Postmodernists, relativists, to save the world

We hear a lot about the big challenges we’re up against. There are now over seven billion people on earth. Cheaply extractable fuel is running out. The effects of burning all that carbon-based fuel are transforming the climate, which will compromise agricultural production just when our need for food at its greatest. Other vital materials are becoming scarce. Our own medical science is helping to cultivate pathogens resistant to our most powerful drugs. We have our work cut out.

Or do we?

What if these so-called ‘challenges’ were no more than one way of looking at the world. What if science was just ‘one kind of knowledge’ along with others, and the others were equally valid? In that case, maybe everything would be just fine.

The great postmodern hope

It is not clear that any of the millions of ways of describing this
picture of a bit of space-time occupied by what we call a Richard
Rorty is closer to the way things are in and of themselves than
any of the others.

Postmodernists, social constructivists and relativists have been saying, for some time, that there are no facts independent of human construction.

So, there aren’t really giraffes, independent of our deciding to talk about the world in a certain way. That, at least, is Richard Rorty’s view:

“More generally, it is not clear that any of the millions of ways of describing the bit of space time occupied by what we call a giraffe is closer to the way things are in and of themselves than any of the others.” (Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. xxvi.)

This doesn’t just apply to giraffes. According to constructivists, it holds pretty generally. Here’s Nelson Goodman:

“Now as we thus make constellations by picking out and putting together certain stars rather than others, so we make stars by drawing certain boundaries rather than others. Nothing dictates whether the skies shall be marked off into constellations or other objects. We have to make what we find, be it the Great Dipper, Sirius, food, fuel, or a stereo system.” (Nelson Goodman, ‘‘Notes on the Well-Made World,’’ in Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism, ed. Peter McCormick (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 156.)

Forget giraffes, and constellations, though. Here’s a much more policy relevant example. We might say that the tuberculosis bacillus was ‘discovered’ by Koch, in 1882. But that’s a very objectivist way of thinking about it. That is, it presumes that there are some objective facts of the matter no matter what we think, or even whether we think about them.

If you think that this image in
any way encodes what were once
a set of mind-independent
facts about the world standing
in any orderly relationship
with the individual
conventionally called ‘Bruno
Latour’ you’re probably so
gullible that you think
the Sun is objectively
larger than the Earth.

A constructivist might say, instead, that the tuberculosis bacillus was invented, or created in 1882. In that case the claim that Ramses II (who died about 3000 years earlier) probably died from tuberculosis couldn’t be true. I’m not making this up. This, in fact, is precisely what constructivist Bruno Latour has said:

‘‘Before Koch, the bacillus had no real existence.’’ [Reference 1] Bruno Latour, ‘‘Ramses II est-il mort de la tuberculose?’’ La Recherche, 307 (March, 1998), 84–85. Quoted in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador Press, 1998), 96–7.

So, we might say: disease, schmisease! If we constructed the facts about disease, we can just un-construct them, and construct some much more fun facts where we don’t get sick or injured.

After all, if we construct the world, let’s make it be the way we want it to be.

Instead of spending loads of money trying to work out how to combat infections that we constructed ourselves, let’s just not construct them in the first place!

Frankly, too many of the facts constructed so far are downright pretty gloomy and depressing. But if the postmodernists are right, then there’s no reason why the Malthusians should be writing the main storyline.

So here’s the postmodern world-saving plan:

• Let’s just construct the fact that humans are immune to disease!
• Or, maybe, we could construct the fact that no diseases exist!

Postmodernists agree that they’ll need a good few coffee breaks to decide which of the above two plans is the best. But either way, as far as disease goes, we’re sorted.

Whatever the details, the idea is that we can construct ourselves (us seven billion or so people) a much happier set of facts to live with.

So, once disease is unconstructed, or reconstructed, we can move on to energy and climate. Remember Goodman – “We have to make what we find, be it the Great Dipper, Sirius, food, fuel, or a stereo system.” Fuel! Think about it! Why, oh why, did we ever construct the fact that there wasn't lots more fuel (not to mention constructing the fact that so much of the little there 'is' happens to be under ground controlled by misogynistic anti-democratic creeps...) Here's the plan:

• Maybe we should construct the fact that there’s all the cheap fossil fuel we need, and construct the fact that there’s no such things as climate change.
• Or, we could construct the fact that there’s lots of cheap fuel, and that burning loads of fossil fuel will prevent climate change!

