Does anyone else find this here video (via BBC) very odd? It's what can only be described as a government propaganda clip, but rather than trying to persuade or inform it's basically telling you to cheer up. Or as they put it "Increase your wellbeing today!" - they must have a jargon quota to meet. Maybe this is what happens when media-obsessed politicians listen to people to Lord Layard who say that they should be trying to make the population happier?
Also - a lot of psychologists and philosophers would say that everything we do is motivated by the desire to increase our own well-being, which would make the advice a bit redundent. Is this video proof that this theory of human nature is wrong? I wonder what Jeremy Bentham would say.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Cheer Up, Citizens
Does anyone else find this here video (via BBC) very odd? It's what can only be described as a government propaganda clip, but rather than trying to persuade or inform it's basically telling you to cheer up. Or as they put it "Increase your wellbeing today!" - they must have a jargon quota to meet. Maybe this is what happens when media-obsessed politicians listen to people to Lord Layard who say that they should be trying to make the population happier?
Also - a lot of psychologists and philosophers would say that everything we do is motivated by the desire to increase our own well-being, which would make the advice a bit redundent. Is this video proof that this theory of human nature is wrong? I wonder what Jeremy Bentham would say.
Also - a lot of psychologists and philosophers would say that everything we do is motivated by the desire to increase our own well-being, which would make the advice a bit redundent. Is this video proof that this theory of human nature is wrong? I wonder what Jeremy Bentham would say.
Galileo Strikes Again!
Link: I write further on this topic in a subsequent post.
Some interesting comments over at Respectful Insolence got me thinking about the "Galileo Gambit". This is when people with unpopular ideas compare themselves to Galileo with the implication that, like him, they're being persecuted for their unorthodox views but that they will eventually be proved right. Everyone wants to be the underdog, and the Gambit has become such a cliché that several writers are famous for denouncing it. Michael Shermer gave us the snappy aphorism -
Some people don't like this, such as this HIV/AIDS denier who takes issue with those who accuse others of using the Gambit. He's right (about this, not about AIDS) - Shermer and Sagan are attacking straw men, if you take their words literally, because no-one ever claims that just because their ideas are unorthodox, this makes them right. People generally invoke Galileo either as a rhetorical device - to give themselves a cool sense of rebelliousness - or as a defence against the "Argument from Consensus", which says that we should believe something just because most scientists do.
I'm now going to argue that if most scientists believe something you probably should believe it, just because scientists say so. I'm aware that this is an unorthodox view (oh, the irony.) After all, the motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in Verba - "Take nobody's word for it". The oldest scientific society in the world doesn't want you to take their word for anything! I think they're wrong, but the idea that we should "think for ourselves" is fundamental to the way that we in the West argue and think. Once, "heretic" was a serious accusation, now, "not a heretic" is almost as bad. If there's one thing everyone agrees on, it's that everyone should be an indepedent thinker.
But if you take this even vaguely literally, it's obviously bollocks. You take someone's word for it whenever you read a newspaper. Scientists do so whenever they read a journal article - they trust that the results presented weren't made up. "Heretical" science is no exception - if you believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism, it's because you take Dr. Andrew Wakefield's word for it that he did some experiments and got certain results. This is fairly trivial, and you might object that even if we decide to trust the published evidence, we should still insist on evaluating it and interpreting it for ourselves. The idea that anyone can look at the evidence and reach their own conclusion seems only fair and democratic. Just because, say, almost all climate scientists think that the evidence implicates human activities in global warming, this doesn't make it so!
Yet again, it's balls. Unless you are a professional climate scientist (or whatever), or an amateur with an unhealthy amount of spare time, the chances are that you just don't know enough to come to an informed conclusion. Galileo could prove his points by getting people to look down a telescope, but modern science has grown so large and complex that you now need to read and digest dozens of papers to even understand most controversies. Even with life-or-death stuff like the question of whether antidepressants cause suicides, I'd bet that there are only a few dozen people in the world who know all of the relevant evidence. (I say this as someone who knows people whom you would expect to know it, and they don't.)
Ultimately, most of us just can't have an informed opinion about complex issues like evolution, climate change, vaccine safety, or the roots of the economic crisis. Life's too short, and 21st century knowledge is just too much for our brains to handle. It's easy to pick up a few statistics and a couple of stock phrases and think you're informed, but the chances are, you're unskilled and unaware of it. The most rational thing to do, therefore, would be to be agnostic about such matters. This is hard though, so as a second best, we should accept the experts' consensus. Academics are generally pretty intelligent, and if thousands of intelligent people freely discuss something and reach a certain conclusion, that in itself is evidence (although not proof) that what they conclude is true.
So: In theory, we should take no-one's word for it. Ideally, we should gather all the evidence about everything ourselves, and then draw our own conclusions. No-one would deny that this is the ideal, but equally, no-one can deny that this is not actually going to happen. Unless you're an expert on a topic, you have to take someone's word for it if you want to know anything about it. You are taking people's words for it right now. You might as well take the word of the majority of experts.
