Apathy Sketchpad

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 assume everyone here already knows that I think smoking in public is something that should be banned. Dave Hitt does not. But then, Dave Hitt doesn’t appear to think very much at all.

I found his website (The Hittman Chronicles — I swear, he calls himself “The Hittman”. It would be cute if he wasn’t a fully grown man) through a pro-smoking group’s website that I was looking to email because I’d seen their representative on BBC4 and he was demonstrably a moron. (He was consistently outwitted by a comedian. I think that politicians should be smarter than comedians but they persistantly prove to me that they are not. One wonders if we would be better off putting the comedians in charge for a while. The only problem is that of who’d do the comedy. Certainly politcians aren’t funny. Not on purpose, anyway.)

You may have noticed that both people I’ve mentioned so far who support smoking in public I have dismissed as morons. I want to mention that I don’t consider that they are morons because they disagree with me. In fact, it’s the other way around. They disagree with me because they are morons.

And now I shall prove that Dave Hitt is a moron. The page I was linked to on his website was this one. I don’t advise you bother actually reading it. That will just make you angry. I’ll give you the gist here: nobody can give me three names of individuals killed by passive smoking. Therefore nobody has been killed by passive smoking.

I touched on this issue before, but I thought it so clear why this argument is wrong that I left it to a six-word sentence in the comments section to explain it, but as at least one person is too stupid to understand it, I’ll spell it out more clearly. I spelt it out to him, too, and his response was to point out that studies of smoking were mostly inconclusive (and therefore, he presumably believes, any argument that reaches the same conclusion is valid). So I spelled it out again:

The “name three” defence is analogous to saying that someone who throws a six four hundred times in a row shouldn’t be accuse of using a loaded die because rolling a six is not that unlikely. Point to any given roll of that die and prove that it wouldn’t have come up six anyway. Can’t do it. But when you consider all 400 throws it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain that the die is loaded.

Whether or not the statistics show smoking is dangerous [the] argument is flawed.

You know what Dave Hitt said when I told him that? I swear this is a direct quote from his email which has not been altered to make him look foolish (in the same way that people don’t draw stupid moustaches on photos of Hitler):

That’s a semi-valid analogy. Yet, if SHS were so dangerous that it’s killed a million people in the past twenty years, why can’t the very people who make a living selling the dangers of SHS come up with three measly names?

Because there aren’t any, that’s why.

Clearly he has some kind of mental block, so I decided to remove smoke completely from the equation and try him on something he has no stated agenda in:

You appear to have once again completely missed the point of my email. I am left with no choice but to slowly and patiently explain it to you a third time. I shall try to use shorter words and an example this time around.

In Cornwall, the local granite pours radon gas into the air. This is radioactive. A study has shown that this causes about 1% of UK cancer deaths — about 1000 people per year. But since cancer doesn’t leave a calling card, it’s not possible to say which ones, becuase for any given cancer patient there is only about a 1% chance that it was caused by radon gas. (This chance is higher in places like Cornwall, but still not 100%.) For any given patient, the cancer is more likely to have been caused by something else. This means that it would be impossible to produce even one name of someone killed by radon gas. It would be impossible even to pinpoint the exact figure accurately. This does not mean the risk does not exist. It is a very real danger that kills a thousand people a year in the UK alone.

If you know as much about statistics as you seem (or claim) to, then you already know this and are refusing to acknowledge it out of sheer stubbornness, or possibly the fact that you don’t actually have any valid arguments to fall back on. It’s hard to say.

Your “people say passive smoking is dangerous but when I ask people to name three people it has killed all anyone can ever think of is Roy
Castle” argument is akin to saying “people say radon gas is dangerous but when I ask people to name three people it has killed all anyone can ever think of is Marie Curie”. It’s a stupid argument and you would be wise to abandon it.

And do you know what he said?

Ah, but does it? You have numbers to make that claim, but how accurate are they? How big was the sample size? Who paid for the study? Was it a
cohort study, a case control study, or a meta-analysis? Was the data gathered by survey or interview? Was it done in such a way that recall bias would be an issue? Was it repeated independently, with similar results? And most importantly, does it have an RR high enough to be concerned about?

He doesn’t quite understand the concept of an example, does he?

That’s irellevant. That study could be totally ficticious and still
serve as a good example.

And his response?

Wow. Again, just, wow. You think *making stuff up* proves things. No wonder you’re so gullible.

What an utter twat. And I consider that I’ve now proved he’s a twat.

For the sake of completeness, let’s have another proof:

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.

So why does he get to make that claim when people who claim that it’s dangerous are expected to prove it? Well, he has a handy thing called the Burden of Proof.

The Burden Of Proof is a sort of logical-argument version of Godwin’s Law. Generally in my experience the first person to mention it should be excluded from the remainder of the debate. Here, he uses it to show that as the Smoking Is Dangerous camp spoke up first they should be the ones to prove their claim, and should be assumed to be wrong until they have done it. It should be clear to anybody with half a brain that who says what has no bearing on the truth they are trying to find.

And what the hell? One last proof:

Dave Hitt eventually admitted to knowing that the “name three” argument was invalid and continued to use it.

But that’s not the fun part. Oh my, no. The fun part is that he believes that valid conclusions can be drawn from invalid reasoning. I’m not limited by petty details like facts or logic or common sense. So let’s start the real Dave Hitt bashing…

Fact: Nobody I know can name three people that Dave Hitt has met and not immediately raped. Therefore there aren’t any.

Fact: Out of everybody that has ever met Dave Hitt, the number that actually like him is statistically insignificant. Therefore, it is unreasonable to assume that Dave Hitt caused them to like him. Probably they have confused him with somebody else.

Fact: Dave Hitt has a beard. Fact: At least three murderers had beards. Therefore Dave Hitt is a murderer.

Fact: CDs are a silicon based data storage medium. Therefore Dave Hitt is a twat. This argument makes no sense, but apparently I can still draw conclusions from it.

Fact: Nobody I know can name three of Dave Hitt’s brain cells. Therefore he doesn’t have any.

Fact: Well, you get the idea.

Look at my comments system, by the way. It’s good, isn’t it? You know what it does? It lets people post things onto the page itself, and I’ve never once deleted a comment for disagreeing with me. Dave Hitt’s website has his email address at the bottom. All emails go invisibly to him and he never publicly responds.

Essentially, what he’s doing is putting up a website full of lies with a “please give me feedback” link at the bottom, and then winding people up who exercise the option. What an utter twat.

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*This sentence was updated in July 2007 to give less undue credence to this idea, which, it has come to my attention, is basically lies peddled by anti-ban lobbyists and other propaganda artists. Also, I feel I should mention that Hitt’s new “mini-blog” has much the same open comment system as my blog has, although his “name three” page still does not. (Also, a brief but important update for the foreign or otherwise ignorant: smoking has in fact been banned in public places in the UK now.)