The Braindump Blog

Traditionally, we might have expected the UK’s young people to be more liberal or left-wing than their older counterparts on most topics - see for example which party various age groups voted for in the 2019 general election according to Yougov’s poll. But from a recent report it seems like younger folk are not huge fans of a rather fundamental aspect of liberal democracies - the democracy part.

A poll conducted by J.L. Partners on May 2022 for a report published by Onward, a conservative thinktank, on a sample of UK respondents weighted to be nationally representative on several demographic factors found that young people are not great fans of democracy.

Starting off with a chart shown on page 20 of the report:

We see the younger age brackets having fairly low net support when asked whether a democracy was a a “very good”, “fairly good”, “fairly bad”, or “very bad” way of running the country. Around a quarter of 18-34 year olds felt that democracy is a bad way of governing the country (the equivalent figure for over-55s is 8%).

A similar net proportion of the young thought some kind of technocracy was a good way to run a country as felt the same about democracies.

Admittedly life in the UK doesn’t exactly feel well-governed to many of us at present, to put it politely - so perhaps that’s fairly understandable. A different survey, carried out by IPPR found that only 19% of UK’s 18-24 year olds felt democracy has served them well, vs 55% who say badly. What surprised me a bit more was the support for some of the rather more authoritarian options.

There was a net 23% support for “a strongman who can ignore parliament” as a good way to run the country in 18-34 year olds, vs a negative -42% in > 55 year olds. 60% of the youngest group, 18-24 year olds thought it was a good idea.

Even the rather radical “put the army in charge” only just got a negative support rating in younger cohorts - net disapproval of 8% in 18-34 year olds vs -74% in >55 year olds. 44% of the 18-24 year olds were favourable towards this type of rule.

So is this a young person thing? Maybe despite being liberal in many other domains young folk always think strongman or army rule is a decent option? As well as not really making intuitive sense, it also isn’t the case.

To be honest, I find the even the agreement level in the “good years” surprisingly high - and just look at the 2019 results! - but clearly something changed such that the younger folks still think relying on a single strong leader is a good way forward.

Likewise a pro army rule position has just gotten more and more popular over time, especially in younger cohorts.

Based on this admittedly fairly small time series, it doesn’t look to be a general age effect.

Some of the factors the report suggests are linked to this support for authoritarian rule include:

• Socio-economic circumstances, with the least secure 20% of voters being more than twice as likely as the most secure to say that democracy is a bad way to govern the country.
• Social connection, with people with more friends, or more diverse friend circles, being less likely to support authoritarian rule.
• Political leanings, with socially conservative young people being much more likely than liberal folk to support the strong man or army rule.

A lot of that makes intuitive sense at least on the dislike of democracy side of things. If you live in a democracy and you have a particularly difficult life, why would you feel like it’s a good way to run things?

Thinking one form of rule is a good way to govern a country of course doesn’t rule out also thinking others are. For example, young people who report generally trusting other people are both more likely to support democracy than those who don’t, (81% vs 69%) but also more like to support strongman leaders (72% vs 51%). In fact a higher proportion of young people who say democracy is a good way to run the country also support the authoritarian methods of rule than those who don’t. Perhaps some people just think that there isn’t a good way to run a country?

The report authors believe that the drivers of general detachment that are leading to this and many other negative effects on young people can be summarised as being the narrowness of their social networks, overprotective parenting, the treadmill of modern work and the online culture.

I'm struggling to believe the intro I have just written to a story but it's true..

"Morrisons supermarket has turned off the beeps at its checkouts in a mark of respect to the Queen."

🤯

— Andrew Ellson (@andrewellson) September 12, 2022

Although in the interests of accuracy it seems like the official policy was only to lower the volume of the beeps.

