Florence Evans: mud larking, art collecting, curating and dealing | Podcast

Florence Evans is an art dealer, historian, curator, collector and mud larker. Her Instagram flo_finds is here for mudlarking.  And here for art collecting. This is a Guardian profile featuring Florrie and other mudlarks.

We chat on what does mudlarking tell us about history ? What does art tell us about being human ?

…we mustn't forget is that ultimately there's a real human connection with beauty. So conceptual art aside which serves an important purpose and helps us to think and challenges us in many ways. On the other hand, there's a human need, I think, a kind of nesting instinct to have art for the home, things of beauty to lift your spirits. I think that's really elemental. …

Florrie chats on the cultural history of mudlarking, the stories found objects represent from the both the darker side of human history such as beads and the slave trade, as well as the lighter sides of found items. 

We discuss one of her favourite finds, a whole child’s shoe from the Tudor era. 

We chat on what we’ve puzzled out from our river finds including a hand blown glass apothecary bottle from the 1600s. 

We discuss: bottles, beads, coins, stories, Roman items, buttons and costumes and more…

We touch on her philosophy as an art collector and what art means to us as humans. 

One of my happiest achievements in my career thus far was curating an exhibition on mudlarking and mudlarked art in 2019 for the Totally Thames Festival. That was an exhibition that I put on showing art by artists featuring mudlark finds, still life photographs by Hannah Smiles; a photographer of mudlarked finds and portraits of mudlarks as well that she had taken. That was in the Bargehouse which is a massive warehouse space on the South Bank by the Oxo Tower; so right by the river.

That was a joy to be asked to do that and it felt like it was a fusion of both my passion, hobby; mudlarking and what I do in work which is curate and look at art. So that was a fusion of art and mudlarking and looking at craft and elevating it to art. Looking at history and saying, "This is part of who we are as human beings. We create-- There is an impulse and an urge to make things of beauty. Even things that are utilitarian, there's beauty to be found." And that kind of links back to the philosophy of someone like William Morris who believed that art should always be useful and beautiful.

What art Florrie likes and collects and the challenge of modern art. 

Florrie gives her advice on art collecting and life.

I've always done what I love and it gives me great satisfaction. You can always find your people, you can always find your niche even just by going online. It's amazing how the world opens up. As long as you are doing something that you're passionate about, you should be okay.

Available wherever you get podcasts. Video above or on YouTube and transcript below.

PODCAST INFO

Transcript (only lightly edited): Florrie in conversation with Ben

(Time stamps only very approximate)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Florence Evans. Florrie is a mudlarker extraordinaire. She's also well followed on Instagram under account, under @flo_finds. She also runs an independent gallery representing artists as well as an art collector herself. Florrie, welcome.

Florence Evans (Florrie)

Thank you so much, Ben, and thank you for the little praise scene which sounds very grand when you put it like that. But honestly, I'm not tall and I don't technically have a gallery. I do popups.

Ben (00:33):

Popups. Well, an independent representation, I guess.

Florrie (00:37):

Exactly.

Ben (00:38):

So thinking about mudlarking, one of the things I've really loved about walking down the river is the connection with nature. Something both man-made, I guess, with the bank and the foreshore and also the connection with history; a time and a place, one person's rubbish being another person's treasure. What do you think perhaps for you is most underrated about mudlarking or walking on the river?

Florrie (01:14):

Well, I think that a lot of Londoners don't realize that they have the river as a place to go and as a refuge which makes me sad. I mean, I think more and more people are discovering it thankfully. But I was very fortunate. I grew up near the river. My mum who is Australian and from Sydney always said that she had to live near water. So as a child, she would take my brother and I down to have walks along the foreshore and that felt very special. But I don't think many people necessarily realize that they can go down onto the banks of the Thames, or they think that you have to climb down a ladder to get down there. But actually there are numerous access points. So it is a place that needs to be visited more.

I think when you do go down, it is an extraordinary experience because as you say, there's this sense of nature in the middle of the city and a connection with the city's past. You can't escape the fact that you are walking upon detritus centuries; old detritus, whether it's old bricks or broken bits of pipe stem or plastic that was chucked into the river yesterday. It's a very specific terrain and it has a very specific smell as well, I should add. I love the smell of the River Thames. I imagine for some people that's a horrendous thought. But it's slightly briny, it has elements of the seaside to it. And I do think of parts of the foreshore as being like a beach. In fact, my daughter calls it the beach because where we live in East London, the stretch of river by Wapping is very sandy. So yeah, it's a connection with nature and it's a connection with the city and it's quite a special space.

Ben (03:25):

It does feel like a beach to me. So in London, fortunately or unfortunately today-- people in the video can see this. You will need a pass. You do need to get a license from the PLA to go mudlarking. And I think they are currently-- as of the end of 2022, kind of full up because there's over 5,000 licenses. But I guess when recently thinking about finds-- The last time I was at the river, I don't go so often-- Talking about the pipes here. Again, on the video you can see there's these little stem pipes. I think for a lot of people and certainly for me, it was one of the first finds. I still get excited and my son still gets excited when he finds one. I'm also on the ever lookout for a bead and I haven't found an interesting bead. I know famously you always hunt for beads and you have some amazing ones. So maybe the question would be what are your most exciting finds or quirky finds or those that you've had? Maybe you can talk about your love of beads.

Florrie (04:34):

Yeah, sure. Well, it's interesting that you say that one of the first things you found was a clay pipe stem because one of the first things I ever found as a child was a clay pipe stem and I didn't really know what it was. I was mentioning to you earlier actually that I first made the connection when I went on a school trip to Hampton Court and saw some examples of clay pipes that they had found under the Tudor kitchens from the time of Henry VIII. And I went, "Oh my God, those are what I've been finding by the river." That was very exciting to me. It was a tangible piece of archeology. From there, I started to realize that the river had these little scraps of history to be found and then I think I started looking more carefully.

I remember a particular find-- one of my first, again, after the pipe stems was a Venetian Millefiori bead. I don't have it today unfortunately. I can't be sure whether it wasn't just dropped off someone's 1980s earring or whether it was some amazing Renaissance's trade bead. I will never know. But for me, that was a very exciting find. Today, I do make a point of looking for beads. And again, where I live in East London, I have found an area which is rich in trade beads. Trade beads have quite a dark history. They were used as a commodity to trade with indigenous peoples in the Americas and in Africa because in these places the Europeans worked out, they didn't know how to make glass. So a bead was seen as a very precious object. And of course, they were small and they were portable. They would sell them for what would've been thought of as a high price. 

So you could buy literally slaves in Africa with beads. So some of them are known as slave beads; particular types of beads. You could buy beaver pelts from Native Americans because obviously, fur was hugely coveted over here but also incredibly important over there in the harsh winters. But they were prepared to sell the pelts for these tiny little glass beads. So they tell a story that is fascinating and I think is important to be brought to light today so that we understand what colonialism did and how our ancestors conquered-- if you want to call it, far flung places and people. The mind boggles really when you think of beads in that way.

Ben (07:48):

Wow, I hadn't heard that full story in their history like that. Walking down the river it also does-- and these objects really brings home how what humans’ value is a part of the myth and the story. You could say this about money. Money's a trust thing, you can't even touch it digitally. And we've given it value. We have in London this idea of a peppercorn rent because peppercorns used to be extremely valuable and actually they're not so valuable anymore. Things like beads or whatever we've had to represent used to be very valuable. They might have had a certain meaning; a dark meaning or a light meaning. We can reinterpret that today. Sometimes we don't even understand what we're looking at or what it means and I think that connection's really amazing. I had once found a piece of flint which I thought had been fairly worked on. So I did wonder how old it would be, but other people thought maybe it hadn't been worked on that long. But what's the oldest thing then you might have found? Because some of the worked flint could be over a couple of thousand years old going back that far.

Florrie (08:59):

Yeah. I would say I have quite a considerable collection of worked flint tools; Neolithic scrapers and cores and things like that. Not an arrowhead yet, unfortunately. But yes, I would say my flint tools are my oldest finds definitely.

Ben (09:19):

And that's, I guess because there used to be communities all during that time which lived on the river, lived from the river, and by the river and all of that.

Florrie (09:27):

Absolutely. I mean, this is it. The river is a place where people always have to settle near water. It gives life literally but also it's used as a dump where you chuck things as well. So it's kind of this wonderful contradiction in a way. The river sees communities flourish and grow and it sees communities kind of-- not the demise of, but it has just seen the ebb and flow of time and people. I find that quite interesting.

Ben (10:12):

This is very London centric and it's got a particular rich history. In fact, I think there have been mudlarkers for several hundred years where the treasure hunters of 300 years ago were looking for different sorts of treasure today. But I was on a beach or a foreshore, I guess, in an American city and found not very old detritus. But I guess you can mudlark anywhere in some of those sort of history, although I guess river cities are always going to be the richest. People do these bottle bank hunting and rubbish dump sort of hunting. So have you done any other type of hunting like that?

Florrie (10:51):

I do. I go digging in Victorian and Edwardian bottle dumps on the outskirts of London to find the vintage bottles and things. I have an endless desire to find these things. I'm a regular Womble. I just like picking stuff up and digging shit up-- excuse my language. But it is a recreational drive today and I think it's an important distinction that you made in the past. The term mudlarking is a Victorian term for the destitute people of London in Victorian times who would go looking for things like old rope to sell, lumps of coal, things that had fallen off ships when they were being unloaded or packed. They were looking for things that they could trade and sell or even just food. They saw the river and mudlarking as a source of income. Often, it was sort of poor children who would go into the muddy, low tide without even any boots or shoes on because often they could feel things with their feet in the mud and use their feet almost as a sensory way of finding things.

But then, I mean, it goes back beyond there. There are 17th century and 18th century drawings and engravings of people looking for Roman finds for the Antiquarian collectors. You would get locals wading in the Medway on the coast line looking for Roman pots using long pikes to dig into the mud to feel for pot shards underneath. It has been going on for centuries. I should add actually also the poor little destitute Victorian children who would look for things to sell from the river would sometimes come across artifacts which they would sell to Antiquarian dealers. So there have always been treasure hunters. But in those days it was generally rich people paying the impoverished to go out and find the treasure for them rather than get their hands dirty themselves.

And this-- I'm sorry to go off on a tangent-- brings to mind an amazing picture that I handled a couple of years ago by an artist called Walter Grieves. It is a very detailed painting of the Chelsea embankment from 1876 showing the Chelsea Regatta. There were numerous people that he drew on the foreshore watching the race and they were all men. There were no women down on the foreshore. That's another thing to remember. Women wouldn't have wanted to get their skirts muddy. It would've been considered indecorous to go down there. Only women destitute women and mudlarks would've gone down onto the riverbank. But if you had any sense of decorum, you wouldn't go down at low tide unless to watch a race and you were a man.

Ben (14:46):

Wow. So it shows everything about our history with gender, trade, colonialism, and everything. That brings to mind a couple of things. One is how oysters used to be a peasant, a poor person's food; similar type of things before it kind of changed through. Do you think the Romans themselves would've mudlarked? And I wonder what they would've mudlarked for? I guess it might've been too early. But I imagine they were on the river and they did find things.

Florrie (15:16)

Oh God, yes. It's interesting because there are pockets of London where you find lots of Roman detritus. Obviously, that's because they were very active in the center of London and that was where Londinium rose up from the river by St. Paul's; that kind of area. But yeah, what did they find? I imagine again, there must have been always trade on the river and there would've been mudlarks and locals looking for things that had been dropped off the boats. Of course there will always be opportunists.

Ben (15:56):

Yeah. Even in modern day. The most valuable thing that I've found which wasn't very valuable was a half penny from I think the 1950s or sixties when we still had half penny. But I think if you were a mudlark from then, people would've been dropping coins. And if you find a coin, that would've been your week or maybe even your month if it was a particularly good coin.

Florrie (16:18):

Absolutely. Another thing to mention with regards to coins, obviously you had all the dockers who would be dropping their [detritus] and things as they were loading and unloading boats. But there are certain parts of the river where there were spectacles such as the Regatta and you would get people going down and dropping coins from their pockets. Also, there were kind of your London pick pockets who just as today, might steal someone's wallet and then throw it into the river. You would presumably have that happening and things being thrown in the river. As you can imagine, a kind of Fagan type character or one of his children stealing things. Suddenly realizing they're going to get caught, chucking it in the river to then go and retrieve it later on at low tide.

Ben (17:19):

I can imagine that's been happening for thousands of years.

Florrie (17:21):

All sorts going on. Yeah.

