Dr Oz thinks that promoting quack medicine “empowers” people

The New Yorker has an article by Michael Specter on Dr Mehmet Oz, a heart surgeon who is also the host of ‘The Dr. Oz Show’, a hugely popular US television program watched by millions of Americans. Dr Oz is notorious for his refusal to disavow ‘alternative’ medicine as unscientific and unproven; he promotes quackery like ‘miracle’ foods and cures, anti-GMO and anti-vaccine propaganda, Reiki, acupuncture, homeopathy and psychic powers alongside real, effective medical advice. To quote one of his critics, the cardiologist and professor of genomics Eric Topol, Dr Oz’s lack of discrimination between evidence-based medicine and alt-med can mislead people, since “how are consumers to know what is real and what is magic? Because Mehmet offers both as if they were one.”

Echoing the singer Tim Minchin, Specter writes:

Scientists often argue that, if alternative medicine proves effective through experimental research, it should no longer be considered alternative; at that point, it becomes medicine. By freely mixing alternatives with proven therapies, Oz makes it nearly impossible for the viewer of his show to assess the impact of either; the process just diminishes the value of science.

Neurologist Dr Steven Novella (who has been a guest on ‘The Dr. Oz Show’) is another critic of Dr Oz, writing in a blog post that “Promoters of alternative medicine [like Dr Oz] only pay inconsistent lip-service to science, but the core of their philosophy is that science is optional,” and that this is “a very dismissive attitude – the casual dismissal of scientific evidence simply because it contradicts a pet belief.”

The problem of shoddy methodology in medical science, whether in research or in the media, is also touched on by the physician and writer Dr Ben Goldacre in his book Bad Science. As a media personality, the issue of how entertainment values and populism subvert medicine is pertinent to Dr Oz’s case. He seems to think that truth is a democracy, that facts are determined not by the careful examination of reality but by popular vote. These personal beliefs about truth and facts are a core factor in Dr Oz’s promotion of quackery, as this passage from Specter’s article reveals:

”Either data works or it doesn’t,“ I [Specter] said. “Science is supposed to answer, or at least address, those questions. Surely you don’t think that all information is created equal?” 

Oz sighed. “Medicine is a very religious experience,” he said. “I have my religion and you have yours. It becomes difficult for us to agree on what we think works, since so much of it is in the eye of the beholder. Data is rarely clean.” All facts come with a point of view. But his spin on it – that one can simply choose those which make sense, rather than data that happen to be true – was chilling. “You find the arguments that support your data,” he said, “and it’s my fact versus your fact.”

Dr Mehmet Oz is an epistemological relativist; to him, there is no such thing as objective truth, and unsubstantiated medical claims are just as valid as those backed by a mountain of evidence. With such a rotten ideological foundation, should it surprise us that his house of medical knowledge is so unsound? The tragedy is that Dr Oz has an impressionable audience of millions, many of whom may be harmed, not empowered, by the relativism of ‘America’s doctor’.

19.2.13

Why it’s important to debunk ‘harmless’ nonsense

Recently Newsweek published a fluff piece about neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s near death experience in which he claims to have visited heaven. I don’t know which confounds me more: that a (supposedly) reputable magazine should peddle such flagrantly religious propaganda as though it was serious, objective journalism, or that a medical professional conversant with the human brain can be so ignorant of its neurological flaws and biases.

Sam Harris and Steven Novella both exposed Alexander’s feel-good anecdotes for what they really are: post hoc rationalisations and selective memories coloured by his Christian beliefs. ‘Proof’ of heaven they certainly are not. Novella’s critique got a response from someone who thought that skeptics like him were targeting “topics or elements of human culture that are neither harmful nor unhealthy”. It’s a common gripe; skeptics are a bunch of curmudgeons and wet blankets who unnecessarily pick on people’s silly but harmless beliefs just to feel superior to the superstitious peasants. Novella replied with a blog post defending the skeptic’s interrogation of so-called ‘harmless’ beliefs, like Alexander’s belief in an afterlife. He writes:

The major unstated premise of this criticism [against skeptics] is that a claim or belief must have direct demonstrable harm in order to be harmful. A further unstated premise is that the belief itself is the only subject of concern. […]

What I think does matter is the intellectual process – how do people reason and come to the beliefs that they hold? A harmless but flawed belief is likely to be the result of a flawed thought process, and it is that thought process that I think is important. The same intellectual flaws are likely to lead to other false conclusions that do have immediate consequences.

