Log base 2

Too much of nothing

2011-09-29T22:53:00.000-04:00

Is more placebo better?

A friend of mine pointed me to the above TED talk, by Ben Goldacre. It's a entertaining presentation with lots of interesting content, although Goldacre's discussion of the placebo effect—"one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine" (6:32)—is a little weak. At 6:47, he says:

We know for example that two sugar pills a day are a more effective treatment for getting rid of gastric ulcers than one sugar pill a day. Two sugar pills a day beats one pill a day. And that's an outrageous and ridiculous finding, but it's true.

Notice that the claim is not about pain, but about actually healing the ulcers.

The source of this claim is apparently a 1999 study by de Craen and co-authors titled "Placebo effect in the treatment of duodenal ulcer" [free full text/pdf]. It's a systematic review based on 79 randomized trials comparing various drugs to placebo, taken either four times a day or twice a day depending on the study. (Note that Goldacre refers to twice a day versus once a day; I'm uncertain of the reason for the difference.) From each trial, the authors extracted the results in the placebo group only, obtaining the following results:

The pooled 4 week healing rate of the 51 trials with a four times a day regimen was 44.2% (805 of 1821 patients) compared with 36.2% (545 of 1504 patients) in the 28 trials with a twice a day regimen

This 8% difference was statistically significant, and remained so even when several different statistical models were used.

However, the authors are up-front about a key limitation of the study: "We realize that the comparison was based on nonrandomized data." Even though the data were obtained from randomized trials, none of the trials individually compared a four-times-a-day placebo regimen to a twice-a-day placebo regimen, so the analysis is a nonrandomized comparison. What if there were important differences between the patients, the study procedures, or the overall medical care provided in the four-times-a-day trials and the two-times-a-day trials? The authors discuss various attempts to adjust for gender, age, smoking, and type of comparator drug, but report that this made little difference. But they acknowledge that:

Although we adjusted for a number of possible confounders, we can not rule out that in this nonrandomized comparison the observed difference was caused by some unrecognized confounding factor or factors.

The strength of a randomized comparison is that important differences between groups are unlikely—even when it comes to unrecognized factors. Although the authors go on to consider other possible biases, their bottom line is:

... we speculate that the difference between regimens was induced by the difference in frequency of placebo administration.

These results of this study are intriguing, but they're hardly definitive.

The placebo defect

2011-09-25T09:04:00.006-04:00

Suppose a clinical trial randomizes 100 patients to receive an experimental drug in the form of pills and an equal number of patients to receive identical pills except that they contain no active ingredient, that is, placebo. The results of the trial are as follows: 60 of the patients who received the experimental drug improved, compared to 30 of the patients who received the placebo. The drug clearly works better than the placebo.[1] But 30% of the patients who received the placebo did get better. There seems to be a placebo effect, right?

Wrong. The results from this trial provide no information about whether or not there is a placebo effect. To determine whether there is a placebo effect you would need compare the outcomes of patients who received placebo with the outcomes of patients who received no treatment. And not surprisingly, trials with a no-treatment arm are quite rare.

But there are some. In a landmark paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001 (free full text), Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and Peter Gøtzsche identified 130 trials in which patients were randomly assigned to either placebo or no treatment. Their conclusions?

We found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects. Although placebos had no significant effects on objective or binary outcomes, they had possible small benefits in studies with continuous subjective outcomes and for the treatment of pain.

How could that be? Returning to our hypothetical trial, recall that among the patients who received placebo, 30% improved. The question is, how many would have improved had they not received placebo? If the answer is 10%, then there is 20% placebo effect. But if the answer is 30%, then there is no placebo effect at all. What Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche found was that in most cases there was no significant placebo effect. The exception—and it is an interesting one—was in studies with continuous subjective outcomes and for the treatment of pain. It is not hard to imagine how a placebo effect could operate in such cases. The expectation of an effect can strongly influence an individual's subjective experience and assessment of pain, satisfaction, and so forth.

A study published this summer provides a nice illustration. Weschler and colleagues randomized patients with asthma to receive an inhaler containing a bronchodilator medication (albuterol), a placebo inhaler, sham acupuncture, or no intervention. When patients were asked to rate their improvement, the results were as follows:

Self-rated improvement was similar between the active-medication, placebo, and sham-acupuncture groups, and significantly greater than in the no-intervention group.

When an objective measure of respiratory function (maximum forced expiratory volume in 1 second, FEV₁) was made, the results were as follows:

The objective measure of improvement was similar between the placebo, sham-acupuncture, and no-intervention groups, and significantly less than in the active-medication group.

At least in this study, it appears that a placebo effect can operate when the outcome of interest is self-rated improvement, but not when an objective outcome is used. This finding is in accordance with what Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche originally reported, as well with an update of their review published in 2004 (free pdf).

Indeed the notion of a placebo effect in the case of objectively-measured outcomes has always seemed a little shaky, and the putative mechanisms rather speculative. So why has the placebo effect commanded so much attention?

Fascination with the placebo effect

Although placebos had probably been used clinically long before [2], it was a 1955 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Henry Beecher titled The Powerful Placebo, that brought widespread attention to the placebo effect. Beecher's analysis of 15 placebo-controlled trials for a variety of conditions showed that 35% of the patients who received placebo improved and he referred to this as "real therapeutic effects" of placebo. As discussed above, this mistakenly attributes clinical improvement among patients who received placebo to an effect of the placebo itself, without considering other possible causes such as the natural course of the illness. Unfortunately Beecher's error was not widely understood, and the mystique of the placebo was cemented.

Over the years, the placebo effect has received a tremendous amount of attention in both the academic and popular press. A search of PubMed, a publicly-accessible database of citations of biomedical publications, reveals 527 publications with the words "placebo effect" in the title, going back to 1953. This number is particularly impressive given that not all articles on the topic—for instance, Beecher's paper itself—include the words "placebo effect" in their title. A Google search of "placebo effect" reports "about 5,220,000 results". Why has so much attention been given to such a dubious notion?

One reason may be our fascination with mind-body interactions. Conventional medicine, perhaps influenced by the philosophy of René Descartes, has tended to treat the mind and body as entirely separate. It is clear that this is not so, perhaps most obviously in regards to mental health. Perhaps in reaction, some fuzzy thinking has developed around the idea of mind-body interactions. New-age and alternative-medicine movements have often entailed beliefs about how positive attitudes can heal the body, and conversely how negative ones can lead to illness. While this may contain elements of truth, at its worst it fosters dogmatic thinking and pseudoscience.

Curiously, however, in more scientific circles recent developments in neurobiology have also encouraged interest in the placebo effect. Advances in understanding of how the brain works have lead to research efforts to understand the mechanism of action of the placebo effect. This is more than a little odd, given the fairly sparse evidence for such an effect! An article in Wired Magazine asserts that "The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology." Note that the article takes for granted "the fact" that the placebo effect works.

Indeed, the term "the placebo effect" itself is part of the problem. By labeling it as an effect, we lend it credence. Arguing against the placebo effect seems to put one at an immediate disadvantage. Hasn't everyone heard of the placebo effect? How could anyone deny such an established fact?

______________________________
1. ^Relative to the sample size, the difference is large enough that we can safely rule out chance as an explanation. In statistical terms, a test of the hypothesis that the improvement rates in the two groups are equal using Fisher's exact test gives a p-value < 0.001.
2. ^For some historical background, see The Problematic Placebo, by Stanley Scheindlin [pdf].

Rethinking property

2011-08-27T09:17:00.015-04:00

Suppose Alison has been playing a game of solitaire, but has left the room. A little while later, Trevor, aged 4, notices the cards lying on the table and reaches for them. Another member of the family calls out, "Trevor, don't touch those, they're Alison's!" A straightforward case of teaching a young person about property rights, isn't it?

Perhaps not. The deck of cards may belong to the family rather than just Alison. And in any case, it's really not the ownership of the cards themselves that's the issue, it's their arrangement on the table. If that arrangement is significantly disturbed, the game will be ruined even if the cards themselves are not at all damaged. So why do we construe this as an issue of property rights?

I believe the reason is that we find it much easier to express property claims than to describe the real issue, which is respect for other people. Perhaps we might have said, "Trevor, don't touch those, Alison is playing a game of solitaire!" The trouble is, Trevor may not know what solitaire is, or what that has to do with touching the cards. In fact, it may not even be clear that Alison is still playing. Perhaps she got tired of playing, and just abandoned the game. In that case, the arrangement of the cards wouldn't matter to her—but more about that later. Suffice it to say that the complexities in this and many other situations can easily get out of hand, and we fall back on the simple formulation: "Don't touch that, it's not yours."

Unfortunately, we tend to get fooled by our own simplification. In the Western tradition of political philosophy, property rights have been a central focus, as exemplified by the writing of thinkers like Hobbes and Locke. Today many see the notion of property rights as a sacrosanct and even supreme principle. But this obsession with private property has its costs. If access to resources depends on ownership, then it is natural to equate property with security. This psychological dynamic plays out in individual obsession with accumulation. On a broader scale, our economic systems emphasize that continual growth is the only option. Considerations of sustainability are given little attention.

The limitations of the private property model are readily apparent when it comes to land. Suppose you own a piece of land with a beautiful tree on it. I own adjacent land which I dig up, and in so doing I damage the roots of the tree so that it dies. Similarly, if I pollute my land with toxic chemicals, they may seep into nearby land and water. If I dump radioactive waste on my land, even if nearby areas are unaffected, the land may be rendered permanently unusable. Long after my life has passed, my footprint on the planet may continue. Such considerations lead to ideas of stewardship, which have a long history. The notion that property comes with responsibility seems to be an attempt to mitigate the more anti-social tendencies that ownership can promote.

Of course in the short term, stewardship may be motivated by self interest. A classic scenario that examines these issues is the tragedy of the commons. Suppose there is pasture land where people take their cattle to graze. It has been argued that if the land is held in common, it will be overused and the land will be exhausted—to everyone's detriment. If the land is privately held, the owner has an interest in wise use of the land. This scenario has connections to the history of English agriculture and the enclosure of public lands, but the interpretation continues to be debated. Furthermore, the supposed wise use of a resource by a single owner has plenty of counter examples. Particularly in the case of non-renewable resources, the use is often anything but wise.

Let us now return to the case of Alison and Trevor. Alison left the room, but did she intend to return to her game? If she didn't then by leaving the cards lying on the table she isn't exercising good stewardship over the cards themselves. If anyone else wants to play another game or use the table for a different purpose, they'll first have to tidy up the cards. The ownership of the cards (or the table) is not the main point. Instead, the key issue is respect for other people.

More broadly speaking, conflicts that are framed as property issues often go far beyond ownership and involve more fundamental issues of respect, tolerance, and basic human needs. Our society's traditions, conventions, and language can easily corral us into thinking that property rights are supreme. As we go through life, and as we raise our children, we should keep this in mind.

The landscape of probability

2011-08-12T20:49:00.010-04:00

We all know that the probability of some condition can lie anywhere between a sure thing (which we represent as a probability of 1) and a flat-out impossibility (0). But it turns out there are several other points of interest along the way. Let's take a tour.

When we say that something is a sure thing, we mean it is bound to be so. For example, the probability that a bachelor is unmarried is 1. This is a logical sure thing because, by the definition of 'bachelor', it couldn't be otherwise. (It could also be called an apodictic sure thing, however that's pretty much guaranteed to sound pretentious—but I'm getting ahead of myself.) Now consider the statement that an object with a positive electrical charge is attracted to an object with a negative electrical charge. This is a physical sure thing: though there may be a universe where this isn't true, it is true in ours.

Now let's move from sure things to things that are pretty much guaranteed. For example, it's pretty much guaranteed that the sun will rise tomorrow. Not a sure thing though: who knows what strange astronomical events might come to pass overnight? More about this in moment.

Nevertheless, most of the time, when we think about things that we consider likely, we're not thinking of things that are so overwhelmingly likely as the sun rising tomorrow. Likely things just have better than even odds.

Even odds (a probability of ½) is of course the sweet spot where the probability of some condition is exactly equal to the probability of its opposite. This can be interpreted as an expression of perfect uncertainty about the condition, and this was how Pierre-Simon Laplace used it in working out a solution to the Sunrise problem.

But as we continue our stroll, we find ourselves in the realm of unlikely things. Note that they don't have to be terribly unlikely. Something with a probability of 0.49 is (just slightly) unlikely, in that it has worse than even odds.

As the probabilities get thinner and thinner, we soon find ourselves encountering things that ain't gonna happen. These are the opposite of sure things. I'd love to win $50,000,000 in the lottery, but it ain't gonna happen. Well, of course it is gonna happen, but not to me (in all likelihood). Not that it's a physical impossiblity of course, much less a logical impossibility.

I'd just have to be awfully lucky.

The fragmentary nature of television

2011-06-01T20:39:00.015-04:00

For the past couple of months, I've been reading, and thinking about phenomenology, a philosophical movement concerned with the nature of conscious experience. My guide has been the wonderful Introduction to Phenomenology by Robert Sokolowski. I haven't found it easy to understand phenomenology, nor have I found it easy to explain to other people, but I am finding it to be a very rich source of insight. As I was watching a television show the other night (Vampire Diaries, if you must know), I suddenly made a connection with something I had read in Sokolowski's book:

One of the dangers we face is that with the technological expansion of images and words, everything seems to fall apart into mere appearances. ... it seems that we now are flooded by fragments without any wholes, by manifolds bereft of identities, and by multiple absences without any enduring real presence. We have bricolage and nothing else, and we think we can even invent ourselves at random by assembling convenient and pleasing but transient identities out of the bits and pieces we find around us.

It struck me that television is a perfect example of this point. Now it's easy to criticize TV, but my main goal here is to understand a particular aspect of television, its fragmentary nature. If we can better understand the phenomenon of television in our culture, we may be able to approach it more wisely.

Perhaps the most fragmented experience of television is channel surfing—a series of disconnected images, sounds, and representations—a toothpaste commercial / a football game / a lion in a savannah / a riot / a soap opera / ... But even when one stays on one channel, watching television is a fragmented experience. Camera angles switch constantly, and our attention is distracted by commercials, and sometimes streaming lines of news updates and stock prices at the bottom of the screen.

But the fragmentation runs much deeper. Consider the constructed narrative of reality TV, a Frankenstein's monster of dismembered and reassembled footage. More fragmented still is one of the parents of reality TV: the news. Like reality TV, a television news segment consists of a patchwork of content assembled to tell a story. A number of these segments are themselves assembled into a news broadcast. Allowing time for advertisements, and to keep things lively, each segment is typically only a few minutes long. What gets left out is context: current events are presented with a minimum of historical, political, and cultural background.

As another example, consider the situation comedy. Granted, this is fiction designed to entertain, and the outlandish characters and situations sitcoms portray are not meant to be taken seriously. Such elements are easily set aside. What is more disconcerting is some of the elements that at first sight seem more mundane. While sitcoms often represent people in apparently ordinary situations, there are jarring absences. For example in some sitcoms nobody seems to have to work. In others, ordinary standards of politeness don't seem to apply. Bizarrely, a laugh track is added in place of an absent audience. Episodes are totally disconnected from each other, so that events have no long-term consequences. One-dimensional characters substitute for authentic identities. It is as if the characters are trapped in an endless loop, condemned to repeatedly play out their fates under a variety of starting conditions, never learning, never changing.

The examples go on. Consider sports on television. Or dramas. Or talk shows. In each case, we can see "fragments without any wholes ... manifolds bereft of identities ... multiple absences without any enduring real presence."

Sokolowski argues that because of this "we think we can even invent ourselves at random by assembling convenient and pleasing but transient identities out of the bits and pieces we find around us." Is he right? Does the fragmentary nature of television lead to a fragmented sense of ourselves? And if so, what is the impact?

Causal language

2011-01-30T17:50:00.014-05:00

Consider the following sentence: "You ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained." What is odd about it is that ordinarily, when we say "X because of Y" we mean "Y is the cause of X". For example, "The window broke because the baseball hit it" means that the baseball hitting the window caused it to break. But in this case, the sentence surely doesn't mean that your fingers being stained caused you to eat the blueberries. Now one might object that it's a weird sentence, and that instead it should be "I believe you ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained." But the original version is not confusing to an English speaker, and people sometimes do speak this way. Language is a complicated business. And language about causality is particularly tricky.

It is well known that correlation does not imply causation. But when scientific studies are reported in the media, this dictum is often forgotten. Professor Jon Mueller at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois has compiled a great set of links to news articles reporting scientific findings. Some of the headlines for these articles suggest causal relationships and some do not. Clicking through to the actual news articles shows that the purported causal relationships are often a stretch, to say the least. For example:

TV raises blood pressure in obese kids: study

The news article reports that:

The researchers found children who watched two to four hours of TV were 2.5 times more likely to have high blood pressure compared with those who watched less than two hours of television a day. Those who watched more than 4 hours per day were 3.3 times more likely to have hypertension.

In other words this was an observational study, which established a correlation between watching high amounts of TV per day and having high blood pressure. Contrary to the headline, the study did not show that the TV watching was the cause of the high blood pressure. For convenience let's rework the headline, while preserving its causal sense:

TV watching increases the probability of high blood pressure. (1)

The causal implication can be removed by writing:

TV watchers have higher probability of high blood pressure. (2)

In a wiki entry on causal language Gustavo Lacerda points out that action words often express causality. Note that in the present example, in order to remove the causal aspect of (1), it was necessary to change the verb "watching" into the noun "watchers" and the verb "increases" into the noun "higher".

Interestingly, there is a Bayesian formulation that sounds closer to (1):

Being a TV watcher increases the probability that a child has high blood pressure.

Note that this version has the verb "increases", like (1), but not the verb "watching". Instead it's expressed as "being a TV watcher", which indicates group membership rather than action or choice. It is this information about group membership that is used to update the probability of high blood pressure, following the Bayesian recipe.

Prediction and causality

Prediction can sound a lot like causation. Consider this statement:

If you exercise, you're less likely to have a heart attack. (3)

Does this mean:

People who exercise are less likely than people who don't to have a heart attack. (4)

or does it mean:

The act of exercising reduces your chances of having a heart attack. (5)

It seems quite ambiguous. On the one hand, "if you exercise" sounds like a statement about your choice simply to exercise instead of not exercising, which supports interpretation (5). On the other hand, "if you exercise" identifies you as a person who exercises, and that may predict your risk of heart attack, perhaps due to another behaviour common among people who exercise, such as healthy eating. This would support interpretation (4).

Natural language allows ambiguities. It's convenient to leave things out because everyone knows what we mean. Don't they? Not necessarily. Certainly, when it comes to causality, ambiguity can lead to a mess of trouble. In ordinary speech, the distinction between correlation and causation is often blurred. Statement (3) above is ambiguous about the comparator: less likely than whom to have a heart attack? Less likely than people who don't exercise? Less likely than you would be if you chose not to exercise?

It seems to me that causal language is almost a worst-case scenario. Many people would see the concern as unimportant. And yet evidence and beliefs about causation are at the foundation of any intervention, whether in health care, education, social programs, economics, what have you. The media and politicians routinely use misleading causal language. But it's difficult even when we try to be clear!

Sweetness and life

One of my favorite of Mueller's examples is:

Eat sweets, live longer.

All you have to do is juxtapose "eat sweets" and "live longer". Your mind does the rest.

Chance and inevitability

2011-01-11T22:28:00.006-05:00

In an op-ed in today's issue of the Los Angeles Times, Michael Shermer wrote about the rush "to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events", with reference to the shooting in Tucson, Arizona and the recent mass bird deaths.

Shermer made some good points, but parts of his argument were flawed. For example, he cited statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health to argue that unbalanced people are not uncommon, and

Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme tea party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun control laws are in this or that state. By chance — and nothing more — there will always be people who do the unthinkable.

In other words, he is pointing out what he sees as an inevitability, and then attributing it to chance. But an inevitability is the opposite of chance: it is a systematic pattern. And a systematic pattern is precisely what we can hope to change. I tend to agree with Shermer that "there will always be people who do the unthinkable." But surely we ought to do what we can to make such occurrences as rare as possible, and to reduce the harms as much as we can.

Shermer finishes his piece as follows:

... as often as not, events in life turn on chance, randomness and statistical probabilities that are largely beyond our control. So calls for "an end to all overt and implied appeals to violence in American politics" — such as that just issued by MoveOn.org — may make us feel better, but they will do nothing to alter the inevitability of such one-off events in the future.

By definition "one-off events" are unpredictable and idiosyncratic. And yet Shermer says they are inevitable. The apparent confusion here is between statistical probabilities that can be used to make fairly certain predictions, and the virtual impossibility of prediction at the micro level. For example, age- and sex-specific incidence rates of different types of cancer are carefully tabulated by the CDC, and we can use these rates to predict the number of people who will be diagnosed with cancer this year. But we can't predict well who those people will be. There are, however, patterns. We learned that smoking causes lung cancer (and heart disease, and emphysema, ....) and through reduced smoking rates we have seen reductions in mortality [pdf]. Perhaps we do have some control after all.

