Studies show

Studies show.  How many fraudulent arguments and political pieties begin with that statement?  Milk produces phlegm, Gluten causes inflammation, calories don't count, Obama caused the recession, money trickles down from the "job creators"  human activities don't affect the climate.  No matter how many large, double-blind studies are published in peer-reviewed journals, these flawed "Studies" many of which are speculations and fabrications or selected anecdotes persist.

Nobel laureate psychologist and Economist  Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow posits that we have two ways of making decisions: fast and slow as you might suspect from the title, or as he calls them: system 1 and system 2.  Reading it might just cause you to reevaluate a lot of  things you've been led to believe because people who want to enlist your support, sell you their products, receive your donations and secure your votes make skillful  use of this knowledge.

We have statistics thrown at us every day and we make decisions based on our statistical illiteracy, our intellectual laziness and the tendency to make decisions based on limited facts and wishful thinking.  So much of Kahneman's work applies to how we choose investments, but it applies to virtually everything we prefer to approach with the unreliable "system 1" rather than to wade rigorously through volumes of data until our heads hurt. In a large part, "studies show" is enough for most of us.  there's always a study, an authority, a  book and it's usually enough. We prefer to judge, to evaluate on limited evidence and we prefer intuition over analysis and when we believe something to be true, whether it's because we identify with a party or an organized faith or an ethnic group, we are

"very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.  If system 1 is involved, the conclusion comes first and the arguments follow."

That doesn't sound very profound or startling and yet we virtually always fail to detect such tendencies in ourselves, perhaps more so when we think we are highly intelligent.  As Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory says "If I were wrong, don't you think I'd know it?

We tend to disallow legitimate science and valid statistical conclusions out of hand if we are engaged in politics that argue to the contrary and apparently intelligence has less than enough to do with it. The difference between that quoted statement of the obvious and the body of work summarized in the book is an enormous amount of documented science.  ( I'll mention the Nobel prize once again.)

But this is not a book review and what I'm getting at is not another Lefty attempt to show the shoddy thinking and fallacy filled folly of the Right Wing. I'm making a case for divorce.  I'm just not getting the kind of liberal thinking out of the Democratic party I need.  I feel neglected and betrayed, ignored and saddened at the endlessly tainted logic, the misused statistics and conclusions supported by faith and gerrymandered facts. I want a divorce. Let me explain.

I got an appeal yesterday, to rethink my position on the legal modifications to prior self defense laws the press likes to call "stand your ground."  Places that have such laws have more murders, states the pleading, and not just more murders but more murders of  African Americans because non-African Americans tend to see dark skinned people as hostile and dangerous and likely to be carrying weapons. But don't take their word for it and you guessed it: studies show.

It so happens that I took part in the cited study which consisted of  pressing a key with either the right or left hand  to show whether the small black and white images of human eyes belonged to white or black people. Small images were also displayed which included items like crossbows and maces.  Delays in pushing either key determined whether or not I was a racist and wouldn't you know it -- I am a racist.  The study shows  and never mind the various possible reasons for time delays. Never mind any other study.

The problem from my standpoint is that it was impossible for me to determine the 'race' of well more than half of the eyes much less analyze the emotion  and there was a greater delay in pushing the key when I had that problem.  The delay is said to be proof that I associated black people with weapons and hostility, albeit mostly medieval weapons.  Seriously, but none the less, studies show. 

Now from this study, taken to be conclusive and irrefutably so, comes the leap of fallacy that I cannot be trusted to determine whether or not someone is a threat to my life because I'm a racist and by extension, no other whit person can be trusted because white people are racists. I would expect Liberals to gasp and perhaps to gag, but Democrats don't.  Democrats cling to this conclusion because studies show it's safer for to require me to run away from the attacker with a gun, white or black, and because they're Democrats after all. The conclusion comes first and the arguments follow.

