Month: September 2014

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Continuum

I intend for this to be a short communication. It is something that I often think when faced with many headlines proclaiming things to be wrong or right trying to give a sense of black and white.

A good simple lesson to remember for pretty much any issue you could face is:

It’s probably a continuum

Murder is wrong. Yes, most often, but there are grey areas, it could be argued that it is justified sometimes and the law takes account of that.
Stealing is wrong. Yes, but there are grey areas, the law takes account of that too.

As humans within a social structure we like to have rules and laws and we think we need them to maintain a cohesive structure. However, we do not apply these rules blindly. We use our sense of right and wrong (not given to us by god) and we decide on a case by case basis. It’s what our court system or individual judgement is for.

As an example:
I will set a detention if someone does not complete their homework to a good standard and on time. I would, however, be considered a bastard if that student had just lost a close family member and still punished him. I use my judgement to decide whether the punishment is morally correct to be applied.

Another example:
I might want to wear a political badge at work. Maybe it says “Save the NHS”. I don’t think that should be too much of a problem. Now suppose I was backing a slightly harsher political view “Stop All Immigration”. Should I be allowed to wear that? You can see there is a line or at least a point where the message says too much. That line might move from time to time. It’s hard to quantise where the line stands, it comes to judgement and it may be the case that one type of message is allowed and another similar isn’t.

The application of the rules is carefully considered and applied with a sense of fairness. We can not have fairness if we apply the rules rigidly.

Sometimes the rules are applied differently from time to time and each case is judged on its own merits. We like to “draw a line” we like to have hard and fast arrangements so we know where we stand but life isn’t like that and we should all appreciate that there is no “line” and even if we could say there was it would be wobbly and move around.

I think most about this argument when I hear of racism or discrimination. Let’s say there are counties where a black person isn’t allowed to sit at the front of the bus. How black do you have to be? How white do you have to be? The colour of us is a CONTINUUM. If I am white but have a black grandfather does that mean I can’t sit near the door of the bus. What an utterly ridiculous and pathetic way to classify people.

How about a place where homosexual people aren’t allowed. How homosexual do you need to be? How can they tell? Sexuality is a scale from strongly heterosexual to bisexual to strongly homosexual [it’s a CONTINUUM]. If you have had sex with someone of the same sex once does that make you gay? How many times would make you gay? This is another ridiculous way to classify people.

Nationality is another of these. If I am Scottish and live in Scotland I can vote in the upcoming referendum. How far into Scotland do I have to be born? If I was born in Longtown I would be English. If I was born in Gretna I would be Scottish. Where is the line. If my mother was giving birth and she straddled the border where would I be born. The matter of a couple of miles or even inches determines my entire identity? What a load of rubbish. Just ask the people of Alsace.

When this sort of argument is used it is called a FALSE DICHOTOMY. In mathematics answers are generally correct or not [although there ARE grey areas in mathematics]. On the whole your answer to a mathematical problem will be a dichotomy – correct or not. Whether you are blue eyed or you are not is a FALSE DICHOTOMY. How blue do your eyes need to be? What if one is not blue but the other is? What if you have specks of green in your eyes? It’s a ridiculous concept.

We seem to spend so much of our energies defining things using black and white statements and yet most of the time we ignore the grey areas. Every time we do humanity struggles.

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The Worst Reason

This communication deals with some ideas I have been having recently and I hope I put my argument across well.

In life and society we sometimes give people special dispensation from our general rules because we see there are special reasons. We allow disabled people to park closer to shops, we allow single dwellers to pay less council tax, we allow the poor to pay a lower rate of tax, we allow the young and the old to have cheaper travel. You get the idea.

It is right that we have varying rules and that we shouldn’t treat everyone the same. I think this is right because of my moral structure and that there is evidence to show that these actions improve the quality of life for those people. The justification for these dispensations is good.

If you are reading this you are probably aware that I don’t “believe” in a god or gods and therefore do not follow any form of religion. See the communication directly preceding this one. As there is no god everything that hangs on this premise is mistaken. All of the rules and societal requirements we have are unjustifiable using religion, holy books or holy men’s rantings. Some religious ideas are good but they can be derived from a general principle of “do good” and “do no harm”, principles which are humanistic rather than from a sole religion. If your argument for behaving a particular way ends with the line:

It says so in this good book

Or

My preacher/imam says so

then it’s time for you to appraise what else the book says.

I think it is wrong to make dispensations from our normal laws and rules for religious reasons. In fact, I think that dispensations for this reason are the worst form of dispensation and incongruent with a liberal society.

