Educators From England

"[W]e can compare hang gliding... taking heroin... health treatments, with standing next to Hiroshima. We're deliberately... using these numbers to tell uncomfortable stories."

"This was discovered by Gompertz in 1825. There's something about our bodies, the way that we age, that means that every year our chance of dying increases by the same amount, 9%."

"Life-expectancy reduced by 1 year = about 30 minutes off your life expectancy for each day with the habit = 1"

"[S]omeone is diagnosed with autism after receiving the , so people assume a causal connection – even when there isn’t one."

"Framing is absolutely vital. ...All the work in communications is driven by the work of psychologists like Kahneman, Tversky...[etc.] The simplest one... is not always to talk about s, but to talk about s, and preferably... to give both. Our predict systems are almost always... positively framed, all in terms of survival. So we draw survival curves, not mortality curves... How long can you be without this condition. ...In a way you should give both, but ...it makes a big difference ...whether you talk about 2% mortality or 98% survival. ...2% mortality sounds rather terrifying while 98% survival sounds rather good, and we don't want to unnecessarily upset people... [W]e are all going to die ...It's 100% mortality in the end, but you want to show a decline in survival ...because it's just fairer and more likely to get people engaged rather than frighten them off immediately. ...[W]hen we ...provide an icon array that shows everybody, it shows the deaths ...patients like it. ...They like seeing out of 100 people ...in 10 years time, how many people are going to be alive ...because they have the chemotherapy now, or dead because of breast cancer...[etc.]"

"We need to think slow instead of fast, and resist drawing causal links between events where none may exist."

"[W]hen... there have been 30 "thromboembolic events" after around 5m vaccinations, the crucial question... is: how many would be expected anyway, in the normal run..?"

"(DVTs) [normally] happen to around one person per 1,000 each year... out of 5 million people getting vaccinated, we would expect... 5,000 DVTs a year, or... 100 every week. So it is not at all surprising that there have been 30 reports."

"In the UK, adverse reactions are reported using the “yellow card”... Up to 28 February, around 54,000 yellow cards have been reported... from... 10 million vaccinations... three to six reports per 1,000 jabs [0.3-0.6%]. That means a far greater number of side-effects are reported in the trials..."

"The most serious problem is anaphylactic reactions, and the advice is not to inject anyone with a previous history of allergic reactions to either a prior [vaccine] dose... or its ingredients."

"Probability was only invented a few hundred years ago. It's not a natural way to think at all. It's extremely difficult and complex. Anything that can help people do it, is of benefit."

"Gompertz's observation said that between the ages of 25 and 80, your risk of dying increases by about 9% per year. ...[T]hat means that every eight years your risk of dying doubles, essentially. ...[I]t's going to get you in the end. Mathematics proves it. You can't go on forever, because it's this exponential increase in the risk. Amazing, really powerful. That's why you peg out in the end. It's going to get you."

"When epidemiologists... do studies, when they follow lots of people for years, they measure the effects of various habits, in terms of s. This is what it does to your hazard every year. So if you have a daily sausage or a bacon sandwich, this goes up by about 10%, a fixed amount... as your... annual risk. 10% increase in your annual risk of death, of not making it to your next birthday."

"That change in life expectancy is not that gripping in itself. So what we've done in the book, it does seem a rather a strange thing to say... "Over an adult lifetime, about... 50-60 years... take a year off your life." It's like losing roughly 1/50 of your life. It's actually ' because of... these daily habits... like losing a week every year of your life, the same as losing 1/2 hour off a day. So we could say... that... 2 hours watching television... it's as if it's taking 1/2 hour... off your life. ...You're aging an extra 1/2 hour sitting on your backside watching television ..."

"Psychologists got hold of this lovely idea of why we're trying to do it. I don't care what people do, so I'm not trying to change what they do, particularly. ...It would be nice if they could remember it... get the gist of something... learn something, but I don't even care too much about that. Psychologists have got this great scheme of what, perhaps, we're really trying to do, which is trying to breed some immunity to misleading anecdote, which is... the fact that we're so influenced by idiotic stories we hear on the web, or from our friends and neighbors."

"So... in the book we make all these comparisons... That's acute timing risk, things that are going to kill you on the spot. ...What about the other sort of risks? ...You can have your spam ...[T]hat is not going to kill you on the spot. Well, it might. ...You might choke on...[it]... but it's... unlikely..."

"So it's a different sort of risk. These are chronic risks. ...[T]hings that... if you carry on with them, are likely to shorten your life. So how can we express these... [T]hese are the ones that newspapers tend to get terribly wrong."

"We spent ages... working... for child heart surgery... such a delicate area, trying to find the wording for... random error or binomial variability... [Y]ou can give a percentage... 95% . Well, am I going to be one of the 5% or one of the 95%? We don't know. It's just chance or luck, fortune. We can't... use those words in... delicate situations... operating on children... Then we came up with a good phrase... which we used and tested on parents... It's "unforeseeable factors," not "unforeseen factors," because that would suggest someone's to blame... [T]he unforeseeable factors could lead some people to... not survive the operation, and some to survive. So... we can put you in a group, but we can't go beyond that... [O]nly what develops over time, in terms of complications, or something like that, could... put... you in one group or another. "Unforeseeable factors," I really like that phrase. I try to use it all the time, I recommend it."

