The list is being published online by the genealogy company, Ancestry
Ian Johnston in The Independent
A once highly secret list containing the identities of two million Freemasons throughout history is to be published online, revealing the extent of the organisation’s influence in the upper echelons of society.
Everyone from Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling to the Duke of Wellington and Lord Kitchener were members, The Daily Telegraph reported.
There are even claims that a singer suspected of being Jack the Ripper was protected from prosecution because he was a mason.
Other members include Sir Winston Churchill, Edward VII, George VI, Edward VIII, explorers Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Falcon Scott, scientists Edward Jenner and Sir Alexander Fleming, engineer Thomas Telford, businessman Harry Selfridge and social reformer Thomas Barnardo, as well as both Gilbert and Sullivan.
The list is being published online by the genealogy company, Ancestry.
Miriam Silverman, senior UK content manager at Ancestry, told the Telegraph: “We’re delighted to be able to offer people an online window into a relatively unknown organisation.”
Meanwhile a new book by the director and screenwriter of the film Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson, claims that Jack the Ripper was a singer called Michael Maybrick.
The book, The All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, claims that all the murders had elements of masonic ritual. The symbol of a pair of compasses, for example, was carved into the face of one victim.
Maybrick and his brother James, also a suspect, were both masons, as were two senior police officers, three police doctors and two coroners involved in the case. Maybrick was a member of the “Supreme Grand Council of Freemasons”.
Robinson told the Telegraph: “It was endemic in the way England ran itself. At the time of Jack the Ripper, there were something like 360 Tory MPs, 330 of which I can identify as Masons.
“The whole of the ruling class was Masonic, from the heir to the throne down. It was part of being in the club.
“Part of the whole ethic of Freemasonry is whatever it is, however it’s done, you protect the brotherhood – and that’s what happened.
“They weren’t protecting Jack the Ripper, they were protecting the system that Jack the Ripper was threatening. And to protect the system, they had to protect him. And the Ripper knew it.”
Monday 23 November 2015
Sunday 22 November 2015
Why job interviews are pointless
Richard Nisbett in The Guardian
Hard taskmaster: Ricky Gervais as David Brent in The Office. Photograph: Adrian Rogers/BBC
Statistics often sounds like a dry subject, but many judgments and decisions in everyday life would be improved by an application of statistical principles. Take the following scenario: a football scout hears of a player who has powered his team to a good win-loss record. His coaches think he’s one of the most talented players they’ve seen. But the scout is unimpressed by the one practice game he sees him in; he tells his manager it’s not worth trying to recruit the player.
Statistics often sounds like a dry subject, but many judgments and decisions in everyday life would be improved by an application of statistical principles. Take the following scenario: a football scout hears of a player who has powered his team to a good win-loss record. His coaches think he’s one of the most talented players they’ve seen. But the scout is unimpressed by the one practice game he sees him in; he tells his manager it’s not worth trying to recruit the player.
Most sports fans would think that was a pretty foolish call, right? Athletic performance is much too variable to base an important judgment on such a small sample. It’s not necessary to take a statistics course to get the correct answer to this problem.
But consider this problem: an employer gets an application from a junior executive with an excellent college record and strong references from his current employer. The employer interviews the applicant and is unimpressed. The employer tells his colleagues that it’s not worthwhile recruiting him.
Most people regard this as a reasonable sort of decision. But it isn’t. Countless studies show that the unstructured 30-minute interview is virtually worthless as a predictor of long-term performance by any criteria that have been examined. You have only slightly more chance of choosing the better of two employees after a half-hour interview as you would by flipping a coin.
In both of these cases, predictions based on references – school reports, prior performance, letters of recommendation – give a 65-75% chance of choosing the better of the two.
Why do we get the athletic problem right and the employment problem wrong? Because in the case of the job, unlike for athletic performance, we haven’t seen hundreds of candidates in interviews of a particular type and seen how well performance in the interview corresponds to ultimate performance in the setting we’re concerned about. We haven’t seen that the guy who looks like a dunce in the interview turns out to be a whiz on the job and the guy who aced the interview turns out to be a dud. The only way to see that the interview isn’t going to be worth much is to be able to apply the “law of large numbers”, which prompts the recognition that an interview represents a very small sample of behaviour, whereas the references summarise a lot of behaviour.
