I’m an embarrassment: official

So yeah, this is pretty important.

I made an offhand remark yesterday about race being largely irrelevant now, and a clarification that turned into an equally facetious comment about racism being something that generally lies beneath the surface these days. But it’s really still a big problem, the way it does that.

The people who the author of that article is mostly talking about are white people who still somehow, on some level, see black people as being “other”, or categorised differently somehow, even if it’s not conscious or deliberate or in any way malicious or derogatory the way it’s done. These are people who might try to consider themselves “colour blind”, but in so doing end up just being oblivious to any racial tensions or other issues that really exist, thinking that they’re being perfectly fair and equal to everyone by not taking any notice of racial matters at all.

This is not an entirely alien position to someone like me. But the point is that I still need to do some actual work in this area. I can’t slack off just because I’ve done the easy bit. Sure, so I think black people are great. That doesn’t mean I’m done. It doesn’t mean that I can disassociate myself from any bigotry or discrimination going on around me and declare myself apart from it, tell myself that it’s nothing to do with me, it’s all somebody else’s fault, racist people’s fault, because I’m not racist.

The author also writes about an event that was held recently at 10 Downing Street to celebrate LGBT history month. (Apparently it was February. I didn’t notice. Doesn’t seem fair that they have to share it with black people, really.) It turned out that it had been a largely white middle-class affair, and “queers of colour” didn’t seem to be fairly represented there. He posted an irate comment about this on Facebook, and admits that he may have “a lot to learn in terms of how to challenge racism within the LGBT community”.

But I don’t think one rather aggressive comment about the under-representation of minorities is the real problem here. I think bigger problems include A) the, y’know, under-representation of minorities, and 2) a tendency among the people of privilege (which I use relatively – among the queer community, the privileged are the white middle-class queer people) to respond to the tone of these messages ahead of the content.

Yes, one person was being kind of bitchy, but the thing he was being bitchy about was racial discrimination, and it’s intensely frustrating how easily that seems to be lost sight of. Minority folk aren’t always going to pussy-foot politely around the subject and ask for your kind permission to raise a point or be part of your community. Sometimes they’re pissed. Sometimes they’re going to shout. If you listen, then maybe they won’t need to keep shouting.

I’m still not desperately comfortable writing on this subject, but I hope it’s making some kind of sense.

Also, although the biography at the bottom of the page refers to the author as “he”, he does say in the article: “I don’t identify as a man”. I’m happy to take advice on more appropriate pronoun use here.

And in my “And in other news” section for today, not all politicians are rubbish: some liberal democrats consider internet freedom important enough to publicly support, and indeed to take an emergency motion to their party conference this weekend. Yay them. I don’t know enough of the background to really get stuck into this topic. I tend to just worry about it as a distance. Maybe now I’m being all politically activistical this is the sort of thing I’ll have to start finding stuff out about.

In my back yard

So I think I might be starting to give fractionally more of a shit about local politics.

It’s still not a great deal of a shit, mind. I’m not going to start taking to the streets and campaigning loudly for the important issues facing the good people of Bromley just yet, not least because I don’t know what they are. I’m not at the stage of waving placards angrily outside City Hall (do we even have one of those?). But the idea of having some sort of involvement in what’s going on around here politically is starting to seem like a less dull and distant notion.

This is largely down to a couple of activist websites I’ve been encountering recently, in particular TheyWorkForYou.com, a largely volunteer-led project organised around the idea of establishing some accountability for our elected politicians. Which sounds like a handy thing to have. And it takes off a lot of the pressure for me to have to be organised myself, in order to get involved in some way.

For instance, all I’ve really done so far is type in my postcode so they know what constituency I live in. And now I know all sorts of things that I’d never taken enough interest to find out myself in the time I’ve lived here, like that my MP is called Bob Neill, is the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, and that he has tended to vote against legislation to establish and protect gay rights and in favour of renewing Labour’s anti-terror laws. Which are the kind of things I might want to know if and when I’m trying to decide who to vote for in future. Also, Wikipedia tells me that in the last by-election the liberal democrats made substantial gains in this area, and as such Mr Neill has one of the smallest majorities in parliament.

