The tone pots on my Epiphone Les Paul were monsters, especially on the bridge. Turn the bridge tone pot up to 10 and the sound was 10dB (!) louder than at 0. Neck wasn’t quite as much, but it was still unmistakeable. And to my ears the difference in tone was independent of the volume pot setting.
The effect of the McCarty tone pots depends on the volume level: the higher the volume pot, the greater the difference between 0 and 10. The difference is greater at the bridge than the neck, but that’s because physics.
Which is one reason it took me a while to notice that the bridge tone pot wasn’t actually working. Coil split was, but not the tone control. The neck one was okay.
So back to those nice people at GuitarGuitar Epsom I went, where their wonderful tech swiftly diagnosed a dry solder joint. A quick touch of the iron, and everything worked as it should. All covered by warranty.
A lot of a modern guitar is made by CNC tools. The body is cut by CNC millers, which is why the body shape is so consistent. The pick-ups are wound by a CNC winder, so every pickup gets 5,324 turns of 60AWG (or whatever) - as opposed to 1950’s Gibson pick-ups which were wound by hand and could vary considerably. The necks must be cut and fretted by machine as well, given the cost of a luthier re-fret these days.
The wiring has to be done by hand. I doubt even Apple could automate that. The connections are soldered by hand. Just like when Leo Fender made his first guitar for Noah on the Ark. Hand-soldering has not improved since it was invented. The mid-teenage me used to solder slot-car chassis back in the day, and even I could get a dry joint now and again. However, I wasn’t making lots of chassis in a day, so I had time to spot it and re-solder. The guys in the factory probably don’t have the time.
Once upon a time, cars used to be assembled more or less by hand, and we could tell. Rattles, squeaks, screws coming loose… There’s a reason Ford, Fiat and the rest spend gajillions developing automated manufacturing. It’s the reason that modern cars are so reliable and last so long. That and improved paint formulations.
Guitar-makers don’t work at the volumes of car manufacturers and can’t afford the investment in specialised robots. So we will just have to accept that, at least for the budget-price market (if PRS SE prices are your idea of “budget”), a fair proportion of the guitars will need some post-sale tweaking to get 100% right.
Now everything is copacetic. The default volume pot setting is around 7-8, which lets the tone pots do their thing. I had to tweak some settings on my HX Effects, but I’m getting real slick at playing the stomp switches.
My McCarty 549 SE sounds great, has humbuckers, the Les Paul control layout, and weighs 7 lbs. It’s not going anywhere for a long time.
Friday 19 July 2024
Tuesday 16 July 2024
Moral Injury
Apparently this is a thing. It was identified by an activist on behalf of US Army vets. He said it was: betrayal of 'what's right' in a high-stakes situation by someone who holds power. Puts the blame squarely on management. I heard about it during this YT video.
One day someone will do a study of the sad career of this concept, and psychologists and their kind will hang their heads in shame.
A more recent definition is “the inability to contextualize or justify personal actions or the actions of others and the unsuccessful accommodation of these . . . experiences into pre-existing moral schemas”. This polysyllabic neo-gibberish appears to put the blame squarely on the injured person, since it is their “failure to contextualise other people’s actions into pre-existing moral schemas” - in other words, management didn’t do anything wrong, you just don’t understand why what they did was right.
Any idea that can be so easily turned on its head has something wrong with it. The mistake (which I have just recognised after many abandoned words) is to go in search of what’s wrong and try to explain or rectify it. Because it won’t affect the underlying insight.
Which is that some people can be severely shaken and lose faith in the institutions within which they are working, when they see some ghastly event happen as a result of yet one more incomprehensibly dumb management decision.
They can also lose faith and respect for themselves for going along with that decision, for fear of a Court Martial, the sack, a poor performance review, and otherwise having their career screwed. The relevant phrase comes from a Sunday Times journalist after Rupert Murdoch bought it: it is an unpleasant experience to discover that the size of one’s soul is just less than the size of one’s mortgage.
