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.

Honest communication about science

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date November 5, 2013
Categories In Academia and teaching, Science

It’s easy to lose objectivity when we feel strongly about an issue. Some of the things we feel strongly about might also be of great consequence, making it even more difficult to separate the strength of your emotional commitment from the strength of your argument. Some of the comment following my blog posts regarding Prof. Tim Noakes‘ research (especially on Twitter, where nuance is sometimes in short supply) ask why people like me focus on these issues, when obesity (or diabetes, or whatever) are such enormous problems – and the answer is simple, albeit two-fold.

First, because the more important something is, the more important it also becomes that our reasoning be sound, so that we can stand a better chance of convincing doubters. And second, because there are more problems in the world than simply obesity (etc.), and just because one of those is your focus, doesn’t mean it has to be mine. Furthermore, in what might come as a shock to some, it’s possible to focus on more than one of those problems at a time – you can promote critical reasoning while also caring about public health, for example.

I attended EthicsXchange this morning, a TEDx-style event where 11 speakers spoke on ethical challenges and potential responses to them. The Doctor has written about this event also, focusing on some of the hyperbole (such as the ‘addictive’ nature of sugar) we encountered on the day. Besides a general grumble regarding the oddity of an ethics conference that featured no ethicists, it was a worthwhile event. My favourite presentations were the ones that focused on the complexities and apparent contradictions we sometimes encounter in seeking the good, and I thought that my Vice Chancellor, Dr. Max Price, and Peter Bruce of Business Day did the best job of raising those issues.

It’s the talks on scientific themes that I want to briefly address here. I do so mostly as a prompt to those of us who speak or write about science to remember that we do live in an age of celebrity, short attention-spans and a lack of patience for complex arguments. What this adds up to is beautifully illustrated by a recent xkcd panel, reproduced below:

Sensation and hyperbole grab attention. TEDx-style talks are meant to be slick, yes – and it’s also not a bad thing to make science compelling (quite the contrary, in fact). But we should remember that science is about the method, not the conclusion. When we forget to reinforce the method of good science in expressing our conclusions, we’re sending the message that things are a) more certain and b) easier than they actually are. Of course there are permissible shortcuts, or liberties. When we say that we know, for certain, that smoking is a cause of cancer, it’s only a pedant who asks you to confess that yes, of course, nothing is ever absolutely certain and there might be some other factor we haven’t spotted, with smoking and cancer being caused by that, etc.

When we get to a certain level of justification, we can say we “know” something – even though what/where that level of justification is can (rightly) be contested. But what we should not do is say things like:

“The literature says that X” – when we know full well that some of the literature says X, while other literature says Y, with no clear consensus having yet emerged.
“We now know that X” – where X is really your preferred view, and not at all “known” but instead the subject of significant dispute

And then, there are some words that we just know – going in to our talk, or sitting down to write our column – that people are going to invest with greater significance than is merited. Words like “caused”, or “proven”, or even sometimes, “evidence”.

I’m not saying that we need to include a ream of disclaimers with every sentence. But if a popular science talk or piece of writing doesn’t make it quite clear that there’s room for reasonable doubt, it’s doing a disservice to the goal of getting people to think more critically and clearly about knowledge-claims.

No matter how important the scientific subject under discussion, the goal of promoting sound reasoning is a worthy one too. And there’s no reason why one of these goals has to be pursued at the expense of the other.

UCT Admissions policy – race and redress

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date October 29, 2013
Categories In Academia and teaching, Morality, Politics

The various Faculty Boards at the University of Cape Town are currently considering alternative models for UCT student admissions. These models arise from a debate the University has been having for some time now, regarding whether “race” is still the most effective identifier of likely disadvantage available to us. Some participants in this debate argue that race has become an increasingly crude proxy for disadvantage, resulting in a large number of false positives (which in turn has the effect of shrinking the number of places available for people who are actually disadvantaged, whatever their race might be).

That line of argument is also frequently accompanied by the observation that the racial categories we use in South Africa (and elsewhere, but South Africa has a particular history in this regard) are innately odious, and should be eliminated from legislation, policy and discourse wherever we can.

Some critics of that position argue that to eliminate recognition of race as a special category for attention simply perpetuates racism, and that any policy shift in this regard would be regressive. Others argue for the more moderate position that while race should be eliminated from policy in principle, it is too soon to do so – and that even though race is mostly a proxy for disadvantage, it remains the best one we have available to us in the present moment.

The contribution to the debate offered below merits wide distribution, and is shared here with the permission of the author, Professor Anton Fagan of the Law Faculty. For what it’s worth, I agree with his position, and find the paragraph below to be a strikingly crisp articulation of the obvious wrongness of including race as a criterion for disadvantage in perpetuity:

to make an applicant’s preferential admission conditional upon her having identified herself as ‘black’, ‘coloured’, ‘Indian’ or ‘Chinese’ is to make the receipt of something that is deserved, unconditionally, conditional upon a Faustian bargain. To get what she deserves, as a matter of justice, an applicant is compelled to validate one of the foundational principles of the racist apartheid order – the principle that everyone falls, naturally and in a way that can be read off one’s biologically-determined features in a mirror, or can be determined by inspecting one’s nails or one’s genitals, into one of the following groups: black, coloured, Indian, Chinese, and white.