I was actually first prompted to find out who my local elected representative is when I was being encouraged to find out his position on libel reform, and was directed to WriteToThem.com, a site built to make it absurdly easy to send messages to your MP without having to do all the off-putting research like finding out who they are. I didn’t get a reply to my questions, and apparently only 48 out of 147 messages sent to him this way in the year 2008 got a response. Which ain’t great.

And then there’s Democracy Club, which provides a forum for residents of a particular constituency to suggest and discuss local issues that may need addressing, in the context of a forthcoming election, and recommends the kind of tasks you can do to help get things done. Right now, the main default task being recommended to me is to “Describe local issues”, but I’m so woefully out of the loop that I can’t even really think what to bring to the table here. I’m going to keep a lookout for any election leaflets we get posted, like it says, but I’m still hoping to be able to follow people’s leads for a while. Things seem mostly fine around here, really. The bins get picked up on time. The roads aren’t full of pot-holes. The crime rate has avoided me entirely.

So… what should I care about most? Now that I’m actually being persuaded to take an interest, has anyone got any ideas where I should go from here? How do I decide what’s important to me without getting bored again? For all that this has grabbed my attention, it’s still local politics, and it’s not unlikely that I might just doze off if I try writing about it at this length again in a few weeks.

In other news, another anti-gay Republican senator is gay. Yeah, this kind of thing has long since stopped being any kind of a surprise. I guess he’s doing better than most to have simply come out, though, rather than done the press conference rounds with his supportive wife by his side and muttered about indiscretions and having a problem and needing help and going into rehab. I’m just looking forward to when this all becomes as irrelevant as race, frankly. Not that I’m saying we’ve totally moved beyond racial prejudice and into a utopia of tolerance and acceptance or anything, but at least people aren’t usually appalled by white folks and black folks wanting to get married any more, and the only people who still openly complain about foreigners being inferior are mostly fuckwads we can all just ignore.

So, what I appear to be saying is that I can’t wait for the day when everyone’s homophobic bigotry is forced beneath the surface and has to fester in secret as people mask their true feelings for the sake of a superficially polite and tolerant society, just like they’ve done with racism. Maybe that needs a little more thought.

Those Hilarious Atheists!

You just know something with a title like that is going to be infuriatingly smug about making some really bad rhetorical point, don’t you?

Either that or it’ll be something self-referential and sarcastic about something else which was smug and unconvincing.

Any guesses which you can expect from me?

I don’t have time to get a lot said here today, but I thought I’d share the germ of an idea that I plan to rant about at greater length in future (I know I say that a lot, but it’s often true. Some of the time. More often than never, anyway.)

Here’s a blog which begins by instructing you to laugh, and insists that you have no choice in the matter. It then explains the comical nature of atheists’ disbelief in God, and repetitiously observes that “God’s an awfully big guy to try to avoid”.

It’s never quite made clear what “big” means in this context, but it seems to be something more along the lines of “has a lot of things named after him” than, say, “really exists”. The author’s main point seems to be that the name of God can be found in all sorts of places, many of which are often used by atheists – such as the origins of the word “Goodbye”, or in the kind of blasphemous exclamation that might follow a painful accident involving a hammer.

So, leaving aside the comedy inherent in a denial of evolution consisting of the phrase “I personally do not believe Man came from globules in the ocean”, here’s the comment I left to this post, which is currently still awaiting moderation:

Excellent point! I have a quick question, though – what day of the week did you post this on? I only ask because, personally, I’d call it Wednesday – but that’s named for Woden, the god of Anglo-Saxon paganism until around the 7th century. And of course the current month, which most refer to as March, was named for Mars, the Roman god of war.

Now, I hope I’m not being too presumptuous if I surmise that you are a Christian, and don’t believe in the divinity of Woden, or of Mars, or of the various other Norse, Roman, or Greek gods I imagine you invoke regularly when referring to days of the week, months of the year, and so forth. So, do you find it hard avoiding all these other deities who permeate your world like this?

I mean, I said “goodbye” to a few people on Wednesday, a word which does indeed have its origins in reference to the Christian God – but it was Woden’s day all day, for 24 hours straight. I think he trumps your Jesus fella. (And he had an awesome beard too, for what it’s worth.)