Ben (17:24):

Interesting. I'm just thinking outside of London for one moment. Are there any other cities which are as famous for mudlarking? Are American cities too young? I guess some European ones must have a-- I guess it helps having a tidal river. I'm only thinking out loud, I haven't discovered this long enough. But are there other famous cities for mudlarking?

Florrie (17:46):

Absolutely. It is really helpful if you have a tidal river because obviously you can go down and search the river banks. There are mudlarks in the north of England, in Edinburgh as well, and Scotland. Then in America, there is a lot of mudlarking that goes on around New York for art Deco treasures. Probably the place I would most like to go mudlarking but it's not titled and it requires actual diving is in Netherlands, in Amsterdam. There are amazing treasure hunters there who literally go into the canals, dive, and bring out all these Dutch golden age artifacts which put all the things from the Thames to shame. Honestly, they're bringing out complete onion bottles from the 17th century, amazing complete delftware tiles; all sorts of extraordinary things. There's a real community of Dutch mudlarks. They're hardcore.

Ben (19:00):

It's almost beyond mudlarking.

Florrie (19:03):

They go down and they dive and it's incredible what they find.

Ben (19:06):

Wow. That's the next step. So that brings me to this little piece of glass that we found. Actually, Anishka, my partner found it. It's a piece of nothing, right? It's a bit of rubbish but we really loved it because it had these words. You can only make out “society unlimited.” We saw a couple of double op. So we looked it up and it was the co-op society. We puzzled it out that it was an old milk bottle from I think the 1930s or something like that. And what's great about these little things-- whatever you find-- if you have a little bit of something, there's a puzzle and a history that you can figure out from something medium to easy, hard like that to really complicated things. What's the best thing that you ever puzzled out?

Florrie (19:58):

That's a difficult question. You are right. These pieces of social history which you don't learn about in school books, these little personal stories that you get from written text are so satisfying to find and puzzle out. But I have to admit that the finds that fire me up are historical costume which don't necessarily have the little clues with the writing and the maker's marks. But having said that, I have a vast collection of buttons. On the backs of buttons you'll often have the maker's name and address. So you can have a deep Google and find the details or sometimes the birth and death dates of the tailors who made these buttons. That's always fascinating that you can go down a rabbit hole with those.

Ben (21:01):

And can you do that even without a mark because the shape and style are over time?

Florrie (21:06):

Absolutely. So you learn the fashions for different periods and so you learn to expect a certain shape for a certain period. For instance in the 18th century, buttons became very large and flat. So if you imagine a gentleman's waist coat, it would have these big shiny flat buttons. So they're very easy to date because it was specifically a fashion of the time, of the era. For a Tudor period button it's generally quite globular and small and round and often decorated. Then in the 17th century, button makers realize that they could make buttons-- they're called blowhole buttons that are hollow. So they're still round but they use less metal and therefore they're more economic to make. Less metal used, cheaper all round, cheaper to sell, and saving on materials. So you can definitely learn a lot about what period something might have come from by how it was made.

Ben (22:32):

I remember viewing a series of mudlarked knives and hadn't realized that the style of knife tells you a lot. And actually then if you find it with something else, you can really date that period. I'm told it's also the same with shoes. So shoes date really... Even modern day shoes, you can see this with trainers that you have. They're only sold in a two or three year period. So if you see one in a photo you can really tell roughly when that was.

Florrie (23:01):

That's right. In fact actually, one of my favorite finds that I have is a complete child's Tudor shoe. It's a very specific shape. Apart from the fact that the leather is very fragile and soft, it has this wonderful kind of pointy toe which is typical for the period. So that's one of my favorite finds. Also, the idea of a child's shoe, how did it end up in the river? You can play out all sorts of scenarios in your mind.

Ben (23:38):

Wow. What's the one you want to find that you haven't found? So you mentioned an arrowhead. I'd still love to find a bead. I'd love to find some worked flint which I could definitively say was old. I'd like to find a whole glass bottle-- but partly because I think glass often breaks so getting a whole one is going to be tricky.

Florrie (24:00):

Although actually glass bottles are incredibly well preserved in the deep mud. So maybe you're not going into the muddy end.

Ben (24:08):

Yeah. I'm mostly around Hammersmith and just walking on the top which is a well walked bit so it's not... I probably need a lucky storm to put something up or I need to go east one day or something like that.

Florrie (24:22):

Or you need to head towards Chiswick from Hammersmith because there are lots of bottles down that way as well. I'm giving secrets away. Oh, no.

Ben (24:33):

So what do you still lack in your collection which you would love?

Florrie (24:42):

I am very lucky because I have-- like to think of myself as being quite a good all-rounder, but I have time on my side which is that I've been doing this for years and years. So I have a well-stocked collection. I have found most things, Ben. That sounds really awful, but I have. I have found most things. What would I really love to find? A complete onion bottle would be a bucket list find for me. I just love the shape of the bottle. For anyone who doesn't know, an onion bottle is a 17th century style of wine bottle and it looks like an onion. It's globular and it has a flat base. There's an apocryphal tale whether this is true or not-- I think it probably isn't true but I like it. That they were designed to be bottom heavy so that when ships went out to sea they didn't roll around on the captain's table. You would have a heavy bottomed, flat bottomed bottle that would be there in the center of the captain's table and all the sailors could help themselves to a drink from it which is quite good.

Ben (26:03):

That's why you have to learn to dive and go to Holland.

Florrie (26:06):

Yeah, exactly. So I'd love to find one of those. I love finding worked bone artifacts, and until recently, I had never found a complete worked bone knit comb. I found one from the 1600s this year so that was a bucket list item ticked. But thinking of worked bone, I have found over the years numerous bone dominoes and gaming pieces but I have never found a Roman bone gaming piece. So I'd like to find a Roman gaming.

Ben (26:53):

And they're medium common or they're findable?

Florrie (26:55):

They're medium common. They're findable. The problem is I don't generally like mudlarking in the center of London where one finds them because it's too overcrowded for me. I go to the river also for peace, nature, to kind of be by myself, and for head space. So I'm not someone who likes to go and mudlark next to the hoards, but I feel like I should probably go a bit more often into the center of town and then I might find my bucket list Roman game encounter. But until then, I don't think I ever will find it.

Ben (27:34):

Talking about groups, we should mention that actually group visits-- Is it Thames Discovery?

Florrie (27:41):

That's right.

Ben (27:42):

They do tours. So if you're just interested in coming for a day in London or you're in London and just want to try it-- you're not going to do this every week and go up for a license-- That's one way of getting a taste for it and a little bit of history. I wouldn't say absolutely certain, but you're very likely to find at least a pipe stem. I think every time I go we still find a pipe stem and we're not even in a very particular rich bit, either walking along Hammersmith or by the Tate Modern.

Florrie (28:08):

Well, you guys must be eagle-eyed because not everybody finds a pipe stem. They're there to be found but they do blend into the pebbles so you have to be in tune. I recommend to anyone who is interested in going mudlarking and doing something with Thames Discovery-- While they can't get a license, they can do the Thames Discovery group tours-- To have a look at what these things look like online so that then you know what to look for. I think you have to have an idea because if you had never seen a clay pipe stem-- and I should add these are the fag butts of yesteryear. They're from literally clay smoking.

Ben (28:47):

They do look a little bit like cigarettes.

Florrie (28:49):

They do look like cigarettes. If you haven't seen them, you might not necessarily know to pick them up.

Ben (28:59):

Yeah, I agree. Maybe we'll finish on this part. You brought some of your own finds with you. Is there one you'd like to share?

Florrie (29:08):

Yeah. I've brought in several things but I do love glassware. There's something about glass that really does it for me. I thought I would show you my 17th century apothecary bottle which is tiny and it's like a miniature onion bottle actually. But it would've contained some kind of quack cure. God knows what medicine went in that.

Ben (29:37):

This is amazing. So for those not on the video, the glass has a really beautiful, translucent quality with greeny, very slightly oily rainbow colors. It has this kind of handmade quality because it's not quite regular. Only very slightly off regular, but it gives it a kind of really unique joy. And it's really tactile. You have it in your fingers and it feels like it has definitely been touched or shaped by humanness. I guess it was blown rather than with fingers. But because of that, very slight unevenness. There's a real quality of being connected to another human just me touching this and looking at it

Florrie (30:28):

Exactly. It's hand blown and it has been squished by the bottle maker to be slightly cuboid. So while the glass was still malleable, as it was cooling, they kind of pinched it. That's why it has this tactile quality, I think. So they've pinched it into this slightly sort of square shape and then left it to cool. It has such a fascinating hidden story that we'll never know. So from the glass maker, the glass blower to the apothecary-- what they chose to put in it, to the person who bought it to cure The Black Death, maybe. Who knows what their aspiration was that this medicine would cure? Did it work? Probably not.

Ben (31:23):

And you've dated it from 1600s?

Florrie (31:25):

This is from the 1600s. Probably the mid to late 1600s.

Ben (31:32):

And how can we tell?

Florrie (31:34):

From the tint of the glass. The kind of wonderful aqua color. From the way it's been made, the shape. And on the bottom, this kind of kick up and rough bit is called the pontil scar. That's where you have the scar from where it was blown and cut off the piece of glass. By the 18th century, they had worked out how to make glass completely transparent; the flint glass which has a slightly gray color to a modern eye but which was considered to be transparent then. But this still has that kind of slightly greeny aqua color of the earlier glass. This was as close as they could get in the 1600s and before then to transparent.

Ben (32:31):

That's amazing. So I would take something like that-- And today, if we put it on a little plinth or had it in a gallery, I think a lot of us would call it art. I guess there's always been through history a kind of, "Where does craft become art?" But I think even more so when we think about finds or there's a whole modern day sequence of found objects or found art or I guess earlier, but from the time of Duchamp's famous urinal where he takes it and puts it on a plinth and calls it art and it therefore becomes art. What do you think about how much if an artist or if anyone says something that they've created or even found or placed is art? Do we really think that's art? And how does that change the things through time? 

I guess I ask it partly because it links into this. But I meet a lot of people today who think, "Oh, a lot of this modern art will go into post-modern." Doesn't seem to be art to them because it doesn't have some of that craft skill based. But people sort of read into how some modern art has gone and think about it, does value it in things like art and in that language of art. So I was wondering of your perspective of long art history and obviously you’re are very learned within mudlarking and objects, but also within modern art, even into masters in classics and how that's been viewed full time. So is art always art if an artist calls it such?

Florrie (34:10):

Well, that's a very big question that perhaps I can't fully answer. I think if someone creates something and decides that they want it to be viewed as art, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. It will be a piece of art if it has been created with artistic intent. Whether you think it's any good is another matter. But it is interesting. There are a lot of artists today who are fascinated by craft from the past and who work specifically with mudlark finds. In fact, I think there's an exhibition on view at Tate Modern at the moment which I haven't been to see yet. An installation of objects displayed by an artist and there are objects that she found in the Thames. I wish I could tell you who this artist is. I'm so sorry everybody. I haven't been to see it yet. Someone just mentioned it to me in passing the other day and said, "Oh, you should go and see."

But there we go. There's a whole mudlark display in Tate Modern so I think that sort of answers your question there. One of my happiest achievements in my career thus far was curating an exhibition on mudlarking and mudlarked art in 2019 for the Totally Thames Festival. That was an exhibition that I put on showing art by artists featuring mudlark finds, still life photographs by Hannah Smiles; a photographer of mudlarked finds and portraits of mudlarks as well that she had taken. That was in the Bargehouse which is a massive warehouse space on the South Bank by the Oxo Tower; so right by the river.

That was a joy to be asked to do that and it felt like it was a fusion of both my passion, hobby; mudlarking and what I do in work which is curate and look at art. So that was a fusion of art and mudlarking and looking at craft and elevating it to art. Looking at history and saying, "This is part of who we are as human beings. We create-- There is an impulse and an urge to make things of beauty. Even things that are utilitarian, there's beauty to be found." And that kind of links back to the philosophy of someone like William Morris who believed that art should always be useful and beautiful.

Ben (37:19):

Yes. And we were talking earlier about how there are these human impulses; children throwing stones in the river, people leaving hand prints in wet mud or cement, maybe cave painting hand prints. Maybe it's the same impulse and this impulse to be with nature and things. So some of my friends who don't really like or appreciate modern art think that it's not saying anything around that. But a lot of people who are into modern art or post-modern art kind of think, "Well, actually there is a story and language which maybe half of it is in the kind of the viewer's part-- we call it, I guess the beholden part." And maybe this is one reason that part of me is not too worried about AI (Artificial Intelligence) generated art because although you have the visual picture, there's a portion of any picture or object like we've discussed which has this whole other value or story or narrative behind it and what we make of it; whether it's to your earlier story about the dark side of beads or the light side of costume making.