___________________________________

UCT’S NEW ADMISSION POLICY

ANTON FAGAN

UCT’s new admission policy has much to recommend it. In so far as it seeks to undo inequality, by looking at home and educational circumstances, it represents a major step forward. However, the criteria by which the ‘Faculty Discretion’ is to be exercised, especially ‘racial diversity’, are troubling.

In 1987, I was an LLB student here at UCT. In an evidence class, the lecturer discussed a 1957 Appellate Division decision called R v Vilbro. It concerned the admissibility of a witness’s opinion as to whether the accused were ‘white’ or ‘coloured’ for the purposes of the Group Areas Act. The Court held that such an opinion was admissible. For, it said:

‘There may be people who have had a reason to apply their minds specially to the question of distinguishing the races. Such a witness was, in the present case, the Chief Inspector of Indian and Coloured Education . . . .’
‘[T]here may be people who, in respect of the persons whose race is in issue, may have had more opportunities of observing them than the magistrate. The latter only sees them in court, dressed up for the occasion, a woman probably with make-up . . . Other people may have seen them more frequently and in different circumstances, and have had more opportunities and more time of forming a definite impression about them.’

Upon hearing these passages, a student in the class, Zehir Omar, shouted out angrily: ‘Who was the judge?’ I sat forward expectantly, like everyone else, keen to hear who this racist was. The lecturer answered: ‘Fagan CJ.’

The effect of this view of admissibility was that the accused’s conviction under the Act was upheld. But that was not the main reason for Mr Omar’s outrage and my shame. Indeed, I am not sure that the lecturer even mentioned this outcome. Our outrage and shame were grounded, primarily, on something that Mr Omar, and I, and many others in the class took for granted: racial classification, in itself, is morally repugnant. We knew that the division of persons into ‘coloureds’, ‘whites’ and ‘natives’ had no biological basis. We knew that this division was not merely a social, but a political and ideological, construct. We knew that it took its life from, and was inextricably linked to, the practice of racism under apartheid.

You may know the book Racecraft, written by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields, and published last year. The Fields are sisters. One is Professor of History at Columbia University. The other is a sociologist, based at the Center for African and African American Research at Duke University. They have written a great deal on slavery, witch craft, and racism. The following extracts from their book show some of its key ideas:

‘Anyone who continues to believe in race as a physical attribute of individuals, despite the now commonplace disclaimers of biologists and geneticists, might as well also believe that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy are real, and that the earth stands still while the sun moves.’
‘Race is not an element of human biology . . . nor is it even an idea that can be plausibly imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons . . . Thus we ought to begin by restoring to race . . . its proper history.’
‘[R]ace is neither biology nor an idea absorbed into biology . . . It is ideology, and ideologies do not have lives of their own. . . . If race lives on today, it [is] because we continue to create it today.’
‘[T]he first principle of racism is belief in race, even if the believer does not deduce from that belief that the member of the race should be enslaved or disfranchised or shot on sight by trigger-happy police officers . . .’
‘[W]hat “race” is’ ‘is a neutral-sounding word with racism hidden inside’.

The current UCT application form requires applicants to identify their ‘population group’, the choice being between ‘black’, ‘coloured’, ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’ or ‘white’. An applicant may refuse to choose any of these, in which case he or she will be assigned to the open category. It is fair to assume that UCT’s new admission policy will be implemented with an application form that requires more or less the same.

The effect of this will be a continued naturalisation of race. The division of persons into ‘black’, ‘coloured’, ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’ or ‘white’ is presented as part of the natural ordering of the world, rather than as what it really is, namely an historically-contingent, politically-constructed and ideologically-driven ordering. The historical, political and ideological connection between these categories and the racism of the apartheid state is simply swept from view. Rather than that categorisation being presented as being deeply-embedded in a particular history, politics and ideology, it is presented as a free-floating categorisation with a logic and reality all of its own.

Worse than that, the categorisation into ‘black’, ‘coloured’, ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’ or ‘white’ is supposed to be insensitive to distinctions of social standing or class. Being the son of a billionaire entrepreneur, or the daughter of an unemployed domestic worker, will neither qualify nor disqualify an applicant for any of the categories. It follows that the primary basis for categorisation must be biological difference. The effect, therefore, is not merely to continue the naturalisation of race. It is to entrench a form of bio-racism.

The Fields sisters gave their book the title Racecraft, because they see the idea that a person has a particular race as analogous to the idea that a person is a witch. Just as there are not really witches, and never have been, so there are not really races, and never have been. Neither ‘witch’ nor ‘race’ has, as they put it, ‘material existence’. Both the idea that a person is of some race and the idea that a person is a witch are merely ‘illusions’ or ‘fictions’ created and sustained by social practices. Now imagine that a university has decided to provide redress for those who were victimised on the ground that they were witches. It would be odd for the university to pursue that redress by asking every applicant to the university this question: ‘Are you a witch or are you not?’, and then to make the provision of the redress conditional upon the person answering: ‘Yes, I am a witch.’

