Apathy Sketchpad

To discover how honest homeopaths are, here is a passage from the Society of Homeopaths’ website, edited for accuracy:

Homeopathy simply explained: What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is an effective system of healing which assists the natural tendency of the body to heal itself. It recognises that symptoms of ill health are expressions of disharmony within the whole person and that it is the patient who needs treatment not the disease.

In 1796, a German doctor, Samuel Hahnemann, discovered a different approach to the cure of the sick which he called homeopathy (from the Greek words meaning ’similar suffering’). Like Hippocrates two thousand years earlier, he realised there were two ways of treating ill health: the way of opposites, most commonly used by conventional medicine and the way of similars.

Hahnemann discovered that diluting and succussing (shaking) remedies, which homeopaths call potentisation, not only produced fewer side effects but also produced better results. Homeopathic remedies are drawn from the natural world and prescribed on the principle of treating “like with like” or the way of similars.

How does it work?

Scientists cannot yet explain the precise mechanism of action for homeopathy but there is published evidence of its efficacy. It is believed that homeopathic remedies work by stimulating the body’s own healing abilities and that this stimulus assists your own system to clear itself of any expressions of imbalance. For more details on research evidence, please see the Society’s website at www.homeopathy-soh.org.

That’s not too bad. I’ve crossed out very little by homeopathic dilution standards.

A theme I’ve heard a lot about from alternative medicine types is “choice”. Homeopaths in particular are extremely keen that everyone be given a choice between ‘conventional’ and homeopathic medicine. Choice is, of course, a good thing. People should have a choice wherever possible. But the way alternative medicine practitioners use the word is disingenuous at best.

I’m going to skip over the argument for choice within the NHS, as I think that’s more to do with entitlement issues and the persecution complex fringe groups always adopt when their absurd privileges are taken away — hence every ‘attack on Christianity’ news report you’ve ever read or the endless ‘put the football on the BBC’ petitions on the 10 Downing Street website. The problem with ‘choice’ as an argument for providing alternative remedies is that their practitioners are intent on taking away any choice you may have.

A particularly gutsy Deal Or No Deal contestant may find themselves offered the swap with only the 1p and £250,000 boxes in play. Their dilemma, essentially, is between the prize in box 4 and the prize in box 17. One of them is life-changing money, the other won’t cover their bus fare if they live down the road. If they call it wrong, we wouldn’t incredulously ask them why anyone would want 1p instead of £250,000. They were never given a meaningful choice.

Both extremes of the ‘choice’ argument can agree on one thing: homeopathy and evidence-based medicine do not both work. One of them cures diseases, and the other is a waste of time and money. A patient given a choice between homeopathy and real medicine is in the same position as the Deal Or No Deal contestant above: they want the medicine that will cure their disease, but they don’t know which box it’s in. The patient has no meaningful choice until they’re told which medicine works (at which point they still have no meaningful choice since one option just seems silly).

An uninformed choice is no choice at all, so the people pushing for consumer choice are the skeptics who work to disseminate evidence of efficacy or lack thereof, to expose quacks and to debunk media scare stories. They are giving people the information which enables them to make a choice. Homeopaths are effectively arguing that we are ‘anti-choice’ because we want to give people information that will make the choice so easy it will cease to exist. I think they are anti-choice because they deprive people of information that makes the choice meaningful — and often give out misinformation that makes the answer to their dilemma both obvious and wrong. When they die of a treatable condition, will the homeopath stand up in court and say ‘this is what he chose’?

Nobody is arguing that consumers should have a choice between conventional business deals and Nigerian princes who e-mail them opportunities.

This Saturday, a lot of people are going to publicly overdose on homeopathic medicine, to prove that the pills are totally inert. This is part of the ‘10:23′ campaign. Personally, I love homeopathy. Its practices read like a scathing satire of alternative medicine. Literally every part of it is wrong. Just as you think it’s done being silly, you read the next bit and if anything it gets more absurd. Allow me to explain.

