Author: Jacques Rousseau

Jacques Rousseau teaches critical thinking and ethics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is the founder and director of the Free Society Institute, a non-profit organisation promoting secular humanism and scientific reasoning.

Religion in education: when government officials violate the law

Earlier today, Barry Bateman sent me this:

barrybateman_2014-Dec-04

For those of you whose Afrikaans is as poor as mine, a rough translation would look something like this:

Instead of a moment of silence, schools under his leadership can have a moment of prayer. Preachers were previously not welcome at schools, “but I’m opening schools up to preachers”, said Panyaza Lesufi, MEC for Education in Gauteng.

“Schools can decide for themselves which prayers they would like to offer at their school. Each school has the right to practice religious activity, so long as it’s not harmful, like Satanism. If Satanism is followed, I’ll bring the police into it. Why do we find Bibles in hotels, but not in schools? In my first 100 days in office, I distributed 50 000 Bibles to schools.”

Lesufi also said that if we want to understand problems in schools, we need to understand the souls of schoolchildren. In answer to a question regarding the pending court case, brought by OGOD against six schools in light of those schools’ Christian characters, Lesufi said that 85% of South Africans are Christian.

“As I last understood the Constitution, it was the majority that won.”

The same Department of Education recently held a prayer meeting for prospective matriculants, at which Lesufi remarked that “We support all the pastors and reverends in our school”.

2012_5$thumbimg131_May_2012_092556310-llLesufi is not the first Gauteng Education MEC that seems to have difficulty keeping their personal religious views out of the frame when doing their jobs – last year, Barbara Creecy singled out Satanism and “the occult” as dangerous, despite the fact that we have a community of pagans, Wiccans, Satanists and the like who pose no threat to anyone, and whose religious freedom is Constitutionally protected.

As I’ve noted on numerous occasions now, we have a policy on religion in education, and it’s pretty good. Unfortunately, our politicians (and schools) are pretty good at ignoring it. It calls for secularism in schools, in the sense that schools cannot proselytising for one faith to the exclusion of others. Secularism isn’t anti-religion – it’s anti schools being used as proxy churches.

Given this policy, you’d hope that MECs and MPs – as public representatives of the government, who adopted the policy in question – would themselves respect it, and not abuse their positions of authority to push the agenda of one religion.

If Lesufi were to do the same thing with regard to a building contract, or somesuch – i.e. use his authority to get a mate some lucrative deals for building schools in Gauteng – he’d be investigated, and hopefully fired. It’s an abuse of power and authority to introduce Christian prayer, and Christian texts, into public (and thus by definition, secular) schools.

Furthermore, who is paying for these 50 000 Bibles? Presumably, the Department of Education or the Gauteng government. Either way, that would be an abuse of public money. It’s not on the scale of Nkandla, of course, but simply because you might like the product he’s stealing your money to distribute to schools, doesn’t make it less of a theft.

Two final points: Lesufi violates the religious freedom and dignity of non-Christians, specifically Satanists, in the quote above. You cannot threaten someone with the police for holding religious views you don’t like. And, Satanism is not a synonym for certain (or, any) criminal activity.

As I’ve written before, Satanism does not encourage human sacrifices – it’s Christian propaganda versions of Satanism that these confused kids who commit murders and sacrifices are falling prey to. And this is again why the National Policy on Religion and Education gets things right, in the sense that it calls for instruction on all religions. If we do that, fewer kids will have the false beliefs that might encourage criminal activity like that.

Finally, this MEC needs a refresher course in democracy and the value of our Constitution for protecting rights and freedoms. We signed up for a system in which the majority don’t necessarily get their way, because we recognise that the majority can abuse their power.

We signed up for religious freedom, because even you, Mr. Lesufi, should recognise that this protects you too – as it’s a purely contingent fact that you happen to share the majority view. If you happen to convert to something else, or lose your faith, you’d perhaps better understand why it’s rather important that the state stay out of religion entirely.

(Incidentally, Lesufi’s 85% figure seems entirely made-up – the last reliable data we have is from the 2001 Census, which had Christians as 79.77% of the population, and I’d be surprised if that figure hadn’t decreased since then.)

As ever, nothing will come of this, because all the lovely policy in the world is powerless against untouchable power, led by a man – Jacob Zuma – who has offered various masterclasses in how not to give a shit about the law.

Yes, this particular case is very trivial in comparison. But it’s still wrong, and Lesufi should know better.

Is Noakes the North Korea of epistemology?

On November 25, I gave a talk with the above title at an event hosted by SAAFoST* and ADSA**. Unfortunately, the proceedings weren’t recorded, so you won’t be able to hear the superb presentation that preceded mine, by Dr. Celeste Naude, who focused on an evidence-based approach for differentiating between varying macronutrient-focused diets.

Those of you who are interested in the topic of diets, and specifically the role Prof. Noakes has played in popularising the LCHF approach to diet, might already know of the recent study by Naude and others, which found that low carb diets showed a similar reduction in weight to other diets. Noakes’ response to that study was to say that the “researchers have no clue”. I leave it to you to determine who you find more persuasive.

You won’t be able to watch my talk as presented either, but in case it’s of interest, I decided to record a version of it in any case, accompanied by the slides I showed on the day. By contrast to Dr. Naude, who focused on science, I focused on rhetoric, hyperbole, and sound scientific reasoning – or, the lack of it.

You can find that recording immediately below, followed by the approximate text of the presentation. It hasn’t been edited into essay form, so is telegraphic in places. Lastly, I’ve embedded the presentation slides at the end, for no particular reason.

*SAAFost: the South African Association of Food Science and Technology

**ADSA: the Association for Dietetics in South Africa

Is Noakes the North Korea of epistemology?

Betteridge’s Law – any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered with “no”.

Of course, “no” is part of the answer here – if we are asking the question of whether Prof Noakes is a propagandist who leads a repressive state, and is implicated in various human rights abuses, the answer is clearly no.

I’m also make no claims with regard to their relative levels of sincerity. In the case of Prof. Noakes, I’m of the view that he is utterly sincere, and desires nothing but to enhance the health and wellbeing of those he engages with. He’s received far too much abuse related to claims regarding a profit motive, for example, and I think that sort of abuse unjustified, and deplorable.

But that’s not what my title is alluding to. Instead, I’m highlighting the fact that the North Korean press machine has a habit of making hyperbolic claims, and Kim Jong Un for appearing in various baroque, grandiose, and sometimes merely perplexing situations, all to buttress his mystique and support a particular narrative.

This narrative is of him being misunderstood, a maverick, and a person who has privileged access to knowledge and opportunity that he is able to share with the enlightened or anointed. He serves as an inspiration, and in doing so, the impression created is more important than the evidence – marketing is the point, rather than content.

This is the sense in which Noakes is the North Korea of epistemology. As I will show, he displays a pattern of what philosophers and psychologists call “motivated reasoning”, which can be defined as confirmation bias turned up to 11.

You all know what confirmation bias is, I’d imagine: our predisposition to take evidence that confirms what we believe seriously, while discounting contrary evidence. What motivated reasoning adds is a substructure or foundation to this, in which the agent develops background rationalisations to justify holding the beliefs that others argue are false, or at least not settled conclusively at this point.