The bottom line: there’s safety in numbers. The more recommendations a person has, the more positive the outcome is likely to be for the employer. Consider the job interview: it’s not only a tiny sample, it’s not even a sample of job behaviour but of something else entirely. Extroverts in general do better in interviews than introverts, but for many if not most jobs, extroversion is not what we’re looking for. Psychological theory and data show that we are incapable of treating the interview data as little more than unreliable gossip. It’s just too compelling that we’ve learned a lot from those 30 minutes.
My recommendation is not to interview at all unless you’re going to develop an interview protocol, with the help of a professional, which is based on careful analysis of what you are looking for in a job candidate. And then ask exactly the same questions of every candidate. It’s harder to develop such a protocol than you might guess. But it can really pay off.
What if I fail?
Tom Hodkinson in The Guardian
Yes, even Johnny Depp (pictured with his wife, Amber Heard) feels like a failure sometimes. Photograph: Warren Toda/EPA
We are all failures. Every one of us.
That’s not always how it looks, of course. Other people seem so successful. Their own PR machines paint a positive picture. They are perpetually “excited” on Twitter about their new project. Their photos on Facebook show them looking happy and smiley.
Seen from the outside, our friends always seem to be earning more money than us. They have bigger houses and go on sunnier holidays. And we are surrounded by images of wealth. All I see when I walk the streets of London are fleets of black jeep-like cars everywhere, which has the effect of making me feel like a failure because I am skint.
We are all failures. Every one of us.
That’s not always how it looks, of course. Other people seem so successful. Their own PR machines paint a positive picture. They are perpetually “excited” on Twitter about their new project. Their photos on Facebook show them looking happy and smiley.
Seen from the outside, our friends always seem to be earning more money than us. They have bigger houses and go on sunnier holidays. And we are surrounded by images of wealth. All I see when I walk the streets of London are fleets of black jeep-like cars everywhere, which has the effect of making me feel like a failure because I am skint.
Aristotle felt we needed to make space for quiet study. Photograph: Hulton Getty
Add to that the sense that my contemporaries all seem to be writing best-selling novels or acting in Hollywood films or making tons of money somehow or other, and the sense of failure can easily creep up on you.
But if only we knew what failures other people felt, then we would not feel like failures. As Dr Johnson wrote in the mid-18th century: “All envy would be extinguished, if it were universally known that there are none to be envied, and surely none can much be envied who are not pleased with themselves.” Yes, and that even includes Johnny Depp. Can you imagine being an actor? Blimey, the insecurity of it.
Johnson’s advice was simple: drink, forget and take a nap. Sip the nectar of oblivion and conjure up happy fantasies while in a state of semi-slumber.
And what about the home lives of the rich and successful? Any amount of fame and money cannot compensate for bad relationships. Every life is full of joy and woe, probably in equal measure, so envy makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, to be envious at all shows a stunning lack of empathy, an inability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. Everyone suffers.
Sir Paul McCartney said no matter how far you get, you feel everyone is doing better than you. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA
Even the most successful man in the world doesn’t feel successful. Who has done better than Paul McCartney? But he said in a 2013 interview: “No matter how accomplished you get – and I know a lot of people who are very accomplished – you feel that everyone is doing better than you, that it’s easier for them. You’ve got to the top of your profession – you’re now prime minister – but you still get shit off everyone.”
Successful people are failures because they have dozens of failed projects behind them. We tend only to see the successes. I’ve been reading a lot of business books recently, and if there is one thing that all entrepreneurs have in common, it’s a stunning track record of colossal disasters. Failure and success, then, are the same thing. Two sides of the same coin.
It is said that all political careers end in failure. And the merchants, the city traders – they can lose fortunes as well as make them.
So how can we answer the question: what if I fail?
‘Dr Johnson’s advice was simple: drink, forget and take a nap.’ Photograph: Alamy
The only real answer is that we need to cultivate wisdom and to do that, we need to make space for quiet study. That, anyway, was the view of Aristotle. Like most of the ancient Greek philosophers, he believed that the answer to life was to “know thyself”; in other words, not to push yourself in the wrong direction, or to chase money or fame. He said that the life of a merchant was full of worry, and that the glories of a political life were brief and fleeting. The happy life, he wrote, was the contemplative life. If you can read books and enjoy doing nothing, you can always be happy.
