians have more trouble getting grants, so there’s a bit less pressure to get them.)

The great thing about tenure is that it means your research can be driven by your actual interests instead of the ever-changing winds of fashion. The problem is, by the time many people get tenure, they’ve become such slaves of fashion that they no longer know what it means to follow their own interests. They’ve spent the best years of their life trying to keep up with the Joneses instead of developing their own personal style! So, bear in mind that getting tenure is only half the battle: getting tenure while keeping your soul is the really hard part. [emphasis added]

On the hazards of Epistemic trespassing

Scientists fear that ‘covidization’ is distorting research

Scientists straying from their field of expertise in this way is an example of what Nathan Ballantyne, a philosopher at Fordham University in New York City, calls “epistemic trespassing”. Although scientists might romanticize the role and occasional genuine insight of an outsider — such as the writings of physicist Erwin Shrödinger on biology — in most cases, he says, such academic off-piste manoeuvrings dump non-experts head-first in deep snow. [emphasis added]

But I do love the language…

On the need for Epistemic trespassing

Haack, Susan, Not One of the Boys: Memoir of an Academic Misfit

Susan Haack is a wonderfully independent English borne philosopher who loves to roam, casting light wherever her interest takes her. 

Better ostracism than ostrichism

Moreover, I have learned over the years that I am temperamentally resistant to bandwagons, philosophical and otherwise; hopeless at “networking,” the tit-for-tat exchange of academic favors, “going along to get along,” and at self-promotion

 

That I have very low tolerance for meetings where nothing I say ever makes any difference to what happens; and that I am unmoved by the kind of institutional loyalty that apparently enables many to believe in the wonderfulness of “our” students or “our” department or “our” school or “our” university simply because they’re ours.

 

Nor do I feel what I think of as gender loyalty, a sense that I must ally myself with other women in my profession simply because they are women—any more than I feel I must ally myself with any and every British philosopher simply because he or she is British. And I am, frankly, repelled by the grubby scrambling after those wretched “rankings” that is now so common in philosophy departments. In short, I’ve never been any good at academic politicking, in any of its myriad forms.

 

And on top of all this, I have the deplorable habit of saying what I mean, with neither talent for nor inclination to fudge over disagreements or muffle criticism with flattering tact, and an infuriating way of seeing the funny side of philosophers’ egregiously absurd or outrageously pretentious claims — that there are no such things as beliefs, that it’s just superstitious to care whether your beliefs are true, that feminism obliges us to “reinvent science and theorizing,” and so forth.

.

Citizens of nowhere trespassing…

The Economist | Citizen of the world

From a wonderful article in the Economist

As Michael Massing shows vividly in “Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind” (2018), the growing religious battle destroyed Erasmianism as a movement. Princes had no choice but to choose sides in the 16th-century equivalent of the cold war. Some of Erasmus’s followers reinvented themselves as champions of orthodoxy. The “citizen of the world” could no longer roam across Europe, pouring honeyed words into the ears of kings. He spent his final years holed up in the free city of Basel. The champion of the Middle Way looked like a ditherer who was incapable of making up his mind, or a coward who was unwilling to stand up to Luther (if you were Catholic) or the pope (if you were Protestant).

The test of being a good Christian ceased to be decent behaviour. It became fanaticism: who could shout most loudly? Or persecute heresy most vigorously? Or apply fuel to the flames most enthusiastically?

And in case there is any doubt about what I am talking about.

In Britain, Brexiteers denounce “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere” and cast out moderate politicians with more talent than they possess, while anti-Brexiteers are blind to the excesses of establishment liberalism. In America “woke” extremists try to get people sacked for slips of the tongue or campaign against the thought crimes of “unconscious bias”. Intellectuals who refuse to join one camp or another must stand by, as mediocrities are rewarded with university chairs and editorial thrones. [emphasis added]

As Erasmus might have said: ‘Amen’.