It will always need a human or an audience or a reader to complete that. Yet I also worry sometimes that maybe some modern art or post-modern art has gone so far that they've left a lot of people behind because they've been working and building on all of these stories and every generation goes a bit further. I know you started off in old masters, but now you also deal with modern and living artists and things. Do you think this is much of a worry and do you find people outside of the art world? Do you think they're correct to be worried that they don't understand modern art? Or is this always one of those things a bit like these finds which you need to puzzle it out and appreciate to get perhaps the most out of it, although there's always a surface tactile craft quality as well?

Florrie (39:32):

Well, I think that there are tiers of art. And what we mustn't forget is that ultimately there's a real human connection with beauty. So conceptual art aside which serves an important purpose and helps us to think and challenges us in many ways. On the other hand, there's a human need, I think, a kind of nesting instinct to have art for the home, things of beauty to lift your spirits. I think that's really elemental. I certainly found as an art dealer that post-Covid coming out of lockdown, a lot of people had been in their homes going a bit stir crazy looking at their walls and had been rearranging their homes in their mind's eye. There was a kind of frenzied fever of art buying that happened both online during lockdown and immediately after lockdown. People had been art staffed and commercial art galleries were the first galleries to open because businesses were given special dispensation by the government.

Commerce had to carry on eventually. So they opened before museums and galleries. As a result-- I was working in a gallery at the time, the influx of visitors, the number of people who wanted to come just to see art was a massive uptick. I think that that was a direct result of people being in their home and feeling the need to rearrange their nests, but also to get out and see art again. They had felt starved of art and the need for beauty and a need to look at beautiful things to distract from what might be happening in the world. So I think that art has a very important place and people haven't actually become disconnected from it. But there is very much a difference between conceptual and AI and what you materially might have in the home, and I include craft in that.

But looking again at instinct, I think so much of what I love and what I do is an instinct. You are either a collector or you are not, but there's a definite core group of people who are fascinated and want to collect and want to find and look at things. My mum tells me that as a small baby once I'd learnt to crawl, I would go out into the garden and bring stones back in and arrange them under the kitchen table. I'd be nipping in and out all the time creating installations of stones under the kitchen table; nesting is what she called it. She says that as a little baby I just wanted to nest and create dens with things that I had found. That wasn't something that was influenced by home life per se. That was surely at that age an instinct.

Ben (43:03):

Wow. Amazing. Yeah, I think we do have that instinct to some degree in all of us. That leads me to think what are the pieces of art that you have in your own home or flat? I guess you're going to like all of them because that's why they're there. But maybe you would highlight some pieces you have or what they mean to you or perhaps what they brought to you during pandemic or out of pandemic. How you've thought about your own collecting within art for the home.

Florrie (43:35):

Well, I definitely have a philosophy which is that I never buy any art that I wouldn't want to have on my own walls. Indeed, when I buy art now, that's where it goes. But at the same time, nothing is a permanent part of my collection or home. Everything is fluid. I'm an art dealer so I buy art that I can sell and I buy art that I'll sit on for years and then sell down the line and I'll enjoy it. Then it will be time to let it go and find it a new home and bring something else in. So it's a constant state of flux. 

But a painting that I recently acquired that means a lot to me is a view of Hastings where as a family we go every summer to spend time. It's by a wonderful artist called Laetitia Yhap, who is half Chinese, half Vietnamese. She has lived and worked as an artist in Hastings for the last 55 years. She does these beautiful figurative paintings often; sort of fishermen on the beach. But this is actually a view from the window of her home looking out at the cliff; a very specific cliff where I've been for long family walks. So it has resonance for me because it represents a place that is special to me and my partner and our daughter.

Ben (45:18):

Lovely. What do you look for in art or an artist then? So you have a nesting instinct piece. There's also an eye to maybe there's going to be value longer term. I guess that's the market commercial piece as well. Then there's the meaning and the symbolism and all of that. I guess it's got to speak to you. But if you are thinking to maybe represent an artist in a pop-up gallery or a piece to collect, what goes through your mind when you are looking or handling a piece of art or talking to an artist?

Florrie (45:54):

Well, again, I think a lot of it is just gut reaction and that sounds very unscientific. We all like to think that we've got good taste but it's all relative. I mean, all I can do is look for art that speaks to me and I see beauty in. I suppose because my grounding-- as you mentioned briefly-- is in old masters, I am interested in artists today who use techniques that bridge the centuries. So I am interested in art where you are looking at a painting and it's a picture of something and you can say, "Yes, that is a portrait of a person or a landscape." I do like abstract art as well. But then in something like that, it would have to be a composition that has balance and color that I like. But I'm afraid it's an entirely personal cocktail that's impossible to quantify or specify really.

Ben (47:06):

I guess that's one of the joys that it hasn't been brought to just an algorithm or something that you can count in numbers or things like that. And I guess thinking about art like that, I'm probably-- because my day job is within the market-- much more amenable to thinking about art markets and culture markets. I think artists in general, all creators are probably on average undervalued because of the way they've done it. But I think it is important to have that value. I know a lot of my arty friends have a very uncomfortable relationship with the market because they think quite rightly that a lot of the things that they produced are in some ways beyond a measurable value. Like the things we've talked about are very hard to put in words and you don't put in numbers.

There is something slightly awkward about putting a price on it. Yet in so many things human, markets are also our invention and there is this invention of being able for people to exchange in some sort of value these intangible things which are hard to count. But do you have a view-- I guess with a commercial background you are probably going to be also at least somewhat amenable to art markets having dealt with them your entire lifetime. But is there anything misunderstood about art markets or how artists should think about approaching a market or their work or something which is maybe more valued? I think it's very easy to make the argument against them just saying, "Look, these things are priceless and valuing them somehow makes it awkward.” But I think it's often less talked about of the value of markets that they can bring. And I've been just intrigued as to if you have to have any of these debates with artists and people.

Florrie (49:01):

Well, I should really say at this point that I do deal with living artists but my expertise really is in historic art. My main dealing now is with mid-20th century works of art; modern British art. So a lot of the paintings that I buy and sell are by artists who are no longer alive. I am particularly drawn to works from the 1920s, thirties, forties. I love high Art Deco design and I love what was happening in art at that time. I find the history interesting as well. So that's a market that has really blossomed and grown over the last 10, 15 years. A lot of the paintings that I deal in now are by artists who you could have bought their work 10, 15 years ago for nothing, but now you have to pay a price.

Auction houses have a really big role to play there because I think that they set the basic level at which people are prepared to spend in an art market. So there are auction records. You can look online and see what a particular artist's works might have fetched in the last year or two or even the last decade, and you can look on a website called Artnet; a kind of auction records for the last 10, 15 years on a particular artist so you can see how the market has changed or grown. That really is the litmus test. 

But with contemporary art, I tend not to deal with contemporary artists who are super trendy where you are talking Gagosian level prices. That is a market I don't understand and I have no interest in. The kind of artists that I deal with today who are living, as I say, they tend to be rooted in the past. And as such, often they're kind of what I would call late career artists. People who were working in the 20th century and are still active today, but who have a kind of back catalog, so to speak, and already have a market themselves, already have a level at which they used to sell their works. Having said that, I would love to represent young emerging artists as well and students and help to guide them.

Ben (52:14):

If you have a good connection.

Florrie (52:15):

Yeah. If I think that the work is beautiful and worth pushing, I will. I have an old boss who always used to say to me, "Florrie, willing buyer, willing seller." I know that sounds a bit ridiculous, but it's true. Ultimately, all you can do is say what you think something is worth and then it will flow from there. You may have to end up in a scenario where you haggle or you reach a mutual point of agreement, but markets are fluid. But in the end, you just need someone who wants that piece of art and who's prepared to pay the price that you think it's worth.

Ben (53:04):

And why has 1920s, 1930s British art flourished and do auction houses or galleries in general? What is their role in the curation that may then actually impact value or even just the stories? I guess that's not just auction houses and galleries. That would be public galleries and national art places as well. Although again, that's probably split between contemporary and living and that. Is it just market forces of demand or is there some story as to why that art has suddenly become more noticeable? And I guess the other part I look at very afar-- So I'm interested in art, don't track the market. But it seems to me that artists or art which was perhaps historically more underrepresented, whether that's women-led art or art outside of western art or normal domains is also lifted. And you could see that as a reflection of a society movements although obviously, there's a range. So I speculate, I wonder whether that's had anything to do with it. But I'd be interested in your thoughts as to why it happens now.

Florrie (54:18):

I think that it's recent enough history that people can relate to it visually. And I think a lot of our taste today is informed by the last hundred years and what we are used to seeing, whether it's growing up with cartoons of a certain era. We are inevitably visually impacted by the aesthetics of the last century. So I think that it is natural that people look to the past to try and understand the present. That applies to art as well. But something that you say there really does strike a chord. And as you say, right now museums and public galleries are trying to rebalance their collections and to look at art and to bring women and minority groups into the history; to bring them back into the public eye. When in the past it was very much kind of white male art in galleries and museums.

I was very fortunate recently to acquire a group of works by a female artist from the 1930s who was part of the East London group of painters; a movement in East London. Her name was Brynhild Parker. She did some very sensitive, beautiful portraits of East Londoners; one of which is a young girl of Afro-Caribbean descent. She was painting what she saw every day in East London. So those are paintings for which I have aspirations. I think that they should be placed in museums and that's what I intend and hope to do because people do need to see the work of female artists and of especially the female gays in the past, they need to know it existed. They need to know that there were people looking at minority groups then in a way that we're trying to sort of look at them today.

In the past, if you went to the National Portrait Gallery you wouldn't expect to see, for instance, a portrait of a black person. Its lots of pictures of white aristocrats. I think that there's a conscious decision and it's laudable that museums and galleries are trying to kind of say, "This isn't a fair representation of our history and our country." We are a multicultural, interesting place and we have been for centuries. It's not just male artists who've been painting over the last few centuries. There were women painting as well. So I think that that's a real shift.

Ben (57:39):

And a good shift.

Florrie (57:40):

And rightly so, a good shift.

Ben (57:41):

I'm very sympathetic to that. I still think it's extraordinary that roughly half your population is still underrepresented in all walks of life and in everything that we do. Therefore, that means that society doesn't flourish as well as it could be. I'm very interested in minorities, neurodivergent, and all of that type of work. But there is, I guess-- You hear in some quarters a kind of counter argument or some sort of backlash for saying... And I guess the arguments go, "Oh, these old master works were still really great or there was that." And we have this argument, I guess, quite acutely in Britain. But you've had it in other places around statues and their role. Maybe we can reinterpret them, but should it all be put by the wayside and people feel like maybe something that they liked or they felt part of has been diminished? I don't particularly see that. I see it as raising a side which should always have been there. But what would you say to people who feel awkward or challenged by some of that older line of work perhaps being more diminished or feeling threatened by the raising of this other kind of work?

Florrie (59:05):

Oh, you said to me earlier if you had a different question...

Ben (59:10):

We can avoid it.

Florrie (59:14):

No. The thing is-- I would say to that person, "Why don't you want to discuss this?" I think that people who can't understand that there needs to be a shift in the way in which we look at society need to look at themselves.

Ben (59:36):

Yeah. I think that's fair. I really think of this still globally. Like when people saying this shift and it happens in my work domain quite a lot. And I just point out that do you think broadly speaking, the world would be a better place if we had more female power, all of these type of things? I think the answer is unequivocally yes. Obviously, there's difficulties, anything, and the nuance and challenges of actually doing that. But you can't help but to say that's true and I think it's the same in history. There's always been roughly half the population and to have it not represented just doesn't seem very true. Never know quite what the truth is, but seems very far away from the truth that we had.

Florrie (01:00:26):

Yes. And for someone to suggest that by doing this it's to the detriment of the art that we... The two have always kind of shone a light on. I mean, that's ridiculous, really. We are not going to stop looking at paintings by Monet just because we think we need to be looking at paintings by a female artist of the same era for instance.

Ben (01:01:03):

The other thing I think on that and then I'll move on is that often those artists have been really supported often by-- I guess you could call them a missing woman because we don't often know. I was reading a story about Giacometti. So he does these tall sculptures as you would know, extremely famous, very well regarded. He worked obsessively on his art for hours and hours a day, day in, day out. But if you read the story of his life, there was no way he could have done that without the women in his life. Very short, that's a very complicated domestic life he had. But it was obvious that he could not do his art without that.