The way homeopathy works — I say ‘works’. The way homeopathy is thought to work — I say ‘thought’. The way homeopathy is believed to work is by a principle called ‘like cures like’. So you cure a disease using something that causes the same symptoms (even though they tell you that homeopathy treats diseases, not symptoms unlike, they say, something which they call ‘allopathy’ and which everyone else calls ‘medicine’). So, for example, say you have fractured limbs. As any player of Theme Hospital will tell you, Fractured Limbs is caused by falling from high places onto concrete, so you might get some concrete, put it in a glass of water and call it medicine. That’s a rather facetious example, but you can genuinely buy homeopathic remedies made with dolphin song or the light of Venus. The light of Venus? What disease does that cause? I think if you’re exposed to significant amounts of Venus-light then the terrible heat and the atmosphere of sulphuric acid will be what does for you. Homeopaths work out what diseases to flog these esoteric tinctures for by giving them to healthy people and writing down what it does to them. In case nothing happens, they omit such extravagances as a control group or any statistical tests, so they get the same guaranteed results as the N = 1 science of Braniac. They call these experiments ‘provings’, which is a bit like me writing ‘working’ on my timesheet when I was actually doodling: it is what I would like people to believe I was doing.

Anyway. You take your medicine, which you’ve carefully selected to be the worst possible thing you could give the patient, and dilute it. This, homeopaths conveniently assert, reduces its harmful effects while amplifying its presumed healing properties. You take a drop of the water with your medicine in, and put it in 10ml of fresh water, which is assumed to be about a 1:100 dilution, which they call “1C”. Then you shake it, or hit it with a book. (That obviously achieves nothing, so it can be fun to leave it out, thereby making homeopaths say amusingly daft things like ‘well of course it’s going to sound silly if you don’t mention the succussion’, which is the word they invented for hitting things with books.) Then you repeat the dilution, and succussion, so you have a 1:10,000 dilution, which they call “2C” and then again so you have a 1:1,000,000, or “3C” dilution. They call it a ‘potency’ instead of a ‘dilution’ because that sounds more like it might work, but chemists may recognise this as the technique used to remove all trace of a chemical from titration pipettes (except they’re delicate so you don’t hit them with books). Homeopathic remedies are routinely sold at a potency of “100C”, which means…

The problem with a 100C dilution is that it’s beyond analogy or satire. A 60C dilution would have to literally fill the entire universe before it had even a remotely realistic chance of containing a single molecule. When homeopathy was first imagined, we didn’t know about Avogadro’s Number, but now we know that beyond 12C there are generally no molecules left of the original medicine. It’s just a glass of water. So modern homeopaths have invented a thing called the ‘memory of water’. Some of them write long pieces of gibberish about quantum theory which read like a shooting script for one of the sillier episodes of Star Trek Voyager, but mostly they pin their meagre hopes on some kind of unspecified crystalline microstructures which they say form around molecules in water, and which heal your body somehow and don’t get damaged by being repeatedly hit with a book. Of course nobody has ever shown the memory of water effect in a laboratory or that homeopathic remedies have any therapeutic effect, but they write a lot more entertaining but merit-free quantum bullshit to explain that away. This empty water can optionally be soaked into a sugar pill if liquid medicine isn’t your thing, so my advice would be not to give hyperactive children homeopathic sleeping pills.

The problem with the ‘memory of water’ hypothesis (aside from the fact that it isn’t true) is that beyond a 24C dilution there is none of the 12C solution left either, so water would not only have to remember what it contained, but communicate this information to some future water. A 100C dilution would have had to do this at least four times. This aqueous Chinese-whispers obviously has no active ingredient, and homeopaths therefore believe that the real power of homeopathy is that it activates the body’s own healing powers, which sounds very natural and healthy but raises two rather important questions, the first of which is ‘why doesn’t the body just use those powers in the first place?’, and the second of which is ‘what environment did mankind evolve in where this was the best system?’. Developing an immune system that needs kick-starting by some water which used to have poison in it seems to me like an evolutionary mis-step.