No UK resident can have missed the news that the cost of electricity to the consumer in the UK is going up and up, to truly unprecedented levels. The way it works over here is that the government issues a cap, which limits the maximum amount the energy supply companies can charge consumers. Perhaps I’ll look in more detail as to how this is calculated in future but to be extremely simplistic about it at present, the majority of the increase is down to the wholesale cost of energy to the supplier, which is presently very high. In fact a bunch of them went bankrupt last year.

A year ago the cap worked out at £1,277 for the average UK consumer. Earlier this year it had already painfully zoomed up to £1,971. In October, had it been worked out in the standard way, it would be not-far-off-doubled to £3,549.

The Government has tried to mitigate some of the obvious impending disaster by putting a “price guarantee” on it such that the average consumer will be paying £2,500. So a lot less than £3,549 thankfully, but still substantially more than it ever has been.

One thing to understand about the energy cap is that it is not…a cap. Or at least not an overall one. You will always pay more if you use more electricity. The quoted cap is on the cost it would be for an average consumer. This translates down to a cap on the standing cost and unit price. If you have a big or energy inefficient house you may well pay substantially more than £2,500. So even if you manage to save up enough money to pay the £2,500, you still shouldn’t go wild from a financial, let alone an environmental, point of view.

At the time of writing there are apparently no tariffs that are appreciably below the maximum permitted cost to switch to, per Martin Lewis. So most of the levers we can pull at an individual level are about cutting down on the usage of electricity. Not necessarily a bad thing for other reasons too, including environmental, if it can be done without impacting people’s wellbeing. But that’s a big and often unrealistic if.

Some people, myself included, are billed at a different cost in the day vs in the night, aka economy 7, in which case perhaps retiming your electricity consumption will help. Although it seems weirdly difficult to learn what counts as day or night unless your electric meter is labelled or you have a smart meter - it’s not the same for everyone. In the end I just asked my electricity supplier. And will attempt to do my washing after 10pm from here on in!

What devices should we focus on to reduce our electricity consumption and hence costs?

The general rule seems to be that most modern electronics don’t cost a whole lot - modern bulbs, LCD televisions, charging your phone etc. It’s not zero, so there’s a perhaps a little potential saving you can do there. But unfortunately the big deals tend to be appliances that relate to heating or eating, both of which are fairly essential.

Bloomberg had a nice chart which combined the energy consumption of the average device of a given type with the average usage time to show the cost. Now the actual costs shown on it will be a bit higher than reality I believe because the £2500 price guarantee hadn’t been announced when they published this - but still the “big circles are the expensive ones” idea holds.

The washing machine cost I understand to be highly dependent on the temperature of the wash. If you can wash at a lower temperature you’ll save electricity. I’ve started trying 30 degrees for everything.

All heating-related ones are clearly the big drain. With regards to saving on central heating itself, I’ve seen tips around the internet that concentrate on heating the people rather than the entire house if times are real tough. For instance you can see in the above that using electric blankets is way, way cheaper than central heating. I’ve also seen suggestions for hot water bottles.

To get a more precise personal estimate, there are also energy cost calculators, like sust-it where you can type in the energy consumption of your appliance and the time you want to use it for to get a cost estimate. It also has guides for specific types of appliances e.g. vacuum cleaners or microwaves. It also allows you to compare models of appliances based on energy efficiency if you’re in the market for something new.

How should I dry my clothes?

I used the general calculator to help me think about clothes drying on occasions we have too much laundry to hang around the house and the weather won’t allow the washing line to do the trick. I used Martin Lewis' estimate of 34p per kWh, found here.

Our washing machine also has drying functionality. Whilst I can find that the appliance is overall energy rating B, I can’t quickly figure out how to know what that means specifically for the dryer component in watts. I’d say it usually takes 1-2 hours to complete. The Bloomberg chart above suggested £1.95 per load. Trying to work backwards from Which’s figures for the cheapest washer dryer I get to about £1.21 (and I’m sure ours isn’t the cheapest.) This page suggests the average dryer is about 3000 kwH which for 1.5 hours would be £1.53. This site has says a tumble dryer cycle is 4.5 kWH, which would equate to the same.