Novella makes a good point; the actual false or flawed belief may be inconsequential, but the sloppy thinking that leads to forming such beliefs can just as easily result in beliefs that are harmful. Or if not strictly harmful, then conducive to ignorance. Referring to Alexander’s particular case, Novella writes:

The story that Alexander tells, coming with the authority of a Harvard neurosurgeon, promotes misconceptions about the nature of brain function and coma. I have to frequently deal with families of loved-ones who are in a coma, and I can attest to the fact that having significant misconceptions about brain function can be a significant impediment to making rational health care decisions in those difficult situations.

Further, it is extremely helpful in understanding the world in general to know something about how our brains construct the model of reality that we have in our heads, and how that construction can be altered, even in significant ways. That is the real lesson of Alexander’s experience, one that is missed if we instead grab for a pleasing fiction.

Generally speaking, skeptics like Steven Novella and Sam Harris are not simply being mean when they aim to burst people’s bubbles. The justification for debunking harmful beliefs may be obvious, but as Novella argues, debunking harmless ones is just as important, albeit for less direct reasons.




18.10.12

Ben Goldacre takes on Big, Bad Pharma

Doctor and science writer Ben Goldacre has a new book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, that exposes in meticulous detail what many of us already suspect: pharmaceutical companies fudge the results of their drug trials in order to sell drugs that don’t work, or that are actually harmful. The cynics are right, though it would give them little satisfaction to learn the depressing extent of Big Pharma’s corruption.

The Guardian has published an extract from Bad Pharma, which contains this passage:

Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? No one can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or has the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it's dangerous? No one can tell. This is a bizarre situation to arise in medicine, a discipline in which everything is supposed to be based on evidence.

Proponents of ‘alternative’ medicine and other New Age quackery will be quick to pounce. They will feel vindicated for their distrust of modern drugs and the corrupt system that makes and markets them. Goldacre’s findings may prove Big Pharma’s critics right about its unethical practices, but these critics commit the logical fallacy known as ignoratio elenchi, or irrelevant conclusion, if they think that Big Pharma’s unethical actions prove the efficacy of ‘alternative’ medicine. They don’t. What they do show is that more scientific skepticism and rigour is needed, not less. The fact that Big Pharma is largely a corrupt industry that puts profits before patients doesn’t mean that homeopathy works, or that vaccines cause autism.

Goldacre is certainly not an ally of the quacks. In his previous book, Bad Science, he debunked pseudoscientific claims about ‘alternative’ medicine, vaccines and consumer products, and also criticised the way that the media misrepresents science, thereby misinforming the public. I highly recommend it as a much needed corrective to the misconceptions and false beliefs that we all have about health matters. And Goldacre is an engaging writer, leavening his statistical analysis with vivid anecdotes and passionate arguments. His new book will no doubt fulfill a similar purpose; to wake up readers with a splash of cold, hard facts, however unpleasant it may be, and to propose solutions to a chronic and widespread problem that affects us all.

25.9.12

Simon Blackburn on faith, religion and secularism

It’s always nice to see philosophy articles in magazines that aren’t specialist publications. I take it as a sign that philosophy is shedding its navel-gazing, ivory tower image - that its relevance to modern life is gaining recognition. Case in point: philosopher Simon Blackburn was interviewed by Tara Wheeler for Glass magazine’s winter 2011 issue, which carries the theme of ‘faith’. Glass belongs in that genus of culture magazines that cover art, design and fashion, having the common morphology of thick matte paper, stylised photography, clever graphic design and ubiquitous luxury brand ads. Given this, a philosophy article is a rather incongruous feature, much like antlers on a duck.

