Clever people explain things in a way that is understandable to those who are less clever, whereas people whose main goal is to be seen as clever do the opposite.
Actually I have if anything the opposite experience. The brilliant lecturers at my university had no clue what normal students found difficult, so they coasted through the material saying things like "This is of course trivial because X". (On one occasion one of them paused and said "Actually X is wrong, so it must be trivial for some other reason!") The less talented researchers were usually the better teachers.
But, more neutrally, I think that the ability to explain stuff is a separate skill, largely independent of whether one's bright or not - though obviously you can't explain something you don't actually understand.
Good teachers often are those who understand the difficulties students may have. Whereas if something is easy or obvious to you, it can be hard to understand why it is not that for others. So it’s not just understanding and knowledge you need but a sort of imaginative empathy with your listener / audience / pupil etc.
You can see the same phenomenon in sport, for instance football coaches (managers) tend to have played at the top level but not been the preternaturally talented but those who had to work harder to develop their skills.
One of the biggest cultural divides remains — (after all these years) — between those born before and after the Second World War. The problem is that at the moment a lot of them are being put in the same "over 70s" category which is technically correct but wrong in almost every other way. (Of course I'm not trying to say that people born before the Second World War should be treated as less important than those born after it. It's just that people born in 1950 or thereabouts probably aren't going to put up with things that people born 15 years earlier might have done).
That is true but can be generalised even beyond that. One of my old psychology lecturers used to rail against lumping different generations together. The war is an obvious divide but you can go back to those who lived through the 1930s depression, or forwards to those who did national service. For political betting we look at those for whom Mrs Thatcher toxified her party and others for whom she is a footnote in a history textbook. Within generations there are also class divisions, and we see even now one's experience of lockdown might depend on living in a small flat or a large semi. And thanks to Dianne Abbott, we also remember some people grew up in completely different countries.
I think there is no problem with that , different regions have different situations, just as London is different from say Cumbria or somewhere else.
Cumbria may not be the best point of contrast. It is quite a Covid hotspot. It isn't obvious why, being rural and not commuter land.
Cumbria has a number of large towns: Barrow, Carlisle - which had the earliest cases (from people who had been to Italy on holiday), Kendal and Penrith. Also Workington, Whitehaven and Keswick.
And plenty of people commute to Barrow and Sellafield from places roundabout. So the rural picture is not quite the complete picture.
The patching of the epidemic is quite striking. Sunderland has it bad, so does Darlington, but Harlepool gets off lightly. Leicester has half the rate of Derby, a quarter that of Brum etc.
I think commuting by car is low risk, it is rail and bus that is high risk. The casualty rate in London Transport shows that. How that works post lockdown is going to be a real problem.
Indeed. If the tube is allowed to operate, why keep restaurants, pubs and cafes closed? Few of the latter are as crowded as the tube - or most commuter trains and buses - most days.
Aside from whether it's really a threat (not much talking in normal commuting and you could add a stfu rule) some people need the tube for essential jobs, whereas nobody really needs pubs and cafes. Also, closing the pubs and cafes reduces the number of trips on the tube, which makes it less crowded and safer for the people who need to use it.
So they are saying SAGE is unable to do its job, even though it already has to provide advice to the most powerful people in the land?
I maintain this is not about Cummings at all, but about undermining any government defence based on scientific advice it received by saying it cannot be trusted. But where does that leave us? What was the government now supposed to have done - it would be pilloried for not following advice, and it will be pilloried for following advice because the advisers bowed before almighty Cummings?
Cummings is news. You do not need a conspiracy theory to explain why Cummings is news. You might need one to explain why Cummings was there in the first place.
It's not a conspiracy theory. Cummings is a bogeyman because he's a powerful arsehole, so it makes any story juicier, but what is the effect of the story? As seen, it is to claim that the government cannot claim it followed advice, because that advice was undermined in some fashion. That purpose would have occurred without Cummings, he just makes for a convenient hook to the story.
If that is the effect then that is because Cummings was there, and since he did not need to be, Cummings has shot the government in the foot. There is no reason to believe in any conspiracy to write the story to undermine the government and then look around for anyone who happened to be at these meetings.
They announced them at the start of the press conference. 29,xxx tests.
There is bugger all sign they are going to get even remotely close to 100,000. The media are going to roast Hancock in the way your average Tory does to those babies.
Thanks - numbers now updated!
Tests 29,058
People tested 25,577
Positive 4,463
That means % positive = 17.4% which I think is probably the lowest so far by quite a wide margin.
All data today very encouraging - in particular this and number in hospital.
Pretty clear going strongly in right direction.
I'd argue that the positive percentage is meaningless, especially as they now want everyone and their mother to get a test, regardless of whether it is useful in a clinical sense.
Agreed. It is a bizarre use of resources but the government made the number of tests into a rod with which to beat themselves. They should have been more robust: we will test those that it is useful to test and no one else.
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