23,500 words
Reflections on half a year of newsletters
In the six months or so since I started this newsletter, I reckon I’ve written about 23,500 words. I started this newsletter primarily to keep my writing in good shape, but it’s also helped me flesh out a few of my opinions, and figure out the things I’m most interested in.
Five topics came up a little more than I expected.
Policy
Regardless of your politics, we’re at a pretty exciting moment for policy making. There’s a government unencumbered by the melodrama of the past ten or so years. There’s no Brexit, there’s no COVID, and there’s a more-or-less unified party with a stonking majority.
In other words, for the first time in ages, our elected government can actually do some governing. They can be radical and shake things up.
Labour is off to a slow start, and I think one of the reasons they have struggled is because they didn’t come into government with much of a plan for governing. They should’ve had some aces up their sleeve, like Tony Blair’s early move to make the Bank of England independent.
If they’re looking for ideas, I wouldn’t be upset if they stole some of mine. Across 22 newsletters, I think I’ve suggested a couple of half-decent policies they might want to pursue:
A tuition fee hike (which Labour did one month after my newsletter suggesting it came out - I’m sure just a coincidence)
Reform to CBOs to enable them to be issued on the balance of probability
A mental wellbeing curriculum in schools to teach emotional coping skills
There’s not quite enough there for a manifesto - maybe next year. Some of it, I’m sure, would poll terribly, and much of it, I expect, wouldn’t work.
But these are the sort of radical policy ideas that a government with such a strong foothold should be pursuing. Instead, it’s been relentless consultations, White Papers and speeches without much substance.
Health
Mental health is a longstanding interest of mine. My general view is that we’ve become obsessed with mental illness, and that’s been to no benefit - and possibly some detriment - to the population.
Whether I’m right about that or not, it’s concerning that almost nobody is asking the question. Correlation is not causation, of course, but after a decade with a cacophony of awareness campaigns and slogans, every metric on mental health has gone in the wrong direction.
I wrote one post about that this year, Awareness isn’t working (Oct 14).
My thoughts in that post are based on two things. The first is my own experience working in and around mental health: both speaking to people with the full range of struggles with their mental health, and from speaking to (and sometimes being part of) the institutions that are supposed to support them. It is abundantly clear to me that the obsession with mental illness, diagnoses, smart-sounding pathological language - is not helping the people that are actually suffering.
The second is the work of the Oxford academic Lucy Foulkes. Foulkes was, for a long time, the only academic who seemed to be working on this idea that mental health awareness and the normalisation of severe and complex disorders might not be all good. If you have even a small interest in this, I massively recommend her paper on mental health awareness - and her book on mental illness.
Beyond mental health, I also wrote about physical health: Built to cure, forced to care (Sep 16).
It’s become a cliche to say that the NHS is on its knees, but it really is. The system is massively overcomplicated, it uses decades old tech, and it’s held-back by bonkers restrictions on data sharing.
But above all, it’s completely ill-equipped to deal with the two massive societal shifts that are happening today: conditions are going from short-term to long-term (acute to chronic), and the population is getting older.
The NHS needs a radical shake-up (the whole welfare and care system does).
We’ll get a 10-year plan for the NHS in Spring 2025 which will focus on three big shifts: “from hospital to community”, “analogue to digital” and “sickness to prevention”.
Populism
I had to consciously stop writing about populism this year, because I felt I’d gone on about it a bit too much, but it is rampant.
There are five men who I’ve described as populists this year, ranked below in order from most populist, to least (I’ve not mentioned Jeremy Corbyn yet, but I’ve added him to the ranking too, just for fun).
Nigel Farage
Donald Trump
Jeremy Corbyn
Jacob Zuma
Narendra Modi
Boris Johnson
What do all of these men have in common?
They promise easy answers to difficult questions: that reducing immigration is as easy as building a wall, or closing the door
They divide, rather than unite: It’s always Us v them, whether that’s demonising immigrants or pushing nationalism over globalism
They insist they’re not part of the mainstream political elite: Despite some of them being lifelong politicians, being outside of the political mainstream is a big part of their brand
They are all working from the same playbook: if they lose an election, it’s rigged (though they have a high level of comfort with rigging elections themselves). They hate the justice system. They’re knee-deep in corruption. And, often, international audiences see them for what they are but they have domestic popularity.