Since the winter issue’s theme is ‘faith’, and since you can’t mention faith without mentioning religion, Blackburn was asked for his views on faith, religion and secularism. I reproduce below his lengthy yet incisive responses to two questions, where he points out how religious believers cherry-pick their holy books (thus contradicting their supposedly infallible moral authority) and how moral values are not exclusive to any one religion, or to any at all. Essentially, Blackburn is arguing what humanists and atheists have always argued: you can be good without God.

The theme of this issue is Faith. How do you feel about faith in society today? Perhaps we could begin with looking at the decline of religion – do you think secularisation risks leaving society with a vacuum of moral infrastructure?

Well I think that we human beings stand on our own feet. We have to, even if we consider ourselves people of faith. The faith will be provided by a text or by authorities or our own conscience sometimes. So the idea that you’re holding hands with a deity has always struck me as a delusion. You’re holding hands with a tradition, a literature, a set of authorities, a church and with others in your congregation, which may be a very nice thing to do and I don’t deny the consolations of faith altogether, but as far as morality goes you’re still on your own. You have to decide which of the texts you’re going to listen to. If you read, for example, the Old Testament, it’s absolutely ghastly. God’s always calling for genocides. I think Steven Pinker in his recent book on the decline of violence says that there are 1.2 million killings in the Old Testament and that’s not even counting the flood. It’s just a story of murder and rape and carnage as the Israelites interpreted their own history, so that’s not a moral foundation for anyone. You could go on to things like mental illness as possession by devils, witchcraft and so on and so on, and in the New Testament too, all kinds of superstition and witchcraft. Of course the upstanding Christian says, ‘Oh no, I don’t listen to any of that stuff, I listen to the good stuff’ – fine but then you’re using your own judgement and what you’re going to come out with are things that humanists believe in too, things like be nice to one another, love your neighbour, try not to be too retaliatory, turn the other cheek, don’t sweat the small stuff and the usual kind of advice for living well. Well fine, it’s nice that it’s there in the Bible but it’s also nice that it’s there in Confucius or the Greek philosophers and other traditions. So it seems to me that the idea that it’s because God’s holding your hand that you can manage to be a good person is really just an illusion. And there are other values that Christianity is not so strong on too. For example, Daoism in China has enormous respect for nature, for animals, for the natural world and landscape, which Christianity is entirely silent about.

Would you be happy to see an entirely secular society?

Yes I would. I mean, I feel a slight aesthetic piety; I like the fact that England is cloaked in medieval churches. I enjoy visiting them, I get a sense of community and tradition from them, which I find very enjoyable and I’m sort of grateful to the Church of England for keeping them up and I don’t know what would substitute that because I don’t think David Cameron would do it very well, or perhaps I should say George Osborne. One side of me thinks that the Church of England is a nice little Labrador and I don’t want to put it down, but other churches are more like Rottweilers and I wouldn’t mind putting those down. So there is an ambiguity there but, by and large, I think we can do without the superstition, the hostility to outsiders, the exaggerated sense of righteousness of cause and all of the other bad things that come along with Church membership.

Grab a copy of Glass winter 2011 for the rest of the interview.




8.2.12

Heaven is like North Korea

So the death of a vile man follows soon after the death of a good one. In his capacity as a journalist, Christopher Hitchens had visited North Korea and written about the failed state and its now deceased dictator, Kim Jong Il. In a Slate article last year, Hitchens wrote:

Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult.

Far from being the poster child for evil godlessness, North Korea is inherently religious: its founder is worshipped as a divine being, while miracles and portents intending to legitimate the totalitarian rule of the Kim dynasty are propagated just like the myths surrounding Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha and every other religious figure. Furthermore, as Hitchens observed in the video below, the constant adulation of the Great Leader bears a disturbing resemblance to what Heaven is supposed to be like: a place where billions of souls offer up everlasting praise to their lord and master.

I couldn’t picture [Heaven]… but I’ve seen the nearest approximation to it, which is North Korea, where it is the only duty and job and right for a citizen to eternally praise the Divine Leader and his Divine Father. […] North Korea is only one short of a Trinity.