Back when the Feds finally killed the 55mph speed limit, there were impassioned arguments from self-styled liberals like Alan Dershowitz telling us that there would be a bloodbath and indeed for a very short time there was a slight increase of highway fatalities. It was a statistical blip and those fatalities have continued to decline. Dershowitz made the mistake of taking statistically irrelevant data as proof of a trend -- of ignoring, as most of us do, regression to the mean and of choosing facts to fit the prior conclusion .

So my first reaction to the "states with SYG laws have more. . ." statement was the question: did they have more beforehand? and has the alleged increase been long enough to have statistical significance?  Will Regression to the Mean make this increase go away?  Without answering that question I'm supposed to hear Studies Show and jump on the bandwagon.  Sorry, I can't and because it's nearly universal in political advertising to play games with statistics, I have to side with Dr. Kahneman again when he explains that a few facts and a plausible story tend to trump informed and rational conclusion. WYSIATI he calls the gambit: "what you see is all there is" and we're all prone, in our laziness and longing to belong, to fall for it. If we fear guns we won't ask questions.  If we are invested in guns and gun rights, the opposite is true. First comes the conclusion.

The problem with interpreting statistics isn't just the pervasive ignorance of statistical method, the confusion between context and causality, but the laziness we're encouraged to cultivate in our consumer society. The vast majority of educated people will read the syllogism:

All roses are flowersSome flowers fade quicklyTherefore some roses fade quickly.

says Kahneman and agree, but of course it's not true, because it's possible that there are no roses among the some flowers that fade quickly, but my head hurts when doing the work needed to analyze it. It looks plausible,  the statements before "therefore" are true even if they are not the only facts that need to be considered and therefore we settle for "it's true" and will defend any argument based on it's truth. What with our liberal backgrounds, it's easier to agree that all white people are racists and defend policies based on it than to question Liberal authority. Easier to explain gender differences on society than on science and therefore it's fine to suppress data and prevent studies which might show. the studies that agree with us are always right.

Because it gets cold outside and insulation is necessary to sustain life, no one should interfere with our right to own warm clothing.

Does that mean that we're not allowed to own a coat in Key West but only where it gets cold? You know what I'm getting at here. Context means more than what's actually said. We see what we want to see, believe what we're disposed to believe.  We're not afraid of mittens, but still we think we're rational. We think we're guided by science and are objective, independent thinkers.  If I am actually to be all that, can I still be a Democrat?  Can I still be a Democrat if than now means I can't trust anyone in any way, that heresy is everywhere and the job of Democrats is to root it all out and punish it  even if we have to cut a swath through truth, science and  humanist values to bring the unbelievers to the stake?  No, I think I need a divorce.

They don't want you to know

I'm probably repeating myself by warning you that a sales pitch insisting that the item or idea or information you're selling is something someone doesn't want you to have or to learn about is a marker for hokum and perhaps outright fraud.  Similar marketing techniques include warnings that you must get this or read that or go to the website "before they ban it" or that scientists, or historians or doctors or liberals are hiding the real truth from you about things like magic beans or  some dietary trick that will block the effects of eating ten thousand calories a day -- or that some common ingredient is making you sick or pumping you full of  obscure 'toxins'  you can only get rid of if you buy my book.

Such marketing, if you can call it that, is so pervasive that it might seem as though the truth about most things has been hermetically

encapsulated in an impenetrable shell of propaganda: websites, infomercials and advertisements designed to misinform and mislead for profit.  We recognize some of it, tolerate much of it as just hyperbole and humor, but sometimes too much flim flam will send you to the slam.

Kevin Trudeau, whose Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About is a prime example of health and nutrition hokum, just found out the hard truth the hard way and will have ten years in Federal prison to meditate on life.

Do booksellers who feature and promote such books bear some responsibility for misleading millions into harming or at least neglecting their health?  As far as I know there have been few cases like it. It seems to be a rarity and there are no end of fraudulent sales pitches for water "with a different, non-toxic hydrogen bond angle,"  bracelets and pendants "tuned to natural frequencies" and books that assure you it's only the gluten-containing bun on that triple bacon chili cheese megaburger with cheese fries making you sick and giving you "grain brain."  Caveat Emptor after all, is part of the Tea Party Utopian dream where allowing anyone to cheat anyone else leads to liberty and justice for all -- and of course enforcing any kind of truth in advertising law would run up the debt and cost jobs and place an unnecessary regulatory burden on business.