What am I doing here?

I mean, what are any of us really doing here, in a cosmic sense of-

No, wait. I don’t mean that at all.

I mean, what’s the point of this blog?

Here’s one part of the answer: I’m having fun. I like having somewhere to vent about stuff that catches my attention and/or bugs the hell out of me. I like constructing a good rant, I enjoy the process of the writing as I try to pick just the right way of phrasing a sarcastic remark to make it as bitchy as possible.

And because it’s a subject of interest, the field of science and skepticism is a great one for me to practise being bitchy about. I’m less interested in celebrity feuds or showbiz events or the latest news from the world of competitive eating than I am in pseudoscience and religion, so I don’t spend as much time being snide about them. And I know a thing or two about some of the hot topics in woo by now, so occasionally I get to be sarcastic and informed.

But it’s not entirely a solo activity for my own isolated benefit. If it was, there’d be no real need to even publish anything I write, and I certainly wouldn’t need to check my hit count as often as I currently do. I get a kick out of actually being involved, too – but what is it I’m involved in? What should my role be in whatever it is the skeptical blogosphere is doing?

I started thinking about this again lately after hearing the Carol Tavris interview on a recent episode of D.J. Grothe’s excellent For Good Reason podcast. She was talking about cognitive dissonance, and the way people tend to justify their own beliefs beyond what’s rational, and how difficult it can be to change a particularly entrenched opinion or idea about something, if changing your mind would cause a fundamental belief about yourself to be shaken.

And this was tied in to how skeptics should approach the issue of pseudoscience, and what sorts of methods are or aren’t likely to be persuasive to anyone not entirely in line with your own viewpoint. (If your opening gambit is “If you don’t agree and you really need this explained to you then you’re an idiot”, you’re less likely to persuade anyone to agree that they are, indeed, an idiot, than you are to put them on the defensive and close them off to any potentially good arguments you might make. Of course, some of us would never stoop to such ad hominem attacks. And fuck you if you think I would.)

Actually, that ironic parenthetical kinda brings me onto what I’m really getting at here. When pondering why I keep this blog, the first reason that sprang to mind was that it gives me the chance to get angry and be sarcastic about stuff. When people read it, they may enjoy the sarcasm if they’re already on my side, or they may be a little turned off by my tone if I’m sounding dismissive of something they believe in – but should that matter to me?

It should, I think, if I have any interest in doing something constructive beyond just amusing myself here. Which I think I do. I take an interest in things like the anti-vaccination movement, and am certainly compelled to try and do something to improve the situation, even if only by cheering on the troops as they totally kick ass. But if I’m intending this blog to do anything more than give me something to do of an evening – especially if I’m hoping it might become any kind of useful informative resource – I have to at least be aware of the tone I’m taking, and what effect this will have on my readership.

I’m wary of misquoting Penn Jillette, but I remember him saying on one of his episodes of Penn Says (before they stopped being available outside the US) that he thought that trying to craft your message to people – curbing the sarcasm, making any compromise, going out of your way to placate people and avoid antagonising them so they’ll be more open to your ideas – is necessarily manipulative and disingenuous. His view was that you should just speak the truth from your heart as you see it, and being totally honest like this is the best way for ideas to be exchanged.

Well, I like honesty, sure, and I think that going too far to appease and accommodate those with an opposing view can be disastrous (cf. just about anything PZ Myers has had to say about Chris Mooney in the last couple of years), but I don’t think that can possibly be the whole picture. Whenever anyone states a position on anything, or reports on any fact or occurrence, it’s unavoidably done so with a particular tone, with certain underlying assumptions. That’s just a facet of language. When you say something, you’re choosing to say it in a particular manner.

And when it comes to choosing that manner, I don’t think it’s simply that there’s “an honest way” to state your case, and then a bunch of devious and dishonest ways to try and manipulate people to your cause. Sometimes tailoring the style of delivery to your audience isn’t pandering, it’s just common courtesy.