Oversimplification

2010-12-11T08:26:00.034-05:00

The map of the world is a familiar image. But a closer look at this one reveals that it is lacking detail. For example, a number of large islands are absent, including the British Isles, Japan, and the island where I grew up, Newfoundland. The continent of Antarctica has been omitted. Furthermore, Greenland and Ellesmere Island are joined, while North and South America are disconnected. Still, the map does give a general idea of the shape of the continents (except of course Antarctica). And it's certainly better than I could draw! The map is a simplification. But is it an oversimplification?

Here I want to take a general look at oversimplification because it has broad relevance and raises some subtle questions. Maps provide a convenient example and raise some issues that turn up elsewhere. In particular, I'm going to focus on how oversimplified ideas gain traction in our society, as illustrated by three popular nonfiction books.

Although the world map above simplifies a number of details, it is important to note that any map at a given scale involves simplification. Fine detail is sacrificed for an overall description. What's more, regardless of the projection used, any two-dimensional world map inevitably provides a distorted representation of our planet. A map is a model, and as I argued previously, one should not confuse models with reality, or in the words of Alfred Korzybski, "the map is not the territory." It is however convenient to represent the world in two dimensions with various details simplified. This is a general aspect of simplification: for all its costs, it is convenient.

Nevertheless, we do have the word "oversimplification", suggesting that you can have too much of a good thing. But if that is true, where would you draw the line? How much simplification is too much simplification? This issue arises, for example, in science teaching. If you were to teach 10-year-old children about Einstein's theory of special relativity, some simplification would be necessary. If you were teaching 16-year-old children, simplification would also be necessary, but to a slightly lesser degree. Einstein himself recognized the challenge of simplification, and is often quoted as having said that "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler," which has been dubbed "Einstein's razor" in reference to Occam's Razor. Certainly, it would be oversimplification if one taught a university student the same way as a 10-year-old (or "undersimplification" if it were the other way around, though nobody uses the term).

But "oversimplification" is often used in a slightly different sense, one that hints at distortion, deception, or dishonesty. The issue then may not be too much simplification, but rather that the simplification is carried out in a way that is somehow improper. The world map above may perhaps offer a hint of this. As I noted above, some substantial islands have been omitted from the map. But larger ones such as Madagascar are present. However, one enormous landmass is not present: Antarctica, despite the fact that it is larger in land area than Australia. A possible explanation is that Antarctica is seen as unimportant because nobody lives there (except for a handful of scientists). This could be seen as a type of bias. It is one thing to simplify, but another to do so in such a way as to systematically misrepresent. I'm not really taking the map-maker to task here so much as using this as an illustration of a biased simplification.

I believe there is another way in which simplification can be improper, and that is when there is a lack of transparency. A simplified portrayal should not be presented without some explanation of how it was obtained. This provides some protection from confusing a simplification with "the truth". For example, in the case of a world map, different projections can give strikingly different impressions of our planet. For example, compare the map at the beginning of this article with the Eisenlohr conformal projection below:

Oversimplification in popular works of nonfiction

To further explore oversimplification, I'd like to consider three recent works of nonfiction. My purpose here is not to provide detailed reviews or commentary, nor to pass any overall judgment, but rather to explore issues of oversimplification that have been raised by others.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape makes the claim that moral questions can be not only informed but answered by science. Sam Harris proposes an updated version of utilitarianism, whereby an action is only morally right if it contributes to "well-being". Versions of this idea have been around for a long time: some of the key contributions to utilitarianism were made in the 1800's, and numerous objections and counterarguments have been made since then. But as Kwame Anthony Appiah writes in the New York Times, "having acknowledged some of these complications, [Harris] is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path." As philosophy professor Troy Jollimore wrote:

Harris might be right that the best way to reach a "wider audience" is to sidestep difficult philosophical issues. But just how helpful to that wider audience can a book be that hides from the complexities of its subject, and misrepresents what it alleges to discuss by making genuinely difficult questions look straightforward and simple?

As I noted earlier, misrepresented simplification is a key feature of oversimplification. Harris has also been criticized for using an uncommonly broad definition of science and for placing it in an easily-missed footnote. The footnote reads:

For the purposes of this discussion, I do not intend to make a hard distinction between “science” and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss “facts”—e.g., history. For instance, it is a fact that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Facts of this kind fall within the context of “science,” broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality. Granted, one doesn’t generally think of events like assassinations as “scientific” facts, but the murder of President Kennedy is as fully corroborated a fact as can be found anywhere, and it would betray a profoundly unscientific frame of mind to deny that it occurred. I think “science,” therefore, should be considered a specialized branch of a larger effort to form true beliefs about events in our world.

It does seem odd to put in a footnote an idiosyncratic definition of a word that appears in the book's subtitle and is central to Harris' case. Note that Harris' use of a generalized notion of science is a form of simplification. Failing to highlight this simplification could be seen as oversimplification.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point explores factors that may explain how social trends can suddenly catch on. In a review on Amazon.com, Benjamin Northrop wrote that Gladwell "seems to be showing you what's really behind the "curtain" - not something boring or muddled or technical, but rather something simple and crisp and clear!" He goes on to say that

The problem, however, is that real life is not so simple, nor is real science. Complex phenomenon have complex causal components. ... Gladwell, however, disingenuously presents only the facts and the stories that prove his point, giving the reader the false impression that there really is no debate, he has found "the answer".

Northrup's mention of "complex causal components" points to causal oversimplification. Many phenomena have multiple causes; reducing them to a single purported mechanism can make for a more compelling account, but may provide only a counterfeit understanding.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate attacks the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate. In a review, David B Richman suggests that Pinker has constructed a straw man:

I agree with [Pinker] that a person's genetic makeup is highly important and that the extreme blank slate idea (that humans are born without a human nature and can be "written on" like a blank slate) is obviously wrong. ... However, I cannot follow the equally extreme idea that only our genes matter (a concept that Pinker alternately defends and retreats from.) As several people have pointed out in recent research the expression of a gene is primarily a dialog between genome and environment. Indeed, is there any reputable scientist today who believes in the absolute Blank Slate?

A straw man is a kind of oversimplification: the wide range of views on a topic that are contrary to one's own are simplified down to a single, extreme one. If debate were really so polarized this might be acceptable, but this is rarely the case. And when countering an extreme opponent (albeit of one's own creation), one may find oneself presenting highly selective evidence, another hallmark of oversimplification. Another reviewer, D. Palmer, writes:

Pinker presents other points of view only in caricature, apparently with the goal of persuading the reader, not informing him.

The sources of oversimplification

Oversimplified ideas abound. All three of the above books have made it to the New York Times Bestseller lists. Politicians routinely deal in oversimplification, and the voting public often seems only too happy to accept it. Stereotypes and sweeping generalizations are ever popular. Clearly there's something very appealing about oversimplification. But as I have argued above, it is possible, through transparency and efforts to avoid bias, to separate simplification—which is not only helpful but essential—from oversimplification.

So why is oversimplification so prevalent? One reason may be that it takes much less intellectual effort to accept a simplification that is presented without a transparent explanation of how it was obtained. It is easier to point to a map and say "this is the Earth" than to say "this is a projection of the Earth onto two dimensions that exaggerates land areas near the poles". A map is most useful when we accept its metaphor, just as a play is most enjoyable when we suspend our disbelief. But to read a map intelligently you need to see the limits of the metaphor, just as a theater critic needs to be able to see the actors and not just the characters they play. This takes effort, and it is easier to simply be swept along without question.

Working overtime to overcome oversimplification

The desire for simplicity seems to be universal. But we need not be taken in by oversimplification—whether it comes from our own thoughts or from the culture around us. We can start by distinguishing simplification from oversimplification. If there is a lack of transparency it's likely that oversimplification is at work.

To prevent simplification from slipping into oversimplification, we can cultivate the discipline of switching perspectives. On the one hand, to realize the value of simplification we need to pretend that our model is "true", and work under this pretense. But on the other hand, we need to recognize the model for what it is, a convenient tool, but a construct, not reality. From this perspective we can see the limits of the model, and appreciate where it may lead us astray. Repeatedly switching perspectives, and integrating the resulting insights, is very hard work, but I believe it's essential if we want to avoid being imprisoned by our models.

I will conclude with a quote from Goethe: "Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you can imagine."

When technology undermines science

2010-09-27T22:34:00.044-04:00

On the day the iPad was launched, Apple sold over 300,000 of the tablet computers. Since then, over 3 million iPads have been sold. Our society is infatuated with technology, and this affects us in ways both obvious and subtle. Here I want to examine how our adoration of technology influences the way we think about science, and in turn how we see our whole world. I should note that I write this as a scientist, and someone with a long-time interest in, and fascination with technology.

Because the words science and technology are often paired, their meanings tend to be conflated. But science can be pursued with few technological spin-offs (as is the case with astrophysics, for example) and technology can be developed without the use of science (as was the case with the early technologies developed by trial and error in prehistory). Certainly scientific discoveries can often be used to develop new technologies, and existing technologies can be evaluated scientifically. But science itself is not about developing technology, it's about learning through systematic observation and (sometimes) experimental manipulation. Some would argue that this distinction is mere semantics, but I will argue that confusion between science and technology leads to some very unfortunate consequences.

Because we're so taken with technology, and because of the close connection between science and technology, it's not surprising that science is held in high esteem. But this is a double-edged sword. The downsides of technology (e.g. sedentary behaviour patterns and burgeoning rates of obesity, global warming from carbon emissions, toxic waste, etc.) are sometimes blamed on science. On the one hand, this is fitting: for better or worse, without science, modern technologies could never have been developed. On the other hand, surely it is our society's moral, economic, and political choices that determine how scientific knowledge is applied, and responsibility for those choices should fall to the decision makers. But our terminological confusion blurs such distinctions, and science and technology are routinely seen as one and the same. Praise or criticism of one is seen as identical to praise or criticism of the other. This has lead to a curious polarization of views.

The church of science

On the one hand, a triumphalism of science has become more and more common. Science is increasingly seen as providing the most trustworthy information, or perhaps the only reliable source of knowledge, not just about the physical world, but about all aspects of life.

I believe two factors underlie this tendency. First, the products of technological wizardry provide a concrete demonstration of the mastery and control that scientific knowledge can provide. The most important point here is the universality of this demonstration: no special knowledge or education is required to appreciate the power of technology. This technological factor rides on top of an epistemological claim. As Luke Muehlhauser puts it:

the massive success of science leads me to suspect that methods condoned [sic] by science are the most successful methods of knowing we have discovered yet.

And while it seems likely that a philosophical argument such as this will only appeal to a limited audience, it nevertheless provides the intellectual muscle beneath the alluring skin of technology.

Triumphalism about science has a long historical lineage, expressed in the first half of the 20th century in the school of logical positivism, and more recently in some of the writings of the so-called new atheists. In their extreme forms, such arguments tend towards scientism, the view that only scientific statements have any meaning and that, ultimately, science will provide all the answers. The trouble is, if science is seen as having all the answers, it must either expand to encompass a much broader range of concerns, or else dismiss such concerns as meaningless. Where does that leave ethics, philosophy, literature, history, art? While science can inform each of these fields, a radical redefinition of science would be required to assimilate them. And yet that is just what is being proposed.

Philosophy. Luke Muehlhauser argues: "I think philosophy will be most productive when it functions as an extension of successful science ... ". Commenting on such thinking, Massimo Pigliucci writes:

There are profound differences in method, style and type of problems between science and philosophy, and frankly I think that people who deny or minimize this simply have not taken their time to read any philosophy, or they would immediately see how bizarre it is to deny the difference.

More broadly, I am having a really hard time understanding the agenda of people here who wish at all costs to dismiss philosophy or absorb it into science. Why are you so bent on arrogating more epistemological power to science than it possesses? Why is it not good enough to say that science is by far the best approach we have devised to understand the natural world, but that there are problems that lie outside of it and other disciplines that are better equipped to address those problems?

Ethics. Sam Harris recently gave a TED talk titled “Science can answer moral questions”, in which he argues that "The separation between science and human values is an illusion". Massimo Pigliucci described the "malady that strikes Harris: scientism, the idea that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having." Thinkmonkey, a commenter on Pigliucci's blog wrote:

Sam Harris has simply not done the hard work needed to understand the historical and ongoing arguments in ethical theory and metaethics - the context in which the argument he wishes to make *must* be situated. Perhaps these arguments have not settled very much, but they have at least established some shared terminology and made important distinctions: Without knowing the terminology and understanding the important distinctions (and the reasons for them), Harris cannot help but be confused - and to introduce still more confusion when he attempts to engage with his critics.

Philosophy may be where all the unanswered questions live, and may not get a lot of respect thereby, but at least we try to avoid these kinds of messes. Or, as Sydney Morgenbesser famously described our collective work: "You make a few distinctions. You clarify a few concepts. It’s a living."

The Humanities. The academic disciplines concerned with the human condition include history, literature, law, languages, art, and religious studies. Aspects of these and related fields may be studied using the methods of social science. But large parts of these disciplines use methods that are not scientific. Criticism of these disciplines is increasingly common. For example, the website of Edge: The Third Culture sneers:

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

... the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

Mathematics. Interestingly, the claim that science provides the only reliable source of knowledge is easily refuted. Mathematics uses deduction to arrive at certain knowledge, something that science cannot achieve. One response to this is to claim that mathematics is part of science. Certainly mathematics is a key tool of science, but claiming that it is part of science goes too far. A different response is to point out that mathematical knowledge pertains to abstract entities, and thus in itself is not practical. This is indeed correct, but it highlights the key point that there are different kinds of knowledge, which cannot be seen as competing, because they belong to entirely different spheres.

Science is sometimes identified tout court with rationalism, and in a you're-either-with-us-or-against-us manoeuvre, everything else is simply deemed to be irrationalism. This is more a rhetorical trick than a line of reasoning, but once again we see the definition of science being expanded at will.

Science as fiction

At the other extreme, is an anti-science sentiment that manifests itself in support for pseudoscience, quackery, and superstition. From Deepak Chopra to crystals to the anti-vaccination movement, anti-science thinking is surprisingly prevalent. As I suggested previously, some of this is a reaction against the evident problems engendered by technology, coupled with a confusion between science and technology. But some of the anti-science thinking is a reaction to the kind of triumphalism of science that I have described.

What is to be done?

I've argued that fuzzy definitions have done real damage, fueling a grandiose vision of science and its flip side, a crude resurgence of superstition and anti-science thinking. The pairing of science and technology is here to stay, and the allure of technology will continue to promote an exaggerated conception of science. What can be done in the face of this tendency?

First, it remains important to distinguish between science and technology. The careless fusing of the two terms contributes to the unwarranted expansion of the notion of science. Second, it is important to challenge attempts to expand the purview of science to non-empirical matters such as ethics. This does no good to either science or ethics. While science can certainly inform ethics, the primary focus of ethics is normative, not predictive or explanatory. Science provides the best way to understand the physical world, but it is not a source of values or meaning. Third, pseudo-science, superstition, and quackery should be challenged by insisting on high-quality evidence. However it should be remembered that such delusions are nourished by out-sized claims about the universal dominion of science. Attempts to discredit new-age nonsense can backfire when metaphysical claims are denounced as being unscientific. Science can only address empirical claims. Non-empirical claims may certainly be challenged, but not by science.

Mind your own business

Many of the issues I have discussed are particularly vexing where the mind is concerned. Advances in neuroscience have encouraged a physicalist view that in its most extreme form argues that the mind is nothing more than the activity of neurons. This idea has an interesting connection with technology. Early computers were described as being "like a brain". As computers became more familiar, the simile was inverted, and the brain was seen as being "like a computer". More recently this process has reached its conclusion, and it is common to hear that the brain simply "is a computer".

Of course it's true that the brain computes, albeit in a way rather different from our digital computers. But somehow, along with the computation, we experience consciousness, a sense of self, the impression of free will. We experience sensation (rather than simply processing signals), we feel emotion, we delight in beauty and we abhor ugliness. Questions about these aspects of mind have occupied philosophers from the earliest times. Naturally, developments in the scientific understanding of the brain have had an important impact on philosophy of mind. But the fundamental questions remain.

Unfortunately, reductionist views about the mind are flourishing, nourished by both enthusiasm about developments in neuroscience and uncritical acceptance of the technological metaphor that "the brain is a computer". It is perhaps noteworthy that Sam Harris, who argues in his new book that Science Can Determine Human Values, has a PhD in neuroscience. In a New York Times review of Harris's book (with the telling title Science Knows Best), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

when he stays closest to neuroscience, he says much that is interesting and important ... Yet such science is best appreciated with a sense of what we can and cannot expect from it ...

Indeed we should approach all science this way.

Rainbow particles

2010-09-03T13:19:00.002-04:00

My son enjoys creating Flash applications. Check this one out:

An ORnery problem

2010-08-23T20:43:00.021-04:00

Some time ago, I wrote about missing values and how they complicate the life of an applied statistician. A particularly tricky case concerns logical variables, and I give a more detailed explanation here.

Suppose X is a variable representing whether a person is at risk for developing type-2 diabetes. Two known risk factors are (A) being older and (B) being overweight. If we had a database containing the age and weight of each person in a group, we could compute X using the following logical expression:

X = A OR B.

(X, A, and B are known as logical variables, and they each take values TRUE or FALSE according to whether the corresponding condition holds.) But what happens if some ages and weights are missing from the database? Fortunately statistical software packages like R and SPSS have built-in rules that will correctly evaluate the logical expression, even if A or B (or both) are missing. The complete truth table is as follows (where T means TRUE, F means FALSE, and a dot means missing):

Note that if A is FALSE and B is missing, the result is missing. That makes sense because if the actual value of B were TRUE, the result would be TRUE, but if the actual value of B were FALSE, the result would be FALSE. Thus it is not possible to say what the value of X is.

The trouble is, this logic can sometimes be perverse. Suppose X instead represents whether a patient tests positive for infection with a certain virus. But there may be two different blood tests (A and B), and patients may receive one or the other, or perhaps both. Suppose that if any of the tests is positive, the patient will be considered to be infected. The logical variables A and B take the values TRUE, FALSE, or missing according to whether the corresponding tests were positive, negative, or simply not performed. Shouldn't the logical expression X = A OR B handle this situation correctly? Unfortunately not. Suppose only one test was performed, and it was negative. Then the truth table shows that X will be missing, even though the patient tested negative!

Why does the logical expression handle missing values the way we want in the first case, but fail to do so in the second? The answer is that in the first case a missing value represents the fact that the age or weight of a given person is not available, whereas in the second case, when a test outcome is missing from the database, it means that no test was performed, thus the variable representing the outcome is not applicable. Another common case of variables that are not applicable occurs with data representing observations on multiple occasions. For example, suppose a database records whether hotel guests eat at the hotel restaurant on the first day of their stay (EAT1), the second day (EAT2), or the third day (EAT3). Some guests stay for just one day, while others stay longer. The database may look like this:

This is an example of a ragged array, and as with the blood test, the issue is that the denominator (the number of tests performed, or the number of days a guest stays at the hotel) varies. To determine whether a guest ate at the hotel restaurant at least once (which we will represent by the logical variable EAT), we might try:

EAT = EAT1 OR EAT2 OR EAT3.

Unfortunately, as with the blood test example, this can fail when there are missing values. Guest number 4 in the table above stayed just one day at the hotel and did not eat at the restaurant, so EAT should be FALSE, but the expression above gives a missing value.

Workaround in R

In R, the vertical bar operator | represents OR, and missing values are represented by NA. For the diabetes example, the following behaviour is just what we want:


> FALSE | NA
[1] NA

In other words, when a person does not have one of the risk factors, but we don't know about the other one, then we don't know if the person is at risk. But for the blood test example, we need to use the following code:


> sum(FALSE,NA,na.rm=TRUE)>0
[1] FALSE

The sum function adds up logical values by treating TRUE as 1 and FALSE as zero. If the sum of the logical values is greater than zero, then at least one of the values must have been TRUE. Setting na.rm=TRUE tells sum to ignore missing values.

Workaround in SPSS

The situation is much the same in SPSS. For the diabetes example, the following works:


COMPUTE X = A OR B.
EXECUTE.

But for the blood test example, we need to use:


COMPUTE X = SUM(A,B)>0.
EXECUTE.

Note that the SPSS function SUM ignores missing values.

Missing value mistakes

The hard part, of course, is thinking through how the missing values in a given situation should be handled. I suspect that this issue has resulted in countless errors in data analyses. Proceed with caution: a miss is as good as a mile!

The prince and the polemicist

2010-06-26T09:16:00.014-04:00

I've written before about Christopher Hitchens and his penchant for overblown rhetoric. Well, he's at it again, this time with a scathing attack on none other than Prince Charles. As a longtime advocate of the dismantling of the monarchy, you might think this would be music to my ears. Well, it's not. Hitchens' diatribe is mean-spirited and intellectually flawed.

The mean-spirited aspects are easily catalogued and of lesser significance. Hitchens calls Prince Charles "a very silly man", "a moral and intellectual weakling", "a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts" whose "empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant".

