May
18
Facing up to Father: The pleasures and pains of a Cotswold childhood
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New book by David Worlock. Pre-order now at Marble Hill Publishers or Amazon.
A small Cotswold farm is the setting for a classic struggle of wills. Robert Worlock, eccentric and demanding, resolutely maintains the old ways, determined above all to make his son into a farmer fit to take over the family acres. His son, David, is equally determined not to be bullied into something he neither wants nor likes. His childhood becomes a battleground: can he find a way to make his father love him without denying his right to determine his own life?
Jan
15
One of Dr Johnson’s most famous utterances, made on the 7th of April 1775, was “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel“. But of course he did not mean that you should not love your country. He simply meant, in his time, that people who waved the flag and proclaimed their loyalty to King and country were usually hiding something or trying to distract you from something else. “Free speech” is the “patriotism” of our times.
Over the holidays, a painful attack of sciatica kept me lying down and lying still, especially during the critical festive days! This provided plenty of space for thought. I found that I had become obsessed by an article that I read in the Guardian newspaper (10 December 2024 by Hannah Milner and David Pegg) concerning Elsevier‘s decision to reevaluate articles by the “race scientist“ Professor Richard Lynn. This man, now deceased, had apparently published over 100 articles in several Elsevier journals between 2002 and 2023. He is particularly widely known for his national IQ data sets, first published in 2002 and revised in 2010. The Guardian elicited these views from fellow academics:
“They are concerned about flawed research being used to support racist ideology, but also about the frequency with which Lynn is cited in passing by experts in other fields who may not be familiar with the controversy that surrounds his work.”
And “Critics say Lynn relied upon samples that were unrepresentative or too small to be meaningful. According to Sear(Prof Rebecca Sear, president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Associat), Angola’s national IQ was based on 19 people from a malaria study, while the Eritrean average IQ was derived from tests of children in orphanages.
The 2010 iteration of the dataset asserted an average national IQ of 60 for Malawi, 64 for Mozambique and 69 for Nigeria – all below the typical threshold for intellectual disability. “It is wholly implausible that an entire world region should, on average, be on the verge of intellectual impairment,” wrote Sear in a critique of the 2019 edition.
Prof Jelte Wicherts, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has published several critiques of Lynn’s methodology and concluded that Lynn’s 2010 paper appeared to have systematically excluded higher IQ scores in calculations of IQ in African countries.
“The main inclusion criteria he had been using appeared to be the IQ itself, not objective measures like whether it was a normal, healthy sample,” said Wicherts. “That’s quite a lethal indicator of bias.”
I am no expert in the academic disciplines concerned, but it does seem to me that the judgement that much of an entire continent was nearly educationally subnormal was worthy of some interrogation, by the editors of the journals concerned and not only by Professor Lynn’s peers. That this material has been floating around as respectable data for 22 years is difficult to imagine; the fact that even when retracted it will still exist in the data systems of the world, and in the AI sensibilities of the world seems to me almost unthinkable. In the past few years I have become acquainted with quite a few directors and managers of integrity units in journal publishing. They have all been splendid people and I admire their ethics and their effort. Yet in my 55 years in publishing, appointments like this have only come along in the last five years. We do have a lot of catching up to do.
And then, as I tried to lie still and wait for the anti-inflammatory drugs to work, came further inflammation of a different sort. Elon Musk and his abandonment of fact checking, followed by Mark Zuckerberg‘s pathetic “me too“ led me to read articles describing the pushback of these “free speech“ advocates against the “soft authoritarian dictatorship of woke“. Apart from wondering whether these men were more concerned with cost cutting than ideology, with margins rather than freedom of expression, I also wondered about these two streams of public information flowing in opposite directions. In science, we are desperate to root out the illegitimate, the unfounded and the downright wrong; in social media we will tolerate any lie, distortion or pure prejudice on the grounds that anyone, anonymously or not, has the right to say anything about anyone. Professor Lynn should be alive and publishing on X.