We also have a dehumidifier that works reasonably well, but may need leaving on the entire day, let’s say 8 hours. It has two settings, I usually use the clothes drying option which I assume is the high one, 725W. That’s mean it’d cost £1.97. Using the lower one would knock it down to £1.14.

There are also heated drying racks out there. In the Sun’s rundown of “the best” ones, the one they prefer overall is 230W. It seems that there’s great variance in how long clothes take to dry on them, but let’s say it’d take between 5 and 10 hours. That’d imply a cost of 39p - 78p.

So from that I guess there’s not much benefit in using the dehumidifier for long periods over the tumble drying facility of the washing machine. The heated rack sounds a more economical option, except that I’d have to buy it in the first place.

The Black Mirror option

Seeing as in 2022 we continue to inhabit the Black Mirror Timeline there is of course one other option. Exploitation via light entertainment! Here’s a much shared clip of a phone-in TV contest gameshow where the top prize on offer was “we’ll pay your electricity bills for 4 months”, the concept of which was fairly condemned by many folk out there as entirely dystopian. There is a touch of one of the early Black Mirror episodes, Fifteen Million Merits, about it to be fair.

Started watching Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power 📺, the LOTR prequel Amazon created.

Probably the most expensive TV show ever, with season one costing an estimated $462 million, a number I cannot begin to get my head around the idea of spending on a TV show. For reference the most expensive season of Game of Thrones apparently cost $90m. To be fair, nobody really liked it, so maybe spending more is somehow required 🤷‍♂️.

In one of the stranger rituals following the Queen’s death, the Royal Beekeeper has been sent around the Palace’s 7 hives to inform 20,000 bees of their owner’s sad demise.

“You knock on each hive and say, ‘The mistress is dead, but don’t you go. Your master will be a good master to you.”

This comes from a ancient belief that if you don’t let the bees know that they’ve got a new owner then they’re going to stop producing honey.

Fairly understandably, this particular responsibility was apparently new news to the beekeper in question. Mr. Chapple, despite his long-standing tenure.

The official palace beekeeper has worked with the bees for 15 years but did not realise informing the bees was part of the job.

A random downside of connecting too many things to the internet: A server error meant that some owners of Roomba vacuums couldn’t vacuum their house. Or, even more terrifyingly, tell them to stop cleaning, especially for those that had used the child lock feature to disable the hardware stop button.

Hopefully unrelated: remember that time people got drunk and attached big knives to the front of their Roombas for their very own robot wars?

I recently read The Expectation Effect, a fascinating book looking at how what you expect influences what actually happens with regard to your body and life.

Below is a fairly detailed summary of chapter 6 (prioritised as being most potentially relevant to my work). I’m sure I’ll be talking a lot more about the rest of this book in future. But for now, the main topic of this chapter was how your beliefs and expectations influence how your body and brain react to what you eat - potentially useful knowledge for anyone interested in healthy eating.

Our brain’s predictive processing means that our expectation of what nutrients a food contains directly affects how our body responds to that food, including our:

• digestion, i.e. the breaking down and absorption of nutrients in the gut.
• metabolism, i.e. how we process the food to power our cells.

If we believe we’re eating fewer calories than we really are, our body responds to that belief. The brain induces a deprivation mindset, and we feel less satiated, more hungry and inclined to expend less energy in order to preserve fat stores.

It’s known that appetite is controlled in part by activity in the digestive system - bottom-up information. However the brain also seems to need top-down info e.g. memory and expectation, to make sense of the digestive information input in order to create the appropriate feelings of hunger or satiation.

Altering how we think about food can change the brain’s assessment of what it has eaten.

Memory

A patient who had lost the ability to form new memories, was asked to rate how hungry he was on a scale of 0 -100. He rated his hunger similarly both before and after consuming a meal. After two meals in a row he felt only partly satiated.

