“Fake” means “not what it is being presented as”, and a faker is a person or institution knowingly making the false representation.
A fake tenant is someone who is living in a flat, but at the request of the landlord and at a low rent, to make it look as though people who pay market rents live there. A fake political policy is one that cannot achieve what is being claimed for it. BBC period dramas with historically-inaccurate multi-ethnic casts are fake, because the BBC knows they are doing it for political reasons. AI images passed off as a photograph in a newspaper article are fake. A programme announced as a “documentary” that pushes a political or social agenda is a fake documentary, though it may be a really powerful polemic. (There is a place for polemics, as long as everyone knows that is what they are getting.)
We have fake borders in the UK, because we allow anyone from anywhere to enter the country as long as they do so illegally. But we will ban Dutch journalists whose opinions someone on X / Twitter didn’t like.
We have fake policing, which turns up mob-handed for a rude Tweet, but can’t be bothered to deal with shop-lifters. Policing involves more compromises than the public wishes it did, but even then there are limits.
String Theory was fake physics because for a couple of decades its publicists said it was the “only game in town”. MOND, Quantum Loop Gravity and others are just as speculative and untestable, but they don’t claim to be the only path to the truth.
Fusion power, quantum computing and General AI go through periods of fake-ness, whenever there’s a sudden outburst of “It’s five years away and will solve all our problems”. It’s been five years away all my long life, and it will be five years away during yours as well.
Heard of the ”Replication Crisis” in the social sciences? It has not passed. Most research in sociology, psychology and the variations thereof cannot be reproduced. And yet it is passed off as “peer-reviewed research”. Fake. And peer review doesn’t do what we think it should either.
Surgery is almost as good as they say it is, but the rest of medicine is nowhere near as effective as surgery. The list of incurable conditions is long, and the list of curable conditions is short. Usually, the doctors say so, so there's no faking. As for psychiatry and psychotherapy… almost as bad as the cold porridge of class-prejudice and old maids’ remedies that masquerades as “health advice”. The drugs (psychiatry) and the kale (health advice) are prescribed as if they are effective, when they mostly aren't. That's fakery.
The ONS functions as the authoritative source of statistical data on the economy and population, but its staff make mistakes like anyone else does. One example: it occurred to no-one at the ONS there that Eastern Europeans would enter the country by low-cost airlines via airports where the ONS had no coverage, and for years it understated migration by hundreds of thousands. The result is sometimes fake statistics: held out as authoritative, actually wrong.
The “fake-ness” of the news is the skewed choice of what is reported, and how it is interpreted. The editorial claim is that these are the important stories of the moment, but the mainstream media has long been taken over by PR companies leaking forthcoming speeches, policy proposals, and inside gossip. None of which are news. Most of the news is fake - real news is something someone does not want you to know. Media attacks on political figures are not news, but polemics.
The biggest fake of all was the farrago of ever-changing policies in the 2020-2022 Lockdown. The overall strategy, and many of the specific communications and measures, were dreamed up by “behavioural scientists” for the express purpose of scaring the public. They told us they were lying. Masks, social distancing, business closures, school closures, Track ‘N Trace, and the rest was could not achieve what the public were told it could. And by the end of 2022, even the most fervent curtain-twitcher knew they had been fooled by fakery, and in many cases, knew they had wanted to be fooled.
Remember Russia Russia Russia - the multi-year attempt by the Democrats and mainstream media to slur and depose Donald Trump with the false charge that he was in cahoots with Vladimir Putin? Nothing genuine about those claims either.
A certain level of error and omission is allowable in any complicated process, but only as long as it is admitted, its extent estimated, and steps taken to reduce it. If that cannot be done, the organisation should say they cannot afford to put the process right and stop doing it. The fakery begins when the organisation carries on with the process, denies that the errors and omissions are significant, says it does not have the budget to put the faults right, and asks everyone to sign a waiver, but then represents the process and its results as fit-for-purpose. That is where the NHS, the BBC, the ONS and all government policy-making are now.
A more subtle source comes from the fact that we expect our culture - fiction, history, philosophy, science, drama, movies, songs and so on - broadly to represent our values and the emotional realities of our lives. Shakespeare is about kings and princes and wealthy families, but as people they resonated with their audiences (perhaps less so now - the “modern audience” doesn’t match up to the Bard). Overly-fast social and economic change can create a dissonance between the world portrayed by recent cultural products and the contemporary reality. I find that films and TV series set even as late as 2010 seem to be set in a different world. Both the media and the world feel a little askew as a result.
Cost inflation unmatched by salary inflation creates fake money. In the 1970’s, trades unions in the UK were strong enough to keep pay rises in line, if lagging by a year, with the often double-figure inflation throughout the decade. During the 2010-2020 period in the UK the unions lacked the strength to win inflation-matching pay rises, with the result that many people were being paid up to a third less in real terms in 2020 than they were in 2010. Professionals that had been reasonably well-paid were now barely able to pay the rent on a shared flat. The perceptions of the economic status of those professions no longer matched the reality.