No, the immune system evolved to try its level best to fix anything that might go wrong in the body, but it’s a bit of an ad-hoc job and doesn’t always get it right. Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it fails, and sometimes epically backfires and kills its owner. Modern medicine works by giving a group of intelligent people a deep understanding and knowledge of anatomy, asking them to interfere with the natural progression of a disease, and banking on their expertise to make a better fist of it than the body’s in-built system, which by the way is the same system that reckons if you don’t wash your face enough you need a load of spots that hurt to clean. It’s a slightly messy process, obviously, because there’s a finite number of options available, so we do massive amounts of research to discover every effect that every chemical and surgical procedure we can think of has on the body. Doctors look through that research to find one which will do what they need it to, and anything else it happens to do is called a ’side effect’ and the patient has to put up with them or take their chances with the disease.

Homeopaths, on the other hand, insist their medicine has no side effects. Much like the Daily Mail, they see the world as divided into ‘healing’ and ‘disease-causing’ things, and like the Daily Mail put everything on both lists. It’s just a pathetic piece of magical thinking which belies a complete lack of understanding of how the world works. It’s not divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things; things are right or wrong for a particular purpose. It’s this kind of thinking that leads to people putting deisel in a petrol engine, assuming they haven’t ruined it already by using 100C unleaded.

Homeopathic medicines in Boots, labelled with poncey Latin names to appear more credible. Hence the alternative spelling ‘homœopathy’.
photo credit: Gwyn Richards

And obviously people are perfectly free to think this way and to spend many a happy afternoon pointlessly diluting glasses of water and hitting them with books. Probably the ritual will make them feel better. But if people rely on this voodoo nonsense instead of real medicine, they die. And when they promote it over real medicine, they kill. Boots the Chemist have admitted in Parliament that there is no evidence that homeopathic medicines work, but they sell them anyway, alongside the real medicine, because “[their] customers think they work”. Campaigns like 10:23 are important to minimise the harm these things do.

Homeopaths will tell you that 10:23 does nothing to disprove homeopathy. The stunt is for loads of people to each chug an entire box of pills all at once to demonstrate that nothing happens. Such homeopathic overdose stunts have been done before, and homeopaths have got their excuse down pat by now: they say that any non-zero number of pills, if swallowed all at once, is the same as one pill. (I agree, apart from the ‘non-zero’ part.) They can say this, and indeed anything they like, because once you’ve effectively invoked magic, all bets are off. But the point isn’t to convince homeopaths — they’re far too invested to quit now — but to show everyone else how silly it is. If you have a bit of a cold and someone suggests you try homeopathy, and you do and you get better because it was only a cold, that can be quite convincing. But if we can goad the homeopathic community into publicly saying something as patently absurd as “one hundred pills is the same dose as one pill” then that’s a valuable victory. Anyone who’s seen that will think twice before entrusting their health to a homeopath. It also raises questions about why the packaging of these pills says to take a dose of two. That’s the business plan of a dodgy plumber.

That’s the point: we don’t need to disprove homeopathy. Aside from the fact that it is the homeopaths’ responsibility to prove their theory, all you need to do to homeopathy is hand it enough rope. A public awareness campaign is exactly the last thing homeopaths need.

Presumably if you’re reading this you’ve heard that Alan Johnson demanded David Nutt resign as head of something called the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for comments he made in a speech reproduced as a pamphlet you can download. I have read his speech. It’s quite interesting. It discusses the intentions of the drug classification system, criticises the current implementation, and offers a proposal for and justification of an alternative based on a systematic comparison the effects of a range of drugs, according to criteria decided by the public. This is complete with references, and in short exactly the sort of thing a Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology should be doing and while it’s not perfect I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would sack him for it.

Ann Widdecombe, who can always be relied upon to jump into the wrong side of any issue put before her, offered this dismal attempt at an explanation:

Look, you read your newspapers every day. Scientific advice changes almost as often as the wind.

You can hear this on iPlayer now; I heard about it from @krypto. And she’s right, of course, because the sum total of everything we know about the universe changes when we learn new things. Your choices are to go with what we know now, understanding that it could change in the future, or to make shit up and run with that. If you want to make shit up then fine (it’s called religion), but don’t foist your made up shit on me, and don’t employ a scientific advisor to make it look credible or else exactly this is bound to happen.