Even civilian life can inflict sufficient insults, disappointments, refusals, rejections, broken promises, incomprehensible bureaucratic decisions, below-inflation pay rises, increased prices for decreased quality and quantity, zero-hours contracts, redundancies, offshoring, increased taxes for policies no-one agrees with, long waiting lists, cancelled operations, unavailable GPs, LTN schemes appearing out of thin air… to reduce even the strongest to despair and self-doubt.
The concern is that this will affect the functioning of our society and economy. Trust feels like something nice and warm that we should have in our leaders and institutions. But we don’t, because that’s not how it works.
We just need to know that the law or institutional practice says that if we competently follow our leader’s instructions, we are absolved of any liability, if anything goes wrong as a result. Which is why we should always get everything in writing. The deal is that we will not question their dumb and self-serving decisions, and they will protect us from the consequences of following those dumb and self-serving decisions.
It’s when that deal is broken that all hell breaks loose amongst the ranks. Management that goes looking for low-level scapegoats is tarred and feathered in the press, should the story get that far. And management finds out that “staff goodwill” is a real thing, especially when it vanishes.
Most of what is covered by “moral injury” (front-line warfare and NHS treatment of whistleblowers excepted) is what used to be considered a “welcome the real world” moment, in which one’s delusions and were rudely broken, and one’s un-informed expectations were properly informed. It was regarded as a moment in which one added additional adult maturity to one’s character. People who could not handle the disappointment or shock were regarded as a little short of moral fortitude. Back in the day, women who couldn’t handle the shock were offered a move to (name some gentler place off the serious career track here). Men just sucked it up.
“Moral injury” suggests that our delusions and unrealistic expectations are in fact precious possessions, and their loss in the face of reality is to be regarded as a blow to the integrity of our character from which we may never recover. The truth is no longer learning, but injury.
We are supposed to be shocked as our delusions are dispersed, and then build the character needed to carry on doing good work despite being in a world we now know is far-from-perfect. Being cynical is not good enough, and nor is running away in shock.
It may be that the only way to do good work is to do the same job somewhere else. Nothing wrong with that: there’s no obligation to stay in a dysfunctional institution run by a**holes. Apply for a job elsewhere, and speak so well of the place you’re leaving that everyone wonders why you are leaving. Except they will know, and appreciate your willingness to play the game.
(Edited 24/7) It may be you are not cut out for nursing / surgery / sales / customer service / (enter some other activity here). That’s how it used to be said. Nothing wrong with that. Find another occupation, preferably that you don’t have high-flown illusions about. Yes, sometimes management or the enemy do something so egregious that not to react to it would be inhuman, and to regard it as an opportunity for growth would be obscene. Then we could talk about “injury”. But that happens to very few people outside a war zone, or the NHS.
One day someone will do a study of the sad career of this concept, and psychologists and their kind will hang their heads in shame.
A more recent definition is “the inability to contextualize or justify personal actions or the actions of others and the unsuccessful accommodation of these . . . experiences into pre-existing moral schemas”. This polysyllabic neo-gibberish appears to put the blame squarely on the injured person, since it is their “failure to contextualise other people’s actions into pre-existing moral schemas” - in other words, management didn’t do anything wrong, you just don’t understand why what they did was right.
Any idea that can be so easily turned on its head has something wrong with it. The mistake (which I have just recognised after many abandoned words) is to go in search of what’s wrong and try to explain or rectify it. Because it won’t affect the underlying insight.
Which is that some people can be severely shaken and lose faith in the institutions within which they are working, when they see some ghastly event happen as a result of yet one more incomprehensibly dumb management decision.
They can also lose faith and respect for themselves for going along with that decision, for fear of a Court Martial, the sack, a poor performance review, and otherwise having their career screwed. The relevant phrase comes from a Sunday Times journalist after Rupert Murdoch bought it: it is an unpleasant experience to discover that the size of one’s soul is just less than the size of one’s mortgage.