Either way: Sorted.

Population, schmopulation

Gaze in awe into the two,
or three, (or four, or thirteen)
eyes of Hilary Putnam.

Anyway, constructivists say that there’s not even an objective fact about how many people there are. This ‘seven billion’ talk is simply how it looks given one discourse about the world. Hilary Putnam makes this point in his 1990 Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Putnam asks his reader to contemplate a toy universe consisting of three individuals (call them I1, I2, and I3). Then we can ask how many objects this universe contains:

“Suppose . . . like some Polish logicians, I believe that for every two particulars there is an object which is their sum . . . . [then] I will find that the world of ‘‘three individuals’’ . . . actually contains seven objects.” (Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 96.)

So, there’s no objective fact about how many objects (including objects of some specific kind) there are. There are only facts relative to some chosen scheme. Now, if we went ‘Polish’ on the human population, we’d end up with vastly more than seven billion. But there’s no need to go there. It’s totally up to us.

This is why a key plank of the postmodern world-saving plan is to adopt a policy where the number turns out to be much less than seven billion.

Postmodernists haven’t yet worked out the details.  One option on the table is that we’ll only count relatively affluent people who can afford the luxury of relativist speculation. Another idea is that we’ll adopt a simpler counting scheme that goes “one, two, three, four, MANY”.

Either way: Sorted.

An un-named senior representative of the S.E.C. has
poured water on the postmodern proposal. “We’ve got
rules against trying to construct facts. If you break some of them
you can go to jail. Seriously. Ask Bernie Madoff.”

Acknowledgments

Several of the examples of constructivist views here can be found – along with careful arguments against them – in Paul Boghossian’s terrific 2006 book Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press.)

Time vs The Economist (Economist 1, Time 0)

Travel does terrible things to a person. Take an otherwise rational being, and stick them in a succession of economy class seats and airport concourses for long enough, and they'll start shopping in completely idiotic ways, endorsing intelligent design and otherwise showing that they've abandoned their senses.

That's how I ended up buying a copy of 'Time' magazine, for the first time in ages. I was desperate. Jet lagged, unwashed, rumpled, crabby and also (perhaps the airport food, or the diet in Las Vegas) flatulent to the level of a superpower, if only I'd had any control over it. Worse, I'd finished the novel I had with me (Cormac McCarthy's riveting, dark, spectacularly violent Blood Meridian) and read the current and previous weeks' editions of The Economist cover to cover, including the advertisments.

It was awful. So bad I struggle to explain it. Think of a cross between news-lite and vacuous celebrity drivel. They had a 'Technology Roundtable' where they rounded up some people who had made a lot of money, and asked them dumb questions, leading to answers that were barely coherent sometimes, and rarely interesting when they were. Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg) had this to say about 'The future of free news':

Increasingly, over time, I think information is ubiquitous. I think that I will be able to get a lot of that data - sometimes not even assembled by an individual - to give me the answer that I want. And for that, I will not have to pay.

Clearly he spent more time on getting his hair right for the 'interview' than on the answers, and Time spent more on photography than editing. If anyone can see an argument here, or even a hint of an analysis, please let me know. The best answer gets a free (slightly used) copy of Time magazine.

Anyway, it's easy to take pot shots. The cool thing is that there is one story, a review of an exhibition, that was covered in the Time and one of the two issues of The Economist that I had just read. So my weary flatulent self read the one with the other in recent memory. And the comparison is most instructive.

The exhibition is currently at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It is covered in in Time on November 23, 2009 (pp112-2) and in The Economist on November 12th.

The Economist says something coherent, historically informed and useful. In 650 odd words. Time take a bit over 1050 words, and chuck around pomposities like 'rectitude' and barbarisms like 'Bauhauslers'. Sigh. And there's some outright vacuous smoke. For example:

... there's a color photograph of Gropius' righteously Cartesian office, with a right-angular chair resting on a grid-patterned carpet and a grid-patterned tapestry hanging on one wall.

Uh. Well. No. That's bollocks. Regular geometric patterns are a staple of ancient art from all over the world. They massively predate Descartes. And a 'Cartesian' set of co-ordinates assigns every point an address, it has axes so that points are identified by signed distances along the two (or three) perpendicular axes. Calling a rug with a grid on it 'Cartesian' is just pseudo intellectual tosh.