ADDENDUM: Here's Hitchens describing his experience in North Korea, and explaining how religious its society actually is.







20.12.11

Science and politics (and how postmodernism can fuck things up)

Here’s the introduction for a New Scientist special report on the worrying state of science in the US (‘Decline and Fall’, 29 October):

The US was founded on Enlightenment values and is the most powerful scientific nation on Earth. And yet the status of science in public life has never appeared to be so low.

As campaigning for the 2012 presidential election gets into full swing, US politics, especially on the right, appears to have entered a parallel universe where ignorance, denial and unreason trump facts, evidence and rationality.

Almost all the main Republican presidential candidates subscribe to some variety of anti-scientific bunkum. Michele Bachmann thinks science classes should teach creationism; Rick Perry rejects evolutionary theory because “it’s got some gaps in it”; Newt Gingrich considers embryonic stem cell research to be nothing less than murder; Herman Cain claims that people choose to be homosexual.

Meanwhile, Republican candidates who display a modicum of scientific literacy are practically committing political suicide. Shawn Lawrence Otto writes:

Republicans diverge from anti-science politics at their peril. When leading candidate Mitt Romney said: “I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer… humans contribute to that,” conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh responded with “Bye bye, nomination”. Romney back-pedalled, saying, “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.”

The story of an Indian atheist

The October 10 issue of The New Yorker has an article by Akash Kapur about an Indian cow broker named R. Ramadas (‘The Shandy’, online abstract here). Kapur writes about Ramadas’s line of work in the context of a rapidly modernising India. As expected of a New Yorker piece, Kapur’s journalism is engaging, eye-opening and full of pathos without being condescending or mawkish.

The article takes an unexpected turn when the reader discovers that Ramadas is an atheist. I say ‘unexpected’ because Ramadas is a poor, uneducated man born into the Dalit, or ‘untouchable’, caste of a highly religious and superstitious society. The trend is for religion to be more prevalent among those who share Ramadas’s demographic traits. Yet, amazingly, he bucks that trend.

Kapur writes:

[Ramadas] said people always talked about gods and the miracles they’d supposedly performed. People believed the gods could heal a disease. But where was the proof? Ramadas believed only in what he could see. He believed in science. He believed in doctors and their injections.

Not just fraudsters, but bullies too

Let’s say that you’re a large corporation or institution that has staked its profits and prestige on nothing more than a confidence trick. What do you do when someone calls you out on your public deception? Well, since you can’t actually defend your claims with evidence (because you haven’t got any), you’ll just have to sue that pesky know-it-all critic. With the deep pockets you’ve got, you can easily afford a legal campaign to silence anyone who had the temerity to expose your lies.

The British Chiropractic Association did exactly that to the journalist Simon Singh when he wrote a Guardian article criticising chiropractic. And now Boiron, a French manufacturer of sugar pills homeopathic ‘remedies’, is using the same bully tactics against an Italian blogger, Samuele Riva, who pointed out in a post that Boiron’s flu ‘treatment’ product Oscillococcinum doesn’t actually do anything. Like all homeopathic medicine, the so-called active ingredient has been diluted so many times to the point where there isn’t any left in the final product. Homeopathy ideology posits that water has ‘memory’, so even though there aren’t any physical traces of the original active ingredient left after multiple dilutions, its remedial power is nonetheless ‘remembered’ by the water, and thus retained.

Over at Science-Based Medicine (where real medical professionals advocate for evidence-based treatments, not magic), Steven Novella has written a great post on the Boiron case. And here’s Darryl Cunningham’s educational comic strip on homeopathy.

Quacks and snake-oil salesmen like the BCA and Boiron should really familiarise themselves with the Streisand effect. It might give them pause before they call their lawyers.




18.8.11

Why I am an atheist

Earlier this year journalist Andrew Zak Williams interviewed about 30 public figures who believed in God. Their explanations for their belief were published in a New Statesman article. Now Williams has followed up his earlier piece with another NS article, this time presenting the reasons given by prominent atheists for why they don't believe in God.