There's an interesting thing actually. I'm going to pivot completely around something called music therapy or also music enablement and this idea of that we don't-- The idea of anyone creates anything and avoid is even more mythical than the other myths that we have. And that people or men throughout the centuries, the fact that they created and avoid is not true. In fact, old masters used to have-- They probably had male assistants. But they had big workshops. They had people that had helpers. In fact, you could see this maybe in Damien Hirst today. Other people, they have studios and you've always had people to work with you whether they are craft assistance or your family life and how that works. I think it's always been really interesting that it's coming to light more and more how that enablement happens. Without that enablement, you don't have the art. So I do think that is a form of co-creation which historically we've undervalued-- and we're still undervalued today, I'm sure. But we could have a slightly bigger sense of how that comes about.

Florrie (01:02:59):

That's so true. And it's also interesting, I think, that often a lot of artists' wives historically painted as well but are not as well-known as their husbands because they facilitated their husband's creativity and they tended to the family. But I've always thought you could do an exhibition called Artists Wives or Artists Two. Especially in the 20th century, there were so many artists whose wives they met at art school. In fact, a lot of women in the early 20th century went to places like the Slade to study, met their artist husbands, and then kind of went on creating but didn't have shows in the way that their husbands did because it was just understood that the male part of the relationship would be the one that was nurtured.

Ben (01:04:03):

Yes. And if they do go off by themselves, they're then often labeled difficult women.

Florrie (01:04:09):

Yeah, exactly.

Ben (01:04:10):

There's a whole other like... 

Florrie (01:04:11):

Barbara Hepworth was considered to be a difficult woman because she agitated to have representation in New York and London and she expected for herself what a male artist would expect. So she was labeled a difficult woman.

Ben (01:04:30):

Is Hepworth's art now valued about the same as Henry Moore's or is there still a gap?

Florrie (01:04:36):

I would say the gap has closed.

Ben (01:04:41):

Okay. Last few bits and then we'll talk about current projects and advice for people. So very short section on underrated, overrated, or some thoughts or comments on where things might go. So one of this is NFT art. So these are non-fungible tokens or this kind of crypto art type thing. Do you think it's underrated or overrated? We had this conversation a couple of years ago so it might be quite different because that market has come down. 

Florrie (01:05:10)

I have no idea. Zero idea.

Ben (01:05:13):

Let's pass. Okay. Next one would be, do you think we should have more public funding for art, or is it about right or should we have less?

Florrie (01:05:26):

We probably should have more. Always more public funding for art, especially in bleak times. We all need places to go to raise the spirits and elevate the soul.

Ben (01:05:39):

And you said you don't think it can be supported just by commercial terms on the art mark after?

Florrie (01:05:43):

No. We need more.

Ben (01:05:46):

Very fair. Then we briefly touched on this, but AI art or art generated by computers or artificial intelligence. Or at the moment what's really happening is you are using a prompt. So show me a boxer in the style of Van Gogh and then the algorithm has been trained on these sort of images and produces these type of things. Do you think underrated, overrated, or where do you think it'll go?

Florrie (01:06:16):

I think it's absolutely amazing. I know nothing about it. My brother knows a whole lot more. But something that really sticks with me is as a teenager in the nineties I remember him creating these incredible AI demos through programming. These beautiful things that would come out of incredibly complex coding and was so intriguing. I think he created one of the first codes, or if not the first code that enabled movement in time with music which was hugely innovative at the time and paved the way for AI; the fluidity of it today. I think it's fair to say he was a pioneer of that. I just have huge respect for artists who work with computers. I think that what they do is phenomenal. I say to anyone who looks down their nose at it that they have no idea the craftsmanship that goes into that. It is a type of craftsmanship and it is art, in my view.

Ben (01:07:41):

Yeah. And I hinted that this is my view on a lot of people who don't really engage with modern art or even conceptual art. I can see why it doesn't resonate with them, but I never find a case where it hasn't been extremely worked upon and thought about. You might not value that very much and everyone's got their own taste but I wouldn't necessarily just dismiss it. So thinking about collecting then, if you wanted to start out and you're interested in maybe collecting some sort of art which might be sending to you and maybe you have even just a few hundred or maybe a few thousand pounds or however, whatever budget you are. What would be your advice to a would-be person starting out thinking about collecting art?

Florrie (01:08:30):

I would say there are two things you could do. First of all, identify whether you are interested in new art or old art. If you are interested in new art, then go to degree shows, go to graduation shows for the Royal College of Art, the Slade, all these types of places and you can buy from students and support them. You can do that for not very much money and get a beautiful piece of art by an up and coming artist and that is a fantastic way to collect. 

Or look at auctions. Everything's online these days. It's incredible. You can look at all sorts of things on the-saleroom.com for instance. There's another site called Invaluable and all these regional auction houses and global auction houses put their sales online with photographs of things that they have for sale. Again, you can buy things for not very much money at auction and it's quite exciting. Just think of it as a kind of glorified eBay. It's no different. If you like to kind of truffle out a bargain, that's the way to do it.

Ben (01:09:54):

Very good advice. In fact, I think I will make that on my list of things to do next year. I haven't been to a student show for quite a number of years but always really like them. I like them in design and furniture as well because I quite like the craft stuff. Okay. And then current projects and things that you are working on. So you've moved to representing potentially on pop art, pop-up gallery type things, and a little bit of collecting yourself. But any current projects you want to talk about?

Florrie (01:10:22):

Yeah. I mean, I touched on it. I'm hoping to do a pop-up exhibition on Brynhild Parker; the East London artist I mentioned who was very active in the 1930s. I have a group of her paintings so I intend to do an exhibition pop-up hopefully in the spring. So that's my main focus at the moment.

Ben (01:10:49):

Great. Would you like to end with any advice for our listeners? You could think about that as advice for artists or advice for someone who wants to take a career as a gallery person or a mudlarker, or anything you'd like to share about your life experiences so far?

Florrie (01:11:09):

Oh my gosh. I don't know that I'm the best person to give advice but I've always done what I love and it gives me great satisfaction. You can always find your people, you can always find your niche even just by going online. It's amazing how the world opens up. As long as you are doing something that you're passionate about, you should be okay. And I think it's okay to monetize your passion as well. I mean, you know I'm an art dealer. Maybe I've sold my soul, I don't know. But I mean, I don't see it that way. I just think I love art, I love dealing in it. That's how I earn my living and it gives me great pleasure.

Ben (01:12:09):

That seems like excellent advice. So Florrie Evans, thank you very much.

Florrie (01:12:14):

Thanks, Ben.

Saloni Dattani: improving science, important questions in science, open science, reforming peer review | Podcast

Saloni Dattani is a founding editor at Works in Progress, a researcher at Our World in Data and a commissioning editor at Stripe Press. She has recently been profiled by Vox as part of the Future Perfect 50. Saloni is an excellent thinker on progress and science with recent articles for Wired (on making science better) and Guardian (on challenge trials). Her substack is here and twitter here.

Saloni tells me what are the most important questions in science that we should be working on.

We discuss making science better and thinking around challenge trials, making science more open source, reforming peer review and thinking around experimental clinical trial design.

We talk about vaccines, why Saloni might have room for optimism and what risks and opportunities around science she is thinking about.

…there are two points that I have that I think about when it comes to optimism. The first is that we already have lots of tools that can make the world better that just aren't being used as much as they could be. Global health is a really good example of that. So we have lots of vaccines and treatments that have huge benefits to people who take them, but much of the world doesn't take them yet. One example is influenza vaccines which have varying efficacy, but they're usually quite effective and yet most countries don't routinely give them out to people even though they could massively reduce the burden of hospitalizations and respiratory disease and so on. There are many other examples of treatments like that where we already have these things but they're just not implemented widely. That gives you some optimism but also makes me a bit cynical about why we aren't even using what we have.

Then the second part is more about the frontier and having new technology developed. I think on that it's kind of difficult to predict how much progress is possible on those areas, but it's also useful to see how things have changed over time. So genome sequencing is one example where the cost of sequencing is dropped from millions of dollars in the early two thousands to now just a few hundred. What that means is that we can collect much more data than we could in the past. We can understand things that we couldn't before. Sequencing is hugely important for understanding how our cells work but also how viruses and bacteria work.

It just means that we have much more scope to make progress on treatments and vaccines than we did in the past. So that's something that I'm hopeful about. So there's various technology that drives the ability of researchers to make advances in these fields. But I also kind of avoid taking any stance on whether I'm an optimist or not. I think it's helpful to just see how things are, see how things have been, and treat everything as potentially different from other examples and just look at the facts of what's happening in that particular area. Sometimes there's room for optimism and sometimes there isn't…

Borrowing from Tyler Cowen, I ask: 

How ambitious are you ?

Which of your beliefs are you least rational about?”  (Or what is she most irrational about?)

What is something esoteric you do ?

We play over rated / under rated on:

  • Substack

  • Misinformation

  • Doing a PhD

  • Women in Science

  • Vaccines and Drugs

We end on Saloni’s current projects and advice.

Podcast available wherever you get podcasts, or below.  Transcript follows.

PODCAST INFO

Transcript: Saloni Dattani and Ben Yeoh (only lightly edited)

Ben

Hey everybody. I'm super excited to be speaking to Saloni Dattani. Saloni is a founding editor at Works in Progress, a researcher at Our World in Data, and a commissioning editor at Stripe Press. She's an excellent thinker on progress and science and has recently been profiled by Vox as part of the Future Perfect 50. Saloni, welcome.


Saloni

Hello. Thank you for inviting me onto your podcast.



Ben (00:29):

You're most welcome. So to start off, what do you think are the most important questions in science or meta science that we should be working on today?



Saloni (00:39):

That's a really good question. I think the most important questions are thinking about what scientific publishing is going to look like in the future. So currently, a lot of academic research gets published in journals, and journals are very connected to what they used to be like before the internet. So they're published in a static format, they don't get updated very easily, their citations are kind of difficult to follow, and it's also hard to put together research with comments from other experts and criticism. All of that means that things are happening quite slowly in a lot of academic fields. And I think what we're seeing now is that people are trying to think of other ways of publishing. So for example, publishing on GitHub or on forums, and you can often see comments between different experts on the same topic. It's a huge change, but I still feel like it's just the beginning of what could be done. I think how to develop that further in a way that allows people to contribute to science but also has some kind of moderation or some ability to filter out the good and the bad will be really important.



Ben (02:15):

I had Alec Stapp on the podcast who made a similar kind of idea for think tanks or policy pieces in general; that you put out a white paper and it's a very old school way of doing it. And policy makers as well haven't adapted for the internet age. I guess you had the recent article out in Wire talking about how to make science better. I feel this comes under maybe one of your items of make science more open source. What do you think about expanding on that idea and maybe we can talk about three or four of your other ones as well. But I guess this is the making science open source. Is it just building on things we have like GitHub and things like that? Or do you think there should be some other system or something we should develop to help that open source ecosystem?



Saloni (03:04):

Yeah. So I think GitHub is a really good starting point. So what GitHub does is it allows you to share your data and your code for whatever analysis you've done. It means other people can comment on those. They can also branch out so they can kind of reuse your code and change it slightly to adapt it to whatever they're doing. It's a really cool way to publish science because it means that people can contribute from anywhere around the world. That's something that was done during Covid. So a lot of research groups published their data on GitHub and then had hundreds or thousands of people from across the world commenting and pointing out that like, "This country had missing data for these three weeks and something's gone wrong." Or they've contributed in a way that helps people automatically update their data sets.



That's a very good way to publish science, I think. But it also doesn't really work for a lot of fields; a lot of fields that don't have analyses that are written in computer scripts. It also doesn't fit some of the things that we want. So it doesn't make it easy for people to add a kind of review, comments from other experts. It doesn't allow you to connect different research pieces together. So I think there's a lot of scope for new tools and platforms to be created and I want to see how that happens. Then the second part is I also think that there are lots of new tools that could be created in terms of making sure that people aren't plagiarizing or fabricating their data or manipulating their images and things like that. And that has just started to be developed. So I think some kinds of platforms that allow you to check for errors and things like that could also be much bigger in the future.



Ben (05:09):

I guess that rolls round into your idea on reforming peer review. That's some way you could do that check and balance. Like if the image is too perfect which is often something that people done. I'm sure AI or some sort of computational manner can pick that up more easily. But is there anything more to your idea of reforming peer review which isn't just about the system?