What is of more interest to me than all this name calling is the substance of Hitchens' piece, which concerns a speech the prince gave recently at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. It turns out that Prince Charles is the patron of the Centre, and in his speech he said:

It has been a great concern of mine to affirm and encourage those groups and faith communities that are in the minority in this country. Indeed, over the last twenty-five years, I have tried to find as many ways as possible to help integrate them into British society and to build good relationships between our faith communities. I happen to believe this is best achieved by emphasizing unity through diversity. Only in this way can we ensure fairness and build mutual respect in our country. And if we get it right here then perhaps we might be able to offer an example in the wider world.

Hitchens contemptuously labels this as "Islamophilia" and writes:

... as he paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience.

This kind of innuendo is typical: here and in his other writings, Hitchens often hints at Muslim fanaticism. In this case, at least, it seems to be entirely the product of his imagination.

Prince Charles' speech was titled "Islam and the Environment". He pointed out that "Many of Nature's vital, life-support systems are now struggling to cope under the strain of global industrialization", and went on to argue that:

... what is less obvious is the attitude and general outlook which perpetuate this dangerously destructive approach. It is an approach that acts contrary to the teachings of each and every one of the world's sacred traditions, including Islam.

Prince Charles explained that he was referring to "a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific understanding of the world around us." It is perhaps not surprising that Hitchens, one of the "new atheists" and author of Good is Not Great, characterizes this as a claim that "the scientific worldview" is "an affront to all the world's "sacred traditions." But this misconstrues what the prince was saying. Later on in his speech, Prince Charles argued that:

... there is a point beyond which empiricism cannot make complete sense of the world. It works by establishing facts through testing them by the scientific process. It is one kind of language and a very fine one, but it is a language not able to fathom experiences like faith or the meaning of things – it is not able to articulate matters of the soul.

Hitchens dismisses this as "vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe". But although the prince made liberal use of words like "soul", "spiritual", and "faith", his arguments do not stand or fall on a narrow religious interpretation. He was pointing out that science has limits, and the temptation to pretend otherwise may lead us astray. Prince Charles sees part of the solution in "the traditional teachings, like those found in Islam that define our relationship with the natural world". Not everyone will share his interpretation, but it's hardly the "farrago of nonsense" that Hitchens alleges.

I found the prince's speech interesting and even thought-provoking. Read it yourself and see what you think.

JustPacifism

2010-01-31T09:02:00.006-05:00

I just launched a new blog devoted entirely to pacifism, defined as a commitment to peace and opposition to violence and war. It's called JustPacifism.com and it's meant to be a place to discuss pacifism from the broadest standpoint, without focusing on any single tradition or framework. Here's part of my introductory post:

I see pacifism as a direction of thought and action rather than a fixed point, as I have illustrated below:

At the far right-hand side is what some have termed "absolute pacifism". In its strongest form such a commitment would prohibit violence even in self defense, and perhaps violence against non-human living things. At the other extreme is a total lack of concern about violence. Someone holding this view might oppose a given war, but not because it involves violence. For example such a person might object that this particular war is not cost effective.

I suspect that not many people hold to one of the views at either end of my diagram. Instead, most of us fall somewhere in between. If it were possible to formulate a "pacifism index", then someone with no concern at all about the use of violence would score a 0%, and an absolute pacifist would score a 100%. I would be interested in where readers would place themselves (or perhaps historical figures) on such a scale. Of course it's just a thought experiment, but it demonstrates how pacifism is not a fixed point, but a tendency. To the extent that you believe that your society is too ready to use violence, I would say that you have pacifist leanings.

What I find particularly striking however, is that discussions of pacifism so often gravitate towards debating the absolute pacifist position. Although I recognize the philosophical value in considering the boundaries of an issue, I think that one must not ignore the domain where most choices are actually faced. One shouldn't spend too much time worrying about scaling Mount Everest if one has trouble climbing a couple of flights of stairs. And yet pacifism is routinely dismissed based on this sort of reasoning!

I'd like to invite folks to visit JustPacifism.com, and join the discussion!

Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama

2010-01-16T21:53:00.019-05:00

The links between Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama are hard to miss. Obama's historic election as the first African American President of the United States seemed to echo the stirring words of King's 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Obama's inauguration took place on Tuesday, January 20th 2009, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This Monday—one year later—Martin Luther King Jr. Day will again be celebrated, and with the one-year mark of Obama's presidency imminent, connections between the two men will again be drawn—including the fact that both were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But an examination of Obama's December-10th acceptance speech suggests some striking differences.

The Nobel committee's selection of Obama so early in his presidency was controversial. Fuel was added to the fire when, just nine days before accepting the prize, he announced that he was sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. His acceptance speech was unapologetic:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

Yet he went on to say:

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

Can you feel a "but" coming?

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.

So there it is. King and Gandhi had great "moral force", but, apparently unlike them, Obama faces "the world as it is". This strikes me as a shocking distortion: King and Gandhi were deeply involved in practical action, and indeed were instrumental in bringing about change.

The rhetorical pattern we see here is repeated throughout Obama's speech. Moral principles are praised (as long as they remain principles), but "hard truth" is emphasized. Carefully crafted oratory is used to sell the Orwellian idea that "War is Peace". But the awkward fact remains that Martin Luther King Jr. was a proponent of non-violence. What does Obama make of that?

The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached -- their fundamental faith in human progress -- that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

It would appear that non-violence can be dispensed with when required. What is apparently fundamental is something rather vague and comforting: "love" and "faith in human progress". Of course Martin Luther King Jr. did talk above love, but as a basis for moral decisions rather than a distraction from them.

King's 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech is strikingly different from Obama's, as this excerpt suggests:

After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of [the civil rights movement] is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s words apply to the world as it is in 2010, just as they did in 1964.

Update (18-Jan-2010): Jeff Nall has written an excellent piece on "How Obama Betrays Reverend King’s Philosophy of Nonviolence".

You are responsible for your feelings. Or are you?

2009-10-15T19:46:00.009-04:00

These days everyone seems to be in favour of people taking responsibility. But in the self-help world, an unusual spin on this idea has become popular: "You are responsible for your feelings." (Sometimes the word "emotions" is used instead of "feelings", and here I'll treat the two terms synonymously.) Now it makes sense to talk about taking responsibility for your behaviour—although it's easier said than done—but what would it mean for a person to take responsibility for their internal state of being? The question hinges on what we mean by the word "responsibility".

Consider the following scenario: suppose you're helping to organize a party and you take responsibility for the drinks. In this case, taking responsibility means looking after, taking care of. Applying this to our feelings makes a good deal of sense. Ultimately, each of us needs to look after and take care of our feelings. Other people's behaviour can of course have a great impact on our lives, but each of us is the only one with direct access to our own feelings. Given this unique position, a passive approach doesn't make much sense. Part of what it means to "take responsibility for your feelings" is embodied in the familiar term from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "the pursuit of happiness".

But there's another sense to the word "responsibility". The sense of causation—and blame. For example, "Who's responsible for this mess?" and "The Taliban took responsibility for the attack." In what way can you be the cause of your feelings? Well, it turns out there's a very popular model in psychotherapy that suggests just that.

It's called the A-B-C model and it was introduced by Albert Ellis, the founder of rational emotive behavioral therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy. The A-B-C model counters the common notion that people and events make us feel certain ways. Ellis argued that between the activating event (A) and the emotional consequences (C) lie our beliefs (B). Changing our "irrational" beliefs can change how we feel about the events in our lives. While this approach seems reasonable—and indeed studies have shown that it can be very helpful for some people—the A-B-C model has its limitations.

For example suppose you're taking a pleasant walk in the woods when a bear jumps out at you. Your response may have little to do with your beliefs and a lot to do with thousands of years of evolution telling you that you're in mortal danger! Another limitation of the A-B-C model is that while thoughts can influence emotions, emotions can also influence thoughts. The work of neuroscientists such as António Damásio has revealed the intricacy of how thoughts and emotions are intertwined in the brain. The A-B-C model strikes me as a drastic oversimplification. And that's ok; it's only a model after all. An imperfect theory can still be useful.

But the limitations of the A-B-C model often seem to be overlooked in pop psychology. If people's emotions are caused by their beliefs, then can't it be said that they "choose" their emotions? It's not hard to see how this can lead to "blaming the victim". For example, people who have suffered traumatic life events often experience serious emotional consequences. It would be callous in the extreme to suggest that their suffering is "caused" by their own beliefs.

In the end, compassion is essential, both towards others and towards ourselves. I find it hard to see how simplistic notions of emotional causation will engender such a response.

You're being irrational!

2009-10-02T19:23:00.006-04:00

As anyone who has watched the original Star Trek series knows, Mr Spock was big on logic. He was also big on labeling the behaviour of humans "illogical". For example, consider this quote:

May I say that I have not enjoyed serving under Humans. I find their illogic and foolish emotions a constant irritant.
Season 3, episode 7 ("Day of the Dove")

Now it's true that humans do make logical errors from time to time. For example suppose Tom is considering hiring a contractor. A friend recommends asking for references because "Good contractors provide references." Sure enough, the contractor provides references and Tom hires them. Unfortunately the work is poor, and Tom complains, "I thought good contractors provide references!?"

But it's not just in the case of formal errors of logic that people's arguments and behaviour are termed "illogical"—or more commonly "irrational". For example, purchasing and selling decisions are sometimes called irrational simply because the commenter doesn't understand or agree with them. Why doesn't Grandma sell her home to make way for the skyscraper? She's been offered a very generous price! Why's she being so irrational? But Grandma has lived in that neighborhood for years and simply doesn't want a fancy new home with new neighbours.

People whose political views differ from ours are often slurred as being irrational. But what we really mean is that taken within our political framework their arguments make no sense. What really doesn't make sense is the idea that someone else's argument has to fit with our premises.

Logic proceeds from premises to conclusions. Without the premises, there can be no reasoning. Premises can be facts ("It is raining.") but they can also be desires ("I'd like to stay dry."). When Mr Spock complains about human emotions, he's suggesting that we should behave like computers. But who will program the computers?

Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" sounds a bit as if it privileges thinking above other human capacities. Descartes was in fact questioning everything he believed until he reached the point of questioning whether he himself existed. Of course this is nonsense: if he was thinking this, then he must exist. Problem solved! Sort of. What about everything else in the world, including his senses?

Thinking is only part of what human existence entails. Feeling and emotions are perhaps more fundamental. And much of what purports to be reasoning may in fact be post hoc rationalizations. Simple exercises in reasoning—"It's raining and I'd like to stay dry, so I'll bring an umbrella"—depend on desires born of feelings (it's not pleasant to be cold and wet). When it comes to more complex motivations and behaviours, the roles of thinking and feeling get hopelessly entangled.

Of course Mr Spock is just a character on a TV show. The writers repeatedly emphasize that emotion is indeed central to human existence. What bothers me is the false dichotomy they set up between thinking and feeling. In general, our emotions don't cause us to act irrationally, and the notion that we should act more "logically" misses the point. This is illustrated in Season 1, Episode 12 ("The Menagerie: Part II"):

Captain Kirk: Eh, Mr. Spock, when you're finished, please come back and see me, I want to talk to you. This regrettable tendency you've been showing lately towards flagrant emotionalism...

Mr. Spock: I see no reason to insult me, sir. I believe I've been completely logical about the whole affair.

Why do we overinterpret study findings?

2009-09-29T22:07:00.005-04:00

MSNBC recently reported that a new study suggests "U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth". (I learned of this on Rationally Speaking.) The study itself is Open Access, so all the details are freely available. The scatterplot illustrates the strong association the authors found. Now, the authors were reasonably cautious in how they interpreted their findings. The trouble is, the general public may not be.

A common error is to conclude the study shows that religiosity causes higher teen birth rates. But correlation does not imply causation. It could be that higher teen birth rates cause religiosity. Or perhaps a third, unidentified factor causes both.

But isn't the strength of association still impressive? It is. But what if, as I just suggested, there are other variables involved? Such confounding variables (or confounders, as they are commonly known) can wreak havoc on this sort of analysis. Indeed, the authors of the study did adjust for median household income and abortion rate (both at the state level). But it is possible that other confounders are lurking. And unfortunately, we tend to forget entirely about the possibility of confounders when we hear about study findings.

Another error is to conclude that the findings directly apply to individuals. Here I will quote the authors directly:

We would like to emphasize that we are not attempting to use associations between teen birth rate and religiosity, using data aggregated at the state level, to make inferences at the individual level. It would be a statistical and logical error to infer from our results, “Religious teens get pregnant more often.” Such an inference would be an example of the ecological fallacy ... The associations we report could still be obtained if, hypothetically, religiosity in communities had an effect of discouraging contraceptive use in the whole community, including the nonreligious teens there, and only the nonreligious teens became pregnant. Or, to create a different imaginary scenario, the results could be obtained if religious parents discouraged contraceptive use in their children, but only nonreligious offspring of such religious parents got pregnant. We create these scenarios simply to illustrate that our ecological correlations do not permit statements about individuals.

To err is human ...

My goal here has not been to criticize the authors of this study, nor the media. Rather, what I find remarkable is how such a simple statement—"states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth"—can be so easily misinterpreted, and in so many different ways! Does anyone know of any research about our tendency to overinterpret scientific findings? Of course, we'd probably overinterpet it.

War is bad for your health

2009-09-20T21:42:00.007-04:00

U.S. health care spending per capita is the highest in the world. Yet, as The Economist notes, "America lags behind other wealthy countries in the overall performance of its medical system". It might seem ironic then, that the same magazine has stated that the U.S. "offers the best health care in the world." But keep reading:

If you are lucky enough to have proper insurance and be admitted to the Mayo Clinic, the UCLA Medical Centre or Johns Hopkins, you will enjoy outstanding treatment. Unfortunately, as the tens of millions of uninsured and underinsured have discovered, America offers some of the most unreliable, costliest and least equitable health care in the world too.

The U.S. spends around 17% of its GDP on health care. This compares to Canada where we have a publicly-funded system, and spend around 9%.

Now there are lots of complexities here and I don't mean to oversimplify. The Canadian health care system is far from perfect, although I think most Canadians are bemused by the outlandish depictions some American demagogues present. In any case, the fact is health care costs have been spiralling here just like in the U.S. As President Obama struggles to enact health care reform, people wonder, "Where will we get the money?" Canadians are asking the same question.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Asia ...

... we have some nasty little wars going on. According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the U.S. spends $771 a second on Afghanistan and $3973 a second on Iraq. Oh, that's $2 billion/month and $10.3 billion/month respectively. Canada isn't involved in Iraq, but the total projected costs of the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan are "up to" $18.1 billion. (Those quotes express a certain skepticism on my part.)

And how are things going in Afghanistan?

Overall security conditions throughout much of Afghanistan continued to deteriorate during the quarter. In May and June, the frequency of insurgency attacks nationally was higher than in any month since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.

The CBC reports that, to date,

Since 2002, 131 Canadian soldiers have been killed serving in the Afghanistan mission. One diplomat and two aid workers have also been killed.

There is no mention of Afghans. Nor—and this raises another point—is there any mention of soldiers who were wounded. Soldiers who may well require ongoing medical care. And how do you measure the costs of post-traumatic stress disorder?

Diagnosis

We are pouring money down the drain on unnecessary, unwinnable wars, all the while wringing our hands about where we'll get the money to pay for decent health care.

Why philosophical zombies matter

2009-09-04T22:20:00.003-04:00

I first wrote about the mysteries of consciousness on this blog back in February 2006. This prompted me to do some reading on the philosophy of mind, and in March 2006 I wrote more about consciousness.

Though I didn't mention it directly in that post, a very compelling argument concerns what are called philosophical zombies. I would put the argument like this. First, ask yourself: Is it conceivable that there could be a thing that appears to be human but in fact has no conscious experience? In other words, a biological machine, identical to a human in every way, except that it has no free will, feels nothing, experiences nothing. To put it bluntly, a zombie.

If your answer is no, then I would ask this: How can you know that some of the "humans" around you are not in fact zombies? Is there a device available that will measure consciousness? Granted we have tools that can measure aspects of the complex electrical and chemical activity in the brain. But complex electrical and chemical activity is not consciousness. Consciousness has to be experienced. And there's the rub. We can be sure of only one person's consciousness: our own. As Descartes famously noted, "I think therefore I am". Continuing to follow this line of reasoning can lead to solipsism, but that's not my point at all. Rather, I believe that the philosophical zombie argument provides one indication that there is more to the world than the material.

In response to this argument, people will sometimes steadfastly maintain that consciousness is nothing more than complex neurological activity. When I point out that there's no reason to believe that such activity has to be accompanied by consciousness, the response has sometimes been to deny consciousness itself! Which brings me back to the cartoon at the start of this post. Someone who denies their own consciousness could only be a zombie!

Photos from Gatineau Park

2009-08-30T19:55:00.005-04:00

Today was a wet day in the Ottawa area, but the Gatineau Park was beautiful, as always!

The headline effect

2009-07-04T22:23:00.004-04:00

In Canadian print journalism, probably the single most important real estate is the front page of the Saturday Globe and Mail. Today's lead article was about the plight of Pakistani women fleeing the Swat valley. In the print issue, the headline was "Between Fear and Freedom", with a secondary headline stating that "The Taliban have driven almost a million women and children out of their homes in the Swat valley." The article itself, by Stephanie Nolen, describes it differently: "Nearly a million Pakistani women have had to flee ... as the government intensifies a military operation against Islamist militants."

No doubt the agonizing decision to leave behind one's home is made for various reasons. Nolen writes: "The women arrive here with their families, running from Taliban aggression or aerial and ground attacks from the Pakistani military – or both." So why does the headline mention only the Taliban?

In a journal article titled How Bias Shapes the News [pdf], Barbie Zelizer and co-authors noted that "Headlines highlight the main point of the coverage, privileging certain interpretations of an event over others." The importance of headlines has been studied empirically. In a study by Percy Tannenbaum published in 1953 ("The Effects of Headlines on the Interpretation of News Stories", Journalism Quarterly, vol 30: 189-97), students were given a fictitious newspaper story about a homicide trial with different headlines. The slant of the headline was significantly associated with whether students believed the accused to be guilty or not. F. T. Marquez argued (The Journal of Communication, 1980, vol 30: 30-36.) that "Many newspaper readers may read only headlines and thus may form their opinions of the day’s events based on those headlines alone."

As I understand it, newspaper headlines are typically not written by the journalists who write the articles. Jazzed-up headlines may serve to excite interest and sell more newspapers. But they may distort the content of the articles, and—whether consciously or unconsciously—inject ideological bias.

Photos from Banff

2009-05-31T09:11:00.008-04:00

Just got back from a trip to Banff, Alberta. Foolishly, I didn't pack a camera! Well, except for my cell phone. So here, in glorious low resolution, are some snaps:

Is everything that can be imagined real?

2009-05-21T00:56:00.009-04:00

A couple of days ago, I went to see the Mythic Beasts special exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. It's a fascinating collection of artifacts and stories from around the world.

Now, I have previously written about beasts like unicorns that (probably) don't exist. What about the unicorn's cousin, Pegasus?

How can we talk about Pegasus? To what does the word 'Pegasus' refer? If our answer is, 'Something,' then we seem to believe in mystical entities; if our answer is, 'nothing', then we seem to talk about nothing and what sense can be made of this? Certainly when we said that Pegasus was a mythological winged horse we make sense, and moreover we speak the truth! If we speak the truth, this must be truth about something. So we cannot be speaking of nothing.

The quote—or perhaps it's a paraphrase—is from the Wikipedia entry for philosopher W.V. Quine. In the philosophy of language, this is known as the problem of empty names, and I stumbled on it yesterday by chance. But it reminded me of a curious quote I'd seen at the entrance to the exhibition:

Open-mindedness

2009-05-10T21:42:00.006-04:00

Following from my previous post on supernatural explanations for unexplained events, I was delighted to find this entertaining video on the topic of open-mindedness. Seems it's been making the rounds, but if you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth checking out. (For a précis, see the blog mental indigestion.)

Not only is it visually clever, the content is quite good. What's more, the author, who goes by the intriguing moniker Qualia Soup, has produced a bunch of other good videos.

Think it's unthinkable to explain the unexplainable?

2009-04-12T10:15:00.044-04:00

Recent years have seen a remarkable rise in the popularity of atheism in the English-speaking world. For example, the proportion of respondents to the U.S. General Social Survey who indicate "no religion" as their religious preference (the green line in the figure to the left) has been steadily climbing for about 15 years.

Along with this rise has come a spate of Does-God-Exist debates. These debates raise plenty of interesting questions, but I wonder if there is more heat than light. Taking an adversarial approach to an omnibus question is a good way to bring up issues, but perhaps a poor way to clarify them.

One thing that does come up in most of these debates is the issue of divine intervention. In a 1995 debate with William Lane Craig, Massimo Pigliucci mentions the kind of God

... that doesn't interfere with the regular everyday life of the world. He may have created the world, but then after that he retired. That kind of God is completely unfalsifiable; science doesn't have anything to do with it, and rationalism doesn't have anything to do with it. There is no way to deny that kind of God.

