Child Death Thoughts, My Next Performance; The Value of Life - philosopher views
Our children on thinking about death. Why I look at music/art/technology over politics. My next show: How We Die. Philosopher, Jonthan Wolff, on the value of life. Alex Edmans on ESG vs Tariq Fancy.
If you only have time for one blog this I recommend Anoushka’s Child Death thoughts: The Audacity of Death. Thoughts week:
OpenSpace Work Shop: Business as Force for Good
My next show: How We Die (Nov 26th, Theatre Deli)
Team ESG strikes back (Alex Edmans on Tariq Fancy)
ShareAction on health and ESG
Mark Ravenhill notes and live tweet workshop
Do pass this on to friends and, or, subscribe below.
Thanks to everyone who came to London drinks this week. I learned about futurism from Wendy Schultz. I had not appreciated that this is a significant academic discipline based around trendspotting and emerging issues identification; impact assessment of long-term change; scenario building and analysis and the like. The way she described how futurism scenarios work was fascinating. This intersects with sustainability. One of the hubs for the ideas is a podcast, Future Pod.
…I was asked why I don’t blog much - if at all - on politics. At least where it does not impact on political economy questions. Like why if 35% of US voters do not believe in man-made climate change that it means it is unlikely that a carbon tax happens.
My answer is to do with the longevity or impact of a political moment versus the same for art, music or technology. Whether a politician calls someone scum or not - may be part of a social-political plan or not, but in the grand scheme of life it will be a forgotten moment.
This last few weeks I learned a lot speaking to scientists and biotech operators about the state of synthetic and computational biology in advance of Gingko Bio (a YC 14 biotech start up) listing publicly1 and my continuing interest in the breakthrough the Deepmind team have done on protein folding.
I am 98% confident that while there are no front page stories or even any mainstream news articles about what and how synthetic biology will change the world, that synthetic biology will indeed be world changing within a decade or two (most likely on the early side) and that the current political noise mostly will not.
Similarly, while I have a lot less confidence that the next Mark Ravenhill play will be world changing, the chances that Mark’s next work may still be regarded and thought about in 50 or 100 years is much much higher than the average “scum or no scum” politician.
The works of Bach (1685 - 1750) have around 6.7 million plays a month. I doubt 1 or 2 people reading this letter can name me the UK Prime Ministers*2 of that time let alone other politicians. Similar thinking for Shakespeare (died 1616).
I’ve also been doing research and thinking on robotic surgery and again anyone reading this newsletter who is going for a prostate or a gynae surgery stands a >50% of going under robotic surgery and the first new type of robotic surgery equipment for many years is currently being installed in some of the leading UK NHS hospitals. My university friend helped found the company (CMR) that is doing it (Intuitive Surgical’s Da Vinci was for years the only robot available).
This is the quiet history in the making. This is the extraordinary progress of humanity.
….speaking of art, I have committed myself to the next episode of my performance-lecture series. Thinking Bigly: How We Die. This is about death. But it’s funny, informative and entertaining! As I had committed to Theatre Deli I needed to create some image copy for it. With the massive powers of technological progress, this took me about 15 minutes rather than a day. The results are below.
The performance will be what theatre-makers call a scratch performance (in other words a work in progress) and will be (hopefully) on Friday, Nov 26th at Theatre Deli Broadgate at 7pm. Save the date if you are interested. Deli will be putting up tickets for sale soon, and we’ll have drinks and a laugh too.
I am planning to dance. A very little.
Blurb: What’s the best way for Ben to die? Help Ben figure out his death admin. Shape his story. Plan his funeral. Learn how we used to die and where best to die. An interactive performance show where you help Ben have his best death (eventually).
Before that I’m helping Improbable with promoting their Open Space work. If you or your organisation are interested in unconferences, openspace and participatory work then we are running a workshop on afternoon 28 October. Let me know.
...speaking about death, Anoushka has some lovely writing about our children and death thoughts…
...When Oscar was about 3 or 4 years old, he had a lot of questions about death. He didn’t ask them all at once. They trickled out slowly as he quietly processed everything. “Do we go to Heaven when we die?” and then, needing to know more, “What happens when we die?” There were one or two nights when he was upset about the idea of me dying and needed extra cuddles but, at 9 years old, he has done the bulk of the mental work that we have to do when contemplating our mortality. Just last week, we both laughed until we cried at this silly allegedly AI-generated obituary...
It was different with Spike. For many years, he was not curious about death. The subject came up from time to time, as it inevitably does, but the fragments did not come together to form a concept of death. And then when he was 10 years old he suddenly did *a lot* of this processing all at once. It was intense.
There are, apparently, four subconcepts of death: nonfunctionality (your body doesn’t work anymore), universality (all living things die), irreversibility (you can’t come back to life) and inevitability (death is unavoidable). This is the concept of death that children learn.
By the end of the last “death phase”, Spike had grasped these four subconcepts - intellectually, at least. We read a great book called “What Does Dead Mean?” which I would recommend. It is sensitively written in plain language, avoids euphemisms and tackles the typical questions children ask head on (a good approach for autistic kids). It might not be a book you sit down and read cover to cover with your child (although we did), but it provides a good model for answering questions about death as they arise.
Spike was very stuck on the topic for many months. He constantly doodled gravestones with his name on them and used a lot of death-related language in unexpected ways (a disappointment might cause him to grumble, “RIP, Spike.” When New Year’s Eve loomed, he warned of the approaching death of the current year.) Eventually, something settled in him and he was able to move on from the topic.
