The most retarded 'argument' I've ever seen

I came across this article earlier today, h/t to Longrider at Orphans of Liberty, and so it's about time I made another blog post. I'm amused and shocked that this sort of tripe still passes muster from anyone old enough not need help from the teacher to tie their shoelaces.

The article starts off with a bold claim:

Secondhand smoking is more dangerous than main smoking. It creates more serious health hazards. It is the cause of many modern diseases.

Wow! It should have been banned first, then, right? Since it's more dangerous?

There's a discussion of how "voluntary organizations and governments" have checked the "evil effects of smoking", leaving one in no doubt as to the hand-wringing credentials of the author, and then we get to the meat of the argument:

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because ...

Yes? Yes?! Because? We're quivering with antici...pation here!

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because it contains more than 50 substances that can cause cancer and other hazards through passive smoking.

Wait, what?

Those "50 substances" aren't being sucked into the smoker's lungs? Being breathed by the smoker, with their nose mere inches from the cigarette? Perhaps the "50 substances" are scared of fire and therefore only affect people more than six feet away from a lit cigarette...

Secondhand smoke is "more dangerous" than smoking purely because it is "dangerous". And it's only "dangerous" by tautology. This is not an argument. Saying that something is, I quote, "more dangerous" requires an actual comparison of the danger.

Well, the article does have a second try:

Since the secondhand smoke has higher concentrations of cancer-causing agents called carcinogens than the main smoke from the smoker, [...]

That's right. Secondhand smoke, from the combustion of a cigarette, contains more carcinogens than, um, the other smoke from the same combustion of the same cigarette. And at a higher concentration, because spreading that smoke through a 32m³ volume of air in a room makes it more concentrated than containing it in the 0.004m³ volume of the smoker's lungs. It's not diluted eight thousand times or anything. There's no attempt to cite a reference for this claptrap, it's simply thrown out there as a 'fact': smoke coming out of a cigarette is 'more dangerous' to non-smokers. Perhaps smokers build up an immunity to the effects? Science demands answers!

There's a bit of a correlation/causation conflation to 'prove' that secondhand smoke is dangerous, but that's it. Apparently secondhand smoke is dangerous because some non-smokers living with smokers die. Guess what? Everybody dies. It's not even that they died of something potentially smoking-related. Heart disease. Y'know, the #1 killer in the Western World, caused by a lifetime of fatty foods and just generally getting old.

This is like someone has heard about arguments, but hasn't quite understood how they work. Yes, arguments usually contain the word "because"; that doesn't mean that everything containing the word "because" is an argument. There's the whole 'logic' thing to consider, too. Let's have some fun with examples...

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because it contains more than 50 substances that can cause cancer

How about:

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because the sky is blue

Or:

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because my garden wall isn't three feet high

Maybe:

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because the giraffe is made of brightly-coloured kites

All of which make about as much logical sense

- KoW

We must lament and cause a fuss...

Page 7 of today's Metro - "Two die in cord accidents" - mentions a coincidental pair of tragic accidents. Two young children (one 3 years old, one 16 months) strangled themselves with blind cords they got entangled in. This is a terrible shame, and it must be heart-wrenching for their parents.

However, the grieving parents of one of the children have launched an imbecilic campaign to ban looped blind cords. Yeah, because that's the problem. A child couldn't strangle himself on a treadmill cord, or a phone cord, or a belt, or a network cable, a tangled bedspread, any reasonably-sturdy wire. Oh, no. It's only looped blind cords. So we must ban them, obviously.

Never mind that there are millions out there not killing anyone, that the alternative is more complex (and more expensive), that there is no way in hell a toddler should be able to reach a blind 4ft off the floor, no, we must Ban This Sick Filth.

I look forward to having to have my landlord fix my "dangerous" blinds, and maybe put padding on the walls at the same time, because - you never know - someone might hurt themselves. Clearly the world is too dangerous for people to live in.

Whatever happened to parental responsibility?

- KoW

What is Rape?

The front page of today's Metro screams "One in 4 women 'is rape victim'" based on a report from Havens.

This is clearly a shocking figure, and it's clearly intended that way, but is it actually meaningful? Have 25% of women been forced down an alley at knifepoint and abused? No. It turns out that the definition of rape they're using is "having sex when they did not want to".

