Society – Page 34 – Common Infirmities

How Harold Wilson kept it together

One could spend the whole day and half the night recording the weird infelicities of expression that automatic spell-checking has wrought upon once-proud journalistic enterprises. But some are truly exceptional.

According tq The New Republic, his close associate Joseph Kagan (who was rumoured to be his KGB handler, by those who thought he was a Soviet mole) was a “clothing magnet”.

It sounds like the kind of excuse a teenager caught shoplifting might use. “I don’t know how it got into my bag, your Honour. I seem to be a clothing magnet.”

Early 20th century MOOCs

It is always enlightening to see how some of the same breathless optimism derived from our newest innovations, the claims that perennial problems are going to be solved at last, were also derived from innovations a century or more old, when they were new. In particular, I was struck by Kevin Birmingham’s account (in his remarkable book on the genesis of James Joyce’s Ulysses) of the early days of Random House, and its Modern Library series:

Both within and beyond universities, people began thinking that certain books illuminated eternal features of the human condition. They didn’t demand expertise — one didn’t need to speak classical Greek or read all of Plato to benefit from The Republic — all they demanded was, as [Professor John] Erskine put it, “a comfortable chair and a good light.” […]

The Modern Library offered commodified prestige with the illusion of self-reliance. Readers could have the benefits of institutional culture without the institutions. They could rise above the masses by purchasing a dozen inexpensive books.

Replace “good light” by “fast internet connection”, and you have the promise of Coursera. Of course, that jibes well with the feelings that many skeptics have, who wonder why we need new technology to democratise education. As long as you’re lecturing to masses, where personal feedback is logistically impossible, doesn’t it suffice to have a well-stocked library?

Banks and casinos

The title may suggest I’m talking about the gambling proclivities of investment banks, but actually I’m talking about the way the high street banks treat their customers.

Many years ago I got fascinated by the fact that my mother seemed to be able to spend many hours playing blackjack in casinos, and not lose anything. I calculated the expected returns on a blackjack hand played with optimal strategy (but without counting cards). It turned out that the expected returns on a $100 blackjack hand are something like -$0.04. That means that if you play 1000 hands, your chances of coming out ahead are about 49.4%. Ridiculously close. Furthermore, that is the result of all kinds of extra options that are given to the player, like splitting cards, which each allow the player to move the odds ever so slightly in their favour — but obviously, they’ve been precisely calculated to make sure the odds of winning don’t go over 50%, since that’s a tipping point for the casino. But it’s so close to even that she could play 1000 hands at $10 each, and lose only $4 on average, much less than the value of the free meals and other inducements offered by the casinos.

So why do they do it? Why do they give the players all these extra tools, like splitting cards, to shave fractions of a percent off the house advantage? I realised that it’s a matter of giving players enough rope to hang themselves with. Most of these extras are almost never beneficial to the player. Most players will use them incorrectly, thus increasing their losses while simultaneously acquiring a satisfying sense of control over their fate. Continue reading “Banks and casinos”

Security theatre review

The newspapers are full of the new rules, requiring that electronic devices be powered up at the security checkpoint before entering flights to the US. Apparently, this is in response to information that terrorists may be hiding explosives in smart phones.

Now, I am fully aware of the limitations of the usual common-sense criticisms of anti-terror and anti-crime measures. Most criminals are not masterminds, and the same is true of suicide bombers. But here we’re not talking about a bunch of crackpots with big ideas and a truck full of fertiliser. The whole premise is that a master bomb designer is packaging a bomb powerful enough to bring down a plane into a Samsung smartphone. Surely, with modern miniaturisation, he can also design it to include a reasonable simulacrum of an Android home screen. Maybe he just won’t think of it, but unless the intelligence agencies have some very specific design specs for this device, it seems like they’re targeting a very narrow gap of stupidity: Smart enough to design an ingeniously concealed bomb, not smart enough to make it behave, at least superficially, like a smart phone. (“Why has the email app been removed and replaced by the “Blow Up the Plane” app?”)

(And one more thought: If the phone is designed to explode immediately upon being powered up, then the effect of this measure will just be to kill a few dozen people at the security check, which is probably an improvement, but hardly counts as a solid win for our side.)

I am reminded of my favourite bit of security theatre, from about 2006. Passing through security in Montreal, the man ahead of me had a bag filled with small cans and jars of what looked like Jamaican delicacies. Solid food is permitted on the plane, but liquids are forbidden. But these were in sealed tins, and obviously you couldn’t open them all. So the security agent did what any reasonable person would do: He read the labels to determine the contents and quantity. All the cans and jars were cleared to be taken on the flight.

