Apathy Sketchpad

So you know, I’m working on making my own theme for this blog, so there’s going to be a certain amount of ugliness at random until then. please bear with me. Shouldn’t be for too long at a time.

The NHS in Kent have stopped funding the Tunbridge Wells Homeopathic Hospital, which leaves four NHS-funded homeopathic hospitals. This is, of course, a good thing: homeopathy is (and let’s be fair to it) total bollocks, and while there’s nothing particularly wrong with homeopathic hospitals existing*, giving them public funding is quite indefensible. Apparently, the decision was taken because “the NHS has to decide the best use of money on the evidence of clinical effectiveness”. This is also good — homeopathy has no clinical effectiveness and therefore should get no money. But I can’t help feeling that all of this is not so much a good thing as it is a very, very small step towards a good thing. The ideal situation is that public money isn’t spent on irrational things. It may come as a shock for many people, but I have checked, and we are not living inside a Jasper Fforde book, and here in Real Life there’s no reason to spend public money paying deluded people to put bad medicine into beakers and then repeatedly rinse them out, just like there’s no reason to spend public money brainwashing vulnerable children into believing in God.

Okay, so the NHS in Kent have decided that homeopathy is at least a little less deserving of funding than the other things they’re doing, but that’s not the same as the NHS stopping spending my money on stupidity. The NHS still seems pretty supportive of homeopathy. They know it’s nonsense, of course, everyone know that (or at least, everyone who counts), but they support it anyway. Why? Because a very tiny fraction of the public want them to. This is what the NHS has to say on its homeopathy information page:

Around 200 randomised controlled trials evaluating homeopathy have been conducted, and there are also several reviews of these trials. Despite the available research, it has proven difficult to produce clear clinical evidence that homeopathy works. Many studies suggest that any effectiveness that homeopathy may have is due to the placebo effect, where the act of receiving treatment is more effective than the treatment itself.

Medical doctors and scientists do not generally accept homeopathy because its claims have not been verified to the standards of modern medicine and scientific method. Scientists argue that homeopathy cannot work because the remedies used are so highly diluted that in many there can be none of the active substance remaining

That, to me, reads as a pretty damning condemnation of homeopathy**. It’s cagily worded, saying “it has proven difficult to produce … evidence” rather than flatly stating that there is no good evidence, but it’s pretty clear in its message: the people whose job it is to know if things like this work generally agree that it doesn’t. And yet this is on the website of the NHS, a body who spend a million pounds on homeopathy every couple of months. So why do they do that?

I think the government lately has taken to trying to appeal exclusively to minorities. A small number of people want magic water on the NHS, so they get it. A small number want faith schools, so they get it. They held out on the smoking ban for as long as possible, presumably to please the small number of smokers in the public (although the quite bare-faced exemption of the House of Commons’ bar suggests another motive).

Of course, it doesn’t help that MPs are basically all rubbish at science. The above link is to a transcript of a debate in the House of Commons. Here’s a paragraph, spoken by David Tredinnick, whoever he might be:

Surveys have been done to see whether the treatments are effective. The Bristol homeopathic hospital did an outcomes study, not just of a percentage of its patients, but of the lot. It surveyed 6,544 consecutive follow-up patients, and the outcomes scores were as follows. They had all taken homeopathic medicine, and they were asked whether it worked. Seventy-one per cent.—three quarters—said that they had improved, half said that they were better or much better, and homeopathy was associated with positive health changes to a substantial proportion of a large number of patients with a wide range of chronic diseases. In other words, cutting out the jargon, the hospital was treating lots of different people for lots of different things—lots of serious problems.

He’s citing a survey as evidence. Which would perhaps be fair enough if there was any kind of a placebo control group — without knowing what kinds of conditions were being treated and how those conditions generally respond to placebo, without knowing what I’m supposed to understand from “71% … said they had improved, half said they were better”, without knowing what “a substantial proportion” might be, this is just a bunch of meaningless statements. I can see that at an idle glance at that paragraph. It worries me if the people running the country can’t. He mentions some numbers from other trials later, but to be honest I’ve already lost faith in his ability to understand scientific studies so his summary of them is of little value to me.

And of course, one might argue that they shouldn’t be expected to; that they’re politicians, not scientists, and that it’s unreasonable to demand they know how to critique a scientific study — they have advisors for that. And that would be true if they weren’t discussing NHS policy. NHS policy has to be decided by people who understand medicine; that’s just common sense. And anyone who thinks that a survey performed by a homeopathic hospital with no control group is in any way useful evidence does not understand medicine and shouldn’t be given a say, elected official or not.