[BPSDB]
Some interesting comments over at Respectful Insolence got me thinking about the "Galileo Gambit". This is when people with unpopular ideas compare themselves to Galileo with the implication that, like him, they're being persecuted for their unorthodox views but that they will eventually be proved right. Everyone wants to be the underdog, and the Gambit has become such a cliché that several writers are famous for denouncing it. Michael Shermer gave us the snappy aphorism -
Heresy does not equal correctness.While Carl Sagan went for the comedy angle -
And so on. In fact, pointing out that not everyone with weird ideas is Galileo, seems to be almost as popular as claiming to be his spiritual heir. Hmm.The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Some people don't like this, such as this HIV/AIDS denier who takes issue with those who accuse others of using the Gambit. He's right (about this, not about AIDS) - Shermer and Sagan are attacking straw men, if you take their words literally, because no-one ever claims that just because their ideas are unorthodox, this makes them right. People generally invoke Galileo either as a rhetorical device - to give themselves a cool sense of rebelliousness - or as a defence against the "Argument from Consensus", which says that we should believe something just because most scientists do.
I'm now going to argue that if most scientists believe something you probably should believe it, just because scientists say so. I'm aware that this is an unorthodox view (oh, the irony.) After all, the motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in Verba - "Take nobody's word for it". The oldest scientific society in the world doesn't want you to take their word for anything! I think they're wrong, but the idea that we should "think for ourselves" is fundamental to the way that we in the West argue and think. Once, "heretic" was a serious accusation, now, "not a heretic" is almost as bad. If there's one thing everyone agrees on, it's that everyone should be an indepedent thinker.
But if you take this even vaguely literally, it's obviously bollocks. You take someone's word for it whenever you read a newspaper. Scientists do so whenever they read a journal article - they trust that the results presented weren't made up. "Heretical" science is no exception - if you believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism, it's because you take Dr. Andrew Wakefield's word for it that he did some experiments and got certain results. This is fairly trivial, and you might object that even if we decide to trust the published evidence, we should still insist on evaluating it and interpreting it for ourselves. The idea that anyone can look at the evidence and reach their own conclusion seems only fair and democratic. Just because, say, almost all climate scientists think that the evidence implicates human activities in global warming, this doesn't make it so!
Yet again, it's balls. Unless you are a professional climate scientist (or whatever), or an amateur with an unhealthy amount of spare time, the chances are that you just don't know enough to come to an informed conclusion. Galileo could prove his points by getting people to look down a telescope, but modern science has grown so large and complex that you now need to read and digest dozens of papers to even understand most controversies. Even with life-or-death stuff like the question of whether antidepressants cause suicides, I'd bet that there are only a few dozen people in the world who know all of the relevant evidence. (I say this as someone who knows people whom you would expect to know it, and they don't.)
Ultimately, most of us just can't have an informed opinion about complex issues like evolution, climate change, vaccine safety, or the roots of the economic crisis. Life's too short, and 21st century knowledge is just too much for our brains to handle. It's easy to pick up a few statistics and a couple of stock phrases and think you're informed, but the chances are, you're unskilled and unaware of it. The most rational thing to do, therefore, would be to be agnostic about such matters. This is hard though, so as a second best, we should accept the experts' consensus. Academics are generally pretty intelligent, and if thousands of intelligent people freely discuss something and reach a certain conclusion, that in itself is evidence (although not proof) that what they conclude is true.
So: In theory, we should take no-one's word for it. Ideally, we should gather all the evidence about everything ourselves, and then draw our own conclusions. No-one would deny that this is the ideal, but equally, no-one can deny that this is not actually going to happen. Unless you're an expert on a topic, you have to take someone's word for it if you want to know anything about it. You are taking people's words for it right now. You might as well take the word of the majority of experts.
[BPSDB]
Galileo Strikes Again!
Link: I write further on this topic in a subsequent post.
Some interesting comments over at Respectful Insolence got me thinking about the "Galileo Gambit". This is when people with unpopular ideas compare themselves to Galileo with the implication that, like him, they're being persecuted for their unorthodox views but that they will eventually be proved right. Everyone wants to be the underdog, and the Gambit has become such a cliché that several writers are famous for denouncing it. Michael Shermer gave us the snappy aphorism -
Some people don't like this, such as this HIV/AIDS denier who takes issue with those who accuse others of using the Gambit. He's right (about this, not about AIDS) - Shermer and Sagan are attacking straw men, if you take their words literally, because no-one ever claims that just because their ideas are unorthodox, this makes them right. People generally invoke Galileo either as a rhetorical device - to give themselves a cool sense of rebelliousness - or as a defence against the "Argument from Consensus", which says that we should believe something just because most scientists do.
