Looking Out To Sea

Clearly the chiropracters need to take a good long look at their PR strategy. Two separate incidents from opposite sides of the world within a few months of each other — and both incredibly stupid.

CCC: Cat Chiropractic Clinic
© Kevin

In the New Zealand Medical Journal David Colquhoun wrote about Inappropriate use of medical titles by some “alternative” medicine practitioners. Rather than keep quiet about this editorial and hope it would blow over, the New Zealand Chiropracters’ Association sent a letter from their lawyer, demanding retraction and apologies. The journal printed the legal demands in full, with a statement from the editor:

The Journal has a responsibility to deal with all issues and not to steer clear of those issues that are difficult or contentious or carry legal threats. Let the debate continue in the evidence-based tone set by Colquhoun and others. … I encourage, as we have done previously, the chiropractors and others to join in, let’s hear your evidence not your legal muscle.

Now it should be very obvious that the New Zealand chiropracters would rather resort to a legally enforced muzzle than demonstrate the efficacy of their treatments. One can only hope that this kind of embarrassing repercussion will be enough to make them think twice about legal threats in future.

Something very similar has been going on much closer to home, and it’s the chiropracters involved again. Simon Singh wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian way back in April, for Chiropractic Awareness Week. True to form, the British Chiropractic Association is suing for libel. The original article has been pulled from the Guardian website, but has been quickly replicated elsewhere.

The best reposting is on Gimpy’s blog: the article comes with full references for every one of Simon Singh’s assertions.

It should be pretty obvious now that these two associations have little interest in medical science or patient wellbeing. If they did then stifling criticism would not be their first reaction.

Last week I went looking for rye flour, and it took me a little while to find some. A lot of shops near the flat don’t sell it. In the end I had to go up to Broughton Street and visit the Real Foods shop. I had not been there in a long time.

The shop caters to that whole spectrum of loosely related beliefs and circumstances — loose flour, pulses and mueslis, organic fruit and vegetables; non-dairy and non-gluten products; vegetarian and vegan substitute products; cotton bags and eco-friendly household wares; books on caring for the environment, doing yoga and nutritionism; classes on crystal healing; homeopathic bottles of stuff; and all the rest.

Some of that stuff I’m all for. Some of that stuff I’m all against. And lots of it ends up mixed together in a grab-bag of woo and feel-good activity that doesn’t hold up to critical analysis. I guess this has all grown up together, this stuff — the Earth Goddess types and the animal rights people and the organic farmers and so on.

And then there’s me, caught in there just because I want to buy some flour. Trying to avoid the Patrick Holford, Media Nutritionist and Professional Liar books and thus retain my composure. It mostly worked, but I was all hot and bothered from walking about town looking for the flour with a heavy jacket.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say in the end — other than I object to propping up anyone who would promote these lies as much as I object to encouraging supermarkets to treat their suppliers as badly as they do, or clothes shops to employ child labour and sweatshops. I don’t know what the answer to it all is. I suppose the possibilities are, in no particular order of preference or feasibility:

• Start up my own shop, which will sell rye flour but not Ancient Atlantean Healing Crystals.
• Buy what I need and ignore everything else.
• Wear a ninja outfit and sneak in to add a bunch of copies of Simon Singh’s Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial to the bookshelf.
• Complain.
• Publish my own woo book, so at least I get a cut of the profit.

This must be what it feels like to fall into a bottomless pit of inanity, also known as a parliamentary discussion about “alternative” medicine. I think the defining point of the discussion is this short note by Oliver Heald (Cons):

My hon. Friend must not forget aromatherapists. The Aromatherapy Organisations Council has done a great deal of work to move towards regulation of the profession, and would be interested to hear the Minister’s remarks on that.

And so on with other contradictory approaches to health. The important thing is not whether these approaches are effective or worth the money — but whether there is a council of idiots to represent it. In short, whether they are vocal enough.

Comment of the century, on the wonders of herbal medicine:

The great thing about British herbal medicine, of course, is that it’s automatically geared to be very compatible with your physiology.

