The Charybdis is a swirling water feature in the temperate house at Savill Garden. It was designed by Giles Rayner in 2006. https://funandgames.org/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Charybdis_Savill-Gardens_9257-2-scaled.jpg– you may have recently seen the original in The Odyssey
Last week I mentioned that I thought this blog, for the rest of the year at least, would be about what we resist, what we create and what we could nurture in the face of a terrifying future. This week I thought I should start to put a bit of flesh on that particular carcass.
One source for my thinking on this is Alex Steffen. I recently attended one of his Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics webinars. He is particularly good on the importance of continually updating your world view in the face of climate discontinuity and increasing evidence of societal brittleness, and how professions can often be a barrier to doing this:
The greatest danger in any work that asks you to think systemically about the future is getting locked into the worldview that made sense to you when you first began, that you built your successful career on.
We all have limited time and energy. Building up an insightful mental model of how the world works takes a lot of both. The pay-off is in the profit and sense of purpose gained from one’s expertise. It is very common, when you’re highly rewarded for a given set of working insights, to commit more to those insights as your career unfolds, to begin even to defend those insights from challenging new perspectives (ones you fear might devalue your intellectual stock in trade). This “sunk-cost expertise” can easily become a set of shackles.
The article then goes on to explain the process of triangulation, by which professionals can “deflate pressure (from the public, regulators or activist stakeholders) to change more quickly and shore up the power of management and experts who would otherwise be forced to admit that they don’t really know what they’re doing”. If someone starts by saying that they support what you are suggesting, then responds with a bunch of short-term easy actions and claims that these are the start of a journey towards what you are suggesting, you are probably being triangulated.
The biological idea that first made me think this might be possible is called allostasis. It is not a complicated concept. It simply describes the way living organisms survive by continually adapting to the changing world around them.
As we all know, nothing alive exists in a stable environment. Every living thing must continually respond and adapt to changing circumstances. Human beings are no exception. Our brains and bodies are constantly anticipating change and adjusting to it. Most of that work happens without us ever noticing. Allostasis happens all the time, and most of us do not notice. But the fact is that this continual adaptation has a cost.
Murphy points out that, at a time of continual change like ours, that cost is high. And the adaptation required is much higher for people who cannot just throw money at their problems. He then goes on to say:
That changes how we think about political economy. Politics then becomes the process by which societies decide how those costs of adaptation are distributed, whilst economics becomes the study of how institutions either increase or reduce them. Accounting becomes the means by which we identify who ultimately bears the cost of adaptation and health becomes one of the principal ways in which we observe its effects.
I think there is a lot to this approach, which would also provide a structure to identify and critique the triangulation process set out by Steffen. Murphy only mentions education once in this piece:
Education should recognise that human beings learn differently, rather than assuming that everyone should conform to a single model.
I would go a lot further than that, because I think education is the key to helping individuals with their own adaptation strategies as well as in developing the political understanding to see how the costs of adaptation are currently distributed and how to change that within a democratic system. This seems to be an extension of what I have been writing recently about how not to be a reverse-centaur for instance.
The implications for this in health, education and our institutions are considerable in my view and growing all the time. So that is what I am going to be writing about for a while.
Two events recently have made me think about the last 55 years in a different way. The first was the last Birmingham Science Fiction Group meeting, which we had dedicated to a 55 year anniversary celebration for the group (the 50th anniversary having been pandemicked). We had a cake, illustrated by David Hardy’s Stratus Hotel, and we showed a film of interviews from members across the years, again featuring some of David Hardy‘s artwork, with stories about guest speakers from Asimov to Frank Herbert to Iain Banks to Jack Cohen and very frank recollections from our current honorary president, Alastair Reynolds. If you want to see the film, you need to join the Group, which you can easily do by emailing us at contact@brumsfgroup.org.uk. Seeing some of the original organisers talking about some of these meetings like they had just happened made me reflect on how we often attribute significance to things after the event and tend to downplay things happening around us now. Things are both never as good or important as they used to be and, of course, as we prove to ourselves over and over again, they also are.
The other event was a visit with my brother and his wife to where we used to live, in the officers’ married quarters of an RAF station in Yorkshire, 55 years ago, when I was eight. Just standing on this patch of grass, with a field of wheat still growing the other side of the fence (to the right), I got a very strong sense of another way of getting from there to here. Obviously there was the one I had taken, with countless house moves, school moves, marriages, careers, children, holidays, illnesses and death and grief and so much joy and laughter in the very fortunate and privileged life I have lived.
But what if I had just stood here and the 55 years had just sped past me instead. My Liverpool football kit would have been a bit tight, with the number seven sewn on the back by my Mum (actually that might have been the following year, when the full magnificence of Kevin Keegan had become apparent). Or, much more spookily, if the eight-year-old just found themselves on the same patch of grass 55 years later in a Wells’ The Time Machine kind of way. It all suddenly felt just as possible and plausible, as if the 55 year old football-and-everything-else pitch was still there within touching distance somehow.
The thing is, I could understand the world of 1971, once I had been reminded of a few things no doubt. A world of cash (just decimalised so no shillings and old pence), phones fixed to houses and telephone boxes, smaller cars filled with leaded petrol, three channels on the black and white TV. I had just driven up there in a car with bodywork comprising mostly plastics, with no spare tyre and no wallet. Just a device known as a mobile which can not only make calls, but send and receive text messages, carry out all my financial transactions and navigate me to my brother’s house. My eight-year-old self would recognise very little about this world beyond the patch of grass he stood on and the field beyond the fence where he had parachuted his mother’s childhood teddy bear.
And this is the terrifying thing about life: we are all that eight-year-old facing the incomprehensible future, and so much of what we spend our time doing is trying to deal with that fear and lack of understanding with often meaningless structures and practices and customs to ward off the sense of being totally out of control. Trump is scary because he appears to have taken a lot of the guard rails off the path we are on, with little sense that he understands what he is doing. AI is scary because it is putting its foot on the accelerator before we have a clear idea of where we are going. Climate change is scary because we no longer look like we are headed where we thought we were.
And we try and stick some grit in the wheels to slow down the disruption to our own little bit of the world, whether to our sense of ourselves, or to how we think life should be lived. And sure we need to question whether we need to change things which are working perfectly well, but often the driver for resisting change is fear of what we don’t know is coming and finding familiar things irresistibly reassuring.