So how do I relate all this to me? Well, I don’t plan to really change my strategy anytime soon. Not a lot of people come here, and I don’t have the opportunity at the moment to really engage with people on a grand scale. I have a style of writing that I find most natural, and it involves being sort of a dick and calling people dumb-asses once in a while. They’ve usually earned it, so I’m going to forgive myself the occasional lack of rigorous objectivity, and just keep writing what feels like the right thing to write. Maybe if I’m ever doing this more noticeably, as a more involved part of a big movement, I’ll think more about public engagement, but for the time being, the public can suck it.

Does that sound fair? If you blog, how much consideration you give to the way dissenters react to your style of engagement? Do you think this kind of engagement is even worth your time?

Mandy, rape, cancer quacks, and an unbiased recommendation

– Peter Mandelson wants to steal every photograph in the country. Well, that’s not really quite right. I’m being glibly flippant (which is less dirty than it sounds), but I bet it’d be alarmingly easy to make the case for those exact terms. The Digital Economy Bill is, it seems, a terrible terrible idea. I don’t know what to do about that, exactly, but I thought you should know.

– Christians: using Jesus as an excuse to be creepy and evil for 2000 years. This slogan was suggested by my own favourite Christian (and let me know if I should credit you), based on an article about some really despicable views on rape and what clothes women choose to wear. Just the fact that those two concepts are even grouped together in a single phrase should tell you that this is going to be painful.

You may have been given this leaflet because of the way you are dressed,

is a phrase included on a tract handed to a 19-year-old girl working in a drive-through. My own suggestion was some counter-literature to hand back. “You may have been given this leaflet because of the offensive anti-feminist victim-blaming propaganda bullshit you were pushing on people.”

– Adrian Pengelly cannot cure cancer. But he says he can, and charges for it, and is a fucking twat who deserves to go down for way longer than three months, which it sounds like might be all he’s up for. I can’t stand the picture of him in that article, either. Would I want to punch him in the smfugly (smug + fugly) face quite so many times if I didn’t already dislike him for other perfectly good reasons? I suppose we’ll never know.

– But more importantly than all that, the first series of Chance In A Million is out on DVD! This was a sitcom that my dad wrote about 25 years ago, and I can say with perfect objectivity that it’s brilliant. As I write this, it has six reviews on Amazon, all giving it five stars (out of five). And only one of those was written by my mum.

Sci-fi-entifically illiterate

In which I take the foolish and reprehensible step of holding a slightly different opinion from that of David Mitchell.

David Mitchell (the comedian, not the author, though he’s brilliant too (and there are apparently many others as well, many of whom I’m sure are also jolly good)) is brilliant. He’s been getting some play in the skeptical community lately because of some rather fun jabs that comedy duo Mitchell and Webb take at pseudoscience in their sketch shows, like the Homeopathic E.R. sequence. And he wrote an article this week, about this physics professor in the US who declared recently that Hollywood films should stick closer to science fact.

The first thing I’m prompted to wonder is why this is suddenly newsworthy now, when I’m sure there have been any number of scientists grumbling on very similar lines for years. And David’s main point has also been made a number of times before: the primary purpose of TV and film is to be entertaining, and it’s entirely correct that this should sometimes take priority over reflecting such petty details as the laws of physics with perfect accuracy.

Reality is unrealistic, after all. You don’t want everything in fiction to perfectly resemble the real world you already know and are bored with – that’s why you’re watching telly in the first place. I think I more or less agree with David’s assessment that:

Being realistic is a storytelling tool, like lighting, music and sexy actresses.

This doesn’t downplay its importance too much. If you’re telling a story, then storytelling tools are vital. If you don’t bother worrying about the lighting while filming, it’s likely to end up looking terrible; likewise, if realism is completely disregarded, your script will probably be a total mess. Realism is important, but to be used wisely as a tool of story-telling, wherever appropriate, not adhered to dogmatically.

Where I started to cringe a little was this paragraph:

How typical of a scientist to try to reduce film-making to a formula. He’s noticed that enjoyable science fiction sometimes needs to include the impossible, but streams of implausible events don’t make a compelling narrative. He’s right but he should have left it at that. The happy medium is found by using judgment not maths.