This suggests that our appetite is not solely governed by “fullness signals” from the stomach. It’s also influenced by our memory of what we ate.

Milder forgetfulness is also associated with over-eating.

In an experiment asking students to taste test cookies, they consumed 45% less if they had first been prompted to remember their lunch by noting down what they’d eaten.

Working, watching TV or using the internet whilst eating may create a distraction that impairs our memory of what we ate, leading to eating larger meals and more snacks afterwards.

Expectation

The sense of fullness and satisfaction participants had from eating either 300ml or 500ml of soup was largely based on how much soup they thought they’d eaten, rather than how much they actually had.

Participants who believed they’d eaten a 3 egg omelette felt more satiated than those who thought they’d eaten a 1 egg omelette, even though they’d eaten the same amount.

Patients who believed that they’ve undergone obesity-related surgery, e.g. stomach stapling or gastric balloon, experienced 70% of the benefits of the operation (reduced appetite, higher weightloss) even though the actual surgery never took place.

Presentation

The presentation of manufactured foods can disrupt our brain’s ability to assess its contents:

• The brain remembers eating a lot less after drinking a small bottled smoothie vs eating the equivalent portions of fruit, giving the expectation of hunger later in the day.
• Several studies show that the exact same food leads to lower satiety when it is labelled “healthy” as opposed to when it’s labelled “hearty”.
• The more viscous a drink is the more filling we expect it to be, and the higher our physiological response.
• Iron absorption from meals that have been pureed were much lower than the same meal presented in its standard form.
• “Healthy” snacks may be counterproductive - participants given a “healthy” chocolate bar were hungrier afterwards than those given nothing.

Beliefs

When presented with a choice of 2 items such as a McDonald’s hamburger and a 8.5oz grilled ocean code, most people think the burger has more calories even though they’re about equal, over or underestimating the true value by up to 50%. People who have greater mismatches in their estimates are on average heavier.

People who agree more strongly with statements such as “There is usually a trade-off between healthiness and tastiness” tend to have higher BMIs.

Mechanisms

Ghrelin is a hormone secreted by the stomach when it’s empty.

High levels induce our body to:

• lower its metabolic resting rate, burning less energy.
• store body fat.
• feel lethargic, so we don’t waste energy on exercise.

Participants who had drank a milkshake marketed as indulgent saw lower ghrelin levels, as expected after a meal. But those who drank the same milkshake presented as healthy and light, saw very little change in ghrelin.

Brain areas associated with energy regulation are also affected. People given a low-calorie drink labelled as a treat had a stronger hypothalamus response when it was labelled as a “treat” as opposed to “healthy”,

Expectations also affect the movement of food in the gut and our insulin responses.

The environment

Our environment reinforces the idea that healthy foods are less satisfying. An analysis of 26 American chain restaurants that offer “healthy eating” options saw that they were less likely to have descriptions relating to enjoyment, vice, decadence, texture and taste. They were more likely to be described in terms evoking simplicity, thinness, or deprivation.

In one study where these healthy options were described with words evoking enjoyment and indulgent, consumption of them increased 29% and were likely to lead to lower snacking afterwards. Adding the words “fuller for longer” to a yoghurt pot increased people’s satiety for 3 hours.

Low socioeconomic status is a risk factor for obesity. There are many potential explanations. One study showed that when people are primed to feel poorer and less secure they tend to choose sweeter snacks and have bigger portion sizes, corresponding to observable changes in the body and brain. People’s feelings of social and financial insecurity induced a sense of deprivation which influenced their hormonal response. For people living with this sense of vulnerability long-term, it’s possible that this response could increase your likelihood of obesity even if your food choices were healthy.

The belief that healthy foods are unsatisfying isn’t universal.

That belief is strongly held in the US and to a lesser extent the UK and Australia - but the opposite view is more common in France. It’s been shown that labelling a food as healthy in France doesn’t reduce the satisfaction and pleasure as much as elsewhere.