I'm now going to argue that if most scientists believe something you probably should believe it, just because scientists say so. I'm aware that this is an unorthodox view (oh, the irony.) After all, the motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in Verba - "Take nobody's word for it". The oldest scientific society in the world doesn't want you to take their word for anything! I think they're wrong, but the idea that we should "think for ourselves" is fundamental to the way that we in the West argue and think. Once, "heretic" was a serious accusation, now, "not a heretic" is almost as bad. If there's one thing everyone agrees on, it's that everyone should be an indepedent thinker.
But if you take this even vaguely literally, it's obviously bollocks. You take someone's word for it whenever you read a newspaper. Scientists do so whenever they read a journal article - they trust that the results presented weren't made up. "Heretical" science is no exception - if you believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism, it's because you take Dr. Andrew Wakefield's word for it that he did some experiments and got certain results. This is fairly trivial, and you might object that even if we decide to trust the published evidence, we should still insist on evaluating it and interpreting it for ourselves. The idea that anyone can look at the evidence and reach their own conclusion seems only fair and democratic. Just because, say, almost all climate scientists think that the evidence implicates human activities in global warming, this doesn't make it so!
Yet again, it's balls. Unless you are a professional climate scientist (or whatever), or an amateur with an unhealthy amount of spare time, the chances are that you just don't know enough to come to an informed conclusion. Galileo could prove his points by getting people to look down a telescope, but modern science has grown so large and complex that you now need to read and digest dozens of papers to even understand most controversies. Even with life-or-death stuff like the question of whether antidepressants cause suicides, I'd bet that there are only a few dozen people in the world who know all of the relevant evidence. (I say this as someone who knows people whom you would expect to know it, and they don't.)
Ultimately, most of us just can't have an informed opinion about complex issues like evolution, climate change, vaccine safety, or the roots of the economic crisis. Life's too short, and 21st century knowledge is just too much for our brains to handle. It's easy to pick up a few statistics and a couple of stock phrases and think you're informed, but the chances are, you're unskilled and unaware of it. The most rational thing to do, therefore, would be to be agnostic about such matters. This is hard though, so as a second best, we should accept the experts' consensus. Academics are generally pretty intelligent, and if thousands of intelligent people freely discuss something and reach a certain conclusion, that in itself is evidence (although not proof) that what they conclude is true.
So: In theory, we should take no-one's word for it. Ideally, we should gather all the evidence about everything ourselves, and then draw our own conclusions. No-one would deny that this is the ideal, but equally, no-one can deny that this is not actually going to happen. Unless you're an expert on a topic, you have to take someone's word for it if you want to know anything about it. You are taking people's words for it right now. You might as well take the word of the majority of experts.
[BPSDB]
Some interesting comments over at Respectful Insolence got me thinking about the "Galileo Gambit". This is when people with unpopular ideas compare themselves to Galileo with the implication that, like him, they're being persecuted for their unorthodox views but that they will eventually be proved right. Everyone wants to be the underdog, and the Gambit has become such a cliché that several writers are famous for denouncing it. Michael Shermer gave us the snappy aphorism -
Heresy does not equal correctness.While Carl Sagan went for the comedy angle -
And so on. In fact, pointing out that not everyone with weird ideas is Galileo, seems to be almost as popular as claiming to be his spiritual heir. Hmm.The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Some people don't like this, such as this HIV/AIDS denier who takes issue with those who accuse others of using the Gambit. He's right (about this, not about AIDS) - Shermer and Sagan are attacking straw men, if you take their words literally, because no-one ever claims that just because their ideas are unorthodox, this makes them right. People generally invoke Galileo either as a rhetorical device - to give themselves a cool sense of rebelliousness - or as a defence against the "Argument from Consensus", which says that we should believe something just because most scientists do.
I'm now going to argue that if most scientists believe something you probably should believe it, just because scientists say so. I'm aware that this is an unorthodox view (oh, the irony.) After all, the motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in Verba - "Take nobody's word for it". The oldest scientific society in the world doesn't want you to take their word for anything! I think they're wrong, but the idea that we should "think for ourselves" is fundamental to the way that we in the West argue and think. Once, "heretic" was a serious accusation, now, "not a heretic" is almost as bad. If there's one thing everyone agrees on, it's that everyone should be an indepedent thinker.
But if you take this even vaguely literally, it's obviously bollocks. You take someone's word for it whenever you read a newspaper. Scientists do so whenever they read a journal article - they trust that the results presented weren't made up. "Heretical" science is no exception - if you believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism, it's because you take Dr. Andrew Wakefield's word for it that he did some experiments and got certain results. This is fairly trivial, and you might object that even if we decide to trust the published evidence, we should still insist on evaluating it and interpreting it for ourselves. The idea that anyone can look at the evidence and reach their own conclusion seems only fair and democratic. Just because, say, almost all climate scientists think that the evidence implicates human activities in global warming, this doesn't make it so!