Next time I'm buying the National Enquirer.

Robophobia in The Grauniad

Last week's Guardian has a blog piece by Mark Lawson about the composer Emily Howell, who has a forthcoming album. Part of what is interesting about Emily is that she isn't a natural person, but a trained computer program. She's the successor to Experiments in Musical Creativity (EMI, or 'Emmy'). Both are projects of David Cope, himself a composer. There's a lot you can read (including a lot that’s on line) about the history of Cope's work, and the music produced by the systems he has developed and trained. I'm not going over any of that here, but I do want to take issue with some things Mark Lawson has to say. Lawson doesn't care how good Emily's music might sound. He says it's "worthless" because it's not made by real people. I think that he is being a silly anthropophile robophobe twerp.

After some rather disorganised paragraphs in which Lawson half-heartedly faces up to the fact that much creativity is a matter of re-arranging elements that are not themselves original, he turns to banging the table. Along the way are a few telling bits of rhetoric that show honesty is not a big priority for him, including the gem that when Emily produces a work it is by “simply randomly reshuffl[ing]” bits of another. Clearly he’s simply ignored the fact that Emily is laboriously trained, and that the process of construction is guided by the set of constraints produced by the training. Anyway, here comes the table banging:

So logic is on her side. Art, though, is illogical. Although she can be defended intellectually, the creator of From Darkness, Light is no more a composer than a synthetic sperm knocked up in a laboratory would be a father.

Oh. So a traffic light isn't a “real” instruction, because it's just a machine. Calculators don't tell us arithmetic truths, because they're not people. I haven't really been to Scotland because I didn't walk there. It’s not about what happens, it’s about where it comes from. Why should we think this? Lawson continues:

Music, writing or art is a communication between two humans. This does not mean it has to be emotional or warm – a delusion industrialised in large parts of Hollywood – but that there is some sort of conversation between two members of the same species, even if the artist's side of the exchange is "go away and leave me alone".

Paradoxically, it was JD Salinger, a novelist who has refused any rapport with his readership outside the pages of the books, who most beautifully captured this truth when the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye suggests that reading a really good book makes you want to phone up the author. A composition by Emily Howell might make us want to email her, but we know that she could not reply. Admittedly, we also know that Salinger wouldn't take our phone call, but the crucial difference is that he could if he wanted to.

A computer, cleverly programmed, could probably produce the Doubting Thomas Passion by JS Bach or More Snow on Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway. But the exercise would be worthless because the works from the software would not be informed by being a God-fearing kapelmeister in 18th-century Germany or a suicidal macho male in mid-20th century America.

Our shelves may be full of composers and writers who could be accused of having only artificial intelligence, but their efforts are still more worthwhile than art created by AI. "From the heart – may it go to the heart," wrote Beethoven on the manuscript of his Missa Solemnis. From the byte to the brain can never be equivalent to that.

This is a pretty strong set of claims. No matter how beautiful, or moving, or exciting, or anything else music, including Emily Howell’s, might make us feel, it's "worthless" because it didn't get to us by being passed through the brain of a natural person. And the reason for that being important is that we could (in some fabulously diluted sense of could, which covers long dead people who can't talk to anyone now, and living ones who don't want to talk to us, etc.) talk to them about stuff.

It's interesting that no matter how it got here, and irrespective of whether anyone could (or would want to) talk to where it came from, that is surely the most lousy justification for a claim that I've seen all week.

Lawson is, I’d argue, perfectly free himself to have a silly prejudice to the effect that he prefers music that in some sense came out of a brain. But it’s arrogant and absurd for him to declaim that such much is in general “worthless” just because he’s prejudiced.

More than that, it’s confused. People, and their brains, are physical systems. Their basic working parts are mechanisms – mechanisms of DNA transcription, protein construction, ion channelling, neurotransmitter action. Their interesting functions are the product of gigantic co-ordinated action among these myriad mechanisms. This means that if having in some sense been produced by mechanisms guarantees being “worthless” then everything made by any person is worthless.