Even civilian life can inflict sufficient insults, disappointments, refusals, rejections, broken promises, incomprehensible bureaucratic decisions, below-inflation pay rises, increased prices for decreased quality and quantity, zero-hours contracts, redundancies, offshoring, increased taxes for policies no-one agrees with, long waiting lists, cancelled operations, unavailable GPs, LTN schemes appearing out of thin air… to reduce even the strongest to despair and self-doubt.
The concern is that this will affect the functioning of our society and economy. Trust feels like something nice and warm that we should have in our leaders and institutions. But we don’t, because that’s not how it works.
We just need to know that the law or institutional practice says that if we competently follow our leader’s instructions, we are absolved of any liability, if anything goes wrong as a result. Which is why we should always get everything in writing. The deal is that we will not question their dumb and self-serving decisions, and they will protect us from the consequences of following those dumb and self-serving decisions.
It’s when that deal is broken that all hell breaks loose amongst the ranks. Management that goes looking for low-level scapegoats is tarred and feathered in the press, should the story get that far. And management finds out that “staff goodwill” is a real thing, especially when it vanishes.
Most of what is covered by “moral injury” (front-line warfare and NHS treatment of whistleblowers excepted) is what used to be considered a “welcome the real world” moment, in which one’s delusions and were rudely broken, and one’s un-informed expectations were properly informed. It was regarded as a moment in which one added additional adult maturity to one’s character. People who could not handle the disappointment or shock were regarded as a little short of moral fortitude. Back in the day, women who couldn’t handle the shock were offered a move to (name some gentler place off the serious career track here). Men just sucked it up.
“Moral injury” suggests that our delusions and unrealistic expectations are in fact precious possessions, and their loss in the face of reality is to be regarded as a blow to the integrity of our character from which we may never recover. The truth is no longer learning, but injury.
We are supposed to be shocked as our delusions are dispersed, and then build the character needed to carry on doing good work despite being in a world we now know is far-from-perfect. Being cynical is not good enough, and nor is running away in shock.
It may be that the only way to do good work is to do the same job somewhere else. Nothing wrong with that: there’s no obligation to stay in a dysfunctional institution run by a**holes. Apply for a job elsewhere, and speak so well of the place you’re leaving that everyone wonders why you are leaving. Except they will know, and appreciate your willingness to play the game.
(Edited 24/7) It may be you are not cut out for nursing / surgery / sales / customer service / (enter some other activity here). That’s how it used to be said. Nothing wrong with that. Find another occupation, preferably that you don’t have high-flown illusions about. Yes, sometimes management or the enemy do something so egregious that not to react to it would be inhuman, and to regard it as an opportunity for growth would be obscene. Then we could talk about “injury”. But that happens to very few people outside a war zone, or the NHS.
Friday 12 July 2024
Farewell Les Paul, Hello McCarty
My first electric guitar was an Epiphone Les Paul. It weighed 9.1 lbs and sounded - once I finally sorted out the effects+amp chain - pretty darn awesome. Double humbuckers will do that. I liked the feel of the neck. I bought it in late 2022 before my neck vertebrae decided to play up. 9.1 lbs was just too heavy to sling on my shoulder for more than half-an-hour, and if it wasn’t positioned just right, like all LP’s, it would slide off my right thigh like a (insert analogy here).
Facing the prospect of my second lesson, and needing to play for practice sessions for longer than I would find comfortable, I finally faced up to the fact that the weight and balance of the LP was a distraction.
My Marshall-owning friend advised me to get the guitar I needed / wanted, rather than could live with, as trading guitars can be an expensive way of renting them. Which is a good point.
What I wanted was a Les Paul that weighed 7lbs at the most and didn’t fall off my lap like (analogy supplied above). One candidate is an SG. It weighs around 6 lbs, has a shorter body from neck pick-up to the end and hence superior upper fret access, but it has neck-dive. Acoustics have neck-dive (falling forward in the direction of the headstock) but nothing like an SG. Straps are compulsory, and it does not balance on one’s knee. Sounds wicked though.
Fender don’t really do double-humbuckers, and don’t have the LP control and wiring. Also, Strats and Teles are heavy - not hefty like some LPs can be, but still heavy.