Another thing which annoys me is that while I was trying to find out how much the NHS spends on homeopathy I found many references claiming that it costs 16p to treat a patient. Now I don’t know what that’s meant to mean, but it’s a lie. A glass of tapwater costs effectively nothing, and no molecules of medicine costs exactly nothing. But the whole placebo shebang costs a lot more — you have to pay someone to sit and talk to a patient for ages before they’re sufficiently bored that the ‘medicine’ will have any effect. They say it costs 16p. The BBC article I linked at the beginning says that the hospital in Tunbridge Wells costs £160,000 a year and treats 1000 patients with that money. That works out to £160 a year, which is a thousand times what is being claimed.

Apparently, the NHS has been funding homeopathy since it was founded, and it still is. You celebrate this one hopsital closing if you want, but I don’t call that progress.

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* I think it’s fair enough to provide a market for anything people believe, although if the homeopaths say that their medicine is more than just a placebo, as I’ve seen homeopaths do quite explicitly, then of course that’s fraud (even if it does make the placebo more effective — these morals are pretty clear cut when it’s not your money you’re spending, as in the case of the NHS spending money that the general public has worked to provide). And if a patient has nothing wrong with them then it’s just about acceptable for a GP to suggest they try alternative therapy, although obviously the NHS mustn’t fund that. If we’re happy for the NHS to lie to us in what it sees as our best interests, then how can we complain when ministers do it?

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** Here’s some example questions from the “what to ask” section of that same page (emphasis mine). I think there’s some pretty good advice here:

• How effective is this treatment?
• How will I know if the treatment is working?
• What will happen if I don’t have any treatment?
• Are there any other ways to treat my condition?
• Can you explain it again? I still don’t understand

Dave Hitt is a very prolific pro-smoking crank who I wrote a long page about in the past. For the sake of completeness, I shall summarise it here: Dave Hitt emailed a lot of people who’d reported the dangers of passive smoking and asked them to name three people that it had killed, and then he wrote a webpage about it, which (implicitly) says that their failure to provide names shows that their numbers are wrong and reveals “blatant dishonesty”, when in fact it doesn’t*. I had a long email conversation with him in which he admitted as much, but didn’t alter his webpage*, and I held that his various carryings-on show that he is a twat, and so far I’ve not been convinced otherwise. My page was entitled “Dave Hitt Is A Twat”, and is now the second website returned by a Google search for “Dave Hitt” (with or without quotes).

More recently, he posted this on his website*. It’s a brief story about someone who asked a newspaper for the source of some numbers they’d printed and been told they were made up, and these closing comments:

Here’s a fun project for a rainy weekend. Scan the news for ass numbers. Pick one that seems really outrageous. If you like, you can do some research on your own to see if there’s any truth to the number, or even to find out what the real number should be, but that’s optional. Now send some e-mail to the reporters who wrote the story and any sources quoted in the article. Ask for specific sources of the numbers.

…

A while back I did just that with ten different nicotine nanny organizations and individuals. You can read the results here.

I took issue with this, because he didn’t do “just that” at all; he asked for a list of names, when the source of the numbers was most likely a statistical analysis*. He’d written a good post about an interesting story, and then spoilt it by trying to attach his own pet delusion to it — he wasn’t just passing on something he’d read and enjoyed, he was hi-jacking a well executed piece of investigative blogging to try and push his own, far less well executed, agenda*. So I posted on his page and said so. He replied to me, and said two things. First:

You claim “He repeatedly asserts that smoking is safe,” a comment I would never make. Every single nanny I’ve ever dealt with is an unrepentant liar. I’ll make you a wager, Andy boy: $100 American says you can’t find a single instance of me saying that anywhere on the internet. Is it a bet?

Now I did use those words in that order referring to him. Here is the entire paragraph:

Dave Hitt, in common with much of the world’s other anti-ban propaganda artists, believes that any statistical survey that produces less than a 100% increase in risk is inconclusive. Passive smoking does not double the risk of cancer, and as such no (properly performed) survey could ever prove to that standard it is dangerous. “Some risks”, to use his words, “are just too small to measure.” He repeatedly asserts that smoking is safe, implicitly on the grounds that nobody has yet managed to prove that it isn’t, and dismisses any study that suggests that is isn’t as invalid.