But, he continues,

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that not many people here actually believe in that kind of God because it's not particularly satisfying. It doesn't do anything for us.

And he moves on to the idea of a God who does intervene in the world.

Early religions provided explanations of mysterious natural phenomena. While those explanations provided meaning as part of a mythic framework, they lacked predictive power. As science gradually developed, the older religious explanations were displaced. As Pigliucci put it,

The more we understand, the less room there seems to be for God to exist. Now if you extrapolate just a little bit, you'll see that you have no reason for God.

William Lane Craig responded:

... even if it were true that God doesn't often intervene in the universe in miraculous ways, that's not incompatible with Christianity. After all, miracles by their nature are relatively rare, and I don't think that God does frequently go around intervening in the universe in miraculous ways.

Which got me wondering about miracles (from the Latin mirari, to wonder) ...

Mirabile dictu!

Glass painting by Faroese artist, Tróndur Patursson, from The Catholic Church, Tórshavn, Føroyar.

It turns out that it's not so easy to define a miracle. According to an article by Jakub Pawlikowski on The history of thinking about miracles in the West,

... the most general characterization of a miracle is an event that causes wonder. As such, it must also be in some way unusual, extraordinary, or contrary to our expectations.

That seems to fit with the "casual usage" referred to by Wikipedia:

... any statistically unlikely but beneficial event, (such as the survival of a natural disaster) or even which regarded as "wonderful" regardless of its likelihood, such as birth. Other miracles might be: survival of a terminal illness, escaping a life threatening situation or 'beating the odds.'

But Pigliucci and Craig were talking about physical miracles, or as Wikipedia puts it, "a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature, such that can be explained by divine intervention".

Now, as I previously discussed, I'm not too keen on the term "the laws of nature". For one thing, I think it obscures the distinction between the way the physical universe really is and the way we model it scientifically. Our models (sometimes called "laws") are just approximations. But suppose the physical universe really is as depicted below:

The vertical axis represents the three spatial dimensions and the horizontal axis represents time. The light colour filling the box represents the way the universe ordinarily works. The bright coloured areas represent miracles, wherein the universe works differently. The blue miracle is quick and localized (Jesus turning water into wine?). The green miracle takes more time and is also localized. The yellow miracle is fairly spread out in both time and space. Finally, the red miracle is quick but has a wide spatial extent (The parting of the Red Sea?).

For the purposes of illustration, I have depicted several miracles, and together they occupy a substantial part of the diagram. But miracles are generally seen as quite exceptional. For example, in the debate, William Lane Craig stated that

... miracles by their nature are relatively rare, and I don't think that God does frequently go around intervening in the universe in miraculous ways.

Note also that I have shown each miracle in a different colour to represent their uniqueness. As far back as Aristotle, it has been recognized that

there is no science of the individual as such (hê d' epistêmê tôn katholou)
History of Philosophy by William Turner.

where (the Wikipedia page on reproducibility notes):

... the word used for individual in Greek had the connotation of the idiosyncratic, or wholly isolated occurrence.

So if a miracle were to repeat, there could be a pattern, rendering it subject to scientific investigation, i.e. not a miracle at all. Bearing this in mind, the definition I shall use is:

A miracle is a physical event that cannot ever be explained in terms of physical patterns.

Scientists generally assume that the universe has certain uniformity properties. Indeed the validity of inductive inference depends on such properties. A universe with miracles is not credible—as Einstein put it, "the Lord is subtle but not malicious". Furthermore, simplicity is prized in science, and affirmed in the principle of Occam's razor. Many scientists see beauty in the simplicity of scientific models, but as I've noted, these models are just approximations. It is conceivable that the universe does feature intractable complexity—such as miracles would entail—and it's just our models that are simple.

Now in a universe like the one in the diagram, people would report miraculous events from time to time. Many of them would simply be unexplained observations from the light-coloured part of the diagram, i.e. where the universe is working as it ordinarily does, but we don't understand it. (As Goethe put it, "Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.") But a very few of them would be observations from the bright-coloured parts of the diagram, i.e. the true miracles. Science would likely progress as in our world, with developing scientific knowledge of the ordinary functioning of the universe. Scientists would treat reports of miraculous events as unexplained anecdotal observations, as they do in our world. The faithful would treat some of the reports of miraculous events as true miracles. Of course they might fail to identify some miracles and falsely identify some ordinary events as miracles.

Consider, however, a case of apparent divine intervention: solar eclipses. The book of Amos (8:9) apparently refers to one:

And on that day,' says the Lord God, `I will make the Sun go down at noon, and darken the Earth in broad daylight.'

This is suspected to be the near-total Assyrian eclipse, dated to 763 BCE. But between 600 and 200 BCE, Babylonian astronomers discovered that these mysterious events could be predicted. Eclipses began to move from the realm of miracles to that of natural patterns.

So the eclipse of Amos may have been a misidentified miracle. But is there a good way to identify miracles? William Lane Craig provides a method for retrospectively identifying a miracle:

You should believe in a miracle, I think, when (1) No naturalistic explanation of the facts is available that plausibly explains the facts, and (2) There is a supernatural explanation suggested in the religio-historical context in which the event occurred.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that by Craig's criteria the eclipse of Amos was not a genuine miracle. However, with reference to the miraculous event at the heart of Christianity, Craig states:

... I certainly think a Christian is within his rights to say, "You know, it looks to me like those men were telling the truth," that the best explanation is that Jesus did rise from the dead. So you can remain agnostic if you want to, but it seems to me that as a historian I'm certainly within my rational rights to say the best explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead.

Reasons to believe in miracles

It seems to me that there are two main reasons to believe in physical miracles. The first is that one's religious faith leads one to do so. The second is that one believes that the evidence is overwhelming that a given event is not just unexplained but unexplainable. Here one would need to have complete trust in any eyewitness reports, and be sure that the eyewitnesses were not deluding themselves, or halucinating.

Reasons not to believe in miracles

I think that there are also two main reasons to not believe in miracles. The first is that science has been tremendously successful. Ancient peoples were surrounded by mysterious natural phenomena whose patterns were difficult to discern. It is not surprising that divine intervention seemed ubiquitous. Today we understand and have learned to manipulate many aspects of our world. Paraphrasing Pigliucci, "The more we understand, the less room there seems to be for miracles."

The second reason to not believe in miracles is the belief that the universe is fundamentally simple. Einstein wrote that "Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas." Indeed the successes of science—based as it is on inductive inference and principles like Occam's razor—seem to support this. Miracles seem neither simple nor elegant, but more like a kludge.

Regardless of those reasons not to believe in miracles, I believe that we're evolutionarily programmed to look for patterns. In a world full of physical patterns, the capacity for sophisticated pattern recognition is highly adaptive. It's a no-brainer (as it were).

More meaningful miracles?

While the idea of physical miracles poses some challenges to a scientific view of the world, I think that in the end there may be more meaningful miracles to consider. English writer Margaret Storm Jameson wrote that

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

I'd be very interested in other thoughts on the subject of miracles.

The urge to infer

2009-03-10T23:36:00.011-04:00

A news item on cbc.ca this week had the following headline: "Need 8 hours of shuteye? Even 6 can cut diabetes danger, study suggests". The first line of the article informs us that:

People who sleep less than six hours a night are nearly five times more likely than longer sleepers to develop a blood-sugar condition that could lead to diabetes, new U.S. research suggests.

A longer Reuters article fills in some details:

Using data from a large, six-year study, they identified 91 people whose blood sugar rose during the study period and compared them to 273 people whose glucose levels remained in the normal range.

They found the short sleepers were far more likely to develop impaired fasting glucose -- a condition that can lead to type 2 diabetes -- during the study period than those who slept six to eight hours.

One might ask any number of questions—for example, how did they measure the number of hours slept—but I want to focus on the interpretation.

The Reuters article accurately stated what was observed:

people in [the] study who slept less than six hours were 4.5 times more likely to develop abnormal blood sugar readings in six years compared with those who slept longer.

This is an example of descriptive statistics: it simply describes what happened.

In contrast, the CBC article refers not to what did happen, but to what will happen (at least as "new U.S. research suggests"). This is a jump from the sample to the population, and into the realm of inferential statistics. Presumably the authors applied valid statistical methodology in making their inferences. Unfortunately, we can't check because their results are not yet published. They were presented this past Wednesday at the American Heart Association's 49th Annual Conference in Florida. I will not comment here on whether it is appropriate for the media to report on results that have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

There is, however, a second inferential leap here. The CBC article suggested that inadequate sleep is "a culprit" in diabetes. Causal inferences like this are notoriously slippery. Could it not be that the development of diabetes can lead to sleep difficulties? Or perhaps there is some unidentified factor that causes both impaired glucose function and sleep difficulties? Reuters reports that the authors adjusted for age, obesity, heart rate, high blood pressure, family history of diabetes and symptoms of depression. But one can imagine any number of other possible factors. Causal inferences are extremely difficult, and at the very least they deserve cautious interpretation.

I believe that inference comes naturally to human beings; indeed this is perhaps our most distinctive evolutionary adaptation. We are programmed to infer. But like other aspects of our evolutionary inheritance, this can sometimes be maladaptive in the modern world. Consider for example the drive to consume calorie-laden goodies, which for most of human history was highly adaptive. Today, the causal chain between such behaviour, obesity, and diabetes is all too evident.

Reason is not enough

2009-02-27T20:03:00.018-05:00

I just finished reading Chris Hedges' 2008 book, I Don't Believe in Atheists. The image on the left is from a YouTube video of an interview Hedges gave on CBC's The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos, which gives a pretty good overview his argument. One side point: while the book is a great read, its title is oddly misleading, so pay that no heed.

Hedges argues that both poles of the debate about reason and religion are occupied by fundamentalists, but at one end they are religious while at the other they are atheist. He argues persuasively, but I have some doubts ...

Thesis

Hedges, a distinguished foreign correspondent for various newspapers including the New York Times, wrote the book after debates he had in May 2007 with Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) and Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great). Hedges terms these two writers "New Atheists" along with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. But what particularly distinguishes Harris and Hitchens is that their political views with respect to the Islamic world are curiously compatible with those of the Christian right. Harris: "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death." (The End of Faith). Hitchens: "But the plain fact is that the believable threat of violence undergirds the Muslim demand for 'respect.'" (Slate)

Hedges' thesis is that the new atheists and religious fundamentalists make the same mistake. They have a utopian belief in the perfectibility of humanity. The difference between them is that atheists hitch their wagons to reason and science while religious fundamentalists rely on faith. But Hedges argues the key point is that they both externalize evil:

Evil, for the Christian fundamentalists and the atheists, is not something within them but an external force to be vanquished. It must be conquered and defeated. This may take violence, even massive acts of violence, but if it leads to a better world, this violence is justified. They have been anointed by reason or God to do battle with this terrible evil. But once evil is seen as being only external, once some human beings are proclaimed more moral than others, repression and murder becomes a regrettable necessity to improve the world. Those infected with the "vice" of evil have to be controlled or exterminated.

On the contrary, asserts Hedges, inside each of us lies what Joseph Conrad called the "heart of darkness":

Human beings are frequently irrational. They are governed by unconscious forces, many of them self-destructive. ... We are bound by our animal natures.

Finally, Hedges argues that "We discard the wisdom of sin at our peril.":

This understanding of innate human corruptibility and human limitations, whether explained by the theologian Augustine or the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, has been humankind's most potent check on utopian visions. It has forced human beings to accept their own myopia and irrationality, to acknowledge that no act, even one defined as moral or virtuous, is free from the taint of self-interest and corruption.

Hence, "We have nothing to fear from those who do or do not believe in God; we have much to fear from those who do not believe in sin."

Now, I'm well disposed towards a lot of what Hedges says. I find the islamophobia of Hitchens and Harris to be repugnant. The same goes for Hitchens' promotion of the Iraq war and Harris' equivocation on the legitimacy of torture. They have both helped to prop up the Orwellian "war on terror". I dislike their combative, insulting, condescending styles of debate. And they both seem to lack insight into the meaning of religious belief.

Hedges' thesis has a lot going for it, and for the most part he presents his argument in a cogent way. Above all, I agree with him that absolute certainty is extremely dangerous. But some of his arguments don't sit right with me.

Antithesis

Hedges writes that many atheists believe that

... reason and science, rather than religion, will regulate human conflicts and bring about a paradise. This vision draws its inspiration from the Enlightenment, the European intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that taught that reason and scientific method could be applied to all aspects of human life. This application would lead to progress, human enlightenment and a better world.

Indeed,

The human species, elevated above animals because it possessed the capacity to reason, could break free of its animal nature and, through reason, understand itself and the world. It could make wise and informed decisions for the betterment of humanity.

Hedges seems to agree with Enlightenment thinkers that our "animal nature" is a threat, but does not believe we can "break free" of it. We are "bound by our animal natures", "frequently irrational", and "governed by unconscious forces, many of them self-destructive". He sides with Freud who "warned that our instinctual lusts were stronger than our reasonable interests." Thus reason can be overwhelmed by our animal urges.

Is instinct really so unreasonable?

Like fear, for example? Is it unreasonable to flee from danger? Is it irrational to go out of your way to pursue a romantic possibility? Our basic needs, many of which we share with animals, are not irrational per se, but are instead the starting point of reasoning. Given that I'd like to go on a date with this man or woman, what's my best strategy? If I smell a gas leak, what should I do? Sometimes our instincts lead us to do things which might be labeled irrational, like running into a burning building to save a child. But that hardly seems contemptible.

Reason can lead to many different conclusions, depending on where you start. Deep-seated psychological factors can colour a person's reasoning. For example, strong biases can blind one to contradictory evidence. Perhaps more problematically, even when the evidence one uses has not been selected in a biased fashion, one's moral premises may be distorted. In particular, most of us are constrained (to put it mildly) by personal history and cultural assumptions.

What most worries Hedges, is our aggressive instinct and its connection with war and barbarism. We can understand aggression in the animal world. For example, when a mother Bear feels her cub is threatened, her aggressive response makes sense to us. Human aggression is another matter. Hedges, who has seen the brutality of war first hand—in Central America, Palestine, Bosnia, and elsewhere—is not optimistic. He is again swayed by Freud's argument that, as Hedges understands it,

The lusts for death and destruction are not external. They lurk in all human beings. They cannot be eradicated.

This dark view leads Hedges to some remarkable conclusions:

Pacifists, although they do not fuel the lust for violence, keep alive the myth that the human species can attain a state of moral perfection. This myth feeds the aggressiveness and cruelty of those who demand the use of violence to cleanse the world, to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush, of "the evildoers." The danger is not pacifism or militarism. It is the poisonous belief in human perfectibility, and the failure to accept our own sinfulness, our own limitations and moral corruption. This belief in our innate goodness becomes dangerous in a crisis, a moment when human beings feel threatened. It enlarges our capacity for aggression, violence and mass slaughter.

So pacifists do not "fuel the lust for violence", but they indirectly "feed the aggressiveness and cruelty" of others. Huh? And militarism isn't dangerous?

What I think this reveals is that Hedges is extremely pessimistic about attempts to address structural causes of the world's problems. I do not disagree with him that each of us is morally imperfect. And I share his distrust for utopian projects—though I would strongly argue that pacifism need not be construed as utopian. But I think he's been reading a bit too much Ecclesiastes.

Knowledge about wisdom / wisdom about knowledge

Hedges writes that "We drift toward disaster with the comforting thought that the god of science will intervene on our behalf." I agree that this naive faith in science is misplaced. Indeed I fully agree when Hedges writes:

Knowledge is not wisdom. Knowledge is the domain of scientific and intellectual inquiry. Wisdom goes beyond self-awareness. It permits us to interpret the rational and the nonrational. It is both intellectual and intuitive.

The equation of knowledge and virtue goes back at least to Socrates. And though I have long recognized it as an error, I have trouble shaking it—much to my chagrin. Perhaps it is because I think knowledge and virtue ought to be united. And perhaps it is just this sort of utopian thinking that Hedges is warning us about.

Colour commentary

2009-02-24T12:07:00.001-05:00

I've just reworked the design of this blog (well, it's really the culmination of lots of tinkering). While the form has changed, the content remains the same. Perhaps I should follow Ray Deonandan's suggestion and rename my blog Log base 2.0.

Colour me ignorant

In the redesign, I wanted more colour. But colour is trickier than I thought. There's the physics of light, the physiology of the eye, and the way the brain interprets colour information from the eye. On this last point, the Wikipedia page on colour says:

A dominant theory of color vision proposes that color information is transmitted out of the eye by three opponent processes, or opponent channels, each constructed from the raw output of the cones: a red-green channel, a blue-yellow channel and a black-white "luminance" channel. This theory has been supported by neurobiology, and accounts for the structure of our subjective color experience. Specifically, it explains why we cannot perceive a "reddish green" or "yellowish blue," and it predicts the color wheel ...

A guy I know purportedly (though my memory may have embellished a little) once argued that there are "really" only 7 colours. (Oops. It has been estimated that humans are capable of distinguishing several million colors.) I think he was engaged in some kind of battle of the sexes with his girlfriend, who was distinguishing between colours such as coral, salmon, and tomato. In our culture, women seem to be much more attuned to colour than men.

No doubt some would argue that this is due to underlying physiological differences between the sexes. I certainly wouldn't rule out biological factors, but I think culture is a more likely culprit.

Which brings me to another fascinating aspect of colour: its symbolism, associations, and preferences. For example in the west, blue often represents business (think of a dark blue suit), red means passion, purple is the colour of royalty. Green symbolizes environmentalism, but it also traditionally represented envy. But it's not that simple. In Canada blue is the colour of the Conservative party, whereas in the U.S., blue is the colour of the Democrats whereas red is the colour of the more conservative Republicans. Speaking of red, what about "red" China? Well in China, red is the colour brides wear, not the white that is conventional in the west. White, after all, is the colour of funerals in the east. Then there's the whole question of what colours are seen as masculine or feminine, and whether this varies between cultures, and over time.

Multivariate analyses: interactions galore

When more than one colour is involved, things get even more interesting. Consider two instantly recognizable colour pairs—at least in the West: (1) black and orange; (2) red and green. Colour schemes are a staple of graphic design. I think this is because the meanings conveyed by colours, individually and as part of multi-colour schemes, is very powerful and subtle. Visitors to a website often make snap judgments based in part on colour schemes. Gaudy clashing colours may be a clue that the website isn't worth spending time on. Or perhaps it's an avant-garde artsy site? And of course, the word "gaudy" is dripping with cultural assumptions.

Effective colour schemes aren't easy to conjure up. Instead we often rely on default choices, such as those provided by blog templates. In my exploration, I did find one fabulous colour-scheme tool: Adobe's free online site kuler. It lets you create colour schemes (automatically generating complementary colours, analogous colours, etc.) and explore other people's, with entertaining names like "Old Shell Station", "Ugly Accusations", and "Sushi Maki" (one of my favorites).

They certainly weren't going to pick blue!

And finally, in case you were wondering, the 2009 colour of the year, according to Pantone, is
Mimosa. "Mimosa embodies hopefulness and reassurance in a climate of change." Drat! Now I have to redesign my website again.

The Fort Chipewyan cancer cluster

2009-02-07T10:34:00.007-05:00

Fort Chipewyan (often called Fort Chip) is a town of 1200 in northern Alberta. In 2006, a local physician reported 6 suspected cases of a rare form of cancer, cholangiocarcinoma, as well as elevated rates of other cancers. What made this particularly alarming is that Fort Chipewyan is located downstream from the huge Athabasca oil sands development and there is also uranium mining and pulp and paper industry in the area. Yesterday, Alberta Health Services released a report on Cancer Incidence in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta 1995-2006 [pdf].

It turns out that only two of the six suspected cases were in fact cholangiocarcinoma. However overall cancer rates do seem to be elevated. The report concludes that:

In particular, increases of observed over expected were found for biliary tract cancers as a group and cancers of the blood and lymphatic system. These increases were based on a small number of cases and could be due to chance or increased detection. The possibility that the increased rate is due to increased risk in the community, however, cannot be ruled out.

To be precise, during the period 1995-2006 there were 51 cases of cancer, where 38.9 were expected based on the population and age-distribution of the town. Thus the incidence is 31% higher than expected, which can be expressed as an "indirect standardized incidence ratio" (ISIR) of 1.31. A 95% confidence interval for the ISIR goes from 0.98 to 1.72. Because this confidence interval (barely) includes 1, we cannot reject the hypothesis that this is simply a chance finding. The report, however, notes that this:

... is a two-sided equal tail test that does not discriminate whether the aim was to examine an ISIR that is greater than 1 (Observed>Expected), or an ISIR that is less than 1 (Observed<Expected)

As an alternative, the report presents the results of simulations. The red bar below shows where the observed 51 cases lie relative to a Poisson distribution with mean 38.9. (The Poisson distribution is the simplest assumption for event counts. Note that its mean and variance are equal.)

The caption notes that the "percentage of the simulated counts greater or equal to the observed count is 3.5%". This is equivalent to a one-sided test, which rejects (at the 5% level) the hypothesis that this is a chance finding. (Generally speaking, two-sided tests are preferred because they are more conservative and do not presuppose a direction of deviation.)