Confessions

Reading Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, I was struck by her formulation of a question that I had wondered about myself, and never seen explicitly stated:

Why the Soviet secret police were so obsessed with confession remains a matter for debate…

What is the motivation to force a prisoner to “confess”? Even if the interrogator believes the charge to be true, why is it important for the prisoner to say it? Surely a confession under duress is not going to convince anyone else. Of course, you may want to use a confession extracted under torture to deceive someone else into thinking this was a confession freely offered, but it is hard to see how that can be relevant to system where torture is standard.

Furthermore, in the pre-video era, it’s hard to see why anyone would go to the trouble of manufacturing a deception by torturing the prisoner to put his own signature on the confession, rather than simply forging the signature. And yet it was important enough for interrogators to spend months attempting to extract the “genuine” confession, and for prisoners to submit themselves to agonies to resist.

The officer investigating Vladimir Tchernavin, a scientist accused of “wrecking” and sabotage, threatened him with death if he refused to confess. At another point, he told him he would get a more “lenient” camp sentence if he confessed. Eventually, he actually begged Tchernavin to give a false confession. “We, the examining officers, are also often forced to lie, we also say things which cannot be entered into the record, and to which we would never sign our names,” his interrogator told him, pleadingly.

In the context of the Inquisition, at least, it is possible to believe in a certain sort of twisted altruism: Being convinced of the truth of the accusation, the inquisitor believes the unrepentant sinner’s soul to be forfeit to Hell. His life is of no account, but the soul can be rescued, if only said sinner can be moved to whole-hearted penitence. In this context, the confession has its own value, and it is clear why it must come from the heretic’s own lips.

Continue reading “Confessions”

Blaming the victim: Antibiotic edition

Having failed to hold back the tides, King Camerute is now taking on the worthy task of stemming the flood of antibiotic resistant microbes, according to a report on the front page of today’s Times. On the inside pages we have an opinion piece by one Theodore Dalrymple, under the title

Patients, not GPs, are to blame for the antibiotics crisis

Since GPs are responsible for prescribing most of the antibiotics in this country, I was curious how they were not to blame. I assumed the story would take one of two tacks (or both):

Patients are obtaining prescriptions under false pretences, perhaps by exaggerating or misrepresenting their symptoms.
Patients are somehow acquiring antibiotics without prescriptions.

Neither of these is mentioned. In fact, despite the headline — which Dr Dalrymple is presumably not responsible for — the article states clearly “The real problem we face is the over-prescription of antibiotics in ordinary medical practice.” Patients are never mentioned in the article until the last paragraph, which states, in full

And, hard though it ma be for some to accept, it would help if patients took their GPs’ advice rather than demanding the drugs they want. Doctor really does know best.

Well, that’s it then. The responsibility does not lie with the GP who actively wrote a prescription. It lies with the stupid but strangely powerful patient who “demanded” it. And it gets worse. We live, it seems, in a “litigious age and doctors are afraid”.

There is, after all, more rejoicing by malpractice lawyers over one missed diagnosis than over 99 people treated unnecessarily with antibiotics.

Presumably the author thinks they should rejoice more over all the people treated unnecessarily with antibiotics? I’m confused. In any case, they’re bad people, so anything that makes them happy is bad for the rest of us.

I’m no expert in British law, but why would a treatment with unnecessary antibiotics prevent a lawsuit? How many doctors have actually been sued, under circumstances where a random antibiotic prescription might have forestalled the lawsuit? Dr Dalrymple doesn’t even have a silly anecdote to offer.

Or could it be that overworked GPs find prescribing antibiotics to be a convenient substitute for actually talking to the patients? Dr Dalrymple, we learn at the bottom, is a “retired prison doctor” which, I think, helps to explain where he acquired his exquisite contempt for patients.

A very special relationship

Anyone interested in the technical details of US and British internal signals espionage, as practiced by NSA and GCHQ in the second half of the 20th century and beyond, should read James Bamford’s The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Some of the details are fascinating, many are disturbing, and some are just unimaginably bizarre. Like the fawning letter sent by Sir Leonard Hooper, director of GCHQ in the late 1960s, to his NSA counterpart Marshall “Pat” Carter, in which he suggested (perhaps tongue in cheek) he might like to name GCHQ’s two giant radio dishes after Carter and his deputy. After effusive thanks for the NSA’s support, and Carter’s personally, he goes on:

Between us, we have ensured that the blankets and sheets are more tightly tucked around the bed in which our two sets of people lie and, like you, I like it that way.