It’s the first sentence, really. I hang out with far too many science geeks, and read far too many scientists’ blogs and Twitter feeds, not to be acutely aware that reducing anything to a formula is not typically representative of what scientists always do. It’s usual poor tabloid reporting that produces that kind of nonsense. To some actual scientists, such formulae are anathema.

But despite that nagging quibble, he’s making basically a good point. The guy making these recommendations – Professor Sidney Perkowitz of the Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia – has reportedly suggested a limit of “one big scientific blunder in a given film”. Which is where it starts to get a bit silly.

David speculates that this is comparable to the “one coincidence to which good screenplays are supposed to be restricted”, but that doesn’t seem like a great analogy. Major coincidences happen sometimes in the real world, but rarely in big clumps, so multiple coincidences in your film will make it start to look unrealistic.

But scientifically impossible things don’t happen at all, so whether there’s one breach of the laws of nature in your movie or a dozen makes no difference as to its implausibility. Any such simple hard-and-fast rule is bound to be misleading and unhelpful.

One film I recently really enjoyed was called Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. I’m about fifteen years older than its target audience, but it was warm and funny and energetic and had nifty pacing and great comic timing and for the most part it stopped short of being annoying in its zaniness. Two thumbs up. But it was full of completely impossible things going on that only make sense in a cartoon world – unsurprisingly, being an animated kids’ film – and if you were scientifically nit-picking your way through, you’d have no time left for anything else.

And I would dispute that there exists any precise definable line between stories where you can do stupid cartoon stuff, like drop anvils on your characters and have tweeting birds appear circling around their dazed heads, and sci-fi, where everything must make perfect sense. Just as much as I dispute that allowing “one big scientific blunder” per movie does anything useful to address scientific plausibility in cinema. What’s likely to be acceptable depends far more on the context and the internal logic of an individual film.

It’s also worth noting that sci-fi writer John Scalzi was way more put out by the bad science in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie than was astronomer Phil Plait. These are both guys who know a thing or two about a thing or two, but it’s clearly possible to forgive a lot that you know is technically unrealistic, in the right context.

And while it’s lamentable that it’s taken me this long to reach one of the most interesting points about all this, there’s one thing I’ve heard from scientists on this subject time and again: When big-budget sci-fi movies do get actual science advisors on board to try and make sure things stay somewhere within tentacle’s reach of reality, they almost never have to totally sacrifice huge swathes of cool stuff that they wanted to do. Very often, having someone who really knows their stuff just makes the science even more awesome.

The conversation will go something like:

---

“Okay, someone send the resident geek in here. And get me some more coffee. Ah, smarty-brain, there you are, how’s it going? Listen, what’s your nerdy take on this bit in scene twelve where James Bond goes solar-wind-surfing? That’s a thing, right, solar wind? So I figure we get him wind-surfing but, like, on the Sun. Pretty cool, right? Not really sure how we get him up there, though. Does the Space Shuttle go to the Sun? Could we get one of those sky elevator things I think I heard about that one time? China has those, right?”

“Yeah, look, I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about this whole scene, none of it really makes any sense, and if you go ahead with it as it’s currently written then your audience are going to tear you a scientifically impossibly large new one for turning their favourite franchise into a joke.”

“Damn. Tina, cancel my breakfast with the Prime Minster of China, tell him he can keep his crazy moon escalators. Okay then, astro-boy, you’d better come up with some new idea that’ll give me an excuse to have Bond to take his shirt off and justify a special effects budget bigger than the GDP of several small countries.”

“Well actually, if you’d ever paid any attention in school, or indeed to any other human being in your entire life, you might be aware of this other thing you could do, which would still look awesome on screen and let you showcase the CGI expertise of your hordes of computer-literate underlings, with the added bonus that it’s not total bullshit.”

“You mean, giving a shit about scientific accuracy might not reduce the entertainment factor by crippling my ability to blindly throw in whatever cool stuff I can think of, and may even put me in a better position to make exciting and visually inspiring references to genuine scientific phenomena?”

“Yep. You want to do things that way then?”

“Make it so.”