Saloni (05:33):

So in terms of the system, do you just mean what gets checked or...?



Ben (05:39):

Yeah. I guess the system of journals which you're kind of indicating is not fit for purpose and then you've got new things like GitHub. I guess is there anything around the particular peer review idea which you're kind of thinking about? You highlighted some of the problems like checking for errors or false data and things like that. I think in your article you make the point that if you ask-- Papers always claim that you can ask for the data, but if you actually go and ask the academics, “Do you have your data?” then a lot of the time they've lost it or they didn't really have it or it's moved on system. It's not even necessarily in bad faith, they just didn't keep it right. So there's kind of these crossing checks and balances which aren't really great, I guess in terms of thinking about peer review.



Saloni (06:24):

Yeah. I mean, that is such a strange issue. I just find it so strange that email is the way that we are supposed to get people's data instead of it just being stored in some repository where anyone can access it. But in terms of how else we can reform peer review, I think one great idea that is starting to get traction is this idea of having some kind of centralized platform where you submit your research to this central platform which connects to various reviewers. They comment on the paper, help you improve it, and then it gets published in a journal. I recently just today saw that that is happening with registered reports. So registered reports are this type of academic paper where you submit your methods and your introduction or hypothesis for what you want to find, people comment on it and make sure that the whole analysis is done correctly. And then you start actually analyzing or collecting your data, and then you publish the results no matter what they show. So that kind of avoids the issue of publication bias where people decide not to publish certain things because they didn't like the results or they change the analysis after they've found the results or so on.



So that's something that I've just seen today has been developed by Chris Chambers who is a meta scientist, who's one of the editors at Cortex, this neuroscience journal. So what they plan to do is have people submit their papers to the central system where reviewers review the paper and then after that it gets sent to a different neuroscience journal. That seems like a great way to do it. Not just because you are kind of avoiding the publication bias issue, but also because it means you only have to submit your paper to a journal once and then it just gets connected to the journals. Whereas currently it's the journals themselves who are trying to find reviewers and doing it very badly because each of them don't have that many connections. They can't really track how much time people have to review papers. It's just a very strange system. So having the central platform which is connected to loads of different researchers would be a huge benefit.



Ben (09:05):

That seems to me dividing up the labor in the journal side of the system. But you also seem to have some ideas about dividing up labor within the research ecosystem itself. Would you like to touch upon that and how that occurred to you in terms of like, well actually if you could divide up labor and research that might be also more effective for science?



Saloni (09:27):

Yeah, definitely. For me, it's quite a personal experience where I realized that I really enjoy some parts of this scientific endeavor. I like reading past research. I like summarizing it. I like writing manuscripts. I don't really like coding so much and I don't really like going out and presenting my work and finding people to collaborate with. What I've found is that other people really enjoy those things and don't enjoy writing or reading very much, and other people are really good at running lab experiments. It's very strange because each of these skills take so long to develop. You have this deep learning curve when you're starting out on the process, but you also have to spend a lot of time to maintain those skills and keep them up with the latest developments in the field. And it just doesn't seem very efficient to be trying to do that for every single role that's part of the scientific industry.



So what I think is that if we allow people to have much more focus on the things that they're interested in or the things that they're skilled at, it just means everything becomes more efficient and also improve its quality. So I can spend time on the things that I'm very good at and team up with someone else who can manage the data or runs scripts for me and that's something that they enjoy as well. It's very similar to the origin or one of these ideas from Adam Smith's story of the pin factory where people are specializing in different parts of manufacturing a pin. You increase the production of pins enormously just by putting these different pieces together instead of having one person do everything. So I think that kind of approach to science would allow much more science to be done at a higher quality, at a higher speed. And also it would mean that we could open up the scientific process to people not just in academia, but also like software engineers, data people, writers and so on.



Ben (11:57):

Yeah. It's really obvious to me when I was at university that you had some lecturers who just weren't very good at lecturing or teaching or they didn't want to, but they were brilliant scientists. Their papers were brilliant. It always seemed like, "Well, why do you have to do the teaching?" And vice versa; some people teaching maybe didn't want to do as much lab work. And we have these, I guess they're not so much fledgling fields anymore, but I guess they sort of are like science communication or even climate change science communication. It's obvious to me they are separate disciplines. You can do that really well. You don't have to be an atmospheric scientist to be able to put together complex systems work. Actually, you get to Adam Smith's point, comparative advantage over that. So I do think that's quite interesting.



And a lot of other industries obviously do that. Would that flow into your ideas of also streamlining experiments? You can get people doing their little bit and then perhaps improving on that bit. I guess the other bit you talk about is collecting routine data which seems a little bit different. But it does occur to me that the kind of people or organizations collecting some of that data may not be what you would traditionally have thought of as a science organization, right? There could be some public body or even a private body. There is some very interesting data set. They should just collect it or maybe be paid to collect it somehow and then that's a resource that people can use.

Saloni (13:23):

Yeah. So streamlining is this idea that you have lots of experiments running in a parallel way. So the aspects of experiments that are routine or shared can be managed by a different group in the same way that you have specialization within a field. One of the examples that I give there is the recovery trial in the UK. So what happened there was this was a very large randomized control trial that had around 20 different treatments. Patients in the NHS were connected to this trial and could volunteer for it. And as the pandemic went on, they would be randomized to different treatments but within the same trial. So you wouldn't need to set up the whole organization, you wouldn't need to recruit patients for each one separately.



You would analyze their data in the same way, look at the same outcomes, and it would mean that you could make better comparisons between them, but it would also save a lot of time and costs and effort in setting these things up. So the difficulty there is actually setting it up in the right way and making sure that you're not having this badly organized thing that affects every experiment. But I think there's a lot of scope for that to be done well if there are people who are able to learn from experience and do these-- Running a trial is very difficult. Operating a trial in practice is very difficult and I'm sure there's people who have been doing that for a very long time. It just makes much more sense to give them the ability to run the practical aspects of it while the smaller research groups are able to specify what specifically needs to be done in their part of the trial.



Ben (15:25):

I reflect that actually I currently think that the classic standard so-called RCT sort of double blind placebo controlled trial is a little bit overrated. Obviously it's extremely good, but it means that people haven't thought about these other ways of doing trials. Trials which can change over time and these more up to date statistical methods. So I was wondering whether you think experimental design has actually maybe moved ahead a little bit further but we don't do enough. One very classical element of this, and I think you've written about it as well, is on the so-called challenge trial particularly for type of infectious type things where there was a reasonable amount of pushback for certain bioethical point of view. But if you looked at it in total population utility and other things, there was a lot of people saying, "Well, we would potentially save a lot of lives or get a lot of other information quicker."



And there was perhaps a little bit. But again, it hasn't really developed as I thought it might. So I'd be interested in whether you think experimental design might be, whether we should perhaps look at challenge trials or other parts of design more? I guess we had a recent Nobel Prize winner in terms of discontinuity designs and other sort of designs as well which has obviously really helped the field. And I kind of feel there is just so much there but it hasn't filtered down. I'm sort of quite a far way observer of it then. So I’d be interested in your view; challenge trials and general experimental design.



Saloni (16:58):

Yeah. I would say I'm a huge fan of randomized control trials just because they're very helpful when you don't know how the mechanism of something works. Usually when you have a study where you're trying to just use data that's already observed, you're not running an experiment or manipulating something that requires you to have some understanding of what the confounders are or how people might select into receiving the treatment and so on. What a randomized control trial lets you do is kind of avoid a lot of those questions and just using the process of randomly allocating someone to the placebo or treatment how that affects their outcomes. But at the same time, randomized control trials are not very old. The first one was run in the 1940s and with time they've had various developments along the way.



So a lot of the procedures that we consider part of the traditional randomized control trials have only been developed in the last 20 years or so. So for example, for clinical trials they're now all registered online. So the methods and the things that will be measured are declared before the trial is run. That didn't happen in the past. And also blinding, for example, is relatively new. So I expect that these things will continue to advance and change in the future. And so with this example of what's called a platform trial where you can allocate people to different drugs at different times, that's also quite new. I think it's just another part of the evolution of these journals and it's a cool thing to see how they develop.



In terms of challenge trials, I think challenge trials are a bit tricky. Sometimes they're very useful and sometimes they're not. So with a usual randomized control trial, what you do is you give people a vaccine or a placebo for example, and then you just kind of wait until they get infected on their own by the infectious disease, by the pathogen and you see how those rates vary between the two groups who were randomly given the vaccine or not. That can often take a really long time. So because you're just waiting and watching for them to get infected, if the disease is rare or if it doesn't cause symptoms in many people, you might miss a lot of the people who get infected. In contrast with that, what a challenge trial does is you deliberately give people the pathogen and you can then see the effects of the vaccine if there is an effect in a very short amount of time because you're controlling when you give it to them, you're controlling the doses that you're giving and the routes, and you're monitoring them in a much more controlled environment.



So the main benefits of challenge trials are that they can be much faster. They can involve much fewer participants like sometimes a hundred versus thousands in a usual trial. It just means that you get this data much quicker. But the problems are that you have to actually be able to develop the pathogen in the lab and be able to give it to each of these participants. And that can be hard. So you might not be able to culture the pathogen in the lab. You might not be able to give it to them in the same way that they would receive it in the outside world. You also have to figure out the right dosing. So if you give people too much of the pathogen then they might just get infected regardless of whether they got the vaccine or placebo, even if the vaccine is usually helpful in an outside setting.



So those kinds of questions are difficult and they make challenge trials currently not as useful as they could be. But at the same time, they're very helpful for some diseases. So I've recently written about how they're going to be the best way to test vaccines for Zika virus disease because the disease is now in this trough and there just aren't that many cases worldwide and we don't know when the next wave will come. So if we want to prepare for that, we have to try out these new methods at least making sure that people are informed about what the risks are and willing to take those risks and also kept in this safe environment where they can easily be treated if anything happens.



Ben (21:56):

So they have a role; there are downsides, but there are upsides too. So in specific circumstances maybe we should be looking more closely at them. You've written a really great piece on depression I think on World in Data. So I was interested in your view as to maybe what's most misunderstood about depression? I guess there are various types. And whether maybe overall depression drugs are overrated or underrated, or I'm sure you're going to talk about the nuance that actually it probably depends. But I'd be interested in your research on looking at the overall depression field and what you think.



Saloni (22:32):

Yeah. Good question. So I think what's most underrated about depression is that it's not that recognizable. Sometimes we have this image sometimes of someone who's just sad and no matter what they do they're unhappy. They just don't react positively to anything. The main quality that we associate with depression is just sadness. It can be a lot more than that. It can be different from that. It can involve just lots of tiredness and anxiety, feeling very guilty about themselves or feeling thoughts of death and so on. Sometimes it can involve people who are sad overall but can react positively to good news. It can last several months and sometimes people don't realize that they're depressed because they don't have those classic symptoms of just pure sadness.



I think those symptoms are one of the least understood, the least known parts of the condition. So it's not the case that just because it involves other symptoms that it's like a very loose criteria. To get a diagnosis of depression you need to have these symptoms almost every day for two weeks at least. It involves two main symptoms. So either sadness or a loss of interest in your usual activities along with at least five other symptoms. So that can be quite a high threshold, but it's also not that uncommon for people to have it.



Ben (24:28):

And those five other symptoms you can almost draw from them from quite a large pool. Reading your work it was kind of like, "Wow, there's these hundred other of symptoms that might be slightly large.” But the mix of the five can be almost any sort of mix which is why you might miss it. You've obviously got the sadness and loss of interest. But you often miss it because it's like, "Well, it could be these five or it could be a combination of these five and they all kind of make sense.” I hadn't understood that kind of complexity or broadness of it. And then the fact that depression drugs, your sort of first line of treatment, a lot of them kind of work for some people and then they often stop working and you sort of recycle through them. So I think in general they're probably quite useful for a whole bunch of people but obviously they don't work for everyone. I didn't know if you had any thoughts on looking at the use of the drugs.





Saloni (25:19):

Yeah. What's difficult with that is it's actually not easy to tell whether they've worked at an individual level. If you think about maybe your own experience of being happy or sad during different weeks, you have various changes. So some days you'll feel happier, some days you'll feel worse, and these things also continue over weeks or months. And because there's so much variation within each person, even if a treatment is reducing your symptoms by 30% or whatever that means-- Even if it is reducing your symptoms by 30%, you still might be having some really bad days at the end of a trial, for example. So that's why we need to look at these kind of group differences. So the difference between the whole group who's taking the antidepressants and the whole group who's taking the placebo.