Within my budget, this leaves the PRS SE range. You don’t have to be a lawyer to buy one of those. It’s in the Mexican Fender price range, and the unoccupied land between Epiphone and Gibson prices. After much trying of this and that , I asked one of the GuitarGuitar staff if they could weigh the two candidates. I felt one was slightly but crucially lighter than the other. It was. 7lbs dead on.
7 lbs
So I went back to the car, fetched the Epiphone, and traded it in.
Facing the prospect of my second lesson, and needing to play for practice sessions for longer than I would find comfortable, I finally faced up to the fact that the weight and balance of the LP was a distraction.
My Marshall-owning friend advised me to get the guitar I needed / wanted, rather than could live with, as trading guitars can be an expensive way of renting them. Which is a good point.
What I wanted was a Les Paul that weighed 7lbs at the most and didn’t fall off my lap like (analogy supplied above). One candidate is an SG. It weighs around 6 lbs, has a shorter body from neck pick-up to the end and hence superior upper fret access, but it has neck-dive. Acoustics have neck-dive (falling forward in the direction of the headstock) but nothing like an SG. Straps are compulsory, and it does not balance on one’s knee. Sounds wicked though.
Fender don’t really do double-humbuckers, and don’t have the LP control and wiring. Also, Strats and Teles are heavy - not hefty like some LPs can be, but still heavy.
Within my budget, this leaves the PRS SE range. You don’t have to be a lawyer to buy one of those. It’s in the Mexican Fender price range, and the unoccupied land between Epiphone and Gibson prices. After much trying of this and that , I asked one of the GuitarGuitar staff if they could weigh the two candidates. I felt one was slightly but crucially lighter than the other. It was. 7lbs dead on.
7 lbs
Double humbuckers with separate tone + volume controls in parallel, joined at the switch (e.g. Les Paul wiring).
Sounds fine - in fact, I preferred the slightly cleaner sound of the PRS pickups
Looks good
Balances nicely on my right thigh
Doesn’t feel like a weight on my shoulder
7 lbs
This is what I wanted.
This is what I wanted.
So I went back to the car, fetched the Epiphone, and traded it in.
Tuesday 9 July 2024
Sleep Hygiene Is Not For Regular People
There needs to be a name for a piece of advice, given as part of a programme, that almost everyone would not be able to follow, and so, when they complain that the programme “doesn’t work”, the guru can say “Did you do the thing I put in there that I know almost nobody every does?” and you say “No, because almost nobody can” and the guru says “Well, that’s the most important part of the programme”.
In the self-improvement / recovery business, that thing is usually “sleep hygiene”. This says we should go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, and get at least five full circadian cycles of sleep, waking up from shallow sleep. Everyone’s circadian cycle is different in length, and the default number is 90 minutes.
Now think this through. You have to go to work. Starts at (say) 09:00, but it’s best to get there around 08:30 so you get a seat in the open-plan office. Say it’s an hour’s commute. So that’s 07:30. An hour for dressing, breakfast, showering and the like, 06:30 wake-up time. Seven and a half hours’ sleep plus dozing-off time, means getting into bed at 22:30 the previous evening. That means you’re winding down - no exciting TV or we-need-to-talk conversations - around 22:00. You left work at 17:30, were on the gym floor at 18:00, exercised and showered and on your way home at 19:15, arriving home at 20:15, leaving you 105 minutes to deal with life at home. Maybe you caught a movie at 18:30, which stopped at 20:30, so you were home at 21:30-ish, and straight into your wind-down routine. Weekends? You’re up at 06:30 while the rest of the world doesn’t even get started until about 10:00.
What you didn’t do was go to the theatre at 19:30, because that’s letting you out at 21:15 or so, adds fifteen minutes to the commute, so you’re home at 22:30, and oops! Nope.
Sleep hygiene is often incorporated into self-improvement and recovery programmes. Not because sleeping consistently is good for you (though it is), but because of all the things you stop doing in order to sleep consistently. No more late nights. No more parties. No theatre, ballet, concerts, gigs, or Above and Beyond all-dayer’s. No drinks after work. No chasing after potential partners of your preference. No weekend city breaks (what is the point of going to any major European city if you’re not going to party?).