As for me, my answer has been covered by many of the NS atheist respondents, with greater eloquence. But for what it's worth, here's why I am an atheist:

Lack of evidence for gods and the supernatural, the obvious human-centric (usually male) artificiality of religion, the correlation between levels of poverty, education and security and levels of religiosity that suggests a mundane - not divine - explanation for religion, the evidently indifferent, amoral universe of randomness, accident and chance, and a personal preference for reason over faith.




1.8.11

A terrorist by any other name

I watched the BBC’s live coverage of the Oslo bombing just minutes after it happened. It wasn’t long before reporters and interviewed commenters mentioned the ‘I’ word. Despite the paucity of facts at the time, there were knee-jerk assumptions that the Oslo bombing was carried out by Islamist terrorists. I confess that I had the same assumption. Now we know that the bombing and the subsequent mass murder of people at a youth camp were all the work of one white, Christian, Islamophobic, right wing extremist Norwegian.

Waleed Aly has written an eloquent essay that spotlights our post-9/11 tendency to associate the word ‘terrorist’ almost strictly with Islamists. When non-Muslims like Anders Behring Breivik, or white supremacists, or violent environmentalists commit politically motivated atrocities targeting innocents, they’re usually described as insane, or slapped with epithets like ‘lone gunman’. They may eventually be (correctly) called terrorists. But when Muslims commit similarly terrible acts, charges of terrorism come with greater alacrity.

Waleed writes:

Today's domestic terrorists are a broad bunch, as the FBI notes: “From hate-filled white supremacists… to highly destructive eco-terrorists… to violence-prone anti-government extremists… to radical separatist groups.” And that is to say nothing of anti-abortion violence, which is quite common. These attacks don't get international headlines, or blanket domestic coverage. As a consequence, they don't generate the broad fear that Islamist terrorism does. But when they succeed, and they do, the dead are just as dead.

Terrorism is terrorism is terrorism. We may have been conditioned by the media’s biased reporting to immediately link brutal, indiscriminate, politically motivated violence with Islamists, but this Pavlovian response is inappropriate, even dangerously complacent. Terrorism risks becoming something that the alien Other engages in, but not ‘us’, however ‘us’ is defined. But any “fear-inducing violence by a non-state actor in the service of a political cause”, according to Waleed, is a “textbook case of terrorism”, regardless of the ethnicity or beliefs of the perpetrator. The ideology and actions of both Al-Qaeda and Anders Behring Breivik are equally despicable. Our language should reflect this.




25.7.11




UPDATE: ABC News has an article criticising the media for quickly jumping to the conclusion that the Oslo bombing was carried out by Muslim terrorists. Waleed Aly was interviewed for this piece, where he expands on a few points he made in his essay.

Steven Novella defends science-based medicine

Dr Steven Novella is a neurologist, educator and dedicated proponent of science-based medicine (SBM). He maintains an excellent website, NeuroLogica, where he writes well-argued criticisms of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), among other scientific and philosophical topics. I enjoy reading Novella’s eloquent, straightforward essays where he calmly yet firmly corrects common misconceptions of both SBM and CAM. He neither rants nor abuses his ideological opponents; in fact, Novella often responds to his critics with admirable patience and professionalism (especially considering that these critics repeatedly make the same flawed arguments either supporting CAM or opposing SBM).

Novella’s qualities are displayed in his response to an article by David Freedman in The Atlantic. Freedman had interviewed Novella to get the SBM side of the story for his article on CAM versus SBM. Unfortunately, the published article turned out to be sympathetic to CAM (its title, ‘The Triumph of New-Age Medicine’, pretty much declares its bias). Novella may be a gentleman ideologue, but he’s also bloody tenacious. Not letting this gross misinformation go unchallenged, the good doctor has written a lengthy, detailed rebuttal to both Freedman’s arguments in his article and his comments on NeuroLogica and elsewhere defending his journalism.

It’s a lot to read, but I recommend that you do it. Novella uses his trademark critical thinking skills, measured rhetoric and deep knowledge of the subject matter to show why CAM is pure nonsense, and why promoting it is a serious mistake.

