POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

Keir Starmer takes on ‘broken’ NHS and warns: no more money without reforms

This is surprisingly sane for a Leftist leader. Heavy reliance on locums is absurd. There should be sufficient staff. Big tax incentives could be used to bring in the needed staff and nursing homes. And the "Trusts" should be abolished. They just add a layer of needless bureaucracy

Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to “take on” any opposition to radical changes in the NHS, saying difficult and unpopular changes are needed before it receives a penny more from the government.

The prime minister said the health service required “major surgery, not sticking plasters” and that fixing it could take a decade or more.

Risking anger from unions, he said he was not prepared to spend more money while the system was paying huge sums to agency workers, adding: “We have to fix the plumbing before we turn on the taps.”

“I’m not prepared to see even more of your money spent on agency staff who cost £5,000 a shift, on appointment letters which arrive after the appointment, or on paying for people to be stuck in hospital just because they can’t get the care they need in the community,” he said.

As he was speaking, ministers announced a clampdown on junk food advertising in a bid to cut obesity rates and reduce the burden on the NHS. From October next year, online adverts will be banned altogether while TV ads will be shown only after the 9pm watershed.

But critics questioned how far Labour was prepared to go. Former Tory health minister Lord Bethell told The Independent: “You cannot be serious about prevention and rule out a sugar tax on the same day.”

Sir Keir’s comments, in a speech to the King’s Fund think tank, following a damning independent review that found the NHS in “critical condition” with some of the worst cancer survival rates in the Western world.

Completed in nine weeks by Ara Darzi, a surgeon and an independent peer, it blamed choices made by the last Conservative government and warned the health service would take years to fix.

Government sources denied the reforms would mean more privatisation, saying the Darzi report was clear about the amount of money the NHS is currently spending badly and in the wrong places.

Health secretary Wes Streeting has previously announced plans to use the private sector to help cut NHS backlogs, and hit out at “middle-class lefties” who oppose the move, saying they risk putting ideological purity ahead of patient care.

Earlier on Thursday, Mr Streeting said the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA), should stop “sabre-rattling” and work with ministers.

An “unnecessary threat” of action from the organisation’s GPs “would harm patients”, he said.

Leading scientist Professor Sir John Bell also hit out at doctors in the BMA, saying they had “been a major drag on reform of healthcare”.

Setting out a broad vision for reform, Sir Keir said his 10-year plan would include changing the NHS to a “neighbourhood health service”.

This would mean “more tests, scans, healthcare offered on high streets and town centres, improved GP access, bringing back the family doctor, offering digital consultations for those that want them, virtual wards and more patients safely looked after in their own homes where we can deal with problems early before they are off work sick and before they need to go to hospital”.

He also pledged to drive up productivity in hospitals, giving them more of a role in preventing sickness.

He said that increased use of technology, including to speed up test results in A&E, was one area where improving service was not about piling in more money year after year.

He also pledged to continue the last Tory government’s hospital-building programme.

But while he warned it was not possible to build an NHS for the future without fixing social care, there was little detail on how that could be achieved.

He said: “Reform does not mean just putting more money in… so, hear me when I say this, no more money without reform.”

He said he was "genuinely shocked" when he learned how many young children are admitted to hospital every year to have rotten teeth removed – something that is preventable.

“I know some prevention measures will be controversial but I’m prepared to be bold even in the face of opposition,” he said.

Former Tory minister Dame Harriett Baldwin criticised Sir Keir’s comments in the wake of his cuts to winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, saying the move would hurt “bed capacity over the winter to come in our NHS”.

And Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Daisy Cooper warned that “the elephant in the room is that we cannot reform our NHS without reforming social care”.

But Sir Julian Hartley, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents trusts, said the NHS was “down but not out”.

“As the prime minister said today, we can’t go on like this. To build an NHS fit for the future, the NHS needs to work differently and go further and faster to improve care for patients.”

Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of King’s Fund, said the government “now needs to develop a detailed strategy for reform. That plan will need to model how greater investment to primary and community services will be implemented.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-nhs-money-reform-b2611670.html

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Harris’s ‘Joy’ Would Cost US Dearly

American progressives are out of ideas. Instead of a bold economic agenda, all they have to offer is reruns of policy failures. Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent proposals are notable examples. Behind the facade of joy hides an alarming indifference to the immense costs her schemes would create if she wins the presidency. Economists have a duty to point out just how destructive these proposals are.

Exhibit A is her call for price controls on groceries. Ignore the rhetorical sleight-of-hand from the campaign and its defenders, who insist they only want to clamp down on “price gouging.” This is clearly a call for the government to crack down on retailers who are selling food at any price Harris and other progressive elites deem excessive.