Another great Greek philosopher was Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school. The Stoics were so called because they taught in the Stoa, the marketplace. They did not believe in getting away from it all like the Epicureans. They reckoned that you should put up with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and develop a detached attitude. Their trick was to imagine that you were flying into space and looking down on the world. From that distance, our little problems and issues seem like nothing more than vanity.
Failure is polite. To be imperfect is an act of courtesy to your fellow humans. In the same way, to appear to be hugely successful is an act of extreme rudeness, simply because it excites envy and jealousy in others. A friend of mine took to calling the glossy mag World of Interiors World of Inferiors because it made people feel bad. And this truth is admirably expressed in the title of Marge Simpson’s favourite magazine: Better Homes Than Yours.
Failures are lovable. Who is more popular: Homer Simpson or Donald Trump?
The writers of comedy can make us feel a whole lot better. They are almost the heirs to the Stoics. Comedy is all about disaster and failure and anxiety, and has a great healing power, by making us realise that we are not alone.
‘Failures are lovable. Who is more popular: Homer Simpson or Donald Trump?’ Photograph: Matt Groening/AP
We’d also do well to remember that the admen out there try to make us feel like failures because it’s good for business. The world of trade, exciting though it is, thrives on negative emotion. It identifies problems in your life and then offers to fix them. Lonely? Go on Facebook. Afraid of missing the moment? Photograph it and put it on Instagram. Sexless? Try Ashley Madison. Anxious? Drink beer. Onion breath? Chew gum. The business owners have a vested interest in making you feel like a failure. Poor? Join my get-rich-quick scheme.
This is not necessarily an evil process. In fact, it is completely natural. After all, if it is dark, you can light a candle. Human life is all about the light and shade. I just think it helps to understand that advertisers deliberately appeal to our sense of failure in order to sell stuff.
‘What did Samuel Beckett say? Fail again.’ Photograph: Jane Bown/Observer
What if I fail? It doesn’t matter. Who cares? Keep failing. It’s good for society, it’s good for you and it makes your friends feel better. What did Samuel Beckett say? “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Fail again. Fail better.”
Everything we hold dear is being cut to the bone. Weep for our country
Will Hutton in The Guardian
Last Thursday, my wife was readmitted to hospital nearly two years after her first admission for treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She is very ill, but the nursing, always humane and in sufficient numbers two years ago, is reduced to a heroic but hard-pressed minimum. She has been left untended for hours at a stretch, reduced to tearful desperation at her neglect. The NHS, allegedly a “protected” public service, is beginning to show the signs of five years of real spending cumulatively not matching the growth of health need. Between 2010 and 2015, health spending grew at the slowest (0.7% a year) over a five-year period since the NHS’s foundation. As the Health Foundation observed last week, continuation of these trends is impossible: health spending must rise, funded if necessary by raising the standard rate of income tax.
There will be tens of thousands of patients suffering in the same way this weekend. Yet my protest on their behalf is purposeless. It will cut no ice with either the chancellor or his vicar on earth, Nick Macpherson, permanent secretary at the Treasury. Their twin drive to reduce public spending to just over 36% of GDP in the last year of this parliament is because, as Macpherson declares more fervently than any Tory politician, the budget must be in surplus and raising tax rates is impossible. Necessarily there will be collateral damage. It is obviously regrettable that there are too few nurses on a ward, too few police, too few teachers and too little of every public service. but this is necessary to serve the greater cause of debt reduction.
To reduce the stock of the public debt to below 80% of GDP and not pay a penny more in income or property tax, let alone higher taxes on pollution, sugar, petrol or alcohol, is now our collective national purpose. Everything – from the courts to local authority swimming pools – is subordinate to that aim.
Not every judgment George Osborne makes is wrong. He is right to advocate the northern powerhouse, to spend on infrastructure, to stay in the EU, radically to devolve control of public spending to city regions in return for the creation of coherent city governance and to sustain spending on aid and development. It is hard to fault raising the minimum wage or to try to spare science spending from the worst of the cuts.