Besides all that, it’s fascinating to learn more about music, and what sorts of process can compose it. There’s little reason to think that what goes on in Emily will be strictly analogous to what happened in Bach’s skull, but there’s at least a tantalising suggestion that we have more idea that we used to about what might have been in there. And there’s exciting work to be done – I for one would like to see computers capable of sophisticated ensemble improvising.

Here are some links:

Lawson’s article (comments unfortunately closed).

David Cope's mp3 page, with material by EMI. (In particular, see 5000 works in Bach Style.)

Article on Ars Technica.

Article on Times Online (includes streaming media with short clips from the forthcoming album).

Article on Vox.

(The image at the top was lifted from an image challenge on B3TA.)

Undiluted detox bollocks in the Daily News

Today's Mercury (A Durban based daily rag) contains an article headed "A detox takes a lot of will-power, but it is definitely worth it" (page 8). The article rattles though a bunch of the usual bollocks, in breathlessly uncritical vein, with no evidence at all.

As scientifically minded blog readers will know, there's been a surge of recent criticism of the detox industry. Ben Goldacre has weighed in, as has David Colquhoun. This is well-deserved. The Mercury piece provoked my mate Dave to write in - here's his letter (I don't know yet whether they'll print it):

Dear Sir,

In your edition of 8 January you include an article headed "A detox takes a lot of will-power, but it is definitely worth it" (page 8). In the article you parrot a number of claims regularly made by the detox industry as though they are true. You give no evidence. In fact, you could give no evidence. No scientifically rigorous clinical trial has ever shown a measurable benefit of a "detox" regime, and the pseudoscientists who peddle them barely agree about what "detox" amounts to. Some of the purgative measures suggested are potentially dangerous. Vitamin supplementation gives either no benefit, or (again, according to clinical trials) in the case of high dosage anti-oxidant supplements can be positively harmful. Everyone should get a decent amount of exercise and eat healthily most of the time, perhaps especially after festive over-indulgence. That much is obvious. Your uncritical regurgitation of unsubstantiated pseudo-science passed of as journalism is shameful, and given that the topic is human health, dangerous.

If the letter is published and I notice, I'll post an update. It's hard to read the Mercury every day, so I might not notice. (The offending article, by the way, is cut and pasted from, according to the attribution, the Belfast Telegraph.)

*Note on the picture: As usual, I'm grabbing something that comes up high on a Google Images search for a keyword. This picture is from a gallery of frankly rather striking images at Dr Natura. Only the very strong of stomach should browse this gallery while consuming a chili dog.

Undiluted astrology bollocks in Sunday Tribune

Here's a useful rule of thumb: any publication with an astrology column shows thereby that it is willing to print utterly unwarranted bullshit. It should make you worry about the editors' ability to distinguish evidence from rubbish elsewhere in the publication.

The Economist and The New York Times don't have horoscopes. Cosmopolitan and Hello magazine do. Go figure.

Daily newspapers might try to excuse themselves by saying that an astrology column is like a crossword, or a bridge column - only some readers like it, but they like it enough to care, and it doesn't do much harm. That strikes me as a weak excuse, but to invoke it the astrology rubbish needs to be carefully ring fenced.

The Sunday Tribune (South Africa, January 4, 2009) shows that it respects no such boundary.Page 8 includes an article under the headline "2009, Year of the ox, will be more stable". The article includes a bunch of the usual nebulous waffle, presented in a totally uncritical register. Key claims are asserted as fact, rather than opinion of an astrologer, for example that "The Chinese calendar moves in 60-year cycles, meaning the world will experience similar events in the new year to those that took place 60 years ago."

There is nothing in the article (zero, not a bit, bugger all) about whether there is any evidential basis for the claims made. Garbage is simply presented as news.

(For non-SA readers, the Sunday Tribune is not a generally nonsense publication. No alien abduction stories, relatively little superficial tosh about celebrities, and astrology generally coralled next to the funny pages. So this is a serious own goal.)

BPSDB - Bio-energy bollocks

There's a recent story in The Guardian about how Michael Flately is back on his toes and ready for more Celtic prancing following a baffling illness. He credits this to a visit to some bozos at the Plexus Bio-Energy Clinic, who(accoding to their website) use a system that "represents the integration of a network of powerful and effective healing techniques that work by rebalancing the life energy within". For good measure we're told that they have "achieved exceptional results in the treatment of a wide range of conditions often in cases that have proved difficult to treat by conventional means alone".