The Daily Mail’s A N Wilson also defended Johnson, who presumably wishes he wouldn’t, saying

The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth. He allowed scientists freedoms which a civilised government would have checked.

This was accompanied by an inset photo of Hitler until The Jan Moir Police made them take it down.

While obviously Wilson’s biggest crime against reason in that quote is kidnapping the word ‘only’ and dumping it, lost and confused, in front of an idea well outside its comfort zone, he’s also quaintly ignorant. Hitler was a big fan of science in principle, but corrupted it with quackery and racist ideology, and all but banned theoretical work as ‘Jewish science’ (except secretly where it might help his war effort). Anyone caught doing science that didn’t fit the racist message was fired. One mathematician even attempted to prove quantum mechanics and Nazism were the same thing. All of this is covered in John Grant’s Corrupted Science which I presume the Daily Mail’s A N Wilson hasn’t read, because it is a book.

Melanie Phillips, also of the Mail, implied pretty strongly that Nutt’s claims were simply wrong, which would at least be a legitimate defence of his sacking, were it true.

The reason they are casting the Home Secretary as the villain of this episode is that the chattering classes have bought into the idea that soft drugs are indeed less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. They therefore think Nutt is the voice of scientific reason.

But he is not.

She does, at least, appear to have read his speech, as she criticises it piece by context-free piece, which is perhaps as strong an endorsement as a scientific claim can get. Melanie Phillips’ views on science are almost uniformly opposed to reality. Take, for example her butchering of the Cochrane report on MMR or her support for ‘intelligent design’. Incidentally, Nutt’s speech cites the MMR fiasco as an example of harm done by ignoring evidence. Phillips doesn’t mention this. (For a better cricism of Nutt’s ideas, see the Transform blog post about the original paper.)

On what I will generously refer to as ‘the left’, Alan Johnson himself defended his actions by saying

Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with … He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. This principle is well understood and long established.

Widdecombe also made this case. And it’s true, although irrelevant. This was a lecture about scientific work, not a campaign. In any case, I think it’s equally well understood and established that you can’t ignore science and expect your science adviser to sit there and let you get on with it. Even if Nutt had crossed the line into campaigning, I think he would have been justified in doing so. As it is, Nutt did little more than present an alternative idea for consideration and present arguments in its favour (i.e., science). Gordon Brown believes Nutt should be fired for this, “because we cannot send mixed messages”, an argument pre-emptively demolished by Nutt himself on page 12 of the PDF transcript.

Martin at LayScience.net points out [with my annotation in square brackets] that

nobody hearing Professor Nutt speaking about the government is going to confuse him with a Labour minister [and it was made clear Nutt was speaking only as a scientist], so the problem that Gordon Brown is referring to is the problem of a senior scientist publishing and publicising research that contradicts the government line. In Gordon Brown’s world of control freakery, such dissent is not to be tolerated.

which sounds familiar but I shan’t comment on why because I’m not sure what happens if both sides of an argument are compared to Hitler.

Don’t listen to these people, and don’t listen to me. Read Nutt’s speech for yourself. If you’re a scientist, you’ll find its structure and tone familiar and start to wonder what all the fuss was about. If not, just read it and then ask yourself if you’d consider it ‘campaigning against government policy’ or ‘a man telling a class what he does at work’.

My PhD research makes use of CT scanning, so I’ve had to do a lot of research into that for the literature review. Here is some of the knowledge I’ve gained:

The mathematical framework that makes CT possible was all outlined in 1917 by Johann Radon. Then in the 50s, the mathematical framework was outlined again, differently, by Allan McLeod Cormack, who invented the CT scanner without having read Radon’s work. Then, in 1973, the CT scanner was invented by Godfrey Hounsfield, who hadn’t read Radon or Cormack’s work. For this, Cormack and Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize.

I’ll be honest, this somewhat undermines the importance of the literature review in my mind.

Only… I wonder what amazing stuff we’d have invented by now if we’d started inventing information technologies instead of pissing about with steam engines all that time. There should have been Discworld-style semaphore towers up and down the country in Tudor times at least. Why should a message take days to get across the country just because that’s how long paper takes? We could have had a CT scanner in the 30s, for a start. By now I’m totally convinced we’d have flying cars and moonbases.