Yet again, it's balls. Unless you are a professional climate scientist (or whatever), or an amateur with an unhealthy amount of spare time, the chances are that you just don't know enough to come to an informed conclusion. Galileo could prove his points by getting people to look down a telescope, but modern science has grown so large and complex that you now need to read and digest dozens of papers to even understand most controversies. Even with life-or-death stuff like the question of whether antidepressants cause suicides, I'd bet that there are only a few dozen people in the world who know all of the relevant evidence. (I say this as someone who knows people whom you would expect to know it, and they don't.)
Ultimately, most of us just can't have an informed opinion about complex issues like evolution, climate change, vaccine safety, or the roots of the economic crisis. Life's too short, and 21st century knowledge is just too much for our brains to handle. It's easy to pick up a few statistics and a couple of stock phrases and think you're informed, but the chances are, you're unskilled and unaware of it. The most rational thing to do, therefore, would be to be agnostic about such matters. This is hard though, so as a second best, we should accept the experts' consensus. Academics are generally pretty intelligent, and if thousands of intelligent people freely discuss something and reach a certain conclusion, that in itself is evidence (although not proof) that what they conclude is true.
So: In theory, we should take no-one's word for it. Ideally, we should gather all the evidence about everything ourselves, and then draw our own conclusions. No-one would deny that this is the ideal, but equally, no-one can deny that this is not actually going to happen. Unless you're an expert on a topic, you have to take someone's word for it if you want to know anything about it. You are taking people's words for it right now. You might as well take the word of the majority of experts.
[BPSDB]
Saturday, October 25, 2008
New Age Experiment Goes Wrong, Hundreds Dead
What with all the fuss over the Large Hadron Collider being about to suck us all into a black hole or blow up the world or something, it's easy to forget that it's not just cutting-edge, incredibly cool physics research that can be dangerous. Even seemingly benign New Age woo can go awry and end up killing hundreds - at least judging by the results of the fascinatingly flaky Peace Intention Experiment, an update of the famous Transcendental Mediation crime reduction studies.
The Peace Intention Experiment, or as I call it the PIE (in the sky?), is the latest project from Lynn McTaggart, New Age author and alternative health guru. McTaggart's previous research has investigated whether human intention can make plants grow better and whether it can "change the structure of water". This time around, she set her sights higher - the goal was nothing less than saving lives by stopping violent conflict. But the method was very similar to that used previously: McTaggart invited her fans to think really hard about something for ten minutes or so, all at the same time (coordinated via the internet). McTaggart claims that her previous studies have already proved that the collective mind of thousands of internet users can influence events thousands of miles away, sometimes even backwards in time. Then again, it's not hard to get positive results if you perform enough statistical tests.
Anyway, this might sound harmless, but the preliminary results of the PIE have just been released and they make disturbing reading. The PIE was intended to reduce violence, but tragically, it made matters much worse. I mean obviously it did bugger all in reality, but if you go along with McTaggart's usual reasoning processes and persistently confuse correlation with causation, you'd have to conclude that it had killed hundreds. Except that Lynn McTaggart doesn't think that - we'll see why later.
Here's what happened: For ten minutes each day for eight days, 11,468 intentioneers looked at pictures of Sri Lankan people while intending - hard - that peace should come to war-torn Wanni, Sri Lanka. Specifically they intended thus -
Anyway, that was the plan. What happened? Well, according to the statistician involved, before the experiment started, people were getting killed in Wanni at an average rate of 102 per week. So there was plenty of room for improvement. However, sadly, during the 8 days of the experiment, 461 people died! That's an extra 45 deaths each day. Pretty impressive - if you were trying to remotely kill civilians with some kind of psychic super-weapon. Fortunately, McTaggart et. al. have an explanation for this unexpected result:
The sensible thing to do at this point would be to declare the experiment a failure and blame it on, oh I don't know, the sheep/goats effect or something. But McTaggart seems instead to be claiming that the experiment was a success, on account of the reduced violence which followed the initial terrible explosion of violence. This is known as "cherry picking". She is not perturbed by the fact that the Eastern Sri Lanka region which was not targeted by the PIE experienced an even greater reduction in violence over the same period. To me this suggests that, if anything, PIE increased violence, but McTaggart believes that it shows that PIE is so powerful that it affects whole countries even if it's only aimed at one region, like a nuclear bomb of peace. This is known as "coming up with a story to explain the data".
Naturally, McTaggart wants you to give her money to keep doing this kind of thing. After all, the PIE was only a pilot study.
So Lynn McTaggart continues to wage, and win, her ongoing battle against those who would parody her, by doing it better than they ever could. (For previous episodes see Hawk/Handsaw). But this sorry spectacle is more than just a source of cheap laughs for bored bloggers. Honestly, it is. It's actually a fascinating case study in the psychology and sociology of science. McTaggart's efforts to extract a positive result are far from unique - they are only marginally more strenuous than those of some respectable researchers.