And when we realise that it is not just us with our, certainly in my case, fairly small and unimportant lives (although obviously very important to us!), but also the people who seem to be shaping the world around us that feel these insecurities and uncertainties, the possibility of working together to make it easier to adapt to the very weird future that is coming suddenly doesn’t seem so outlandish after all.
I think this – what we resist, what we create and what we could nurture in the face of this terrifying future – is what I am going to be writing about for the rest of this year, as we all rattle on down the road in the back of someone’s van.
Lobby journalists often fall back on “a week is a long time in politics” whenever there is more than one thing going on. It’s like what the rest of us mean when we say we’re quite busy at work. It is unclear how the phrase was originally coined, but it is usually attributed to Harold Wilson during one of his sterling crises in 1964. He could not remember ever having said it himself.
I am here this week to say it’s all tosh anyway, because the place where a week can be a really long time sometimes is football.
The World Cup week started at 2am on Monday morning. It should have been 1am, but the lightning storms and North American monsoon had led to a delay in kick off time to 7pm local time and the local weather forecast rather unfortunately designated Mexico City as having “poor weather for running right now”.
I anticipated that it was going to be an operatic night, win or lose, so at 1am I decided to take a walk through Sutton Coldfield to take the temperature of my neighbourhood. I was Charles Dickens’ uncommercial traveller in my mind, who documented several nights of night walks, starting around 12.30am. He described:
The restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep, formed one of the first entertainments offered to the contemplation of us houseless people. It lasted about two hours. We lost a great deal of companionship when the late public-houses turned their lamps out, and when the potmen thrust the last brawling drunkards into the street; but stray vehicles and stray people were left us, after that.
By contrast Sutton was very quiet. The first pub I came to, the Horse and Jockey, was closed and dark. Lights behind curtains and blinds were dotted around the streets, but everyone seemed to be keeping their own company. The Distillery had gone full event night, with bouncers posted on the door, but I walked past the Wetherspoons just as the staff were locking the front door there. Otherwise the only communal places still lit up and active were the pool bar and the Sher Punjabi Bar and Grill, whose Facebook page encouraged you to “feast like a lion”. Compared to the London of the 1860s, where pubs open until 2.30am seemed commonplace, Sutton Coldfield was, on the whole, tucked up in bed with the sound turned down.
I returned home to take my seat for the opera. It started with the national anthems. I have never seen a team and home crowd singing a national anthem more terrifyingly. “Mexicans, at the Cry of War” it translates as, written in 1853 to refer to various Mexican victories in battle in defence of their homeland. This was soon after the Mexican-American War between 1846 and 1848, following the United States’ annexation of Texas from Mexico, a war which resulted in Mexico being forced to sell its northern territories of New Mexico and most of California.
The venue was the Azteca stadium, the largest stadium in Latin America, built in 1966 when the 60 years of hurt began. It is 7,352 feet above sea level. ITV had this hilarious graphic:
The 20% reduction in oxygen partial pressure at that attitude means you have to work harder to breathe. This is something that can be adapted to in time. The Mexican team had played every game except one (Guadalajara at 5000 feet) in Mexico City.
England had last played in the Azteca in a World Cup 40 years earlier when Maradona scored with his hand (he called it “the hand of God”) for one of his two goals (the other was one of the most brilliant individual goals ever seen) to defeat England in the quarter finals. They had never beaten Mexico there. Indeed Mexico had only ever lost there twice before, in 2013 and 2001.
I won’t document the actual match in much detail, as there are many match reports around and you don’t come here for the sports reporting. But in summary:
Quietened the crowd for 20 mins by breaking up any flow to the game – first hydration break – 2 goals in quick succession from Bellingham followed equally quickly by one back from Quinones – half time, when the Azteca produced its own light show including flashing all the lights off in a very unsettling way – Quansah sent off and down to 10 men for most of 2nd half – Gordon won a penalty which Kane scored then Kane gave away a penalty which Jimenez scored – then Tuchel at the hydration break assessed the state of his 10 men at 7000 feet and changed the entire team to one which could man barricades and they threw themselves bodily in front of any attempt at a shot for over half an hour – 3-2 phew!
Jordan Henderson managed to get yellow carded and injured without even coming on the pitch. It was that kind of night.
Source: ET Heisenberg on X
The mythologising of the match began almost immediately. Sky Sports described it as “one of their greatest knockout results”. The BBC report said:
On a night of sheer sporting theatre, with the game delayed by an hour because of severe storms, Thomas Tuchel’s side even survived Jarell Quansah’s red card early in the second half to record one of their finest wins in recent years.
The week continued. Spain knocked out Portugal and Ronaldo in stoppage time, which seemed appropriate after Portugal’s win over Croatia being so controversial the crowd rained plastic water bottles down on them. Even more appropriate was Belgium’s 4-1 win over the United States, who fielded Folarin Balogun after his red card suspension was itself suspended following a conversation between US President Donald Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino, with the Belgian forward Romelu Lukaku doing a Trump Dad dance at the end and the team posting this on X:
Argentina struggled past Egypt controversially too, with Egypt having a goal disallowed and their FA calling for an investigation of the entire team of referees and VAR team over “blatant errors and insisting on not reviewing some of the footage that we believe are in favour of the Egyptian national team”.
This was not the first country to lose its shit over an early exit. The South Korean President has instructed their Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to conduct a thorough investigation into the team’s early exit, citing the amount of public money invested in the team’s World Cup campaign.
The week continued. Neither Switzerland nor Colombia were able to shoot straight, but Switzerland went through on penalties.
So, as part of this hard-hitting report, a good friend of mine suggested I look into the incidence of people having their boots trodden on, which we agreed to call Bootgate. To be honest, unless it was one of the many things happening to Jordan Henderson I had not really been paying attention, and after an extensive investigation I can confirm that I can find no evidence for my friend’s claim. However one reason, if it were true, might be that everyone’s boots seem to be DayGlo pink this year.
On to the quarter finals. France looked dazzling beating Morocco, with Mbappe now almost unplayable at times. Spain, as clever as they were in the European Championships but much more incisive now with the 19 year old Yamal, eased past a severely injury-depleted Belgium, who even lost their legendary goalkeeper Courtois before the end.
And England? Well huge amounts of drama but not a great game of football. The Norwegian fans’ Oops-Upside-Your-Head routine roused their team fitfully. Both teams had goals ruled out and England a penalty too. In the end Bellingham wanted to win more than anyone else on the pitch and carved out two goals from sheer bloody-minded willpower.
