Free Speech | Pronouns | What Police really think | Electric Planes | COVID strains and genetics
Hi ~ I’ve noted several related culture wars conflicts arise and flare up over the last few weeks.
Identity wars notable Trans and Female. This has its physical manifestation over toilet identities and its notable social media conflict in JK Rowling tweets.
Scott Alexander taking down his blog in defence of being outed in the NY Times in a friendly article. (I learn his type of thinking is “New Rationalist”).
Free speech, liberal debate v. Censorship and, or de-platforming. In the US this most recently centred around a letter in Harper's over protecting free speech. A form of cancel to the cancel culture.
This is intersectional with status.... also leading into Race and leading into Police Culture… all flaring up, links below, end. All going on with a backdrop or foreground of COVID.
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Events coming up: Thinking Bigly, presented by CFA UK, Thursday 23 July, 5pm. Register here, Free.
Are you reading this newsletter and still haven’t seen it? It’s my performance lecture on climate with David Finnigan. It’s funny, engaging and thought provoking. Have you heard the sound of a koala ? Review here (Plays the Thing) and video interview with David and me here (Facebook platfrom with Pigfoot Theatre's Bea Udale-Smith.
-Sustainability Soiree, Cary Krosinsky/Real Impact Tracker, July 16
-CFA UK Bigly performance, 23 July
-Small Electric Plane approved in Europe
-Free Speech Letter (Harpers)
-UK Arts Funding, Govt package
-Taiwan Semi buying renewable electric
-Heteterogeniety + COVID (Marginal Revolution Reader)
-COVID experts, an essay looking at the humans (Atlantic)
-Visual story telling, essay with novelist + statistician (Frieze)
-On Pronouns, philosopher Amia Srinivasan (LRB)
-Police Culture (Vox)
-Glimpse into my magnificent son's mind (Autism aware, NYT)
-Rights of autistic adults (Tyler Cowen on lack of rights, US)
In sustainable world, Cary Krosinsky is having a virtual drinks soirée. I’m speaking for a few minutes and hanging out. If you are interested in Sustainable investment come along and hang out. Register here, Free. July 16.
Sustainability innovation is still pressing ahead, two recent alerts. First electric plane authorised in Europe. OK, it's small and maybe can only be used for training - carrying 600KGs but it's a start.
Taiwan Semi and Orsted sign (largest ever so far) deal on renewable energy. Showing the demand for this from large corporates. Long time readers will know I'm a supporter of innovation, along with adaptation, resilience etc.
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The world is still engulfed by COVID. I found this Ed Yong piece (Atlantic) on the human side of the pandemic experts interesting. These are people not use to the spotlight or politics and it’s an insightful human interest piece.
"Saskia Popescu’s phone buzzes throughout the night, waking her up. It had already buzzed 99 times before I interviewed her at 9:15 a.m. ET last Monday. It buzzed three times during the first 15 minutes of our call. Whenever a COVID-19 case is confirmed at her hospital system, Popescu gets an email, and her phone buzzes. She cannot silence it. An epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, Popescu works to prepare hospitals for outbreaks of emerging diseases. Her phone is now a miserable metronome, ticking out the rhythm of the pandemic ever more rapidly as Arizona’s cases climb...." **
What’s confusing for most people - or at least what’s fascinating to me - is the heterogeneity in COVID. The extremely different outcomes you can see in various populations when you segment by region, race, age, morbidity, blood type and so on.
There is no single explanation that accounts for many of the observations. The genetic observations as noted by a Tyler Cowen reader I found notable.
"....You will note that the majority of doctors/nurses who died of COVID in the UK were South Asian. This is quite striking. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/world/europe/coronavirus-doctors-immigrants.html — Goldacre et al’s excellent paper also found this on a broader scale (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1). From a probability point of view, this alone should make one suspect a genetic component.
There is plenty of other anecdotal evidence to suggest that this hypothesis is likely as well (e.g. entire families all getting severe cases of the disease suggesting a genetic component), happy to elaborate more but you get the idea.
Why don’t we know the answer yet? We unfortunately don’t have a great answer yet for lack of sufficient data, i.e. you need a dataset that has patient clinical outcomes + sequenced genomes, for a significant number of patients; with this dataset, you could then correlate the presences of genes {a,b,c} with severe disease outcomes and draw some tentative conclusions. These are known as GWAS studies (genome wide association study) as you probably know.
The dataset needs to be global in order to be representative. No such dataset exists, because of the healthcare data-sharing problem.
