Learning Resilience and Adaptability in an Unpredictable World

I recently got the chance to appear on the excellent Art of Problem Solving podcast on behalf of Sapienship, talking about how to raise and educate a generation whose jobs may not exist yet, or who may find automation erodes their employment opportunities.

To date, I haven’t spoken much on my personal site here about my work with Sapienship, largely because most of it has yet to reach the public domain. I expect that to change quite a lot in the next few months.

Anyhow, one of the benefits of migrating to an academic-adjacent position, especially one as wide-ranging as mine, is the ability to escape the narrow pigeon-holes of expertise which the artificial boundaries of academic disciplines enforce.

In my career, as noted elsewhere, I’ve had a number of very different roles. As a journalist alone, I gained expertise in a very varied range of topics and subjects including healthcare, politics and international sport. Hence it always seemed somewhat constrictive to me that academia was so insistent that I stay in my narrow lane, even as it nominally espoused interdisciplinary practices.

This is why my current areas of personal research are fundamentally interdisciplinary – in particular Religious Futurisms and Invented Languages. But it also informs why I have always been keen to teach students to be resilient and adaptable. I’ve finally been offered the chance by the Art of Problem-Solving podcast to expound on this pedagogical ethos and I feel especially privileged that in this area, as in many others, I find my personal values echoed and amplified by Sapienship.

I did not have a role model or a teacher to guide me how to become resilient and adaptable to a world in which change seems to be perpetually accelerating. I had to develop those skills myself, on the hoof, as I migrated from the Arts to Journalism to Academia and to the position I now hold.

Hopefully this podcast can help others to shorten that learning process, because the world is not slowing down anytime soon, and resilience and adaptability are going to become the defining traits of success, or possibly even survival, in the decades to come.

SF and Catholicism on the New Books Network

I’m archiving the interview I did with the delightful, professional and highly astute Carrie Anne Evans for the New Books Network here.

Carrie Anne was an excellent interviewer, very well researched and informed, and asked some great questions. There are pro media interviewers who could learn a lot from how she goes about her work.

Interview conducted for New Books Network; aired first November 8th 2019.

Ten Grand

I was on the BBC this morning discussing, inter alia, the UK government’s decision to implement fines of up to £10,000 for people who fail to quarantine themselves when directed to do so.

It seemed to me that this is yet another example of the government attempting to be seen to be doing something while doing nothing at all. The overwhelmed police, already disgruntled from being told to check how far and for how long people had been walking or jogging last spring now find themselves ordered to snoop on whether people are conscientiously staying at home or not. They don’t have the manpower to solve the vast majority of muggings and burglaries, so how are they expected to achieve this?

Apparently the government want the public to start grassing up their neighbours. This is an intriguing suggestion predicated on a number of unlikelies, including: a) the idea that people know their neighbours; b) that they know where their neighbours have been holidaying or whether they received a message to quarantine; and c) their desire to grass up their neighbours.

Of those three, only the last seems remotely likely, and I still feel that most people are either disinclined or disinterested in reporting their neighbours’ activities. Furthermore, who spends their time twitching the curtains to monitor the rest of the street? Most of us have our own lives to live.

Anyhow, this kind of pointless nonsense is why the UK has suffered one of the worst COVID infection rates in the world. The government are too busy doing stupid shit badly to bother even attempting to do the right things (testing being the main one).

There’s more here, including what put me right out of my comfort zone this morning, if you’re interested. Archived programme available for the next month or so. UK listeners only, alas.