I think it’s safe to say that in context it is clear that by “smoking is safe” I mean from the perspective of people other than those doing the smoking. Hitt took that phrase out of context and only after I showed him an instance of him saying exactly what I said he said did he explain that he wanted me to prove he said that smoking is safe for the smoker, which obviously I couldn’t, but then I never said he’d said that, and then called me a liar for not being able to back up a statement that I didn’t in any meaningful sense make*. In the original Dave Hitt Is A Twat page, I criticised him for not having a public comments section on his site, and now he does, but after I disagreed with him three times he banned me from it, so what he has in actuality is a fake public comments system: it looks like people can comment, but any actual discussion is cut short*. That said, I just posted there anyway* and he appears to have made a less than thorough job of banning me. Possibly only I can see it in some kind of crazy Tachy Goes To Coventry system. I invite all of you to post on his blog as rationally and as often as you would like, though.

Here is the second thing he said:

When I started out the Name Three project I knew that if just one of these so-called experts pointed that out that statistics don’t work that way I’d be dead in the water. But none of them did. Not one! Why not, if they’re such experts in the field?

Well this I found interesting. This is a valid argument! At last! And I agree with him: the people he emailed should (unless they had some names, I suppose) have told him he was making an unreasonable request. But again, his “Name Three” page didn’t make that argument. I’d emailed him several times and I’d never heard this argument before. That is not the aim of “Name Three”. I know this not least because there’s nothing about it on the whole page, but I can be absolutely sure because he sent me several emails refusing to acknowledge that Statistics Don’t Work That Way. I suspect he’s making excuses. He said, and I quote:

Primary smoking can, and often is, blamed for specific deaths. So why should secondary exposure be exempt from the burden of proof?

So either he did know that Statistics Don’t Work That Way — and was deliberately using an argument he knew to be invalid* — or he didn’t know that Statistics Don’t Work That Way, and is now lying rather than admitting to having made a mistake and being expected to apologise*. I don’t think there’s any other way that things can be.

Dave Hitt, you’ll be glad to hear, Is Still A Twat.

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*This is the kind of thing a twat might do.

I surprised one or two people the other day when I mentioned that this country’s laws require schools to have “collective worship” every day. Of course many of them don’t, which is about the only reason I think this law doesn’t actually cause riots, but that’s the rule. I’ve just read an Observer article about a man called Dr Paul Kelley, author of a book about how to fix education and headmaster of a school in Tyneside. He’s also fresh from his last adventure, championing the cause of a good student rejected from Oxford University supposedly because she was a northerner from a comprehensive school, who later cooled off changed her mind anyway. His school is one of the government’s fancy new “trust schools“, and he’d like to make it secular, because he is not a complete moron.

But he can’t, because apparently that would be “politically impossible”, whatever that might mean. Apparently the government, then led by Blair, “accepted it would be popular but said it was politically impossible.” I don’t understand what that means. It would seem to me that if something would be popular then that would, by definition, make it politically very, very easy. I thought that was the whole point.

One senior figure at the then Department for Education and Skills, told Kelley that bishops in the House of Lords and ministers would block the plans. Religion, they added, was ‘technically embedded’ in many aspects of education.

I can only infer from this (as of course the Observer would never be caught actually explaining things fully) that, due to the way the law is set up at the moment, it would be impossible to create secular schools in this system. But practically it’s very easy: what you do is you stop having a daily act of collective worship. That’s easy: a monkey could do that. Monkeys are very good at that; they almost never hold religious services of any kind. If the system doesn’t allow you to implement simple plans which would be popular and benefit society then the system is broken and needs fixing.

If a company screws me over and then says that because of some matter of policy or bureaucracy they can’t offer me a refund I won’t just say “oh, fair enough then” and go away; I’ll pester them until they cough up. I refuse to give up stuff that I’m entitled to because someone else has an arbitrary rule saying I’m not allowed to — why do you think religion annoys me so much in the first place? Luckily, Kelley seems to feel much the same way, and he’s hoping other schools will start to demand secularity as well.

More power to him.

Update: Here are a couple more blogs which have covered this topic in the last couple of days: Why Don’t You, “Ghetto Religion In The UK”, and Pharyngula, “Two Countries Separated By A Common Idiocy”.

