Month: February 2017

Mosul in mind

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Things are still desperate. There is a hopeful moment in Ben Solomon’s interactive film report from the front line in East Mosul. ISIS forced their own hideous curriculum on schools, but in one school where he filmed, only 20% of the pupils had been turning up. Now with ISIS gone they are flocking back. West Mosul, where the old town lies not far from the river, isn’t free yet. Here’s a picture of – believe it or not – a Jewish boys’ school in old Mosul,  Lawrence Kedoorie School, from before 1951.

lawrence-kedoorie-school-mosul

It comes from Ezra Laniado’s 1981 book on the Jews of Mosul (only available in Hebrew).

jews-of-mosul-cover

One of the endpapers even has a map of the small Jewish quarter and in my copy of the book my father circled his address on it in red pen. It was one street back from the Souk al-Kasibin (market of the butchers) which must have been the busiest place in the community. There’s what looks like a child’s drawing of it in the book, by Gabriel Laniado. You can see children playing, people selling bread and fish, and a barber’s shop. The clothing including turbans or keffiyehs doesn’t indicate religion or ethnicity and I’d guess the people shown would all have been Jews.

souk-al-kasibin-mosul

Mosul in mind

Trusting the expert

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Nicholas Russell writing in the Times Higher Education refers to a paper by Friederike Hendriks , Dorothe Kienhues, Rainer Bromme on measuring laypeople’s trust in experts. Expertise is not enough. ‘We must also believe the specific expert in question to be honest and to have our welfare at heart.’ Unfortunately Nicholas Russell only mentioned Hendriks, and left out the other two authors Dorothe Kienhues and Rainwer Bromme, so here’s a photo of Dr Dorothe Kienhues to compensate.

dorothe-kienhues

The Hendriks, Kienhues and Bromme paper looks at trust in scientific experts. The big concerns at the moment are about trust in experts in politics, social science, economics, health and education, not to mention climate change. The obvious villains when it comes to undermining trust in human knowledge and understanding are Trump, Gove and the other Brexit crooks but there are plenty of others. In a small way this blog intends to fight back by recommending reliable experts and saying why they are reliable, why  we should pay them attention and what I think we can learn from them.

I’m going to look out for Tom Nichols’ book, The Death of Expertise, due out in April. There’s a trailer here. Meanwhile, I’m going to look at what the experts have to say about American politics and the use of Twitter.

Trusting the expert

Experts, and LSE gender politics fail

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The LSE is having its annual literary festival this week on ‘Revolutions’, basically shaped around various authors with new books out although there is much more to it. I went to ‘Was Brexit a Populist Revolution?’ (two people on the panel of four said yes but gave different interpretations). The attempt at gender balance failed even though the chair said he was trying to take questions from men and women in turn, because the panel consisted of two male professors, Simon Hix and James Tilley, who knew stuff and made definitive informative statements, and two women, Mary Dejevsky and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, who told anecdotes and gave their opinions. The anecdotes cancelled out and the opinions were often contradicted by the evidence the other panellists cited. The professors tended not to state any opinions but said when they didn’t know, didn’t have evidence or it was outside their area of expertise. Next time, LSE, try to do better and find some actual female experts if gender balance is an issue (as it often should be). They do exist.

Key takeaway points: most voters haven’t changed their minds since June 2016 and if anything there is very slightly more of a Leave majority. There has been an anti-EU majority amongst working-class voters for decades but elections haven’t reflected that as they are about so many other issues. The north-south voting divide reflected class and income divisions as much as anything.

Experts, and LSE gender politics fail

Anne Applebaum, essential expert

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Anne Applebaum is right at the top of my list of the experts I would recommend. She writes regularly for the Washington Post but is primarily a historian. Read or follow her for analysis of Putin’s Russia, Eastern Europe, and Putin’s strategy towards European and American institutions and policies. This week she’s in London speaking at the LSE Literary Festival. Her sessions are fully booked and I didn’t manage to get tickets (returns may still be available). Yesterday’s session on Ukraine and the Maidan revolution was, predictably perhaps, interrupted by a pro-Russian propagandist who is apparently well known for his disreputable past behaviour.

I’ve read Gulag (2003), a history of the Soviet Union’s concentration camps, and Iron Curtain (2012), on how Stalin’s Russia took control of Eastern Europe. They were hard going because of the grimness of the content but she is a brilliant writer and both these histories are based on a lot of interviews and oral history as well as written testimonies and a vast amount of archival research and official documents, in several languages. Many of these sources were inaccessible before 1989 and it must be doubtful how easy it will be in future for historians to gain access to official archives in Moscow. These books are extremely upsetting to read but filled in vast gaps in the history of the twentieth century that were never covered in my schooling. Stalin’s crimes have been systematically ignored, minimized or even defended by many (I had an example of that a couple of weeks ago when a questioner at a talk on the history of the British Left began ‘Far be it from me to defend Stalin, but…’ going on of course to mount a defence). No one who has seriously read Ann Applebaum’s or Timothy Snyder’s work could speak like that, so her opponents go for personal attacks. What makes her a trustworthy expert is her knowledge. She’s done the work. Her analyses are evidence-based and she sees through the lies of propagandists whose claims are based on ideological positions at best, and corruption at worst. It’s worth checking out her own columns and other sources she recommends such as this one, on how Europeans are trying to counter the Russian fake news onslaught.

(Added March 3: podcast of Anne Applebaum and panel discussion at LSE available here)

Anne Applebaum, essential expert

New Crick on the block

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From the bus stop opposite over the last few years, by the taxi queue outside St Pancras, you could see the amazing new Francis Crick Institute being completed behind the British Library. It went up rapidly for such a huge building. The website says it can officially be known as the Crick as well as by its full name, so in years to come it will probably join those other buildings named after people, where the building replaces the person as the primary referent. I don’t like the cleverly balanced double-helixy lump of rusty metal in the forecourt but I do like the strips of jewel colours in the windows at the front. George Osborne posed on site in a hard hat when he was Chancellor and claimed credit but the project was of course launched much earlier under the Blair and Brown Labour governments.

crick-jewel-windows

Yesterday I went to visit. The first public exhibition (free) on biomedical imaging gives glimpses of how research teams are visualising and analysing what goes on in cells, healthy or not. Recommended.

New Crick on the block