And even given that, scientific knowledge is still trapped in PDF versions of paper journals, behind a myriad different paywalls and arbitrary institutional subscription lists. That’s a terrible system. It should be on a big database, searchable by any parameter you like. If I’ve got a question to which mankind has found an answer, I should be able to run a quick-and-dirty search and get a good idea what that answer is in about fifteen minutes.

If you want jetpacks, don’t invent the jetpack, reform scientific information handling. Because that way it’ll come with teleports and moving hologram projectors and sexy androids and other implausible future stuff.

I was going to throw this up on Google Reader and let FriendFeed tweet it at you all, but since I have apparently become the standard reference for ‘perfect formula’ stories, I thought I’d stick it up on here. Presenting… The Respectable Face Of PR Science Formulae!

From the b3ta newsletter, it’s OK Cupid’s analysis of what words and phrases are more successful than others at eliciting a response to a first-contact message. Essentially, it’s a formula for the perfect on-line chat-up line, and it basically reads ’spell right, don’t be a creep, and mention specific interests’. It’s just a blog post, so it’s still not really Proper, Peer-Reviewed Science, but there are enough mentions of N and f and statistical significance — all used quite correctly — as well as a note about anonymisation, that my instinct says they probably did it right. And the results are a nice mix of the obvious (read the other person’s profile), the counter-intuitive (confidence is bad) and the interesting (mentioning a religion is good but mentioning atheism is better).

In any case, it does what the original ‘perfect formulae’ story tried to do (or at least what its creator claims he tried to do and I see no reason to disbelieve him), which is to combine clever PR with an actual attempt to show how science can be relevant. And it worked, because here it is in the Telegraph, alongside a photo of attractive young people kissing each other, for purely illustrative reasons, naturally. Wouldn’t it be nice if companies realised they could get the PR without the sneers of intellectuals if they just did these things right?

Also I’m inclined to like it because it seems to say that self-effacing male atheist physicists are sexy. And I think we can all agree that that’s basically indisputable.

picture credit: ssoosay

Advances in technology are already leading to the development of robots that mimic human appearance as well as movement. And security experts fear terror groups could diguise them as innocent pedestrians in future plots.

The key word here, I think, is ‘future’. I’m thinking maybe… forty years hence? I mean, maybe mankind will be able to create a realistic replica human in the next decade, but not at a price some wingnut religious fundamentalist would be able to afford. Certainly it won’t be cheaper or easier than radicalising a disillusioned student any time even remotely soon.

The call [for ideas for anti-terrorism gadgets] is part of a new terrorism science and technology strategy and echoes the fictional boffin “Q”, made famous in the James Bond stories.

Yes, thankyou. Just report the news and I’ll relate it to my experience of popular culture myself. Further, I hypothesise that any article that uses the word ‘boffin’ is a load of shit. You don’t even need a clever idea to spot an android posing as a human. A cheap (by then) thermal camera will do it, I should think. A weighing scale will probably suffice. Analyse its gait. Fire random EM pulses about the place.

Millions of pounds could be available to fund the right product and one idea that has already found success is a maritime “stinger” able to stop a terrorist speedboat.

Terrorists haven’t got speedboats. They’ve got flour and vegetable oil. They’ve got rucksacks and bus passes. They dig up corpses and bomb cars. They use mobiles and email and trains, just like everyone else. The only terrorists who have speedboats are the fictional ones made famous in the James Bond films. People with easy access to speedboats wouldn’t bomb in such crude ways even if they wanted to — which they wouldn’t because people who’ve got speedboats tend to be pretty chuffed with the status quo just the way it is, thankyou very much.

Some of them have missiles, mind, so the problem of ‘how to blow something up without being there’ isn’t one they can’t solve already.

Experts with ideas to counter future threats are urged to get in contact.

Okay. I have some ideas.