The more expensive it is to do something in the real world, the more time we spend in front of the television or scrolling social media. “Escapism” used to mean going to the cinema, the theatre, perhaps a fun park, or for some, reading a lurid novel. All of those now cost a serious chunk of change: streaming something at home, or playing a computer game, is way cheaper. Rising costs drive us away from the outside world, which starts to seem strange or irrelevant, unless it is where we work. Work is always real.
So are the people who claim that “everything feels fake these days” just click-baiting or are they on to something? I think they are on to something. Too many of our institutions, that we pay for with our taxes, claim to be doing something we want doing, but actually are not. We look out at our culture and reporting, and do not see the world we experience. It’s not so much rotten, as distorted and askew.
Friday, 6 March 2026
Friday, 27 February 2026
18-29 Relationships: Same As It Ever Was
Recently a number of online mavens have been quoting this...
“In 2025, approximately 63% of men aged 18–29 in the U.S. were single, and 34% of women the same age range were single.”
... and depending on their intended audience, blame this on men (who are all scardy-cat Peter Pans) or women (who would rather be one of a top 10% man's harem than partner to a regular guy) or whatever else it is they think their audience will pay to hear.
Oh woe is us and the downfall of our society.
But wait. There’s a sleight-of-hand here. If I told you that 100% of men aged 14-17 were single, as were 100% of women, you would not bemoan the state of our society. You would remind me that 14-17 year olds are not supposed to be married.
Well, neither in this economy are 18-21 year olds. They are supposed to be in education or starting their careers. Some will be married, but not many, and to a first approximation, none. 18-21 year olds are (approximately) 33% of the 18-29 year-old cohort. So let’s take that 33% of shouldn’t-be-married out of the they-are-single figures.
Wow! 1% of women aged 22-29 are unmarried. That’s nonsense. Even if 100% of the 29 year olds were married, and women started marrying at 22, the average over the 22-29 range would be 50% (assuming a straight-line rate). So “single” does not mean married. It means “not in a relationship”.
“In a relationship” is a self-reporting variable (marriage is a Government statistic based on a legal document), and self-reporting variables are subject to delusions and mis-understandings. One person might report something as a relationship that another would regard as a weekly hook-up, while another might only regard the weekly hook-up as a perfectly acceptable "relationship". It would not be the first time women were caught...um...managing their answers to such questions. (Remember that old canard about "men being more promiscuous than women"? Went on for years until some researchers debunked it, and it turned out that women were exactly as promiscuous as men. Men were exaggerating a bit as well, but nowhere near as much as the women.)
But then 18-21 year olds can be “in a (flimsy as all heck) relationship”. So let’s assume that’s what it means, and run the numbers again.
The proportion of men under 30 in relationships (or “relationships” they would describe as such) with women 30 or over is not quite zero, but to keep things simple we will take it as such. However, the proportion of women under thirty dating (or married to) men 30 or over is significant. On average wives are two years younger than husbands. Let’s assume that applies across the age-group, though it may not at the younger end. Two year’s worth of a 12-year wide cohort (18-29) is 16%, women who are going out with men 30 and older.
So that 63% of single men 18-29 breaks down like this: 34% (single 18-29 year old women) + 16% (18-29 dating men 30 or over) + 13% (other reasons).
One of those “other reasons” could be that more that 16% of those 18-29 year old women are going out with older men. The rest is women thinking they are in a relationship with a man who doesn’t think of it as one, or just outright… um… response management. I’ll leave you to pick your weighting of these
In other words, 63% of men and 34% of women aged 18–29 in the U.S. being single is a feature, not a bug. It's the way it's always been.
But wait. Why are 34% of women 18-29 single? Isn’t that because of (enter clickbait reason here)?
Do the math. Suppose you’re in a relationship for two years / quarters / months and it takes a year / quarter / month to get over the break-up, find and establish a new one. You spend one-third of your time not in a relationship. Seems about how real life works to me.
None of this means that men and women today have the same attitudes towards each other and “relationships” as their parents, grandparents or “back in the day”. Some do, many do not. The quantity of their relationships is more or less unchanged, and for many the quality will not have changed much either. But let’s be clear about one thing: their parents and their grandparents are lying about how much better they were at relationships. And I have the divorce statistics to prove it.
“In 2025, approximately 63% of men aged 18–29 in the U.S. were single, and 34% of women the same age range were single.”
... and depending on their intended audience, blame this on men (who are all scardy-cat Peter Pans) or women (who would rather be one of a top 10% man's harem than partner to a regular guy) or whatever else it is they think their audience will pay to hear.
Oh woe is us and the downfall of our society.