That’s foreign herbs bad, native herbs good for those still boggling.

A few weeks ago Randall Munroe published [XKCD 426: Geohashing] [comic] and apparently invented a new sport…

The idea is quite simple. The world is divided into little degree-by-degree segments (by latitude and longitude). If you see these on a map they look mostly rectangular at the equator and gradually get more triangular at the poles, because the pole-wards side is shorter than the equator side. You can see a picture of the [geographical segment around Edinburgh] [edinburgh] on the wiki.

If you imagine that each rectangle has a starting corner (the one nearest the equator and nearest the Greenwich meridian), which we’ll call (0.0, 0.0). We can identify any spot in your rectangle with a fractional offset from this point — like (0.456, 0.235).

If you want to know the major co-ordinates for your home then a good place to start would be [this list for the major cities of the countries of the world] [coords].

I’ve put together a Haskell program to demonstrate the next stage of the procedure, though there are plenty of web-based tools to do the same thing. I just wanted to try out the new cabal-install package (akin to CPAN, gems etc for other languages).

[coords]: [comic]: “The Geohashing comic with original algorithm” [edinburgh]: “Edinburgh geohashing region”

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A wee while back Rowan Williams got in a bit of trouble with large parts of the thinking world for, amongst other things, saying evolutionary biology was some kind of Dawkinsian cult which wanted to kill all believers. Well, something absurd was certainly reported in the press (which is the same thing, right?).

I’ve given up trying to decide if accurate reporting by newspapers is just a hoped-for ideal that has never been attained, or whether we currently just have a fine crop of journalists who (to paraphrase Terry Pratchett) use truth more as a reference point than as a shackle. Instead, what I can do is find out what he actually said. All the archbishop’s speeches, essays and similar productions appear on his official website eventually. And the official transcript (and the original audio recording) for this Faith and Science speech is now available.

First I’d like to present what Rowan Williams said on the day:

First of all there is the extension of Darwinian theory beyond straightforward biology and genetics. The heart of the conflict between faith and science as it’s frequently presented these days is no longer a simple stand-off between what people might regard as two rival accounts of how the world came to be.

Immediately we can see that, though he later refers to neo-Darwinism, he is not talking about “straightforward biology and genetics”. A curious claim, like saying “I’d like to talk about ice cream — by which I don’t mean the frozen cream dessert or non-dairy equivalents”.

Rowan Williams may be guilty of many things, but clarity is not one of them.

The transcript, however, includes a small aside intended to clarify the matter of his poor wording. I just wanted to leave it out first in order to give you a good idea of what the original audience would have heard. This is what the transcript says, with my emphasis:

First of all there is the extension of Darwinian theory beyond straightforward biology and genetics. [Note: This extension of the theory is sometimes loosely called ‘Neo-Darwinism’; but this is potentially confusing, as this term is more strictly applied to the fusion of Darwin’s original theory with Mendelian genetics. I did not avoid this confusion in the original version of this lecture.] The heart of the conflict between faith and science as it’s frequently presented these days is no longer a simple stand-off between what people might regard as two rival accounts of how the world came to be.

So, in this small aside he has admitted to being foolish and unclear, by redefining perfectly good terms. Fair enough. He goes on:

In spite of all the fuss about creation science versus evolution, that’s actually not where the intellectual energy of the debate lies. The real issue is in this extension of Darwinian principle and theory into an entire theory of culture and intellectual life. This is a vision fairly regularly reiterated by Professors Dawkins and Dennett and it deserves a moment’s explication.

What he’s talking about here is memetics. That’s what it looks like. (Richard Dawkins came up with the word, though he hasn’t done much research into it since it was mentioned in The Selfish Gene. I’m not sure about Daniel Dennett but in the couple of lectures of his I have seen he mentioned memes a bit.) Why Williams ever thought “neo-Darwinism” was a good label for this I’ll never understand. He may have been thinking of Universal Darwinism but I don’t think that’s accurate either.