But the big call he is making is entirely misconceived. There is no economic or social argument to justify these arbitrary targets for spending and debt, especially when the cost of debt service, given low interest rates and the average 14-year term of our government debt, has rarely been lower over the past 300 years.
This is not to contest the need to balance current public spending and current revenues over the economic cycle. As I wrote in my first book, The Revolution That Never Was, completed 30 years ago this month, Keynes was no deficit denier. But governments have choices about how they arrive at this outcome.
The Conservatives’ choice is driven by a refusal to see any merit in public activity: in their worldview, the point of life and the purpose of civilisation is to celebrate and protect the private individual, the private firm and private property. The state should be as small as possible. It has no role, say, in owning Channel 4 to secure public service broadcasting; it will be privatised with scant care about its ultimate owner. Equally, there was no point in holding the 40% stake in Eurostar, forecast to generate more than £700m in dividends over the next decade and a good payback for £3bn of public investment. Thus it was sold for £757m in March, the government concerned to get the sale through before the general election. You could only proclaim a £2.25bn loss on the public balance sheet and the surrender of £700m of dividends as a “fantastic deal for UK taxpayers”, as Osborne did, if you see zero value in public activity.
It is this philosophy that will drive the choices to be laid out on Wednesday. The spending of the so-called protected departments – the £189bn spent this year on the NHS, schools for five- to 16-year-olds, aid and defence – will rise in cash terms in line with inflation, but only to buy the same in 2019-20 as it does today, an unprecedented decade-long freeze in real terms. The block grants to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be hit slightly harder, protected only in cash terms, implying, after adjusting for inflation, a small real fall. The axe therefore has to fall on what is left – £77bn of spending by 15 departments along with non-school spending.
So if we take the summer budget and Office of Budget Responsibility economic forecasts as the baseline (both may change) – and there are no new tax increases – to meet his target, the chancellor has to find £22bn of cuts from this £77bn, crucial areas of our national life that have already cumulatively been cut by 30% since 2010.
As the Resolution Trust points out, seven of the smaller departments have settled for 21% cuts, which leaves the big five – Business, Communities and Local Government, Justice, the Home Office and non-schools education – to bear the brunt. This can only mean the de facto wind-up of the Department for Business as a pro-active department, further shrinkage of the criminal justice system (mitigated by prison sell-offs), local government reduced to a husk and the knell of further education. Meanwhile, the cuts in welfare will hit the wellbeing of millions, including their children. Expect on top a firesale of government assets – from housing associations to Channel 4.
Is this wanted, necessary or appropriate for these profoundly troubled times? I think it’s a first-order category error and that in 2015 the need – whether protection from terrorism or the promotion of innovation and investment – is for complex collaborative action between a properly resourced, agile public sector and a private sector in desperate need of remoralising and repurposing. There is no magic in a 36% state. But as Osborne knows, he is politically free to do what he wants. The leadership of the Labour party offers no substantive intellectual or political opposition, nor represents a potential governing coalition, nor, wedded to a bankrupt simplistic top-down statism, understands the complexities of these new times. Rarely has the principal opposition party been so irrelevant at a time of national need. All that is left is noises off – the odd newspaper editorial or column and civil society and business beginning to stir as they experience the impact. Weep for our country.
Last Thursday, my wife was readmitted to hospital nearly two years after her first admission for treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She is very ill, but the nursing, always humane and in sufficient numbers two years ago, is reduced to a heroic but hard-pressed minimum. She has been left untended for hours at a stretch, reduced to tearful desperation at her neglect. The NHS, allegedly a “protected” public service, is beginning to show the signs of five years of real spending cumulatively not matching the growth of health need. Between 2010 and 2015, health spending grew at the slowest (0.7% a year) over a five-year period since the NHS’s foundation. As the Health Foundation observed last week, continuation of these trends is impossible: health spending must rise, funded if necessary by raising the standard rate of income tax.