Perhaps no policy has a record as consistently bad as mandatory price caps. While Econ 101 doesn’t always tell the full story, it does an admirable job in this case. Expect shortages, portion shrinkages, and discriminatory sales practices if Harris gets her way. Price controls are such bad policy that other prominent Democrats almost immediately promised that they will never happen. Yet the very fact Harris proposed them is appalling. It is too dangerous to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Next is her growth-killing tax plan. Harris is among those calling for the rich to “pay their fair share.” For starters, the rich tax skimps narrative is ridiculous. The top one percent of income earners already pay more than 40 percent of all federal income taxes. Yet she wants to raise rates anyway. This will dampen incentives to produce and innovate.

The same is true for corporate taxes. Raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent would inhibit capital formation, resulting in smaller returns for owners, higher prices for consumers, and lower wages for workers. This last point should dispel the myth that Harris and the progressive elite are concerned about economic opportunity.

Perhaps most egregious is her endorsement of President Biden’s plan to tax unrealized capital gains. Just look at the awful incentives this policy would create. Instead of keeping their wealth in capital markets, bearing risk and facilitating growth, those experiencing unrealized capital gains would likely have to divest their position to discharge their tax liability. This policy seems designed to dry up capital markets, or else provide a beachhead for future direct wealth seizures by the government.

Those objecting that the policy only applies to the hyper-rich (those with a net worth of more than $100 million) are clearly unfamiliar with the history of the income tax. Once upon a time, only high income earners paid any tax at all. Now the IRS has its tendrils everywhere. The same will eventually be true with unrealized capital gains, unless we root out this weed right away.

Lastly, her so-called home affordability plan is rubbish. Harris wants to give new homebuyers up to $25,000 in “down payment assistance.” I’m sure that phrase poll-tested well, but a subsidy by any other name is still a subsidy. If you give a family $25,000 to help purchase a home, they’ll be much better off. But the gains are much smaller if you give it to many families.

Harris’s proposal would boost market demand, further driving up housing prices. Keep in mind that housing supply is generally much less responsive to price changes than housing demand. New home construction is subject to high fixed costs, significant time to build, and zoning laws and other local restrictions. The implication is that homebuyers won’t get much of the benefit of the subsidy, since prices will go up by much more than the quantity of homes. If your goal is transferring wealth to homebuilders and existing homeowners, Harris’s plan is great. But if your goal is making housing more affordable, it’s terrible.

She keeps piling on examples. Her stated desire to throw 180 million Americans off their private health insurance plans, her eagerness to impose massive regulatory costs on energy producers, and her enthusiasm for hamstringing law enforcement come easily to mind. The result is a political-economic model guaranteed to induce malaise. Vice President Harris’s ongoing audition for Enfeebler-in-Chief proves the American left needs a hard reset. Otherwise, the “opportunity economy” they claim to want will never materialize.

https://www.aier.org/article/harris-joy-unabashedly-cynical/

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David Gerard, the tyrant of Wikipedia

Wikipedia administrator David Gerard cares a great deal about Reliable Sources. For the past half-decade, he has torn through the website with dozens of daily edits—upwards of fifty thousand, all told—aimed at slashing and burning lines on the site that reference sources deemed unreliable by Wikipedia. He has stepped into dozens of official discussions determining which sources the site should allow people to use, opining on which are Reliable and which are not. He cares so much about Reliable Sources, in fact, that he goes out of his way to provide interviews to journalists who may write about topics he’s passionate about, then returns to the site to ensure someone adds just the right quotes from those sources to Wikipedia articles about those topics and to protect those additions from all who might question them.

While by Wikipedia’s nature, nobody can precisely claim to speak or act on behalf of the site as a whole, Gerard comes about as close as anyone really could. He’s been a volunteer Wikipedia administrator since 2004, has edited the site more than 200,000 times, and even served off and on as the site’s UK spokesman. Few people have had more of a hand than him in shaping the site, and few have a more encyclopedic understanding of its rules, written and unwritten.

Reliable sources, a ban on original research, and an aspiration towards a neutral point of view have long been at the heart of Wikipedia’s approach. Have an argument, editors say? Back it up with a citation. Articles should cover “all majority and significant minority views” from Reliable Sources (WP:RS) on the topic “fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias” (WP:NPOV). The site has a color-coding system for frequently discussed sources: green for reliable, yellow for unclear, red for unreliable, and dark red for “deprecated” sources that can only be used in exceptional situations.