He suggests that “science” (or maybe just that evil Dawkins fellow) have been concocting fairy stories about the world and letting the stories run away with themselves. They have not paying attention to the evidence. This is a curious argument since it doesn’t reflect the reality of (visible) academic research into memes or the attention that is paid to them. As far as I can tell, memetics as an active research area is dead at the moment. The only Journal of Memetics — not even a paper one at that, just an online publication — has been closed for business for at least three years now. This is not quite the threatening body of science the archbishop makes it out to be.

The whole speech seems rather pedestrian in the end. If you were to replace every instance of ‘Darwinism’ with ‘memetics’ then it would make more sense but it still wouldn’t say more. Susan Blackmore, who is mentioned in the speech as a “follower” of Dawkins (ah, the science-as-religion canard, where would we be without you?), raises most of these arguments in her own book on memes. They are not new to the people interested in the field. The remainder seem to be ordinary philosophical musings about reductionism and so on, or the realisation that popular views of genetics (a “gene for X”) are not very accurate. In any case, there is nothing actually show-stopping in his speech, and no obvious connection to faith.

Anyway, I’m getting a wee bit off the point. In short, Rowan Williams did not call biology a fairy story: he called memetics a fairy story. Though in the process he did admit that Christianity was a fairy story, which was a surprising point. Why did the press not quote that bit so widely? Maybe it’s old news by now.

I’m willing to bet you’ve never seen stupidity like this before:

Scientists at the Roslin-based firm Global Bioenergetics think disturbance to bees from mobile phones, radio signals, wi-fi and microwaves is disrupting them with devastating results.

Oh no! It’s electrosmog!

This little report in The Scotsman is such awful, transparent, witless advertising for some useless snake oil that I’m honestly gobsmacked it could ever have been published.

The scientists are trying out a new device, called a Bioemitter, that transmits electromagnetic waves to provide a stable environment and reduce stress for the bees in their hives, boosting their immune system.

By strange coincidence the scientists¹ have just the thing to solve all your bee-related problems! (It can even work pigs and chickens!) They use electromagnetic waves at particular frequencies² to boost the bees’ immune systems and kill off parasites. It’s almost like magic: it must be very advanced technology.

But what’s this down here, right at the bottom of the article, after all these winning statements about how much good this Bioemitter can do?

Now [the company] is trying to secure funding to carry out trials on bees using the device.

Yes! That’s it! All these claims are nonsense! They have no idea if this thing works at all. (And given the absurd nature of the claims, I think it’s easy to guess the outcome of any rigorous trial.)

To round things off, why not mention a scientist? Any scientist will do!

Ms Murray said: “Bees are so representative of the whole ecosystem. Einstein said we have only got five years to live without the bees. I believe this is evidence that everything we have done to our environment is coming to a head.”

Ah, where would an article on good beekeeping be without mention of that famed theoretical physicist beekeeper Albert Einstein.

I have a conundrum to lay out. Or at least, a question which seems to require some nuance in answering.

One the one hand, it’s poor form to rebut an argument without some familiarity with it. Recently Mark Ravenhill wrote a terrible piece about how “Richard Dawkins’ secular army must be stopped or future generations will be denied a source of inspiration” (that’s a direct quote, believe it or not) at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog. It’s painfully obvious that the guy hasn’t read anything of what Dawkins has written on religion — he erects and burns straw men with gay abandon. Most of those projected opinions are the opposite of what Dawkins states in his book. And it’s not the first time people have attacked his work at length without bothering to read or understand it. (Mary Midgley’s review of The Selfish Gene is a classic in this genre; you can read Dawkins’ extended rebuttal to it here.)

On the other hand, it’s a common argument from pedlars of pseudoscience and the like to claim they will reveal all the proper scientific details in their book. And refuse to be drawn on the matter unless you read their book. Which is to say, buy their book.

So the question is, what kind of argument is “read this book!” and should it be used with sincerity? When is it valid? In the first case, it’s obvious that if you’re criticising someone’s views you should have at least a reasonable understanding of those views. And yet many people will hide behind that, using the cost and effort as a shield for their weak arguments. I’m not spending twenty quid on Amazon every time I run across a crank with “revolutionary” ideas on physics, medicine or what-have-you. I feel that this doesn’t let them off the hook.

