They always put me on hold. Thank You for Being Expendable

Years after I first returned from Iraq and started having thoughts and visions of killing myself, I’d call the Department of Veterans Affairs. They always put me on hold. 

NYT

‘Statisticians have already overrun every branch of science with a rapidity of conquest rivalled only by Attila, Mohammed, and the Colorado beetle’

Maurice Kendall (1942): On the future of statistics. JRSA 105; 69-80.

Yes, that Maurice Kendall.

It seems to me that when it comes to statistics — and the powerful role of statistics in understanding both the natural and the unnatural world — that the old guys thought harder and deeper, understanding the world better than many of their more vocal successors. And that is without mentioning the barking of the medic-would-be-statistician brigade.

“Like the rest of the leadership of the ANC, he was blindsided by the collapse of socialism worldwide; the party had no philosophical resistance to put up against a new, predatory economic rationalism. Mandela’s personal and political authority had its basis in his principled defense of armed resistance to apartheid and in the harsh punishment he suffered for that resistance. It was given further backbone by his aristocratic mien, which was not without a gracious common touch, and his old-fashioned education, which held before him Victorian ideals of personal integrity and devotion to public service…

… He was, and by the time of his death was universally held to be, a great man; he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows.” 

JM Coetzee on Nelson Mandela in the NYT

On that day in 1981 when he first sat at the pinnacle of British journalism, the editor’s desk at the Times, and wrote his first policy editorial, Harold Evans heard Abraham Lincoln’s voice in his ear. In 1861 the president had said he knew of nothing more powerful than the Times, “except perhaps the Mississippi”.

Another wonderful obituary in the Economics — this one about a great man, whose life was changed by an evil one whom to this day continues to be dirt on humanity.

That said, his [Chris Bustamente, president of Rio Salado College ] discussion underscored some of the stark labor realities driving the proposed solutions for increased access to higher ed. Rio Salado [in the USA] educates 60,000 students with 22 full time faculty and 1500 adjuncts. Let me say that again, Rio Salado educates 60,000 students with 22 full time faculty and 1500 adjuncts. And while a small percentage of these part-time faculty may do it for the love of teaching as Bustamente suggested, it’s all but certain the vast majority are teaching on subsistence wages to eke out a living, much like many of the students they serve. Such a mixed message about the power of a college education to set you free, at least financially, hasn’t been lost on me since my first adjuncting gig in 1997.

Jim Groom, The bloody waters of Higher Ed (a post from 2014)

I think¹ the words are mine:

Every time I hear the term line-manager used about an academic, retirement gets a day closer

But the great JK Galbraith (senior) had some words of his own on line-management (Galbraith, a famous Harvard Professor of Economics, was ambassador to India for JFK)

Galbraith proved up to the task, in part, as Bruce Riedel writes in “JFK’s Forgotten Crisis”, because he had access to the president and his aides. Most ambassadors report to the State Department, but the blunt Galbraith told the president that going through those channels was “like trying to fornicate through a mattress”.

Economist.

1. I think they are mine, but apologies if I have nicked them … ↩

I had forgotten this piece I wrote a few years back for Reto Caduff’s amazing book onFreckles. Here it is:

Imagine at some future time, two young adults meet on an otherwise deserted planet. They are both heavily freckled. What would this tell us about them, their ancestors and how they had have spent their time? First, all of us learn early in life that skin colour and marks like freckles are unequally distributed across the people of this earth. They are most common in people with pale skin, especially so if they have red hair, and we all know that we get our skin colour from our parents. Second, freckles are most common in those who have spent a lot of time in the sun. So freckles betray both something about our ancestors, and how we ourselves have lived our life.

Skin colour varies across the earth, and the chief determinant of this variation has been the interaction between sunshine (more particularly ultraviolet radiation) and our skin over the last 5 to 50 thousand years. Dark skin is adapted so as to protect against excessive sunshine, whereas we think light skin is better adapted to areas where the sun shines less. As some humans migrated out of Africa, say 50,000 years ago, a series of changes or mutations occurred in many genes to make their skin lighter. Their skin became more sensitive to both the good and the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation. One way this change was accomplished was the development of changes in a gene called the melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R), a gene we could also call a gene for freckles.

Skin and hair colour arises from a mixture of two types of the pigment melanin: brown or eumelanin, and red, or pheomelanin. If the MC1R works effectively, eumelanin is favoured; if the MC1R  works less well, pheomelanin is favoured. We know that the change to pheomelanin is associated with skin that is more sensitive to sunshine. When people who harbour changes in MC1R are exposed to sun they are much more likely to develop freckles, than those who contain no changes in their MC1R.