It’s a terrific way for people who want to minimise their contact with the rest of the human race to do just that. I’d love to join you, but pumpkin time comes early for me.
Usually those same recovery programmes will suggest that one spend more time with friends, family and “like-minded people”. Rub that tummy while patting the head of your sleep hygiene.
Also, try sleep hygiene when you have young children. Or you have to deal with your partner’s snoring / restless leg / need to start sharing when you get to bed.
Nah. Sleep hygiene for regular people with actual lives is, well, aspirational.
We’re not supposed to practice sleep hygiene, anymore than we’re supposed to abstain from alcohol and sex. Abstaining from any of those is for people like me who would be far worse off if we indulged. Sleep hygiene, like sobriety, is either a productivity hack (for e.g. athletes) or for messed-up people who need to avoid screwing-up. It’s not for regular people.
Real people are supposed to get tipsy and laid from time to time, and they are supposed to be short of sleep now and again.
What they are not supposed to be is permanently sleep-deprived, running on six or less hours of sleep a day. That has all sorts of horrible effects on our short-term functioning. But sleep hygiene does not, take it from me, have all sorts of beneficial effects on short-term functioning: one does not feel better, one just doesn’t feel worse.
So given the unrealistic demands it makes, why is it included in self-improvement or recovery advice?
So the gurus can blame you for not following the programme when you tell them it isn’t working.
In the self-improvement / recovery business, that thing is usually “sleep hygiene”. This says we should go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, and get at least five full circadian cycles of sleep, waking up from shallow sleep. Everyone’s circadian cycle is different in length, and the default number is 90 minutes.
Now think this through. You have to go to work. Starts at (say) 09:00, but it’s best to get there around 08:30 so you get a seat in the open-plan office. Say it’s an hour’s commute. So that’s 07:30. An hour for dressing, breakfast, showering and the like, 06:30 wake-up time. Seven and a half hours’ sleep plus dozing-off time, means getting into bed at 22:30 the previous evening. That means you’re winding down - no exciting TV or we-need-to-talk conversations - around 22:00. You left work at 17:30, were on the gym floor at 18:00, exercised and showered and on your way home at 19:15, arriving home at 20:15, leaving you 105 minutes to deal with life at home. Maybe you caught a movie at 18:30, which stopped at 20:30, so you were home at 21:30-ish, and straight into your wind-down routine. Weekends? You’re up at 06:30 while the rest of the world doesn’t even get started until about 10:00.
What you didn’t do was go to the theatre at 19:30, because that’s letting you out at 21:15 or so, adds fifteen minutes to the commute, so you’re home at 22:30, and oops! Nope.
Sleep hygiene is often incorporated into self-improvement and recovery programmes. Not because sleeping consistently is good for you (though it is), but because of all the things you stop doing in order to sleep consistently. No more late nights. No more parties. No theatre, ballet, concerts, gigs, or Above and Beyond all-dayer’s. No drinks after work. No chasing after potential partners of your preference. No weekend city breaks (what is the point of going to any major European city if you’re not going to party?).
It’s a terrific way for people who want to minimise their contact with the rest of the human race to do just that. I’d love to join you, but pumpkin time comes early for me.
Usually those same recovery programmes will suggest that one spend more time with friends, family and “like-minded people”. Rub that tummy while patting the head of your sleep hygiene.
Also, try sleep hygiene when you have young children. Or you have to deal with your partner’s snoring / restless leg / need to start sharing when you get to bed.
Nah. Sleep hygiene for regular people with actual lives is, well, aspirational.
We’re not supposed to practice sleep hygiene, anymore than we’re supposed to abstain from alcohol and sex. Abstaining from any of those is for people like me who would be far worse off if we indulged. Sleep hygiene, like sobriety, is either a productivity hack (for e.g. athletes) or for messed-up people who need to avoid screwing-up. It’s not for regular people.