As noted above, two specific types of cancer are of particular concern. Eight cases of cancer of the blood or lymphatic system were observed compared to the expected 3.4, an ISIR of 2.37 with a 95% confidence interval of 1.02 to 4.68. Three cases of cancer of the biliary tract (cholangiocarcinoma is part of this category) were observed compared to the expected 0.7, an ISIR of 4.48 with a 95% confidence interval of 0.92 to 13.08.

There are always limitations

The report notes that:The small population size of Fort Chipewyan limits the ability to interpret results. In larger populations, one additional case does not have the same impact.
The increased rates observed were all based on a small number of cases.
The First Nations in Fort Chipewyan may have unique characteristics that are different from other First Nations communities in Alberta; this cannot be accounted for in the current analysis.
This study was not able to account for the effect of migration on the cancer rate calculation.
The study was not designed to determine whether living in Fort Chipewyan elevated cancer risk.
The study was not designed to determine the cause of any of the cancers experienced in Fort Chipewyan.
Cluster distruster?

In Cancer as an Environmental Disease, edited by Polyxeni Nicolopoulou-Stamati et al., A. Novogradec and S. Harris Ali note (p.25) that:

The value of studying cancer clusters has been questioned by those who contend that little has been gained in terms of acquiring etiological understanding ... Such critiques commonly cite the issue of 'pre-selection bias' or the 'bulls-eye problem'.

But they go on to say that:

... clusters at the very least should signal the possibility that there may be a common source or mechanism for carcinogenesis amongst members of the cluster.

There is a lot more that could be said about the particular situation at Fort Chipewyan (including evidence of environmental contamination and its sources), about the strengths and weaknesses [pdf] of the study, about epidemiological methodology for investigating cancer clusters, and about the history of other cancer clusters around the world. My sense is that the answers may not be straightforward.

Update 09Feb2009: Here are two interesting blog posts on the subject, one from Ken Chapman and the other from Metis Bare Facts. Also note that the U.S. National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both have good pages on cancer clusters.

And philosophy

2009-02-02T09:03:00.011-05:00

I was at the bookstore the other night and wandered over to the philosophy section. Or should I say, the "and philosophy" section. You see, it was dominated by books with titles like The Simpsons and Philosophy, Metallica and Philosophy, Monty Python and Philosophy, The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy (subtitle: "I Link Therefore I Am")—the list goes on and on, as do the witty subtitles.

These are all part of the Popular Culture and Philosophy series. Editor George Reisch writes:

Since its inception in 2000, Open Court's Popular Culture and Philosophy® series has brought high-quality philosophy to general readers. The volumes present essays by academic philosophers exploring the meanings, concepts, and puzzles within television shows, movies, music and other icons of popular culture.

The first in the series was Seinfeld and Philosophy, edited by William Irwin:

How is Jerry like Socrates? Is it rational for George to "do the opposite?" Would Simone de Beauvoir say that Elaine is a feminist? Is Kramer stuck in Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage?

How about Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy?

Who counts as human? Is killing an intelligent non-human murder or garbage disposal? Can we really know who we are until we know what we are?

Or James Bond and Philosophy?

Is Bond a Nietzschean hero who graduates "beyond good and evil"? Does Bond paradoxically break the law in order, ultimately, to uphold it like any "stupid policeman"? What can Bond’s razor-sharp reasoning powers tell us about the scientific pursuit of truth? Does 007’s license to kill help us understand the ethics of counterterrorism? What motivates all those despicable Bond villains—could it be a Hegelian quest for recognition?

Maybe Star Wars and Philosophy?

If the Force must have a Dark Side, how can the Dark Side be evil? Why and how did the tyrannical Empire emerge from the free Republic? Are droids persons, entitled to civil rights? Is Yoda a Stoic or a Zen master?

And yet ...

My first reaction upon seeing this plethora of pop-culture on the philosophy shelves was disapproval. Try to find a book by C. S. Peirce and you're out of luck. But no problem if you're looking for The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless!

But the truth is I haven't read any of these books, so I can't comment on their quality. Still the reader reviews on Amazon.com are generally quite positive. For example, here's some of what reader Angela Allen has to say about Harry Potter and Philosophy:

As one who reads the Potter books mostly for the escapism, it was interesting to have professional philosophers help me delve into the deeper meanings contained in the books. [...] My favorite essays were "Feminism and Equal Opportunity: Herminone and the Women of Hogwarts", "Heaven, Hell and Harry Potter" "Magic, Muggles and Moral Imagination" and "The Prophecy-Driven Life: Foreknowledge and Freedom at Hogwarts". [...] This book is probably not for the expert philosopher as these concepts will be basics but for someone of my experience (almost none) studying philosophy, it was a great read.

If anyone has read one of these books, I'd be interested in your evaluation. Are they well written? Do they trivialize philosophy or simply introduce it to ordinary people in terms they can relate to?

The truth is, I'm looking forward to reading one of these books! But which to choose? Perhaps Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant!

Development: A Basic Human Right?

2009-01-26T14:17:00.005-05:00

The University of Ottawa's International Development Week is February 2nd to the 7th. Scheduled speakers are:

Feb.2: Alex Neve, Secretary General, Amnesty International Canada
Feb.3: Maude Barlow, Senior Advisor to the UN on questions of water
Feb.4: The Honorable Lloyd Axworthy, former Minister of Foreign Affairs
Feb.5: His Excellency S.M. Gavai, High Commissioner of India
Feb.6: Alexandre Trudeau, Journalist
Feb.7: Peter Levesque, Knowledge Mobilization Specialist

Contact hpihc@uottawa.ca or visit www.sdi-idw.uottawa.ca for more information.

Absence of evidence ...

2009-01-11T07:54:00.018-05:00

In a valid deductive argument, the conclusions follow necessarily from the premises. This is a proof in the mathematical sense of the word. Provided we know that the premises are true, we can establish with complete certainty that the conclusions are true. For example, identifying a single unicorn would establish without a doubt that unicorns exist.

Unfortunately much of the time this type of certainty isn't possible. Consider another example from the realm of mythology: weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. Here's what Donald Rumsfeld had to say on the subject in 2002 (the boldface is my addition):

There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. ... Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.

But surely hunting high and low for WMD month after month and not finding any (absence of evidence) supports the inference that there aren't any there (evidence of absence). Indeed, it turns out that the popular maxim cited by Rumsfeld is simply incorrect.

But didn't he have a point? Absolutely: failing to prove that something exists does not prove that it does not exist. Or, in the words of the English writer William Cowper (1731-1800):

Absence of proof is not proof of absence

Compare this with the version invoked by Rumsfeld:

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

The originator of this maxim seems to be the cosmologist Martin Rees, although it has been attributed to many others, including Carl Sagan. By substituting the word evidence for proof it makes a much stronger (and invalid) claim. Evidence, after all, is often uncertain. If I look outside and see that the ground is wet, that is evidence that it has been raining. But perhaps my neighbour was watering her flowers. Seeing someone walk by with an umbrella folded under their arm might strengthen my evidence for the rain hypothesis, but perhaps they are anticipating rain later on. In general, evidence can support an inference, but it won't necessarily prove it. And that's where Rees's formulation of the maxim falls down.

Black and white thinking about evidence

When evidence is construed as being certainty, we get into all kinds of trouble. This is how Rumsfeld turned a simple truism (no WMDs have been found, but they might still be) into a puzzle of obfuscation (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

But Rumsfeld is not the only one. As I noted recently, the term "no evidence" is commonly used to describe situations where an effect is not found to be statistically significant. Now statisticians are wary of people concluding that a lack of statistical significance implies that there is "no effect". (It might be, for example, that the sample size was inadequate.) Hence, it is not at all uncommon for statisticians to declare that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence! As Kim Øyhus has pointed out, even the American Statistical Association buys into it, as the t-shirt they sell attests.

Of course statisticians know well that uncertainty isn't easy to think about or communicate to others. So why have we fallen into this trap?

Well, part of the reason may be philosophical. Statistical reasoning is inescapably inductive—it does not guarantee certainty. Philosophers have been worrying about what is called the problem of induction for a very long time. David Hume (1711-1776) challenged the logical foundations of induction, and ever since, philosophers have sought a way around the problem. The reigning "solution" is known as the hypothetico-deductive method, developed by philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902-1994). Popper argued that induction in science could be avoided by proposing a hypothesis and then seeking evidence that would either prove the hypothesis wrong ("falsify" it) or fail to do so. This is very similar to the frequentist statistical hypothesis testing framework that developed from the work of Fisher, Neyman, and Pearson. Unfortunately, it lends itself to black-and-white thinking. A hypothesis is either proven wrong or it isn't. There's no grey zone.

Popper's formulation, in particular, buries the uncertainty completely, construing the reasoning as entirely deductive. Suppose, for example, that a new biochemical theory predicts that a certain drug will shorten the duration of an illness, whereas the older theory does not. Now duration of illness depends on numerous factors, including differences in patients' immune systems, and we expect to see variation above and beyond any differences due to the drug. A clinical trial may demonstrate that the average duration of illness for patients who are randomly assigned the drug is shorter than that for patients who receive placebo, and that this difference is statistically significant at the 0.05 level. Has the older theory been proven incorrect? Not with absolute certainty. The evidence against it may be strong but it is possible that this is a "type-I" error—rejecting the null hypothesis even though it is true. Indeed, because of the way the statistical test has been designed, when the null hypothesis is true we expect to see such errors 5% of the time. The companion to the type-I error is the type-II error—failing to reject the null hypothesis even though it is false.

Pretending that type-I and -II errors don't exist is wishful thinking. Just as diagnostic tests produce false positives and false negatives, statistical hypothesis tests can give the wrong answer. The point is that we can study and control the error rates and make inferences while acknowledging their limitations.

It suited Donald Rumsfeld's purposes to be fuzzy about the distinction between evidence and proof. It doesn't suit ours.

Update 03-Jun-2009: I had originally attributed the maxim "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" to Carl Sagan in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World." Apparently however, the originator was cosmologist Martin Rees. There is reference to it in the proceedings of a 1972 symposium titled Life Beyond Earth & The Mind of Man [pdf], jointly sponsored by Boston University and NASA. In his introductory remarks, the chair, Richard Berendzen stated:

A generation ago almost all scientists would have argued, often "ex cathedra," that there probably is no other life in the universe beside what we know here on Earth. But as Martin Rees, the cosmologist, has succinctly put it, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Beyond that, in the last decade or so the evidence, albeit circumstantial, has become large indeed, so large, in fact, that today many scientists, probably the majority, are convinced that extraterrestrial life surely must exist and possibly in enormous abdundance.

(The boldface is mine.) Note that Carl Sagan was one of the panelists at the symposium.

For your listening pleasure

2008-12-27T11:25:00.003-05:00

Check out Gramercy Riffs. They have been described as a "heartbreak/nostalgia pop" band; see other commentary here.

Something fishy about "no evidence"

2008-12-24T09:12:00.012-05:00

Searching Google for "no evidence" yields "about 21,300,000" hits. It seems we're keen to deny that there is any empirical support for countless different claims. For example, scientificblogging.com reports that there is "No Evidence For Fish Oil Benefit In Arrhythmias" based on a systematic review just published in BMJ. (Full disclosure: I have previously participated in research on omega-3 fatty acids, however I have no related financial interests.) What does the review itself say?

This is the first systematic review attempting to evaluate whether the protective mechanism of fish oil supplementation is related to a reduction of arrhythmic episodes determined either by a reduction in implantable cardiac defibrillator interventions or a reduction in sudden cardiac death. We found a neutral effect on these two outcomes. The confidence intervals for these outcomes were wide and a beneficial effect up to a 45-48% relative risk reduction cannot be excluded.

To better appreciate this, here's their Figure 2:
Note that of the three studies that looked at the proportion of implanted defibrillators that were triggered, one showed a statistically significant effect in favour of fish oil, and the other two did not show statistically significant effects (one favoured placebo and the other favoured fish oil). Six studies looked at sudden cardiac death in patients taking fish oil compared to those taking placebo. Only one was statistically significant, and it favoured fish oil. Of the five studies that did not show statistically significant effects, two favoured fish oil, and three favoured placebo.

The diamond shapes in the figure show the pooled estimates with their 95% confidence intervals: in each case the diamond overlaps an odds ratio of 1, indicating that the overall effect is not statistically significant. And when there's a non-statistically significant effect, it is common practice to say there is "no evidence". But that can be very misleading! After all, two of the individual studies did show a significant benefit of fish oil. So what's going on? Well, for starters, there's some indication of heterogeneity between the studies (particularly in the case of the defibrillator studies). But it also seems that more large studies are needed: a good deal of the variation in results between the studies may simply be due to the play of chance. Quite substantial benefits of fish oil are entirely plausible: relative risk reductions of as much as 45-48%!

What is "no evidence"?

Consider the figure below:

At the bottom there is a gray axis line with tick marks and a vertical gray line indicating the "null" value (where there is no preference one way or the other). The blue line with arrows at each end represents an infinitely wide confidence interval. This is the most straightforward representation of "no evidence": there is simply no empirical information to indicate what the true effect might be.

But suppose we have a very small sample, that is, one that provides almost no empirical evidence. The figure might become:

The only difference is the blue dot on the confidence interval just a bit to the right of the null line. It represents the point estimate based on a very small amount of empirical information. Of course it could equally well have been on the left hand side (or perhaps directly on the null line). Regardless, the confidence interval is still very wide, so very little can be said about the true effect. With such a wide confidence interval, the location of the point estimate is almost irrelevant.

Finally, suppose that a reasonably large sample is available:

I have left the point estimate at the same place. The confidence interval no longer has arrows on either end and is relatively narrow. However it still overlaps the null line. That means the estimate is not statistically significant. Sometimes this sort of situation is described as showing "no evidence of an effect". But as I noted above, that's quite misleading language. In fact, what this situation shows is indeed evidence—evidence that any effect likely has a magnitude of no more than two tick marks (whatever they represent) on the right hand side of the null line or a magnitude of no more than about a half a tick mark on the left hand side of the null line.

But here's the tricky part: what do those ticks represent? Suppose the axis represents annual cost savings that might result from implementing a certain type of federal government program. If each tick mark represents $1000, then we have estimated that the program will cost at most $500 a year and save at most $2000 a year. In other words, the program has been shown to be effectively revenue neutral: the evidence suggests that the cost/cost-savings of the program will not be important. On the other hand, if each tick mark represents one million dollars, most of us would feel that the jury's just not in yet. A possible cost of $500 a year is a drop in the bucket, but $500,000 a year is something else entirely.

In a way, money is the easiest measure to evaluate like this. Things like safety are much harder. For example, if the evidence suggests that a certain chemical may increase the rate of certain types of cancer, but the findings are not statistically significant, what can we conclude? Can the manufacturer claim that there's "no evidence" the chemical is harmful? Can health activists claim that there's "no evidence" the chemical is safe?

I would argue that the term "no evidence" is inappropriate in either case. The underlying questions remain: what is required in order to conclude that a chemical is harmful or that it is safe? Ultimately there's no getting around the issue of how large a difference (in, for example, cancer rates) has to be in order to be considered important. And that's a rather uncomfortable question.

Fuzzy on the whole "good-bad" thing

2008-12-16T00:03:00.010-05:00

Michael Ignatieff, the new leader of Canada's Liberal Party has been described as a political chameleon. Writes Michael Valpy:

But who is Michael Ignatieff really? Is he the pinkish liberal who champions human rights and carries Pierre Trudeau's torch for social justice? Or is he the conservative realist who embraced George W. Bush's attack on Iraq and flirted with the notion that torture could be acceptable?

I wonder if Ignatieff's 2004 book, The Lesser Evil, should instead have been titled Maybe Torture's Like, Ok?

But one thing's for sure—as a reviewer on Amazon.com put it—Ignatieff is "fuzzy on the whole 'good-bad' thing."

For a commentary on torture minus the fuzziness, see this 2003 editorial from the British Medical Journal. The subtitle puts things in focus:

Torture is a form of terrorism:
there are no justifications for it

Michaëlle Jean for President

2008-12-08T20:05:00.003-05:00

So our Governor General, Michaëlle Jean acceded to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's request that Canada's parliament be suspended until late January. And the justification ... ?

Well, none was provided. But perhaps it had something to do with Harper's Conservative Party being on the brink of losing control of the government.

Now I don't dispute that the Governor General was acting within her powers. But I do think her powers need some tweaking if parliament can be suspended just to allow the Prime Minister to evade the will of the elected members of parliament. That kind of contempt for democracy smacks of absolutism. Who does the Governor General report to, anyway? Oh, right: the Queen of England!

I'm reminded of some lines in the jingoistic second verse of "God Save the Queen":

O Lord, our God, arise,
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all.

God save us all, indeed. It seems that Canada's politics are the ones being confounded. (I confess, however, that I do admire the rhyming of politics with knavish tricks.)

I wonder if it isn't time that Canada grew up and that the sun set once and for all on the western remnant of the British Empire. It's time we became a republic. Of course a republic needs a President. And to show I hold no grudges, I would like to nominate Michaëlle Jean. But enough already with the proroguing!

Peroguing parliament

2008-12-04T00:40:00.005-05:00

I note with alarm that Canada's parliament may soon be perogued!

Update 07Dec2008: Overheard at a party: "We're in prorogatory!"

Express yourself with the Log base 2 virtual fridge

2008-11-24T18:55:00.006-05:00

Oh m'eye

2008-11-21T22:18:00.002-05:00

My daughter has an eye for art:

False idols

2008-11-18T18:32:00.005-05:00

The painting below is Golden Calf 2, 1985, by Irving Norman.

A recent post on Massimo Pigliucci's blog Rationally Speaking proposed a "classification of types of commitment, from the most ludicrous to the most defensible". Pigliucci started with "commitment to a symbol", and he didn't pull any punches:

This is the stupidest form of commitment ever invented by human beings. I’m referring to people who “pledge allegiance” to flags, or who worship religious symbols of torture, such as crosses. It seems to me that nationalism and religion in particular are among the worst causes of human misery, and that more generally it is profoundly irrational and highly immoral to “commit” to a symbol for the symbol’s sake. Flag burning, or making sculptures of crucified frogs, while not acts I have ever actually engaged in, ought to be protected and even encouraged forms of free speech.

He followed this with some interesting thoughts on "commitment to an institution" and "commitment to people" before arriving at "commitment to ideas":

Within limits, I think this is actually the most important and rational type of commitment one can make. Ideas like democracy, education, fairness, justice, and so on are actually much more durable than either institutions or individuals. If an idea is good, it remains good under a wide range of circumstances, and it accordingly deserves our steady commitment. Even here, however, commitment should not be absolute and unconditional

But there's a problem here, as commenter J pointed out:

I'm having a somewhat hard time seeing the real difference between the first level (commitment to symbols) and the last (commitment to ideas)!

I noticed you qualified it there, "it is profoundly irrational and highly immoral to “commit” to a symbol for the symbol’s sake". But is there such a thing as committing to a symbol solely for its sake? Isn't a symbol always the embodiment of an idea? There is no symbol without an idea behind it, is there?

I then chimed in:

I agree with J: commitment to a symbol usually means commitment to an underlying idea or set of ideas. For example, to Christians, the cross symbolizes love, redemption, justice, etc. Sacred symbols like the cross are typically the focus of ritual and worship. Note that the English word worship relates to ideas of worthiness and respect, which is, I think, a big part of what religious expression is about.

J goes on to point out that some ideas have associated symbols, "but we never see anyone worshiping those symbols, curiously enough". Perhaps, but consider the idea of materialism, which is widely admired. Its symbols could be said to be the logos of consumer brands, like Mercedes-Benz, Starbucks, Chanel, ... the list is endless.

When people walk around bedecked in corporate logos, perhaps they are expressing a form of worship of materialism.

Pigliucci responded:

I still think there is an important distinction to be made here. Christians, or patriots, get really worked up about their symbols, threatening violence or passing legislation in their defense. The symbol seems to transcend the idea.

And I replied:

Interestingly, this issue comes up in religion itself. The idea of idolatry is at least partly about confusion between symbols (images, objects) and ideas (about the divine). Differing ideas about the proper treatment of symbols have contributed to the divisions between branches of Christianity.

And consider that although we today use the term iconoclast to mean someone who attacks conventional ideas, originally it meant someone who destroyed religious symbols (art in particular).

The crash of symbols

It seems to me that when people treat a symbol as sacred (whether explicitly or implicitly), they are not only expressing a commitment to the ideas represented by the symbol, they are also identifying with it at a deep emotional level. They view an attack on the symbol as a desecration, and more: an assault on their identity.

The symbol par excellence

What is the most ubiquitous and perhaps most potent symbol of all? Language. Consider, for example, the Biblical injunction against taking the Lord's name in vain. Doing so is desecration of a holy symbol.