But wait. There’s a sleight-of-hand here. If I told you that 100% of men aged 14-17 were single, as were 100% of women, you would not bemoan the state of our society. You would remind me that 14-17 year olds are not supposed to be married.
Well, neither in this economy are 18-21 year olds. They are supposed to be in education or starting their careers. Some will be married, but not many, and to a first approximation, none. 18-21 year olds are (approximately) 33% of the 18-29 year-old cohort. So let’s take that 33% of shouldn’t-be-married out of the they-are-single figures.
Wow! 1% of women aged 22-29 are unmarried. That’s nonsense. Even if 100% of the 29 year olds were married, and women started marrying at 22, the average over the 22-29 range would be 50% (assuming a straight-line rate). So “single” does not mean married. It means “not in a relationship”.
“In a relationship” is a self-reporting variable (marriage is a Government statistic based on a legal document), and self-reporting variables are subject to delusions and mis-understandings. One person might report something as a relationship that another would regard as a weekly hook-up, while another might only regard the weekly hook-up as a perfectly acceptable "relationship". It would not be the first time women were caught...um...managing their answers to such questions. (Remember that old canard about "men being more promiscuous than women"? Went on for years until some researchers debunked it, and it turned out that women were exactly as promiscuous as men. Men were exaggerating a bit as well, but nowhere near as much as the women.)
But then 18-21 year olds can be “in a (flimsy as all heck) relationship”. So let’s assume that’s what it means, and run the numbers again.
The proportion of men under 30 in relationships (or “relationships” they would describe as such) with women 30 or over is not quite zero, but to keep things simple we will take it as such. However, the proportion of women under thirty dating (or married to) men 30 or over is significant. On average wives are two years younger than husbands. Let’s assume that applies across the age-group, though it may not at the younger end. Two year’s worth of a 12-year wide cohort (18-29) is 16%, women who are going out with men 30 and older.
So that 63% of single men 18-29 breaks down like this: 34% (single 18-29 year old women) + 16% (18-29 dating men 30 or over) + 13% (other reasons).
One of those “other reasons” could be that more that 16% of those 18-29 year old women are going out with older men. The rest is women thinking they are in a relationship with a man who doesn’t think of it as one, or just outright… um… response management. I’ll leave you to pick your weighting of these
In other words, 63% of men and 34% of women aged 18–29 in the U.S. being single is a feature, not a bug. It's the way it's always been.
But wait. Why are 34% of women 18-29 single? Isn’t that because of (enter clickbait reason here)?
Do the math. Suppose you’re in a relationship for two years / quarters / months and it takes a year / quarter / month to get over the break-up, find and establish a new one. You spend one-third of your time not in a relationship. Seems about how real life works to me.
None of this means that men and women today have the same attitudes towards each other and “relationships” as their parents, grandparents or “back in the day”. Some do, many do not. The quantity of their relationships is more or less unchanged, and for many the quality will not have changed much either. But let’s be clear about one thing: their parents and their grandparents are lying about how much better they were at relationships. And I have the divorce statistics to prove it.
Friday, 20 February 2026
Guitar+Amp Bedroom Tone Need Not Be DAW / Mix Tone
The Internet makes a moderate deal about the difference between bedroom or solo tone, and what is needed to mix in with a live band or in the studio. “Bedroom tone” is usually fuller, with more bass. “Mix tone” is alleged to be much lighter on the bass frequencies. The unspoken inference is that going for bedroom tone is for the newbies, and pros practice with a mix-friendly tone.
Except there’s a reason mixing desks and DAWs have a gajillion controls. Because it is extremely unlikely that the guitarist (or anyone else) will get the sound the producer wants, using only a guitar, pedals and an amp. Close, sure, but not the final sound. That final tweak is why producers and recording engineers have jobs. It’s cheaper and faster for the mixing engineer to do it from the recordings, than to do take after take to tweak tone. In one approach, the band plays with a sound they liked in rehearsal, and the engineers change it as needed for records and venues. In another, everyone plays with no effects straight into the board and all the effects are added in the mix.
So recording at home, we may as well play with a sound that pleases and even inspires us, and then use the DAW to jiggle it around to make a hi-fi / head-fi / radio / phone friendly mix.
The McCarty 594’s humbuckers can sound dull. Listening a bit more and trying out some other descriptions, I got to “lacked bite and clarity”. And I was always tempted to add more treble, because treble helps with clarity. Then I wondered what would happen if I turned everything on the Princeton up to 10. Which is forbidden. Or terminally newbie. Or eye-rollingly crass.
But it was a lot closer to what I was looking for. So I went in search of explanations of how the Princeton’s tone and volume controls work. A question that is usually answered by blog posts that mostly consist of circuit diagrams. I can read a circuit diagram as slowly as I can read music.