Sunday 27 December, 2020 | Memex 1.1

The following were both posted separately by John Naughton over recent weeks. It may seem bad manners to ‘borrow’ in such a way, but the combination seems apposite, and the necessary conclusion hard to put aside.

There are no credentials. They do not even need a medical certificate. They need not be sound either in body or mind. They only require a certificate of birth — just to prove that they were the first of the litter. You would not choose a spaniel on those principles.

Lloyd George on the House of Lords, 1909.

The privately educated Englishman — and Englishwoman, if you will allow me — is the greatest dissembler on Earth. Was, is now and ever shall be for as long as our disgraceful school system remains intact. Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damned fool.

George Smiley in John le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim.

Remind you of anyone?

Vaccine rollout hampered by red tape and lack of back-up stocks | Financial Times

Mr Hancock told the BBC that the amount of bureaucracy would be reduced, including no longer requiring vaccinators to undergo training on the need to tackle terrorism.

No surprise here. Those familiar with the NHS (and many other organisations) will know there is little limit to the crap that those at the top can pass down, chiefly to protect their own hides. I used to chair a student teaching ethics committee (note: an ethics committee, not an ethical committee). We had to ask all applicants whether they were aware of the Home Office’s Prevent Strategy (terrorism!). As for training, the standard of NHS online modules that I used to have to do, was execrable. They were yet another form of subsidy for the parasitism this is much of UK Private Business. Even with retirement, the rage only ebbs away slowly. Wasted days.

So far away

Between now and Easter universities should stop, collaborate and listen | Wonkhe

Academics got good at distance learning — for students who were studying at the distance of half a mile away.

The long-term issue is simply that if the experience is mainly large lecture delivery, then the value of university has been washed away by successive cuts and internal transfers of money to research and ‘impact’. That is what should worry universities now. At one time you could find high street retail with knowledgeable staff. Then rationalisation took over and quality took a nose dive in order to pay the dividends of investors. Then came Amazon.

All I want for 2021

All I want for 2021 is to see Mark Zuckerberg up in court | Internet | The Guardian

It’s always risky making predictions about the tech industry, but this year looks like being different, at least in the sense that there are two safe bets. One is that the attempts to regulate the tech giants that began last year will intensify; the second that we will be increasingly deluged by sanctimonious cant from Facebook & co as they seek to avoid democratic curbing of their unaccountable power.

John Naughton, my first and still my favourite blogger. It was on my list too, but Amazon have failed to deliver.

Innumerate economists.

Blanchflower aiming to counter ‘disastrous’ austerity economics | Times Higher Education (THE)

“I think I said on Bloomberg [the business TV channel] I thought Brexit was the worst decision made by any advanced country in the last thousand years,” he continued. “And I only said a thousand because I’m not very good on the thousand before that.”

Danny (David) Blanchflower.

Bozo et al.

What makes John le Carré a writer of substance | Financial Times

Again, like Orwell — who revealed himself now and then as a poetic limner of deep England — le Carré had a pitch-perfect ear for the disingenuous hypocrisies sustaining those who mistook “Getting Away with It” for national purpose.

I think the quip was from the series Cardiac Arrest: the ITU used to be called the ICU (intensive care unit) until they realised nobody did.

In March, 2019, a doctor informed 78-year-old Ernest Quintana, an inpatient at a hospital in California, USA, that he was going to die. His ravaged lungs could not survive his latest exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, so he would be placed on a morphine drip until, in the next few days, he would inevitably perish. There was a twist. A robot had delivered the bombshell. There, on a portable machine bearing a video screen, crackled the pixelated image of a distant practitioner who had just used cutting-edge technology to give, of all things, a terminal diagnosis. The hospital insisted that earlier conversations with medical staff had occurred in person, but as Mr Quintana’s daughter put it: “I just don’t think that critically ill patients should see a screen”, she said. “It should be a human being with compassion.”

From Care in crisis – The Lancet