"Misleading anecdote is someone smokes 20 a day and lives to 110, [or] who buys some tablets off the web and their cancer goes away... These are not representative... stories... [T]his is an active area of research, and it's been shown that if you present information in the way that Michael was presenting, as icon arrays, show both the good and the bad, show the totality, [it's been] shown empirically that you can make people less influenced by misleading anecdotes."

"One of the other things we do in the book is talk about radiation... [Y]ou can say exposure to radiation, you can talk in terms of micro-lives or cigarette equivalents. So... a flight to New York, the radiation you get from that is equivalent to smoking a couple of cigarettes, about 1/2 hour of your life... The whole body CT scan... exposing yourself... to possibly an unhealthy dose of radiation... 150 microlives, smoking about 300 cigarettes, about the same as standing about 1 1/2 miles from the Hiroshima explosion. ...[W]hen they advertise these things for a thousand quid, they don't tell you that."

"This is called a hazard curve. ...This is the chance of dying before your next birthday, on average. ...[I]t's... on a , so 10%... (1 in 10) 83 year olds will not see 84... 1 in 100 people like me [age 59] will not see their next birthday. 1 in 1,000 thirty-two year olds, and 1 in 10,000 7 year olds... and there is a... lump, sadly jumping up at 17, as you can imagine... boys... a risk-taking lump, but if you ignore that lump... it's a... straight line between... 7 and 90."

"... the as a substitute for is a law about the metrical properties of space around the "attracting" mass. Since it is to have universal validity, it must be a mathematical formula whose form is preserved when it is transformed from any one system of coordinates to any other; and since each system has its own time-measure as well as its own space-measures, time as well as space must be involved in the metrical properties with which the law deals."

"Every scheme of education being, at bottom, a practical philosophy, necessarily touches life at every point. Hence any educational aims which are concrete enough to give definite guidance are correlative to ideals of life—and, as ideals of life are eternally at variance, their conflict will be reflected in educational theories."

"One cannot walk through the streets of any center of population in India without meeting face after face which is eloquent of thought, of fine feeling, and of insight into the profound things of life. In a very true sense the people of India are nearer to the spiritual hearts of things than we III England are. As for brain power, there is that in India which is comparable wIth the best in our country.""

"The principle we wish to establish, put in other words, is that the important thing in this connexion is an increased demand on the part of all kinds of people for educational facilities, which may roughly be termed non-vocational, since they are concerned really with restoring balance to a man who has, of necessity, developed to a great extent one or other of his characteristics for the purposes of his livelihood or for the satisfaction of his reasonable desires."

"Experience has shown that the best organizers or directors of adult educational work are those who have at some time or another sought it for themselves."

"The best education for any man or woman is that which develops the maximum strength of body and mind."

"Knowledge is not education; it is but the fuel burnt in a flame which comes from the heart of the world and which makes all things new. Burnt in any other way it smoulders and suffocates."

"The reconstruction of society in the world depends upon the co-operation of the different interests in pursuing a line of action which leads to noble and pure ends. Of all possible ends the education of the people stands out as most clearly necessary."

"On returning, she got off the 214 bus outside our house, and spotted a familiar pram being pushed up the front steps. The person propelling it was a stranger — a sinister woman, tall with pointy glasses and a gash of lipstick. It would be nice to say that my earliest memory was looking up from my pram and seeing a prototype of Edna Everage. Instead, I comfort myself with the idea that I may have been the only person in history to be so unmoved by the sight of the housewife superstar — who went on to convulse the world and once rendered the then Prince Charles and Camilla helpless with mirth by simply turning up in their box at the London Palladium — that I slept through the whole thing."

"[J]acking in journalism to become a teacher so late in life wasn’t brave – it was desperate. Though I didn’t admit it at the time, I was entirely burnt out – I had been at the same place for an interminably unimaginative 32 years – and was showing the classic symptoms. I was cynical about the value of what I did and of journalism as a whole – what was all this crazy chasing of ephemera really for? I also felt the columns I was writing were rubbish. The very thought of writing another one was making me feel so sick I had to find a way out and do something else entirely."

"[T]he biggest thing, which readers may find hard to swallow given my entire career has been based on ridiculing others, is that, for my next act, I want to be useful. Yes, I know sticking pins in pompous chief executives is useful in a meta kind of way but that's not the kind of useful I have in mind."

"Our blindness to ageism is particularly puzzling as it is a prejudice not against people who are different from us (other races, genders etc) but against our future selves."

"People in professional jobs work for three reasons: money, status and the interest of the work itself. The main reason those in their fifties become sluggish is not that their minds are going, nor that the work itself has become too monotonous. It is that neither money nor status move them as they used to and the interest of the job is not enough to keep them going on its own."