At work, we have a thing called a “fax machine”. This is sort of like the bastard lovechild of a marriage betwixt 14.4kbps dial-up modem and a bad photocopier. It’s designed to send images over a phoneline, like a really shit version of email. It has many disadvantages over email:

• The resolution is worse.
• It can’t send sound, video, files or text. Just images.
• If you want to send something from your screen you have to print it then give the paper to the fax.
• If it receives something then it prints it whether you want it to or not and you can’t just look at it without printing it.
• It very often doesn’t work.
• When it doesn’t work, it sits there making dial-up modem noises and shouting “the other person has hung up” on a loudspeaker, and offers no apparent way to mute this.
• They tie up your phone line
• If someone faxes your phone line by mistake then you get pestered with beeps all afternoon.

It’s much bigger than a computer and costs a substantial fraction of the price of a cheap PC. So what the hell is it for? Even if we assume that we have to deal with people who like receiving and sending faxes, there still doesn’t seem to be any advantage to owning a massive machine over just getting an online service to do it via email.

Why do fax machines exist? What are they for? What do they want?

A while ago the Carbon Trust stopped me in the street and gave be a pad of post-it notes. They were shaped like little feet and had carbon-saving tips written around the side and the Carbon Trust logo on the bottom. All this means that there’s only a very tiny area of paper that can actually be used (which means, when combined with the fact that nobody in the world recycles post-its, that they’re laughably carbon-inefficient), but I put that area to good use this afternoon before I left work for the day:

Today I phoned Yorkshire Water. I had to do this because my old landlord insists on bill receipts in order to claim our deposits back. I’d phoned them before, about six weeks ago. They told me then that it would take “seven to ten working days” to get a receipt. I said okay, and a month later phoned them back to ask where it was.

They said that their system said it had gone out and I insisted it hadn’t gone all the way out so they said they’d send me another. Again, they said it would take “seven to ten working days”. That was, as those of you who are good at maths will doubtless have worked out, two weeks ago. To be exact, eleven working days have passed. Those mathsy types I just mentioned will already know this, but it is important so I’ll make it explicit: eleven is more than ten.

So today’s phone call was me asking them to have a third attempt. A month and a half and two attempts has so far not been enough for Yorkshire Water to print out a bit of paper and put it in the outbound mail bag. The guy on the phone told me he’d send me a bill. He told me it would take seven to ten working days, is that okay?

I told him that no, it wasn’t really okay, because I have £500 waiting on this receipt and it simply doesn’t take two weeks to send a letter and both times they said that before they didn’t bother to send me anything.

He said that they had sent them both; says so on the screen. Possibly, he suggested, the Royal Mail had lost them.

Both of them? That’s not very, very likely, I asked, is it?

It could happen, he insisted.

So I’ve done some checking. (One thing I love about having a blog is that you’re allowed to be really anal and nerdy about utterly trivial stuff — I know from experience that the same things in everyday conversation get you mocked.) According to this page, the Royal Mail lose 14.4 million out of 21 billion items of mail every year. That means that the odds of any one bill receipt going missing are a hair under 0.07%, or one in 1,458 and a third. The odds, therefore, of them losing any two bill receipts are one in 2,126,736-and-a-ninth. The odds of Yorkshire Water being incompetent seem somewhat higher than that. Especially since, even if we grant them the 2-million-to-one failure of both deliveries, it still takes them two weeks to mail a letter.

I’ll let you know if and when they get back to me.

This page, whatever it may be about, is (presumably unintentionally) hilarious:

• What do I need to consider when choosing a television program or DVD for my little one?
• What makes an “educational program” truly educational?
• What impact might television have on my baby’s early development?
• Are there any health considerations I need to think about?
• How long should I allow the TV to be on for and does this change with age?
• How do I achieve a healthy balance between TV usage & other developmental activities?
• What on earth is RVI-Free media?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the above, welcome! You’re at the right place!

I recently read in The Times that the government plans to make more faith schools in an effort to integrate minorities better. This is a clearly stupid idea. It’s a bit like trying to put out a fire by pouring napalm on it. Like most newspaper articles, it refers to a document that nobody could read. In science articles these are unpublished research, and in politics stories they’re documents that haven’t been published yet. In this case, the document was published a few days after the article, and here it is. I’ve skimmed it, and I think I can safely summarise that it’s a lot of emotional but empty sentiment and nothing very much of any substance. What substance it contains is almost entirely aimed at downplaying the differences between faith schools and what it calls “schools without a religious character”.