This communication and my view on these things was formed from the following events:

  • On a run one day I passed a building site. There were 4 people working on the site at the time and three of them had bright yellow safety hats on. The 4th person had a turban on. It would appear that he had special dispensation to wear this turban, probably for religious reasons. I do not understand this argument. If there is good evidence to show that wearing a turban gives as good protection as wearing a safety hat then I am ok with that but if the evidence doesn’t exist then why does religious requirements get a “free pass”?
  • In some places of work people ask for special dispensation to go to prayer at certain times during the day or they have rules about certain types of food. I do not understand why these religious reasons are special and can’t be questioned. Could I ask for dispensation from the canteen to avoid serving any form of pasta because I follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster? My argument for this is just as robust as any other religious argument.
  • I think it is morally wrong that dispensation is given to some abattoirs to avoid our rules on humanely  slaughtering animals because a religion requires animals to be killed in a certain way. If I can show you two slabs of meat, one slaughtered normally and one slaughtered using religious requirements and IF you can tell them apart then I would be seriously impressed. Mind you this still would not justify your reasons for wanting animals slaughtered inhumanely.

I am not using this communication to ridicule individual beliefs, oh, damn, I am! Oh well. Societies’ laws should be based on humanistic consensus and that is why we have a government and democracy here in the UK, for all its flaws. Over the last thousand years we have produced a decent liberal society even though we are a constitutional theocratic society because people who make the laws understand that religion should play no part in creating laws. As soon as laws are created for religious reasons we have lost our way [just read Leviticus].

If you want to use a religious reason to excuse a certain behaviour or to allow you to break the rules of our society then I will use the Church of the FSM to justify the rules I want to break. The argument is precisely the same. If you want to claim the FSM is not a REAL religion then I ask you to define what you mean by REAL religion.

Religion should play NO part in dispensation from laws and rules. It’s not an excuse.

Religion – Not An Excuse

Just in case some of you become offended at this then please consider what I have said. I haven’t called you stupid, I haven’t said you are wrong and I haven’t ridiculed your religion. I have said I don’t believe. My argument is that religion is not a reason for dispensation. Oh, look! I have given special dispensation to religious people in this post script. Tell you what: Your religion is wrong. It is not the truth. It is not the path to eternal life. Your preachers are wrong. It is not a reason for doing anything. There is no god. Get over it. You shouldn’t get special treatment because you believe in Zeus or whatever you call your god. Join our society and behave within its rules or leave.

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Evidence – How To Change My Mind

Let’s take something that is quite obviously a load of rubbish: Homoeopathy. I will now state the following:

Homoeopathy does not work

My reasoning for homoeopathy goes as follows:

  • Implausible (there is no prior plausibility that suggests HOW it should work)
  • No good scientific evidence to show it works

I want to make the following clear:

I would love for homoeopathy to work. It would revolutionise medicine and curing people and it would also create whole new areas of physics for us to learn about.

However, the evidence does not show it works. The gold standard of medical trials, double blind random controlled, all show negative. See my “discussion“.

If you can show me the evidence and it needs to be good evidence then I would be willing to change my mind. I will shout it from the rooftops and I will become your cheerleader. I will work tirelessly for your cause because it would be so wonderful.

If you can show me the evidence I will change my mind.

I think that’s quite a simple rule to live by. It does mean I have to be able to evaluate the quality of evidence and I could make mistakes there, but I am willing to correct myself.

If what you are suggesting is a quite remarkable “new thing” then the evidence needs to also be quite remarkable to persuade me. If what you are suggesting adds to my current understanding then it will take a normal amount evidence. This is not to say I am closed minded. I would love to be wrong about many of the things I currently know are not true. It would be a brilliant and happy thing to be shown good evidence for something you say is true. As I mentioned earlier I would happily change my mind. Here’s a list of types of evidence ranging from very bad to good:

  • Anecdote [NOT evidence. NOT even interesting]
  • Testimony [NOT evidence. Human memory is remarkably poor at recalling what happened]
  • Human Experience [NOT evidence. We can only explain the world within our understanding]
  • A single experiment or non-blinded medical trial [an interesting start but NOT fact]
  • Results of single experiment reproduced by teams working separately [Good evidence]
  • A medical trial which is controlled [still more interesting]
  • Results of different reproducible experiments leading to same conclusion [this can go in stone]
  • Results of large scale double-blinded placebo controlled medical trial NOT paid for by pharmaceutical company [expect the results to lower efficacy a bit over time but this is a good treatment]

The wonderful thing about this process of requiring evidence, oh I know, let’s call it the scientific method, is that it does not rely on me believing. The truth is there whether I believe it or not. A scientist working in Japan should come to the same conclusions as a scientist working in Brazil. The scientific method leads us to knowledge whatever our social and cultural background.