Dr Novella said it best in the conclusion of his post ‘Alt Med Apologetics at the Atlantic’:

Freedman seems to have been overwhelmed by the finely crafted propaganda of the CAM industry. The “triumph of new-age medicine” is not in patient outcomes, or in filling any perceived gap in science-based medicine. The triumph is in pulling off a massive con. They have managed to put together a very slick package of logical fallacies, misdirections, misconceptions, and outright deception that is very effective. They have an excuse for every failure, and have managed to successfully attack their critics – even science itself.

Sowing confusion is easier than careful explanation, however. And it is remarkably easy to sell people something that they want. The appealing lie will always be hard to counter with harsh reality.

A journalist’s job, however, is to tell the harsh reality. Freedman failed in this regard. Despite his intentions, in the end his article was just another advertisement for an industry of pseudoscience.

If you’re too lazy to read the whole thing, you can scroll down to the ‘Conclusion’ section of Novella’s essays, a great feature of all his posts where he summarises the essay’s main points. But c’mon, read the whole damn thing! It’ll be good for you.




20.6.11

Anti-vaccination ads in Times Square

Anti-vaxers are going for the jugular this time. Mercola and the National Vaccine Information Center (or rather MIS-information Center) have launched an anti-vaccination ad campaign on the JumboTron in New York’s Times Square, where it will be seen by millions of locals and visitors. The lies and fearmongering must not go unchallenged.

There’s a petition asking CBS Outdoor, the owners of the JumboTron, to stop running the ads. Please sign it, even if you’re not a New Yorker or an American, and spread the word to all and sundry. Misinformation on health matters affects us all, no matter where we live.

Over at the Skepchick website, Elyse Anders has posted links to stories illustrating the harm caused by a significant drop in vaccination rates. When a certain number of kids in any given population aren’t vaccinated, it compromises the ‘herd immunity’ effect that acts to prevent outbreaks of contagious diseases.

Two trusted medical experts that I know of have written extensively on vaccines and the global anti-vax movement. Dr Ben Goldacre, who is also an investigative journalist, has covered these issues in newspaper articles, interviews, blog posts and his book Bad Science (2009). Dr Steven Novella is a neurologist and educator who has written about the efficacy, safety and necessity of vaccines on his blog NeuroLogica. I highly recommend you read what these two doctors have to say about the vile anti-vax campaign that needlessly puts children at risk of disease and death.

On a lighter note, here’s an awesome poem by the Digital Cuttlefish on the Times Square anti-vax ads.




12.4.11

Reading the world

A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they do is just open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world.

- Ferdinando Scianna

About a month ago I came across the work of Italian photographer Ferdinando Scianna. He’s a member of Magnum Photos, that venerable stable of photographers and photojournalists whose numbers include a few of my own aesthetic, if not technical, mentors.

Like a lot of his colleagues, Scianna covered various genres: portraiture, fashion, documentary, still life. Many of his photos were complemented by his writing. Scianna’s images can be witty like Elliott Erwitt’s, dignified like Henri Cartier-Bresson’s, poignant like Robert Doisneau’s, or brooding like Robert Frank’s. He’s not distinctive, but assuming he was influenced to some extent by the more idiosyncratic styles of the masters, I can sympathise.

Scianna’s comment about photography being “closer to reading than it is to writing” however is uniquely his, and it sings to me. Until I read those words, I – like most people presumably – saw photography as a process of authorship. It seemed obvious that photographers took pictures the way painters applied paint or how bakers baked bread. It was an act of creation. Or at least that was how it appeared.

Not to Scianna though. His is a more humble view of the art. To him, the photographer is merely an enabler; he facilitates the artificial expression of the beauty and wonder (and the ugliness and horror) that already exists out there, in the world. He does not make anything new.

There is a tender charm to this self-abnegation. Scianna’s gentle photographer does not seek artistic glory. He does not presume to be the author of reality. He is only a keen, and grateful, reader.