I’ve read this over multiple times, and I don’t think I can decipher it. Are the blankets and sheets wrapped around the two sets of people separately, or are they bound in a transatlantic conjugal embrace? Are the intelligence agencies the Mommy and Daddy, tucking us in for the night while they protect us from the bogeys (from whom they derive much of their power, while themselves knowing that they are mere figments). This talk of wrapping sheets “tightly” around two sets of people who passively “lie” makes me think of winding sheets wrapped around corpses.

And then, there’s the closing: “like you, I like it that way”. Is he still speaking metaphorically here? Was he ever? Or is he proposing or recalling a secret tryst? Is that the sort of pillow talk that deeply closeted military types engaged in half a century ago?

“Not infinite”

From The Guardian:

British nurses are planning to debate whether GPs should start charging patients for appointments.

The Royal College of Nursing’s (RCN) annual conference in Liverpool will discuss whether the union backs the idea of charging people a fee to see their family doctors.

Traditionally the RCN has stood behind the belief that the NHS should be free at the point of delivery. But nurses have put forward the motion, saying that NHS finances are “not infinite”.

“Not infinite” sounds like a sensible observation. Neither are the funds available to the police infinite, which is why we charge people a fee to report a burglary, with extra hourly charges for the investigation. And schools. And that’s why when the smoke alarm klaxons you out of bed, the first thing you need to do is grab enough cash to pay the firefighters who show up. Because their finances are not infinite.

Obviously, the RCN is just trying to make the point that healthcare workers are having their salaries squeezed up against the free-at-the-point-of-delivery. But this argument is made often, and it’s ridiculous. If you want to advocate patient fees, as opposed to all the other ways that the nation could increase funding of the NHS, it can only be because you think that the service that is now free is being overused, and you want to encourage ill people to do something else, besides visiting their GPs. In any case, the cost of administering the £10 fee would probably be more than the fee would bring in.

Here’s what charging for fire and rescue services looks like.

Poor parents

Fining parents is the latest fashion in UK education policy. The government has this started fining — and threatening with criminal prosecution — parents who take their children out of school, other than for illness, for any reason short of a funeral. Education Secretary Michael Gove has recently announced his intention to impose fines on parents if their children misbehave in school.

Now we have the UK chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, wanting to go beyond the school walls, suggesting fines for parents who don’t read to their children enough (or, presumably, the right books full of “British values“). In an interview reported on the front page of today’s Times he said

It’s up to head teachers to say quite clearly, “You’re a poor parent”… I think head teachers should have the power to fine them. It’s sending the message that you are responsible for your children no matter how poor you are.

To be fair, the context makes clear that the first use of the word poor is meant to be metaphorical, but I think there’s no denying that the word choice there simply reveals more than is intended. The government’s attitude is that families with children in state schools must be indifferent to education, because if they weren’t, they would have sent their children to private schools, wouldn’t they?

If you’re poor and a parent, you must certainly be a poor parent, and you need to be chivied into allowing your children to be trained to the appropriate mediocre level that will spare the City drones of the future from ever having to do an honest day’s work. If you think that education is a collaborative project between families and schools, and that children need to be engaged rather than bullied, you’re just making “an excuse for not teaching poor children how to add up.”

In other words, if we don’t make schools like prisons now, those children will end up in real prisons later on.

What is unclear to me is whether this reflects reflexive an intentional policy to drive families who could afford private education out of the state sector, whether purely in the interest of cutting costs or to curtail social mixing.

Trojan hobby horses

Don’t forget: Troy was in Turkey — a Muslim country!

A scandal has been rumbling on in the UK primary and secondary education establishment. A few months ago the UK press splashed around the text of ~~The Protocols of the Elders of Islam~~ the “Trojan Horse” letter, purporting to be a missive from one group of Islamists to another, describing the progress of their nefarious plan to take over and islamise the Birmingham schools, and recommending methods for expanding the process to other cities. The quotes read like uncensored excerpts from Nigel Farage’s fever dream:

We have caused a great amount of organised disruption in Birmingham and as a result now have our own academies and are on the way to getting rid of more headteachers and taking over their schools. Whilst sometimes the practices we use may not seem the correct way to do things you must remember that this is say ‘jihad’ and as such using all measures possible to win the war is acceptable.

One needs to imagine an Osama bin Laden lookalike twirling the ends of his beard and laughing maniacally as he reads this aloud. Continue reading “Trojan hobby horses”