"London is where powerful people are, on the whole. The best-paid jobs are here, the best-paid egos. London is the capital of power and egos — therefore it's the capital of office affairs as well."

"With jobs, as with parties, it is best to leave when you are still having a good time."

"As I write, I'm interrupted by a dull thud. My partner has discovered medieval ceiling beams in the bathroom above a more recent suspended ceiling. Oops, another section of plaster must have come crashing down — but the sound is muffled as the walls are so thick. Indeed, my sister's housewarming gift of a school playground bell to summon people to dinner has been almost entirely useless — in this house you can't hear a thing."

"As a category theorist, Cheng researches relationships. She uses this focus on relationships to address the problem of the divisiveness of arguments around gender equality. She abstracts the ideas and reframes the discussion based on relevant character traits that she demonstrates do not have to be linked to gender. She looks for assumptions that have been made, seeks to discard them, and discovers fundamental relationships. In order to better articulate these relationships, she invents new terminology as a way of preventing futile divisive arguments. These new terms are ingressive and congressive. She defines ingressive behavior as “going into things” where the focus is on the self and is more competitive, individualistic, and adversarial. She defines congressive behavior as “bringing things together” where the focus is on community and is more collaborative, interdependent, and cooperative. She gives many examples to illuminate her definitions. ... Cheng is deeply interested in making mathematics accessible to everyone."

"[Q:] What is the best thing about your job? [A:] Chatting. And the fact that I can write about whatever I like. [Q:] And the worst? [A:] Chatting. (I'm always behind with my work) And the fact that I can write about whatever I like - which is terrible when the cupboard is bare of ideas."

"… By relating personal stories, historical examples and mathematical analogies, Cheng explains how, when we rely on simplistic concepts like female and male, and the crusty logic that accompanies those concepts, we cannot have good conversations. As Cheng puts it: “If we object to the idea that ‘men are better,’ it’s not that helpful to declare instead that ‘women are better.’ It pits men and women against each other and sets up a prescriptive framework rather than a descriptive one.” She motivates us to strip away consistent triggers for dumb fights that lead nowhere. What would she have us strip away? This is where Cheng becomes a logician. She wants to carefully think through our associations with the word “success” as they relate to gender."

"In my current school the teachers seem happy and have no plans to quit. Many have taught there for 20 or 30 years and educated the parents of the current students. Indeed, teacher turnover is so low that I very nearly didn't get a job. When I started looking last spring, there were 120 vacancies for business studies and economics teachers in London; in the whole of the North East there were only three. In the highest-achieving London academies a quarter of the staff quit every year — not just because they can't afford flats but because they are wrung out by the scale of the work. This is the trade-off: this sort of system gets the best possible GCSE results, but the teachers, and sometimes the students, get burnt out achieving it."

"I've invented some new words... ingressive to replace masculine and congressive to replace feminine... Ingressive is a character trait... a behaviour... about going forward... not being waylaid about what people say... being competitive and winning. Congressive is about bringing things together and... shedding light and understanding... helping people... and maybe we are presenting mathematics at school in a very ingressive way, because it's often about being right... getting the right answer."

"What if the pieces of string aren't really... string, but they're s? ...[M]aybe ...early diagnosis of Alzheimer's may come from looking at... the tangledness of brain cells that mutate... So an abstract way of telling whether it's tangled is... useful."

"I'm not interested in being right... I'm not interested in winning... but I hate losing, and I don't like being wrong. ...But if it's a situation when nobody is going to lose because we're all trying to understand something together, then there's no risk of losing, and... we can all gain from it."

"[T]hen I started my PhD and discovered that in higher dimensional category theory... the braids show the coherence of the structure inside some higher dimensional categories, and I didn't know this when I first drew this picture, and then I... said "Wow!" I was studying braids before I was even studying braids..."

"[S]o mathematics comes up with abstract ways of studying these, where... it... looks like pieces of string, but how can I study them as if they were pieces of string without actually waving pieces of string around... [T]here are all sorts of practical situations where it's not practical to wave... string around."

"I'm not interested in playing sport... because I hate the idea of losing, and I'm not interested in winning, so there's no upside and there's only potential downside..."

"A lot of programs for good mathematicians at a young age are... competitions and... problem solving... and Olympiads, and that is very ingressive..."

"When I drew this picture it enabled me to understand the piece better, but moreover, it helped me understand why I didn't understand the piece, because the voices got wound... between each other in a way that was difficult to follow until I drew this diagram... [I]t enabled me to follow the lines of music as I was playing... which... enables me to play it better. ...This is the point of understanding the s inside things."

"If we strip away the paint... the windows and the non-structural walls of this building, we'll get to the structural walls... and then this building will look a lot more like a lot of other buildings... I don't know which are the load bearing walls, and I don't need to, but it's a good thing that somebody does... [T]hat's true of all abstract structures."