Hanging on too long

I read at reference 1 that there is a chap in the US called Steve Kirsch who has made a lot of money – say a couple of hundred million dollars – out of a string of start-ups: ‘… a serial entrepreneur who has spent decades pitching the next big thing, whether optical mice (Mouse Systems), document processing (FrameMaker), search engines (Infoseek), digital security (OneID), or e-commerce (Propel Software). His latest start-up, M10, is a spin-off of a spin-off that sells a blockchain for banks…’.

Quite a lot of this money has been used for charitable purposes.

Now around 60 years old, when COVID came along, he thought that rather than invent a new drug, which takes a long time, why not test all the existing drugs, the drugs which have already been cleared for use on humans, about which we already know a great deal, and see if there is one that helps with COVID. An approach which had worked with his own rare form of cancer (Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia). Government did not seem that keen, but plenty of other people thought that this was worth a crack. So Kirsch sets up an operation, used some of his own money, attracted more, and started giving out grants for research. So far so good.

But for some reason he decided to home in on hydroxychloroquine (the antimalarial favoured by Donald Trump) and fluvoxamine (an antidepressant). He hung on to the first long after most respectable people had given up on it, and is still punting for the second, which may actually be helpful, if no alternative to vaccination.

He also punts for a chap from England called Norman Fenton, a mathematician turned risk guru. A chap who does not seem to hold with cutting down on risky behaviour or with vaccines. A chap with a strong background in risk who thought he could make a difference in a field of which he had little if any prior knowledge. A sample of his work is to be found at reference 7.

Without looking at either of these men very carefully, I am left with the impression that there must be plenty of people out there who have been very successful in various ways – but who have come to believe in their own success. That everything they touch will turn to gold. Preferably by tearing down the majoritarian, boring view. Not unrelated to what the ancient Greeks called hubris.

A rather different kind of problem is the need to allow free discussion of scientific problems, without which problems are likely to remain problems for longer than they might otherwise. But this has to be balanced with the need for care with talk which might encourage men and women in the street to do wrong things – like assembling in large unvaccinated  numbers in confined spaces. A tension which goes some way to explaining governments’ penchant for secrecy when evaluating policy options, only coming clean when they have already decided what to do. Secrecy which has, in the past, in my view, often been carried too far here in the UK. How can we have a grown up and open discussion about options for the Budget if they are all shrouded in secrecy?

While from the first problem, the hubris, I associate to the well known problems of having successful people who hang on to power for too long, who do not get out while they are ahead, before they come to believe their own twaddle. As amplified by their nominees – not to say creatures – in the media, for an example of which see reference 8.

I believe most well run corporations have established arrangements for turning over their presidents and chief executives at regular intervals. In our civil service, it used to be the rule that most staff, in particular senior staff, retired at 60, which meant, inter alia, that heads of departments did not usually serve more than five years or so. Then there are countries – not including this one – who have rules about how long presidents and prime ministers can serve. So in the US, one cannot serve more than two terms as president, although this rule was only written down after being broken by Roosevelt during the Second World War. While the Chinese, aghast at what Mao and his immediate successors had got up to, put in place rules about turning their senior cadres over. Rules which the current leader of China has managed to brush aside, just as the current leader of Russia has. Hopefully rules which will be reinstated in due course.

Not that any of this helps with the man who owns his own businesses, like the one with which I started. He can do what he wants without being bothered by any tiresome share holders, rules or regulations – so he – and we – have to rely on a bit of self-discipline.

Maybe all this is a downside of our all living far longer. We have yet to learn how to manage the greatly stretched decline and fall of alpha males.

PS: since penning this, I have remembered about Elon Musk. Not quite sure how he fits into all this: he might have a big mouth and he is controversial, with fingers in lots of strange pies – but he does make a lot of electric cars. There is even one in the next road to my own. 

References

Reference 1: This tech millionaire went from covid trial funder to misinformation superspreader: After boosting unproven covid drugs and campaigning against vaccines, Steve Kirsch was abandoned by his team of scientific advisers—and left out of a job - Cat Ferguson, Financial Times – 2021.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Kirsch.

Reference 3: https://www.skirsch.io/. A very thin version of the man himself.

Reference 4: https://stevekirsch.substack.com/. And there’s more.

Reference 5: https://www.normanfenton.com/. A mathematician who moved into risk: Professor of Risk Information Management, Queen Mary London University. Director of  Agena Ltd.

Reference 6: https://www.agenarisk.com/. ‘Agenarisk provide Bayesian Network Software for Risk Analysis, AI and Decision Making applications’.

Reference 7a: Bayesian network analysis of Covid-19 data reveals higher infection prevalence rates and lower fatality rates than widely reported - M. Neil, N. Fenton, M. Osman, S. McLachlan – 2020. A sample of the product.

Reference 7b: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.25.20112466v1.full.pdf. The source of the snap above – which I have not taken the time to try to understand, let alone come to a view. For me at least, that has to be left to the majoritarians. 

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/03/richard-sharpe.html.