And when we do that, we usually do see a sort of moderate effects of antidepressants where it tends to reduce the probability that people will still have a diagnosable depression at the end by about 30% or so. I would say that is underrated by some and overrated by others. So clearly it could be a lot better than that. But that's still a big effect considering these are just small pills and we don't really have a great understanding of how depression even works. Despite that, we have seen many studies confirm that these treatments actually do work. They work around as well as behavioral therapy or talking therapies and so on. I think they're quite useful especially for people who don't have the time to go out and get therapy or are just in these desperate situations where they need something to work quickly. So I think they have an important use but they're also quite misunderstood. I think it’s also a mistake to necessarily think that because one person doesn't feel much better at the end of it that it didn't work for them even. But also there is variation between how different people experience them.



Ben (27:46):

It's the challenge of the kind of individual dynamic versus the population statistics. I was speaking to David Spiegelhalter who looks a lot of stats and he makes the same one. Classically there's alcohol and also statins, big population things. You can see a population effect but you might not see it on the individual effect. In fact, the individual might have a preference to go the other way but not hopeful on the population stats. I hadn’t understood it's a sort of well understood statistical, almost paradox. So thinking maybe on a higher level about optimism and opportunities and then maybe also risks. When I read your work, one of the things I like about it is it's-- I guess I would say cautiously optimistic. There's a lot of things you sort of say like, "Well, yes, there's a lot of things wrong and we could do things better, but we could do things better." And I like that.



So I was wondering what you were maybe most optimistic about or things generally that you see in the world. Obviously there's the improving science part, but do you have room for optimism? And then we can flip on the other side of other kind of risks that you think are underrated that maybe we had to watch out for and mitigate it. But I'm kind of interested in your optimism side because I see that as a very nice thread through your work. Actually, it probably goes through some of the World in Data work and Works in Progress work in general. But this feeling that we can do better and we perhaps are doing better.



Saloni (29:14):

I guess there are two points that I have that I think about when it comes to optimism. The first is that we already have lots of tools that can make the world better that just aren't being used as much as they could be. Global health is a really good example of that. So we have lots of vaccines and treatments that have huge benefits to people who take them, but much of the world doesn't take them yet. One example is influenza vaccines which have varying efficacy, but they're usually quite effective and yet most countries don't routinely give them out to people even though they could massively reduce the burden of hospitalizations and respiratory disease and so on. There are many other examples of treatments like that where we already have these things but they're just not implemented widely. That gives you some optimism but also makes me a bit cynical about why we aren't even using what we have.

Then the second part is more about the frontier and having new technology developed. I think on that it's kind of difficult to predict how much progress is possible on those areas, but it's also useful to see how things have changed over time. So genome sequencing is one example where the cost of sequencing is dropped from millions of dollars in the early two thousands to now just a few hundred. What that means is that we can collect much more data than we could in the past. We can understand things that we couldn't before. Sequencing is hugely important for understanding how our cells work but also how viruses and bacteria work.



It just means that we have much more scope to make progress on treatments and vaccines than we did in the past. So that's something that I'm hopeful about. So there's various technology that drives the ability of researchers to make advances in these fields. But I also kind of avoid taking any stance on whether I'm an optimist or not. I think it's helpful to just see how things are, see how things have been, and treat everything as potentially different from other examples and just look at the facts of what's happening in that particular area. Sometimes there's room for optimism and sometimes there isn't.



Ben (32:03):

So neither a techno optimist nor a doomster. I would add on the genome sequencing which I think is a big thing and then I would pair it with essentially what DeepMind and others have now done on protein folding and AI and computational biology. And I just see like when I speak to computational biologists versus 10 years ago, they kind of think this is magic. It’s equivalent to magic that you see; not quite, but it's a definite step change. Are you worried about anything on the risk side? I guess you've got some people thinking about broad existential risks; so manmade pandemics, nuclear war, those type of things. Or I guess sort of rogue AI or there’s more sort of mundane risks like antibiotic resistance, climate, war currently. I guess you sort of said it was in a balance. Maybe there's something around science. Is there anything you think is particularly underrated or is on your radar screen that you kind of worry about somewhat?

Saloni (33:09):

Pandemics are a big one. So the risks of pandemics come from various different places. There's the risk that a disease emerges in the first place and then the risk that it turns into a large epidemic and then turns into a pandemic. Just because we have so much more travel and globalization means that these things can spread much faster than they could in the past. And also because of how we use land, how we farm animals, how we sort of reuse land for various purposes means that we're encountering animals and plants and various pathogens that we wouldn't have in the past. So that's a kind of growing risk. 



There's also the risk of biosafety from labs, and I think one thing that's very underrated is bio risks from industrial use. So if we have these much larger factories that are using cultured products or whatever biomaterials that has quite a large risk of turning into a big safety issue much more than small research labs. So that's something that I worry about but I also think we have better tools than we could in the past to stop them. We have better tools to understand what they are as soon as they emerge with genomics and so on. It feels like we're kind of playing catch up with the technology versus the risks, but they're also various ways that we can reduce the risks while still having growth and development. So for example, having much more biodiversity conservation, having much more urbanism, having people live in places that are not so risky that we have to worry about these spillovers and so on. Having cultured meat, for example, makes a big difference as well. One of the big drivers of spillovers is factory farming, for example. We have like avian flu very often breaking out around the world. That's something that could be avoided with technology and so on. So yeah, I think that's a big underrated risk.



I also think in general new technologies do often carry risks. So if we look at the 20th century and we look at lead use for example, leaded gasoline and so on, those were big breakthroughs in technology but they also had risks of pollution that people didn't necessarily see at first or didn't take much attention to. And I think we should also be thinking about those happening now. So what are the inventions or tools that we're creating now that have big negative effects that we're not seeing yet? Usually when people say that they are kind of anti-growth and they're afraid of new technology in general, I think if we look at history we have to recognize that these things have happened before with lead, with x-rays for example and so on. And there are many risks that we wouldn't have foreseen at the beginning that we should still be aware of.



Ben (36:52):

That's very balanced. Do you have a view on any of the ideas of effective altruism then? Because it seems that some effective altruist or EAs are very worried about these existential risks or the risks of going too fast in AI. So something bad happens, some of them are very worried on biosecurity. On the other hand, you can say that a lot of this technology is going to happen and it's like how we use antibiotics, how we do cultured meat or whatever which will be there. Where do you think there might be most right or wrong? Or do you have no particular view?



Saloni (37:28):

It's hard to say. I haven't really thought very much about AI in particular. It just seems so out of field for me that I've kind of avoided and stuck with what I think I'm better at. But I think in general, we should take these risks seriously. It's not necessarily the idea that we should just stop technological development in some areas or just try to align it with what would be best for us. In the past there have been lots of examples of these kinds of new technologies just being banned. For example, CFCs which were responsible for the hole in the ozone layer and there were replacement technologies that we could use for them. I think that's kind of one thing that I think is underrated. It’s having this kind of backup or contingency technology that could be used instead if there are growing risks with something that we don't recognize yet. So trying out different things, comparing them, not being satisfied with something that works just because we've looked at how effective it is, but also thinking about are there other options that are safer and effective at the same time and not treating it as a tradeoff between growth and safety. I think you can often just do both.



Ben (38:55):

That seems fair. Okay. I have a couple I guess Tyler Cowen inspired type of questions that he asks on this type of thing. Maybe I'd start one about sort of ambition in the future. So one of the things he ask is, I guess how ambitious are you?



Saloni (39:20):

I think people find it annoying when I tell them that I just don't have ambitions. I don't think I've ever really had ambitions. I have short term goals of projects that I want to complete and things I want to do. I generally want to improve myself and be a better person and so on. But I don't think there are big goals of things that I want to achieve. It's just a path that will kind of emerge and I'll see how things go in my life. I didn't really plan to be where I was. I just kind of tried out different subjects that I was interested in and fell into various jobs along the way. I think it's nice to have an open mind about what the possibilities are just because you don't know what opportunities will arise, but you also don't really know where you'll be when you're able to achieve them.



Ben (40:19):

That's very modest of you because I think you are doing a lot to both improve science and meta science and speaking in public about it which perhaps is not a stated ambition, but I think is a pretty big thing. My next question in this trio is which of your beliefs are you least rational about? In another way he asks it sometimes the thing is, what views do you hold almost irrationally or like a religion?



Saloni (40:51):

Okay. So I think the main one is-- And I feel like this is not really a religious belief. But I think the motivation is what you're getting at. I generally think that it's very important to be honest and transparent in general just because-- My reasoning for that is that you don't know what the consequences of those facts are. So if you're trying to kind of lie or misrepresent something because you want someone to believe a certain version of the fact, you don't know what other consequences that might have, how other people might interpret it and misuse this kind of distortion and how that might affect other research and other views or policies. So I think it's better to just be very transparent and honest with what you're doing just because of that.



There's so many different ways to use this information that you can’t really predict how it should be used in each situation. But at the same time, there are examples of when those things might be more effective if they were slightly distorted. If you kind of downplayed the risks of something that was in general very good, people might be better off in some ways. I think it's very hard to know those things and I think it's better to stick with a rule. Mainly, I feel like it prevents yourself from going down routes that you wouldn't want to.



Ben (42:44):

That's very fair. I'd interpret that as-- to use Tyler Cowen's term generally don't be Straussian. He's got this idea of reading between the lines. I think we saw that in the pandemic. A lot of people even in good faith knew a certain thing but said a certain other thing because they thought that's what was going to help them achieve the original thing which is very meta. I see it actually at the moment on climate. I try and do quite a lot of work on this broad sustainability climate space and I don't quite know what to do about it. But the sort of median scientist or the median paper makes the point that we've come some way, but they also make the point that there's a really big gap between that and where we should be, could be, want to be.

And a lot within the climate community, some who know this don't particularly want to talk about how much we've come through because they want to focus on a kind of either fear or a raising or they have a particular theory of change that they are using which means that they intentionally-- They don't normally misinformed, although I think sometimes they do. But they misinform by omission instead. So it's even sneakier. They’ve got a definite theory of change about it. But I'm a little bit like you. I worry that it first of all isn't correct, and second of all actually has the second and third order bigger impacts. Like well, you've said literally the world will end in 12 years and some people have taken you at those literal words and actually the median scientist is not saying that at all. So 12 years will come around and then some people I'm sure will say, "Wow, look..." Like Nostradamus, the world didn't literally end like that. And it's like, "Well, that's not quite what we're saying."



Saloni (44:43):

It's hard because I feel like when you frame things as something to worry about, some people will take action because of that and other people completely turn off and they just say, "Well, we're doomed anyway. I might as well just not try to improve things." I think there's like a third important factor here as well that when you are truthful and accurate about something, it means that we can understand where exactly the problems still are. If you are being transparent about how much progress has been made in X and how much lack of progress has been made in Y, that's really important because it means that people know where they should focus their attention. Having the ability to compare things in a way that's neutral and not distorted is very important.



Ben (45:34):

I agree. I think it raises trust and I think trust is a very important sort of meta layer. But also when I think you get it right then you can also say, "Look, this is what I really don't know." That's very useful information to know when trusted people really don't know something and that will then inform versus when you have a reasonable chance or reasonably informed on where it is. Okay. The last one in these type of questions goes along the lines of, what is something which is esoteric that you do? So I guess this is, do you have an unusual habit, hobby, belief or action, something that is perhaps a little bit esoteric or weird?



Saloni (46:22):

I'm trying to think of one. I think the only surprising thing that people find about me is that I really love really silly game shoes. I recently watched this show called "Is It Cake?" where there are these bakers who are trying to make these hyper realistic cakes and fool the judges into thinking they’re real objects. I like silly things like that. I really love detective novels and crime shows and things like that. I like film noir, the 1940s and fifties genre of crime and detective films. That also seems odd because I think people often think if you're in this kind of progress studies kind of space that you prefer the modern version of anything that exists. There are often genres that have just faded out just because of fashion. But when they existed they were really good. There are also different things that we focus on now. We have much better ability to take very good cinematography, have lots of cool special effects and stuff like that. What I like about old movies is that because people didn't have that, the only way to really get people's attention or keep them entertained was by focusing on the dialogue and the acting. So those are things that I care about much more when I watch a film. And so it means that I enjoy those kinds of films much more even though they're much less developed in a lot of ways.