One thing I didn’t pick up until the following morning’s coverage was the controversy over England’s first goal. The Norwegians claimed their goalkeeper’s clearance hit the camera cables suspended over the pitch and changed direction before it landed, and there should therefore have been a drop ball. This is when I discovered that FIFA had installed snickometer technology, of the type that tells whether batsman have hit the ball before it hit their pads and therefore whether they are lbw or not, in every match ball. And it didn’t snick! If we win, I predict this will be talked about as long as England’s third goal in the 1966 final.
And then, exactly one week from the start of England’s game in the Azteca, Argentina kicked off against Switzerland in the final quarter final. Argentina scored an early goal against Switzerland and then did very little after that, with Switzerland looking like the most likely team to win until Embolo managed to get a second yellow card for falling over his own feet and was sent off, at which point Argentina stirred themselves to two extra time goals to win it. Meanwhile Tuchel was saying his team were lucky to get through and that he was unhappy with the performance. To which Bellingham, clearly feeling unappreciated, retorted that:
“Maybe he doesn’t know what it’s like to play in those conditions against Erling Haaland, Martin Odegaard, Antonio Nusa and Alexander Sorloth.”
Harry Kane stepped in like a good captain to both defend his manager and indulge in a bit of Good Cop-Bad Cop psychology:
“He’s trying to drag it out of us and we know ourselves we have another level we can reach.”
So that was a week in football. What did politics achieve in that time? Well Trump ended a war and then restarted it. Nigel Farage resigned as an MP and then immediately stood for a by-election in the same constituency, with only Count Binface for company. All of Labour’s MPs have now ruled themselves out of challenging Andy Burnham for the PM role. Compared to the football it feels like Groundhog Day in politics.
Next week in football may turn out to be just as long!
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan is a difficult book to categorise. Some might call it “cli-fi”, as it sets itself in a future significantly altered by human actions and the landscape’s response to those. The Sunday Times appears to think that it might have created a new genre entirely. I think it is best seen as an Oxford novel, even if many of Oxford’s landmarks are submerged for large parts of it. Radiohead even gets a mention. As the petty snobberies and clandestine affairs of academics play out on the much-changed landscape of 2119, earnest academics Tom Metcalfe and Rose Church explore the petty snobberies and clandestine affairs of 2014 and the quest for the long-lost poem from that year. “A Corona for Vivien” certainly feels like a poem which belongs in a past of barn conversions and dinner parties.
For these academics, The Derangement – which is how they refer to the developing crisis mindset between 2015 and 2030 – is just a backdrop to what they regard as the important drama of their lives. It is followed by the first of several climate wars in 2036 involving nuclear weapons, ironically causing a cooling before the Inundation of 2042 causes the deaths of 200 million, with the UK’s population halving and life needing to be eked out on a cluster of small radioactive islands.
I set this out because the book, while occasionally referring to the eeriness of things, carries on with the work obsessions and love lives of its characters pretty much regardless. If What We Can Know is to be believed, academia carries on much as before, with lectures and seminars and essay marking, despite all of this. For humanities departments currently under the cosh despite the absence so far of a nuclear war, this may seem unlikely.
My grumpiness about all this may be partly due to the fact that I am writing this during a series of record breaking heatwaves and unbudgeable heat domes, but I feel like I have had to make more accommodations to the climate – cancellation of plans, a whole new routine at home with the single aim of keeping the thermometer from moving up any further – than McEwan’s characters seem to be doing in their post-not-quite-apocalyptic lives. Whereas one visit to the swimming pool last month was reduced to bobbing about in water along with a couple of dozen others in a manner reminiscent of the wet bulb event at the start of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, McEwan’s only concession to a future world that can still apparently support an academic entirely focused on a 105 year old poem which has never been seen since, seems to be that journeys anywhere are now more difficult and dangerous.
And yet Tom then travels to Snowdonia (where the Bodleian is now housed) fairly easily. And he and Rose then travel to the flooded valleys of the Cotswolds to attempt to retrieve the poem. The only difficult journey described is once they get on to the target island and have to navigate through thick vegetation without satnav (GPS is no more) or even rudimentary hiking skills between the two of them. At one point we are told the internet is on the way out and at another that there is a National Artificial Intelligence which remembers everything you have ever told it.
This book seems as complicit in the “crisis of realism in fiction” as McEwan, via Rose, accuses everything else written between 2015 and 2030 of being. However it is an entertaining Oxford novel, with tense conversations in parked cars and breathtaking egomaniacs everywhere you look.
What we can’t know is what Tom and Rose will make of it in 100 years’ time.
Isaac Newton may or may not have been nutted by an apple. His friend William Stukeley, whose memoir of Newton was the source of the story, states it as follows (spelling and punctuation from Stukeley’s manuscript at the Royal Society):
“why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,” thought he to him self: occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood: “why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.”
However there may be stronger grounds for believing that Newton nutted English mathematics and, as a result, the actuarial profession.
I thought all this to myself, occasion’d by participation in the Actuarial Teachers and Researchers Conference (ATRC) this week. It was great. There were lots of interesting talks, and people were very engaged and respectful in how they discussed them. There was a lot of expertise in the room about both education and actuarial practice and theory. It felt like it was a room that could take on difficult topics and make progress in tackling them.
There were several calls for the need to change assessment, one of them by me, whether due to large student cohorts and the difficulties of engaging them, or the ease with which AI can duplicate examination solutions or because the credentials provided by those assessments seem increasingly irrelevant to the actual actionable skills, knowledge and experience required to operate successfully as an actuary. And there was an equally robust response from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) to the effect that assessments would not be changing significantly in the latest changes due to come in by 2029.
My favourite presentation was by Angus Macdonald, about his recent short paper on Newton, Leibniz and Actuarial Science. It conjectures that the argument between Leibniz and Newton over who invented calculus resulted in the stagnation of mathematics in English universities and meant that actuaries needing to gain respectability for their advice were forced to create a professional body (in company with architects, accountants and engineers) rather than rely on universities to develop actuarial thinking as happened in continental Europe. This stagnation (Macdonald quoted G.H.Hardy, talking about the Cambridge mathematics exams, saying that they had “. . . effectively ruined serious mathematics in England for a hundred years”) was felt across the whole Anglosphere, with attempts to create institutions with equal status to the traditional universities leading to the establishment of business schools in the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This explained a lot for me. The suspicion of our actuarial courses amongst some of our mathematics colleagues at times at Leicester. The occasionally uneasy relationship between the IFoA and the accredited universities where students can gain exemptions from their exams. The horror from some at the very idea that an actuary might qualify as a result of university courses, like they can in the Netherlands, for instance. ATRC seemed the appropriate place to explore these ideas.