In one way, this is a very bad thing, because including any kind of religious “service” (forgive me if I think “service” is a rather grand term for “indoctrination”) in a context where science, mathematics and history are taught is effectively teaching religious beliefs as facts, which is not fair on children, who have a right to be taught objectively about the world. Any blurring of the line between religious beliefs and facts is a very dangerous thing. Children must be taught to question beliefs — all beliefs — or else they will grow up vulnerable to exploitation by fundamentalists, con artists, and fraudulent and deluded “alternative” therapists. Faith schools also segregate children, which reduces their contact with people of other backgrounds, which causes more segregation and intolerance in the future. Both of these things will have serious repercussions when these (comparatively) indoctrinated, ignorant and intolerant children grow up and adopt positions of power.

In another way, though, this is a good thing: the difference, according to British law, between a faith school and a “school without a religious character” is very small. The document, Faith In The System, reminds us that “all maintained schools [including non-faith schools] are required to have a daily act of collective worship”. If the school has no other faith then Christian worship must be practised. That makes them Christian faith schools in all but name, and this is a big problem which shouldn’t be ignored. The school is required by law to teach children that two thousand years ago a man, whose father was an omnipotent but invisible being, raised the dead, turned water into wine, walked on water, then died and went to Hell at the request of his supposedly benevolent father and rose again, before ascending bodily into a paradise world. The government claims that this plays a vital role in “exploring social and moral issues and [children's] own beliefs”, despite the fact that this worship is mandatory — parents can withdraw their children from it but the children themselves have no say in what, or how much, religious dogma they are exposed to. That is not “exploring their own beliefs”. That is indoctrinating them with their parents’ and the state’s preferred beliefs. RE lessons, which I certainly do approve of, show children a wide variety of beliefs and explores them sensibly. “Collective worship” just shows them one of the available options and teaches them to believe it unquestioningly. That is clearly detrimental to a child’s psychological development.

The rather patronisingly named Department for Children, Schools and Families would appear to think that if we have a load of faith schools anyway then we might as well make some for other religions as well. Whereas actual common sense, and indeed teachers and large sections of the public*, would say that we must remove all influence of religion on education. Neither parents nor the state have the right to dictate what children believe, either directly, by simply telling them what to think, or indirectly, by controlling what influences they are exposed to. Instead, children must be given the right to be educated without also having religious beliefs forced upon them, and to make up their own minds after hearing what everyone has to say.

So this month I’m awarding Religious Crackpot Of The Month jointly to these five crackpots (who all have suitably ridiculous job titles): the “Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families” Ed Balls, the “Minister of State for Schools and Learners” Jim Knight, the “Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools and Learners” Andrew Adonis, the “Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families” Beverley Hughes, and the “Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children, Young People and Families” Kevin Brennan. These publicly elected ministers run a department which has publicly endorsed a document suggesting — and repeatedly made it a matter of policy to — back faith schools and increase their numbers. If one of them is your MP then you can write to them, and if they’re not then you can write to them anyway. Or more simply you can just sit back, wait for a snap election and vote them out of office. Well assuming someone can muster up some less ignorant opposition.

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*The public is, as it is wont to be, split on the issue, but here’s a few samples. This petition against faith schools gained 3,191 signatures and this response from the PM’s office, which really misses the point on every possible level. This petition, in favour of faith schools and more alarmingly, in favour of creationism, got 18,699 rather depressing signatures from 18,699 rather depressing signatories, and this response from the PM, which is bang on about creationism but rather vacuous on faith schools. This anti-faith school petition has only 33 signatories. It’s new. Sign it. Similarly this one, with 19. This one’s been going longer, and has 17,401 signatories, but there’s still time to sign it if you want. (It’s been in the links panel for ages now so you may even have signed it already, I don’t know.) At present this means there are more people who have signed a pro-creationism petition than any anti-faith school one. But it’s close so let’s push it over. Petitions aside, it seems that the general public are mostly against faith schools. Good old general public.

I’ve noticed that people who are usually perfectly rational have a habit of becoming dangerously insane whenever the talk turns to the smoking ban. But I’m also aware that there’s no particular reason why they should do that rather than me. So instead of trying to summarise, I’ll simply post exactly what I said yesterday and exactly what Martin said in reply, and let you draw your own conclusions.

What I Said

The simple fact of the matter is that it’s not healthy for a person to be totally incapable of going for a few hours without a fix of an addictive drug, especially when it’s one that fills the room with smoke, toxic or not.

What He Said

Back to addiction again. Similarity is food, insulin. You seem to be saying that addiction is bad in itself, with smoke (toxic or not) only an ‘especially’. Obviously a new meaning of the word ‘healthily’ I haven’t previously come across.

So who’s insane?