A good place to start when faced with something you understand to be quite fanciful is to ask for the VERY BEST evidence for the thing. If this is poor, then walk away. Do NOT accept the following argument:

Oh, the effects are subtle and can’t be measured.

If the effects are that subtle that they can’t be measured by scientific means then they don’t exist. We observe our world and we do our best to understand it and measure it. If you can’t measure it then it deserves to be rubbished. Just because someone believes it dearly it doesn’t mean it’s any more true. Aren’t we doing them an injustice by not educating them?

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Heuristic

This Fooyah communication is going to deal, on a basic level, with too much stuff. It is part of a series that I have been working up to for a long time explaining the way I think about things and how it is the correct way to think about things. I expect to expand on many of these themes over the coming dark months.

My recent communications including those about Osteopathy, Special K, Multitasking, Losing Mass and my Homoeopathic Discussion have all required a reasonable amount of knowledge and also some research.

I often mention that all claims should be appraised critically. I am not advocating cynicism, merely that we have the right to reserve judgement until we have investigated things ourselves. I think there are some basic areas of life where we can do this with little effort. Most claims on adverts can be investigated to see how they stand up to scrutiny. Claims made by friends can be investigated using the internet and maybe even a library!

I have been listening to sceptical podcasts for about 8 years now, moving from one to another as I hear about new ones. I have heard many discussions about the evidence for certain claims made in all walks of life and I think I have a good grasp of reality. Spending all that time listening to people explain logical fallacies and scientific evidence and how we know what we know has given me a good tool box to use to ask the rights questions and find out for myself. I have also read a number of scientific books explaining the meaning of evidence and the scientific method. Again, these have given me a good understanding of what it takes to be a sceptical thinker. I am, of course, open to biases like all people but I try to use the evidence available to question those and seek what is the real world.

Now, I can’t be an expert in many things, in fact I would argue I am an expert in none. I have developed heuristics. I have tools that I use to shortcut my knowledge process. There are certain people and presenters whom I trust and when they say they have looked at the evidence and come to a certain conclusion then I listen. I understand fully that one day they may be wrong but their credentials are good for now.

I also rely on the self correcting nature of science. About a year ago there was a story that made the news all over the world. Scientists had discovered particles travelling faster than the speed of light. This headline appeared everywhere. I was instantly worried as nothing should be able to travel faster than the speed of light [information can’t if you want to get technical]. The scientists weren’t that sure of their results and had opened the problem out to the press and the world, but it was reported as fact. Over the next year many people investigated it and they found the mistake. The particles hadn’t travelled past Einstein. Was this celebrated in the world’s press as a great achievement of the scientific method? No. It was consigned to page 13 in a tiny paragraph. Science corrects itself, that’s the great thing about it.

If I hear a claim that I think is dubious or not, then I do not pass instant judgement. I will investigate myself if it is approachable and see what the evidence is. If it is beyond my understanding then I will rely on others within the community to offer their understanding of what the evidence is and what that means.

In the case of news reporting around the world it is hard to investigate this myself and so I have to rely on the news organisations. This is why I look at quality broadsheet websites and the BBC website. I often rant about the BBC New service as they are meant to be the best but they fail [in my view] so often. For their “what’s going on in the world” section I have to trust them at the moment. There isn’t really any other news organisation that is comparable. It will be interesting over the next few years as social media tries to form a coherent news machine, but I fear it will be controlled by corporations and governments, restricting the views and news that we see.

We all have heuristics. Mine takes me on a journey of learning to seek the evidence.

The great thing about science is that it is right whether you agree with it or not.

Places to seek the truth:

Read some books:

By Robert Park
Voodoo Science: The Road from foolishness to Fraud (Oxford, 2000)
Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Princeton, 2008)

By Carl Sagan
Demon Haunted World

By Ben Goldacre
Bad Science
Bad Pharma

By Michael Shermer
Why People Believe Weird Things

These books will start to give you the mental tools to evaluate and critically appraise information that is presented to you. This is not an easy journey, takes time and is never complete.

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Before I Go To Sleep

This film was one of the very few “normal” films I have seen over the last while. I think by that I mean it wasn’t an action movie or science fiction. Those are probably my favourite type of film to see as they don’t require emotions or thought. They can just be watched and enjoyed.

I liked this film and I thought it was quite good. I rated it a 6 on IMDB, mostly because although I thought it was good a deserves an 8, I am unlikely to see it again, which means it is relegated into the “good but Parish won’t watch it again” category.