Angus Macdonald considers that the Newtonian and Leibnizian branches have nearly rejoined, but I feel that our actuarial education system still suffers from the long shadow cast by these two 17th century gentlemen and their personal enmity. The ferocity with which some within the profession opposed what they saw as a threat to the popularity of the fellowship qualification posed by the new chartered actuary designation was hard to explain when the number of practising certificates issued for chief actuaries, pension scheme actuaries, etc was only around 1,100 (out of over 17,000 fellows), but if the whole profession originated from a highly developed form of status anxiety compared to academics, it becomes much easier to understand. As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Now, nearly 180 years on from this “unstoppable” “rush to respectabilize” (according to Jeremy Paxman) I think it is legitimate to ask:
Why does the IFoA still insist on detailed accreditation of individual university courses on basic mathematics, statistics and business economics? Do they not trust them to teach them right? Do they think that there is something better about learning these universal subjects via a bespoke course created by a tiny professional body with 34,000 members globally?
Why are they so concerned about what assessment methods the universities use? Do they consider that they have more educational expertise on this than some of the leading universities in the world?
I have written previously about the changes in assessment I think are necessary and floated some ideas about where actuarial education might sit to accommodate these. My view was that the IFoA, faced with the need to innovate at all levels of its education system at a time of great uncertainty, might wish to get out of the foundational mathematics and business education tuition of the core principles subjects and leave this to the university system, in a truly Leibnizian way.
In actuarial science, the list of UK universities offering accredited courses has not changed for some time, and it is a small group within the university system. These courses must be seen as vulnerable. I don’t think it is a coincidence that it is so hard to persuade one of this tiny band to run the ATRC. This week’s was the first since 2021 and the list of past hosts is not very long:
The IFoA needs to ask itself what it would do if there were some high profile closures of actuarial courses and whether perhaps it might be time to protect the core mathematical education arrangements for actuaries through a broad brush accreditation of a wider range of courses, rather than the very detailed accreditation process it currently carries out on core principles subjects.
I also doubt that it has the capacity on its own to significantly restructure its assessments beyond the objective based assessments it has developed to work within its proctored environment.
The core practice and specialist subjects leading to fellowship are the areas where actuaries have, rightly, the strongest views about content and assessment structures. It surely makes sense that the expertise within the profession and the university system are pooled in a joint endeavour rather than risking both failing independently.
In contrast to Newton, who had quite a temper, Leibniz was famously parodied by Voltaire in his Dr Pangloss character in Candide who believed that “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”
Let’s not be too Panglossian about the current state of actuarial education.
This week I attended one of the National Emergency Briefing screenings near me. While I wasn’t a fan of the Celebrity Gogglebox presentation style, with Chris Packham on the sofa seeing what Jennifer Saunders and others thought about the climate emergency, it did give me enough of an idea about the individual presentations to want to follow them up, and there is a really good website to do so here.
The two points which struck me particularly were the following:
Professor Tim Lenton warning about what would happen if the weakening Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) hit a tipping point which, in some models, “shows that London would be -20°C in three frozen months of the year, and Edinburgh would be -30°C in five and a half frozen months of the year. And yet the summers will still be hotter than today because it’s a 2°C warmer world.”
Professor Hayley Fowler warning of the risks of mega floods: “These storms can produce two thirds of a year’s rainfall in just a couple of days. Over London, that would mean about 35cm of rainfall falling over a large area. A flood of this scale will be a national crisis. Recovery would take years.” She also warned that by 2050 1 in 4 properties – 8 million in England – will be at risk of flooding.
And since flooding often follows a heatwave such as the one we are currently experiencing, I thought I would look at the risk of long-term flooding in a bit more detail, which is when I came across the government’s check the long term flood risk for an area in England website. When you put in your postcode, it assesses your flood risk under four different categories:
It then explains how they measure the risk and the kinds of things which tend to affect it. All in all a good resource, and the modelling behind it is what the 1 in 4 properties at risk of flooding by 2050 is based on.
In July 2021, several European countries were affected by severe floods. The floods started in the United Kingdom as flash floods causing some property damage. Later floods affected several river basins across Europe including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania and Switzerland. At least 243 people died in the floods, including 196 in Germany, 39 in Belgium, two in Romania, one in Italy and one in Austria. It was thought that some of the affected regions may not have seen rainfall of this magnitude in the last 1,000 years.
A study using climate simulations on a grid of 2.2km squares published in June 2021 had come to the following conclusion:
Intense rainstorms are expected to be more frequent due to global warming, because warmer air can hold more moisture. Here, using very detailed climate simulations (with a 2.2 km grid), we show that the storms producing intense rain across Europe might move slower with climate change, increasing the duration of local exposure to these extremes. Our results suggest such slow-moving storms may be 14× more frequent across land by the end of the century. Currently, almost-stationary intense rainstorms are uncommon in Europe and happen rarely over parts of the Mediterranean Sea, but in future are expected to occur across the continent, including in the north. The main reason seems to be a reduced temperature difference between the poles and tropics, which weakens upper-level winds in the autumn, when these short-duration rainfall extremes most occur. This slower storm movement acts to increase rainfall amounts accumulated locally, enhancing the risk of flash floods across Europe beyond what was previously expected.
As Professor Fowler says:
Our infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists. Raised reservoirs, drainage, housing and transport were designed many years ago when extreme rainfall was rare and less severe. As rainfall intensifies, risks such as dam overtopping and cascading failures rise.
The government also produces monthly reports on rainfall, soil moisture deficit, river flows, groundwater levels and reservoir levels. This includes a wonderful map of the year’s rainfall:
What struck me was that the report looked at exactly the same things (river levels, groundwater levels and reservoirs) but, because they were concerned with low levels of rainfall, did not even mention flood risk. The rainfall scale only goes up to >125mm rainfall within a month as a maximum, which looks hilarious when compared with the 271.5mm of rainfall over 48 hours in parts of Belgium in 2021.