The motivated reasoner might see conspiracy instead of disagreement, and tends to react defensively to contrary evidence, seeing conspiracy, or dismissing it out of hand for other reasons instead of responding to it on its merits.

“I ignore what I consider not to be evidence” – Noakes.

The goal of my talk today is quite simple. I want to suggest to you that regardless of any debate on the virtues of the Banting diet – which I’m not interested in discussing, and haven’t expressed any public view on – there’s a language, method, and character that we should all value in scientists and scientific enquiry.

I believe that any of us who work in fields including science, education, or journalism have a responsibility to encourage a responsible epistemic approach, rather than to aim for persuasion above all else.

By this I mean an approach that is objective as regards the evidence, where we are willing to be wrong, and where we resist attacking the character or motives of opponents when arguments are the relevant issue.

Prof. Noakes has frequently set a bad example in these regards, and my concern as an educator – particularly one active in the field of critical reasoning – is that with 50 000 Twitter followers, and as an engaging and hard-working media personality who has garnered as many accolades as just about anyone you can think of in South African science, he has a powerful influence on how people perceive scientific activity.

One of the virtuous traits I mentioned a moment ago was a willingness to be wrong. Defenders of Noakes might immediately retort that of course he’s willing to be wrong – after all, he famously changed his mind on carbohydrates! And while this is a notable change of mind, it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) reassure anyone that it’s representative of a general disposition. As you’d know, it’s a single data point, and we don’t find a pattern in a single data point.

More to the point, perhaps, is that his own language regarding that change of mind comes with significant warning flags regarding his commitment to sound reasoning. Take this example:

At a public discussion with his erstwhile supervisor, Lionel Opie, in May 2014, Noakes told the audience “I’ve said one thing, and now I’m saying the exact opposite. And they can’t both be wrong. And that’s key.”

While a statement like that plays well to a crowd – and in this case, did result in some appreciative chuckles – it’s nonsense as far as logic is concerned.

He’s presenting his change of mind as evidence that he’s right now. And there are two immediate problems here – one is that the argument only gains traction if you agree with him that he was wrong before. If you think he was right then, then you’d think that he’s just strayed into error now.

The second way in which the logic is fundamentally flawed is that he’s suggesting that the audience embrace the logical fallacy of the false dilemma. What I mean is that the truth might actually be undiscovered, and exist somewhere in the middle – it’s not the case that one of the two extremes he’s suggested at various points have to be correct. We have other options, and he’s misrepresenting the choices available to us in leaving them out.

We should all – maybe A-rated scientists, teachers, and public figures in particular – have a concern for good scientific thinking and clear reasoning in expressing the conclusions we’d like to see adopted. Science does not work in absolute truths – it’s an inductive process, whereby we chisel away at falsehoods to arrive at a clearer understanding of what’s most likely to be true. The example above recommends absolutism, despite that being manifestly incompatible with the messy world of empirical data.

At various points in today’s talk, I’ll be showing you examples of statements like these, made by Prof Noakes on public media. There are many more such examples, but it would be tedious to belabor the point through repetition.

But I mention this to offset concerns you might have that I’m indulging in cherry-picking here – the pattern is unmistakeable in itself, and more to the point, many of the examples I’ll show you are examples of Noakes responding to critics accusing him of over-simplifying. In other words, even after applying the principle of charity and seeking clarification from him, his responses validate the concerns I’ll be highlighting.

A taxonomy of trouble

For ease of reference, I’ve loosely categorized the issues into 5 groups:

  • Indiscriminate use of sources
  • Ad hominem & double-standards
  • Exaggeration and immunity to error
  • Salesmanship over science
  • Errors in scientific reasoning

INDISCRIMINATE USE OF SOURCES

Chemicals that may cause diabetes – Noakes links to Natural News.

This is the site that argues that Microsoft are developing eugenics vaccines. And that HIV doesn’t cause Aids. And Icke? The world is controlled by reptiles from outer space, who live in underground tunnels and take on human form (Thatcher, Bush)

“Next they say it has been discovered before. Lastly they say they always believed it. Louis Agassiz.” – Noakes links to evolution-denier.

This from a series of tweets explaining how his conclusions will be vindicated in the end. But if you’re going to suggest that there are better and worse ways of proceeding in science, perhaps better examples than Agassiz could be chosen. He is, after all, an evolution-denier, and a proponent of scientific racism – does one want to cite him as an authority on the scientific method?

“@natachab Weston Price http://amzn.to/15c8xRz believed superior nutrition of trad societies protected against TB. Need LCHF HIV/TB trial” – and to a “holistic dentist”.

Weston Price – “holistic dentist” whose treatments included homeopathy. The site carries numerous articles arguing that vaccines cause autism. Current board member Joseph Mercola has received at least three FDA warnings for making misleading and/or unsubstantiated claims regarding the products he sells.

AD HOMINEM & DOUBLE STANDARDS

Starting on a sound note…
“. @katjanechild Only you know what motivates you, Katherine. My advice: Play the ball, not the man and you will go far.”

“Obese dietician from British Dietetics Assoc tells us on BBC News that @DrAseemMalhotra article is wrong. Will believe her when she loses wt”

“I do not understand why you pay any attention to Dr Witt, who has absolutely no qualifications in this field and is a few years out of medical school.”

On Anthony Dalby, a more recent critic: “Noakes said the doctor who said that happened to weigh 120kg.”

.@Fatworks @Briganto @livinlowcarbman @youmustbenuts That happens when the truth is not on your side. Yet to meet an obnoxious LCHF advocate

Prescription? A mirror.

OVERSTATING THE CASE/IMMUNITY TO ERROR

“If you don’t eat carbohydrates, you don’t have to worry about cancer” – @ProfTimNoakes . Moerse gevaarlike stelling!!!”

Noakes responds: “@RugbyPrinses Where and when did I say that? Or did someone else say I said that?Do you honestly think I would make such absolute statement?”

Franschhoek: “If you’re insulin resistant, you do not have to get any disease whatsoever. If you eat a high-fat diet all your life, you will not develop diabetes, you will not get cancer, you will not get dementia. That I can guarantee you” – that’s where, and when (audio).

“Sweden becomes first nation to reject high fat dogma!” Noakes was making this claim in 2013, when the SBU report wasn’t even available in English, RT’ing AuthorityNutrition & Diet Doctor.

The authors of the (independent) body eventually had to step in and tell people to stop saying this. Report just on obesity, not necessarily generalisable, and:

Two mis-interpretations have, in our opinion occurred in the wake of the publication of the SBU report. One is that low carb high fat is by far better. Yes, during the first 6 months you lose weight faster on low carbohydrate diets. But after one and two years that diet has no advantage than other diets for obesity.

After having this pointed out to her, Teicholz blocks me and others. I couldn’t point it out to Noakes, because contrary voices also get blocked from being heard on his timeline. Contrary to what I think the ideal approach – of seeking out ways in which you could improve your arguments – motivated reasoning can involve simply shutting out dissent.