It seems to me that perhaps the greatest lie ever perpetrated is this one:

Sticks and stones
May break my bones
But words can never hurt me

The human right to peace

2008-11-17T20:29:00.003-05:00

Thursday, December 4, internationally renowned peace and justice activist, Senator Douglas Roche, O.C., former Canadian Ambassador to the UN for Disarmament, will speak at a special public meeting in Ottawa. The venue is Southminster United Church, corner of Bank St. and Aylmer Ave., (just South of the Bank St. Bridge over the canal).

His topic will be “The Human Right to Peace”—the title of one of his recently published books. (Incidentally, I looked up some reviews of the book: here and here.)

Twin delusions

2008-11-02T17:28:00.009-05:00

Fascination with identical twins goes back a long way: think of the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, and the astrological symbol Gemini. Our modern understanding of genetics has given us a scientific perspective on identical twins, and yet it too is accompanied by a mythology.

By virtue of being genetically identical, identical twins would seem to provide an ideal source of evidence concerning the heritability of traits. Since identical twins share physical characteristics, is it not conceivable that they also share traits such as intelligence and personality? There is, however, a fly in the ointment: the influence of the environment in which twins are raised. While eye colour has a purely genetic basis, couldn't intelligence depend on how twins are jointly brought up? There are two ways around this obstacle.

Twins: Take 1

The first depends on a rather unlikely occurrence: identical twins separated at birth. Which brings us, my dear Watson (and Crick) to the curious case of Sir Cyril Burt (1883–1971), an English educational psychologist. In "The Mismeasure of Man", Stephen Jay Gould writes that Burt:

... published several papers that butressed the [claim that IQ is inherited] by citing very high correlation between IQ scores of identical twins raised apart. Burt's study stood out among all others because he had found fifty-three pairs, more than twice the total of any previous attempt.

But perhaps this was too good to be true:

Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin first noted that, while Burt had increased his sample of twins from fewer than twenty to more than fifty in a series of publications, the average correlation between pairs for IQ remained unchanged to the third decimal place—a statistical situation so unlikely that it matches our vernacular definition of impossible.

Gould goes on to review further evidence that Burt faked many of his results. But by the time this came to light, the damage was already done: Burt's studies had influenced British educational policy for decades.

Twins: Take 2

A second way around the impact of environment is to compare identical twins with same-sex fraternal twins. If a trait is inherited, we would expect identical twins (known as monozygotes, MZ) to be more similar than fraternal twins (dizygotes, DZ), irrespective of environmental influences. A particularly disturbing example of this argument is in a 2005 paper titled "Evidence for substantial genetic risk for psychopathy in 7-year-olds" (Viding et al. J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 46:6, pp 592–597). Measures of psychopathy were reported by teachers for each member of nearly four thousand twin pairs. A child with a high score (the "proband") was then compared with his or her co-twin. The figure below is a hypothetical example, but it qualitatively represents the study findings:
As depicted in the figure, identical co-twins (MZ) were closer to the proband than fraternal twins (DZ). In fact, the authors studied two traits: callous-unemotional (CU) and antisocial behaviour (AB). The reported "remarkably high heritability for CU, and for AB children with CU".

Megan McArdle cited this study (via a summary article) in a recent blog post:

Some years ago, I remember reading Jonathan Kellerman's Savage Spawn, a book on sociopathic children, and how nearly impossible it is to treat them. [...] It's truly heartbreaking: a child who doesn't seem capable of loving its parents, or anyone else. It seems to be mostly genetic, and nearly completely immune to any current treaments.

While I can't comment on the claim that it's "nearly impossible to treat" (though I wonder what the substantive basis for such a claim would be), I do question the claim that it's "mostly genetic". Do identical twins really grow up in the same environment as same-sex fraternal twins? I doubt it. As Lea Winerman wrote in A Second Look at Twin Studies in the April 2004 issue of the American Psychological Association Monitor: "... some research suggests that parents, teachers, peers and others may treat identical twins more similarly than fraternal twins." Winerman provides a balanced review of the continuing controversy about twin studies, raising a number of other problematic assumptions.

Time to move on ...

Back in April I expressed my skepticism about genetic determinism in the context of sex differences. I don't doubt that genetic factors can play an important role in a variety of traits. But the more complex the trait the trickier it is to sort out the relative contributions of genetics and environment. And the more likely it is that our own prejudices will swamp the evidence. We've been down this road before.

Great web apps with strange names

2008-09-13T19:25:00.011-04:00

The last couple of years have seen a proliferation of great web applications. And for some reason, the fashion is to give them bizarre names like Loopt, Mobunga, and Lijit. (Any guesses what they do?) The collage of "web 2.0" logos on the left provides plenty of examples (click on the image to link to the website where they provide a huge high-resolution version).

So here are my favorite strangely-named but wonderful web apps:

Jango is a free, customizable internet radio service. The way it works takes a little getting used to, but it's a terrific way to hear lots of great music.

SUMO Paint is an awesome online image editor.

Weebly is a free service that lets you easily create and host a website.

Slinkset lets you create a social news site. For example, I created StatLinks in just a couple of minutes.

Finally, here's a clever web application whose name says it all: MizPee.

The do-not-call fall

2008-08-07T20:05:00.009-04:00

Sometimes things take a while to make it to Canada. The nutrition facts label on pre-packaged food was introduced in the U.S. in 1994. Canadians had to wait until 2005 for a similar labeling scheme. When it comes to the scourge of unwanted telemarketing phone calls it's no different. The U.S. National Do Not Call Registry came into effect in 2003. Five years later, Canada is finally getting a do-not-call list. It should be operational this fall (September 30th, so they say).

The bad news (as I see it) is that there are some exemptions. Even if we sign up, we'll still get calls—whether we want them or not—from charities, political parties, polling companies and companies with whom we have existing business relationships.

I can see the argument for allowing charities to make fundraising calls, but I still disagree. When I give to a charity, I want as much of my donation as possible to go to the cause, not to pay for fundraising. I suspect that a lot of money is wasted on competition between charities.

To plug the holes in the do-not-call legislation, Michael Geist has created a free service called iOptOut that provides automatic opt-out notification to exempted organizations. The Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) also has a Do Not Contact Service. It covers mail, telephone, and fax. Note: When the National Do Not Call List comes into effect it will supersede the CMA's telephone service but not its mail service.

Don't call me, I'll call you

At the end of the day, I prefer an opt-in arrangement rather than an opt-out one. And if nobody opts in? Well, I'd say that's just fine.

Consider the U.S. experience:

What do you think? How has the do-not-call system worked in the U.S.? Are the exemptions in the Canadian system warranted?

Paintings by Ottawa artist Aline Coulombe

2008-08-06T22:10:00.004-04:00

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
—George Santayana

log calculator

2008-08-06T12:46:00.014-04:00

My son has written a program to calculate the logarithm using any base. Be careful of splinters!

For more stuff about logarithms see my posts:
log base 2 and double, double toil and trouble. And of course, don't forget Wikipedia.

Scandinavophilately

2008-08-01T20:21:00.009-04:00

When I think of SAS, it's usually the Statistical Analysis System I have in mind. But there are about 50 other meanings. (Not everyone likes the word disambiguation, but I think it's helpful in cases like this!)

One meaning of SAS is the Scandinavian Airlines System. I bring this up because my father was a scandinavophile. Below is his hand-drawn map of Greenland.

On the southern part of the West coast of Greenland is a place with the Danish name Søndre Strømfjord (Kangerlussuaq in the Kalaallisut language). If you look closely, it's marked by a little red mark (it's an airplane symbol) on the map about a quarter of the way up from the bottom. Søndre Strømfjord has a fascinating aerospace history that began in 1941 with the establishment of a U.S. air base and has continued right up to the present day.

Hey, it's only 3 hours to the North Pole!

Part of the history of Søndre Strømfjord is described (in rather grandiose language) on the SAS website:

Polar exploration had been something of a Scandinavian specialty and it was no surprise that SAS set about the task of conquering the hostile airspace over the Arctic. It took a special polar navigation system, the heart of which was a polar path gyro, to overcome the problems of flying over the magnetic North Pole.

The first, pioneering transpolar route, between Scandinavia and the U.S. west coast was inaugurated by SAS in November 1954. A SAS DC-6B “Helge Viking” flew from Copenhagen to Los Angeles via Søndre Strømfjord on Greenland and Winnipeg in Canada. The route cut the distance between the two continents by about 1,000 kilometers and was hailed as “the first new commercial route in 1,000 years”

Which brings me back to my father. He was also a stamp collector and had a series of philatelic covers of historic flights involving Greenland. The cover below commemorates the 1954 Helge Viking flight.

Hmm, I wonder what that polar bear is thinking ...

A planet with flowers

2008-07-31T19:54:00.009-04:00

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
—Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Here are some photos I took this afternoon:

n-Fold

2008-07-31T18:19:00.002-04:00

Truth or lies?

2008-07-28T22:47:00.003-04:00

Since I've been focusing on lies lately, I couldn't resist the image on the left which I happened on today. Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter cartoon is quite entertaining.

Reflections on deception

2008-07-27T14:41:00.004-04:00

As I discussed in my last post, the word "lie" is often used to refer to a broad class of deceptions. But there is much to be said for specificity. I like the following definition, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the "the most common definition of lying":

to make a believed-false statement to another person with the intention that that other person believe that statement to be true.

And as I argued a couple of years ago, definitions matter. Someone accused of lying will surely opt for the narrow definition above. The accusation may then actually strengthen their position. If a lie can't in fact be demonstrated, they may appear to be vindicated. It seems to me that politicians often play this game. Indeed the accusation of lying conveniently distracts attention from more important deceptions.

There's a kind of objectivity about lies. With appropriate evidence, only a minimal number of assumptions are required to identify a lie. Children learn this quickly, and graduate from outright lies to distortions. When asked "Did you eat the cookies?" a small child may declare "No, it wasn't me!", all the while wiping the cookie crumbs from their mouth. A slightly older child might evade the question (and thereby avoid lying) by saying "I saw my brother eating some!"

The more sophisticated deceptions that adults practice typically don't include actual lying. It's simply too risky: being caught in a lie leaves one very little room to maneuver, and the likelihood of damage to one's credibility and reputation. Other forms of deception offer far more avenues of escape. Compared to lying, more subtle forms of deception are not nearly so easy to nail down. They often hinge on ambiguous language, evasions, exaggerations, and selective use of evidence.

The stovepipe

Consider, for example, the practice of "stovepiping", in which intelligence operatives are ordered to directly pass raw information that supports a certain conclusion up to the highest political levels. In a 2003 New Yorker piece Seymour Hersh described the practice in the context of "the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered":

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership."

Hersh quotes a former aide to Dick Cheney:

There’s so much intelligence out there that it’s easy to pick and choose your case. It opens things up to cherry-picking.

Lies, damned lies, and deceptions

As everyone knows—thanks to Benjamin Disraeli—there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. I believe the point here is that there are things much worse than lies. Disraeli (a politician) pointed the finger of blame at statistics. And indeed statistics can be used in a misleading way. Even without altering the data (i.e. lying), there are numerous ways to misrepresent the evidence. But this applies much more generally—as Disraeli was no doubt aware. For example, in budgeting a common problem is what is euphemistically called strategic misrepresentation. In the realm of politics, there's the non-denial denial. And in the world of marketing and PR, there's the fake blog, or flog.

Honesty and dishonesty

In the face of so much dishonesty, it may be tempting to retreat into cynicism. I think that would be a mistake. There is far more honesty and integrity in the world than it may appear. But the cacophony of deceit sometimes seems to drown out the quiet decency that is all around us.

Finally, a warning from O. Henry (Rolling Stones, 1912):

There is no well-defined boundary between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other.

To be honest

2008-07-23T21:29:00.005-04:00

People in public relations are sometimes accused of being "paid liars". This misses the point. According to communications consultant Peter O'Malley:

In all instances, on both practical and legal grounds, effective public relations means not lying or defaming. But when perceived or real culpability is high, damage control inherently requires that engaged PR practitioners not volunteer facts they may know which may be true and may even be important to getting at the "truth" of the matter, but the disclosure of which would be harmful to the client's interest.

So lying is out (at least in principle), but that doesn't mean we'll be getting the whole truth. O'Malley continues:

And it frequently requires being steadfast in characterizing a "nearly empty" bottle as being "almost full". We may like to call all this "focused messaging", but in plain language, it means being highly selective in the presentation of information. Ultimately, it may mean being disingenuously mule-headed, and even secretive. In many settings, this may serve the client's interests, but it does not serve to enlighten the public.

Stronger forms of public relations are sometimes termed "spin". As Wikipedia puts it:

In public relations, spin is a usually pejorative term signifying a heavily biased portrayal in one's own favor of an event or situation; it is a "polite" synonym for propaganda. While traditional public relations may also rely on creative presentation of the facts, "spin" often, though not always, implies disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics.

The Wikipedia entry on propaganda sheds still more light on this:

As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented.

So the trick isn't to tell lies, it's to carefully cherry-pick facts and use them to "encourage a particular synthesis". William Blake put it well:

A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
"Auguries of Innocence," Poems from the Pickering Manuscript

Note that the term "lying by omission" obscures this somewhat. The Wikipedia entry for lie provides this description:

One lies by omission by omitting an important fact, deliberately leaving another person with a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions. A husband may tell his wife he was out at a store, which is true, but lie by omitting the fact that he also visited his mistress.

But this raises all kinds of difficulties. To what extent is a person responsible for correcting other people's presumed misconceptions? In fact, "lying by omission" is generally not considered to be lying per se but rather part of the broader class of behaviour we call deception.

Follow the money

Selective presentation of facts may not necessarily be deceptive. In our adversarial legal system, lawyers are expected to argue for one side or the other. The hope is that the truth will come out in the wash. Similarly, we expect a company spokesperson to represent the company's interests. Knowing whose interests a person is representing allows us to decide how to weigh the arguments they present.

Experts are a special case. Whether they are scientists, economists, policy specialists, or what have you, we often believe (or hope) that they are relatively unbiased. The bad news is that bias is ubiquitous. The good news is that a great deal of work has been done to try to identify different sources of bias. (See, for example, Wikipedia's list of different types of cognitive bias.) One straightforward source is bias is financial. Experts (and the journalists who quote them) should reveal possible financial conflicts of interest.

We'd also like to believe that media reports are relatively unbiased. Sadly it's not always so. In January of this year, the Toronto Star published an article titled Top Ten Health Scares, "condensed from the American Council on Science and Health's list of medical stories that made us worry unnecessarily in 2007". As I noted in a previous post, the ACSH is an industry front group. Getting their don't-worry-be-happy message into the pages of a major newspaper—not as advertising, but as content—is PR gold. Imagine the article was instead a full-page advertisement, titled "The Chemical Industry Presents the Top Ten Health Scares".

As an article in the PR Watch Newsletter put it:

In examining organizations like ACSH, therefore, the key question is not, "Are they paid liars?" It is more meaningful to simply ask, "Who funds them, and whose interests do they serve?"

By the Way

2008-07-15T16:19:00.005-04:00

I just got back from a wonderful couple of weeks on the Camino de Santiago in Spain (and a little bit in France). Here are some photos from the journey. I'm not sure how to summarize the experience and all its dimensions, but I can say that I have some great memories!

Stop worrying and learn to love the chemicals

2008-06-16T20:57:00.007-04:00

Well Margaret Wente is at it again. In a column last week titled Yellow duckies and other killers, she claims that "Mothers across Canada have been prostrated by the plastics scare."

It's hard to be a good mother these days. Deadly perils lurk everywhere. Take that yellow bathtub ducky, contaminated with a dangerous substance known as BPA.

But why stop there? Wente proceeds to list other putative hazards: toxic mould, pesticides, perfumes, "death-rays from the sun", walking barefoot in the grass. The message is clear: stop worrying already!

We forget how negligent our own parents were. They gave us naked sunbaths and let us suck on plastic duckies and roll around on pesticide-drenched lawns. It's astonishing how ignorant they were, and how many of us managed to grow up.

Now Margaret Wente is no scientist (what was your first clue?), so she needs an outside authority:

Dr. Elizabeth Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health [ACSH], an independent group devoted to accuracy in health reporting. She points out that both BPA and phthalates have been studied intensively for decades. There are no studies - none - that show any link between these substances and harm to people. The basis for the claims of danger are all from studies done on rats, and they don't predict human risk.

According to Media Transparency, ACSH haven't disclosed their corporate donors since the early 1990's, but their 1991 annual report listed each of the following as contributing at least $15,000:

American Cyanamid Company * Anheuser-Busch Foundation * General Electric Foundation * Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation * ICI Agricultural Products, Inc. * ISK Biotech Corporation * Kraft, Inc. * Monsanto Fund * The NutraSweet Company * John M. Olin Foundation, Inc. * Pfizer, Inc. * Sarah Scaife Foundation Incorporated * The Starr Foundation * Archer Daniels Midland Company * Carnation Company * Ciba-Geigy Corporation * Ethyl Corporation * Exxon Corporation * General Mills, Inc. * Heublein Inc. * Hiram Walker-Allied Vintners * Johnson & Johnson * Kellogg Company * The Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, Inc. * Malaysian Palm Oil Promotion Council * National Starch and Chemical Foundation, Inc. * PepsiCo Foundation Inc. * Union Carbide Corporation

The under-$15,000 list continues on, listing all kinds of industrial, pharmaceutical, and food corporations.

Figures don't lie ...

In her April 19th column, Wente quoted an organizations called the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) who similarly dismiss concerns about BPA. While they don't accept industry money, STATS is funded by a number of the same conservative organizations as ACSH. I think I see a pattern here.

But so what if these organizations get "conservative" funding? An anonymous commenter on my previous post wrote:

Why should the funding source matter? Isn't it the quality of the evidence and the arguments made? Your smear is the equivalent of an ad hominem attack.

My response:

I don't think it's ad hominem. If a medical study was funded by a pharmaceutical company, I'd like to know that. Not that it invalidates the study: as you say, the quality of the evidence and the arguments (analyses) made is centrally important.

So let's have a closer look at the quality of the evidence and arguments in one particular case.

I looked at a recent post on the STATS blog concerning formula- versus breast-feeding. While the author allows that "Yes, there is robust evidence that nursing reduces ear infections [otitis media] and diarrhea", he sets out to discredit claims of a link between formula feeding and diabetes, leukemia, and serious respiratory infections. In the latter case, he writes "The most recent research does not support the contention that formula carries a higher risk," citing a 1995 paper from the Journal of Pediatrics.

Interestingly enough, that study was supported in part by the Mead-Johnson Nutritional Group. Leaving that aside, however, here are some results from the abstract:

In the first year of life the incidence of diarrheal illness among BF [breast fed] infants was half that of FF [formula fed] infants; the percentage with any otitis media was 19% lower and with prolonged episodes (>10 days) was 80% lower in BF compared with FF infants. There were no significant differences in rates of respiratory illness; nearly all cases were mild upper respiratory infections. ... These results indicate that the reduction in morbidity associated with breast-feeding is of sufficient magnitude to be of public health significance.

Sure enough, they didn't find statistically significant differences in rates of respiratory illness. Now an important consideration in statistics is the power to detect differences, which is determined by a number of factors including sample size. So what was the sample size in this study?

... morbidity data were collected by weekly monitoring during the first 2 years of life from matched cohorts of infants who were either breast fed (N = 46) or formula fed (N = 41) until at least 12 months of age.

So there were a total of 87 infants. In their discussion, the authors write:

We did not observe any significant differences in the incidence or prevalence of respiratory illnesses between BF and FF infants. However, the vast majority of episodes were mild upper respiratory illnesses. Previous studies have indicated that the protective effect of breast-feeding is greatest for lower respiratory illnesses. The sample size in our study was not large enough to detect differences in more severe respiratory illnesses.

Blind trust?

Ultimately, we all have to rely on some surrogate measures to judge the quality and trustworthiness of the information we encounter. Our own expertise can only be so broad and we rely on others to help us interpret the world. Oldly enough the words of Ronald Reagan come to mind: "Trust, but verify."

Great expectations

2008-06-09T19:58:00.006-04:00

While a baby carriage makes for a good visual, it's a bit ironic. Once the baby is born there are no special parking spots, at least at the supermarket where I took this photo.

A non-profit, non-partisan organization

2008-06-06T17:53:00.004-04:00

In the April 19th edition of the Globe and Mail ("Canada's National Newspaper") columnist Maragaret Wente had a piece titled "The great plastics panic".

Wente reports that at an elementary school near where she lives, plastic water bottles have been "banished":

The kids know what's at stake. Plastic is death! At home, their anxious parents have stopped microwaving with plastic wrap. They've thrown out their plastic baby bottles and replaced them with ones made of glass. Leading retailers ... have banished plastic containers, baby bottles, sippy cups and pacifiers containing one offending chemical from the shelves. No wonder. A barrage of media reports have warned that the chemical in question - bisphenol A, or BPA - may be linked to breast and uterine cancer as well as lowered sperm count, early-onset puberty, obesity, hyperactivity, miscarriages, diabetes and other horrors.

"So," she asks, "how worried should you be?"