Tone control on the Fender Princeton is subtractive: 10 is no change, and 1 is turned-right-down. Same as a volume knob on an amplifier: it doesn’t increase the volume, it decreases the attenuation. The tone dials on the amp at 10 are in the neutral position, and turning them down reduces the treble or the bass part of the signal from the guitar.
The same logic applies to the guitar, where the tone control (pot) is also subtractive: 10 “leaves the signal alone” and 3 “takes a lot of treble out”. There’s a point on all guitar tone pots below the signal gets wrapped in cotton wool, and the notes have no attack and are blurred all the way through. It’s horrible.
The “natural sound” of the guitar is everything everywhere at 10 - just like Clapton said all those years ago. However, while acoustic guitars are “tuned”, electrics chuck out a signal and leave it to us to do what we will with it. I can set the dials one way for a tone I like, and you can set them another for a tone you like.
Letting the treble rip is close to ice-pick territory or produces overtones some people might find distracting. 10 on the amplifier bass may be felt to be too boomy (especially on the low E string), or smudge the notes too much.
Bass has to be handled on the amp, since the guitar tone control only does treble. Treble can be handled either on the amp or on the guitar. Everyone’s answer will differ. I’ve left the amp treble at 10 (or 5-ish for the single coils) and control the treble on the guitar.
Turning the amp volume up to 10 and the guitar volume up to 10 will be WAY TOO LOUD at home. Anything below 2 on the amp volume and the sound won’t come out to play. I find that amp=2, guitar = 10 gives a nice crispy tone, and guitar=7, amp=3 (or so) is also acceptable and leaves some headroom on the guitar to handle coil-splitting (which drops the volume some). This gives me the definition in the notes that I want. Others may prefer less clarity.
Having the amp tone controls at 10 means the amp sound is closer to what comes out of the Helix and into an interface. Not identical, because amps have a sound of their own. Which is why we record into a DAW with amp models available.
In the Helix I have an EQ that drops 8kHz and 16kHz by 15dB to deal with ice-picky single coils. And the Deluxe Compressor with a threshold of -15dB and compression of 20:1 to take the top off any loud notes. The result puts some spine into the McCarty 594's "vintage-sounding" humbuckers. On the Paranormal, everything sounds fine because single coils are far less fussy than humbuckers, and their lower output doesn’t engage the compressor to the same extent.
This, through the Princeton, is close enough to the sound I want to hear from an amp. What sounds good from a DAW into a WAV file and in a mix, is another thing altogether, and that’s what DAWs and mixes are for.
I cannot emphasise enough that the sounds you are trying to get may involve having one or more of the controls or pedal settings at an extreme. The "put everything in the middle and tweak it" approach can have you tweaking a bit of this and a bit of that, whereas you may need to swing something WAY OVER to a limit to get what you want.
Except there’s a reason mixing desks and DAWs have a gajillion controls. Because it is extremely unlikely that the guitarist (or anyone else) will get the sound the producer wants, using only a guitar, pedals and an amp. Close, sure, but not the final sound. That final tweak is why producers and recording engineers have jobs. It’s cheaper and faster for the mixing engineer to do it from the recordings, than to do take after take to tweak tone. In one approach, the band plays with a sound they liked in rehearsal, and the engineers change it as needed for records and venues. In another, everyone plays with no effects straight into the board and all the effects are added in the mix.
So recording at home, we may as well play with a sound that pleases and even inspires us, and then use the DAW to jiggle it around to make a hi-fi / head-fi / radio / phone friendly mix.
The McCarty 594’s humbuckers can sound dull. Listening a bit more and trying out some other descriptions, I got to “lacked bite and clarity”. And I was always tempted to add more treble, because treble helps with clarity. Then I wondered what would happen if I turned everything on the Princeton up to 10. Which is forbidden. Or terminally newbie. Or eye-rollingly crass.
But it was a lot closer to what I was looking for. So I went in search of explanations of how the Princeton’s tone and volume controls work. A question that is usually answered by blog posts that mostly consist of circuit diagrams. I can read a circuit diagram as slowly as I can read music.
Tone control on the Fender Princeton is subtractive: 10 is no change, and 1 is turned-right-down. Same as a volume knob on an amplifier: it doesn’t increase the volume, it decreases the attenuation. The tone dials on the amp at 10 are in the neutral position, and turning them down reduces the treble or the bass part of the signal from the guitar.
The same logic applies to the guitar, where the tone control (pot) is also subtractive: 10 “leaves the signal alone” and 3 “takes a lot of treble out”. There’s a point on all guitar tone pots below the signal gets wrapped in cotton wool, and the notes have no attack and are blurred all the way through. It’s horrible.
The “natural sound” of the guitar is everything everywhere at 10 - just like Clapton said all those years ago. However, while acoustic guitars are “tuned”, electrics chuck out a signal and leave it to us to do what we will with it. I can set the dials one way for a tone I like, and you can set them another for a tone you like.