French people also have fewer negative sentiments associated with treats. When asked to describe which word is more associated with ice-cream, more US people pick “fattening” whereas French people more commonly pick “delicious”.

This attitude seems to affect their eating choice and body responses. French people tend to choose smaller servings and spend more time eating them.

The average BMI in France (25.3) is lower than other countries like Germany (26.3), Australia (27.2), the UK (27.3) and especially the US (28.8).

The typical French diet contains higher proportion of saturated fat from butter, cheese, eggs and cream than the UK/US equivalent, yet French people are less likely to suffer from coronary heart disease. There are many possible reasons but expectation could be one. People who believe that they are more at risk of a heart attack are 4x as likely to suffer from heart disease even controlling for other factors.

Eating is not a simple chemical process.

…exactly the same item can be nourishing and satiating, or unfulfilling and nutritionally empty – in large part because of our memories of what we have eaten, our impressions of what it contains and the meanings that we ascribe to it.

Some ways to apply these findings

• Avoid the liquid calories in sweetened drinks.
  • The satiety of most drinks is low
  • If you must drink juices and smoothies, make them yourself so you are more aware of the food that went into them - research suggests doing this may increase your satiation.
• Maximise the pleasure in the food you eat. Flavour and texture are important during weight loss as the resulting sense of indulgence increases satiety and hormonal response to food. The lack of later snacking due to greater satiety will outweigh the small number of extra calories this my require.
  • Spicy foods or intensely umami ingredients are good options.
  • Avoid food that gives a sense of deprivation.
  • Thoroughly enjoy any treats - feeling guilt won’t help. One study showed that dieters who associated treats such as cake with guilt gained weight vs those who associated them with celebration progressed towards their goals.
  • Do not label foods as sinful, toxic etc.
• Visualise and anticipate what you’re going to eat in advance.
  • Participants who were asked to imagine the taste, smell and texture of sweet treats first opted to have a smaller slice of cake when one was offered.
• Avoid distractions when eating.
• Eat slowly, savoring each mouthful. The greater sensory experience of eating will trigger a stronger hormonal reaction to the food.
• Remember what you have eaten.
  • If you feel tempted to snack then first recall what it was like to eat your last meal. Your brain may update its predictions of energy balance, making you feel less hungry.

Finished reading: The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World by David Robson 📚.

An fascinating, scientifically-oriented, book, examining how your expectations and beliefs can alter a huge array of vital life outcomes based on your brain’s role as a “prediction machine”. Think of the placebo effect, but all-encompassing. There are also several tips on how to leverage this effect to enhance your time on this planet. I’m sure I’ll be writing more on this soon.

No paper published yet so tbd, but researchers claim to have developed a smartphone app that can detect Covid substantially more accurately than the current Covid lateral flow tests. The app analyses people’s voices using a technique known as the Mel-spectrogram.

Queen Elizabeth II died today.

Not long after the UK temperature hit a horrible new high, a new study reports that the prevalence of hate-speech filled tweets increases as the temperature becomes more extreme in either direction.

Seems we really need to find a way to keep the climate at about 15-20 degrees C.

A colleague introduced me to Super Auto Pets 🎮, so now I’m addicted. Line up some cute animals in a row and see if they can beat another person’s equivalent. Feels like plenty of strategy to think about.

You can play it for free in your web browser, or on Steam, iOS or Android.

It happened…we’ve got a new Prime Minister, Liz Truss 😩.

Her victory speech felt decidely unconciliatory to anyone who isn’t an ardent Ayn Rand capitalism fan.

The only redeeming feature was that people didn’t applaud fast enough after she extolled Boris for his “achievements”.

It’s known that performing acts of kindness makes both the receiver and the giver happier. But new research shows that givers systematically underestimate the increase in positivity that the receivers actually feel after experiencing the kindness.

So if you’re ever in doubt about whether someone would actually appreciate you doing something nice for them, do it anyway - it’ll probably make more of a difference than you expect.