The middle ground exists, when the arguments are large and complex enough to fill a book but the proponent tries to condense them. If someone writes, say, a blog post to describe their ideas, is it reasonable to attack the contents of this post only — is it valid to argue against just the presented arguments? It seems disingenuous to think otherwise — there is no visible difference between someone who presents all of a poor argument and someone who presents the weakest part of a good argument. Both can claim their ideas get better explanation in their book. Buy my book!

I feel a certain degree of unease when I see people use this gambit, whichever side I agree with. It doesn’t help anyone’s understanding to say “you don’t know anything, away and read This Book”. I don’t like to see it used even when I agree with the people who use it. This may be an inherent dislike of unfree information, which is probably related. It’s okay to make a claim if you’re willing to reveal all the information that supports that claim. That seems as good a guiding principle as any.

This is a round-up of things that don’t deserve their own blog posts.

• My birthday seems to fall right in the middle of Homeopathy Awareness Week. The ignominy.

• Last week Rowan Williams appeared to have contracted Hovind’s disease, a condition common in the United State of America, with symptoms such as absurd mischaracterisation of biological theories. The speech took place on 17 March as the first of three lectures, Faith and Science, Faith and Politics and Faith and History. The official transcripts of these lectures have not appeared online yet. I still don’t know whether he’s merely a nutty man with bushy eyebrows or something even weirder.

• I’m re-reading Neuromancer for the Nth time and I’ve only just noticed that the Finn wears a tweed jacket. I don’t know how, but I always pictured him in a dishevelled wax jacket. Also, despite the nay-sayers, it’s still an awesome book.

• I’ve decided not to wait to get myself an Eee PC. The beefier one probably won’t appear until the end of the year and I can always upgrade if it seems worthwhile. Now I just need to find someone who has them in stock…

• If you’ve got some time to spare, and especially if you hated learning mathematics at school, you should read Lockhart’s Lament (PDF). It’s captivating, entertaining and educational — even funny! — not to mention an extremely accurate picture of what school maths was like. (Incidentally, if you search for lockhart's lament there is a lot of discussion, and in nearly all of them someone has pasted the same mini-critique about it being in a “historical vacuum”. It starts “As I see it, Paul Lockhart’s essay would be much more powerful if…”.)

• Our internet connection still seems well screwed up so I can’t access Delicious from home. So if anyone checks my saved links you’ll not find anything new. Sorry about that.

• Alien loves Predator has been updated for the first time in what feels like forever. Now when is Everybody Loves Eric Raymond going to take the hint and follow suit?

That’s all folks.

I took it upon myself, to save you the effort, of collecting together some of the interblag’s lists of common denialist arguments. Feel free to add some more interesting ones in the comments.

• The best place to start is John Baez’s Crackpot Index, a scoring system to help you decide if someone’s personal system of “advanced”, “revolutionary physics” is merely common-or-garden delusion or something altogether grander.

  Many of the ideas in this list can be easily applied to other pseudosciences. Ben Goldacre recently posted a horrifying “lecture” from a homeopath that invoked Einstein, Hawkings (sic) and so on in the same vein. Only stupider — much much stupider.

• And on the related topic of science journalism, Black Stacey has a list of Science Story Tropes which crop up all over.

  It’s honestly hard to choose which one I hate the most. The “folk wisdom” stories are probably the most dangerous because people have a hard enough time disbelieving things they’ve “always known” — having distorted scientific evidence just makes things worse.

• If you’re not sick of people taking liberties with reality and science from that homeopathy video, how about some Creationist Bingo? With a leap and a bound and some long-since refuted talking points you too can call the Earth an even 6000 years old.

• Last on the list is Global Warming Denial Bingo with a useful set of links to refutations built in. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?

Are there any more good pages of a similar nature? I was surprised not to find a general woo/pseudoscience checklist. Maybe a gap in the market?