Letting the treble rip is close to ice-pick territory or produces overtones some people might find distracting. 10 on the amplifier bass may be felt to be too boomy (especially on the low E string), or smudge the notes too much.
Bass has to be handled on the amp, since the guitar tone control only does treble. Treble can be handled either on the amp or on the guitar. Everyone’s answer will differ. I’ve left the amp treble at 10 (or 5-ish for the single coils) and control the treble on the guitar.
Turning the amp volume up to 10 and the guitar volume up to 10 will be WAY TOO LOUD at home. Anything below 2 on the amp volume and the sound won’t come out to play. I find that amp=2, guitar = 10 gives a nice crispy tone, and guitar=7, amp=3 (or so) is also acceptable and leaves some headroom on the guitar to handle coil-splitting (which drops the volume some). This gives me the definition in the notes that I want. Others may prefer less clarity.
Having the amp tone controls at 10 means the amp sound is closer to what comes out of the Helix and into an interface. Not identical, because amps have a sound of their own. Which is why we record into a DAW with amp models available.
In the Helix I have an EQ that drops 8kHz and 16kHz by 15dB to deal with ice-picky single coils. And the Deluxe Compressor with a threshold of -15dB and compression of 20:1 to take the top off any loud notes. The result puts some spine into the McCarty 594's "vintage-sounding" humbuckers. On the Paranormal, everything sounds fine because single coils are far less fussy than humbuckers, and their lower output doesn’t engage the compressor to the same extent.
This, through the Princeton, is close enough to the sound I want to hear from an amp. What sounds good from a DAW into a WAV file and in a mix, is another thing altogether, and that’s what DAWs and mixes are for.
I cannot emphasise enough that the sounds you are trying to get may involve having one or more of the controls or pedal settings at an extreme. The "put everything in the middle and tweak it" approach can have you tweaking a bit of this and a bit of that, whereas you may need to swing something WAY OVER to a limit to get what you want.
Friday, 13 February 2026
The Three Laws of Advice
(These thoughts popped into my head while re-reading Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit, which is an interesting glimpse into her life and creative processes, but has a lot of stuff that just doesn't export well from Manhattan or dance, and feels kinda hack-y and interesting-but-shallow. I can't remember any "A-ha" moments from it. Plenty of such books are like that, and I wondered why. The answer clarified itself over the next couple of days.)
First Law. The probability of there being any good advice for you about how to do something is always strictly less than the chances of you being able to do it.
Second Law. The value of advice is inversely proportional to the product of the vagueness of what you are trying to do and the vagueness of how you are going to do it.
Third Law. Advice given by people who have been successful at something, about how to be successful at that thing, will always mention hard work, but will never mention genetic talent.
The first law is a no-brainer. If the chances of you being able to do something (win a Nobel Prize, write a song that's accepted by Taylor Swift, get a date with the girl of your dreams) are close to zero, there won't be anything anyone can tell you that will help you do it. That doesn't mean you might not luck in to a result, it means your mates won't be able to suggest how. If the chances of you being able to do something (make an omelette, clean your trainers, turn up to work five minutes early) are pretty good, there will be plenty of advice about how to go about it.
As for the second law, consider swimming. There is pretty much only one right way to swim freestyle (aka "front crawl"), and any variation is going to be sub-optimal. Teaching people to do the front crawl is about showing them how it is done, and then correcting their mistakes, or refining their technique, if your glass is half-full. It is a well-defined activity with a well-defined technique and a well-defined aim, and so has well-defined coaching. Now consider raising a child. There is not one right way to raise a child, because while children have some things in common, they also have a lot that is shared with only very few others, and their parents and teachers may not have seen before. Not only is the process highly variable, but the end result is highly variable: some will be mathematicians, some will be carpenter's wives. It is an activity with many aims and many ways of achieving those aims which will vary from person to person. So the advice is poorly-defined and not widely generalisable. To get well-defined advice, we would need to consider not "raising a child" but, say, "raising a teenage chess grandmaster" (step forward Mr Polgar).
The third law is about being really good at something, not just okay at it. Like it or not, some of us are born with a talent for drawing, or for playing the trumpet, or performing back-flips, or selling coals to Newcastle, or organising a bunch of people into an effective team, or cooking food, or making peace, and so on. Most of us are just okay-ish at all sorts of things, and a few are just no good at anything much, except getting in the way. Also there is money to be made from selling courses on music production or writing or sales techniques to people with no ability at any of it, and a common sales pitch of those courses is "anyone can do it, you just need determination and consistency", which sounds so plausible, and it really is not. Many people can put in the work and become competent, but there is a long distance between competence and creativity problem-solving.
Here's the catch. We want to believe that we can find those new friends, or that job, or that nice flat, or a partner who really gets us, make a living doing something interesting rather than grinding out a job, and decorate the flat in a comfortable and yet stylish way without spending a chunk of money, and so on. All the problems we really want to solve have poorly-defined aims or poorly-defined ways of solving them, and very few of us are blessed with the natural talent and drive to figure it out for ourselves.