PIE shows that if you look hard enough you can literally find any conclusion in any data set. All it takes is enough post hoc statistics and a willingness to overlook those parts of the data which don't turn out the way you'd want. The problem is that in academic science, and especially in neuroscience and psychology, there is a strong pressure to do just that. If you report that gene X is not associated with disease Y, or that brain region A does bugger all when people are thinking about B, you're going to have a harder job getting it published than if you "find something". Perhaps even more importantly, scientists can be surprisingly attached to their pet genes / brain regions / treatments and really, genuinely want to find something interesting about them. Luckily, with enough clever mathematics and creative writing up, it's possible to find something almost anywhere (details in a future post.) There's a little Lynn McTaggart inside all of us.
Is this a problem for science? Hell, yes. Can we do anything about it? Sure. I'll elaborate in a future post, but basically we need to introduce pre-registration of studies - like the current systems for the Registration of Randomized Controlled Trials, but covering pre-clinical research as well. Why hasn't this happened? Because no-one's got around to it - we're all too busy dredging our data for positive results and publishing them. Hmpf.
[BPSDB]
The Peace Intention Experiment, or as I call it the PIE (in the sky?), is the latest project from Lynn McTaggart, New Age author and alternative health guru. McTaggart's previous research has investigated whether human intention can make plants grow better and whether it can "change the structure of water". This time around, she set her sights higher - the goal was nothing less than saving lives by stopping violent conflict. But the method was very similar to that used previously: McTaggart invited her fans to think really hard about something for ten minutes or so, all at the same time (coordinated via the internet). McTaggart claims that her previous studies have already proved that the collective mind of thousands of internet users can influence events thousands of miles away, sometimes even backwards in time. Then again, it's not hard to get positive results if you perform enough statistical tests.
Anyway, this might sound harmless, but the preliminary results of the PIE have just been released and they make disturbing reading. The PIE was intended to reduce violence, but tragically, it made matters much worse. I mean obviously it did bugger all in reality, but if you go along with McTaggart's usual reasoning processes and persistently confuse correlation with causation, you'd have to conclude that it had killed hundreds. Except that Lynn McTaggart doesn't think that - we'll see why later.
Here's what happened: For ten minutes each day for eight days, 11,468 intentioneers looked at pictures of Sri Lankan people while intending - hard - that peace should come to war-torn Wanni, Sri Lanka. Specifically they intended thus -
My intention is for peace and cooperation to be restored in the Wanni region of Sri Lanka and for all war-related deaths and violence to be reduced by at least 10 per centIt's a modest ambition - if I thought that I had the power to magically alter reality, I'd probably wish for deaths in Sri Lanka to be reduced by more than 10%. But I'm not an expert in these things. Anyway, since you've probably never heard of it, Wanni is a town in Sri Lanka which has suffered badly in the ongoing civil war between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels. Why Wanni, you ask? Well, McTaggart tells us that one of her main reasons for choosing it over, say, Baghdad, was that
In order to get robust experimental results, I was interested in choosing an area that the West was NOT focused on. Many areas of violence around the world are already the subject of prayer groups and intention; if we were to focus on one of them, it would be more difficult to demonstrate scientifically that the Peace Intention Experiment had a significant effect in lowering violence.This shows some basic knowledge of the problem of confounding factors in intervention studies. Interestingly, she also seems to believe that only Western people have the power to change the world through their intentions. I bet that there are a lot of people in Sri Lanka who very much wish that their country would stop being a war zone, and they probably pray for peace - and indeed their lives - quite a lot. If I lived there I certainly would, and I'm an atheist. However, Lynn doesn't think that this is a problem. Clearly non-white people don't have the Power of Intention.
Anyway, that was the plan. What happened? Well, according to the statistician involved, before the experiment started, people were getting killed in Wanni at an average rate of 102 per week. So there was plenty of room for improvement. However, sadly, during the 8 days of the experiment, 461 people died! That's an extra 45 deaths each day. Pretty impressive - if you were trying to remotely kill civilians with some kind of psychic super-weapon. Fortunately, McTaggart et. al. have an explanation for this unexpected result:
there was a last surge of attacks by the Sri Lankan government, who wanted to quash the Tamil Tiger rebels once and for all.So that explains the extra deaths - government forces launched a surge of attacks. People tend to die in attacks. Whether the government's decision to launch these attacks was caused by the Peace Intention Experiment is not clear, but if the human mind can magically make a plant grow to twice its normal size, surely it could make a Sri Lankan general decide to attack a town. But there's more:
In the 24 days following the experiment, violence levels immediately plunged down and stayed low ever since. The weekly average death rate in the Wanni region dropped by 49 per cent!Of course it's hardly surprising that deaths fell in the period following a major offensive - maybe the government was in control of the area, or maybe everyone had run away. Still, maybe McTaggart could claim credit even so - human intention works in mysterious ways after all. The death rate did fall by 49%, meaning 50 fewer deaths per week, so 171 lives were saved over the course of the 24 days after the end of the experiment. PIE worked! Unless you consider the extra 360 dead during the 8 days that the PIE was actually in progress, meaning that on balance 189 extra Sri Lankans died. Oops!