And what about the freckles themselves? They are just tiny areas of melanin production. Ironically, to the best of our knowledge the freckles themselves seem to protect against the sun quite effectively. It is the non-freckled areas that are most sensitive to the sun. If in a bid to protect skin against the harmful effects of excessive sun, we were to join all the freckles up, the sensitivity might disappear. Of course, on a planet located far away in time and place, our two young adults might already possess the technology to join all their freckles together. It is just that they chose not to.

A year ago, “TT [tenure track] or bust” was a common but ill-advised attitude toward the job market. That attitude should be unthinkable today. COVID-19 is an accelerant to a fire in academia that has been raging for at least a decade. When that fire is finally extinguished, the landscape of higher education will be unrecognizable at best and decimated at worst.

What I learned from leaving academic philosophy (Guest post by Samuel Kampa) — The Philosophers’ Cocoon

Think of it alongside a quote from Stephen Downes:

Educational providers will one day face an overnight crisis that was 20 years in the making. Link

After he had been dismissed from government, and implicated in the anti-Medici conspiracy, Machiavelli was imprisoned, tortured, before returning to the family farm. But his passions ran deep.

…Machiavelli was unable to turn his mind from politics. ‘I could not help but fill your head with castles in the air,’ he wrote to Vettori in 1513, ‘because since Fortune has seen to it that I do not know how to talk about either the silk or wool trade, profits or losses, I have to talk about politics.’ He spent the days chewing the fat with woodcutters on the farm and playing cricca in the tavern. But in the evening, he told Vettori,

I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable court of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them … and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that: no one understands anything unless he retains [it], I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus. [emphasis added]

Erin Maglaque · Free from Humbug: The Murdrous Machiavel · LRB 16 July 2020

I cannot see the future, but like many, I have private models that I use to order the world, and for which I often have very little data. For instance, I think it obvious that the traditional middle-class professions (medicine, lay, veterinary medicine, architecture, dentistry, academia) are increasingly unattractive as careers¹. I am not complaining about my choices — far from it; I benefited on the tailwinds of the dramatic social change that wars and other calamities bring. But my take on what has happened to school teachers and teaching is the model for what will happen to many others. I say this with no pleasure: there are few jobs more important. But the tragedy of schoolteaching — which is our tragedy — will continue to unfold as successive gangs of politicians of either armed with nothing more than some borrowed bullet points play to the gallery. Similarly, in higher education within a timescale of almost 40 years, I have seen at first-hand changes that would make me argue that not only are the days of Donnish Dominion(to use Halsey’s phrase²) well and truly over, but that most UK universities will be unable to recruit the brightest to their cause. I think we see that in clinical academia already — and not just in the UK. Amidst all those shiny new buildings moulded for student experience (and don’t forget the wellness centres…); the ennui of corporate mediocrity beckons. The bottom line is the mission statement.

As for medicine, a few quotes below from an FT article from late last year. I assume that without revolutionary change, we will see more and more medical students, and more and more doctors leaving mid-career. If you keep running to stand still, the motivation goes. And that is without all the non-COVID-19 effects of COVID-19.

One of the major factors for doctors is the electronic record system. It takes a physician 15 clicks to order a flu shot for a patient, says Tait. And instead of addressing this problem, healthcare companies end up offering physicians mindfulness sessions and healthy food options in the cafeteria, which only frustrates them further…[emphasis added]

Over the past few years, efforts have been made to increase the number of medical schools in the US to ensure that there is no shortage of doctors. “When you think about how much we’ve invested to create, roughly, 10 to 12 new medical schools in the last decade, at hundreds of millions of dollars per school, just to increase the pipeline of physicians being trained, we also need to think at the far end of the physicians who are leaving medicine because of burnout,” says Sinsky.

Take the case of a final-year resident doctor in New York, who spends a considerable part of his shift negotiating with insurance companies to justify why his patient needs the medicines he prescribed. “When I signed up to be a doctor, the goal was to treat patients, not negotiate with insurance providers,” he says.

According to Tait, 80 per cent of the challenge faced by doctors is down to the organisation where they work, and only 20 per cent could be attributed to personal resilience.

Re the final quote, 80:20 is being generous to the organisations.

Burnout rife among American doctors | Financial Times

1. Richard and Daniel Susskind provide a good take on this theme. See The Future of the Professions OUP, 2015. ↩
2. Decline of Donnish Dominion : the British academic professions in the twentieth century, Halsey, A. H. OUP, Oxford, 1992. ↩