Eventually the drugs worked and I was able to walk again. All that I have left from my festive season in bed is a nasty headache – the world of information is in crisis. I know that I am meant to believe that the world cannot survive without continuous sacrifice to the gods of growth and profit. My experience of the world of information and data tells me however that the world cannot survive without trust in the data that we handle and in the identity of its sources.. Reliable truth is fundamental to both of them.
The full text of the Guardian article of 10 December 2024 is available here:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/10/elsevier-reviews-national-iq-research-by-british-race-scientist-richard-lynn?dcr=apps&edition=uk#:~:text=Prof Rebecca Sear,issue very seriously.”
Dec
16
The kindness of others – or the good men who lives after them!
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Something should be celebrated. We live in a society that often likes to beat itself up: we condemn our fellows as unfeeling, unsympathetic, unresponsive. our newsfeeds tell us that just when we do not believe mankind cannot behave worse then our fellow men prove that they can . Yet my own experience is exactly the opposite. I call it “crowd surfing “
This is how it feels. Every week I go to London from my home 40 miles away in the English countryside. Taxi, train, taxi. A practiced route and a well established routine eases the burden on a man in his 80th year with two metallic knees, and using two sticks to maintain security for his onward progress given the loss of 60% of his eyesight. That eyesight loss at first deterred truffle but now, given that I do not wish to dropout of the circle of friends that I cherish or the working life that is very important to me, I crowd surf – I leap from a high place, metaphorically, and hope that if things go wrong then someone will help to break my fall.
People are kind. They regularly offer me seats, offer help on and off trains, and, if asked, willingly read the signage and directions that I can no longer manage. Some days I need that help more than on others. Last Thursday was a classic. Heading for the eye clinic in central London, I had not been on the train for more than a few minutes when an announcement told me that a signal failure further up the line had closed the mainline station that I was heading towards. We were all going to get off at West.Ruislip. Where? I’m sure that this is a community of distinguished and generous people, but it is not, I must confess, an area with which I have any familiarity. It is however a station on the Central underground railway line. After some confusion (I had not realised it was the last station on that line and was at pains to find out which direction I should be going in when there was in fact only one direction) we got underway. We reached Marble Arch, a station where I knew I could find a taxi adjacent to the large hotel at street level. And there my troubles began.
In the first instance there was an escalator to the surface. I used to leap aboard such things with gay abandon. Now, the fact that I could not see where the step began , the fact that the step seemed to move very quickly, and the fact that I had two sticks and needed the grip with my hands on the moving banisters, all confused me. I tried once and pulled back. I tried again and failed again. All of my fellow passengers had by now departed to the surface and the place was quiet . Then came a ringing voice .“Are you in trouble? Can we help? “A young couple, perhaps mid 20s in age, with voices full of concern and also full of the confidence that they could help anything. I explained. The young man told me how easy it was going to be, linked arms with me while holding my sticks in his other hand and we marched together onto the moving staircase. It was easy. At the top he said “123 and off we go!“ And so we did. We shook hands and he was gone, back on the down escalator to rejoin his partner. I stood in the station hallway and glowed, and then another realisation dawned. I had a rail ticket, not a tube ticket. Tube train exits require cards to be placed in slots or upon contact points. Neither of these could be readily identified by my depleted eyesight. No helpful staff member was available. I might have risen to the surface by human generosity, but I was still trapped!
The only passengers around me were incoming, passing through the turnstiles to go down to the platforms. One of these , a businessman in a, padded jacket concentrating on his screen bumped into me. “I say, you look lost! Do you need help?“ My mumbled affirmative was enough. He strode powerfully to the staff kiosk, rapped on the door and then , in a commanding voice, bade those within to come out and let me through the barriers. He was gone before I could thank him. A staff member duly released me into the crowded streets and the refuge of London taxi.
I am not a religious person and I have long regarded Christmas as no more than a commercial opportunity. I do believe in my fellow humankind, and I think that most of us will do good if given a decent opportunity. I have an optimist and the events of this day.bouyed my optimism. I think that quiet and casual good works should be celebrated.
It was also my birthday. I wish a very happy Christmas and the splendid 2025 to the anonymous people who helped me that day, and the many others who have helped me through the year in 1000 tiny ways. Thank you, one and all.
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