So, yeah, "Not tonight dear, I've got a headache. Oh, go on then..." is rape. Who knew? Not feeling horny makes you a rape victim. Wonderful. So a substantial number of men will have been raped, too, when their wives were in the mood but they weren't.

Sometimes people have to do things they're not keen on, but which mean a great deal to someone else. It's hard work, and people are not entitled to happiness or effortless utopian relationships.

Why are these morons conflating a heinous life-destroying crime with harmless relationship obligations?

This sort of idiocy is why rape convictions are so "low" - the term has been devalued to the point where any doubt or remorse can count as "an offence", causing the number of reports to explode, but the number of actual rapes prosecuted (substantially all of them) is about the same. And that number is very low because the vast majority of the human race finds rape abhorrent.

- KoW

Education: Big vs Little 'E'

The school league tables were released yesterday and this morning's Metro has a story - Private schools rated 'zero' (p16) - first seen in the Standard last night, but now with a reply from an unnamed official.

Dr Martin Stephen, high master of St Paul's, is quoted as saying:

You need to ask how can we be the highest performing school in the country by every measure except by the government one?

He's absolutely right, of course. Metro has a reply from "a spokesman" from "the Department for Education" - would that be DfES (abolished 2007) or the Department for Children, Schools and Families? This anonymous commenter says it is:

a 'fatuous' argument as 'iGCSEs' did not meet National Curriculum requirements

Which seems to be rather circular logic: an education is only an education if the "Department for Education" says it's an Education?

Public Schools are abandoning GCSEs precisely because of the National Curriculum requirements - which the schools don't feel are stringent enough.

I'm not in a position to say whether or not the requirements, and the resulting exams, are being "dumbed down" - but I am inclined to believe that when pass rates go up and the exams are then publically abandoned by schools with centuries of tradition that standards have, quite possibly, slipped.

I'm rather more concerned by the centralised and centralising bureaucracy that the "fatuous" comment implies, however. Why is a non-specialist minister, or a civil servant (perhaps on an 18-month rotation), making policy (or policy administration, or administration policy) decisions about the - only - curriculum which constitutes an Education? Shouldn't the masters of Eton (founded 1440), Harrow (1572), Charterhouse (1611), St Paul's (1509), Winchester (1382) or Rugby (1567) have some say in what they teach? Aren't they the experts? After all, generations of parents have trusted those schools to provide a good all-round education, wheras the National Curriculum is barely 20 years old!

An education is not the same thing as a state-certified Education and, like with healthcare, it's possible (and even desirable) to support the former without accepting every wart and misfeature of the latter.

What makes Ed Balls think that he knows better than a school paid £10k/term by parents who clearly think that represents value for money?

- KoW

Cigarette Taxation: Doing It Wrong

This morning's Metro (p11) has a story with the headline "Children smoke asbestos ciggies". Aside from the recent hysteria over asbestos - it's nasty, that's why we stopped using it three decades ago - this is a rather emblematic failure of government regulation.

The "fake" cigarettes are being sold for 40p/pack - something like what the market would set, as evidenced by the fact that Japan could still sell Mild Sevens for 100 yen/pack a few years ago - yet the UK retail price is around 15x that. Or 20x if, having imposed extra sanctions on retailers, kids are forced to buy from vending machines.

The price of a pack has roughly doubled under Labour, with the inevitable result of creating a black market. Initially this was people bringing a few packs back from France or non-smokers getting duty frees, but the government started cracking down on that smuggling. That raised the stakes, and the immense taxation raised the possible profit margins, which caught the interest of organised criminal gangs. Now we're warned of "tab houses" where cheap unregulated cigarettes are being sold without the state's oversight. Smokers have been driven out of social environments and hence out of scrutiny.

What did you expect would happen?

This is exactly the same mistake that was made with the "war on drugs" and, while I don't support legalisation, I can't see good arguments for punishing addicts. If you want to stop people from smoking, piss off, it's their choice, not yours.

But, if you're really insistent on meddling, first you need to control the supply - not through legislation and force of arms, because that can never work and has never worked, but by licensing, quality control and allowing manufacturers to compete; cut-throat competition will drive down prices and make the margins unattractive to criminals. That mitigates the problems of people selling asbestos as filler material and means you're not punishing addicts for being addicted. Public education on the dangers of smoking - and I don't mean huge labels and shock campaigns - was good, but everyone knows that smoking is bad for you and now such ads provoke contrarian bloody-mindedness. The main plank, of course, needs to be to consider smoking (and, one might argue, drug-taking) as a medical issue and treat it through the NHS.