When we try to add details to the aim, and get more clarity about what we need to do, the task can sometimes feel as if it is more attainable, other times feel as if we actually had no idea what we wanted, and sometimes we realise that it never was realistic. Worst of all, we realise that we actually have no idea what we really want, or we understand that what we want is not what we need.
(I leave to the reader as an exercise to apply the Three Laws of Advice to psychotherapy and how-to-do-life problems.)
First Law. The probability of there being any good advice for you about how to do something is always strictly less than the chances of you being able to do it.
Second Law. The value of advice is inversely proportional to the product of the vagueness of what you are trying to do and the vagueness of how you are going to do it.
Third Law. Advice given by people who have been successful at something, about how to be successful at that thing, will always mention hard work, but will never mention genetic talent.
The first law is a no-brainer. If the chances of you being able to do something (win a Nobel Prize, write a song that's accepted by Taylor Swift, get a date with the girl of your dreams) are close to zero, there won't be anything anyone can tell you that will help you do it. That doesn't mean you might not luck in to a result, it means your mates won't be able to suggest how. If the chances of you being able to do something (make an omelette, clean your trainers, turn up to work five minutes early) are pretty good, there will be plenty of advice about how to go about it.
As for the second law, consider swimming. There is pretty much only one right way to swim freestyle (aka "front crawl"), and any variation is going to be sub-optimal. Teaching people to do the front crawl is about showing them how it is done, and then correcting their mistakes, or refining their technique, if your glass is half-full. It is a well-defined activity with a well-defined technique and a well-defined aim, and so has well-defined coaching. Now consider raising a child. There is not one right way to raise a child, because while children have some things in common, they also have a lot that is shared with only very few others, and their parents and teachers may not have seen before. Not only is the process highly variable, but the end result is highly variable: some will be mathematicians, some will be carpenter's wives. It is an activity with many aims and many ways of achieving those aims which will vary from person to person. So the advice is poorly-defined and not widely generalisable. To get well-defined advice, we would need to consider not "raising a child" but, say, "raising a teenage chess grandmaster" (step forward Mr Polgar).
The third law is about being really good at something, not just okay at it. Like it or not, some of us are born with a talent for drawing, or for playing the trumpet, or performing back-flips, or selling coals to Newcastle, or organising a bunch of people into an effective team, or cooking food, or making peace, and so on. Most of us are just okay-ish at all sorts of things, and a few are just no good at anything much, except getting in the way. Also there is money to be made from selling courses on music production or writing or sales techniques to people with no ability at any of it, and a common sales pitch of those courses is "anyone can do it, you just need determination and consistency", which sounds so plausible, and it really is not. Many people can put in the work and become competent, but there is a long distance between competence and creativity problem-solving.
Here's the catch. We want to believe that we can find those new friends, or that job, or that nice flat, or a partner who really gets us, make a living doing something interesting rather than grinding out a job, and decorate the flat in a comfortable and yet stylish way without spending a chunk of money, and so on. All the problems we really want to solve have poorly-defined aims or poorly-defined ways of solving them, and very few of us are blessed with the natural talent and drive to figure it out for ourselves.
When we try to add details to the aim, and get more clarity about what we need to do, the task can sometimes feel as if it is more attainable, other times feel as if we actually had no idea what we wanted, and sometimes we realise that it never was realistic. Worst of all, we realise that we actually have no idea what we really want, or we understand that what we want is not what we need.
(I leave to the reader as an exercise to apply the Three Laws of Advice to psychotherapy and how-to-do-life problems.)
Friday, 6 February 2026
The Sicilian - Mario Puzo
I'm a sucker for books about the Mafia in Sicily up to about the capture of Toto Riina in 1993. As I turned the pages on Mario Puzo's book - which is about the bandit Salvatore Guiliano - I wondered why I had this fascination.
It’s a small, self-contained world with a handful of dominant characters, a supporting cast made up of sketched vividly people who play small but key roles in the lives of the main characters. The setting is a pre-industrial, unforgiving agricultural economy. It is a world where men risk their lives to defend their honour, and where justice is dispensed and disputes settled quickly and violently. The slightest gesture can be significant, the slightest phrase can be full of meaning. Everyone is poor, except a few capos and aristocrats. There are spies, traitors, loyal family members, corrupt officials, and barely competent policemen. There are secrets, hidden alliances and shady deals.
It is exactly the recipe for a story that can be told and re-told, each time with a different perspective. The facts are known, settled, and sufficiently past. The cast is small, their roles vivid, the setting full of weirdness. My favourite book about that era is Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, which in part contrasts the events of those times with the conditions in Sicily in 1996, after the Mafia had been making money from drugs and was recovering from the famous Maxi-trial.