The website includes a section on "scientific research". This is where you'd hope to find reports of respectable clinical trials. You know, double-blinded ones with placebo groups and decent statistical analysis. Unsurprisingly, there's none of that. The section on scientific research is a bunch of waffle, much of it pointing back to the Plexus clinic itself (so providing no independent evidence of effectiveness at all). The final paragraph is a choice bit of junk that is worth quoting in full:

Einstein with his new model of the universe, determined that energy and matter are one – thus transforming the classical western duality. Soon the Subatomic World of "leptons" and "quarks" emerged to challenge the existing concept of the atom as the final building block of matter. The Subatomic World seems to be a complex web of inter-relationships – one could say – a "holistic pattern".

This is confused gibberish. It is confused about atoms. After all, plenty of physicists realised that atoms were not truly atomic before Einstein. (His illustrious 1905 year included work on already established sub-atomic phenomena, including the photo-electric effect.) It is confused about leptons and quarks and what they have to do with Einstein. Be clear, though, that the various upheavals in physics say bugger all about 'bio-energy' and that the talk of a "holistic pattern" is gratuitious bullshit.

If I don't start dealing with my actual work in the next day or two, I might write to these folks and ask them if they know of, or are planning, any of the sort of clinical trial that would provide evidence of an effect greater than placebo. It won't be easy bothering, because what they do say about evidence would make it very surprising if the answer was yes. At least, unlike Roger Coghill, they're not offering incentives to kill babies as a sort of rhetorical pseudo-evidence.

BPSDB - Therapy as an alchemical process

Here's some supremely nebulous tosh, among other things illustrating that peer-review on its own can easily be an empty charade. It's by no means clear what is being asserted here, and it's even less clear what reasons are being given. Here, to start with, is the abstract:

In psychology, we can look at human beings either in their thing-like aspects or in their person-like aspects. One of the best places in which human beings can be studied as persons is in the arena of psychotherapy. Unfortunately, the prevalence of schoolism has meant that the findings of different schools of psychotherapy have not been integrated or indeed brought together in any way. But if we can take a wider view, we can see that there is actually a common path which therapy takes, which is common to all the schools. This paper is an attempt to outline this path. In doing so, I have found the fullest statement of it to be found in alchemical writings, but I have also found that as far as it goes, objective empirical research finds the same set of phases, and this suggests that alchemy may also be right about what goes beyond the orthodox research. It is rare to find something which unites the interests of the researcher and the practitioner, but here we have something which promises to do just that.

Ah, right. A generous reader might suppose that some serious metholological or maybe even metaphysical point is being made with the thing-person distinction. Nope. I looked in vain in the paper for any significant content being given to the putative distinction. The same point goes for other pseudo-distinctions drawn along the way, such as between understanding and explanation. Sigh.

The main positive claim seems to be that if you take a nebulous and vague enough conception of the therapeutic process you find it analogous to a nebulous and vague conception of medieval alchemy.

So, for example, therapy begins with the "Materia Prima" which is "what needs to be worked on, and is the most important and mysterious substance of all" (Oi! You at the back! Stop sniggering!). Presumably 'substances' are more like persons than things. Or not. Maybe things are like cheese, and persons are like dragons. Or something. Buggered if I can tell, and I've read this, and a pile of psychotherapy literature, and more renaissance neo-Platonist bullshit from primary texts than most.

And so it continues, for a series of stages.

Suppose that it really was the case that suitably vague conceptions of the therapeutic process and alchemy were in some sense analogous? So the f**k what?

The paper doesn't say. One tempting response is given by Wodehouse:

"Very good," I said coldly. "In that case, tinkerty-tonk." And I meant it to sting. (Right Ho, Jeeves - 1934).

It's also worth pointing that that other things being equal being found to stand in some relation of analogy with a false, superseded, bollocks theory (to the extent that Alchemy was a 'theory' at all) is hardly good news. At least not to anyone who cares about whether her beliefs are true.

Maybe the real analogy is that peddlers of bollocks to the gullible can still turn patients into gold, even if hardly anyone (and nobody with a clue) takes substance alchemy seriously.

John Rowan (2001). Therapy as an alchemical process International Journal of Psychotherapy, 6 (3), 273-288 DOI: 10.1080/14698490120112129

IDiots at their mendacious games again...