As someone who avoids excessive manipulation and artifice in my image-making, I feel closer to Scianna’s photographer-as-reader than to, say, the sort of creative types populating ad agencies and marketing departments. I could be happy just being a reader. In fact, my own peregrinations have yielded a few photographs that require literal reading.




6.4.11

Goldacre uncovers more lousy journalism

The Debunker of Disingenuous Drivel, the Nemesis of Newspaper Nonsense, the Scourge of Pseudoscientific Silliness, Ben ‘Quacksbane’ Goldacre, has asked a good question: why don’t journalists link to primary sources?

Goldacre’s article lays out three examples of journalistic jabber that didn’t bother to link to (or even understand) their information sources. Result: totally whacky reporting that crosses the border into Bullshitistan.

Hat tip to a commenter on Goldacre’s blog, Simon, who mentioned Julian ‘WikiLeaks’ Assange’s op-ed in The Australian. Assange advocated for what he called ‘scientific journalism’, which is basically what Goldacre’s arguing for: journalists linking to primary sources so that anyone can verify the information for themselves.

Media consumers/producers would be wise to keep in mind Goldacre’s Law:

If you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.

20.3.11

Why the f@ck are astrologers being asked for their opinion on Japan’s earthquake?

The UK’s Daily Mail has an article on the Japan earthquake and tsunami filed under ‘Science and Technology’. So to get the facts, naturally they sought out and interviewed seismologists, geologists, science writers, and astrologers. That’s right, astrologers, not astronomers. Because astrology is obviously a scientific discipline, like homeopathy.

In the interest of so-called journalistic objectivity, media factories like the Daily Mail and the ABC engage in ‘he-said-she-said’ reporting regardless of the competence and qualifications of those they choose to interview. This is an all too common media gimmick cynically used to create a ‘debate’ on matters where the facts are already well-established and accepted by all intelligent, informed, rational people (who can be incredibly knowledgeable on the relevant subject). Controversy sells papers and grabs eyeballs. We see this rotten trick being pulled on the evolution-vs-creationism issue, where media outlets give equal time and page space to both legitimate science and religious bollocks. “Teach the controversy” is really a euphemism for “give lies the same consideration as facts”. Ditto for vaccine safety, where the fact-deprived sputterings of anti-vaccination paranoiacs are given the same weight as statements from doctors and medical scientists.

When it comes to separating the wheat from the chaff, the media often prefer not to discriminate. Why, that’s the consumer's job! Too bad if they happen to lack the education or critical thinking skills to tell shit from gold.

I’m not going to dignify the astrologers’ delusional ravings about earthquake-causing ‘supermoons’ with a critique. For gold, not shit, read Evelyn Mervine’s highly informative Skepchick post on what really causes earthquakes, and why Japan gets so many of them. It’s even got pretty pictures and colourful maps. The best bit: not one mention of a fucking supermoon.




13.3.11




Hat tip to Martin at Furious Purpose.

Hitchens on what breaks heroes and idealists

I should read more of Christopher Hitchen’s stuff. He’s a contributing editor and columnist for Vanity Fair, but apart from the occasional browse, I’m not a VF regular. If I hadn’t known that Hitchens wrote for the magazine, I wouldn’t have made it past the April 2011 issue’s cover photo of Robert ‘Twilight’ Pattinson molesting an alligator. I’m glad I braved that salacious image of reptilian abuse (though I suspect some minor psychic trauma was sustained), because the Hitch’s article on the Egyptian revolution (‘What I Don’t See at the Revolution’) contained a standout line, a poetic observation that captured the reason why social change is so bloody difficult, frustrating and, in many cases, nigh impossible.

But first, some context. Hitchens wrote the article before Hosni Mubarak abdicated the Egyptian Presidency. Hence its partly speculative character as Hitchens pondered on the possible outcome(s) of the protests in Tahrir Square. And he was not optimistic.