Give people the means to stop being addicted and they will generally try. Attempt to force them and you will fail miserably. As we've seen and can see now.

- KoW

Free Cheeseburgers!

According to this report on the BBC, the figures of 2000 calories a day for women and 2500 for men are inaccurate. The quotas are too low by about 400kcal - "a cheeseburger" - apparently, as we already take enough exercise to burn the extra calories off.

Naturally, I'm shocked - reality often rounds itself to politically-expedient numbers, after all. That's why we can be sure that CO₂ atmospheric concentration targets are Proper Science - they're exact multiples of 50ppm. Next thing you know someone will be claiming that alcohol consumption recommendations shouldn't be an exact number of units (defined as 10ml of pure ethanol, based on the content of a one-ounce shot of 40% spirits, just so it's nice and exact), and the world will go to rack and ruin!

The article mentions a fear that the the Department of Health will "sweep this report under the carpet" - and they should rightly be fearful. As we've learned from Alan Johnson sacking Professor Nutt, we can't have science causing "confusion" with official policy. Such tension has to be resolved, and quickly lest it worry the populace - but, as we all know, the state know's what's best for us, so policy can't be wrong or changed. It must be the science to blame, eh?

I don't know about you, but I'm about to go and eat my free cheeseburger!

- KoW

Nonce Sense

NSPCC/ChildLine have released a study today, which made the front page of Metro and the BBC also covers it.

It turns out that there's been a 132% rise in the number of women being implicated in sex-abuse cases since 2004-5. That's hardly surprising, given the systematic bias against men (whom we shall refer to as "potential paedophiles") working with children. It's also symptomatic of an under-reporting of woman-on-boy assault - like most teenage boys, I certainly wouldn't have complained to the authorities if a female teacher got a bit frisky (chance would be a fine thing!)

The statistics bear out what we already knew: the vast majority of child abuse is from natural parents and close family. Most of the rest is from step-family, then professional carers. The "paedo under the bed" has - to all intents and purposes - never existed, despite the hysteria about strangers assaulting children.

The number of calls - 16,094 - seems quite high. No doubt there are a fair number of malicious lies there, and a huge number of multiple-callers but, even if not, that represents around one child in 1000 being assaulted. One in a thousand. We're preparing to (ineffectively) vet over 12m people... TWELVE MILLION... for something that affects 0.1% of the population - and that vetting isn't even required of parents or step-parents, despite being 45% of the male and 67% of the female accused.

Sorry, Alan Johnson, looks like the Home Office is yet again failing at Evidence-Based Policymaking.

- KoW

Nutt Sacking

So Professor David Nutt has been sacked by Alan Johnson, for pointing out that the evidence on drugs doesn't say what the government would like it to say, and is predicting a backlash. Mark Easton says "there may be significant fall-out". Good.

It seems to me that the best evidence we could have that independent scientific advice is truly independent is that, when it's ignored by the government for political and ideological reasons, it results in a public bunfight. Not that dissent is quashed to avoid embarassment for the politicians. This should be a public scandal - "Government Scientific Advisor Fired For Disagreeing" - the sort of shoot-the-messenger idiocy that lead the Soviets into Lysenkoism.

I doubt anyone is naïve enough to believe that the Executive actually want independent advice - they want to claim to have taken independent advice, and they want to be supported, but that's cargo-cult decision-making. It's the child sitting (on a pile of cushions) on his dad's chair, peering over the top of the desk, looking intently at a "report", and "evaluating" it - he's seen his dad do the same thing, and he knows how he has to look, but not why or what's going on behind the scenes.

Scientific advice isn't there to provide a veneer of legitimacy; its role isn't to support extant policy decisions; its internal disagreements aren't justification to give "equal time to both sides" or to pick the one which best fits your prejudices. Scientific advice is there to provide a sound basis for rational decision-making.

Ignore it at your peril.

- KoW

Alcohol and ID checks

This morning's Metro letters page has Carole from Gloucester telling us that it's a "Fact" that it's an offence to purchase alcohol for someone under 18, or to sell it to someone under 18, and that's why a 44-year-old man wasn't allowed to buy alcohol because his wife looked under 25 and she didn't have ID.