Interestingly enough, the Eastern part of Sri Lanka, experienced the same evolution. The death rate heightened during the experiment period, and then fell by 68.4 per cent.
The sensible thing to do at this point would be to declare the experiment a failure and blame it on, oh I don't know, the sheep/goats effect or something. But McTaggart seems instead to be claiming that the experiment was a success, on account of the reduced violence which followed the initial terrible explosion of violence. This is known as "cherry picking". She is not perturbed by the fact that the Eastern Sri Lanka region which was not targeted by the PIE experienced an even greater reduction in violence over the same period. To me this suggests that, if anything, PIE increased violence, but McTaggart believes that it shows that PIE is so powerful that it affects whole countries even if it's only aimed at one region, like a nuclear bomb of peace. This is known as "coming up with a story to explain the data".
Naturally, McTaggart wants you to give her money to keep doing this kind of thing. After all, the PIE was only a pilot study.
So Lynn McTaggart continues to wage, and win, her ongoing battle against those who would parody her, by doing it better than they ever could. (For previous episodes see Hawk/Handsaw). But this sorry spectacle is more than just a source of cheap laughs for bored bloggers. Honestly, it is. It's actually a fascinating case study in the psychology and sociology of science. McTaggart's efforts to extract a positive result are far from unique - they are only marginally more strenuous than those of some respectable researchers.
PIE shows that if you look hard enough you can literally find any conclusion in any data set. All it takes is enough post hoc statistics and a willingness to overlook those parts of the data which don't turn out the way you'd want. The problem is that in academic science, and especially in neuroscience and psychology, there is a strong pressure to do just that. If you report that gene X is not associated with disease Y, or that brain region A does bugger all when people are thinking about B, you're going to have a harder job getting it published than if you "find something". Perhaps even more importantly, scientists can be surprisingly attached to their pet genes / brain regions / treatments and really, genuinely want to find something interesting about them. Luckily, with enough clever mathematics and creative writing up, it's possible to find something almost anywhere (details in a future post.) There's a little Lynn McTaggart inside all of us.
Is this a problem for science? Hell, yes. Can we do anything about it? Sure. I'll elaborate in a future post, but basically we need to introduce pre-registration of studies - like the current systems for the Registration of Randomized Controlled Trials, but covering pre-clinical research as well. Why hasn't this happened? Because no-one's got around to it - we're all too busy dredging our data for positive results and publishing them. Hmpf.
[BPSDB]
New Age Experiment Goes Wrong, Hundreds Dead
What with all the fuss over the Large Hadron Collider being about to suck us all into a black hole or blow up the world or something, it's easy to forget that it's not just cutting-edge, incredibly cool physics research that can be dangerous. Even seemingly benign New Age woo can go awry and end up killing hundreds - at least judging by the results of the fascinatingly flaky Peace Intention Experiment, an update of the famous Transcendental Mediation crime reduction studies.
The Peace Intention Experiment, or as I call it the PIE (in the sky?), is the latest project from Lynn McTaggart, New Age author and alternative health guru. McTaggart's previous research has investigated whether human intention can make plants grow better and whether it can "change the structure of water". This time around, she set her sights higher - the goal was nothing less than saving lives by stopping violent conflict. But the method was very similar to that used previously: McTaggart invited her fans to think really hard about something for ten minutes or so, all at the same time (coordinated via the internet). McTaggart claims that her previous studies have already proved that the collective mind of thousands of internet users can influence events thousands of miles away, sometimes even backwards in time. Then again, it's not hard to get positive results if you perform enough statistical tests.
Anyway, this might sound harmless, but the preliminary results of the PIE have just been released and they make disturbing reading. The PIE was intended to reduce violence, but tragically, it made matters much worse. I mean obviously it did bugger all in reality, but if you go along with McTaggart's usual reasoning processes and persistently confuse correlation with causation, you'd have to conclude that it had killed hundreds. Except that Lynn McTaggart doesn't think that - we'll see why later.