There have been no new reservoirs built in the UK since 1992, just another one of the gifts of water privatisation discussed previously. The government announced last year that it had “seized control of the planning process” to build two reservoirs due to be complete in 2036 in the Cambridgeshire Fens and 2040 near Sleaford in Lincolnshire respectively.
Professor Fowler says the probability of dam overtopping is increasing. So how’s the review of reservoir safety going?
In 2019, there was a failure of a dam at Toddbrook Reservoir in the Peak District. The operation to pump water out of the reservoir to safeguard Whaley Bridge seems to have been dominated by concerns about the fish. The independent review commissioned into the incident identified the rather alarming fact that:
“…the reservoir and its Owner can be compliant with the legislation without the reservoir necessarily being safe.”
Among the report’s recommendations were the following:
There is a systematic review of how the current Reservoirs Act, and the associated Regulations and Guidance, are implemented. This should consider the roles and responsibilities of qualified engineers, whether compliance with the Act is sufficient to ensure safety, and how safety is formally assured.
The potential of an Inspecting Engineer issuing a Certificate of Safe to Operate be explored. This should include a review of practice in other safety critical infrastructure sectors. It should also consider liability implications and whether some form of qualifying statement may be needed to accompany the certificate.
The statutory maximum period between inspections is reviewed to determine if it is still appropriate in every case in the light of the ageing reservoir stock.
In his follow up report looking at the reservoir system in general in 2021, Professor David Balmforth made this extraordinary statement:
This raises the question of what is meant by “safe”. In other infrastructure sectors and with reservoirs in other countries, safety is assured by managing risk, and by reducing that risk so far as is reasonably practicable – the terms “reasonable” and “practicable” being well understood in practice and in law. For a reservoir, risk is defined as a combination of the likely failure of the dam (or other reservoir structure) and the impact that an uncontrolled release of water would have on the area downstream, particularly the likely loss of life. I have therefore recommended that in future the assurance of reservoir safety should be managed on the basis of risk, and that the amount of effort (and cost) associated with that process should be in proportion to that risk. In this way the public can be assured that the hazard posed by reservoirs is being managed in an objective and transparent way.
It would appear that reservoir management is playing catch up on the whole concept of risk management.
What has followed is a policy paper from the Environment Agency on the launch of a reservoir safety reform programme. However the public consultation on the proposed reforms has already been delayed until later this year. And the page about the consultation process does not suggest anyone is in any hurry.
As I discussed in How Not To Be A Reverse-Centaur (Cory Doctorow defines a reverse-centaur as “a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace”) our actuarial education system needs to change. This has been true for some time, but the development of AI systems has both demonstrated why more clearly and accelerated the timeframes over which action is needed. As I said in December last year:
A large part of the education of the future will need to be about equipping us all to understand what we now have access to and when and how to access it. We will all have different things we are interested in, or end up involved with and needing to be educated about. It will be up to each of us to decide which things are worth the difficulty of learning, but to make those decisions we will need education that can support the development of judgement.
For education institutions, the question will be what is not worth the difficulty of learning? Credentialising based on now relatively meaningless assessment methods will not cut it. This is where the confrontation with employers and politicians is likely to come. Essential skills and their related knowledge will be better developed and assessed via more open-ended project work and online assessment of it to check understanding. These will need to become the norm, with written examinations becoming less and less prevalent. Not because of fear of cheating and plagiarism, but because an outcome which can be replicated that easily by AI is not worth assessing in the first place.
Suppose you were to ask someone who had never seen our academic system that, in order to assess whether someone else we wanted them to employ in their organisation would do a good job for them, we would:
Award marks for what has been written in answer to academic questions about what the students can remember unaided about the content of their lecture courses and reading lists with a biro on a pad of paper perched precariously on a tiny wooden table surrounded by hundreds of other similar scribblers, for a set period of time as minders wandered the floors like Victorian factory owners.
These marks would be based on marking criteria they would never see.
We would then get together in a secret huddle for a couple of months to mark all these scripts, check them and “moderate” them to check they were in line with the previous years’ exercises.
Then out would come the answer (like the Answer of 42 to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy).
Imagine another world where the kinds of things employers routinely do when trying to decide whether to take on someone as a new member of their organisation are routinely part of their assessments at university, eg:
Watch them operating in groups working on a task.
Ask them to describe how they would go about tackling a particular problem.
Get them to show they understand the implications of a piece of work they have carried out and can explain what assumptions it is based on and can justify them.
With assessments of performance which are not opaque academic exercises but descriptions of performance made as the tasks are being carried out evidenced by video if necessary. In other words, transparent enough to whoever might want to work with these students next to eliminate the gap between their credentials and and their actual actionable skills, knowledge and experience.
Assessing in this way will be highly demanding, for both the students and the assessors, but it means the final assessment is done with the student present and, with careful probing from the assessors, who will obviously need to have done a close reading of the project work beforehand, confidence will be high about the abilities demonstrated by the process. And it removes the need for all the time currently spent on the Victorian factory owner process – imagine what could be done if the whole of May, June and July wasn’t spent marking scripts!
A move like this will significantly change what is taught. There will be no point presenting lots of information in ways which make retention easier for students (the so-called bookwork” questions currently in most exams). This makes sense when you think about how much of the content of your courses is accessible to you now, even on a vocational course like actuarial science, as opposed to skills developed. Instead the focus will be more on conversations with students for the purpose of developing their understanding of a meaty topic and the problems to be solved within it. Explorations of these will form the projects students will be spending most of their time working on. Checking understanding and making sure students are working within frameworks they understand and can talk about will be the main teaching activity, with opportunities to practise these throughout the year. In other words, showing the ability to apply what they have understood and demonstrate the ability to reflect, make judgements and show higher levels of understanding as a result. An ability they can then apply to new problems and situations.
And notice something else about how these alternative credentials are generated? They are all social activities: from operating in groups, to presenting a piece of work to a group of assessors. Even the project work is developed through group sessions alongside individual work. If you want to develop people who can spot the gaps between models and reality you need to do it in groups, where people can test their perspectives against each other.
Compare this to the current solitary exam preparation, peppered with “revision” lectures, exam sitting and exam marking processes which comprise the predominant activities in universities between March and July each year. We are currently being funneled into an ever more solitary professional practice around LLMs. It has become quite accepted for people to do all of their thinking on a subject closeted with perhaps one, two or three LLMs but no other people and then share their analysis with an expectation that other people should read the output. Developing the skills to do these analyses will obviously be necessary, but they will never be the most important skills people learn.