Then, addiction, where I fear that the LCHF movement is doing great harm to public understanding of the difference between compulsive and destructive behavior, and lifestyle choices which can be better or worse but are not intrinsically problematic.

From Real Meal Revolution:

The final blow to the gut: because carbohydrates are nutrient-deficient and often packaged with salt and sugar, you feel the need to eat more of them, thereby putting yourself into a near-perpetual cycle of weight gain.
Unless, of course, you break the addiction…

There’s plenty of “addiction” talk on his Twitter feed, as well as a partnership with Harmony Clinic in Hout Bay, that offers in and outpatient treatment for sugar addiction. Well, Harmony Clinic now liquidated, so perhaps not anymore.

The problem is – there’s no compelling evidence for sugar addiction, yet, and the case is being overstated in the service of promoting Banting.

What should we then say about so-called “addictive” foodstuffs? The first thing to remember is the point Paracelsus made in the 15th century – “the dose makes the poison”.

While there might be no safe number of cigarettes to smoke, there will be a dosage of carbohydrates, or sugar, that’s unproblematic in all but the most rare of cases.

Let’s look more closely at sugar addiction, and addiction in general. Two papers are typically cited as evidence for sugar being addictive. But what they mostly reveal is that science journalists no longer read or understand the journals, and that the public – and some professionals – are far too trusting when it comes to the sensational headlines that convey elements of those studies to us.

First, the Avena study, published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews in 2007:

“we suggest that sugar, as common as it is, nonetheless meets the criteria for a substance of abuse and may be “addictive” for some individuals when consumed in a “binge-like” manner.”

Pause there – who might be inclined to consume in a “binge-like” fashion? Perhaps someone with a pre-existing impulse control disorder, who happens to latch on to sugar – the reverse inference from the bingeing to the sugar might get the causal direction entirely back-to-front. We’ll get back to the neurochemistry later, but also, notice the scare-quotes – the author is hedging her bets, with the text only weakly supportive of any claim to sugar addiction.

One is perhaps reminded of a line from Lewis Carrol’s “Through the looking glass”, where Humpty Dumpty said: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Then, there’s Johnson & Kenny’s paper in Nature Neuroscience (2010) on junk food and addiction, also conducted on rats.

“Notably, it is unclear whether deficits in rewards processing are constitutive and precede obesity, or whether excessive consumption of palatable food can drive reward dysfunction and thereby contribute to diet-induced obesity.”

As in the Avena study, we don’t know whether an impulse control disorder is simply being expressed – rather than discovered as an effect, resulting from the junk food – in this experiment.

Yes, if you grow to like something (or find it rewarding), you’ll seek it out. This does not mean the thing is innately addictive. In fact, Hebebrand’s recently published paper in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews concludes that if anything, “eating addiction” rather than “food addiction” best captures what’s going on when people compulsively over-eat. The food is an expression, not a cause of the impulse control disorder.

We can easily engage in a battle of link-sharing – but the point is that the truth is complex, and not settled by individual studies. In this case, there’s one clear issue with using these studies as definitive, and this is that both of these studies use brain imaging to support their conclusions.

As Sally Satel (who works as a psychiatrist in a methadone clinic) puts it, brain scanning is “a perfect storm of seduction”. The technology promises great revelations and great objectivity. More to the point of my presentation today, it offers the possibility of eliminating your responsibility for what’s wrong with you – we can say, “it wasn’t me, it was my brain!”

This image is interesting is that it neatly summarises why you can’t reach firm conclusions from fMRI data. This fish is in fact dead, yet the scanner showed signs of brain activity.

fMRI data are suggestive, and weakly so at that, in that they reflect neural correlates of various stimuli, and nothing of the perceived and subjective mental responses to those stimuli.

In slightly more detail: Increased blood flow and a boost in oxygen are treated as proxies for increased activation of neurons, and from there we induce to what those neurons are doing. We compare that data to a baseline, and subtract the one from the other, averaging out over the many data points of all participants in a study, with software filtering out background noise, and creating the seductive images.

But our experimental conditions are imperfect – think of the difficulties of creating appropriate baseline tests, for one – and large sample sizes cost a lot of money. Add to that the fact that our brains can process the same stimuli in different regions – no one specific area can reliably be said to perform the same task for all of us – and it should be clear that it’s far too soon to reach definitive conclusions from fMRI data.

The philosophical problem is one of reverse inference – we reason backward from neural activation to subjective experience. But if identified brain structures rarely perform single tasks, one-to-one mapping between activation in a region and a mental state is very speculative.

To avoid the false positive of the fish brain activity above, we need to use multiple comparison fMRI, which comes at far greater expense in terms of cost and time. But headlines don’t have space for subtleties, and furthermore, novel and exciting claims get the public’s attention. If your fMRI scans can be said to show that sugar is more addictive than cocaine, you’re guaranteed some prime media attention, and who can blame you for trying to capitalize on that? Well, perhaps nobody can blame you if you’re trying to sell newspapers. And perhaps we can blame you, or be rather concerned, if you’re presenting yourself as a responsible scientist.

We can’t tell – yet – whether fMRI scans indicate an impulse that is irresistible, or one that simply hasn’t been resisted. But it’s easier to make choices when you believe that there’s a choice to make, rather than a forced one, such that an “addiction” narrative might support. Diminished expectations of agency lead to diminished agency – if you’re not aware of your choices, it’s more difficult to make choices. So, it’s politically useful to say that carbs are addictive – but that isn’t equivalent to it being true.

“But at least we have a following. The great failing in science is not to be wrong – it is to be irrelevant.” – Noakes

SALESMANSHIP OVER SCIENCE & SENSITIVITY

“Robin Williams was a vegan.Vegetarians are twice as likely to suffer mental illness.Humans are designed to eat meat.” @ProfTimNoakes RT’ed, the day of Williams’ suicide.

Response when challenged:
“@theviscountess @HermanBeukes Was Mr Williams informed about association between meat-free diet and mental health? http://1.usa.gov/1t2janN”

Then when people point out how poor that paper is, he appeals to the association, even though when anyone cites associational data in favour of low fat, he rejects it.

“Dr Bill Wilson wonders if the Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain (CARB) disorder played a role in Newtown tragedy http://bit.ly/URArgp”… Where a 20-year old fatally shot 20 kids, and gun control might be a more interesting conversation.

ERRORS IN SCIENTIFIC REASONING

What does the future hold for a pastry chef?
“@PastryKeegan The public will decide. In era of social media, public will eventually discover what works for each, independent of “experts”

Why are “experts” being trivialized here? Experts do exist, and the public are often misinformed. If experts disagree with you, then you defeat them in the battleground of expertise – peer reviewed journals. An army of laypeople doesn’t make the scientific case.

Why is journo Gary Taubes pushing for scientific studies into #LCHF diets (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/10/07/gary-why-we-get-fat-taubes-speaks-out-on-diet-studies-including-his-own/ …) while @ProfTimNoakes focuses on populism?

“.@sarahemilywild Because change will only come when public understands truth expressed in @garytaubes book. New science will not change that”

“New science” will not change the truth? And again, a scientist calling for less science?