Real people are supposed to get tipsy and laid from time to time, and they are supposed to be short of sleep now and again.
What they are not supposed to be is permanently sleep-deprived, running on six or less hours of sleep a day. That has all sorts of horrible effects on our short-term functioning. But sleep hygiene does not, take it from me, have all sorts of beneficial effects on short-term functioning: one does not feel better, one just doesn’t feel worse.
So given the unrealistic demands it makes, why is it included in self-improvement or recovery advice?
So the gurus can blame you for not following the programme when you tell them it isn’t working.
Friday 5 July 2024
Why We Take “Government Advice” - But Shouldn’t
I swear if I read the phrase “according to experts” I will write a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph suggesting that they ban the phrase, and substitute instead the name, rank, recent relevant publications, and commercial or State affiliations of the “expert”. Something like
Okay. Rant over.
There is a serious side to this. The concept of expertise was philosophicalised (which is now a word, meaning, made the subject of a philosophical investigation or enquiry) by Hubert Dreyfus in a series of essays, in which he laid out a five-level characterisation of skilfulness at a task. It has since been abused beyond belief by HR departments and Training Consultants.
Dreyfus was arguing that the so-called “expert systems” (the ‘computers will replace knowledge workers’ hype of the time) could never replicate the actual decision-making of human experts, becuase truly expert decision-making was highly contextual, used implicit knowledge (in the sense of Polyani’s book with the same title), and could not be distilled into rules.
As a description of how experienced, knowledgeable, organisationally-senior doctors made decisions, he was right. Where he was wrong was assuming that they made better decisions because of it. What little research there is suggests that younger doctors, who are nearer to their up-to-date training, make better decisions than more experienced doctors who have not kept up with the research.
He was, I suspect, over-impressed, as many were at the time, by the confidence of senior medical people. Dreyfus formulated his ideas in the late 1970’s (published in 1980), since when public expectations have risen to the point where today, too many of us have too many examples of friends and colleagues being mis-diagnosed, ignored, and given the wrong treatments and drugs. The NHS has become notorious for its hounding of whistleblowers, and also spending millions on NDAs. We can assume that, if there ever was a time when Consultants were diagnostic giants striding the wards, it is well past.
So the “implicit expertise” Dreyfus described is a myth, but the manner of making decisions he describes as “expert” is surely still with us. I would simply remove “Expert”, with its unavoidable overtones of superior diagnostic performance, from the Dreyfus classification, and add a note to the “Proficient” description that, with time, much of the decision-making and task performance will become more nuanced, seem to be more case-by-case, and almost unconscious. In addition, however, those people have about the same success rate (and its variation over time) as people who make their decisions more consciously.
Dreyfus’ point about limits to the development of AI / Expert Systems still stands. What does not stand is his implict praise for the “Expert” way of practicing.
The lesson of the last twenty or so years, in every profession from banking to public health, is that experts are fallible, and sometimes more-than-fallible. The usual solution is to introduce regulatory guidelines, which will amongst other things, require decisions to be made in a transparent, systematic way that may in addition incorporate compliance with purely political considerations, such as equality legislation. In addition, the lawyers will prefer some kind of documentary proof that these regulatory requirements were followed. This, of course, imposes a bureaucratic overhead of work on the productive staff.
In a technically and legally complex economy, no one person can ever become well-informed enough to take responsibility for all of their decisions. Just as we cannot test every egg for salmonella (nor could we afford the equipment), we cannot understand every tax law, nor everything to do with the working of our cars, let alone anything to do with medical treatment. We have to be able to “take someone’s word for it” and not then become liable for doing so - as long as it is the right kind of person. The principle we need is that competently following “expert advice” absolves one from liability if something goes wrong as the result of the competent application of that advice.
The law define who the “experts” are, whose word we may take on trust. For cars, that is a manufacturer-certified mechanic. For food, it is a licensed retailer. For medical purposes, a GP or Consultant. Within a company, it will be one’s manager, as within the Armed Forces it is one’s superior officer. These people do not absolve one of liability because they are right, but because the law or institutional practice says they do.