---

Wow, that rather got away from me. Wasn’t expecting that to turn into quite such a flight of fancy. Probably a bit wordy and less funny than I think it is. Still, not in the mood to edit now.

A good example of the kind of thing you may have just skipped over is the occasional recognition in some sci-fi films that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum, and so cool-looking explosions wouldn’t actually make any noise when observed from a distance. David likes hearing stuff explode, and is willing to forego some realism on that score, which is fine – there’s always got to be some suspension of disbelief for the sake of entertainment, and we all have our different limits – but as Phil Plait points out, a spaceship blowing up in perfect silence can, if done right, be eerie as hell. Knowing how the real world works can really add to a talented director’s repertoire.

Yikes. That was wordy. Have I covered everything? I feel I should sum up. Or at least redraft before I post this. Nah. Thoughts, anyone?

Who am I?

Yeah, I haven’t posted in a little while. Which is fine. Partly I haven’t been feeling all that wordy, partly my creative energies have been somewhat diverted away from the skeptical realm, and towards some fiction projects I’ve had on the back burner for a while but am trying to re-ignite.

At the moment, I’m not planning to let the fiction writing spill over into this blog in any significant way. However, there’s one thing I’m going to clear up here, in lieu of a proper blog post, until I have something really worth saying.

I’ve noticed I’ve been suffering something of a crisis of identity. I’m using Cubik’s Rube as both the name of the blog, and the personal handle with which I post to the blog. This could lead to something of a branding problem, especially when I start using other usernames in other parts of the interwebs that I also want to associate with this blog, for whatever reason.

So, what I hope to try and keep consistent now is that the blog is Cubik’s Rube, and I am writerJames. Let’s see how this pans out. You’ll probably notice no difference at all, and wouldn’t be that interested even if you did, but I wanted to make some sort of note of it. For the official record. Or posterity. Or something.

Why?

So, here’s an attempt to order some vague thoughts into a profound observation. (You’re probably used to that kind of approach from me by now.)

Mystery and the unknown are important in science. They’re what drive the whole thing. It’s all about asking “Why?” to stuff. “Why does the Sun move across the sky like that?” “Why does that apple – or anything else – fall down at the rate it does?” “Why did that happen when I prodded this?” Like a two-year-old, but with a budget and a lot of spare time.

It’s based on observation. We observe something, and say: “This is the data we have. Why do we seem to see what we seem to see?” The quest of science is to come up with an answer to that question, to imagine a model of reality which explains why we make the particular observations we do.

(There’s also the angle of “What if?” – as in, “What if I smashed these beyond-microscopically tiny particles together at almost the speed of light?” – but that’s just a way of finding something new to ask “Why?” about.)

The observation I wanted to make, though, is about the rather different approach to the question of “Why?” that’s often taken by religion.

Religious people often make a big thing of the importance of “mystery” as well, when it comes to God’s way of doing things. There’s so much that’s beyond our understanding, that’s deeply ineffable, that’s on some higher level of logic than mere mortals cannot hope to comprehend.

But it seems to be a different kind of mystery, with a different sort of “Why?” question that follows from it. A lot of them have a similar form to “Why do bad things happen to good people?”, but that’s not a question looking for a straight-forward causal answer, in the same way that a question about gravity is. There’s an implied clause in the question, which gets to what it’s really asking.

If God exists, then why do bad things happen to good people?

Science’s questions look to explore an unknown facet of the world we’re living in. Religion’s questions are a tacit admission of incompatibility with the facts. The fact that you need to ask why, given God’s existence, things are the way they are, tells you that the assumption of God’s existence is not easily squared up with what we observe. There’s an intrinsic challenge that the premise will have to find a way to stand up to.

Some of the “Why?” questions of science contain implicit challenges to their premises, too, such as: “If they’re all releasing phlogiston, why do some things gain weight and some things lose weight during combustion?” But this wasn’t treated as some ethereal wonder, or some intractable problem of philosophy beyond our ken. It was a statement that things shouldn’t act this way, if we have the right idea about phlogiston – and, eventually, the idea had to be abandoned.