The minutiae of Wikipedia administration, as with the inner workings of any bureaucracy, is an inherently dry subject. On the site as a whole, users sometimes edit pages directly with terse comments, other times engage in elaborate arguments on “Talk” pages to settle disputes about what should be added. Each edit is added to a permanent history page. To understand any given decision, onlookers must trawl through page after page of archives and discussions replete with tidily packaged references to one policy or another. Where most see boredom behind the scenes and are simply glad for mostly functional overviews of topics they know nothing about, though, a few see opportunity. Those who master the bureaucracy in behind-the-scenes janitorial battles, after all, define the public’s first impressions of whatever they care about.

Since 2017, when Wikipedia made the decision to ban citations to the Daily Mail due to “poor fact-checking, sensationalism, and flat-out fabrication,” editors have waged an intense, quiet war over which sources to ban, which to give strict scrutiny to, and which to crown as Reliable. Based on the site’s policy, it’s easy to understand why: while editors with a stake in the frame of an article have to acquiese to determined opponents bearing Reliable Sources—or at least must have long, grinding disputes about what should be emphasized and why—if they can whip a consensus to declare the sources opponents would use unreliable, they can win edit wars before they happen. This extends well beyond simple factual coverage: cite an opinion or even a movie review from one of those sources, and Gerard or other editors sweep in to remove it as having undue weight.

The battle over the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online newspaper that alternates between tabloid-style sensationalism and serious, in-depth investigative journalism provides a good example of how this works in practice: in three sparse discussions (one, two, three), a dozen or so editors opined, for example, that it “doesn’t particularly have a reputation for journalistic credibility,” with one citing two Snopes articles in support but most presenting bare opinions. As a result of those sparse discussions, Wikipedia editors treat the site as generally unreliable. Every citation to it is presumed suspect, and rather than spending time and effort haggling over each, editors are broadly free to remove them en masse after cursory examination. In practice, this means Gerard scanning through dozens of articles in the span of a few minutes, tearing out all information cited to the Free Beacon as presumptively unreliable.

Unsurprisingly, Gerard’s slash-and-burn, no-questions-asked policy has led to more than a few conflicts on Wikipedia. Editors who object to his indiscriminate removals have raised the issue multiple times to Wikipedia administrators, on talk pages, and elsewhere around the site. Each time, Gerard defends the approach of indiscriminately removing everything from Unreliable Sources, generally carrying on with removals as the disputes carry on. Each time, the arguments peter out with nothing in particular changing. In one case, another Wikipedia administrator, Sandstein, pushed to ban a user for repeatedly criticizing Gerard’s judgment on the matter.

In other words, whatever Wikipedia’s written policy, the practical day-to-day reality is that Gerard will remove Unreliable Sources en masse with terse explanations and with little consideration for actual content, digging in with elaborate justification when pressed.

Given that, it’s worth examining the reliability battles Gerard picks.

Most interesting to me is the case of Huffington Post. See, in addition to volunteering as a Wikipedia administrator, Gerard is the system administrator and owner of the Twitter account for RationalWiki, a left-liberal wiki focused on directing snark and critique towards groups and concepts the authors dislike, from effective altruists to right-wingers to woo. Gerard has edited RationalWiki upwards of 30,000 times. He updated the site’s harshly critical article on the Huffington Post occasionally, one time adding one of its most scathing critiques: “The truth is not in them.”

When it came time to comment about them on Wikipedia, though, he was rather more enthusiastic, calling the site “a perfectly normal [news organization] on this level” and raising an eyebrow when people wanted to rate its politics section as less than reliable.2

As of today, Wikipedia treats the Huffington Post as wholly reliable for non-politics content and unclear for political content.

During discussions of PinkNews, an LGBT-focused news outlet, the user gnu57 provided several examples of journalistic misconduct:

The site defamed lesbian Scottish politician Joanna Cherry, falsely claiming she was being investigated for homophobia, retracting only after Cherry pursued legal options against them.

The site falsely claimed the Israeli health minister had called coronavirus a “divine punishment for homosexuality.”

The site made salacious, misleading claims about Bill O’Reilly.

The site has a history of tabloid-esque sensationalism, clickbait, and photoshops about celebrities

Gerard, examining the outlet when it came up for comment, lauded it as highly reliable, emphasizing that “claims of journalistic malfeasance on their part didn't check out at all when we looked into them and discovered they'd actually handled them in an exemplary fashion.” Later, he pushed successfully for it to be treated as a fully reliable source despite a note from the discussion that caution should be used.

Wikipedia currently treats PinkNews as a Reliable Source.