After all, if we started going after scam artists, perpetrators of fraud and lie merchants we'd have no room to lock up the politicians.

What You See Is All There Is.

Or Night of the Radio Frequency Dead

Remember the Alar scare from the 80's?  Feed mice enough of the stuff they used to spray on apples to choke a hippo -- about 5000 gallons a day scaled up to human proportions,  and they sometimes might get sick and so therefore according to what passes for logic in America, it's TOXIC and so much so, there were instances of people calling up toxic waste facilities to ask whether apple juice was too dangerous to dump along with the nuclear waste.  Flush it down the toilet and the world might just end. Of course in the real world, nobody really could demonstrate any ill effects.  There are after all enough people who don't feel well at one time or another to keep the Chicken Littles clucking about toxins and selling us things to make it go away. People still believe it's deadly, but then people still believe lead foil on the outside of a wine bottle will make the wine poisonous and that degradation of  someone's DNA would turn it into OJ Simpson's and WiFi at Starbucks will lower your sperm count.

Does eating Gluten give you "grain brain" and make you fat?  No reason to think so but that some entrepreneur wrote a book and advertises on the internet, but all it takes is a handful of people who say they feel good after eating Doctor Bonkers' breakfast cereal to provide "clinical results" and don't bother to teach them about statistical regression or the Placebo effect or deprive them of that holier than thou status one gets from a gluten free diet.  I mean there's a "study" of mummies that proves wheat killed off the Egyptian aristocracy even though it's total fact-free bunkum. It's all I know, so that's all anybody knows.

Think we've learned anything?  No, we haven't and with statistical and clinical support or without it - especially without it -we're still willing to fear that something is making us sick even if we're not sick - something other than the double bacon cheeseburgers with special sauce or the cigarettes or all that TV and video game couch time. Besides it doesn't matter if you buy the magic berries of the week and it must be true if it's on Oprah.  I'm tempted to say there is no truth, no science, no knowledge any more, only marketing.

I remember when TV would make you blind and color TV would give you cancer and you would get melanoma  even on a cloudy day in Yellow Knife wearing a shirt and ski mask. Nuclear testing would produce giant ants and medical advance would piss off God as much as building a ziggurat over 70 feet high once did. None of us are old enough to remember the scares about how taking a train that went over 20mph would make your blood boil and the Telegraph would leach away the electricity from your brain and give you neurasthenia and of course there were dire predictions about electric light and the Telephone - and Ohmagawd, now there's radio and there are "activist groups" to make sure we're properly misinformed and hysterical.

Absence of evidence always seems to trump evidence of absence.  That cell phones after extensive research don't really seem to cause cancer or kill bees, has little effect on belief nor does the fact that police radios put out far,far more power and the police aren't keeling over from neuresthenia - nor the ham radio operators with their 1500 watt transmitters for that matter. That Fluoride in the water doesn't melt your bones and that the Measles vaccine really does prevent measles and condoms really do work for prevention of disease is as demonstrable and more so than than the hard fact that Neill Armstrong didn't take one great leap for mankind in some studio in Pasadena.  It doesn't matter. As Barnum said, there's one born every minute and not one of them has a clue about what a 'study' is, what statistics teach us or what scientists are doing these days.  

An article in the local paper the other day told us about the "environmental activist group" that was suing to opt out of the "Smart Meter" program that eliminated meter readers and that can tell the electric company if your power is out and what you peak usage time is.  They use "radio frequencies" insist the activists and although not one of them can cite any evidence that the microscopic amounts of RF these meters use will in any way affect anything living or dead and despite the many years of research and the 100 years of experience users of high power radio equipment have logged, they're convinced that these meters will produce immense ecological damage.  Of course in this town there's a contingent that is sure the meters are only there to let Obama listen to your thoughts.  I wish I were joking.