Treating each other like walking databases is never going to make you new friends or influence people. However the skills you develop via an alternative more social education will.
There are examples of this approach already happening, with employers involved in the design of assessments in some cases and universities using the flexibility they have to restructure and redesign courses. But the dominant assessment system of formal exams is keeping much of this activity at the margins at the moment.
If it were to become the dominant assessment, it would also mean that larger areas of the curriculum could be examined, as the focus would not be on retention of large bodies of content but the ability to use the content to solve problems. So, perhaps, after a first year levelling up students’ ability and experience of mathematics and statistics, year 2 would have an actuarial statistics module (currently CS1/CS2) and an actuarial mathematics module (currently CM1/CM2), both dissertation based and vivaed. Then in the third year they would tackle an economics module and a business modules (currently CB1 and CB3). Perhaps in the final year of a four year MAct they would tackle a modelling and communication module (CP2/CP3) and either CP1 actuarial practice module would be offered or a professional skills module.
This would be more of a driving test style of assessment, with students working with supervisors on the comments from assessors on the original dissertations and presentations until they were up to the required standard. Students unable to make the standard after an additional year would be offered a move to a non-accredited course. The current funding model for higher education will need to change: loading students with £10,000 more debt every time they add to the nation’s skills bank with another year wrestling with these difficult skills to master was never a clever strategy, but this structure would make it even clearer how self defeating it is. If economists are accepting that the labour market no longer allocates resources effectively and are considering either a universal basic income or universal basic services, then logically university funding should follow suit.
The implications for the actuarial profession will be even more challenging. I question whether the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries will continue to consider it worth the effort and expense of reconfiguring their entire approach to exam setting, syllabus maintenance, marking, online proctoring, etc for subjects routinely taught throughout the university system for a a variety of purposes, ie the current core principles subjects of mathematics, statistics and business studies.
Whether they retain their own capacity to assess the core practice subjects is a more open question (CP1 Actuarial Practice, I imagine, will be seen as sufficiently specialist to keep in house, with perhaps a few universities, as now, accredited to run courses which can earn this qualification, however CP2 Modelling and CP3 Communications are not nearly as specialised now as they seemed when they were first introduced). I would also move the new core economics module recommended by the IFoA Economics Review Group I chaired in 2022 to replace the current CB2 module into the core practice section, as it would be more of a critical thinking module about the economic ideas necessary to underpin good actuarial work than the technical how-to subjects in core principles.
The specialist stage of the SP and SA subjects and the whole continuing education and additional certification options I would confidently expect the profession to retain, review and adapt as needed to reflect new challenges in members’ working lives. However, if CP1 is all that is needed post graduation to get to Chartered Actuary and CP1, two SP subjects and a SA subject gets you to Fellow, then suddenly time to qualification becomes much more predictable for students and their employers alike.
The risks to employers of taking on students would therefore be reduced, but also the rewards to taking them on will be much more transparent. The students we will be developing will have collapsed the gap between their credentials and their actual actionable skills, knowledge and experience. They will have:
Great team working skills;
Very highly developed presentation skills, both in writing and speech;
Strong IT skills and comfort working with data; and
Clarity about why they are in an organisation and a drive to use their skills to solve problems.
Epistemic rigour. They will be more likely to spot when a system or model is over-confident given the evidence, after an intense experience of interrogating models and evaluating evidence in their courses.
Synthesis. They will be able to integrate different perspectives into an overall understanding, through dissertation development, defending a position, understanding weaknesses in a position and adjusting accordingly.
Judgement. They will have been asked to make many judgements in their work and had to defend them in discussions with their supervisors and fellow students. Unconvincing opinions, not backed by evidence, will not pass muster.
Cognitive sovereignty. Students will have to take their own stand on their work, after all of the challenge and argument. Independence of thought is the hard-earned outcome here.
And then they will have a fighting chance of being centaurs in the world awaiting them, masters of the technology and opportunities available, rather than the reverse-centaurs that our education system is currently, and inadvertently, preparing them to be.
It all started for me in May 2017, with the challenge from Daniel and Richard Susskind in their book “The Future of the Professions”, which set out two possible futures for the professions. Either:
They carry on much as they have since the mid 19th century, but with the use of technology to streamline and optimise the way they work; or
Increasingly capable machines will displace the work of current professionals.
Their research suggested that, while these two futures would exist in parallel for some time, in the long run the second future would dominate. The actuarial profession was going to be particularly vulnerable. As the Susskinds wrote:
Accountants and consultants, for example, are particularly effective at encroaching on the business of lawyers and actuaries.
I stood in the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries Council elections that month, on a platform saying that we needed to urgently respond to this challenge. I didn’t get elected.
However, at the University of Leicester we pursued a curriculum transformation programme in response to this challenge aimed at developing actuaries of the future who had:
Highly developed presentation skills, both in writing and in speech
Great team working skills
Strong IT skills – comfortable with working with data
Clarity about why they are there and the desire to use their skills to solve problems
The 2017 post also talked about emerging trends which had hardly started at all yet:
The end of reserved roles for actuaries
Different ways of communicating advice
Online self-help for users of actuarial advice
The advance of roboactuaries and their assistants
A paper called 2036: An actuarial odyssey with AI written for the Society of Actuaries in July 2016 by Dodzi Attimu and Bryon Robidoux discussed the possibilities for robo actuaries and robo actuarial analysts.
They estimated that robo actuarial analysts would be with us in 5-10 years and would provide:
A system that has limited cognitive abilities but can undertake specialized activities, e.g. perform the heavy lifting in model building (once the specification/configuration is created), perform portfolio optimization, generate reports including narratives (e.g. memos) based on data analysis, etc.
Whereas a robo actuary was more like 15-20 years away and which they also helpfully described:
We mean a software system that can more or less autonomously perform the following activities: develop products, set assumptions, build models based on product and general risk specifications, develop and recommend investment and hedging strategies, generate memos to senior management, etc.
Then, in 2018, there was the whole Bullshit Jobs argument posed by the late David Graeber, discussing Keynes’ prediction in 1930 that:
In quite a few years – in our own lifetimes I mean – we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed.