Ben (47:58):

I agree. I guess there's a thinker, Nassim Taleb, although it's not just his idea, has called certain things which last lindy which is the idea that things which last are quite important. He tends to go back to ancient Greeks and beyond. But I think it's the true of same of film and books of culture. Books which have actually lasted from the 1800s are usually pretty good even if they're not in fashion. And obviously, movies and films are a little bit of a younger art to those which have survived on the forties, fifties and sixties are actually really good. Mine is children's books. As I like to say, that actually they shouldn't really be called children's books because simply they're books that everyone can read as opposed to books only for adults. I think we're in a kind of golden age of children book writing. It's never been better. There's amazing stories and literature which includes children as well as adults can read. But they usually think quite serious investor, podcaster, sustainability person, why are you reading children's books? But they're really wonderful.



Saloni (49:05):

I mean, children's movies are also quite underrated because people who make them have this very difficult task of keeping children entertained but also keeping their parents entertained. I sometimes watch kids’ shows and stuff and I notice that there are lots of silly jokes and very plain dialogue, but at the same time they also have these more sophisticated jokes that I assume they're just there because parents might be watching them. It's cool to see-- I think it's not the case that they're only targeted at kids.



Ben (49:39):

For sure. You see that in a bunch of Pixar type movies but you also see it in, for instance, some Japanese anime or the Studio Ghibli work which actually doesn't always have adult in jokes. It's just very beautifully done storytelling which can then appeal to everyone from the age of four to a hundred and beyond. I actually think in some ways that's some of the pinnacle of storytelling when it appeals to everyone and not just certain groups. But yes, reasonable people can disagree on that. Okay. So I thought maybe we have a short section on overrated and underrated and then we'll come to the end. Although I think couple of these might be obvious from where the conversation is going. But overrated or underrated, vaccines in general?



Saloni (50:31):

Very underrated, I think. People don't realize how much progress we've had because of vaccines. In many countries they're so widely used that we don't actually see the counterfactual. We don't see how much disease would be spreading without them. It's hard to see how they could be overrated. I think people often don't understand how vaccines have worked historically. They don't realize that many of these vaccines get better with taking several doses. They don't realize that they don't have super high efficacy but that isn't necessarily a reason to down rate them because if you have very high coverage and also depending on how the vaccine works, you could reduce the transmission of the disease to a much greater extent than like... Say polio vaccines have a 60% efficacy of reducing the disease by that much in a single person who takes them. But if everyone takes them, the disease can't really transmit between them and also because of how a vaccine works, it reduces transmission much more than it reduces infection. So it prevents the spread of disease in a much bigger way. And I think that's also something that people tend to not realize and tend to not put into the calculation.



Ben (52:05):

And would you say the same on pharmaceutical drugs in general?



Saloni (52:13):

It's such a wide range. I think many drugs are very underrated. Especially in psychiatry, I think people tend to talk about psychiatry as an area where we haven't had that much progress or things were just in the same place that we were 50 or 60 years ago. And that's just not true. We have so many treatments that work. We have so many treatments now that focus much more on their safety profiles where they're just as effective as they were before but they're much less toxic and they have much fewer side effects. That's also really important because if people are going to take medications on a long term basis, you really don't want them to be developing other problems as well. So I think in general that's quite underrated. But at the same time, we also haven't had that much experimentation on new types of treatments that could be made and so there's a lot of scope for development there.



Ben (53:16):

Great. Overrated or underrated then, doing a PhD?



Saloni (53:22):

Good question. I mean, it really depends on what you want out of it. For me, I haven't really been interested in academia from the beginning. I did my PhD because I wanted to develop the skills that I would get from a PhD like being able to read the research and learning about various methods and so on. But I think many people-- If you're planning on being a full-time researcher in a specific field, then it totally makes sense to do a PhD and it also kind of allows you to focus on this one big project for a few years in a way that you often can't when you're older because you have other students to manage and grounds to apply for and so on. But I think it really depends on the person. If that's not something you want, then it doesn't really make sense to do it. But there are also other benefits of doing a PhD just because of the social structure of how things work. PhDs tend to just put you on track for a higher salary or they make it easier to migrate to certain countries and so on and people don't factor those in. Not that things should be that way, but they are beneficial in other ways apart from academia.



Ben (54:44):

Yeah. The second order benefits from all of that. Women in the sciences?





Saloni (54:53):

I don't understand how underrated and overrated can apply.



Ben (54:59):

Well, I guess we could go do you think there's significant underrepresentation and that's a problem? Or are you more kind of like, "Well, it's maybe not such of a problem?"



Saloni (55:13):

I think underrated. I think there could be a lot more women doing science. I think what's difficult about science is we have different gender roles and expectations in terms of what we expect from careers and how much work people spend at home or with children. But also academia is very high pressure and you're expected to be continuously doing research for a very long time at a very high rate of publication and so on. And what that means is that even though there are lots of brilliant women who are great scientists, they often drop out along the career progression just because it's difficult to flexibly work on research and also care for their children or whatever they want to do. I think there needs to be a lot more flexibility in what we expect from people and how we structure career progression in academia just to allow for that. And for that reason, I think it's underrated and women are highly underrepresented especially at the later career stages.



Ben (56:31):

Yeah, I agree. I'm quite distant from it, but I see it as generally a problem for science because if it means that there's a big pool of people which on average should be adding a lot and you're not accessing that talent pool, then your science is going to be significantly worse than it could before, I think to your point, reasons which you should be able to at least mitigate a lot more. We seem to have the same problem in economics as well. I mean, maybe you could roll that into science under the social science banner and that seems to have flared up. Again, I'm quite distant for it but it seems quite problematic if you don't have these talent pools. I guess you could extend that to the whole of Africa to some degree like that. But I think it's even obvious within that. Great. So last couple on here. Overrated or underrated, misinformation?



Saloni (57:32):

I'm going to assume that means the impact of misinformation.



Ben (57:35):

I guess you could take it there. Impacts of misinformation or whether perhaps there isn't as much misinformation out there as might be deemed. That's another way you could take it.



Saloni (57:46):

Yeah. I think underrated. Maybe overrated in the sense that people don't just believe anything that they hear. But at the same time, there are memes and things that get shared much more widely and much more frequently than they did in the past just because we have different ways to communicate than we used to. Having all of these WhatsApp forwarding groups and things like that means that communication is very different from what it used to be. So I generally think it's underrated. I feel like it's something that we haven't yet learned how to tackle or moderate correctly and it's something that we're still kind of catching up with. I don't think that there needs to be a trade off again between how much we communicate and whether misinformation occurs, but I think we're just not very good at putting it into context and helping people understand things accurately.





Ben (58:55):

Yeah. I think I agree. That vaccine issue, some of it during pandemic certainly seemed to be misinformation or some people would say disinformation. And then we refer to the climate thing. I think there might be an issue there as well maybe on both sides. So I think it is probably a bigger problem than some people think. But yeah, not exactly sure. The last one on this, writing a newsletter. What everyone is doing nowadays it's via Substack. So underrated or overrated endeavor?



Saloni (59:28):

I think underrated. I think Substack is really cool because blogs had this problem that people didn't really follow updates when they came out. So for example, I'd love somebody's blog but I'm not going to check their Twitter feed all the time to see if they have a new blog post. I don't really use RSS. And even RSS doesn't really give me the information at once. It just tells me that there's something new. The thing that's different about newsletters is that it just gives you a lot of information on a platform that you're already using like email. So it means that you can keep up with writers that you really like but also you don't have to be reading all of their stuff. You're just kind of having this feed in your inbox. And obviously some people just use it as a blog. So they just have their usual blog post type formats and then you don't have to subscribe. The fact that you can do both on these platforms I think is very cool.



Ben (01:00:30):

Great. And on that note, you should subscribe to Saloni's Substack which I think is Scientific Discovery. Is that what you named it in the end?



Saloni (01:00:37):

Yeah.

Ben (01:00:38):

Great. So last couple of questions. What are the projects you're working on now or future projects or things that you are excited about?



Saloni (01:00:48):

I'm currently working on this big-- I've just started this big project at Our World in Data on the history of pandemics. So what I'm looking at is essentially just putting together good estimates of the mortality of various pandemics in history. The reason for that is that currently the collections that you see online when you try to Google for how many deaths were caused by each pandemic come from different sources, but often they're also not even cited. So you have these infographics where it shows the size of each pandemic and then there's just no references at all or the references are very dated and you don't know where they come from. So what I'm trying to do is put together good estimates for each big pandemic that we know of and that will hopefully be useful for many people. So I'm currently just going through each one, one at a time, looking for good data sources and methods and putting together these numbers.



Ben (01:01:50):

That sounds really exciting. I was speaking to Mark Koyama the other week who does economic history. He was looking at economic history cross with Black Death and there was a lot which came from that. But there are issues with the data and I don't think there's been so much studied on other pandemic. So that could be a really exciting data project for a lot of people. And then last question is, do you have any advice or thoughts for listeners out there? Maybe young, independent researchers thinking about wanting to make an impact in the world or any other sort of life advice or thoughts that you might have?





Saloni (01:02:29):

I feel like it's so hard for me to give life advice because I often feel like a lot of things that I'm doing just kind of happen by chance. Like I just knew the right people, things were happening at the right time. I also have been doing lots of different things at the same time. That means that I've had many different opportunities than people would usually have. I think if you're someone who doesn't really know what they want to do in the future, doesn't have a particular interest, then my advice is to just keep your options open. Just try out different things and see how they go and take opportunities as they arise. Whereas if you really do know what you want to do, then focus on a good way to do that. Focus on what you're good at.



Ben (01:03:18):

That makes a lot of sense. But I guess that was partly your early career tactic was to do a lot of things and then you get cross links between those or different networks and then you don't, like you say-- Although you seem to fall into it by accident under one reading, another reading is that you kind of made your own luck by trying out lots of things.



Saloni (01:03:38):

Yeah. I mean, I feel very fortunate. I do work hard, but it still feels so weird that I'm doing all these different things and it feels very much up to chance.



Ben (01:03:51):

Great. I saw you did some travel this year. You've been to India, you went to Italy. Other places that you still have on your bucket list that you really want to go to? I kind of assume that you think travel is underrated still. Or somewhere you've been in the last few years you thought was really brilliant and you'd want to go back?

Saloni (01:04:12):

So I was in Florence for a conference in Italy and it was amazing. I've never felt so happy to see old architecture but also how... The history of Florence is really interesting. I listened to loads of podcasts while I was there while just walking around the city. I really like places that are very walkable, where there's lots of history, and there's lots of culture. There are so many places that I haven't been to. I think lots of Europe I haven't really been to. I also want to go to those big national parks in America. I haven't been to America at all in my life except for once when I was two years old and I don't remember that obviously. So I would love to go sometime. I think I should have some time to go next year and so hopefully that'll be good.



Ben (01:05:15):

Great. Well on that note, Saloni, thank you very much.



Saloni (01:05:19):

Thank you.


Why host events, talent, unconference, weak social ties

I recommend Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross’ book on Talent. I’m still sifting through my notes as the book applies to both how I think about people I collaborate in my theatre making as well as my Angel investing, microgrant making and my main job of global equity investing. 

I wanted to pull out one idea which is almost an aside in the book. The holding of an unstructured event/meet-up/conference. The unstructured part is important.  They write: 

Send Them to an Event (or Create an Event) One advantage of an event is that it may expose the attendee to top achievers and performers and help make those trajectories vivid alternatives. In those regards the event is similar to a travel grant, except you are sending them to a location that is important only temporarily. But event attendance may serve other purposes as well. An event may convince the attendee that a social or tech movement is real, or that it is benevolent, or that it is popular and desirable to belong to, or that it is not crazy. Events make that knowledge vivid in a way that reading about a movement does not: “Look, here are all the other people interested in nuclear fusion!”—or cryptocurrency, or venture capital. For exactly the same reason, events are risky, as they may scare some people off (“Hey, those people are crazy!”). Usually, though, the scared-off individuals were not going to make major contributions to that cause anyway, and so event attendance speeds up their possible reallocation to another cause or venture, one that might prove a better match. Or maybe those people really are crazy; if so, it’s better to find that out sooner rather than later. Events are an accelerated test of cultural fit. Creating your own event is costly in terms of time and money, but it can be an ideal way of raising the aspirations of those you consider talented. You get to control everything, from the invitees to the program to what they will eat for breakfast. Daniel has organized successful events for Pioneer winners, and Tyler has done the same for Emergent Ventures. But here is the important thing to understand about organizing your own event: the group has to gel. You can raise their aspirations a bit, but the group itself creates most of its own dynamic and its own theater. The members of the group will raise each other’s aspirations, at least if you have selected well and structured your event to give them enough interaction with each other. When the leader (you) and the peers are pushing in a common direction—the raising of aspirations—the effect can be very powerful indeed. But you will need to give them the freedom of letting them contribute to defining what the group is all about. [BY: my emphasis]


When I went to check out the Effective Altruism, EAG conference,  there was an element of this, EA were raising each other’s aspirations but I don’t think the main structure of the EAG I went to is quite the best. (I am told UnConference formats happen in their smaller events).