There will be tens of thousands of patients suffering in the same way this weekend. Yet my protest on their behalf is purposeless. It will cut no ice with either the chancellor or his vicar on earth, Nick Macpherson, permanent secretary at the Treasury. Their twin drive to reduce public spending to just over 36% of GDP in the last year of this parliament is because, as Macpherson declares more fervently than any Tory politician, the budget must be in surplus and raising tax rates is impossible. Necessarily there will be collateral damage. It is obviously regrettable that there are too few nurses on a ward, too few police, too few teachers and too little of every public service. but this is necessary to serve the greater cause of debt reduction.
To reduce the stock of the public debt to below 80% of GDP and not pay a penny more in income or property tax, let alone higher taxes on pollution, sugar, petrol or alcohol, is now our collective national purpose. Everything – from the courts to local authority swimming pools – is subordinate to that aim.
Not every judgment George Osborne makes is wrong. He is right to advocate the northern powerhouse, to spend on infrastructure, to stay in the EU, radically to devolve control of public spending to city regions in return for the creation of coherent city governance and to sustain spending on aid and development. It is hard to fault raising the minimum wage or to try to spare science spending from the worst of the cuts.
But the big call he is making is entirely misconceived. There is no economic or social argument to justify these arbitrary targets for spending and debt, especially when the cost of debt service, given low interest rates and the average 14-year term of our government debt, has rarely been lower over the past 300 years.
This is not to contest the need to balance current public spending and current revenues over the economic cycle. As I wrote in my first book, The Revolution That Never Was, completed 30 years ago this month, Keynes was no deficit denier. But governments have choices about how they arrive at this outcome.
The Conservatives’ choice is driven by a refusal to see any merit in public activity: in their worldview, the point of life and the purpose of civilisation is to celebrate and protect the private individual, the private firm and private property. The state should be as small as possible. It has no role, say, in owning Channel 4 to secure public service broadcasting; it will be privatised with scant care about its ultimate owner. Equally, there was no point in holding the 40% stake in Eurostar, forecast to generate more than £700m in dividends over the next decade and a good payback for £3bn of public investment. Thus it was sold for £757m in March, the government concerned to get the sale through before the general election. You could only proclaim a £2.25bn loss on the public balance sheet and the surrender of £700m of dividends as a “fantastic deal for UK taxpayers”, as Osborne did, if you see zero value in public activity.
It is this philosophy that will drive the choices to be laid out on Wednesday. The spending of the so-called protected departments – the £189bn spent this year on the NHS, schools for five- to 16-year-olds, aid and defence – will rise in cash terms in line with inflation, but only to buy the same in 2019-20 as it does today, an unprecedented decade-long freeze in real terms. The block grants to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be hit slightly harder, protected only in cash terms, implying, after adjusting for inflation, a small real fall. The axe therefore has to fall on what is left – £77bn of spending by 15 departments along with non-school spending.
So if we take the summer budget and Office of Budget Responsibility economic forecasts as the baseline (both may change) – and there are no new tax increases – to meet his target, the chancellor has to find £22bn of cuts from this £77bn, crucial areas of our national life that have already cumulatively been cut by 30% since 2010.
As the Resolution Trust points out, seven of the smaller departments have settled for 21% cuts, which leaves the big five – Business, Communities and Local Government, Justice, the Home Office and non-schools education – to bear the brunt. This can only mean the de facto wind-up of the Department for Business as a pro-active department, further shrinkage of the criminal justice system (mitigated by prison sell-offs), local government reduced to a husk and the knell of further education. Meanwhile, the cuts in welfare will hit the wellbeing of millions, including their children. Expect on top a firesale of government assets – from housing associations to Channel 4.
Is this wanted, necessary or appropriate for these profoundly troubled times? I think it’s a first-order category error and that in 2015 the need – whether protection from terrorism or the promotion of innovation and investment – is for complex collaborative action between a properly resourced, agile public sector and a private sector in desperate need of remoralising and repurposing. There is no magic in a 36% state. But as Osborne knows, he is politically free to do what he wants. The leadership of the Labour party offers no substantive intellectual or political opposition, nor represents a potential governing coalition, nor, wedded to a bankrupt simplistic top-down statism, understands the complexities of these new times. Rarely has the principal opposition party been so irrelevant at a time of national need. All that is left is noises off – the odd newspaper editorial or column and civil society and business beginning to stir as they experience the impact. Weep for our country.
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