It is a story in which what people say and do can be a matter of life-or-death, in a place where simply managing to get enough to eat and drink is a lifetime struggle. Almost the opposite of our world now.
It’s a small, self-contained world with a handful of dominant characters, a supporting cast made up of sketched vividly people who play small but key roles in the lives of the main characters. The setting is a pre-industrial, unforgiving agricultural economy. It is a world where men risk their lives to defend their honour, and where justice is dispensed and disputes settled quickly and violently. The slightest gesture can be significant, the slightest phrase can be full of meaning. Everyone is poor, except a few capos and aristocrats. There are spies, traitors, loyal family members, corrupt officials, and barely competent policemen. There are secrets, hidden alliances and shady deals.
It is exactly the recipe for a story that can be told and re-told, each time with a different perspective. The facts are known, settled, and sufficiently past. The cast is small, their roles vivid, the setting full of weirdness. My favourite book about that era is Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, which in part contrasts the events of those times with the conditions in Sicily in 1996, after the Mafia had been making money from drugs and was recovering from the famous Maxi-trial.
It is a story in which what people say and do can be a matter of life-or-death, in a place where simply managing to get enough to eat and drink is a lifetime struggle. Almost the opposite of our world now.
Friday, 30 January 2026
MikeGibbs / Chris Spedding - "Five For England"
It's cold, damp and grey. I feel utterly unmotivated to do anything. I have cut down on the You Tube scrolling (see last week's post). I'm nearing the end of The Mentalist, and have read my way through three novels in the last week. I also narrowly avoided buying a Yamaha Revstar with the P90's in the GuitarGuitar sale. I am in customer service hell with TalkTalk, and can think of only one thing worse, which is to work at TalkTalk. I wonder what they do when asked who they work for? Every day brings another sign that this Government has no idea what is going on out there - but then I'm not sure anyone does.
But there was one bright moment. Way back in the early 70's, I had a Mike Gibbs album called Tanglewood '63. It was the sort of thing musically hip nerds did back then. The final track on the second side had Chris Spedding playing some funky rock-jazz guitar for about twelve minutes. Spedding was one the in-demand session musicians of the time and this track shows why. Every now and then I would try to find it, but other than "Chris Spedding guitar track" I didn't have much by way of search terms. Then I found a wikipedia entry on Spedding, which mentioned the track. And You Tube has it. Qobuz does not - get your act together guys. Discogs has various CD offerings from £15 to £55 + postage. My memory is that for me the Spedding track was the standout, so I'm not inclined to buy the album. Anyway, here's the You Tube link. Listen on headphones.
But there was one bright moment. Way back in the early 70's, I had a Mike Gibbs album called Tanglewood '63. It was the sort of thing musically hip nerds did back then. The final track on the second side had Chris Spedding playing some funky rock-jazz guitar for about twelve minutes. Spedding was one the in-demand session musicians of the time and this track shows why. Every now and then I would try to find it, but other than "Chris Spedding guitar track" I didn't have much by way of search terms. Then I found a wikipedia entry on Spedding, which mentioned the track. And You Tube has it. Qobuz does not - get your act together guys. Discogs has various CD offerings from £15 to £55 + postage. My memory is that for me the Spedding track was the standout, so I'm not inclined to buy the album. Anyway, here's the You Tube link. Listen on headphones.
Friday, 23 January 2026
Overthinking My Use of You Tube
One evening way back in 1999, after a a long day at work, I made supper and slumped on the couch in front of the TV. I got up again after maybe ninety minutes, during which I had watched utter twaddle. What made it worse utter twaddle was comparing it to Homicide: Life On The Street, which was showing at the time. TV could make interesting, surprising shows, but it mostly didn't. British TV especially was just plain lazy. So I unlugged the aerial and canceled my TV license. From whenever that day was, I have not watched broadcast TV in my home - and when I caught sight of it elsewhere, it didn't look as it it had improved.
(You can have a TV and watch DVD/Blu-Ray, or tape if you have that, and you can watch streaming services (MUBI, Curzon... are there any others?) without a license. What you can't watch is "terrestrial TV at-the-time-of-broadcast" and anything on the BBC iPlayer. That's what I do.)
It makes watching TV more deliberate - nobody just played the first movie off the MUBI menu (though that sounds like an interesting experiment). For a long time that worked well.
Then You Tube came along. Most things on the Internet are a migrated version something we had already. Music streaming is just the radio without ads. Movie and TV streaming is just movies and TV delivered another way. Wikipedia is the Encyclopaedia Brittanica without the books. You Tube is both TV and the magazine rack at the newsagent.
And just like TV and magazines, there are some good channels on You Tube. Veristatium. The B1M. Jago Hazzard and Geoff Marshall. Sabine Hossenfelder. Darko Audio. Justin Taylor. Maths lectures (real ones not recreational math), and some music channels: where else am I going to see SRV duetting with Albert King? There is music on You Tube that is priceless.