He regularly makes similar nudges around sites like The Daily Beast (“Generally reliable - not perfect, but a normal news source, editorial processes, etc - no reason not to use it as a source") and Teen Vogue (“Their news coverage is solid - surprising for a fashion magazine, but it's like the surprise when Buzzfeed News turned out to be a good solid RS too”), as well as supporting the removal of any notes of partisanship from Vox.

What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly and not unreasonably, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn't be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.

He would prefer to see Quillette, Claire Lehmann’s longform magazine focused on science and cultural critique and the home of, among other things, the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess, banned from the site entirely: “unreliable, editorially incompetent, repeatedly caught publishing false information, conspiracy theories and hoaxes, [undue weight] for opinions.”

What about The Free Press, created by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss to cover investigative stories and provide commentary she felt was being stifled at the Times? To ask is to know the answer: “It was created not to be "reliable" in any Wikipedia sense, but to feed the opinions of the sort of conspiracy theorist who uses large words spelt correctly. If TheFP ran that the sky was blue, I'd see if I could find an actually-reliable source and cite that instead.”

While he has not yet succeeded in getting either source formally deprecated, Wikipedia considers both unreliable and he prioritizes removing citations to them in his edits.

His treatment of the libertarian flagship publication Reason Magazine (which, despite him, remains a Reliable Source even on Wikipedia) stands out the most: based solely on tendentious readings of issues from nearly fifty years ago, he warns people to “apply extreme caution,” saying he “wouldn't use it at all except where unavoidable.”

In each instance, he is backed up by a vocal contingent of equally opinionated like-minded editors, who go by pseudonyms such as Aquillion, XOR’Easter, or NorthBySouthBaranof. This is the sort of coordination that requires no conspiracy, no backroom dealing—though, as in any group, I’m sure some discussions go on—just the natural outgrowth of common traits within the set of people whose Special Interest is arguing about sources deep in the bowels of an online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia’s job is to repeat what Reliable Sources say. David Gerard’s mission is to determine what Reliable Sources are, using any arguments at his disposal that instrumentally favor sources he finds agreeable. The debate, to be clear, is not between tabloids and the New York Times, a battle the Times cleanly wins. In Gerard’s world, scientists and academics who publish in Quillette or Reason are to have even their opinions discarded entirely, while to cast any doubt on the reliability of the word of Huffington “the truth is not in them” Post and PinkNews is absurd.

From there, it’s simple: Wikipedia editors dutifully etch onto the page, with a neutral point of view, that Huffington Post writers think this, PinkNews editors think that, and experienced Harvard professors who make the mistake of writing for The Free Press think nothing fit for an encyclopedia.

As I mentioned to Substack’s Chris Best recently, I am not a blind cynic about institutions or a blind supporter of those who sing the counter-melody. Whatever the faults of, say, the New York Times, and there are many, its resources and will to remain as the paper of record remain unmatched. Outlets like The Free Press and Quillette are at their best when they act as competition and correction mechanisms for these institutions, covering areas legacy outlets overlook, and they cannot hope to compete in scope or depth. Giving the Times more weight than The Free Press makes perfect sense for an encyclopedia, but what actually goes on at Wikipedia is something else entirely.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin

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Truths that may not be mentioned

It has been known for over a century that there are fewer women than men in the top echelons of IQ -- and in mathematics even more so. But we live in an era of such heavy censorship that any mention of that must be fiercely suppressed

In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.

Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.

Darwin had also raised the question of why males in many species might have evolved to be more variable than females, and when I learned that the answer to his question remained elusive, I set out to look for a scientific explanation. My aim was not to prove or disprove that the hypothesis applies to human intelligence or to any other specific traits or species, but simply to discover a logical reason that could help explain how gender differences in variability might naturally arise in the same species.

I came up with a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles and enlisted Sergei Tabachnikov, a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, to help me flesh out the model. When I posted a preprint on the open-access mathematics archives in May of last year, a variability researcher at Durham University in the UK got in touch by email. He described our joint paper as “an excellent summary of the research to date in this field,” adding that “it certainly underpins my earlier work on impulsivity, aggression and general evolutionary theory and it is nice to see an actual theoretical model that can be drawn upon in discussion (which I think the literature, particularly in education, has lacked to date). I think this is a welcome addition to the field.”

So far, so good.

Once we had written up our findings, Sergei and I decided to try for publication in the Mathematical Intelligencer, the ‘Viewpoint’ section of which specifically welcomes articles on contentious topics. The Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief is Marjorie Wikler Senechal, Professor Emerita of Mathematics and the History of Science at Smith College. She liked our draft, and declared herself to be untroubled by the prospect of controversy. “In principle,” she told Sergei in an email, “I am happy to stir up controversy and few topics generate more than this one. After the Middlebury fracas, in which none of the protestors had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard, and providing links to them.”