When people talk about the problem of evil, the implication is that things shouldn’t be this way if God exists in the way he’s commonly understood. An all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent entity can’t be reconciled with the cruel randomness of the suffering inflicted by nature. Why is this seen simply as an unapproachable curiosity and mystery of the way God is, rather than a challenge that needs to be resolved if our worldview is to make any sense – even if resolving it means giving up on the God idea, like we did with phlogiston, when it becomes incompatible with the data?

It occurs to me that I may be mostly just re-hashing Greta Christina’s problem of unfishiness here. But it’s come up recently from a few religious sources I’ve read, and I wanted to try thinking it through.

The further legal adventures of Simon and the spine wizards

Today seemed to rather get away with me, so there’s just time for a quick round-up of important Simon Singh news.

If you’re not familiar with the backstory, it shouldn’t be hard to catch up. He’s being sued and it’s all bollocks, basically.

Several of the big names in skepticism were in the court with him today, reporting continuously on the proceedings. The overall gist is that it went very well for Simon, with all three judges on the panel appearing sympathetic to the arguments of his team. Full write-ups have appeared from:

Crispian Jago
The Heresiarch
Jack of Kent
Padraig Ready for Index on Censorship

And, as well as supporting Simon’s personal plight, it’s all being used to help highlight the importance of libel reform in general. Even if you’re not from the UK, you can sign the petition to support that campaign.

So, this is one of my more coldly functional and less sparklingly entertaining days, blog-wise. I’m off to liven up my evening by eating some yoghurt now.

Homeopathy < Reality. Again.

In a report published today, the Science and Technology Committee concludes that the NHS should cease funding homeopathy. It also concludes that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should not allow homeopathic product labels to make medical claims without evidence of efficacy. As they are not medicines, homeopathic products should no longer be licensed by the MHRA.

Nice when people get things right.

That Evidence Check report I mentioned yesterday is now available, and Ben Goldacre shares the full release. As he says, looks like pretty sensible stuff. It’s not medicine; homeopathic pills are just sugar; lying to patients about placebos is not okay. That kind of thing.

Ben also made a good point on Twitter earlier – while the problem with accepting homeopathy as medicine is often cited as a “lack of evidence”, in fact we have a great deal of very solid and reliable evidence. That it doesn’t work. It’s like saying “Well, maybe this elephant will be able to fly… It doesn’t look like any of them can at the moment, but we just don’t have enough evidence.”

Le Canard Noir is all over this, of course, looking through the whole thing in great detail. I’m glad that the authors of the report seem to understand this point:

We do not doubt that homeopathy makes some patients feel better. However, patient satisfaction can occur through a placebo effect alone and therefore does not prove the efficacy of homeopathic interventions.

And, as anaglyph reminded me yesterday, you don’t even need a particular placebo effect to just start to feel better over time, and be tempted to confuse correlation with causation as you simply regress to the mean.

Also reporting on this is gimpy, who quotes a comment from a homeopath named Carol Boyce that made me grind my teeth just a little:

Mr Stewart made a valiant attempt to to [sic] bring balance to the proceedings but was hopelessly outnumbered.

A question needs to be asked in parliament about the conduct of this Evidence Check and it’s [sic] inherent bias.

It’s almost impossible to hear a phrase like “bring balance to the proceedings” and not imagine that this must be a good thing to do, restoring some necessary fairness. But nonsense doesn’t deserve to be fairly balanced with science, and if nonsense is all you have on your side then it’s entirely right that things should be biased against you. That’s another thing that’s meant to sound like it’s inherently negative and unfair and unacceptable, “bias”. And there are many cases where bias is unjustified and should be fought against. But there are some cases where it’s proper and necessary.

I’m biased strongly in favour of eating pasta instead of rat poison. I’m also biased strongly in favour of spending tax money on medicine instead of homeopathy.

This is all being covered in more depth by various intrepid investigative blogojournalists (there just isn’t a comfortable “blogger+journalist” portmanteau), and I’m pretty sure Martin Robbins is planning to have his own round-up of events soon too. (Edit 23/02/10: Yep.) I’m still only really a commentator a rung or two below, only joining in the chatter a little later once all the big players have done the real legwork, but that’s okay. This way I get to be lazy and still feel like I’m joining in.