"On my list of a thousand things to worry about, BPA would rank about 892nd," says Trevor Butterworth, who's with an independent outfit called STATS (for Statistical Assessment Service). STATS is a non-profit, non-partisan U.S. group that analyzes the use and abuse of science and statistics in the media.

Although Butterworth's 892/1000 is obviously a rhetorical device, it still gets across the message there's nothing much to worry about. But there's another message: this is a quantitative guy! He works for an organization called the Statistical Assessment Service and accordingly he slings around numbers like nobody's business.

When I read this, I headed to the internet to check out this organization. Well, they have a pretty slick website. They describe themselves like this:

Since its founding in 1994, the non-profit, non-partisan Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) has become a much-valued resource on the use and abuse of science and statistics in the media. Our goals are to correct scientific misinformation in the media resulting from bad science, politics, or a simple lack of information or knowledge; and to act as a resource for journalists and policy makers on major scientific issues and controversies.

As a mark of our success, STATS' work has been featured on NBC's "Nightly News," "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" and ABC's "20/20" - and in print by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, US News and World Report, New Scientist, New England Journal of Medicine, and many other publications.

Furthermore, "In 2004, we became an affiliate of George Mason University in Virginia." Pretty impressive.

But how is the organization funded?

STATS is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that relies on philanthropic donations to support its operations. We do not take money from industry or industry-related groups.

And here, I must admit, I stopped. After all, I had read that STATS is:

non-profit and non-partisan
"independent"
affiliated with a public university
not funded by industry or industry-related groups
"a much-valued resource on the use and abuse of science and statistics in the media"
getting their work into the New England Journal of Medicine and New Scientist

I proceeded to read the rest of Margaret Wente's article. Butterworth's viewpoint was presented a number of times:

Mr. Butterworth maintains that most of the media have been reporting only one side of the story - the side that's driven by a handful of activist scientists and advocacy groups, such as Environmental Defence. Independent assessments conducted by food safety authorities in Europe and Japan, as well as various other risk assessments, have found no basis for the BPA scare. "We've had five major academic independent evaluations of the BPA risk over last two or three years, and they all keep saying the same thing," says Mr. Butterworth. "But they never get reported."

And what about the evidence from animal studies?

"The biological pathways in rats and people are different," notes Mr. Butterworth.

And the final word goes to ... Mr. Butterworth:

"Letting your child outside the door to breathe in exhaust fumes is more risky than letting them drink from plastic bottles," says Mr. Butterworth. He suggests if you're really worried about plastic, give up plastic bags. They suffocate 25 children a year.

Hmmm ... so maybe BPA is not so bad after all.

Uh, not quite ...

Just the other day I got some new insight into the Statistical Assessment Service, thanks to Wikipedia. (I wonder why I missed this the first time round.) Their entry about STATS includes a section on funding:

While the STATS website does not describe its funding sources, STATS is funded by a variety of conservative organizations, including Richard Mellon Scaife's Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation and the Castle Rock Foundation.

In the United States, funding information is available from the tax returns of 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisations. The information above was collated by Media Transparency. Another organization that looks into media manipulation is SourceWatch, who write:

STATS is a 501(c)3 non-profit organisation but its 2006 annual return to the Internal Revenue Service states that "salary costs for the organization are shared with the Center for Media and Public Affairs. CMPA ... reports the salary costs and files payroll reports under its tax identification number. DCFC is a related organization."[1] (It is not clear what "DCFC" refers to). The report also states that the relationship between STATS and CMPA is one of "common control".[2] Since STATS shares the offices (in the pricey "K Street" lobbying district of Washington) and staff of CMPA, it should be considered as a front, rather than a subsidiary or spin-off.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs is a topic in its own right (see here, here, and here). In 2001 some of the people involved in STATS and CMPA published a book called It Ain't Necessarily So. This review from Salon.com concludes:

A fair review of the state of science journalism is always welcome, but this cleverly disguised example of corporate propaganda isn't it.

Up Front?

The staff list of the Statistical Assessment Service is interesting. The president is S. Robert Lichter (one of the authors of "It Ain't Necessarily So"), who has been the DeWitt Wallace Chair in Mass Communications at the American Enterprise Institute and paid consultant to Fox News. There is a PhD economist and a PhD mathematician. These presumably constitute the core of the analytical team. The executive director is an MBA. And there are two journalists, one of whom is Trevor Butterworth.

Butterworth has no scientific training to speak of (rather, his training is in philosophy and intellectual history). Yet he makes quite strong statements about BPA. Consider this paragraph from Wente's column:

Does this mean BPA is completely off the hook? No. Lots of people think it needs more study. "The possibility that human development may be altered by bisphenol A at current exposure levels cannot be dismissed," said an important U.S. toxicology report this week. Some media stories billed this statement as a five-alarm fire. But as Mr. Butterworth says: "It's a very mild caution. Essentially, it says there is possibility there may be some effects, but we need more research."

Presumably someone with scientific training came to this conclusion and Butterworth is simply repeating it. But if Butterworth is simply a talking head, why is Wente not going to the source?

Toxic?

I started out wondering about the toxicity of BPA, and I still am. But along the way, I bumped into a different toxin altogether. So let's see what an Angry Toxicologist has to say about this (and see Butterworth's extensive comments in response).

Update: It turns out that in 2002, the Fraser Institute (a conservative think tank based in Canada) launched CANSTATS, clearly using STATS as a model. (By the way, the Canadian government's official statistics agency, Statistics Canada, is commonly referred to as StatsCan.) It seems that CANSTATS is no longer operating, but while it did it employed some familiar tactics.

The memory of a moment of happiness

2008-05-05T15:21:00.010-04:00

The painting is by Ottawa artist Patty Woodyard (pwoodyard@primus.ca). And the title of this post is from Song of The Flower by Khalil Gibran:

I am a kind word uttered and repeated
By the voice of Nature;
I am a star fallen from the
Blue tent upon the green carpet.
I am the daughter of the elements
With whom Winter conceived;
To whom Spring gave birth; I was
Reared in the lap of Summer and I
Slept in the bed of Autumn.

At dawn I unite with the breeze
To announce the coming of light;
At eventide I join the birds
In bidding the light farewell.

The plains are decorated with
My beautiful colors, and the air
Is scented with my fragrance.

As I embrace Slumber the eyes of
Night watch over me, and as I
Awaken I stare at the sun, which is
The only eye of the day.

I drink dew for wine, and hearken to
The voices of the birds, and dance
To the rhythmic swaying of the grass.

I am the lover's gift; I am the wedding wreath;
I am the memory of a moment of happiness;
I am the last gift of the living to the dead;
I am a part of joy and a part of sorrow.

But I look up high to see only the light,
And never look down to see my shadow.
This is wisdom which man must learn.

Lowering the bar

2008-04-17T20:10:00.009-04:00

I was helping my daughter with some homework the other night. She had been asked to use a spreadsheet program to produce a bar chart. I believe the numbers were densities (g/cm³) and they were something like:

92.5, 91, 93.5, 92

And here's what Excel produced:
The vertical axis starts at 89.5, so the height of each bar represents the density−89.5, which means ... ??

Junk Charts quotes Naomi Robbins, author of Creating More Effective Graphs thus: "all bar charts must include zero". Indeed—otherwise what do the bar heights represent? That Excel's defaults violate this rule is, ahem, unfortunate. (I've tried this using Excel 2000 and Excel on a Mac, but perhaps it's been fixed in newer versions? Maybe?)

Excel can be coerced into starting its vertical axis at 0, but it takes a fair bit of clicking and navigating. The result is:
Relative to a density of zero, there's very little variation. But perhaps this hides the message in these numbers. Doesn't that just bring us back to the first bar chart? Well ... no.

This graph shows the data, with the vertical axis zoomed in to where the action is. Unlike the original bar chart, it doesn't show bars with arbitrary heights.

Again from Junk Charts:

The "start-at-0" rule says that the vertical axis of any graph ought to start at value 0. The rule was mentioned in Huff's classic booklet, "How to Lie with Statistics": as the name implies, the rule is intended to eradicate mischievous graphs that exaggerate small differences by not starting at 0, which is to say, by choosing a misleading scale.

Others, like Tufte and Wainer, have long realized that the start-at-0 rule is not absolute ... My own "anti-rule" stipulates that if all data appearing in a chart are far from 0, then don't start at 0.

If, on the other hand, some of the plotted data are close to 0, then it is essential to start at 0.

This isn't too far from my view, but it doesn't address bar charts, which are a special case because they emphasize the heights of the bars, rather than the position of the tops of bars. Bar charts are only appropriate for variables that are measured on ratio scales. For such variables, there is a non-arbitrary zero, which means that you can calculate a meaningful ratio; e.g. for weight: one thing might weigh twice as much as another. But some variables aren't like that; e.g. IQ: an IQ of zero is meaningless, and so it doesn't make sense to say that someone with an IQ of 100 is twice as intelligent as someone with an IQ of 50. For variables of this kind bar charts make no sense at all.

So, if your variable isn't ratio scaled (in other words, there isn't a meaningful zero), don't use a bar chart. If it is ratio scaled and you decide to use a bar chart, make sure your axis starts at zero.

Derek puts it well in a comment at Pictures of Numbers:

There is a circumstance in which the would-be grapher absolutely must start with zero, and that's when creating a bar graph. If that causes problems, it's time to consider abandoning the bar graph and adopting something which doesn't need a zero on the scale. I've seen bar graphs where the designer recognised the problem with zero, adopted and defended the solutions, but without getting rid of the bar graph format. Those wavy gaps are the least bad of the abortive compromises resorted to by people who won't give up their bars.

In case anyone thinks this really isn't much of an issue, here are some examples I found quite easily:

Food for thought

2008-04-12T22:12:00.008-04:00

The global price of food has risen sharply over the last 18 months. This is most acutely the case with cereals. The New York Times reports that wheat has reached its highest price in 28 years. The reasons for this phenomenon seem to be broadly accepted; see for example, Paul Krugman's column or a recent presentation (pdf) by Joachim von Braun of the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Though the relative importance of the reasons is difficult to assess, the list itself seems clear (the price of oil, a growing middle class in China and India with an increasing demand for meat which requires more grain for feed, droughts likely due to climate change, Western government subsidies for biofuels like corn ethanol).

But I wonder if we shouldn't consider a different aspect of this. As the New York Times points out:

Even the poorest fifth of households in the United States spend only 16 percent of their budget on food. In many other countries, it is less of a given. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of their budgets to eat, Vietnamese 65 percent, Indonesians half.

What is wrong with our world that so many people are living so close to the edge? Hmmm ...

Update 14Apr2008: The graph below was produced using Technorati. It shows the number of blog posts (in "any language" on blogs with "some authority") containing "food crisis". Too bad most of us are at least 6 months late.

StatLinks

2008-04-11T22:27:00.004-04:00

The Internet makes it possible to link a dispersed community of common interest. Now there are a number of blogs that focus entirely or in part on Statistics, but they seem not to be well connected.

So I've just set up a social bookmarking website just for applied statistics, data analysis, and visualization. It's called StatLinks.

It lists links that users submit, and allows other users to vote on their relevance. Links are listed in order of popularity (or in chronological order, if you prefer).

I encourage people to visit StatLinks, to submit links that are likely to be of interest, and to pass the word! I've put a few links in to get things started. (Hat tip to Slinkset whose technology made it a breeze to set this up.)

Could you keep my place in line?

2008-04-10T22:03:00.004-04:00

Line-ups are both eminently civilized and—really annoying! The first in first out (FIFO) principle is inherently egalitarian and respect for it is a sign of social order. But there's something crazy about using our bodies as place keepers in a queue, sometimes for hours on end.

Inevitably, after waiting some time in a lineup, someone will need to step out for a while. Rather than lose one's priority in the sequence, the convention is to ask someone (a complete stranger if need be), "Could you keep my place in line?"

The language here is metaphorical and indirect. The request is not really about keeping a place. It's about promising on the return of the person to vouch to any potential challengers that indeed this particular person was previously in line at this particular point in the sequence.

The fact is, complete strangers generally do agree to "keep your place in line". And that's a further sign of civil behaviour. Maybe line ups aren't so bad after all!

I bet there are lots of good stories about line-ups. I'd love to hear some. Then we could publish a book (I'm trying to think of a queued name for it ...)

P.S. I've tried to give equal time to the different spellings lineup / line-up / line up. I really don't know which is correct. Those who wish to correct me should form an orderly line.

Nature vs. not sure

2008-04-08T23:25:00.011-04:00

The perennial nature-vs-nurture debate just won't go away. This is particularly true with regards to gender differences, a subject of broad interest.

I'll acknowledge my biases up front. I have long been skeptical about biological determinism. This is partly because of its historical association with racism, sexism, classism, and the eugenics movement. But it's also because, particularly in recent years, there has been a tendency to overstate the importance of genetics in explaining human behaviour. Part of the explanation for this "genohype" may be the dramatic achievements of the Human Genome Project together with the rise of the biotechnology sector. Just as the success of Darwin's theory of natural selection led to Social Darwinism, today's molecular genetics revolution has put a new wind in the sails of biological determinism.

In the scientific world, the nature-vs-nurture debate is generally accepted to be an ill-posed problem. Because the environment affects the expression of genes, it is not a question of nature versus nurture, but of nature vis-à-vis nurture. Nevertheless, the ways in which and the extent to which nature and nurture influence human behaviour remain controversial. And beliefs about this can have profound consequences.

But one thing's for certain, and that's uncertainty. Despite the way results from studies of gender differences are often portrayed, we're usually left with more questions than answers. Here I want to comment briefly on two considerations that should be borne in mind.

Does the difference matter?

It's common to read reports stating that, for example, "women perform task X better than men". What this really means is "on average women perform task X better than men, and this effect was found to be statistically significant". The magnitude of the effect may be small or large. The degree of overlap between women and men may be small or large. (And of course the study may be flawed.)

To what can the difference be attributed?

Assuming the difference is real and meaningful, we're still left with the question of whether it represents an innate biological difference or an environmental (cultural) difference. For some reason it seems that people quickly jump to the conclusion that gender differences are innate. But in most cases it is extremely difficult to sort this out. Cultural effects can be extremely subtle. As has been pointed out (by ?), the concept of "wet" wouldn't mean much to a fish.

Grist for the mill

Here are three interesting articles that touch on some of these issues. First, a review by Viv Groskop of "The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes" by Susan Pinker. Next, an interview with professor of language and communication Deborah Cameron about her book "The Myth Of Mars And Venus". Finally, a New York Times article by Elizabeth Weil about the movement for single-sex public education based on gender differences.

I've really only scratched the surface of this issue (not to mention related ones), and there's lots of stuff out there (a Google search of "gender differences" gives 2,450,000 results). Comments?

Update 09Apr2008: It seems there's an almost unlimited number of links that could be added. Here's another review of Susan Pinker's book, from the New York Times. Here's an entertaining retort to an argument about gender differences based on evolutionary psychology. And here's a piece that argues: "Nowhere do scientific findings get more mangled than when they’re about the differences between men and women." Finally, here's a conservative view on gender differences.

Update 11Apr2008: Here's a response to some of the arguments about single-sex schooling.

Upping the anti (depressant)

2008-03-28T19:00:00.005-04:00

A paper on antidepressants by Kirsch and co-authors published last month in PLoS Medicine has received a lot of attention. The antidepressants studied are the six most widely prescribed approved between 1987 and 1999: Prozac, Paxil, Effexor, Serzone, Zoloft, and Celexa.

The Editors' Summary explains:

The researchers obtained data on all the clinical trials submitted to the FDA ... They then used meta-analytic techniques to investigate whether the initial severity of depression affected the HRSD [Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression] improvement scores for the drug and placebo groups in these trials. They confirmed first that the overall effect of these new generation of antidepressants was below the recommended criteria for clinical significance. Then they showed that there was virtually no difference in the improvement scores for drug and placebo in patients with moderate depression and only a small and clinically insignificant difference among patients with very severe depression. The difference in improvement between the antidepressant and placebo reached clinical significance, however, in patients with initial HRSD scores of more than 28—that is, in the most severely depressed patients. Additional analyses indicated that the apparent clinical effectiveness of the antidepressants among these most severely depressed patients reflected a decreased responsiveness to placebo rather than an increased responsiveness to antidepressants.

The press simplified it further. The MSNBC headline was "Antidepressants may not help many patients". The Guardian announced: "Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists".

Reactions, adverse and otherwise

There were reactions to the effect that "we've know all along antidepressants don't work" and at the other extreme "nothing could ever convince me that antidepressants don't work."

A lot of reaction came from people who believe they have benefited from antidepressants. See, for example, the comments following a summary of the study at depression.about.com.

The blogosphere had plenty of reactions: FuturePundit, Action Potential (the Nature Neuroscience blog), The MindFields College Blog, and on and on.

And the journal itself, PLoS Medicine, had an enormous number of responses to the paper.

Betta check the meta

The heart of the findings in this paper is the meta-analysis itself, and when I examined it, two things jumped out immediately. The figure below shows them both.
There's a lot to look at in the figure. The red triangles represent the results of the patients who received the antidepressant. The bigger the triangles, the more weight they receive in the analysis. Similarly, the circles represent the placebo results. The solid red curve is a model fit to the antidepressant results. The dashed blue curve is a model fit to the placebo results. The green region shows where there is a clinically important difference between the curves.

First, look at the vertical axis, labeled "Improvement (d)" and ranging from 0 to 2. This is the mean improvement in the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), but it has been divided by the standard deviation. Why divide it by the standard deviation? Well this is what you might do if each study was using a different rating scale, in order to standardize things. But here it's not necessary. Each study used the HRSD, so it would be better not to standardize.

Second, if triangles represent antidepressant results and circles represent placebo results from the studies, how do they pair up? Each study has two "arms": an antidepressant arm and a placebo arm, but on the figure you can't tell which triangle belongs with which circle. This points to an important problem: the authors meta-analyzed the antidepressant arms separately from the placebo arms. But the studies were randomized controlled trials, which means that within each study the two arms are comparable. Ignoring this can introduce bias. The standard approach in meta-analysis is to compute a contrast between the two arms within each study, and then meta-analyze these contrasts.

But do either of these points make much of a difference? It turns out that they do. PJ Leonard took the trouble of rerunning the analyses using raw HRSD scores and the standard meta-analytic approach rather than the separate-arms analysis of Kirsch and co-authors, and obtained an effect about 50% larger than they did, and stronger evidence of clinical importance. Leonard also performed a regression analysis corresponding to the figure above.

Robert Waldmann has also done some interesting work on this.

Overcoming depression: there's no silver bullet

The evidence doesn't seem to support the notion that antidepressants "don't work". The overheated media response to this article was unfortunate. And that's a topic in itself.

Nonetheless, it seems that on average the effect of antidepressants is hardly overwhelming. So far there's no silver bullet for depression. Drugs can help, but so can other interventions. Including kindness and understanding.

Update: 11Apr2008 Thanks for a post on The Home for Wayward Statisticians, I found a couple more interesting links. One is by Mark Liberman on Language Log. The other is an editorial in Nature.

My selection for the meme team

2008-03-18T19:28:00.010-04:00

I've been tagged by Zeno at Halfway There, with the following blog meme:

The rules are as follows:
1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) List 5 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3) Tag 5 more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

I don't usually buy into this stuff, but why not? So my selection is ...

Charles S. Peirce (1839 — 1914)

I've chosen him even though I don't really believe in the idea of a "favorite historical figure". But he is really interesting. Peirce was an American philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and humanist. He has been extremely influential, yet he remains somewhat obscure.

1. Peirce's name is pronounced "purse". (The family name was originally spelled Pers.)

2. My choice of Peirce was entirely pragmatic.

3. Peirce invented a conformal map projection: the quincuncial projection.
It also turns out the map tessellates the plane, i.e. you can seamlessly tile the plane with rotated copies of the map. (Tessellation is also sometimes used in quilting.)

4. Peirce was one of the founders of the field of semiotics, which is about signs and their interpretation. On that theme (ok, it's a bit indirect), here's a video about signs:

5. Peirce developed a graphical system for representing logic called existential graphs. In 1984, John F. Sowa built on Peirce's ideas and ideas from semantic networks in artificial intelligence to develop conceptual graphs.

The meme made me do it

So now I'm supposed to tag some more folks with this meme. I nonbindingly-respectfully-whattheheckfully tag:

Ray Deonandan at Deonandia
Dr. Free-Ride at Adventures in Ethics and Science
Antonella Pavese at antonellapavese.com
Dr. B at Bitch Ph.D.
Jim Bobby at Jim Bobby Sez

Al Gore defies the laws of probability

2008-03-08T18:54:00.008-05:00

As if the huge success of An Inconvenient Truth followed by winning the Nobel Peace Prize wasn't enough, now Al Gore is defying the laws of probability! At least in terms of probable outcomes of the U.S. Democratic nomination and the presidential election itself.

Intrade, the leading commercial prediction market lets you bet on political outcomes. For example, "Barack Obama to win 2008 US Presidential Election" is currently trading at 47.5, meaning the market believes there's a 47.5% chance Obama will be the next president.

What's the probability that Al Gore will win the Democratic nomination? As I write this, the market believes it's 1.7%. Seems fair enough ...