I liked the idea of this film. Although it would appear than someone paid Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman on a BOGOF deal. This is the second film of recent time when they have both played the leads, the other was The Railway Man. The story is a woman wakes every day unable to remember anything about her past. Each day she has to discover who she is and how she lives. Over time she uncovers what caused the injuries that made her like this.

I won’t say any more than that. I enjoyed watching it and the suspense it created. I liked the little “frights” the director added but gradually I am learning to calm my emotions to a Zen like status when I watch these films to remove the roller coaster. Overall, this was worth the watch and is probably far better than the trailer for some shock-horror-film where the evil thing is an ugly doll [I thought we had done all that with Chucky!].

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Special K

Only a minor rant today about how effective advertising is and how our views of the world are shaped by what we are told rather than what we try to find out for ourselves using sceptical thinking tools.

Special K is a breakfast cereal made by Kellogg’s. The adverts on television promote Special K as a healthy alternative to other breakfasts and good for losing weight. Most of the adverts have a good looking woman in a red swimming suit enjoying life to the full. The message is clear:

Eat Special K and lose weight, be healthy and live a wonderful life.

As far as I can tell, Kellogg’s are perfectly able to make these claims because they all mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The adverts make no particular claims that would require evidence, so I [grumpily] admit that the adverts themselves are perfectly ok to broadcast.

If you want to find out more about the sexual views and (non) medical ideas of the man who invented Corn Flakes then please look here. I am going to look solely at the information I can find about Kellogg’s cereals.

If you want to lose weight then you need to follow this principle:

Calories in should be lower than calories out.

I’ve explained this before in this communication. Therefore you would expect that Special K has significantly lower energy content that other cereals made by Kellogg’s. Let’s see.

Special K Nutrition Panel
Special K Nutrition Panel

As you can see here, 100 grams of Special K contains 375 kcal. To burn that much energy off you would have to walk/run around 4 kilometres. Now, let’s see what Kellogg’s Original Corn Flakes contains:

Corn Flakes Nutrition
Corn Flakes Nutrition

I’m sorry this isn’t the actual panel from Kellogg’s but their website wasn’t working properly and I couldn’t get the information. Let’s read what this information tells us.

CORN FLAKES HAS FEWER CALORIES THAN SPECIAL K

Holy Cow! How does that happen? The adverts tell us one thing but in reality the truth is completely the reverse. I’m pretty sure that Special K tastes like cardboard too, so perhaps everyone should just swap to standard Corn Flakes. In fact when we look at the energy content of other Kellogg’s products we can see that there isn’t a great deal of difference in energy terms.

Crunchy Nut Nutrition
Crunchy Nut Nutrition
Special K with extra crap
Special K with extra crap

So, 100 grams of these cereals are all around 380 kcal. It doesn’t make a great deal of difference which one you eat. However, I am not sure of 100g of Corn Flakes LOOKS the same amount in a bowl compared to 100g of flakes with extra sugar coating. It could be that you will fill the bowl to the same level but end up eating many more calories because the coated flakes are more massive. This is a test I might do one day.

Also, I am not commenting on the extra sugars you will eat if you have sugar coated cereal. This is not a communication about how healthy a particular cereal is, it’s about the energy content and the impression given by advertising.

So, what should we learn from this? I think this shows clearly that advertising works extremely well at forming opinions about certain products and their effects on us in terms of health. ALL advertising claims should be taken sceptically until you have investigated them for yourself. Don’t dismiss or accept things straight away. It is perfectly OK for you to think or say:

That sounds interesting but I’ll form my own opinion once I’ve investigated it a little more.

In fact, that is generally a good approach to life itself.

 

One more thing. Anti-aging creams can legally ONLY advertise themselves as anti-aging if and only if they contain a form of UV sun protection. There is little evidence that any of the other stuff they put in creams will protect your skin from the 3/5/7 signs of aging.

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Electronica

I’m looking forward to a new motor racing formula that will be debuting soon. Formula E is a new idea for racing where the cars are entirely electricity powered.

The cars look great and having seen some television clips they look pretty fast too. There’re some big name drivers involved in developing this sport further, more on the Formula E website.

This is going to be broadcast on ITV4 in this country and then highlights on BT Television. It’s worth a look I reckon.

I am aware this is quite a low-key communication from me, but I was going to write about Suffolk but you’ll just have to wait. As a teaser I would just say that you should always try to get on the A12 when heading to Kent from the East Coast rather than be completely unaware and realise you’ve gone wrong as you pass Newmarket. As I’ve mentioned Newmarket, have a look at the Suffolk county border around Newmarket – crazy.

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