From today’s Guardian:

Shown calculations that her planned reversal of a recent rise in national insurance would benefit top earners by about £1,800 a year, and the lowest earner by about £7, and asked if this was fair, Truss said: “Yes, it is fair.”

Seems I have a very different definition of ‘fair’ than our probable next prime minister.

Here’s the data she was shown:

Jason Allen won an art competition with this picture, which was generated via the Midjourney AI. I wrote more about that, trying to figure out how I even feel about it all, over here.

One of my favourite charts found in the wild, both in terms of subject matter and presentation.

Watched EastEnders 📺 for the first time in maybe a decade. Astonished to see that I recognise almost all the characters from before. They just look surprisingly old, as I guess we all must do!

Had a great time visiting the Scotch Whisky Experience in Edinburgh. Thinking we were going for some kind of formal lesson in the art of scotch tasting, we were somewhat taken back by part one involving getting into a little cart which took us around an fairly trippy exhibition where a ghost explains all sorts of things about the production of scotch.

Later on we entered the Diageo Claive Vidiz collection, which apparently includes a total of 3,384 bottles of whiskey, for some actual tasting.

You don’t get to try a bit from all 3000+ bottles unfortunately. Some are pretty rare. The one in the middle below with the colourful artwork on the label apparently sells for around £80,000, if I remember correctly.

Although I guess that’s a bargain compared to a bottle that sold for £1.1 million in auction a few years ago I guess. I suppose billionaires needed something to do with their money before NFTs were a thing.

The oldest ones in the collection were these two, from the turn of the twentieth century.

Whilst it looks like someone’s drunk a fair bit of especially the right hand one, apparently that’s not the case - these are technically unopened bottles. What’s missing there is the ‘angel’s share’, an ongoing amount of whiskey that evaporates into the atmosphere over time if not perfectly sealed.

I decided I’m a big fan of whiskies from the Islay region.

Contrary to the stereotype, new research involving frequent cannabis users finds no evidence of lower motivation than their age / sex matched non-cannabis using counterparts.

To quote the lead author:

Our work implies that … people who use cannabis are no more likely to lack motivation or be lazier than people who don’t.

The R library installr provides a super simple way to update your version of R to the latest if you’re using Windows.

Simply run:

install.packages('installr')
library("installr")
updateR()

I hear that the updateR package does something similar on Mac, but I’ve not tried it.

I’m sure I’m late to the party on this one, but if you’re a Substack newsletter reader then you can clear up your email inbox by subscribing to newsletters via RSS instead of email. Just add /feed to your publication’s home page, e.g. whatever.substack.com/feed.

There’s then a “Disable all emails” option in the Substack settings - tho beware that this seems to unsubscribe you from everything. The feeds still work fine though.

It only works for the free newsletters you subscribe to. If you pay for access to posts then they don’t appear on the feed, so you’ll still have to receive those by email or by visiting their website.

For the past 3 months, Germany has been trialling a scheme where for €9 a month people can travel on any regional trains, subways, trams and buses nationwide. Compared to the UK cost of public transport that’s basically free!

It sounds like it wasn’t the best planned scheme, so there’s a lot any future such schemes should consider to improve implementation.

But nonetheless in addition to the obvious benefits to travellers, it’s claimed to have saved 1.8 million tons of CO2 emissions by reducing car use.

Everyone’s a winner. More of this please!

For what it’s worth, the last train ticket I bought here in the UK, which was booked weeks in advance and required me to take specific trains, cost around £100 for a single return trip.

Started watching season 3 of Locke and Key 📺.

Forbes reports that more than half of all Bitcoin trades are likely fake - wash trading, and that kind of thing. Perhaps not a huge surprise in a sector riddled with fraud.

But given the amount of energy expended carrying out each Bitcoin transaction - each equivalent to 1.8 million more conventional VISA transactions according to Digiconomist - it feels especially galling in a world currently facing both climate and energy crises.