Tag: books

Data Interpretation

More on that subject of number crunching. I’m not so much concerned about the numerous ways and means to produce reliable statistics as the ethical factors involved in their production.

Two things. One is the importance of saying truth to power and the other the importance of seeing things as they really are rather than how you or I would like them to be.

Starting with the first. If ever it was a hard day to say this but asserting truth is not one of several options, it’s the best option.

Whatever any short-term gains there are in distorting a description of a current situation, in the longer term the truth will out. Now, that may not have always been so. It’s often said that the victors write history. That famous view had some validity when literacy was not universal or when texts were chained in church libraries. Now, information speeds through the INTERNET (and whatever its successor will be). Controlling or supressing information has become like trying to build a castle out of sugar on a rainy day.

The second factor is more troublesome and, for that matter, more difficult. It could be the tug of war between subjectivity and objectivity. What we see is so much dependent upon the observer. What we hear is conditioned by what we’ve heard in the past.

I saw this often in the interpretation of a written narrative. Aviation accidents and incidents are reported. Databases full of multivarious reports of different origins siting there waiting to be read. This is a good thing.

It’s the choice of language that shapes our understanding of past events. That can be voluminous and contradictory. It can be minimalist and ambiguous. It can have peculiar expressions or fuzzy translations. Even if reporters are asked to codify their observations, with a tick box, there remains wide margins.

The writer of a story often knows what they want to say. It might be obvious to them what happened at the time of writing. Then it’s the reader who takes that up. A text could be read years later. Read by many others. Similar stories may exist, all written up differently. Hopefully, slight variations.

Seeing things as they really are, rather than how you would like them to be, without bias, requires more than a degree of care. A great deal of care.

It’s hard enough for an enlightened and skilled analysist to take a sentence and say “yes” I know exactly what happened. Not just what but all six of these – who, what, were, when, how and why. In future, the artificial intelligence tools that get used by authorities will have the same challenge.

For all our technological wonders, it’s the writers of reports that shapes our understanding. From a couple of sentences to a massive dissertation.

Try telling that to a maintenance engineer whose last job of the day, before going home, is to file an occurrence report after a terrible day at work. In a damp hanger with a job only half done. Tomorrow’s troubles looming.

POST: Rt Rev Nick Baines and his Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4 is thinking the same this morning. Truth is truth. In his case it’s Christian truth that he has in mind. There lies another discussion.

Dealing with Difficult Individuals

Dealing with an objectionable person. There’s a title for a book. Could be 101 things you didn’t know about objectionable people or maybe objectionable people for dummies. I can see it now. Airport bookshelves full of such books. You know those colourful sections on management and self-improvement books that you don’t often see in “normal” book shops.

It’s something I suffer from when travelling. I see an enticing book title in the moments of boredom waiting for my flight to come up on the large electronic display board. The ridiculous thought goes through my head after reading a random page. Now, this erudite tone, obviously read by millions, will help me be a better person. Naturally, the book’s future is to sit in a cardboard box and be moved around, never to be read again.

Back to my theme. How to deal with an objectionable person. Of course, the context matters a lot. If I said the person is your boss, then one approach might be in order. If the person in question is a world leader, you and I are a little removed from impacting the prevailing situation. Quite different. Never-the-less, why not have an opinion?

There’s strength in numbers. Through the whole of human history. Let’s face it, we are puny creatures when faced with natures most threatening circumstances. What we do is gather together and hey-presto[1] suddenly solutions start to bubble to the surface. I’m not talking about escaping a woolly Mammoth. More of a woolly Man-mouth.

Unity is powerful. Trouble is that unity is difficult to assemble. It becomes somewhat easier to assemble when a real threat is looming. An example that is of the moment is Canada. Over the last few weeks Canadians, if the media is to be believed, seemed to be becoming unified. I expect the same is true of Greenlanders.

Europeans are, as we often are, struggling to find unity. It’s there at the core but it’s beset with voices of doubt and voices of unfriendly adversaries. Over intellectualising is a common trait of mature democracies. We like to study the woolly Mammoth before we run away or make a lot of noise and throw spears at it.

Here’s a potential solution for dealing with an objectionable person, or more than one. It’s a borne of primitive schoolboy politics. Smart folk will wince. Push that to one side. Lets’ face it, smart folk have led us down the path we are currently on.

Send them to Coventry[2]. I don’t mean literally send them to the ancient English cathedral city in the West Midlands. If you are fed-up with hanging on every word of someone who is a menace, one approach is to stop listening and walk away. That English idiom about sending someone “to Coventry” is to deliberately ostracise. Avoid their company and act as if they aren’t really that important. You’ve bigger fish to fry.

Just like that. A good way to deal with Colin Robinson[3] is to walk away before it’s too late.

[1] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/hey-presto.html

[2] https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/phrase-sent-coventry-originate-from-12137441

[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11582982/

Changing Political Landscapes

You can tell the type of person I am. I occasionally stop for a morning coffee in Gail’s[1]. Overall, I favour cafe Nero. Better coffee. An Italian vibe. That said, the expanding up-market bakery has a pleasant ambience. They are taking over and restoring the more regal old bank buildings of the High Street. Britain’s national banks have long since moved out.

In the last 9-months, I’ve moved from a town that had both, to a town that until recently had only one. It wasn’t my influence, but a Gail’s has opened a new shop in recent weeks. Post election, I might add. I’ve moved from a Conservative town to one that is no longer a Conservative town.

Anyway, there I was doing a bit of lunchtime shopping in Waitrose. It has a small cafe in one corner of the supermarket. Stopped for a ham, egg and chips and a flat white coffee. On a rack on the wall is a display of daily newspapers. I’m pleased to say that there’s a weekly local newspaper there too.

The Times and The Daily Mail are there for the delight of their customers. Two national newspapers that I am not going to spend my hard-earned cash on unless I’m desperate for something to read. Both tabloids aimed at a broadly conservative readership. 

The Mail is serialising the writings of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. No doubt he’s getting an astonishing amount of money for his latest scribblings. Journalism was his calling.

To sell a book about political life the book certainly mustn’t be boring. Charity shops are littered with shelves of books from long forgotten personalities. My observation is that Johnson has taken aim at an audience that still thinks of him as a worthy premier.

I couldn’t resist. Had to speed read the parts that spilled the beans. The parts that dug the dirt. The revelations. Except that’s not what I read in speech bubble paragraphs. First off, I was remined of The Beano[2]. The world’s longest-running comic for children. Johnson’s language assumed my reading age to be about 12-years old. A jolly wizard wheeze ticking-off those fancy pants or misery guts who haunted his days in power. Apart from saving the known universe his anecdotes were mostly to the detriment of the people mentioned. One exception being his dad.

In a moment of reflection, it’s astonishing that Johnson once led this great country. He led London too. What on earth were we thinking? How did it happen? One or two more serious books have gone down that road. I was recommended to read “Johnson at 10 by Anthony Seldon[3].” By the way, you can tell the type of person I am. Earlier in the year, that book suggestion came from the person standing next to me, wating to go into the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall.

[1] https://gails.com/

[2] https://shop.beano.com/

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/24/johnson-at-10-by-anthony-seldon-and-raymond-newell-review-the-great-pretender