As PZ Myers notes, there's a good post at Panda's Thumb called Von Neumann, Berlinski, and evolution: Who’s the hooter? It turns out (again, or should I say yet again) that defenders of ID are helping themselves to the usual mix of selective quotation, selective attention to the facts, wish-fulfillment driven bullshitting (in the sense of Frankfurt) and outright dishonesty. This is worth paying serious attention to: their 'mistakes' are not mistakes in the innocent sense - the fact that they all trend in the one direction (misrepresenting science, misrepresenting specific historical figures, leaving out the bits of context and background that you have to leave out to get even a fake case for ID off the ground) tells you something is driving the process. In this case it sure isn't natural selection - just the kind of systematic deliberate distortion that would end a scientific career, but turns out to be no obstacle to advancement among those of "faith".

The fame formula (bollocks)

So there's a book about the PR industry coming out, in which Mark Borkowski (read about him on Wikipedia) tries to make PR look like science. It seems to be utter bollocks. There's an extract in The Guardian. (The Guardian is an odd rag, combining quite sensible stuff (include Ben Goldacre's column) with cringeworthy trash, regularly including horrifying simpering in the media section. Here's a long-ish extract from the extract:

The formula for illustrating the decline in fame from its peak works out as follows:

F(T) = B+P(1/10T+1/2T2)

where:

F is the level of fame;

T is time, measured in three-monthly intervals. So T=1 is after three months, T=2 is after six months, etc. Fame is at its peak when T=0. (Putting T=0 into the equation gives an infinite fame peak, not mathematically accurate, perhaps, but the concept of the level of fame being off the radar is apposite.);

B is a base level of fame that we identified and quantified by analysing the average level of fame in the year before peak. For George Clooney, B would be a large number, but for a fabulous nobody, like a new Big Brother contestant, B is zero;

P is the increment of fame above the base level, that establishes the individual firmly at the front of public consciousness.

This formula fits the data remarkably well, giving a precise numerical value to the 15-month theory: if I put in T=5 (corresponding to 15 months after the peak), it gives F=B+P(1/50+1/50), which works out at F=B+.04P. In other words, up to 96% of the fame-boost achieved at the peak of public attention has been frittered away, and the client or product is almost back to base level.

Ah, right. So division by zero gives you infinity does it? Well, no. Division by zero is a meaningless operation in real number arithmetic, and from what I gather it's a headache trying to define it in just about any other domain.

Quoting Wolfram MathWorld:

To the persistent but misguided reader who insists on asking "What happens if I do divide by zero," Derbyshire (2004, p. 36) provides the slightly flippant but firm and concise response, "You can't. It's against the rules." Even in fields other than the real numbers, division by zero is never allowed (Derbyshire 2004, p. 266)

(Reference: Derbyshire, J. Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. New York: Penguin, 2004.)

It's bollocks, Jim, just as we know it.

Odd God

So apparently God has been writing his name (Allah in this case) on pieces of cooked beef. As the BBC reports a guy in Nigeria was about to nosh on a piece of meat, when he "suddenly noticed the words in the gristle".

"When the writings were discovered there were some Islamic scholars who come and eat here and they all commented that it was a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind," the Beeb quotes the restaurant owner as having said.

According to the same source, there's previously been divine grafitti in a tomato and on a fish. In all cases this is pretty optimistic blotchology.

Let me get this right. You're supposed to be the boss of the universe. You could -- were you so minded -- write your name in the stars in the sky, or with a mountain range or something. Or just show up with suitable clamour and fanfare to remind folks "oi!, I'm in charge". Or deal out a suitable and unmistakable vanquishing to some crowd following the wrong God or a non-God. Instead, you sneak about putting a few odd blotches onto a fish, in a tomato and on some gristle. I'm sorry, but this sounds more like the behavior of a stalker (contriving 'accidental' and deniable encounters) than a supreme being.

Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism

Let me not mince words. This is the most egregious bullsh*t(1) I've ever read in a peer-reviewed journal. It claims that "the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge" and that "scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct" this dominant, "fascist", movement.

Ben Goldacre picked it up a while ago. (There's also a lively comment thread.) The paper dates from 2006, so there's probably more criticism on there on the tubes too.