Death still comes up regularly. I have noticed that Spike engages in some magical thinking around death. It feels like he is looking for loopholes and testing the veracity of what we say. Just how irreversible is “irreversible”? Perhaps if I change variable x the answer will be different?
Just last night we had a long talk about death….. More at this blog here.
…He is feeling the weight of that full stop. Struggling to picture how exactly life goes on when your world order is upended. All he can see is chaos and devastation after the fact. Tonight he was also thinking about his own death and had specific instructions for me.
“If I die,
Destroy all the buildings
In the Network Railcard area.
Cut Big Ben
And the United Kingdom flag in half.
Do not destroy the train stations.”
I was struck by how conceptually similar Spike’s evocation of his fear of dying was to…More at this blog here.
And thinking on the value of life and death…. I had an amazing chat with Philosopher Jonathan Wolff on these topics.
I know much about the thinking of how to value a statistical life but Jo brought out his personal history of the ideas stemming from working on rail safety.
Jo made the point we still remember accidents by their place and name. The “Potter’s Bar” crash. Thus highlighting the emotion and emphasis this hits in our psyche.
I knew Jo has done work on incorporating ideas from disability thinking and the social model of disability into his philosophy but I had not appreciated quite how backward mainstream political philosophy was (maybe still is?) on thinking about disability and minorities.
I was secretly very pleased when Jo was dismissive of the Peter Singer work on disability. I continue to be troubled by it. Singer is very well known for effective altruism and animal rights, winning substantial prize money awards for his thinking.
I am cautious in advancing my own thinking above learned philosophers (not withstanding that they were so behind the curve on disability). We speak about:
how to value life and the relevance to public policy for healthcare, and Jo’s initial interest stemming from work on railway safety.
Jo gives insights in how disability studies informed his philosophy and how behind the curve political philosophy was last century and, in that sense, he apologises on behalf of political philosophy.
Jo is concerned over vaccine equity and we discuss what role and duty biopharmaceutical companies have and who should pay for vaccines.
Jo outlines his aspiration and idea of a society of equals,
Jo rates multiculturalism, direct democracy, Adam Smith, the future of the city, cryptocurrencies and pronouns.
We chat about the philosophy of musical performance seen through the lens of music therapy.
We end talking about what a productive day looks like and his advice for young people.
Transcript and link to video and podcast here, and pod below.
Team ESG responds…. There is now a substantive response to Tariq Fancy from Alex Edmans. Jon Hale of Morningstar had a small one, but Alex’s dives in depth and extends and expands upon Tariq’s own basketball analogy.
“...So there’s much to like about the basketball analogy. But it breaks down in two important ways. First, basketball is a zero-sum game. One team can’t win without the other team losing. But business isn’t zero-sum. Fancy argues the analogy of two basketball teams is two rival companies. Yet the concept of “coopetition” has existed for over a century, where industry competitors can not only compete with each other to grab a greater slice of the pie, but also cooperate to grow the pie, for example by improving industry standards and sharing best practice. And the relevant analogy isn’t to a company and its rivals, but to a company and its stakeholders. Unlike in basketball, where sportsmanship to your opponent can cost you points, “sportsmanship” to your stakeholders can grow the pie for the benefit of both. This isn’t just wishful thinking; it’s based on rigorous evidence. One of my studies showed that, over a 28-year period, companies that treat their employees well outperformed their peers in total shareholder returns by 2.3–3.8% per year — that’s 89–184% compounded….
...The second limitation of the analogy is that regulation is easy in basketball — referees can spot fouls, perhaps aided by video replays. In business, regulation can address measurable issues such as wages and carbon emissions….”
Worth reading for Team ESG, though with the typical caveats.
On the arts side, Mark Ravenhill continues his playwright education. First he gives 101 very thoughtful notes on writing. Then he does a live tweet session on Brecht’s The Jewish Wife. And next week he is looking at Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard.
That’s a whole course in masterclass writing available for free.
From my own Linkedin… Insightful work from Jessica Attard, Liam Crosby, and Share Action on #health looking at intersections and interdisciplines on the "commercial" determinants that sit along side "social" and other "wider determinants".
"...On one aspect of human capital is health – the overall life expectancy in the UK is middling compared to other industrialised nations [BY: And so is US]. And while it is constantly improving, the rate of improvement has abruptly slowed over the last decade, and more than in any other European country. Not only that, the gap between rich and poor has widened, and in some parts of the country, life expectancy gains have even gone into reverse.
...The so-called “commercial determinants of health” are significant. For example, the rising tide of obesity since the 1950s means that now two-thirds of Brits are overweight or obese. This trend cannot be the result of a gradual loss of individual will-power to make healthy choices, as some would argue. Trends like this are the reason governments are acting on the issue. But there is much more to do.
The power of investors to shape the “four capitals” is now well accepted, not least on natural capital – the “E” of ESG. But there is equal work to be done on the “S”, in particular, health. This report very clearly shows the untapped potential and the progress that needs to be made on this issue..."
"Companies influence the jobs we do, what we consume, and the places we live – all of which shape our health."
While some of the ideas might be provocative, being challenged is good for a long-term #investing mindset. Report here.
Links this week and archive:
I am recommending 4 other substacks:
Links from my Twitter Feed. Highlights below.
Do share!
https://blog.ycombinator.com/ginkgo-bioworks-s14-is-going-public-today/
Who is Robert Walpole? First de facto UK Prime Minister in that era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Walpole