On this principle, “Government advice” is not taken because it is right, but because being able to prove that one followed it competently is an absolute defence.
It would be nice if “government advice” was given because it was right, or at least based on the best available evidence and thinking, but of course it is almost invariably wrong. It must be politically acceptable, within the abilities and pockets of most of the population, does not commit Government to spending more money, and is seen to be coming from the “right” sources, which will be members of the Establishment, or, and this is where the trouble starts, “experts” whom the Civil Service are prepared to listen to. The resulting compromises and ideological influences, as well as industry and single-issue group lobbying, almost guarantee bad decisions.
Who should the Government be listening to? One would think, to the people who know most about the issue, who have studied its past and how other countries have dealt with it. Who have recently conducted research about it, and whose papers are cited with respect by other researchers. And whose computer models produce the same answer twice in a row given the same inputs (rather than professors at Imperial College). The “experts”. Who can be cited by Ministers, who are therefore absolved from responsibility. Because they followed the “experts”.
Here’s the Catch-22. If there were a small range of solutions to an problem, that could be packaged up and made available to the public at an affordable price, which would happen if this issue recurred frequently and affected a large number of people, then… well, the private sector would be selling those solutions already and the Government would not need to get involved.
The Government gets involved when the issue is new, infrequently occurring, has a horrendous cost, and there is limited experience and research to draw on. This will mean that there are many competing theories about the causes and remedies, and no way to decide quickly between them. Advice in these cases will require significant technical understanding to evaluate. This is what the Chief Medical and Scientific Officers (and their staffs) were set up to do, but the world has become far too complicated for that to work. And often in these cases, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Sadly, in these circumstances, what Governments need is certainty. Even if it comes from people who have produced appallingly inaccurate forecasts before, and whose social and political agendas are barely hidden under their shirts.
And this is how activists capture Government. Not by attacking Whitehall and Westminster with guns and ammunition, but with policy papers, advice, “research” by fellow-travelling academics, and PR campaigns, that are as certain as they are false, and passionate as they are obsessive.
Hence the need to identify the anonymous “experts” who make eye-catching claims with immediate political relevance.
Which is where we came in.
Dr Misha Andry (54), Lecturer in Public Health at the University of Carlisle, a subscriber to the Guardian, a member of Greenpeace and of the National Trust, whose most recent publications have been on the transmission of sexual diseases in gerbils.This sort of thing should be willingly provided by the “expert” and is often available on WIkipedia or LinkedIn.
Okay. Rant over.
There is a serious side to this. The concept of expertise was philosophicalised (which is now a word, meaning, made the subject of a philosophical investigation or enquiry) by Hubert Dreyfus in a series of essays, in which he laid out a five-level characterisation of skilfulness at a task. It has since been abused beyond belief by HR departments and Training Consultants.
Dreyfus was arguing that the so-called “expert systems” (the ‘computers will replace knowledge workers’ hype of the time) could never replicate the actual decision-making of human experts, becuase truly expert decision-making was highly contextual, used implicit knowledge (in the sense of Polyani’s book with the same title), and could not be distilled into rules.
As a description of how experienced, knowledgeable, organisationally-senior doctors made decisions, he was right. Where he was wrong was assuming that they made better decisions because of it. What little research there is suggests that younger doctors, who are nearer to their up-to-date training, make better decisions than more experienced doctors who have not kept up with the research.
He was, I suspect, over-impressed, as many were at the time, by the confidence of senior medical people. Dreyfus formulated his ideas in the late 1970’s (published in 1980), since when public expectations have risen to the point where today, too many of us have too many examples of friends and colleagues being mis-diagnosed, ignored, and given the wrong treatments and drugs. The NHS has become notorious for its hounding of whistleblowers, and also spending millions on NDAs. We can assume that, if there ever was a time when Consultants were diagnostic giants striding the wards, it is well past.