Before saying something about what's up, here's the abstract, in full, so you can see clearly that I'm not trying to make these bozos out to be madder than they are:

Background Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.
Objective The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm -- that of post-positivism -- but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure.
Conclusion The Cochrane Group, among others, has created a hierarchy that has been endorsed by many academic institutions, and that serves to (re)produce the exclusion of certain forms of research. Because ‘regimes of truth’ such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.
Key words: critique, deconstruction, evidence-based, fascism, health sciences, power.

Whew.

At least they say that they're going to "demonstrate" something. So there's going to be an argument, right - they'll give reasons, maybe some evidence. Let's see.

The first section of the article headed 'Introduction' is just scene setting - a longer version of the abstract with some name-dropping and some yelling, and bald insistence on draining the word fascist of all discriminating content, so that 'fascist'(2) turns out to mean just 'dominant' and 'exclusionary'. No argument here.

The second section starts with a paragraph describing(3) 'EHBS' (evidence-based health sciences). The authors give zero indication of understanding the reasons for the evidence-based approach, of properly used statistics, the need for control groups, the point of randomization, etc.

The second paragraph begins:

"At first glance, EBHS seems beneficial for positive patient outcomes, which is a primary healthcare objective."

WTF!?

• Why "At first glance"? What the hell have glances got to do with anything here, when you're talking about efficacy study design, data analysis, etc.? Makes no sense at all unless you see that this is just more rhetoric. They're implying that EBHS only seems like a good idea superfically.
• And notice the "seems". Why say "seems" when you've just pretended to give a description of the case for the evidence-based approach? Why not either acknowledge the case, or give reasons against it?

They continue:

"As a consequence, it is easy for healthcare researchers and clinicians to assume that EBHS is the method to assure that patients receive optimal care."

• "Assume"? Why not "recognise on the basis of good reasons relating to what counts as evidence for efficacy"?
• So a key part of the plot should be pretty clear by now. They persistently fail to acknowledge the arguments in favour of EBHS, or to give a fair description of EBHS. Then, they insinuate that supporters of EBHS are the ones guilty of superficiality, for believing things "at first glance" etc.

The other main ingredients here are:

• A bunch of name calling ('fascist', etc.).
• Some mis-representations of the work of certain French philosophers.
• More preposterous non-sequiturs and pastiches of arguments.

Two more examples picked more or less at random:

• We're told portentously that deconstruction is "notoriously difficult to define because it's a practice, and not a fixed concept" as though it's a generally recognised truism that practices (like nose-picking) are that much harder to define than concepts (like the concept of a surreal number). Uh, sure, that seems like the sort of thing that would be convincing at first glace to a group of lazy twerps passing of drivel as scholarship.
• We're told that people who care about "evidence" maintain a "Newtonian, mechanistic world view". Cool. That'll explain why there's no evidence for anything non-Newtonian in the universe like, uh...

I'm sorry. I can't write any more about this. It's too annoying. I re-read the whole text carefully looking carefully for a paragraph that contained an argument that seemed worth taking seriously, or that showed any genuine appreciation of the fact that there are arguments in favour of the key features of EHBC, or that made a single scientific, historical or philosophical claim that did immediately make me think of two or three immediate criticisms based on general knowledge. Nada. This is bullshit of the first water. If you already thought evidence mattered, you'll get no reason to change your mind here, because there's no argument. If you didn't care about evidence, there's no point reasoning with you. Maybe if you had a bird-cage that needed a new floor-lining...

There may be worse, though. For now I'm too scared to look properly.

Endnotes:

(1) In the sense of Harry Frankfurt.

(2) Goldacre shows a picture of Cochrane himself taken during the Spanish Civil War, where he was among other internationals fighting against ... er ... the Fascists. We should not complain too loudly - there's probably another paper forthcoming arguing that anyone who thinks that evidence matters in any area at all, including what counts as fascism, is a fascist.

(3) Not just describing - there's some undermining by rhetoric through use of constructions like "are believed" and "is deemed" in place of acknowledging that there are arguments in favour of a certain position. It is believed that this sort of strategy of undermining by insinuation is especially popular among weasels and cloth-eared constructivist bottom feeders.

Holmes, D., Murray, S.J., Perron, A., Rail, G. (2006). Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism. International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare, 4(3), 180-186. DOI: 10.1111/j.1479-6988.2006.00041.x