... until you look at the probability that Al Gore will be the next president. Curiously, the market believes that's 2.1%. How could that be? Don't you have to win the nomination before you have a chance of becoming the president? (My 13-year-old daughter points out that perhaps Gore could run as an independent, but hey, we're Canadians, so this is a great mystery to us. So for now, let's leave this possibility aside.)

Let's do a few probability calculations (note that the vertical bar | means "given than"):

Prob(Gore pres.)
= Prob(Gore pres. & Gore nom.)
= Prob(Gore pres. | Gore nom.) * Prob(Gore nom.)

Therefore

Prob(Gore pres. | Gore nom.)
= Prob(Gore pres.) / Prob(Gore nom.)

Prob(Gore pres. | Gore nom.)
= 2.1%/1.7% = 123.5%

Therefore, if Gore is nominated, the probability he'll be elected president is 123.5%!

Of course there's no such thing as a probability above 100%, which suggests that something is amiss. Perhaps there is a belief that Gore might run as an independent, which would invalidate my assumption that he would have to win the Democratic nomination in order to become president. Or perhaps at any given time the prediction market isn't strictly coherent in the Bayesian sense that it should be consistent with the axioms of probability.

My interpretation is that Gore remains sufficiently attractive as a presidential candidate that if he were nominated, the chances of him winning the election are very high. But not quite 124%.

Quilt complex

2008-03-07T14:21:00.005-05:00

The quilt on the left is a Broken Star Variation. As Escher knew so well, there's no such thing as plain geometry. However it's possible to take this too far (ok, I don't really mean that!) Here are some amazing mathematical quilts by Diana Venters and Elaine Ellison, who have written a book, Mathematical Quilts: No Sewing Required.

Well, now it's time for me to quilt while I'm ahead. (I'll let you know how it turns out...)

Dragging the people along

2008-03-06T20:45:00.006-05:00

As I pointed out in my recent post, democracy is not so easy to measure. The sine qua non of democracy is generally felt to be "free and fair elections". But that begs quite a few questions: Can you have "free and fair" elections without freedom of the press? How was the list of candidates assembled? Is wealth a precondition for running? Have there been any implicit or explicit threats conditional on the outcome?

But there's a lot more to democracy that elections ("free and fair" or otherwise). Elected representatives should be responsive to their constituents' concerns. When those concerns are consistently ignored, there is clearly a problem.

This has been just the case with Canadian public opinion on the war in Afghanistan. According to public opinion polling conducted by The Strategic Counsel for The Globe and Mail and CTV News, since the summer of 2006, a majority of Canadians have opposed sending troops to Afghanistan. In the poll of January 10th-13th, 47% said they would like to see Canadian troops return as soon as possible, 31% said the troops should remain in Afghanistan but hand over their combat role to another NATO country, and just 17% said that they should continue their combat role against the Taliban.

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
— Hermann Göring

These words are chilling, not just because they were uttered by one of the top Nazis, but because they continue to be put into practice.

What're we fightin' for?

According to the government:

Our goal is to protect Canadians by ensuring that Afghanistan never again falls into the hands of the Taliban and that Afghanistan becomes a stable, free and democratic society.

Interestingly, despite the grandiose language, the supposed danger is only hinted at.

To boost support for the war, it helps to fan the flames of patriotism. And what better way than banners and decals proclaiming "We support our troops!" In several cities across Canada, including Ottawa and Toronto (where there was considerable controversy), decals have been put on police cars and fire engines.

Proponents claim that there's nothing wrong with this, that it's just expressing concern for the wellbeing of Canadian troops. But as many have pointed out, there's a political message here and dissent is being marginalized. It seems to me that putting political messages on public vehicles damages democracy.

To further stifle debate, here's General Rick Hillier, Canada's Chief of Defense Staff:

I'm not going to stand here and tell you that the suicide bombings of this past week have been related to the debate back here in Canada. But I also cannot stand here and say that they are not.

Imposing democracy

The great irony is that these anti-democratic developments are justified as advancing the cause of democracy in Afghanistan. But as Ghandi said:

The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.

Is it fair not to share?

2008-03-04T22:47:00.005-05:00

Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science there's a very interesting post and follow-up comments on whether researchers should share data. It's based on a recent New York Times article by biostatistician Andrew Vickers (Cancer Data? Sorry, can't have it).

Paint by numbers

2008-03-03T19:30:00.007-05:00

The map on the left labels countries as free (green), partly free (peach), and not free (red) for the year 2006. The classification is from Freedom House, a primarily US-government-funded organization. Each country is scored on political liberty and civil liberty; the combined average of these scores determines how the country is classified. Cuba, for example, receives the poorest rating on both political and civil liberties, and is thus categorized as "not free".

The Wikipedia entry for democracy lists two other measures of democracy, one from the Polity IV project and the Democracy Index from The Economist. Each measure has its own scheme for measuring and weighting different characteristics felt to characterize democracies. Since the different measures assess many of the same things, it is not surprising that they show some agreement.

But democracy is not a simple thing and it is far from clear which characteristics matter and how best to weight them. For example, does a free press count more than an independent judiciary? If so, by how much? (And presumably this depends on how "free" and how "independent" they are.) What about non-traditional characteristics that may be important measures of democracy? For example, should voter turnout be factored in? What about incarceration rate? Or media concentration? Or universal health care?

Although there may be some value in overall measures of democracy, individual characteristics still need to be examined and put in context. When we do that, we may find that the global canvas no longer looks like a paint by numbers kit.

Update: 05Mar2008

No sooner had I put up this post than I saw this Adbusters press release relating to media concentration and democracy:

Adbusters Demands Canwest, the CBC and the CRTC Stop Blocking Citizen-Produced Advertising

On Monday, February 18, Adbusters lost its court battle against two of Canada's television networks that refused to sell airtime for its commercials. Adbusters claimed the CBC and Canwest Global had violated its right to free speech under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by refusing to sell air time, but the court decided that the Charter does not apply to private corporations.

"It's outrageous that the fast food, oil and automobile industries can buy as much TV time as they want in order to promote their agendas, but citizens are not allowed to talk back," said Adbusters Editor-in-Chief Kalle Lasn in response to the ruling. "Canadian democracy will not work properly until we the people have the same right to buy airtime as corporations do."

The rejected Adbusters ads pointed out that over 50 percent of the calories in a Big Mac come from fat, called for an end to the age of the automobile, and promoted Buy Nothing Day. While Court Justice William Ehrcke ruled that private broadcasters have the right to run whatever ads they like, Adbusters feels the case raises some troubling questions.

Firstly, why are Canwest and the CBC selling as much time as they possibly can to corporations, while fighting expensive legal actions to keep citizen-produced messages off the air? Why does the CBC call itself "Canada's Public Broadcaster" if they won't sell airtime to citizens?

Secondly, why is the CRTC not standing up for public access? When they grant licences to broadcasters, why is the right of Canadian citizens to access their own "public" airwaves not being guaranteed? Thirdly, why is our freedom of speech being suppressed? Why can corporations buy airtime while citizens cannot? Why doesn't the Canadian Charter apply to the most powerful social communications medium of our age - television?

"This case goes to the very heart of what our democracy is all about," says Lasn. "A healthy society allows its citizens to walk into their local TV stations and buy airtime under the same rules and conditions that corporations do. Adbusters has been given 30 days to challenge the ruling. This legal battle for media democracy will go on."

To talk to Kalle Lasn, or Ryan Dalziel, our lawyer, about the case please contact Lauren Bercovitch (lauren@adbusters.org)

EDITOR'S NOTES

For more information about Adbusters and the global media democracy movement visit www.mediacarta.org and www.adbusters.org

[1] Canadian Media facts:

Three corporations (CanWest, Quebecor and Torstar) control 70 per cent of the country's daily newspaper circulation.

Five major media acquisitions in Canada have been approved by CRTC in the past year: CHUM was purchased by CTVglobemedia for $1.4 billion, which then sold five CityTV stations to Rogers Communications for $375 million; CanWest purchased Alliance Atlantis for $2.3 billion; Astral Media bought Standard Broadcasting for $1.2 billion; and Quebecor bought the Osprey Media newspaper chain for $414 million.

[2] Facts about Media Democracy:

More than 30,000 people have signed the Media Carta www.mediacarta.org, to voice their concerns about the way information is distributed in our society.

In the past year, a growing number of grassroots media activist groups have been formed in Canada to express a dissatisfaction with the continued consolidation of the country's media:

DemocraticMedia.org

MediaReform.ca

MediaDemocracy.ca

Data and development

2008-02-25T22:22:00.004-05:00

Here's a fascinating talk by Hans Rosling about international health and development. His presentation reminds me of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

Thoughts?

A tale of two civil servants

2008-02-24T17:00:00.006-05:00

Once upon a time there were two senior civil servants, Linda Keen and Rick Hillier. Linda Keen was head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and had serious concerns about the safety of an aging nuclear reactor. She was steadfast in refusing to go along with the Conservative government's intention to reopen the facility. Prime Minister Stephen Harper referred to her in parliamentary debate as a "Liberal partisan". She was fired with a late night phone call.

General Rick Hillier is Canada's Chief of Defense Staff. On several occasions he has publicly expressed his opinions on Canada's military presence in Afghanistan. Not on how to conduct military operations, which is his job, but on political issues such as how long Canadian troops should be there. Just a few days ago he argued for an extension and went on to suggest that domestic debate about this was endangering Canadian troops:

... the longer we go without that clarity, with the issue in doubt, the more the Taliban will target us as a perceived weak link.

I'm not going to stand here and tell you that the suicide bombings of this past week have been related to the debate back here in Canada. But I also cannot stand here and say that they are not.

And, certainly, there is a perception out there that the Taliban will try to take advantage of the debate back here and try to prevent a cohesive mission and will indeed attempt to attack our Canadian Forces in Kandahar.

Hillier's job is not to advance his political views, which can certainly be described as "partisan". But apparently that's ok if the partisanship is of the Right kind. Needless to say, Hillier's job remains safe.

So there you have it: do your job and if it's inconvenient for the Conservatives you'll be labeled as partisan and fired; step way outside the bounds of your job with partisan commentary and if it's convenient for the Conservatives then it's all good.

Which is troubling enough. But consider the specifics: Linda Keen was responsible for nuclear safety! As for Rick Hillier, is it not clear that in a democracy, political interference by the military is problematic?

I'm not so sure that we'll all live happily ever after.

Logical aggression

2008-02-21T21:14:00.004-05:00

I spent some time recently exploring a number of pro-war blogs, and posting comments challenging some of the opinions expressed there. The results were discouraging. Though I tried to be respectful, I experienced some unpleasantness. On another occasion, when I pointed out a flaw in reasoning, the blogger just repeated his claim. More than that, I was appalled by the generally nasty tone of much of the writing. I also experienced what is sometimes called the "echo-chamber" of like-minded political blogs. There's precious little interaction between opposite sides of the divide, and what interaction there is tends to be extremely unproductive. Why does there seem to be so little room for logical argumentation?

I imagine there are several reasons. But here's one that comes from a pacifist perspective. I've been reading Choosing Against War: A Christian View by John D. Roth, and I'm especially interested in Chapter 4, "A case for pacifist humility". In a section on epistemological humility, Roth writes:

Since the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reason has been the foundation for most political discourse. And it has typically been the way Christians have argued about doctrine and engaged in missions as well: gather your evidence, marshal your Bible verses, make a tightly constructed rational argument, anticipate all the loopholes, and the powerful logic of the persuasive Christian point of view will, in effect, force your discussion partners to concede the point. ... As such, rational arguments for Christianity very easily become subtle forms of coercion.

Although Roth refers specifically to "rational arguments for Christianity", I think his point generalizes: logical argumentation can very easily take on a coercive character.

Nobody likes to be forced to do something, much less believe something. And yet logical arguments are often employed for just this purpose. A logical argument says if you accept these premises, then you must accept this conclusion. The only logical avenues of escape are to challenge the validity of the argument itself (in case there is an error of logic) or to challenge the premises. But people often try other avenues of escape: introducing a different issue or argument, or behaving aggressively. Where does the aggressive behaviour come from? On the face of it, it would seem to reveal nothing more than immaturity or bad manners.

But if the logical argument is employed with aggressive intent, or if it is interpreted that way, then it is not surprising that an aggressive response is elicited. In other words, even if one's motives are not at all aggressive, the argument may be interpreted as an attempt at coercion. And in all honesty, how often can any of us say that we have no aggressive intent? How often do we not have a desire to "win"? To demonstrate our intellectual or moral superiority? Even if we "take the high road" and scrupulously avoid the slightest hint of an insult or sarcasm, how often are we free of any competitive frame of mind?

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that one should abandon one's beliefs, or one's desire to advance them. Nor am I suggesting that logical argumentation is inherently coercive. But I do think that productive engagement is unlikely when there is a perception of logical aggression.

So what could work?

Commanding and receiving respect

2008-02-18T17:42:00.008-05:00

Today being the (inaugural) Family Day holiday here in Ontario, I took my son and a couple of his friends on an outing. We went to a wonderful exhibition called Secret Riches - Ancient Peru Unearthed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. The exhibition was about the Sicán people, who preceded the Incas by around 400 years.

The Sicán developed advanced metallurgical technology, and produced fabulous artwork, such as the headdress on the left. A text panel nearby the headdress referred to a Sicán lord who would wear such a headdress "commanding and receiving respect".

Conspicuous consumption continues to this day. I was reminded of the recent news about a UAE business man who paid the equivalent of US$14 million for a vanity license plate (somehow the description seems inadequate). The Abu Dhabi plate bears a single digit: "1".

To be fair, the plate was purchased at a charity auction. But still, $14 million? "The price is fair. After all, who among us does not want to be number one?" said the business man.

The wish to be treated with respect by others is universal. But I believe that the kind of respect we all want so badly can't be commanded or purchased. (A number of different kinds of respect have been delineated, and it seems to me that somewhere in there is a core psychological need.)

Still, I believe that each of us is called to treat all others with respect. Immanuel Kant wrote:

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or the person of any other, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end.

This doesn't necessarily mean respecting what someone has done, which may be heinous to us. But it does mean acknowledging their basic human dignity, and acting accordingly. I think the political implications are fairly immediate.

A limited mission or an endless war?

2008-02-12T19:41:00.002-05:00

It came as no great surprise: the Liberals today proposed a very gentle amendment to the Conservatives' motion to extend Canada's military stay in Afghanistan. The key difference is that the amendment calls for withdrawal of troops starting in February 2011, whereas the original motion simply referred to extending the stay until 2011 (and then?).

Seems like a cosmetic change to me, but I guess it keeps everyone happy (except, of course, the Canadian public, who have consistently been of the opinion that the Canadian military presence needs to wind down). Stephen Harper must have been delighted. But it's not yet a fait accompli, so he prudently kept his response low-key, referring to the amendment as a "positive development". The Liberals, who got Canada involved in Afghanistan in the first place, have some internal divisions about this. But it lets hawks like Michael Ignatieff pretend to be doves. Here he is, yesterday in the House of Commons:

When the government speaks of extending Canada's combat role to 2011, is this a withdrawal date or a renewal date? Which is it, Mr. Speaker, a limited mission or an endless war?

Note the clever juxtaposition of mission with war. (Note to Payroll: Increase speech-writer's salary.) And yet even with a "withdrawal date" of 2011, who's to say that the "situation on the ground" won't change? Well then we can just get another extension, now can't we?

But don't take it from me ...

There are some excellent posts about the war at the StopWar blog. Eric Margolis has some unique perspectives and insightful analyses, such as his post on the Manley report and his post yesterday on the NATO conference last week. There are a number of good articles at rabble.ca, such as Making war a winner by Duncan Cameron, and Ottawa gets advice of prolonging the war - part I and part II by Roger Annis. Project Ploughshares has an extensive set of documents and commentaries on the war in Afghanistan. There are some good posts on the Ceasefire Insider blog.

There are many more articles and resources out there. But they don't get a lot of play in the mainstream media. Theories anyone?

Obstacles

2008-02-03T19:11:00.000-05:00

When I talk with people about Canada's military involvement in Afghanistan, their reaction is pretty consistent. Yup, it's a mess. Yup, maybe we shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place. But the Taliban were pretty nasty when they were in power [Agreed!] particularly in terms of how they treated women [Agreed again!].

Should we withdraw? Probably ... except ...

Except we have a reponsibility to the people of Afghanistan.
Except if we did, the Taliban would take power again.
Except if we did, women's rights would disappear.
Except our NATO "partners" would be upset.
Except how can reconstruction take place unless order is established?

It's no wonder that with obstacles like these, many Canadians feel quite ambivalent about the idea of withdrawal from Afghanistan. But the real obstacles are in our minds: we are imprisoned by our own assumptions. To list a few: the assumption that we know best; the assumption that the Taliban are the source of all troubles in Afghanistan; the assumption that the solution is more violence.

It is widely accepted that ultimately peace in Afghanistan depends on negotiation rather that violence. For example, the Manley report states:

Eventually, achieving a genuine and stable peace in Afghanistan will necessitate a more thoroughgoing political and social reconciliation among Afghans themselves—citizens who have been divided for generations on differences of tribal, regional and political identity. With time, better governance will involve a negotiated coming-to-terms between the present Afghan political leadership and some adherents of the former Taliban regime who renounce terror and repression and adopt the norms and practices of democracy.

Negotiate with the Taliban? No, not the Taliban, some-adherents-of-the-former-Taliban-regime-who-renounce-terror and-repression-and-adopt-the-norms-and-practices-of-democracy. But, to save space let's just call them ... the Taliban.

When Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party, suggested something similar more than a year ago, he was demonized by the right wing and labeled "Taliban Jack".

But rhetorical nonsense aside, the point remains that in the end, negotiation is essential. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that the price of peace was negotiation with unsavoury characters. Refusal to negotiate isn't a badge of moral righteousness, it's a commitment to ceaseless violence.

The Manley report mentions negotiation twice. The first time is in the paragraph excerpted above, in a section on "Governance". The second time is in Appendix 10:

Across the various polls conducted in the last four years, views on the Taliban have remained uniformly negative. In the autumn of 2003, some 75% of Afghans viewed the Taliban unfavourably (62% very unfavourably), 89% felt that way in October 2005 (75% very unfavourably), and 73% in September 2007 (53% very negative). At the same time however, when asked whether President Karzai should enter into negotiations with the Taliban and allow them to participate in the political process, some 60% of Afghans currently believe a negotiated settlement should be pursued.

Though it is not unlikely that some of the survey respondents may have given careful replies, fearing that the "wrong" answer might have undesirable consequences, it seems clear that by in large Afghans are unfavourably disposed to the Taliban. And yet a majority support negotiation. They can't be bothered with righteous moral purity; they just want to live in peace.

LOLstats

2008-01-31T23:13:00.001-05:00

"This is tragic but it's worth it"

2008-01-28T22:26:00.000-05:00

John Manley, chair of the Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan:

If Canadians really don't want to do this, well then that is something that has to be respected. But in the past, Canadians have shown a willingness to do things that were difficult and required sacrifice and were challenging. But you can't feed them news about young men and women dying without putting it in a context in which they can say this is why and this is meaningful and this is tragic but it's worth it.

Presumably Manley was referring to the young Canadian men and women dying in Afghanistan. The Afghan victims (young or old) are rarely mentioned. I was reminded of Madeleine Albright's infamous remark regarding the deaths of many thousands of Iraqi children due to the sanctions, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it." I'm not trying to equate these situations, but note that while Manley and Albright both conclude that the deaths in the respective situations are "worth it", they're not the ones paying the price.

It is revealing that Manley says you can't "feed" Canadians "news about young men and women dying without putting it in a context in which they can say this is why and this is meaningful". Factual reports of deaths provide too much opportunity for heterodox interpretation. Instead, bitter facts need to be coated in reassuring meaning so as not to upset Canadians' stomachs.

Manley grudgingly concedes that if "Canadians really don't want to do this" (my emphasis), "well then that is something that has to be respected." In the latest Canadian poll from Angus Reid, 61% of respondents indicated they did not support extending the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan beyond the current end date of February 2009. The figure was almost identical in a July poll. So how does Manley's panel show its respect for public opinion? By arguing strongly for an indefinite extension of the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan.

With respect, that's not respect.

Some relevant commentary on the Manley report: Eric Margolis, Steven Staples, Rideau Institute, Council of Canadians, Canadian Peace Alliance.

Political plots

2008-01-28T14:20:00.000-05:00

Last week the Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan released its report. The full report is available here. The basic message? Stay the course: Canadian soldiers should stay in Afghanistan well into the future. The argument is propped up by the usual noble words—and a few ignoble graphs, two of which I've shown here.

The graph below shows Afghan's opinions about the direction in which their country is moving:

Comments both graphical and political would be most welcome!

Proud Papa

2008-01-27T21:26:00.001-05:00

My 12 year-old son has been learning Flash and ActionScript, and he has been designing a groovy animation for my blog. Here's version 1.0 (to replay the animation, reload this page):

I'm looking forward to new versions ...

Comments very welcome!