So the “implicit expertise” Dreyfus described is a myth, but the manner of making decisions he describes as “expert” is surely still with us. I would simply remove “Expert”, with its unavoidable overtones of superior diagnostic performance, from the Dreyfus classification, and add a note to the “Proficient” description that, with time, much of the decision-making and task performance will become more nuanced, seem to be more case-by-case, and almost unconscious. In addition, however, those people have about the same success rate (and its variation over time) as people who make their decisions more consciously.
Dreyfus’ point about limits to the development of AI / Expert Systems still stands. What does not stand is his implict praise for the “Expert” way of practicing.
The lesson of the last twenty or so years, in every profession from banking to public health, is that experts are fallible, and sometimes more-than-fallible. The usual solution is to introduce regulatory guidelines, which will amongst other things, require decisions to be made in a transparent, systematic way that may in addition incorporate compliance with purely political considerations, such as equality legislation. In addition, the lawyers will prefer some kind of documentary proof that these regulatory requirements were followed. This, of course, imposes a bureaucratic overhead of work on the productive staff.
In a technically and legally complex economy, no one person can ever become well-informed enough to take responsibility for all of their decisions. Just as we cannot test every egg for salmonella (nor could we afford the equipment), we cannot understand every tax law, nor everything to do with the working of our cars, let alone anything to do with medical treatment. We have to be able to “take someone’s word for it” and not then become liable for doing so - as long as it is the right kind of person. The principle we need is that competently following “expert advice” absolves one from liability if something goes wrong as the result of the competent application of that advice.
The law define who the “experts” are, whose word we may take on trust. For cars, that is a manufacturer-certified mechanic. For food, it is a licensed retailer. For medical purposes, a GP or Consultant. Within a company, it will be one’s manager, as within the Armed Forces it is one’s superior officer. These people do not absolve one of liability because they are right, but because the law or institutional practice says they do.
On this principle, “Government advice” is not taken because it is right, but because being able to prove that one followed it competently is an absolute defence.
It would be nice if “government advice” was given because it was right, or at least based on the best available evidence and thinking, but of course it is almost invariably wrong. It must be politically acceptable, within the abilities and pockets of most of the population, does not commit Government to spending more money, and is seen to be coming from the “right” sources, which will be members of the Establishment, or, and this is where the trouble starts, “experts” whom the Civil Service are prepared to listen to. The resulting compromises and ideological influences, as well as industry and single-issue group lobbying, almost guarantee bad decisions.
Who should the Government be listening to? One would think, to the people who know most about the issue, who have studied its past and how other countries have dealt with it. Who have recently conducted research about it, and whose papers are cited with respect by other researchers. And whose computer models produce the same answer twice in a row given the same inputs (rather than professors at Imperial College). The “experts”. Who can be cited by Ministers, who are therefore absolved from responsibility. Because they followed the “experts”.
Here’s the Catch-22. If there were a small range of solutions to an problem, that could be packaged up and made available to the public at an affordable price, which would happen if this issue recurred frequently and affected a large number of people, then… well, the private sector would be selling those solutions already and the Government would not need to get involved.
The Government gets involved when the issue is new, infrequently occurring, has a horrendous cost, and there is limited experience and research to draw on. This will mean that there are many competing theories about the causes and remedies, and no way to decide quickly between them. Advice in these cases will require significant technical understanding to evaluate. This is what the Chief Medical and Scientific Officers (and their staffs) were set up to do, but the world has become far too complicated for that to work. And often in these cases, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Sadly, in these circumstances, what Governments need is certainty. Even if it comes from people who have produced appallingly inaccurate forecasts before, and whose social and political agendas are barely hidden under their shirts.
And this is how activists capture Government. Not by attacking Whitehall and Westminster with guns and ammunition, but with policy papers, advice, “research” by fellow-travelling academics, and PR campaigns, that are as certain as they are false, and passionate as they are obsessive.
Hence the need to identify the anonymous “experts” who make eye-catching claims with immediate political relevance.
Which is where we came in.
Thursday 4 July 2024
Tuesday 2 July 2024
Apple’s Computational Photography Strikes Again
These iPhone cameras can verge on the hallucinatory now and again. The detail in this photograph is way greater than it was in my eyes at the time.
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