First, I thought that we could counter the clear and present danger posed by terrorist androids posing as humans by the invention of the Android Detection Kit. It’s small and fits in a handbag, and although it looks like one of those little flexible magnets people used to use to distinguish aluminium cans from steel ones, with the writing crossed out and ‘android detector’ written in, it is in fact a highly technical robosensor unit.

Next, we should definitely develop some kind of teleport jamming field, because the danger that a terrorist might simply beam a bomb into the middle of a shopping centre or a train station is– well, not a train station, obviously, because we’d all be teleporting around the place instead, but maybe the car park outside the teleport shop.

Although I suppose they’d just teleport your teleport to you. Never mind.

Lastly, I think releasing a gaseous form of Carex into the environment would help. It would be designed to work on humans rather than bacteria, and would kill the bad humans while promoting the growth of good humans, such as homo immunitas.

Theos, the self-appointed ‘public theology think-tank’, whatever precisely a ‘think-tank’ actually is, have done another survey. Their last one, you may recall, reached such eminently plausible conclusions as ‘38% of Jews believe in the virgin birth of Christ’ and ‘36% of people of no religion celebrate Christmas as a religious festival’. This one says that 39% of Britons (including 50% of Londoners) believe in ghosts. The margins of error aren’t quoted, but you can work them out and they’re about 39%±2% and 50%±5%. It also says that 22% (±2%) of Britons believe in astrology.

Seriously? You want me to believe that half the population of London actually think that see-through dead people float through the city rattling people’s drawers? I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t plausible to me. I know people are easily led and a bit gullible. I accept that. But I thought Theos said that 34% of people believe in Jesus and 33% say they’re not sure. You can’t simultaneously accept Christianity and believe in ghosts, and that only leaves 32%. Okay, so there are error margins on this but I don’t for a second accept that all atheists believe in ghosts — because I’m one and I don’t. Someone would have taken a photograph by now. I don’t think there’s anything that exists that hasn’t been photographed, aside perhaps from the Higgs Boson.

The director of Theos, Paul Wooley, said

The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken.

It’s consistent in that they all report implausibly high belief in ridiculous ideas, yes. Then he said

The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs.

…which I thought very charitable to the respondents.

I think what Theos are increasingly discovering is that surveys can’t be trusted. They are repeatedly finding that a sizable fraction of the population will say yes to anything you care to ask them. I’m quite prepared to believe that London is an unusually credulous city, but given that the 2001 survey tells me that 1.4% of its population is Jedi, I’m tempted to think it might also be a city that doesn’t poll well.

And astrology? Really? Surely by now everyone in the world knows that astrology columns are just written by whoever happens to be passing at the time, with no thought or reference to any source of knowledge, just like the science reporting. I don’t believe that 22% of the population think that the stars and planets control their lives. I don’t accept that a fifth of the people I see in the street really believe that the arbitrary shapes drawn in the sky by convention dictate their fortune.

Are they counting ‘I suppose there might be something in it’ as a yes? Are they excluding ‘I don’t know’ responses from the results? Did they phone round houses in the middle of the day? We don’t know, because Theos’ press release doesn’t say. But any of those seems more likely than 4 million Londoners believing in ghosts. Nobody believes in ghosts. It’s a lunatic fringe belief, like crop circles or fairies.

This is a long rambling post dissecting the arguments of one Tom Vizzini with regards to swine flu. It may or may not be of interest to you, but I had to get this out of my head so that I can sleep, and to that end I’ve put it here. Read it if you want.

Andrew,

I have implied nothing. You just don’t seem to be able to read.

Nice. That’s class, right there, isn’t it? That was the response when I accused Vizzini of “[implying] that swine flu is a media-invented scare story like wifi or MMR or whatever”. Now obviously there are two sides to every story, and where one person reads clear implication another might read baseless inference, so I shall paste in the opening of Vizzini’s blogpost and let you be the judge:

Hi folks,

I am sick….sick of the swine flu. I have never seen so much hype over something so stupid.

