HowTheLightGetsIn Festival

London is a major reason for the UK's inequality problem. Unfortunately, City leaders don't want to talk about it

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

In 2022, the richest fifth of the UK population had an income more than 12 times that of the poorest fifth.

Key Points:

In 2022, the richest fifth of the UK population had an income more than 12 times that of the poorest fifth.
Many of these firms are located in the City, which the Corporation states “drives the UK economy, generating over £85bn in economic output annually”.
An alternative perspective is that these contributions should be balanced against what the City takes out of the wider UK economy.
In 2022, the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that the biggest boom in City bonuses since the 2008 financial crisis would further increase this inequality gap.

This is a complex picture, but few disagree that developing a more equitable UK economy and society requires significant structural change.
Politically, this has been recognised from most sides amid often heated debates about the new levelling-up bill.
Read more:
Class and the City of London: my decade of research shows why elitism is endemic and top firms don't really care

I believe they are well placed to help change the national conversation, by asking more of their leaders on this front.
Within many corporate organisations, the issue of inequality is positioned as part of corporate sustainability agendas, or the currently more fashionable “environmental, social and governance”.
The momentum to help drive these and many other changes requires a majority of the population on board.
We need its leaders to play a central role in our national debate about how to address this problem.

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

As many people have also pointed out, the only thing we learn from history is that we rarely learn anything from history.

Key Points:

As many people have also pointed out, the only thing we learn from history is that we rarely learn anything from history.
People engage in land wars in Asia over and over.
One issue is forgetfulness and “myopia”: we do not see how past events are relevant to current ones, overlooking the unfolding pattern.
That means that the next time a similar situation comes around, we do not see the similarity – and repeat the mistake.

Tickets here: 20% off with code CONVERSATION23 Storing information is useful when it can be retrieved well.
But remembering is not the same thing as retrieving a file from a known location or date.
An artificial intelligence (AI) also needs to be able to spontaneously bring similarities to our mind – often unwelcome similarities.
That means it will warn us about things we do not care about, possibly in an annoying way.
We make technology more complex until it becomes too annoying or unsafe to use.
This ultimately makes the technology less reliable than it could be.

The more complex it is, the more fantastic the mistakes can be.
This is also a profound reason to worry about AI guiding decision-making: they make new kinds of mistakes.
We humans know human mistakes, meaning we can watch out for them.
They mimic the biases and repeat the mistakes from the human world, even when the people involved explicitly try to avoid them.
Our aim should be to survive and learn from our mistakes, not prevent them from ever happening.

Retrieved on:

Thursday, April 20, 2023

Instead, we are likely to keep repeating the same mistakes.

Key Points:

Instead, we are likely to keep repeating the same mistakes.
That’s because our brains create a threat-response to the physically painful stimuli based on past experiences.
The reason can be found in the way our brain processes information and creates templates that we refer to again and again.
This article is run in partnership with HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy and music festival, Hay-on-Wye 26-29 May.
Our cognitive shortcuts can force us to override any new information that could help prevent repeating mistakes.
In fact, if we make mistakes while performing a certain task, “frequency bias” makes us likely to repeat them whenever we do the task again.

Researchers have also identified two brain regions with “self-error monitoring neurons” – brain cells which monitor errors.
Researchers are exploring whether a better understanding of this could help with development of better treatments and support for Alzheimer’s, for example, as preserved cognitive control is crucial for wellbeing in later life.
But even if we don’t have a perfect understanding of the brain processes involved in cognitive control and self-correction, there are simpler things we can do.
Come and see Conversation editors Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren with special guests Pragya Agarwal, professor of social inequities, Loughborough University, and Anders Sandberg, from the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, talk about how we can overcome cognitive bias to think about the world differently.