These are the same kind of people that will become hysterical about "cell phone frequencies" without any idea what those frequencies are, how they behave, what other equipment uses those bands at much higher power levels and are likely to mumble something about roulette when asked about the inverse square law.  Are they the same people who talk about 'going green' and  'saving the planet' when they unplug their cell phone charger to save a milliwatt hour per year?

Who knows?  So anxious is the human mind to find causal relationships in chaos.  When one unrelated thing follows another, it's enough and as the man from the paper says, "maybe these meters are the reason we have so much more autism."  Maybe indeed and the less information he has about radio frequency emissions or human developmental problems the more speculation seems justified by random events. One always prefers a plausible story to a discussion of mathematical probability and the more so when the plausibility is based on ignorance.  As Daniel Kahneman calls it:  WYSIATI, or What You See Is All There Is.  If I don't know the science, there is no science.  I've always called it the "I don't know, therefore. . ." fallacy or the Argument from Ignorance, but either way if I don't know exactly how the pyramids were built, even if someone else does, it must be space aliens and by the way, my front porch light burned out yesterday and my knee hurts this morning -- those compact fluorescents emit radio frequencies after all.

In marketing we trust

When is science not science? When you read about it in e-mail or see it on TV.  Hyperbole in advertising is universal and the more ludicrous the claim, the less it seems to violate FTC truth in advertising laws at least in terms of enforcement. I'm not talking about the ability of advertisers to distract from facts, like running a Toyota Camry through some kind of  roller coaster contraption to 'prove' that's it's not a boring, soulless transportation appliance for dull people, or inventing "the star safety system" to distract from stories about how people are dying because of it's defects. I'm not even talking about TV ads claiming that after driving a Nissan, the speed of light doesn't seem so fast or showing SUVs beating sports cars on a track.  I'm talking about the level of deceit in the marketing of health and science products and advice -- the kind of pervasive disinformation that makes people believe they can eat double bacon cheeseburgers with impunity as long as they don't eat the bun -- eat chili cheese fries  and lose weight by buying Dr. Oz's magic beans and miracle berries, or put their faith in "the proven science of the glycemic index" as though an index could be science. -- as though that handsome guy in the lab coat were a real scientist and his doctorate not in marketing.

It's about the kind of massive promotion of ideas about gluten and fructose that have no scientific support, about making your brain work better by doing 'exercises' that really doesn't have support from neuroscience as claimed, about getting "grain brain" or removing those mysterious "toxins" from your blood or colon. Never mind none of these "studies" ever appear in professional, peer reviewed journals, but only in advertising. Never mind that what they call "studies" never are more than anecdotes, inventions, gross distortions and deliberate misrepresentations.  You just can't get to the science through the smokescreen of marketing -- and in marketing we trust.

We live in an age of snake oil where all it takes is some actor in a white coat, some diet book salesman posing as a scientist to convince our gullible nation that unhealthy things will make them well, that lethal germs and 'toxins' are lurking under the bed, that green tea or green coffee beans or Doctor Bonkers' Egyptian Oil will let them eat 10,000 calories a day while they stay thin and live forever. The sun will kill you quick, we just know it and even on cloudy days and even wrapping yourself like a Bedouin in wool won't help unless the clothing has extra sun protection chemicals in it. Your kitchen counter of course is a dangerous place that needs to be laved with "anti-bacterial" products lest your family die horribly and everything we touch has to be anti-bacterial. Does it surprise you that SPF 50 doesn't give you twice the protection of SPF 25 -- hell no and while the marketing guys smile we cover ourselves with lead foil and hide in the basement.

UV and Toxins and Germs, oh my! Unless you buy anti-bacterial products you'll be eaten alive by bacteria, no matter that there are more of them inside and all over you than there are people in the world and you wouldn't be healthy otherwise. Anti-bacterial soap, lotion, shampoo, body wash, eye drops, sprays, food, gels, creams, toothpastes -- there are kitchen utensils, toys, bedding, socks, and trash bags -- we're told to be afraid of such things on the food we eat, but we're soaking in it. is it even practical, necessary, healthy or smart to attempt living in a bacteria free bubble? Is that attempt involved with all the allergies everyone seems to have these days?