September 2014, Australia

So, I watched it. Here’s one rather interesting bit (the text below is copied from a previous post):

And you must never trust consensus guidelines, because they are anti-science. Science is not about consensus, it’s about disproof, disbelief and skepticism. It’s not about consensus. When you’ve got consensus, you’ve got trouble.

This conflates two very different stories into one, to serve the rhetorical purpose of granting credence to the underdog-story. The two stories are first, that yes, dogma is antithetical to science. The second is that if a preponderance of evidence points in a consistent direction, consensus guidelines could be well-justified, and it would only be irrational or inattentive people who would not believe in that consensus.

In the second story, you’d have been rational to believe in the consensus account even if it later turns out to be false. The point is that denying a well-justified consensus doesn’t make you a better scientist – it makes you a conspiracy theorist, or simply wrong about the facts.

In other words, consensus guidelines that emerge out of honest engagement with the evidence, and that are open to correction, are not anti-science at all. They are the product of good science, and their later overturning (if that happens) in favour of a new consensus is also the product of good science.

You don’t measure or identify good science from its conclusions – because we don’t know that those will survive future data – but by method, and by openness to correction in light of evidence. The first kind of story mentioned above, involving dogma, is of course an example of bad science. That doesn’t mean that consensus is by definition bad.

Science is indeed about “disproof, disbelief and skepticism” – but all of these serve to challenge any existing view and replace it with a better one. They are tools, or methods, for reaching a better consensus, not for rejecting consensus in general.

The simplest way of putting the point is this: Noakes would like it to be the case that medical practitioners and educational programmes see the light, and teach the same message he professes. In other words, he’d like his own views to be the basis of a new consensus, because he believes that the existing consensus is wrong.

When you’ve got dogma, you’ve got trouble. And when you’ve got consensus, you might have dogma. But you might also have a bunch of responsible people agreeing that yes, that’s what the data imply, and until we learn something to overturn our view, the evidence leads us – as rational, responsible scientists – to a certain consensus.

In short, while the quote above can play as a sexy soundbite for undercutting received wisdom, it’s another instance of Noakes playing scorched earth with understanding of the scientific method.

He might say that the public health concerns are too significant to care about niceties like the ones I’ve been talking about today. To that, there are two immediate responses. First, sloppy thinking should arguably never be encouraged. For someone who is regarded as an inspiration by many budding scientists, and who is one of South Africa’s most decorated scientists, one might even argue that he has a moral obligation to encourage sound scientific thinking.

The second response is that even if this were true – that we should misrepresent the strength and consensus behind a certain dietary position, in order to save lives – we should be able to debate how far we’re allowed to take the misrepresentation.

But this would require agreeing that misrepresentation occurs, and Noakes insists that it’s others who are being obtuse rather than himself. More disturbing, perhaps, is that those who do disagree are ignored or blocked, or characterized as shills, or victims of “groupthink”.

In conclusion, two tweets that show the best and worst of Prof Noakes:

“.@Magarietha @umduzu @JSDKirby @davegreenway Many of my most vocal critics think science is easy and definitive. It is nuanced and complex”

Yes, it certainly is, and I wish he’d take his own counsel on these matters.

“Overlooked: If I am wrong, all that suffers is my reputation. If diet-heart is wrong, billions suffer. Scary responsibility.”

This is the worst, obviously, in that the consequences of him being wrong could be far more acute. The logic here is entirely circular, in that his conception of being “wrong” simply ignores all the harms that competing views say could result from a high-fat diet.

He’s assuming he’s right, even while speculating about the consequences if he were wrong.

Even Noakes’ supporters should expect more of him, for two reasons:

  1. The scientific method deserves better.
  2. If he’s right, he’s impairing the credibility his viewpoint garners. The same dietary advice could be given without the “aid” of examples like these, and that might well get the revolution taken seriously in a far more widespread fashion.

 

One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo

9781770227460Last night, some of the English liberals that Dan Roodt is currently whining about in court gathered at a launch party for Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo, and I came away with a copy of the book in question. Well, so did everyone who paid for a copy, but I mention this as a prelude to saying that I’ve read it, and can recommend that you procure yourself a copy too.

It’s very funny, for starters. There was something worthy of a laugh on the vast majority of its pages, and at some point, I noticed that I’d been reading with a constant smile for some sustained chunk of time.

From lines that are simply funny (“I’ve never run the Comrades but I have flown long-distance in economy class, which is more or less the same thing”) to extended self-deprecating observations on awkward encounters with doctors, sales assistants, and friends, it’s a constantly enjoyable read.

But it’s more than simply funny and charming. The book deals with many serious themes too, and is on occasion heartfelt (not sentimentally so), and often thoughtful and thought-provoking. At its heart, the book is about ageing, and about coming to terms with loss and failure, and there’s much in it to relate to.

Many of you will know that Darrel Bristow-Bovey spent a long time in the media wilderness after having been caught out plagiarising content from Bill Bryson, a mistake for which he has apologised. Opinions differ on these matters, but my perspective is that it’s unreasonable to hold someone hostage to an isolated incident from a decade ago.

Furthermore, he’s a fine writer, one I’d like to see more rather than less of in our newspapers and magazines. In sum, if you’re looking for Christmas gift ideas, or for something to read while taking a break from eating and drinking too much over the next couple of months, keep this book in mind.

Yet another opinion piece on #Shirtgate (or #Shirtstorm)

shirtgateWhile I realise that there are already hundreds of column-inches devoted to the issue of Rosetta scientist Matt Taylor and his shirt, I’m afraid I’m going to add a few more – mostly because most of those contributions have been in the international media, and 65% of my readership is in South Africa.

And it’s the South African responses that are annoying me, particularly on Facebook. They – like much of the international commentary, to be fair – are setting up an entirely false dichotomy between “feminist rage”, involving allegations of hypocrisy (“first you say we can wear what we like, but Taylor can’t?”); bullying (“Taylor harassed into a tearful apology”) offset against “the things that really matter”, whether it be the science itself, or the real root causes of sexism.

We don’t only have those choices. There are myriad positions available between them, and various combinations of them that are possible too – it’s entirely plausible that someone might, for example, be concerned about the signal that Taylor’s shirt might send (how it might be perceived, rather than how it’s intended), and also be gobsmacked by the scientific achievement of Rosetta.

And then, one can have this conversation without bullying – and talk about both these things at the same time. It’s not well-established that significant amounts of bullying even happened, depending on how you define bullying, of course. But because everyone is saying that’s what happened, it seems folk feel entitled to treat it as fact, even hyperbolising to the extent that Boris Johnson can speak of Taylor’s apology being “like something from the show trials of Stalin”, and his being

subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.

Of course you can find examples of Taylor being abused. My question is whether that was the typical or common response, or instead whether most commentators – perhaps outside of the filter-bubble of your prejudices (whether they be against “feminazis” or “misogynists”, both of which can be misidentified) – simply used the shirt as a springboard for a broader conversation about sexism in science, without vilifying Taylor?