2) Strain
It’s now mostly accepted that there are two “strains” of COVID, that the second arose in late January and contains a spike protein variant that wasn’t present in the original ancestral strain, and that this new strain (“D614G”) now represents ~97% of new isolates. The Sabeti lab (Harvard) paper from a couple of days ago is a good summary of the evidence. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.04.187757v1 — note that in cell cultures it is 3-9x more infective than the ancestral strain. Unlikely to be that big of a difference in humans for various reasons, but still striking/interesting.
Almost nobody was talking about this for months, and only recently was there any mainstream coverage of this. You’ve already covered it, so I won’t belabor the point.
So could this explain Asia/hetereogeneities? We don’t know the answer, and indeed it is extremely hard to figure out the answer (because as you note each country had different policies, chance plays a role, there are simply too many factors overall).
I will, however, note that this the distribution of each strain by geography is very easy to look up, and the results are at least suggestive:
Visit Nextstrain (Trevor Bedford’s project)
Select the most significant variant locus on the spike protein (614)
This gives you a global map of the balance between the more infective variant (G) and the less infective one (D) https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global?c=gt-S_614
The “G” strain has grown and dominated global cases everywhere, suggesting that it really is more infective
A cursory look here suggests that East Asia mostly has the less infective strain (in blue) whereas rest of the world is dominated by the more infective strain:
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I am a fan on how visuals can tell stories. Today some call it data visualisation or data viz. I think most corporates and even most journalism would be improved by strong visual stories. Before the 'Gram we’ve had a long history of data visuals. This co-created essay on the some of the historic form is an elegant take by a novelist and data expert.
"...we have a vague sense of unease. In the current moment, people who have never previously given much thought to data visualization will see information presented in narrative form without fully appreciating how the effectiveness of its communication can, in some cases, be a matter of life and death. At the same time, we would like people who've never thought about it to be converted from easygoing accepters of dataviz as a kind of scientific-looking ornament, to critical and exacting readers capable of being moved to urgency by the visual narrative of expectation and surprise."
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In the UK, the arts industry finally got its rescue package. There are legitimate debates on both sides as to what should have public funding (elite arts? diversity ? The new ArtsCouncil strategy ?) and speed of government response.
I think it’s notable that the venture capital industry received their smaller package much quicker.
My observation is that the industry was slower to react than others. I think that further makes other commentary about the speed/agility of arts organisations, it's fragmented nature and potentially its somewhat inward-looking nature.
True, many organisations were and are fighting near-term survival needs. Still, I think it’s notable how far down the pecking order the Arts has come, rightly or wrongly.
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"....Ethics requires that we embrace a practice of naming that makes people’s passage through the world more bearable. But ethics is not exhausted by such a practice. A true ethical relation requires that we see the other, just as we see ourselves, as ultimately beyond names and categories: not because (as liberals like to say) we are ‘all human’ or ‘all persons’, but because each of us exists, finally, beyond the reach of mere words. We all know this instinctively in our own case: that feeling of exceeding, bursting beyond, all the words that can be truly applied to us. What does it take for us to recognise that this is true, too, of everyone else: of him and her, of them, of you?"
A philosopher (female, non-white, gasp) on pronouns.
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The New Yorker on the Scott Alexander saga. How a controversial rationalist blogger became a mascot and martyr in a struggle against the New York Times.
The NYT on letter on Free Speech (Harper). And orginal letter.
What the police really believe. Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing — and how it justifies racist violence. (Vox)
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Microgrants. I've had 100+ submissions and have backlog of 50+. Sorry if you are waiting for a response, I'm caught up to approx end Feb. Micro-grants. £10K for positive impact people.
➳UK Science: Where did it go? Can ARPA save it?
➳Me on ESG investing / YouTube CFA UK
➳Micro-grants. £10K for positive impact people.
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A 2 min view clip of Thinking Bigly you can now see here.
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I’ve re-issued my 2006 play, Yellow Gentlemen (4 stars in Time Out and is one of my more personal works about the night immigrant Tommy Lee is dying). Buy it for laughs on Kindle for the price of a coffee. All profits to charity. I’ve only sold a few copies at the price of a coffee - 1.99.
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“...Through a long-term orientation and stewardship, this is the time for active investment managers to show their worth. It starts with asking the right long-term business questions. Some companies are giving us answers, but are we really listening?”
My full opinion article in the FT. (3 mins, behind paywall, but you get a free article or email me and I can send you a copy)
Find out more about my aphorism book and contact me for a copy.
The move to online dating has potentially empowered women as the cost to ghosting is so low.
Notes from a conversation with former Royal Court Lit. Manager.