Now I’d have said that that fairly clearly implies that swine flu is ’stupid’. A stupid thing to worry about. A silly little disease that poses no threat. Obviously I’m reading between the lines somewhat here, and you can’t really get all that from those two and a half sentences, so here’s a bit more:

The excuses have already begun. “Even if the swine virus doesn’t prove as potent as authorities first feared, that doesn’t mean the U.S. and World Health Organization overreacted in racing to prevent a pandemic, or worldwide spread, of a virus never before seen.”

Uh….yes it does. All these ‘experts’ are going to have egg on their face and now they are trying to justify scaring the crap out of your for no good reason.

photo credit: â–  Guerry

You see? His point, so he claims, is that people who wear facemasks because they’re scared of swine flu are stupid. I’ll come to that in a minute, but those people are not the same people as work for the WHO or the CDC. He’s veered off onto a tangent here and is mocking the epidemiology experts who have been working to prevent a H1N1 pandemic. That, to me, is not the action of a man who believes there is a risk of widespread infection. That is the action of a man who thinks we should let it run its course and see how many people die. He’s clearly betting on ‘not many’, and deriding people who disagree. That is an attempt to entirely debunk swine flu as a potential pandemic, and it’s simply too early to do that. Ben Goldacre refused to debunk it three times in the time it took him to write an article about how often he’s been asked to debunk it.

He may or may not have meant to imply it, but I think that he did. And given that Vizzini’s post and comments are riddled with non-standard punctuation and typos (to the point where he misspells ‘IQ’), and give the general impression that they were rushed off just as fast as he can type, it seems likely that I’ve read it more carefully than he wrote it and therefore probably the failure is on his end. Certainly he doesn’t use language in the most nuanced way I’ve ever seen. Here, for example, is a selection of his ripostes to my criticism (my emphasis):

You mean someone was so stupid that the nest [sic] they could do was make fun of a typo? Bet they were wearing a mask! … You just don’t seem to be able to read. … Run around terrified if you want to. … A mask is a very visible IQ test at this point. To me it is very much the same as people who pick a typo out of an article and use it to invalidate the article. Andrew….you failed that test. When you have to use a typo to make a point then you have run out of anything intelligent to offer. … Frankly Andrew you suck at debate. If points such as spelling are not relevant then don’t mention them. It makes you appear desperate and ill informed. … Just another example of your tendency to not be able to focus on the topic. I always find it funny that someone like you tosses out insults but then is so fragile when they get tossed back at you. Your mentioning a typo was arrogant and….stupid. If you can’t handle it then learn how to have civil disagreements without acting like a twit. … Stupid people tend not to be able to think for themselves. You have said nothing to contradict that assertion.

That’s right, he acts as if I’m wearing a mask. He literally cannot distinguish ‘I consider there is a chance of a pandemic in the future’ from ‘OH GOD OH GOD I’M GOING TO DIE WHERE IS MY FACEMASK?’. I have, for the record, never insulted him. I have criticised his arguments, and he seems incapable of distinguishing that from mindlessly abusing him, which, if I’m generous, explains his argument style. (Okay, maybe now I’ve insulted him.) For the record, here is my first comment:

That guy’s massively missed the point. Sure, wearing masks now is dumb, but the fact that 1000 people are sick is a worry because the disease might BECOME pandemic. He conflates the media whipping up a profitable panic with the WHO giving out expert advice, then has a go at them for taking measures to prevent a pandemic because they might work and then he can say ‘look, see, there was nothing to worry about’.

Also, he misspelt ‘IQ’.

You can see how I clearly relied on that one typo to invalidate his argument. Clearly there’s no way that could be a throwaway comment, a joke if you will, finding humour in an unfortunately placed transposition error.

But enough of such frivolity. The main thrust of his argument, he tells me, is this:

If you own a business and someone shows up with a mask on….fire them. They are too dumb to work for you. They have no common sense. In a way this is an QI test [see?] for your company.

…

It is stupid. The people in masks are stupid. … The masks are a visible sign of how stupid they are. … If you own a business and one of your employees shows up in a mask…find a reason to get rid of them. They are too stupid for whatever job you hired them for.