In other words, is it true that the Left has “turned into Rick Santorum” – and even if it’s true, is this a good example of that, or is this case being misrepresented, meaning that we don’t get to talk about sexism in science for fear of being spoken of in this sort of supercilious tone:

Because you can criticise without “whining”, and you can celebrate the science while still criticising, less or more hyperbolically. When all the conversation is about how everyone who is criticising is “whining” – and everyone who is not is somehow complicit in sexism – then we don’t get to talk about both things (the science as well as sexism). And I’d hate to lose either topic.

To spell out why Dawkins is wrong, above: The problem here is that it sets up a simple false dichotomy, and again demonstrates the limitations of Twitter as a medium for expressing complex thoughts. (Which should make smart people, like Dawkins, more careful of what they say.)

The false dichotomy is in presenting the option of true feminism (whatever that is) in opposition to the “pompous idiots”, without recognising that there are permutations of feminism that are legitimate, and can be nevertheless be concerned about the shirt. (We’ll leave aside whether Dawkins gets to be the arbiter of what feminism is.)

There’s also an obvious straw man, on two counts – one, that everyone is whining (rather than expressing concern); and two, the implication that there’s a zero-sum game between talking about the shirt and talking about the marvellous scientific achievement of Rosetta.

Of course some treatment of Taylor can be over-the-top. But dismissing all concerns as whining from pompous idiots is oblivious, shoddy thinking.

And talking about “feminism” or “feminists” without allowing for these nuances involves painting with far too broad a brush. For me, the shirt is the springboard to a conversation that’s worth keeping going, and some “feminists” (or just humans concerned with fairness and so forth) are simply using it as that.

Other “feminists” are indeed over-reacting to the shirt as a token or instance of sexism, which then does (or can) detract from both the larger and more important issue of sexism in STEM, and can also detract from conversations about Rosetta. As I ask above, it’s legitimate to ask – not simply assert – that they are typical.

The Dawkins tweet, and comments saying that “feminists” are over-reacting, assume that everyone is in the second, hyperbolic and reactionary camp.

That’s a caricature, and to me, it’s a caricature that suggests an anti-feminist bias.

South Africa (apparently) intends to break the Westminster system

mmusibelieve11871416618143538425242123914580nEarlier today, I tweeted that I didn’t agree with the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) strategy of no longer recognising the Speaker of Parliament. Besides wondering quite how this could be effected, I also suggested that gambits aimed at breaking the Parliamentary process hardly seemed appropriate for an already broken institution.

A friend on Twitter asked what I would suggest as an alternative to what the DA has chosen to do, and this is my answer to him. Well, an answer, and also some reflection on the situation in general.

I’m not going to rehash what happened in Parliament yesterday, and will instead point you to Rebecca Davis’ column, which does a fine job of highlighting what a unfortunate session of Parliament this was for anyone who holds out hope that our nation’s affairs are being governed by reasonable people.

So, in light of those events, Mmusi Maimane (DA Parliamentary Leader) released a statement that begins with:

Events in Parliament yesterday represent a turning point for our democracy and has fundamentally changed the DA’s approach to Parliament. Baleka Mbete lost control of the House and destroyed her credibility as the Speaker. Accordingly, we will cease to recognise her authority as Speaker.

Every time she presides over the House, the DA will only send its Chief Whip, Deputy Chief Whip and those members participating in debates.

By “fundamentally changed”, Maimane seems to mean that they intend to read the mandate that many South Africans have given them to represent them in Parliament, vote on bills, hold the Executive to account and so forth, as giving them licence to rather take their toys and go home.

Because instead of a potential 89 (the number of DA representatives in the National Assembly) (NA) voices, there will now only be the handful described in that last paragraph, quoted above, and the 22.2% of South Africans who voted for the DA might as well have “fundamentally changed” their attitudes towards elections also, and not bothered to vote.

Yes, I get that these are tactics of brinkmanship, where the DA might hope that the pared-down Parliament resulting from this move might provoke the ruling party into fearing a loss of perceived legitimacy in respect of the National Assembly. But if what you’re complaining about is a ruling party that you think above the law, and contemptuous of the opposition, how likely do you think a favourable result is?

More important, for me, are some matters of principle. One, as I’ve already noted, is that DA MPs have a job to do, and their Parliamentary Leader is telling them not to do that job.

Second, tactics like walk-outs (and this is basically an extended and generalised walk-out) need to be used sparingly. A walk-out is one of the strongest protest signals the opposition has, and one doesn’t want to use your strongest currency without exhausting all other options. Now, in this case – given that riot police were in Parliament, assaulting MPs and so forth, a walk-out might well be the appropriate action.

Except, they do it all the time – not just the DA, but other parties too. So, instead of provoking as significant a reaction as it should (“What? All the elected officials of party X, paid R1-Million a year to do job Y, have walked out of Parliament? Either there’s a crisis, or they need to explain themselves. Either way, I care.”), one instead thinks of the boy who cried wolf, and what rhetoric Maimane will need next time he wants to lead a walk-out. Which will probably be next week.

Walk-outs can be an abrogation of your responsibilities to the voters. They can also impair credibility, not only because credibility can be impaired inside the NA but also with the electorate, some of whom still associate the DA with negativity and obstructionism.

Credibility is also impaired through what looks like opportunistic application of one principle in one case, and very different principles in another. Compare and contrast Helen Zille defending yesterday’s filibustering tactics with this DA statement (from Dene Smuts) on Ambrosini’s filibustering in 2011:

But we can, and do, object to the fact that he is subjecting the South African Parliament to a political stunt. His actions demean the national legislative authority of the Republic of South Africa.

It’s different when we do it, I guess.

Third, some of our conventions only have moral force through common assent – they’re grounded in a sort of social contract, where they work because we all agree that they should work in a certain way, and are valuable because they often, in fact, do so.

Maimane is dead right that Mbete is a terrible Speaker, who has utterly failed to hide the fact that she’s defending the ruling party’s interests wherever and whenever she can. She’s a disgrace to the position, and needs to be gotten rid of. But, according to the rules, if she tells you to leave the NA, you need to leave the NA.

And when she told Michael Walters (deputy chief whip of the DA) to sit, and then to leave after he refused to sit, it’s the DA who break that social contract. The DA can’t claim a moral high-ground involving Mbete and the ANC provoking the violence of yesterday, without reflecting on the fact that there were various provocations along the way to that – and that some of them involved the DA, and specifically involved the DA ignoring the same set of conventions that they want Mbete censured for ignoring.

There are differences of degree, no question – as I say above, I’m addressing matters of principle alone, and making the point that it’s not only the ANC who is breaking the relevant social contract. If told to leave, you leave, and use the fact that you were capriciously ejected as ammunition for future battles, rather than running the risk of your refusal prompting an even less productive session for your colleagues, and the citizens you represent.

To conclude, and in part-answer to the question that prompted this column, what would I have suggested instead of what Maimane says in his statement? Well, I suspect that I would have written a far more strongly worded letter, which would have made it clear that the party no longer recognised her moral, rather than her literal, authority.