I was a small-time eye-witness to those “bliss was it in that dawn” episodes, having been in Lisbon in 1974, South Korea in 1985, Czechoslovakia in 1988, Hungary and Romania in 1989, and Chile and Poland and Spain at various points along the [revolutionary] transition. I also watched some of the early stages of the historic eruption in South Africa. And in Egypt, alas – except for the common factor of human spontaneity and irrepressible dignity, what Saul Bellow called the “universal eligibility to be noble” – I can’t find any parallels, models, or precedents at all. […] This really is a new language: the language of civil society, in which the Arab world is almost completely unlettered and unversed.

Referring to Karl Marx’s definition of revolution as “the midwife by whom the new society is born from the body of the old”, Hitchens believed that while Egypt’s “old body may be racked with pangs, and even attended by quite a few would-be midwives, it’s very difficult to find the pulse of the embryo.”

With the perfect vision afforded by hindsight, we now see that Hitchens’s misgivings about the Egyptian people’s ability and resolve are largely undue. The revolution happened, even if new challenges await the freshly emancipated country.

Now for that standout line. Appropriately, it sits within a paragraph on Iran. A textbook example of an aborted revolution, the Green Movement’s courageous efforts have been stymied by both state thuggery and, as Hitchens points out, something else equally pernicious, which I’ve highlighted below.

As we sadly remember, the Ahmadinejad crew in Iran was also able to retain power in the face of popular (mainly urban) democratic insurrection. It, too, was ruthless in the use of force and able to rely on the passivity of a large and fairly pious rural population, itself dependent in turn on state subsidy. Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and the corrupt.

And that is why social change can end up stillborn.




12.3.11

Pretty sure this wasn’t what Andrew Keen had in mind

Andrew Keen doesn’t like amateurs. You can tell from the subtitle of his anti-dilettante jeremiad The Cult of the Amateur (2008): ‘How blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy’. Doesn’t mince words, does Mr Keen. Referencing T. H. Huxley’s theory that infinite monkeys bashing away on infinite typewriters will eventually produce a literary masterpiece, Keen has this to say about blogs:

At the heart of this infinite monkey experiment in self-publishing is the Internet diary, the ubiquitous blog. Blogging has become such a mania that a new blog is being created every second of every minute of every hour of every day. We are blogging with monkeylike shamelessness about our private lives, our sex lives, our dream lives, our lack of lives, our Second Lives. At the time of writing there are fifty-three million blogs on the Internet, and this number is doubling every six months. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, ten new blogs were launched.

If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. These days, kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com. For these Generation Y utopians, every posting is just another person’s version of the truth; every fiction is just another person’s version of the facts.

Free sex, kid porn, make money fast

My post entitled ‘Cartoon kid porn: evil pedophilia or victimless crime?’ currently sits at the number three spot on this blog’s Top Ten list of most viewed posts. Yet I doubt that the post owes its popularity to the subject matter: a criticism of the hypocrisy and irrationality of anti-cartoon kid porn crusaders, written in the form of a fictional interview. Far more likely that the Googlers were looking for more graphic fare. But since the post and its title contain the keywords kid porn, cartoon porn, pedophilia, dick, ass and the ubiquitous sex, Google’s arcane algorithmic administrations would have served it up as a search result, even if the searcher was after a more titillating link. Basically, I cheated, if unintentionally.

WikiLeaks: the case for and against

Looks like they got him. Julian Assange now sits in a London jail on rape charges, awaiting possible extradition to Sweden. But I won’t be drawn into this sideshow. I’m more concerned about the ethical issues behind the actions of WikiLeaks. Assange may be the cognitive, directive and even motive force behind it, but his current absence from WikiLeaks won’t lessen the impact the organisation has made on the international landscape. The fallout of ‘Cablegate’ will continue to occupy people’s thoughts and fuel fiery arguments attacking and defending WikiLeaks (and thus Assange).

Leaking is the new terrorism

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks

According to a former Alaskan governor and North Korean ally, Julian Assange is a terrorist. He has “blood on his hands”, because being the editor of an internet outfit that makes secret stuff not so secret is just the same thing as exploding bombs in crowded places, gunning down hotel guests and flying planes into buildings. With the sort of manhunter posturing and persecutive bombast coming from his critics, you’d think Assange was Osama bin Laden’s chief operations coordinator.