We never ask what anti-bacterial means, do we?  If cleaning our hands with soap and water removes adequate amounts of bacteria according to real double blind scientific studies, we still want to be righteous and hip and enlightened and we don't bother to ask why some chemical that prevents bacteria from reproducing is needed after the bacteria already has been removed by plain water.  We all feel much better eating "organic" food in the faith based belief that chemicals used by those farmers are safer than the chemicals used by regular farmers and the food is healthier and more nutritious. We obsess about unnamed "toxins" and chemicals and preservatives but we don't ask if long term exposure to the serious toxins in anti-bacterial products might have side effects. But hey, better safe than sorry, right? and if it's on TV it must be true!


There are at least 2000 anti-bacterial products on the market says the FDA.  They're finally going to begin to ask for evidence that they are safe. It's about time. In fact scientists have been pressing for the FDA to remove one chemical, triclosan, that interferes with the thyroid gland in rats, since 1978 even though there is no evidence that soaps containing it are any more effective at preventing disease in your home than washing with plain soap and water. The Government is  finally going to demand evidence of safety and effectiveness and it's about time!

  

Bye bye, Miss American Pie

Indications are that the Mayans were right and that 2012 is indeed the end of an era, not because of  some change in politics or religion and not because of anything cosmic or tectonic, but because a piece of America as we knew it has died. An America, exuberant in itself, proud, forward looking, confident.  Hostess bakeries died this week and not because of mismanagement but because of what America has become: timorous, ashamed of what it loves and afraid of being provincial.  Our sweet land of phony authenticity.  Of thee I sing.

The Twinkie, the Ho-Ho, the Snowball are gone now, along with the Oldsmobile and the Mercury; with Buddy Holly and the independent hamburger stand. You can't buy a Hostess cupcake any more for much the same reason you can't find anything like Hopper's Nighthawks any more. Your cupcakes have to be 'artisinal,' gluten free, in season, free range and come from a 'cupcakery' just as that cup of Joe is now an 'Americano' and served (artisinally) by a 'Barista.'  You're not à la mode enough though, unless you order something that sounds like Mississippi camp-meeting glossolalia and costs forty bucks for a "venti."  Good God, don't ask for a "large." America's rites of self detestation and the industries that thrive on it the way a tapeworm thrives on weakening it's host have us all scrambling for the plastic, made in Taiwan, European panache that we attribute to lands  that we otherwise pretend to loathe because, of course, they're 'authentic' and we're not. American means fake and we flee from it toward an imported synthetic authenticity.

The Authenticity industry with it's vast smoking factories churning out the local and seasonal and artisinal synthetic-reality products we crave and the flim-flam pseudo-scientist diet doctors selling us low 'carb' gluten free and without fructose and for heaven's sake, not 'processed' foods: we zumba and carb-count our way to South Beach to be fleeced.  In an age most noteworthy for the triumph of scientific method over superstition and fallacious conjecture, we have come more to trust 'alternative' information that comes from movie actors, comedians and people who get rich by insisting, contrary to all evidence, that gluten is poison, that miracle berries and magic beans will let you live forever, that cooking your food is bad and the fructose you get from corn is full of bad and fattening juju unlike the identical Furanose Sugars found in (organically grown, artisinally picked, local and seasonal ) strawberries.

Studies show. . .  I cringe when I see that and nearly always it means that tendentious conjecture based on selected facts might fool you into thinking. . . It nearly always means that there was no real study.  Large scale, double blind and randomized scientific studies that are repeatable and published in peer-reviewed journals don't have a chance against diet doctors, Oprah-backed pundits or miracle food and fake science purveyors, not in a country trained to favor faith over fact, trained to celebrate the notions of celebrities and mistrust scientists; trained to patronize diet doctors who tell us that studies show.