I would perhaps have embarrassed her with a list of all the ways in which she’s let the NA, and the country, down, and highlighted moments in which she destroyed her credibility – in short, the purpose of the press release would simply be to demonstrate that she’s demonstrably not fit for purpose.

It would have been just on that topic, not about Zuma not attending question and answer sessions, or Lindiwe Zulu attacking an opposition MP, so as to make it clear that as far as you were concerned, this Speaker is contemptible.

Then, I would have told my caucus to get back to work, including respecting the Office of the Speaker, and including obeying instructions that the Speaker gives. If the party thinks they contravene the agreed conventions (and laws), then the people not ejected can make that point, sometimes winning and sometimes losing.

But at least the majority of the MPs will be in the House, able to do some work. Seeing them do that work in a dignified fashion, working within the rules, while simultaneously observing a Speaker making rulings that are biased, arbitrary and perhaps vindictive, might well do more good for both Parliament, and the DA’s share of the vote.

On robots, AI, and the future of humanity

robotaiA few weeks back, Sarah Wild asked if I’d be interested in offering a comment or two on artificial intelligence for a piece she was working on (the article in question appears in this week’s Mail & Guardian).

While I knew that only a sentence or two would make it into the article, I ended up writing quite a few more than that, and offer them below for those interested in what I had to say.

 

What role to humans have to play in a world in which computers can do everything better than they can?

In the most extreme scenario, humans might have no role to play – but we should be wary of thinking that we’re somehow deserving of playing one in any event. While it’s common for people to think of themselves, and the species, as both special and deserving of special attention, there’s no real ground for that except our high regard for ourselves, which I think unfounded. We don’t “deserve” to exist, or to thrive as a species, no matter how much we might like to. If the planet as a whole, including all sentient beings, would be better off with us taking a back seat or not existing at all, those of a Utilitarian persuasion might not think that a bad thing at all.

In a less pessimistic (for some) scenario, we’re still a very long way away from a world in which humans are redundant. Computers are capable of impressive feats of recall, but are significantly inferior to us at adapting to unpredictable situations. They’re currently more of a tool for implementing our wishes than something that can initiate and carry out projects independently, so humans will – for the foreseeable future – still be necessary for telling computers what to do, and also for building computers that are able to do what we’d like them to do more efficiently.

Elon Musk has said that AI offer human kind’s “greatest existential crisis”. What do you make of this statement?

This strikes me as bizarrely technophobic. We’re already at a point – and have been for decades – where the average human has no idea how the technology around them operates, and where we routinely place our faith in incomprehensible processes, machines and technologies. (Cf. Arthur C. Clarke’s comment that sufficiently advanced technology is “indistinguishable from magic”.) If it’s a level of alienation from the world we live and work in that triggers this crisis, I’d think we’d be in crisis already.

There seems no reason to prefer this moral panic or fear-mongering to what seems an equally plausible alternative, namely that the sort of alienation Marx was concerned about might be alleviated through AI. If machines can perform all of our routine tasks far more quickly, efficiently and cheaply than we currently can, perhaps we can spend more time having conversations, walks and dinners, rediscovering play over work, or generating art.

It’s probably true that there will be an interregnum wherein class divides will accentuate, in that wealthier people and nations will be first to have access to the means for enjoying these advances, but as with all technologies, they become cheaper and more accessible as our research advances. Technophobia as displayed by Musk here runs contrary to that, in that the last thing we want to do is to disincentivise people from engaging with these technologies through making them fearful of progress.

A recent Financial Times articles paints an apocalyptic AI future. What do you think a future world – with self-driving cars, care-giver robots, Watson-driven healthcare, etc – looks like?

The key fears around an AI future tend to be driven by the concept of the singularity, popularised by Ray Kurzweil. One possibility sketched by those who take the singularity seriously is that if we invent a super-intelligent computer, it would be able to immediately create even more intelligent versions of itself – and then this concept, applied recursively, means that we’d soon end up with something unfathomably intelligent, that might or might not think us worth keeping around.

Again, I think this pessimistic. We’d be building in safeguards along the way (perhaps akin to Clarke’s laws of robotics), and we’d likely see frighteningly smart computers coming years or decades in advance, allowing us to anticipate, to some extent at least, what safeguards would be necessary. Given the current state of AI, we’re so far away from this possibility that I don’t think it worth panicking about now (despite Kurzweil’s claim that the singularity will occur in 30 or so years from now).

(Incidentally, Nick Bostrom is very worth reading on these things.)

A more general reason to not be as concerned as folk like Kurzweil are is that I’d think malice against humans (or other beings) requires not only intelligence, but also sentience, and more specifically the ability to perceive pains and pleasures. Even the most intelligent AI might not be a person in the sense of being sentient and having those feelings, which seems to me to make it vanishingly unlikely that it would perceive us as a threat, seeing as it would not perceive itself to be something under threat from us. (A dissenting view is here.)

But to address the question more directly: such a world could be far superior to the world we currently live in. We make many mistakes – in healthcare, certainly when driving, and it’s simply ego that typically stands in the way of handing these tasks over to more reliable agents. Confirmation bias is at play here, and also mistaking anecdotes for data, in that when you react instinctively to avoid driving over a squirrel, the agency you feel so acutely feels exceptional, and validates fears that the robot driver might make the wrong choice (perhaps, sacrificing the live of its passenger to save other lives). On aggregate, though, the decisions that a sufficiently advanced AI would make would save more lives, and we are each individually typically in the position of the aggregate, not the exceptional. I therefore would think it immoral to not opt for robot drivers, once the data shows that they do a better job than we do.

(An older column about driverless cars, for more on this.)

What you do think is the most interesting piece of AI research underway at the moment?

On a broad interpretation of AI, I’d vote for transhumanism, without a doubt. We’ve been artificially enhancing ourselves for some time, whether through spectacles, doping in sport, Ritalin and so forth. But AI and better technology in general opens up the possibility for memory enhancement (one could perhaps even rewind your memories), or for modulating mood, strength and so forth. Perhaps these modifications will occur with the help of an AI implant, that modulates some of your characteristics in real-time, in response to your situation.

This would fundamentally change the nature of humans, in that we’d no longer be able to define ourselves as persons in the same way. Who you are – the philosophical conception of the person – has always been a topic of much debate, but this would detach those conversations from many of the factors we take for granted, namely that you are your attributes, such as the attribute of being a non-French speaker (with the right implant, everyone is a French speaker in the future).

It would also likely change the nature of trust, and relationships. Charlie Brooker’s “Black Mirror” TV series had a great episode (The Entire History of You) on this topic, suggesting that it would be catastrophic for human relationships – nobody would be able to lie about anything. It is this area (of human enhancement via AI/tech), rather than autonomous AI, that I think potentially far more worrisome.

But to answer your question more directly – neural network design is going to open up very exciting possibilities for problem-solving and planning. In everyday applications, we’re talking about Google Voice or Siri becoming the most effective PA imaginable. But in more important contexts, we might be fortunate to consult with robot physicians who save far more lives than is currently the case, perhaps with the help of nano-bots that repair cell damage from inside the body.

