The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A story of quackery and care
Uncomfortable Collisions with RealityShow Notes
I talk with Seamus O'Mahony who has written a unique and marvellous book. It's about the origins of psychoanalysis, and it's the first serious history I've ever read that is written as a comedy! O'Mahony brings this off brilliantly, and it enables him to skewer the madness and quackery of the early psychoanalysts without any self-righteousness. In the background of all this is O'Mahony's experience as a (now retired) doctor, older and wiser than when he began. The hero of the book is the now obscure Wilfred Trotter, a man of prodigious natural gifts both intellectual and practical. He baled out of psychoanalysis early and went onto become the greatest English surgeon of his generation while remaining a model of modesty and self-restraint, unlike the other two protagonists of the story. In the end, he stands for the centrality and the indispensability of care in medicine. And yet, as O'Mahony laments, care receives short shrift in modern medicine. All up a marvellous conversation. If you want to dive in from the deep end, start from the 16.04 minute timestamp below.
00:00 Trailer 01:00 Unlocking the Writer's Journey: From Medicine to Literature 06:21 The Intersection of Medicine and Writing: A Personal Reflection 11:24 Critiquing Modern Medicine: The Golden Age and Beyond 16:05 The Making of a Masterpiece: Trotter, Jones, and Psychoanalysis 21:26 Behind the Book: Unearthing Letters and Lives 26:53 Psychoanalytic Pioneers: The Congress and Contrasting Views 31:14 Wilfred Trotter: The Surgeon-Thinker's Legacy 36:01 Empathy in Surgery: Trotter's Influence on Medicine 41:16 Literary Inspirations: Embracing a Comedic Lens 46:28 Reflecting on Medical Evolution: The Primacy of Patient Care
If you prefer the video, you can find it here
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Welcome to another edition of Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality, where Gene Tunny and I react to a UN report on AI that invested me as the intellectual godfather of the phrase "digital public goods". I have been mulling on the quWelcome to another edition of Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality, where Gene Tunny and I react to a UN report on AI that invested me as the intellectual godfather of the phrase "digital public goods". I have been mulling on the question of public goods since well before chairing the Government 2.0 task force, realising that many of the public goods of the twenty-first century are digital. Most people haven't noticed yet, but the Ostroms' quadrant in which a public good is both non-rival and non-excluded is no longer good enough as a definition. It denies public goods as a problem solved. But Wikipedia is a public good and it's excludable. It's just that its founders wanted to open it and could raise the funds to do so as a charity. Likewise, just as free-to-air TV figured as a public good in some 1950s and 60s textbooks, so Google, Facebook and Twitter(X) are public goods even though they're funded by advertising. (And of course you're free to think that X or any of the other social networks are public BADs, but that means they're just public goods that generate negative value. We then go on to explore ways in which social media could contribute to social mobility - something I wrote about hereAnd Gene asks me some questions about AI. I think it's obviously intelligence. Chatting with Claude and ChatGPT reveals a mysterious, shape-shifting intelligence that can easily beguile us without being truly conscious. By launching careful pilots and managing the risks, we can ensure this alien technology serves its ultimate purpose of improving our real lives.The UN report mentioned is here.
Are we suffering from an austerity of the imagination? Why does modern political and policy reform feel completely stuck in a rut?In this episode of Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality, I sit down with Luca Tiratelli to diagnose the exhaustion of the modern policy landscape. We explore why radical solutions seem impossible today, distinguishing between the Overton window of vested interests and the Overton window of imagination. We unpack the creeping careerism infecting academia and the public sector, where producing content and appeasing stakeholders has replaced frank, fearless advice.Luca shares his thoughts on the necessity of utopian thinking and having a clear vision to drive reform, whilst I argue that mapping out an unknown future often distracts from making difficult trade-offs in the present. Finally, we discuss why our current electoral democracy encourages risk aversion and competitive misrepresentation, and how alternative governance models like sortition might break the gridlock and breathe new life into our institutions.
Greg Smith has a well thought out, deeply compelling and scary take on the world we suddenly find ourselves in. I thought you should hear from him and so have just recorded this conversation. I strongly recommend you check it out. (Note: this was recorded in March but only hoisted on YouTube until now - early October. But it's still very much current.
What if technology stopped keeping us apart and started bringing us back together?
Why, in an age of constant connection, are so many of us lonelier than ever?