Here's what happened: For ten minutes each day for eight days, 11,468 intentioneers looked at pictures of Sri Lankan people while intending - hard - that peace should come to war-torn Wanni, Sri Lanka. Specifically they intended thus -
Anyway, that was the plan. What happened? Well, according to the statistician involved, before the experiment started, people were getting killed in Wanni at an average rate of 102 per week. So there was plenty of room for improvement. However, sadly, during the 8 days of the experiment, 461 people died! That's an extra 45 deaths each day. Pretty impressive - if you were trying to remotely kill civilians with some kind of psychic super-weapon. Fortunately, McTaggart et. al. have an explanation for this unexpected result:
The sensible thing to do at this point would be to declare the experiment a failure and blame it on, oh I don't know, the sheep/goats effect or something. But McTaggart seems instead to be claiming that the experiment was a success, on account of the reduced violence which followed the initial terrible explosion of violence. This is known as "cherry picking". She is not perturbed by the fact that the Eastern Sri Lanka region which was not targeted by the PIE experienced an even greater reduction in violence over the same period. To me this suggests that, if anything, PIE increased violence, but McTaggart believes that it shows that PIE is so powerful that it affects whole countries even if it's only aimed at one region, like a nuclear bomb of peace. This is known as "coming up with a story to explain the data".
Naturally, McTaggart wants you to give her money to keep doing this kind of thing. After all, the PIE was only a pilot study.
So Lynn McTaggart continues to wage, and win, her ongoing battle against those who would parody her, by doing it better than they ever could. (For previous episodes see Hawk/Handsaw). But this sorry spectacle is more than just a source of cheap laughs for bored bloggers. Honestly, it is. It's actually a fascinating case study in the psychology and sociology of science. McTaggart's efforts to extract a positive result are far from unique - they are only marginally more strenuous than those of some respectable researchers.
PIE shows that if you look hard enough you can literally find any conclusion in any data set. All it takes is enough post hoc statistics and a willingness to overlook those parts of the data which don't turn out the way you'd want. The problem is that in academic science, and especially in neuroscience and psychology, there is a strong pressure to do just that. If you report that gene X is not associated with disease Y, or that brain region A does bugger all when people are thinking about B, you're going to have a harder job getting it published than if you "find something". Perhaps even more importantly, scientists can be surprisingly attached to their pet genes / brain regions / treatments and really, genuinely want to find something interesting about them. Luckily, with enough clever mathematics and creative writing up, it's possible to find something almost anywhere (details in a future post.) There's a little Lynn McTaggart inside all of us.
Is this a problem for science? Hell, yes. Can we do anything about it? Sure. I'll elaborate in a future post, but basically we need to introduce pre-registration of studies - like the current systems for the Registration of Randomized Controlled Trials, but covering pre-clinical research as well. Why hasn't this happened? Because no-one's got around to it - we're all too busy dredging our data for positive results and publishing them. Hmpf.
[BPSDB]
The Peace Intention Experiment, or as I call it the PIE (in the sky?), is the latest project from Lynn McTaggart, New Age author and alternative health guru. McTaggart's previous research has investigated whether human intention can make plants grow better and whether it can "change the structure of water". This time around, she set her sights higher - the goal was nothing less than saving lives by stopping violent conflict. But the method was very similar to that used previously: McTaggart invited her fans to think really hard about something for ten minutes or so, all at the same time (coordinated via the internet). McTaggart claims that her previous studies have already proved that the collective mind of thousands of internet users can influence events thousands of miles away, sometimes even backwards in time. Then again, it's not hard to get positive results if you perform enough statistical tests.
Anyway, this might sound harmless, but the preliminary results of the PIE have just been released and they make disturbing reading. The PIE was intended to reduce violence, but tragically, it made matters much worse. I mean obviously it did bugger all in reality, but if you go along with McTaggart's usual reasoning processes and persistently confuse correlation with causation, you'd have to conclude that it had killed hundreds. Except that Lynn McTaggart doesn't think that - we'll see why later.
Here's what happened: For ten minutes each day for eight days, 11,468 intentioneers looked at pictures of Sri Lankan people while intending - hard - that peace should come to war-torn Wanni, Sri Lanka. Specifically they intended thus -
My intention is for peace and cooperation to be restored in the Wanni region of Sri Lanka and for all war-related deaths and violence to be reduced by at least 10 per centIt's a modest ambition - if I thought that I had the power to magically alter reality, I'd probably wish for deaths in Sri Lanka to be reduced by more than 10%. But I'm not an expert in these things. Anyway, since you've probably never heard of it, Wanni is a town in Sri Lanka which has suffered badly in the ongoing civil war between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels. Why Wanni, you ask? Well, McTaggart tells us that one of her main reasons for choosing it over, say, Baghdad, was that
In order to get robust experimental results, I was interested in choosing an area that the West was NOT focused on. Many areas of violence around the world are already the subject of prayer groups and intention; if we were to focus on one of them, it would be more difficult to demonstrate scientifically that the Peace Intention Experiment had a significant effect in lowering violence.This shows some basic knowledge of the problem of confounding factors in intervention studies. Interestingly, she also seems to believe that only Western people have the power to change the world through their intentions. I bet that there are a lot of people in Sri Lanka who very much wish that their country would stop being a war zone, and they probably pray for peace - and indeed their lives - quite a lot. If I lived there I certainly would, and I'm an atheist. However, Lynn doesn't think that this is a problem. Clearly non-white people don't have the Power of Intention.