There are channels that catch my attention for a while and then don't. Many of those people would, in the pre-Internet age, have been journalists, columnists, commentators and contributors, and we would have read their work in one magazine or another. Others would have been TV production companies - the larger channels have the same staff and roles.
But I'm having that same moment as I had with TV. You Tube is being swamped by AI channels. The same (e.g.) lecture by Feynman on this and that channel , or channels telling me what England was like in the 1960's and 70's (and since I was there, I can spot the mistakes, some of which are not small: one about why we were so slim in the 1960's ignored how much everyone smoked). After a while, I can tell just from the channel name and subject. (If I can do it it at my age, I'm pretty sure their billion-dollar AI can be trained to do the same. They just don't want to.)
I am almost at the point where the effort required to filter the slop is greater than the enjoyment of watching something interesting. The difference between TV in 1999 and You Tube is that TV in 1999 had no redeeming features. It really was pap, from the news to the cooking programmes, and that hasn't stopped it from reaching ever lower depths of tosh. But You Tube does have some channels I find interesting and occasionally eye-opening.
I watch it while preparing and eating lunch or supper, and that feels okay. What doesn't feel okay is scrolling through it for something distracting because I can't focus on reading a novel, watching a movie, practicing guitar, or something else. It gives me a sense of what is going on out there (which is a whole other subject) and that's a feeling I want. Hence the scrolling - looking for the next bulletin from the real world. So I'm going to give myself a break on doing that.
Also, I watch it in the Brave Browser, so I don't get ads. None. I have had people thank me for suggesting Brave. In the UK it has less than 1% market share, which remained unchanged through 2024 and 2025, so I guess Alphabet just ignore it. If I had to watch ads, I would drop You Tube that afternoon (I'm a shameless free-loader) and wonder if it really was worth £12.99 / month. With AI slop, it isn't. With a slop filter, it would be.
(You can have a TV and watch DVD/Blu-Ray, or tape if you have that, and you can watch streaming services (MUBI, Curzon... are there any others?) without a license. What you can't watch is "terrestrial TV at-the-time-of-broadcast" and anything on the BBC iPlayer. That's what I do.)
It makes watching TV more deliberate - nobody just played the first movie off the MUBI menu (though that sounds like an interesting experiment). For a long time that worked well.
Then You Tube came along. Most things on the Internet are a migrated version something we had already. Music streaming is just the radio without ads. Movie and TV streaming is just movies and TV delivered another way. Wikipedia is the Encyclopaedia Brittanica without the books. You Tube is both TV and the magazine rack at the newsagent.
And just like TV and magazines, there are some good channels on You Tube. Veristatium. The B1M. Jago Hazzard and Geoff Marshall. Sabine Hossenfelder. Darko Audio. Justin Taylor. Maths lectures (real ones not recreational math), and some music channels: where else am I going to see SRV duetting with Albert King? There is music on You Tube that is priceless.
There are channels that catch my attention for a while and then don't. Many of those people would, in the pre-Internet age, have been journalists, columnists, commentators and contributors, and we would have read their work in one magazine or another. Others would have been TV production companies - the larger channels have the same staff and roles.
But I'm having that same moment as I had with TV. You Tube is being swamped by AI channels. The same (e.g.) lecture by Feynman on this and that channel , or channels telling me what England was like in the 1960's and 70's (and since I was there, I can spot the mistakes, some of which are not small: one about why we were so slim in the 1960's ignored how much everyone smoked). After a while, I can tell just from the channel name and subject. (If I can do it it at my age, I'm pretty sure their billion-dollar AI can be trained to do the same. They just don't want to.)
I am almost at the point where the effort required to filter the slop is greater than the enjoyment of watching something interesting. The difference between TV in 1999 and You Tube is that TV in 1999 had no redeeming features. It really was pap, from the news to the cooking programmes, and that hasn't stopped it from reaching ever lower depths of tosh. But You Tube does have some channels I find interesting and occasionally eye-opening.
I watch it while preparing and eating lunch or supper, and that feels okay. What doesn't feel okay is scrolling through it for something distracting because I can't focus on reading a novel, watching a movie, practicing guitar, or something else. It gives me a sense of what is going on out there (which is a whole other subject) and that's a feeling I want. Hence the scrolling - looking for the next bulletin from the real world. So I'm going to give myself a break on doing that.
Also, I watch it in the Brave Browser, so I don't get ads. None. I have had people thank me for suggesting Brave. In the UK it has less than 1% market share, which remained unchanged through 2024 and 2025, so I guess Alphabet just ignore it. If I had to watch ads, I would drop You Tube that afternoon (I'm a shameless free-loader) and wonder if it really was worth £12.99 / month. With AI slop, it isn't. With a slop filter, it would be.
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