Graeber, in Bullshit Jobs, pointed out that this never happened, despite pretty much all of the technological developments and income increases which Keynes predicted. He suggested that the future which the Susskinds were predicting is already happening in terms of needing fewer people to fill the meaningful roles within organisations but that, rather than employing fewer people, we are either creating “bullshit” jobs which even the people doing them can see no point to or bullshitizing existing roles for which the meaningful need has passed. It was as if the organisations themselves have attempted to maintain the outward appearance of the same structures by disguising the hollowing out of so many of their functions with simulated business.
Why? One of the reasons he thought the situation had been allowed to develop was that noone believed that capitalism could produce such an outcome. Graeber gave the example of the creation of Obamacare, where Barack Obama “bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America” in order to protect jobs in health insurance.
Then we had the pandemic, and the painful return to work which found that people were not necessarily keen to return to populating those office empires, preferring to work remotely. Some of the attempts by the captains of industry to get them back were a little desperate.
Now nine or ten years on from the initial challenge, we are deluged in articles about how AI is impacting different areas of actuarial work, whether it is already replacing graduate roles and what actuarial students need to do to make themselves employable. And now the blinkers also seem to have come off about capitalism not producing the need for fewer jobs.
Historically, accountancy firms have typically had a pyramid structure – wide base, heavy graduate recruitment. Firms are now starting to talk about a ‘diamond model’ with a wide middle tier of management because, ultimately, AI is not sophisticated enough yet to make those judgment calls.
But hang on a moment. Now there is something called an “AI boomerang”. Sam Altman of Open AI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have both been backtracking on their predictions of job lay offs due to AI. As the Gold and Geopolitics Substack puts it:
Two-thirds of the companies that ran AI-driven layoffs last year are now rehiring. One in three spent more on the rehiring than they saved on the original cuts. Robert Half calls them “AI boomerangs” – which is the name a consultant invents when there’s a market in unwinding what the last consultant sold you.
The last few years of AI-generated headlines (in both senses of the phrase) have been quite the rollercoaster.
I do not want to add to the deluge, as currently you would need a LLM summarising reports for you 24/7 just to keep up with it as it is.
And there are good reasons for not rushing to judgement on this. It is only six weeks ago that the Bank of England’s Head of Financial Stability warned that global stock markets are overvalued. As she said:
The thing that really keeps me awake at night is the likelihood of a number of risks crystallising at the same time – a major macroeconomic shock, confidence in private credit goes, AI and other risky valuations readjust – what happens in that environment and are we prepared for it?
Since then, the economics of the major AI players has only got more bonkers. In this environment, there is considerable uncertainty about what students should be learning to prepare them for the world they will need to rebuild from the rubble of the current one.
Daniel Susskind reckons a “no regret” strategy for education would focus on the basics, which he describes as literacy, numeracy and critical thinking, and the critical use of AI. Carlo Iacono talks about the work which will always be hard to automate as follows:
The work that depends on reading a room. The work that relies on institutional memory. The work where the important fact is not in the document. The work where the answer is political, ethical or relational as much as technical. The work where being right is not enough, because someone has to be accountable for the consequences.
But you have to get into the organisation first before you can develop much of this. I remain reasonably comfortable with our prescription from 2017 in terms of broadly what the curriculum should be trying to achieve. Curriculum changes take time and, tempting though it is to pile into syllabus changes aimed at incorporating the latest cutting edge technological developments, the likelihood is that you will be arriving at the wrong fire. As a social media post this week put it:
The danger is that, as Agentic AI in particular looks so much like the predictions of 2016, we declare it the new messiah and bet everything on this being the future. I certainly think that 2036 will look very different to now, but I am not convinced that we have the shape of it yet. This may just be another bullshit alternative, waiting for the next crisis to mutate into something else.
What we can say with certainty is that the future for early professionals is as uncertain as any of us can remember. And, in my view, the best way to support our young people starting their professional lives (or whatever is going to replace professional lives) is to make the value they add much clearer to anyone who might want to work with them in the future.
Future education systems are going to need to help their graduates demonstrate their value in ways they haven’t historically needed to. AI has not brought new problems, it has accelerated existing ones. And the gap between actual actionable skills, knowledge and experience and the credentials which are supposed to represent them is the key one I believe as far as those graduates are concerned.
Because currently the companies who might want to take them on have to guess what they can do to a large extent. What does a 1st mean? A 2.1? Do the differences matter to their employer? Should they interrogate the details of student courses? How would they incorporate that into a manageable recruitment process? Some people see a future of AI generated applications by the thousand per student doing battle with AI powered triage systems operated by potential employers.
This is already an issue in academia. The conclusions of one academic paper on submissions to one major academic journal were stark:
Submission volume has risen 42% since the late 2022 release of ChatGPT, while writing quality has declined. The rise in AI-generated writing accounts for nearly all of these trends.
On the other hand, researchers complain about the increasing use of AI peer review to try and cope with these increased volumes, and some have tried to game the LLMs they believe they are dealing with.
I think we can do better than this in actuarial teaching and learning.
I didn’t understand statistics until I started taking actuarial exams that required me to master particular statistical techniques, decide which ones were appropriate to the problem I was looking at, apply them accordingly and be able to interpret what the results did and didn’t tell me. An A at GCE O level in maths, and A at GCE A level in both maths and further maths and a maths degree from Oxford did not give me those abilities.
I didn’t understand economics until I started putting together modules which could be taught on both BSc and MSc courses and then teaching them. My economics module on the way to qualifying as an actuary, based very heavily on Economics by Begg, Fischer and Dornbusch, did not give me that understanding.
There is a pattern here: the most impactful experiences we have are frequently at a bit of a distance from the credentials we present to the world. Your education is not a paragraph on your CV, it is your lived experience, sometimes assisted by, sometimes actively hindered by and often pursued completely independently of the educational institutions you have had a relationship with during your life.
Daniel Susskind has marched into this often fraught relationship between credentials and actual actionable skills, knowledge and experience in the last lecture of his Gresham College series on The Future of Work, called Education – And Its Limits. His analysis is a very clear expression of the problems that will be created if AI systems prove to be half as capable and long-lasting as people from OpenAI and Anthropic are telling us they will be.
Susskind argues that trying to future-proof students through education was a hopeless task and that working on the assumption of unresolvable uncertainty was the better way forward. He suggests a “no regret” strategy for education would focus on the basics, which he describes as literacy, numeracy and critical thinking, and the critical use of AI. Others in the audience suggested some other “basics”: communication skills for instance.