This statement about the law is, of course, true. It's also, to some extent, completely irrelevant. It's a law, and laws change. Specifically, that one was changed in the Licensing Act 2003 to make the penalties much harsher and much broader. The penalties on the Standard Scale are up to level 3 (£1000) for the child and up to level 5 (£5000) for the adult.

It's an offence for the supermarket manager, the supermarket cashier, the person buying the alcohol, and the person receiving it - so, potentially, £16k in fines for a single bottle of adult fizzy pop. Doesn't that seem a little... steep? Those are eye-watering penalties for a cashier or bartender, and the fact that a prosecution will almost certainly mean being fired (not to mention the record being retained forever thanks to yesterday's decision), are ample to ruin lives. Is that really justified for letting a kid have a bit of booze?

It's almost as if the government implemented exponentially higher penalties because the "problem" wasn't being addressed sufficiently. Remind anyone of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Simple fact: teens want to be adults and so will try to smoke and drink. If you let them, there's not really much harm - arguably it's better than letting them turn 18 and go out on a bender; if you try to stop them, you destroy lives for an ideology.

- KoW

Climate quackery

I just stumbled across this from the BBC: "[In 2007] the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report concludes it is more than 90% likely that humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for modern-day climate change."

Pretty damning, huh? Except it isn't. ">90% likely" is another way of saying "<10% that this could happen by random chance" or, as it's often shown in scientific papers, "p < 0.1". Or, rather, that's how it might be shown in scientific papers if they were published with such loose bounds - but they're not. The publication standard for most reputable journals is 5% significance. My supervisor once described it thusly: "if you haven't proven it to 5% significance, you haven't proven it". And with good reason - no journal's reputation could survive long if it published, on average, one incorrect study each issue.

One- and two-sigma errors crop up all the time. In a moderately-sized physics class, you would expect one student to get a result two standard deviations from the mean, not through incompetence but through random errors. With a "science" as complex, fuzzy and politicised as climatology, p<0.1 is a null result.

The BBC also has this graph of atmospheric CO₂ readings from Mauna Loa from 1958 to date:

Here's my rather less scary one from the same data:

Note that the population of the world reached 3 billion in 1960 and 6 billion in 1999, so the atmospheric CO₂ per person is down over 40% in that time! Hardly convincing, prima facie, that people are the problem.

Then, of course, we have this BBC piece telling us that the hottest year on record was 1998 and that temperatures have been stable for the last decade - and will quite possibly decline over the next 20-30 years. I'll not mock the secret models which have utterly failed to predict any of this, but suffice to say that if you put garbage in, you get garbage out, and it's not a good idea to set policy based on garbage.

So, yeah, "global warming" (or "climate change" as people prefer to call it now that it's not actually getting warmer) is very much unproven. And yet... we're forced into using mercury-filled lightbulbs, taxed through the nose for petrol and flights, "encouraged" to use renewable energy sources as our politicians argue over whose hair-shirt is hairier and who can cut emissions the most.

History will judge harshly the current mass-hysteria over climate: "they actually thought they were saving the world"

- KoW

Nanny knows best!

Today's Metro (p30) and the BBC (Wednesday night) have a story about Nottingham City Council's expansion of fixed penalty notices.

"Offences such as leaving a car engine running [...] attract fines from £50 to £300."

WTF? It's an offence to leave a car engine running? It's expensive, certainly, at £1.29/litre, but how the hell is it a crime needing punishment?

I suppose they're going to ban turbo timers (devices which keep the engine idling to allow a turbocharger to cool down gradually) as well? Given that engines are hopelessly inefficient just after starting, forcing people to stop and restart their engines when their passenger pops into a shop for a one-minute errand, will pollute more, waste fuel, waste battery power, wear out starter motors and generally make life worse. So that'll be another stealth tax - in the same vein as speed bumps - from government deliberately inflicting damage on motor vehicles...

Apparently these fines will be meted out - unaccountably, no doubt - by "Community Protection Officers". That raises the question of whether they exist to protect the community, or to protect something from the community, because I don't think fining people for keeping their engines ticking over or leaving their bins out is particularly public-spirited.

A thought for such authoritarian governments: you are accountable to us, not we to you.

- KoW