Feb 26 2009
Bad Science and a book group
We’ve just come back from a science-oriented book group held at the Royal Society of Edinburgh — though as far as I know, nothing to do with them — and I’ve got a few minutes while the bread in the oven bakes and the pasta cooks.
The subject of this evening’s discussion was Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, a book we have both read, which is extra useful when attending a book group. It was good to see that most people had quite favorable opinions of the book (more on the dissenters later) but that most had never heard of him, didn’t read his column, hadn’t heard of that whole anti-pseudoscience movement and were mostly unaware of the major villains like Gillian McKeith and Patrick Holford.
But anyway, there was some good discussion about where one learns critical appraisal of evidence (does it happen in schools? and more importantly, in school science?) and about where the limits of free speech should be for newspapers and public health issues like MMR. How much legal responsibility do newspapers have to report accurate information?
All that was quite good. I mentioned the dissenters above. There was one guy who seemed to have taken the Mary Midgley approach to popular science literature — read the front cover, decided what the book was about, and then blamed the author for not meeting these standards. We never did get a reasonable idea of what he thought the book was going to be about or what it should have done differently — but suffice it to say, it just wasn’t good enough. Five minutes later the same guy (having previously stated he’s never heard of Ben Goldacre) criticised the author for chasing celebrity status. It was about that point I gave up listening closely to him.
The next session of this book group is actually at a performance of Copenhagen, and there’s related discussions and possibly a meeting with the director and stuff too. It was a bit of a let-down to hear that there is no next book to read for the book group (and the meeting after that is for a film!) but this group’s been going for ages so we can hardly complain if they want to spice things up every so often.
2 Responses to “Bad Science and a book group”
was this the origin of “Dougal aspires to being a wild-haired loon who rambles at great length from the back of the hall during public debates. There must always be one”??
Maybe not, though perhaps there is a theme
No, that was the screening of Inherit The Wind at the Filmhouse. There was a “science and religion” talk afterwards, which was just as tedious as you’d imagine, with the added embarrassment of the wild-haired rambling loon talking at length about… something.