The other strand of Susskind’s basics was critical use of AI. And his challenge to the audience was whether we can teach AI without losing the basics in the process.
After a bit about the need to make continuing education in later life more accessible, he looked at his list from a previous lecture (which I briefly touched on here) of problems for a post AI future:
Distribution (replacing wages);
Contribution (how do you “pull your weight”);
Power (domination by Big Tech on economics, politics, liberty, social justice and democracy); and
Meaning (fulfilment in life).
And this is why I continue to watch Susskind’s output, because he is the unusual combination of an extremely orthodox economist (see his book Growth: A Reckoning for proof of this) and someone who has been wrestling with the challenges of more capable systems to our way of doing things for over 10 years. What Susskind gives you is a peek at how the actual economists advising our governments would deal with things if OpenAI and Anthropic are proved right. It is as if you had someone who both thought, as Ben Bernanke, Chair of the Federal Reserve, did in October 2007, that “the banking system is healthy” and also that the banking collapse was going to happen anyway.
Because what he reveals is that, if Anthropic are right, orthodox economists have really got no policy prescriptions worthy of the name.
On 1. Distribution: Susskind acknowledges that, if the labour market could not redistribute wealth effectively any more, then a bigger state would be needed to do so (but he was at pains to emphasise that this would not be the 20th century central planning type of state).
On 2. Contribution: Susskind thinks that perhaps we should allow people to make non-economic contributions! As if all of the activity in society which economists routinely ignore really wasn’t already happening!
On 3. Power: Susskind says the political power of Big Tech with regard to liberty, social justice and democracy is a problem. We have anti-trust legislation that can deal with Big Tech’s economic power, but not its political power. I don’t know what kind of political power he thinks Big Tech would have without the economic power that has been granted it by a steady erosion of that anti-trust legislation over recent years.
On 4. Meaning: he has little to say other than something about us currently having policies for work but not for leisure.
And in all of this, there is the implicit underlying assumption of a stable future environment for all of this tech to operate within.
For me it brought to mind something a friend of mine who was in a tent with Cory Doctorow at the How The Light Gets In festival at Hay-on-Wye last week. “He has a theory of change” he said.
He really does, including about how to break the economic power of the Big Tech companies. You all need to read Enshittification for the full account, but my review of the book here is a sneaky peek.
Susskind really really does not have a theory of change. Which tells me that the economics profession does not have one either.
However I continue to watch him as I find he goads me into thinking what some better answers might be to the questions he asks. And perhaps also a better question than whether we can teach AI without losing the basics in the process. I think a better question would be what do we need to learn when the future is uncertain.
First of all, let’s remind ourselves of the problem. If noone cares how your advice was constructed, but your client can get advice that ticks the compliance box more cheaply and quickly from an AI system, while the experienced professional still has some role in managing the process, it may increasingly be a struggle to justify the cost of the junior colleague. So the future education system is going to need to help that future junior colleague demonstrate their value in ways they haven’t historically needed to. AI has not brought new problems, it has accelerated existing ones. And the gap between actual actionable skills, knowledge and experience and the credentials which are supposed to represent them is currently the key one as far as that future junior colleague is concerned.
The temptation is to rush into syllabus changes towards what currently looks like the cutting edge activity. I agree with Susskind here that this would be a mistake. He cites the example of Michael Gove, amongst many other education ministers at the time, mandating the teaching of coding in 2014. Now we find that the new AI systems (despite the problems highlighted by Hannah Fry, Kyle Kingsbury and others I talked about here) are most suited to writing code and Anthropicclaim that Claude is now writing 80% of its own code. Programmers are saying that, on the famous XKCD cartoon above, they are now living on the theory curve.
But both higher education institutions and the professions who still want to be in the game of developing the next generation of professionals can do a lot more both to reduce the gap between credentials and actual actionable skills, knowledge and experience and to make it clearer to employers that they have done so. That will be the subject of my next post.
This review originally appeared in the May issue of Brum Group News, the newsletter of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and is reproduced here (lightly edited) by kind permission
This book is so many things: a work of fantasy, a literature review of every major work about the journey into hell, a love story, a wicked academic satire, a philosophical musing on the meaning of life and a love letter to Cambridge. Or perhaps the title itself, which means both a retreat to the coast, in this case to the banks of the River Lethe, as well as a descent into Hell. Like its Oxford counterpart before it – Babel – its central leap is that magic (here referred to as magick, ie the academic discipline stretching back to the alchemists and beyond) sits alongside the other subjects at Oxbridge colleges. The magic we see practised, taught, researched and dissertationed feels very mathematical. So we are unsurprised to hear that the mathematicians hate the magicians.
Alice Law is the Chinese-American PhD student of the great Jacob Grimes, who (accidentally?) sends him to Hell and then, with her once-friend-now-mortal-enemy and Grimes’ other PhD student, Peter Morgan, sets out to bring him back. So that Grimes can pass their dissertations, because that’s a good enough reason to journey to Hell and sacrifice half of your future lifespan. And so the quest begins.
There is quite a bit of mathematical fun had despite Alice not really knowing any mathematics, including an Escher Trap, a Penrose Staircase and a hyperbolic geometry which makes the quest very heavy going at times. And so many logic puzzles. Comedy and total horror are nicely juxtaposed throughout, as Alice and Jacob get to understand each other better and start to wonder whether Grimes is worth it after all.
The constant side swipes at the life of a junior academic are often hilarious. Magicians in training are apparently told by all their professors that they should consider careers in other fields or “alt academia”, as they called it:
“…no one really meant it when they said alt academia was just as prestigious (or, more commonly, that there was no shame in it, really). They meant it even less when they emphasized that alt academia paid better, had kinder hours, was less stressful, gave you better job security, made you happier. Oh, magicians do really well in consulting, they said. Employers like critical thinking and problem-solving skills, they said. Fewer people die in industry, they said.”
The most enigmatic character is their not-quite-constant companion, Archimedes the cat, who guides them when he feels like it. All the way through all eight of the Courts of Hell, alongside and across the Lethe and finally to King Yama’s Domain, on a journey which threatens to destroy Alice’s very sense of self. Her catechism, which she repeats at stressful moments:
I am Alice Law I am a postgraduate at Cambridge I study analytic magick
Alice has always felt that if she could just hang on to the delusions which had got her this far until the end of her PhD all would be well, but these turn out to be precisely the things she needs to confront if she is ever going to get out of Hell.