You see how he doesn’t toss out insults or come across as arrogant at all. But still, is he right? Certainly with the number of cases of swine flu so much lower than the number of cases of regular seasonal flu, and given that facemasks don’t actually work all that well, wearing them is a bit stupid. (Well, unless you wore them before swine flu. That’s fair enough. The tube is gross.) But his claim is not ‘it is a stupid thing to do’. It is ‘the people who do it are stupid’. As I said to him,

The media, the tabloids particularly, love to scare people, because scared people buy tabloid newspapers — and they’ve got very good at it, largely by refusing to be hampered by inconvenient details such as facts. I know that. You know that. Not everyone knows that. I mean, I think it’s stupid to use Microsoft Word as an HTML editor, but I appreciate that some people don’t know better and that doesn’t make them stupid. I think it’s pretty stupid to imagine that God exists, but I certainly don’t think all religious people are stupid.

For the record, his response to this was the phrase ‘just another excuse for stupid people’ followed by the last six sentences of the torrent of abuse I quoted earlier. You see how I’m ‘[tossing] out insults’ there, using inflammatory phrases like ‘that doesn’t make them stupid’ and ‘I certainly don’t think [they're] stupid’.

I just think that if you say ‘people are stupid’ and leave it at that, it’s defeatist and misanthropic, condescending and unhelpful. If you engage with them you can change their minds. If you see the bigger picture you can see where the weaknesses are that we can fix and improve matters. If you just write off humanity as too thick to survive then you become a small part of the problem. His solution is to make them all unemployed. That’s what we need, a lot of uneducated people with no money. That will definitely solve both swine flu and the credit crunch. I want to think it’s meant in jest and he’s actually more progressive than that, but I’m really not convinced.

I’ll be interested to see if Vizzini replies to this.

Because, you know, the Pope never makes me cross.

First of all was the story of Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife’s decision to excommunicate a woman who helped her daughter get an abortion. The daughter was nine. She needed an abortion because her Catholic stepfather raped her. The rapist was not excommunicated. The Vatican supported all of this, so the only way these actions make any sense is if the Vatican considers abortion worse than raping a nine-year-old girl. And that nearly makes sense, except that the girl would probably have died in childbirth, so even if you consider her twin fÅ“tuses ‘people’ you still have to be pretty warped to expect her to die for the crime of being raped. (Warped, or Muslim.)

After that, the Vatican calmed down a little and celebrated International Women’s Day, by — I know, this has to be gold, doesn’t it? — by publishing an article asking the question “What in the 20th century did most to liberate Western women?” and reaching the rather brilliant conclusion that it was probably the invention of the washing machine. Not the right to work. Not women’s suffrage. Definitely a machine that makes cleaning clothes (which clearly is Women’s Work) easier. I mean, even if that’s pragmatically true (which it isn’t) don’t say so right after you’ve okayed raping small girls.

It’s lucky the Pope isn’t at all utterly terrifying.
photo credit: openDemocracy

After that piece of light-hearted batshit whimsy, the Pope decided to refocus his efforts on Catholicism’s core competency: ruining innocent people’s lives with arbitrary and idiotic dogma. This time, it’s Africa’s turn. Speaking about the AIDS epidemic there, the Pope himself, not a lackey this time, said “the distribution of condoms… aggravates the problems”. The Telegraph have found themselves a priest to defend him — and let’s mention now that I’m only inferring he’s a priest from his photo. Nowhere do they bother to actually mention that he works for the Pope, because that might be a bit too much like declaring one’s interests for the mainstream media. Their priest, George Pitcher, rehashes the same old argument I’ve heard over and over again: “that the Church’s historic teaching that chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it would prevent the spread of killer diseases such as Aids”. And this is true, but alas irrelevant, because nobody is criticising that teaching. (At least, I’m not. At the moment.) What we are criticising is the Pope’s claim that distributing condoms will make the AIDS epidemic worse. This claim is demonstrably false. It turns out that if you grow up and go with the facts instead of just making shit up, you can actually make a difference and save some lives.

The problem I have with the Pope’s speech is not that he advocated abstinence: it is that he specifically lied about something that we know works. Even if nobody acts on his advice, if they believe the epidemiological claims that he makes then they will make bad decisions and people will die.