Twinkies have anti-oxidant  "preservatives" which everyone knows are bad because studies show. They contain things like gluten and fructose that everyone knows are bad because studies show.  Twinkies may be authentic, but they're authentic American and that doesn't count. We long for something Tuscan, even if we're not sure where that is -- something from Tuscany where it's all artisinal.  Hostess Snowballs -- they didn't stand a snowball's chance in the new America. Maybe if you called them gluten free Palle di Neve or Boules de Neige and opened chic little sidewalk places in Boca Raton and Park Slope and South Beach and had them served by Ballistas for ten bucks each. . .
Ah well, one can only dream now of  temps perdue.  Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Earth Hour - another Sunday sermon

"The amount of power that's saved during that time is not really what it's about,"

I would imagine so, since it's quite an insignificant amount.

"What it is meant to be about is showing what can happen when people come together."

Is the explanation of the hour-long turning off of lights on monuments and many countries around the world given by Earth Hour co-founder and executive director Andy Ridley. In other words it's a feel-good gesture that lets people who prefer gestures to making a difference, like the countless other "awareness raising" parties of all sorts.

Mass delusion, witch hunts, lynch mobs and riots, of course are other examples of what can happen when people come together. I think we need much more and much different solutions.

Might I suggest that working together toward a purpose is what we need and that such things require objectivity, education and a lot of money. Since most of the rapid increase in power consumption around the world is both the cause and effect of raising the standard of living of the suffering poor, it all sounds a bit smug for the haves of the world to be having a parade of Liberal virtue by perhaps not driving the Hummer for an hour or turning off some lights and partying in the dark. It's the kind of smugness that one sees in those swooning over some imaginary romantic and bucolic world where everyone farms with manure and mules and the bugs, crows and fungus don't eat two thirds of the crops. A world where people somehow find something "seasonal and local" and "organic" and not "processed" even in in the desert and tundra and the mountains instead of the often fatal malnutrition and disease our ancestors suffered until Clarence Birdseye, mechanical refrigeration and the steam locomotive saved us from goiters, pellagra, scurvy, hunger and a diet of boiled turnips every winter.

In the real world, billions would starve in short order without the technology that scares us so much, but maybe that wouldn't count because they'd be in Africa and places like that where we wouldn't have to smell it or catch Cholera and we'd have like soooo much fun raising awareness about it by having gala parties where the servants would pass around empty Hors d'œuvre trays for an hour.

It's not that I'm against making some sacrifices or investing in public transportation or supplementing fossil fuel burning with wind and geothermal and hydroelectric power -- or even the newer, smaller, cheaper and safer nuclear plants now on the drawing boards -- quite the opposite. I'm all for heavy investment in research and development -- and paying for it with public revenue because private investment for such long range goals just doesn't happen on it's own. For an example, look at how much of today's digital world is the direct result of the tax and spend space program of the 50's and 60's.

No, what irks me is the neo-Luddite loathing for technology: the very technology we need to save us from Malthusian doom. It's usually the product of some scientific outcast publishing a alarmist book and convincing a lot of simpering young and uneducated celebrities that nature isn't a Hobbesean nightmare, that everything we improve our lives with from electric light to refrigeration to cell phones is going to bring that nature crashing down -- killing the bees with mysterious "cell phone rays" for instance and filling the world with unspecified "toxins" and radioactive vapours.

It's people like Bill Maher telling us our food is killing us even as we live longer and longer -- that we wouldn't have disease to cure if only we didn't eat corn products. It's celebrity scientists like Woody Harrelson telling us telling us not to cook our food. It's charlatans with their magnetic bracelets "tuned to natural frequencies" and pieces of magic duct tape that suck the "toxins" from our feet. It's the ancient and universal practice of blaming everything, every disease, disaster and disorder on witches, made new again.

This kind of "awareness" doesn't need raising, what needs raising is technology: understanding of it, awareness of it, investment in it -- the skill and will in developing and applying it. Please consider our hirsute relatives with thumbs on their feet and remember that it's the ability to produce and utilize energy that stands between us and squalor, privation and the nasty, brutish, disease filled, parasite ridden and short lives we used to share with the animals.