I don’t think populism is rising, but I do think it’s more visible when times are tough. In the face of war, inflation, declining public services and more; it’s natural for people to turn to the ones that are promising sunlit uplands. Pragmatists must figure out how to take the fight to the populists and counteract this.
TikTok
I didn’t think I was particularly opposed to TikTok, but I’ve written about it in some pretty harsh terms this year - and there’s three reasons why.
The first is that it’s perpetuated the mental health overpathologizing that I’ve written about above. Because influencers on TikTok are incentivised to make their videos as relatable as possible, they use sort of Barnum statements to diagnose their followers with serious mental disorders: “If you like to be liked, you probably have clinical anxiety stemming from unresolved childhood trauma!”.
They offer advice that is completely untargeted, and often terrible and unhelpful.
The second reason to dislike TikTok is that its aware of its harms, and does almost nothing to mitigate them. People who don’t use TikTok underestimate how addictive it is: it is unbelievably addictive.
Facing public pressure to stem its addictiveness, TikTok released a time-limit tool to help its young users avoid spending too much time on the app.
But they didn’t care if this tool worked. According to leaked documents, their primary success metric was not an impact on the time users spend on the app, but instead an impact on the public trust score of TikTok.
The actual impact of the time-limit tool: it reduced the time that teens spend on TikTok by 90 seconds per session. An abject failure as a product, but a success as a PR campaign.
The third reason to dislike TikTok is that it might be a Chinese information weapon. Look, I’m not a conspiracist, but if America could beam propaganda of its choosing to millions of teens in China for hours a day it absolutely would do it. It’d be crazy not to entertain the suggestion that China is doing the same.
The professor and writer Scott Galloway is pretty hot on this, and I’m inclined to agree with him: “The CCP has control over the most powerful, yet elegant, weapon in the history of propaganda, and the default position is they… are not using it?”
There are big problems with TikTok we’re only just beginning to scratch the surface of, but let’s finish with something good about it. TikTok changed the game. It flipped all assumptions about what makes good apps on its head: it’s less social and there’s no choice: you don’t see what your friends are doing, and you don’t pick your own videos, it picks them for you. Innovation has benefits for consumers.
AI
I have vested interests in AI for a whole host of reasons, not least that the success of the company I work for is more or less predicated on the success of AI.
My position is that AI is a marvel, that the naysayers are blind to the enormous opportunity, and that its net-effect will be to make things better - rather than worse.
But what’s the argument against that position? There are a few, and it’s worth dedicating a few words to them here.
It’s terrible for the environment. Google’s emissions are up by half because of its AI research, and giving one prompt to Chat-GPT consumes about as much energy as watching TV for ten hours. As these models become more complex, it stands to reason the environmental impact of AI is only going to get greater.
It’s not getting any better. A lot of the huge predictions on AI are predicated on a belief that AI will continue to get exponentially better: but that might not be the case. In fact, AI now seems to be hitting a wall. The models are not getting any smarter and the big problems - of which hallucinations are seemingly the biggest - are not getting any closer to a consistent resolution.
The big players are burning cash. OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion dollars, just two years after it raised $10 billion dollars from investors. It is quite literally burning through billions of dollars: it’s massively unprofitable, and it’s difficult to imagine a clear path to profit when training is so expensive.
The net impact might be negative. Even if AI does get better, cheaper and better for the environment, it’s possible that it will bring about doomsday. Small businesses are experiencing stunted growth already and it’s very possible we could soon start seeing human jobs replaced by AI, and an era of mass unemployment. That’s not even to mention safety fears, of AI self-replicating and taking over the world.
But, despite all of these objections, I am still of the view that AI will transform the world for the better. I have my doubts about whether OpenAI will be the big winner (after all, being a pioneer does not guarantee you the prize), but I have no doubts that Generative AI and the next generation of AI technology will fundamentally shift the way we work and live. Training and use of AI will become more environmentally and financially efficient, almost as an inevitability.