While many AI applications, such as driverless cars or Watson, offer societal benefits, robot caregivers arguably could damage ideas of collective responsibility for vulnerable people or erode filial responsibilities and make people less caring. Do you think that’s a valid concern? That as we outsource more of the jobs we don’t like, we lose our humanity?

Part – I’d say most – of what we currently value about human interaction has been driven by the ways in which we’ve been forced, by circumstance, ability, environment, to engage with people. In other words, I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that those relationships of feelings of commonality are connected to the ways in which we currently care for people. We need to avoid reifying these ideas into very particular forms. Speaking for myself, if I were living with a terminally-ill loved one, I can imagine my relationship with that person being enhanced by someone else performing various unpleasant tasks, which would mean that the time I spent with that person could be of a higher quality.

More generally, we’ve always outsourced jobs we don’t like to machines (or to poor people, of course) – I don’t see how this is a qualitatively different situation from the one we’re already in, rather than just another step on a continuum. Those who argue that these AI applications will cost us some humanity need to accept the burden of proof, and demonstrate that the new situations are incomparable to the old.

Joseph Conrad wrote, in Heart of Darkness, “I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself. You own reality — for yourself not for others — what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.” Do we impoverish our experience or fundamentally alter who we are by outsourcing less enjoyable work?

Much of what I said in response to the question above applies here also. We can’t restrict ourselves to one model of work, or certain sorts of activity, to find meaning – and never have. We’ve always adapted to different situations, and found whatever meaning we can in what it is that we’re engaged with. And optimistically, when we’re freed from running on various hamster-wheels, we might find forms of meaning that we never imagined existed.

When a muppet takes on a puppet – Steve Hofmeyr vs. @ChesterMissing

downloadForeign readers, if you want a snapshot of how weird and emotive racial politics in South Africa can get, here’s one for you: A man who thinks that “Blacks were the architects of apartheid” has now filed a harassment charge against a ventriloquist’s puppet.

Chester Missing (whose book I previously reviewed) is the puppet of ventriloquist, comedian, anthropologist (and friend), Conrad Koch. The puppet’s Twitter account has recently been quite vocal in denouncing the racist – and bewilderingly contrary-to-reality – statement captured above, in part because it was made by someone with a large audience (on Twitter, but more importantly as an award-winning musician who has sold truckloads of records to people who like Neil Diamond, but in Afrikaans).

Missing has also been asking Steve Hofmeyr’s sponsors whether they are concerned about the negative impact on their brands that might accrue from being associated with Hofmeyr. According to Hofmeyr and some of his followers (from what I’ve seen, mostly folks who are routinely associated with Afriforum and/or Praag, organisations that are overwhelmingly white and Afrikaans, and who are – charitably – tone-deaf and emotionally crippled when it comes to race), this amounts to harassment and defamation.

I don’t think it’s defamatory in principle, as you can see above. However, as I’ve argued in the past, I do think it’s possible for criticism to be sufficiently abusive or misdirected that it should be reined-in. (Having said that, the issue in the piece linked just above, on Mozilla and Eich, was for me more about picking the wrong target – Eich – rather than his religion and religious beliefs.)

In this case, though, I don’t see anything in Missing’s Twitter stream that crosses any kind of threshold into abuse, harassment or defamation. By contrast, I think that Hofmeyr needs to take responsibility for the statement he makes above, and others he’s made over the years, which give clear credence to an interpretation of racism, as commonly understood. (Conrad Koch has explained why he thinks the most recent statement is racist on his website, in case you’re Steve Hofmeyr or Dan Roodt, and need this explained to you.)

I’ll close with an example of a absurdly wrong-headed understanding of free speech and censorship, from the Institute of Race-Relations’ Frans Cronje (their name is misleading, in that you’d think they’re about improving race-relations, but I’ve rarely found that to be the case).

Why I say it’s wrong-headed is that obnoxious opinions need to be tolerated. He agrees with me on that, or so he says in the last (chronologically) of the three Tweets I’ll embed here.

But he gets there via chastising Chester (without naming the puppet) for trying to “silence” Hofmeyr.

Chester is doing exactly that, in challenging Hofmeyr’s idea that black South Africans are the architects of apartheid. If Hofmeyr chooses to fall silent in shame (or whatever), that’s his choice. The only entity that has the power to forcibly silence Hofmeyr are the courts, and guess what – only one of the two parties involved (Hofmeyr) has approached the courts.

Cronje’s argument works entirely contrary to his objectives here, in that this is precisely an argument against Hofmeyr approaching the police or courts to silence Missing.

To close the circle of absurdity with regard to South Africa’s racial politics, remember that Missing, in this case, is the puppet who is reminding others that Hofmeyr thinks blacks designed Apartheid, and Cronje is the CEO of the Institute of Race Relations.

And, he seems to want Missing to stop criticising Hofmeyr, while having no problem with Hofmeyr’s lawsuit. Go figure, indeed.

#Ebola: Support, don’t stigmatise

It’s irrational to not be afraid of dangerous things. We tend to avoid them for good reason – but in some cases, they are dangerous enough that we need to suppress our fears and engage with them, because the danger of not doing so is even more acute.

“We” is of course a gloss on something far more complex. It’s only some of “us” who do this, partly thanks to relative courage levels, and partly thanks to having or not having the requisite skills and knowledge.

But in the case of Ebola, clinicians, epidemiologists and other healthcare workers are not going to Sierra Leone and elsewhere because they want to expose themselves to a very scary risk. They are doing so in order to help eliminate this very scary risk – for themselves, for their families, for you.

Ebola is scary enough that engaging with it – no matter how terrifying it must be to do so – is the only way to eliminate it.

When people do engage with it – for all of our benefit – the last thing we should do is punish them for doing so. Panicking and pandering to fear through stigmatising them in quarantine – whether mandatory or socially imposed – does just that.

downloadWe know that asymptomatic people are not contagious. We know that mob mentalities based on fear are dangerous in cases like this (and more generally), in that we need people to be honest about where they have travelled to, and the risks they might have been exposed to – and if you know you’re going to be quarantined or shunned, you might simply lie instead.

We know that self-monitoring works. We know that we want to incentivise those who are willing and able to engage in this fight to do so, rather than to make them fear stigmatisation.

Pandering to fear is not the solution to Ebola. Watch the video below to see State troopers making sure that Kaci Hickox doesn’t leave her home, even though she’s not symptomatic, and has twice tested clear. CNN reports:

Having to defend herself and not being able to hug her friends, especially after four tough weeks in West Africa, is “painful (and) emotionally draining,” the nurse said. Hickox also said “it’s frustrating to hear nasty things,” saying her intentions going to Sierra Leone was to make “a difference in people’s lives” and her aim now that she’s back is not “to put anyone at risk in this community.”

Of course she wouldn’t want to put anyone at risk – she has a lover, she probably has a family. It would be shamefully insulting to treat her as if she’s putting you at risk, when she’s surely thought of who she might be putting at risk already, and wouldn’t be in public (rather than in voluntary quarantine or hospital) if she thought she was putting others at risk.