Anyway, that was the plan. What happened? Well, according to the statistician involved, before the experiment started, people were getting killed in Wanni at an average rate of 102 per week. So there was plenty of room for improvement. However, sadly, during the 8 days of the experiment, 461 people died! That's an extra 45 deaths each day. Pretty impressive - if you were trying to remotely kill civilians with some kind of psychic super-weapon. Fortunately, McTaggart et. al. have an explanation for this unexpected result:
there was a last surge of attacks by the Sri Lankan government, who wanted to quash the Tamil Tiger rebels once and for all.So that explains the extra deaths - government forces launched a surge of attacks. People tend to die in attacks. Whether the government's decision to launch these attacks was caused by the Peace Intention Experiment is not clear, but if the human mind can magically make a plant grow to twice its normal size, surely it could make a Sri Lankan general decide to attack a town. But there's more:
In the 24 days following the experiment, violence levels immediately plunged down and stayed low ever since. The weekly average death rate in the Wanni region dropped by 49 per cent!Of course it's hardly surprising that deaths fell in the period following a major offensive - maybe the government was in control of the area, or maybe everyone had run away. Still, maybe McTaggart could claim credit even so - human intention works in mysterious ways after all. The death rate did fall by 49%, meaning 50 fewer deaths per week, so 171 lives were saved over the course of the 24 days after the end of the experiment. PIE worked! Unless you consider the extra 360 dead during the 8 days that the PIE was actually in progress, meaning that on balance 189 extra Sri Lankans died. Oops!
Interestingly enough, the Eastern part of Sri Lanka, experienced the same evolution. The death rate heightened during the experiment period, and then fell by 68.4 per cent.
The sensible thing to do at this point would be to declare the experiment a failure and blame it on, oh I don't know, the sheep/goats effect or something. But McTaggart seems instead to be claiming that the experiment was a success, on account of the reduced violence which followed the initial terrible explosion of violence. This is known as "cherry picking". She is not perturbed by the fact that the Eastern Sri Lanka region which was not targeted by the PIE experienced an even greater reduction in violence over the same period. To me this suggests that, if anything, PIE increased violence, but McTaggart believes that it shows that PIE is so powerful that it affects whole countries even if it's only aimed at one region, like a nuclear bomb of peace. This is known as "coming up with a story to explain the data".
Naturally, McTaggart wants you to give her money to keep doing this kind of thing. After all, the PIE was only a pilot study.
So Lynn McTaggart continues to wage, and win, her ongoing battle against those who would parody her, by doing it better than they ever could. (For previous episodes see Hawk/Handsaw). But this sorry spectacle is more than just a source of cheap laughs for bored bloggers. Honestly, it is. It's actually a fascinating case study in the psychology and sociology of science. McTaggart's efforts to extract a positive result are far from unique - they are only marginally more strenuous than those of some respectable researchers.
PIE shows that if you look hard enough you can literally find any conclusion in any data set. All it takes is enough post hoc statistics and a willingness to overlook those parts of the data which don't turn out the way you'd want. The problem is that in academic science, and especially in neuroscience and psychology, there is a strong pressure to do just that. If you report that gene X is not associated with disease Y, or that brain region A does bugger all when people are thinking about B, you're going to have a harder job getting it published than if you "find something". Perhaps even more importantly, scientists can be surprisingly attached to their pet genes / brain regions / treatments and really, genuinely want to find something interesting about them. Luckily, with enough clever mathematics and creative writing up, it's possible to find something almost anywhere (details in a future post.) There's a little Lynn McTaggart inside all of us.
Is this a problem for science? Hell, yes. Can we do anything about it? Sure. I'll elaborate in a future post, but basically we need to introduce pre-registration of studies - like the current systems for the Registration of Randomized Controlled Trials, but covering pre-clinical research as well. Why hasn't this happened? Because no-one's got around to it - we're all too busy dredging our data for positive results and publishing them. Hmpf.
[BPSDB]
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Pastor Zachary Tims 2010
Concluyendo ...
Here I have told my experience for nearly a thousand kilometers in which crossed the entire northern peninsula from end to end. It was one of the best things I've done in my life, and an experience I will never forget. It has been a change, an evolution. The person who came from Saint Jean Pied de Port on 16 September 2006 is not the same as that reached Finisterre almost a month later. It's something I recommend and always recommend to everyone, anyone can.
Everything is true ...
Here I have told my experience for nearly a thousand kilometers in which crossed the entire northern peninsula from end to end. It was one of the best things I've done in my life, and an experience I will never forget. It has been a change, an evolution. The person who came from Saint Jean Pied de Port on 16 September 2006 is not the same as that reached Finisterre almost a month later. It's something I recommend and always recommend to everyone, anyone can.
Everything is true ...
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