Much better, in my view are forms of “UnConference”. Tyler Cowen hosts one for Emergent Venture winners very much in this model. Kyle writes about the EV 2021 UnConference here.


I have co-hosted with my Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator friends now two Unconferences with sustainability themes. Here is Nina Klose on coming to my UnConference. Attendees who have been both to Tyler’s and my UnConferences report there are differences (I used a moderator to help people along) but the vibe and principles work similar. People found much value in the events and much more fun than a “standard” conference.  I also host even less structured mingle/parties.


I have several reasons for this. First, I think there is much (under-rated) value in “weak social ties” (here is the wiki on the work, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties). These connections are valuable to everyone. 


Second, in particular for UnConferences you have these benefits:


Advantages

  • (Easier) Discovery of people with similar project interests 

  • More inclusive, less hierarchical 

  • Opportunity for everyone to share ideas 

  • Higher use of agency

 Although there can still be disadvantages… Disadvantages : Can be harder for introverts, can still be dominated by extravert characters and less well known norms can leave people uncertain on how to react.


if you are trying to solve problems by creating more social capital and ideas is a much better form of conference. There is much more interaction and the interaction is with like-minded peers who have typically selected themselves for a similar broad purpose. 


Lastly, there is the point on Talent that Cowen and Gross are making. These forms of unstructured meet-ups are an excellent way of gaining sense of whether you might have a talent fit if you are looking to hire or collaborate with new people. I found a recent hire this way, or perhaps, a recent hire found me this way as well - as the process is two way.


Many more soft skills, characteristics and a muce border and deeper sense of understanding about someone is discovered in these types of events. They synergise well with information you will glean from an interview but I suggest they will be much more revealing. UnConferences are also much much more fun.

ThenDoBetter Grant winner: Bryan Kam

I awarded a grant to Bryan Kam, he writes:

I am developing a methodology for healthy philosophical inquiry, which aims to provide better strategies for thinking about problems at an individual and collective level. This approach will identify warning signs in thinking and discourse. I’ll propose strategies which have worked historically to prevent us from doing either too much abstraction without testing, or too much action without reflection.

Philosophy must be contextual and alive. It is just as dangerous to leave intellectuals in an insulated realm of abstractions as it is to encourage unwise action by those with no understanding of history and theoretical context.

I think of this approach as “neither pure theory nor pure action, but both at once” or Neither/Nor for short. We need both strategies to thrive.

The current consensus is that truth is something objective and static, and that the scientific method is the only way to unveil this truth. This narrow conception of truth, which restricts how science must be practiced and communicated (“scientism”) impedes us rather than empowering us and is preventing the experimentation we need for progress. Thus, rather than something static we uncover, we should be aiming for a practical methodology for inquiry.

I do not oppose science but I believe that a narrow vision of it will limit our ability to understand the problems we face. However, I also oppose relativism and resist the modern tendency to dichotomize which makes it easy to leap to the conclusion that if there is no objective truth, then the only alternative is the opposite extreme: “everything is equal.”

As the first part of this project, I am working on an article, which will become a chapter in a book that I’m writing, about how a better understanding of philosophy and history can help innovation. This is a project I’ve been working on for the past two years (self-funding), but I’m now out of savings, just as I near the first public milestone. As part of writing the article, I plan to record podcasts and video lectures.

My main goal for this stage and for all my work is to move beyond theoretical formulations. I seek to also test and enact the conceptual framework I am elaborating, through a series of dialogical experiments. In the near future, I will look at how conceptions of selfhood have changed over time, and what impact this has had on society. I will question when a commitment to abstract truth might contribute to technological and scientific progress, and when such a commitment might impede progress. I’m also planning a practical guide to the technique of Buddhist “dependent origination,” which promises to end suffering through an analytical method. These would appear in a series of lectures, podcasts, and gatherings.

As part of this effort, I’m drafting video lectures on YouTube. You can also see a 2 minute summary of one of the main ideas here.

The microgrant has allowed me more time to make progress on this writing and the conversations that will support it.

If any of this sounds exciting, I’m searching for collaborators, so please reach out.

If you want daily updates on this work, please check out my Patreon. I post everything there, nearly all of it for free. If you just want the big news, please check out my Substack.

Shape of Friendship

Shape of friendship. I went to my friend, David Finnigan’s, performance piece at the Barbican Theatre, last week.

I took my 10 year old. From what I could tell, there were no other young people in the audience which was a shame in many respects.

A shame because this form of theatre is more relevant, more exciting, more dramatic than, say, a standard piece of Shakespeare performed in a standard type of way.

A shame because if we want to engage young people in live performance, we are still an art form where liveness and vividness counts.

You can observe this in the music gig scene which is still strong.

I also think you can engage young people in serious, fun and thoughtful art from a very young age and that’s better for everyone. In a world where rich nations are - in part - moving more digital and remote, then the importance of liveness and vividness increases.

The Barbican is a living piece of visual and performing art history. Considered a brilliant example of Brutalist architecture, it was considered by the Queen in 1982:

“...one of the wonders of the modern world”

The Barbican is built from and atop ruins from World War 2, atop ruins which stretch to Roman times, atop ruins which stretch back further.

The site is within a javelin distance of where a Roman Amphitheater used to be. There is history that stretches back and back…

Performers and audiences on occasion are sensitive to this history. I have worked in and around the Barbican area, on and off, for 20 - 30 over years.

By no means, do I see even a small sliver of everything at the Barbican but the space has held some of the most profound pieces of human expression that have occurred in modern times across music, dance, theatre and arts.

And so into that space we walk.

David is a friend and we have collaborated. You can listen to us/read on podcast here and below.

It’s a privilege then to see how a show develops (I saw it in one of its earliest incarnations) and live with its creative’s hopes and fears.

Shows performed by friends then have a special resonance. You can not watch them as strangers any more than you can watch friends kiss differently from strangers arriving at a station.

This echo plays into the lives of those who create – and we all create – so plays into all our lives.

My son can have a level of emotion and experience richer for knowing David. Especially in a piece such as this which plays to stories in David’s life.

The show I saw might well be the last time the performance is ever staged.

Certainly, it is the last time it will be staged in that time and place and audience (and so we can suggest all performance is fleeting like this). There is an aphorism which comes about in Open Space and UnConference that people in the room are the ones that matter and thus we can only have the conversations we can have.

Live performances have these lives and these lives are mostly short-lived.

There is a sensation joyous and deep in experiencing live and vivid art with other humans in a fashion never to be repeated.

At its best an urgency and richness which changes you and leaves you changed forever more.

Unlike books or even visual art, performance is not an object to last, performance is a shared experience.

Books and paintings, arguably, are not completed without a reader or a viewer but they can have a life of their own.

Performance lives when experienced together. Anything else is mostly only rehearsal.

Perhaps that is partly why performance through storytelling or dancing seems to have been around before writing and likely at the dawn of homo sapiens.

There is a sadness as well for events that can not be replayed. There is a part of us that wishes to capture part of that dream and bottle the feelings as keepsakes.

Therein lies all the countless visual snaps and videos of live gigs and events hardly ever to be viewed again. The liveness was in the moment and – if we were to be honest – never to be captured again. Live performance shared is a singular experience. Those video snaps are wasted. (Be like the lady at the top photo).

I am both happy and sad then to be part of a final showing. There near the beginning of its journey. There near its end.

David is a newer friend. We first met in the tail end of the last decade. I cherish being able to make new friends and create experiences together.

I cherish that we collaborate deeply in making art.

But, we also tell ourselves the myths that all our types of friendship last forever. Relationships form and crumble. Made and re-made.

Some burnout due to their intensity, others fade due to accidental or intentional neglect. We can be sorry for these things too.

I still have friends from school, but I think I have lost many more. That is not to devalue the friendships when those relationships are alive.

And like that – friendships also are like live performance – they thrive in shared experience, they can end in sadness and in joy, they can go on long lifetime journeys.

We can fool ourselves about them too because someone always dies, and shows always end. 

Still – we can and should nurture and celebrate them where we have them.

Tend, repair and grow – and dare I say perhaps prune – like flabby parts of performance – parts which are already dying

But, if possible, in full recognition of the joy they gave while alive.

What are the shapes of our friendships and relationships? Pocket-shaped, world-shaped, love shaped?

We would not think to measure and manage them.

And so… my tangent into “ESG” - these are the intangible (though sometimes tangible) often difficult, sometimes impossible to measure parts of business, they have a shape and importance, but exactly what that shape is… well perhaps like the shape of friendship.

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Vanishing Asia, Kevin Kelly photos of the past looking forward

I have bought one of the most extraordinary travel photo books. 9,000 photos of a current and vanishing Asia.

On travel photos. The average photo of Kevin Kelly’s is not as “artful” as the equivalent from - for instance - a Magnum photographer (such as Steve McCurry) but this is more than outweighed by the breadth of photographs and its glimpses of the “ordinary”.

When you think about the ordinary you can look at the work of - say - Martin Parr looking at the life of typical British people; their food, their culture, their breakfasts. Or, in the US, deceptively normally, or artfully plain work of William Eggleston. Eggleston influenced Parr and many of those who came after (see image below for glimpse). Touches of Kelly’s photos capture these influences and his look at design, clothing, doors and the like. There is a touch of the pattern book. It does not step into the kitsch or the high (?)  art of Eggleston but it steps into an important area of documentary, nevertheless.

Part of a Parr photo, left; Part of Eggleston’s photo, right.

In the US, there is the work of Diane Arbus for those who are more off-mainstream, or Robert Frank in the Americans. Or further back, Doreathea Lange. Or in another way, Cartier-Bresson. These capture the human portrait and way of an older American life. I see echoes of these in Kelly’s work.

Arbus, left (part of female impersonators). Frank, right (from Americans).

I view all of these photographers as important in the history of visual art and photography and on their influence on culture (partly because of the artists and creatives they influence).  I think this history is understudied. 

In parallel, you have documentary of culture and people as the world has globalised.  This is perhaps less serious for art collectors but no less important for our understanding of the world. 

Kevin Kelly to my mind has photographed perhaps one of the single largest collection of visuals of Asia by a singular individual person over this time. (Selection below, found at Petal Pixel also including essay on his books)

A professional travel photographer such as Steve McCurry has perhaps a wider range of images. I would suggest Magnum and “professional” travel photographers are perhaps more artful in their final selections.

But, Kelly has specifically sought out a vanishing Asia. He has looked for places in people with traditional clothing, clothes and language. And so, in capturing stories, ideas and documentary his books are equal, or arguably, in advance of these travel photographers - as Kelly is capturing a different set of ideas.

He observes that the first items to vanish are traditional costumes, then architecture then music, then food then language. 

He notes while often beautiful, this way of traditional living is often undesirable.  It’s bad for health (indoor fires, poor heating and cooling). It’s bad for liberty and choice. Ornate clothing and jewellery restrict movement and freedom.

He suggest despite the pollution, neglect and chaos of cities, the transformational leap in opportunities for wealth and choice has driven 1 billion Asians to leave their traditional ways to join the cities. Exchanging beautiful homes built by their own hands, organic food grown themselves, dressed in fabrics made by their own hands too.

He ponders that he too would make the same shift. Kelly is a futurist and technologist. Arguably, also one of our great future thinkers  (as befits the founder of Wired, a curator of the Whole Earth Review, creator of cool tools). Perhaps, rarely and counterintuitively, Kelly is keen on remembering these old ways even as he is a supporter of modernisation.

The future never leaves the past behind; it carries the old forward. To steer this future, we need to recall and employ the richness of the past. … I made this book to help transmit this ancient richness into the future.

I agree with much of Kelly’s thinking. His pictures not only tell stories - as mine have done in, for instance, a part of Indonesia even Kelly - has not yet visited, eg Sulawesi - but they record designs, and patterns and ways of life. And with an eye for this, the book is something more than simple travel photos, part pattern book, part history, Kelly documents something more than a vanishing beauty.

Almost $300 dollars / GBP200+ for the collection but worth it, there I think will only be around 5,000 copies and over half (maybe most) have sold already. Amazon link here, but will come from third party sellers if any have stock.