Here are some examples of over-reactions based on fear, and ignorance:

  • A North Carolina school district forced an assistant principal to stay home for 21 days because she visited South Africa
  • Several universities cancelled talks by people from Africa or those who had visited lately
  • A Congressional candidate called for a citywide “no touching” edict in Dallas

I’m currently in the USA, and am hearing far too many fearful conversations about the risks people perceive themselves as being exposed to. Americans can be somewhat paranoid, but the fear is most likely quite universal. It’s difficult, I know, but let’s not make our fears more likely to manifest themselves through panic and misinformation.

Does #Banting compromise humour and understanding of metaphor?

It’s been an amusing few days for those of us who follow the social media commentary related to Prof. Tim Noakes and the Banting diet. Earlier this week, an investment strategist named Magnus Heystek posted an opinion piece titled “Is Noakes running a Ponzi scheme?“, in which Heystek uses the example of Ponzi schemes (where people get suckered into poor investments via a combination of wishful thinking and deception) to riff on the “collective delusions” that can accompany diets.

The analogy is clear, even if imperfect – in the Banting analogue, someone uncharitably disposed towards what they think of as a fad diet could argue that the flock isn’t seeing the evidence and argument objectively, but are instead being seduced by the charisma of a person or an offer into a poor investment (in their health) – just as is the case in the investment analogue.

The analogy is imperfect in the sense that – as I’ve argued in the past – Noakes seems entirely sincere, and second that he is using the proceeds of the “real” meal revolution to fund research into health, rather than for personal enrichment. But even if imperfect, it’s fair comment, and has certainly provoked debate (if not much thought).

Heystek is making a similar point to the one that I’ve repeatedly made here, which is that the evangelical fervour in support of the diet, and the casual dismissals of any opposition to it as simply uninformed, both offer little reassurance that people are thinking things through carefully, rather than being in the grip of a collective delusion (of sorts).

There’s also a sense of humour and perspective failure in the responses – from the earnest (and unfortunately snide) response of one of Noakes’s co-authors, Jonno Proudfoot, to the Twitter contingent who think Noakes should sue for defamation, the Banters need to realise that as strong as they think the evidence is for their point of view, it’s not heresy to think things aren’t as simple as all that.

By contrast, what Heystek is pointing to (and again, my main point in all these words about Noakes and Banting) is that we already know things are not simple, and that we therefore have reason to believe that evangelism is taking the place of reason when people claim they are simple.

It’s when reason is sacrificed that we encounter Noakes saying, on the one hand, that when you get personal, you’ve lost the argument; and on the other hand dismissing the arguments of critics on the grounds of their being overweight (as he’s done at least twice, with Catherine Collins and with Anthony Dalby).

His followers have learnt the lesson well, rushing to dismiss Heystek on the grounds that he, too, could lose a few kilograms (which is something Heystek himself points out in the column, but since when does the playground pay attention to details like that?).

This doesn’t mean that criticism of Noakes and Banting can’t itself sometimes be overly simplistic – nobody is immune to error. Heystek was pricking a bubble of pomposity, though, not making a scientific argument, and his column needs to be read in that context.

By contrast, this Sunday Times piece arguing that Noakes has made a u-turn on dairy is shamefully misleading (rather than simply mischievous), and really just an example of someone exploiting a popular trend to generate some traffic, with complete disregard for the evidence.

The ninth of the “10 Commandments for beginner Banting” – right there in the first edition of “Real Meal Revolution”, you are told “Control your dairy. Although dairy is good for you, it does contain carbs and can be a stumbling block for some. In your Banting beginning, perhaps avoid eating too much dairy.” (I’m leaving complexities regarding particular forms of dairy aside here – they aren’t relevant to this argument.)

Later on in the book, readers are told: “If you are not intolerant to dairy products and find they do not affect your weight loss or blood sugar levels, aim for high-fat dairy products, not skim or reduced fat, light or fat-free alternatives – they must be full-fat.”

In other words, the advice regarding dairy was always qualified advice. The authors made a mistake in compiling their green, red and orange lists of foods, though, in that greenlisted foods were described as follows: “GREEN is an all-you-can-eat list – you can choose anything you like without worrying about the carbohydrate content as all the foods will be between 0 to 5g/100g. It will be almost impossible to overdo your carbohydrate intake by sticking to this group of foods.”

That needed a “terms and conditions apply” in the case of dairy, especially because we can predict in advance that many people would go for the simple heuristic of the list (you don’t even need to read the book for the list – it’s freely available on the Real Meal Revolution website), but despite this error, there’s no evidence of any flip-flopping or change of mind for dairy, as purported by the Sunday Times.

The team simply realised that dairy being in the green list was causing people to consume more of it than was compatible with the weight-loss they were expecting, so they moved it to the orange list – in line with the qualifications above. To put it even more simply, the heuristic of the colour-coded lists wasn’t sending the right signal, so it was adapted.

And then, because people don’t pay sufficient attention to detail or relevant qualifications as they sometimes should, there was a freak-out regarding dairy suddenly being unsafe, and Noakes having “changed his mind” – so they moved it back to the green list, and re-iterated the relevant qualifications.

So, no drama there. Of course, that didn’t stop the chief lobbyist for the Banting cause (or, “science” “journalist”) Marika Sboros, from using this as an excuse to write a new piece of hyperbolic prose in defence of her hero (in which she of course links to all her old pieces, which continue being edited and added to yet carry the same permalinks as before, which seems a rather odd way to practice journalism. But I digress.).

patrick3In this new piece, much effort is directed at undermining the criticisms made by Patrick Holford in relation to Noakes. Now, contrary to how some Noakesians like to read me, I’ve never called Noakes a quack (I have said he can sound like one, though) – but I have no reservations in calling Holford a quack, and I also think he’s a mendacious one, in that he knows he’s a fraud.

There’s no need to waste time debunking Holford’s criticisms, if you are Noakes or a mouthpiece of Noakes, like Sboros. Doing so is like writing a column refuting the metaphysical views of George down at the pub, as Holford is irrelevant to science and scientific reasoning – except as an example of doing so badly.

It’s perhaps instructive, though, that even Noakes seems to think he needs to play in that market, or believes that he should – I suppose that once you become a populist, it comes with certain obligations, or at least expectations. The thing that should concern you, though, if you are a Noakes-supporter, is how defending oneself against populist criticisms can lead you to oversimplification – itself a characteristic of populism.

Sboros reports that Noakes said (it’s not an attributed quote, unfortunately) that “the clear evidence is that carbohydrate in the diet is linked to colon cancer”, in response to Dr Roger Leicester (via Holford) claiming that Banting is a risk-factor for colon cancer. Noakes also says – and I’m sure that you’ll all find this as persuasive as I do – that “that’s all unscientific twaddle”.

Except, that’s utter bullshit. It might turn out to be false – as might any hypothesis – but right now, we’ve got good evidence that high red-meat consumption is associated with increased risk of colorectal cancer. And yes, association/correlation isn’t causation, but it’s the best clue as to causation available to us in many cases – and a staple of much pro-Banting literature also (and as much as you might like to, you don’t get to cherry-pick).

Oh wait, you do get to cherry pick. Sorry, I forgot.