Professor Senechal suggested that we might enliven our paper by mentioning Harvard President Larry Summers, who was swiftly defenestrated in 2005 for saying that the GMVH might be a contributing factor to the dearth of women in physics and mathematics departments at top universities. With her editorial guidance, our paper underwent several further revisions until, on April 3, 2017, our manuscript was officially accepted for publication. The paper was typeset in India, and proofread by an assistant editor who is also a mathematics professor in Kansas. It was scheduled to appear in the international journal’s first issue of 2018, with an acknowledgement of funding support to my co-author from the National Science Foundation. All normal academic procedure.

Coincidentally, at about the same time, anxiety about gender-parity erupted in Silicon Valley. The same anti-variability argument used to justify the sacking of President Summers resurfaced when Google engineer James Damore suggested that several innate biological factors, including gender differences in variability, might help explain gender disparities in Silicon Valley hi-tech jobs. For sending out an internal memo to that effect, he too was summarily fired.

No sooner had Sergei posted a preprint of our accepted article on his website than we began to encounter problems. On August 16, a representative of the Women In Mathematics (WIM) chapter in his department at Penn State contacted him to warn that the paper might be damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young women. “As a matter of principle,” she wrote, “I support people discussing controversial matters openly … At the same time, I think it’s good to be aware of the effects.” While she was obviously able to debate the merits of our paper, she worried that other, presumably less sophisticated, readers “will just see someone wielding the authority of mathematics to support a very controversial, and potentially sexist, set of ideas…”

A few days later, she again contacted Sergei on behalf of WIM and invited him to attend a lunch that had been organized for a “frank and open discussion” about our paper. He would be allowed 15 minutes to describe and explain our results, and this short presentation would be followed by readings of prepared statements by WIM members and then an open discussion. “We promise to be friendly,” she announced, “but you should know in advance that many (most?) of us have strong disagreements with what you did.”

On September 4, Sergei sent me a weary email. “The scandal at our department,” he wrote, “shows no signs of receding.” At a faculty meeting the week before, the Department Head had explained that sometimes values such as academic freedom and free speech come into conflict with other values to which Penn State was committed. A female colleague had then instructed Sergei that he needed to admit and fight bias, adding that the belief that “women have a lesser chance to succeed in mathematics at the very top end is bias.” Sergei said he had spent “endless hours” talking to people who explained that the paper was “bad and harmful” and tried to convince him to “withdraw my name to restore peace at the department and to avoid losing whatever political capital I may still have.” Ominously, “analogies with scientific racism were made by some; I am afraid, we are likely to hear more of it in the future.”

The following day, I wrote to the three organisers of the WIM lunch and offered to address any concrete concerns they might have with our logic or conclusions or any other content. I explained that, since I was the paper’s lead author, it was not fair that my colleague should be expected to take all the heat for our findings. I added that it would still be possible to revise our article before publication. I never received a response.

Instead, on September 8, Sergei and I were ambushed by two unexpected developments.

First, the National Science Foundation wrote to Sergei requesting that acknowledgment of NSF funding be removed from our paper with immediate effect. I was astonished. I had never before heard of the NSF requesting removal of acknowledgement of funding for any reason. On the contrary, they are usually delighted to have public recognition of their support for science.

The ostensible reason for this request was that our paper was unrelated to Sergei’s funded proposal. However, a Freedom of Information request subsequently revealed that Penn State WIM administrator Diane Henderson (“Professor and Chair of the Climate and Diversity Committee”) and Nate Brown (“Professor and Associate Head for Diversity and Equity”) had secretly co-signed a letter to the NSF that same morning. “Our concern,” they explained, “is that [this] paper appears to promote pseudoscientific ideas that are detrimental to the advancement of women in science, and at odds with the values of the NSF.” Unaware of this at the time, and eager to err on the side of compromise, Sergei and I agreed to remove the acknowledgement as requested. At least, we thought, the paper was still on track to be published.

But, that same day, the Mathematical Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief Marjorie Senechal notified us that, with “deep regret,” she was rescinding her previous acceptance of our paper. “Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.” For the second time in a single day I was left flabbergasted. Working mathematicians are usually thrilled if even five people in the world read our latest article. Now some progressive faction was worried that a fairly straightforward logical argument about male variability might encourage the conservative press to actually read and cite a science paper?

In my 40 years of publishing research papers I had never heard of the rejection of an already-accepted paper.

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/