There undoubtedly are many applicants to UCT who, because of inequality, deserve preferential admission. However, to make an applicant’s preferential admission conditional upon her having identified herself as ‘black’, ‘coloured’, ‘Indian’ or ‘Chinese’ is to make the receipt of something that is deserved, unconditionally, conditional upon a Faustian bargain. To get what she deserves, as a matter of justice, an applicant is compelled to validate one of the foundational principles of the racist apartheid order – the principle that everyone falls, naturally and in a way that can be read off one’s biologically-determined features in a mirror, or can be determined by inspecting one’s nails or one’s genitals, into one of the following groups: black, coloured, Indian, Chinese, and white.

Getting what one unconditionally deserves is made conditional upon one’s willingness to treat as real, as essential, as natural, and as morally-neutral, an ordering of the world created by the apartheid state in order to pursue its racist objectives. If you do not admit to being a witch, you will get no justice. If you do not admit to being what D F Malan and H F Verwoerd decided you are, namely a coloured, a black, a member of the other, you will not get the justice you are entitled to. Writing about the American context, the Fields sisters make a similar point:

‘Like a criminal suspect required to confess guilt before receiving probation, or a drunk required to intone “I am an alcoholic” as a prerequisite to obtaining help, persons of African descent must accept race, the badge that racism assigns to them, to earn remission of the attendant penalties. Not justice or equality but racial justice or racial equality must be their portion.’

The continued requirement of racial identification in UCT’s application form reveals a failure of imagination on our part. Damaged as we are by the experience of apartheid, we find it hard to envisage a future in which South Africans do not see each other through the spectacles which Dr Malan and Dr Verwoerd welded onto our noses. And because we find it so hard to envisage this future, we do not recognise that one of the first steps we must take to secure it is to remove the distorting lenses of our racist apartheid past. We must refuse, collectively, to continue seeing the world, and each other, in the way which the racist apartheid project required.

It is possible to do so. We have a policy in my family that none of us refers to race. As a result, my six year old, Lihle, does not see race – at any rate, not yet. Of course he sees skin colour, and hair colour, and so on. But he does not see race. A few months back, my daughter’s boyfriend was having supper with us. Lihle turned to him and said: ‘Rahul, you and I are both brown.’ But that was not a case of Lihle seeing race, and certainly not race as constructed by the racist apartheid state. For then he would have said: ‘Rahul, you are Indian but I am black.’ – which he did not say.

Were I an idealist, I would now propose that all reference to race or population groups, as well as any requirement of racial classification, be removed from UCT’s application forms. Like the Fields sisters, I would argue that what matters is not racial inequality and racial injustice, but inequality and injustice full stop. And I would argue, as they do, that a continued focus on race, on the one hand, is not necessary to achieve equality and justice and, on the other, is likely to blind us to, and therefore also to leave uncorrected, many of the inequalities and injustices that plague our society.

But I am enough of a realist to curb my ambition a little. I therefore propose, as a compromise, the following:

No applicant should be asked to state whether he or she actually is ‘black’, ‘coloured’, ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’ or ‘white’, or is a member of a population group so described. Instead, applicants should be asked to which of these groups the racist apartheid state most probably would have assigned them.

This way of posing the question makes visible the historical contingency of this racial classification and its connection with the racist programme of the apartheid state. It therefore helps to guard against the naturalisation of these racial categories, and against the entrenchment of the belief that they are an inevitable biological or cultural fact. It also avoids the Faustian compact spoken of earlier: an applicant entitled to redress would not be required, as the price for getting it, to treat as true one of the racist apartheid state’s great falsehoods, namely the claim that there are black persons, and coloured persons, and Indian persons, and Chinese persons, and white persons, and that each of these are a kind of person essentially different from every other.

Thinking Things Through: A national conference on secular humanism and science

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date October 28, 2013
Categories In Science, Secularism, Skepticism

On Sunday, December 1 2013, the SciBono Discovery Centre in Newtown will host the 3^rd national conference of the Free Society Institute (FSI). The conference theme is “Thinking Things Through”, and it will focus on resources and ideas that help us to make more informed decisions about what to believe, and why.

Why “Thinking Things Through”?

We all make choices every day – decisions that impact the way we live, the health of our families, and the things we spend our money on. The FSI believes that taking time to carefully think things through leads to better choices, and that better choices lead to better lives, and help to foster freer societies. This conference is dedicated to the idea of thinking things through – and we hope it’s just the start!

What is the Free Society Institute? What are their goals?

The FSI believes in the value of thinking things through, and that every person can improve the choices they make and the lives they live with better thinking.

We work to keep people accountable; to challenge those who take advantage of others; to make debates more informed, and to be a rational voice on issues such as free speech, free thought and other values – in short, on the things that matter in our society. We believe that thinking things through can improve the quality of life for everyone – and that we all deserve the best life possible.

Who should attend?

Anyone with an interest in science, secular humanism, skepticism and the role of religion in society will benefit from attending Thinking Things Through. The conference will address these and other themes, with an emphasis on showing how careful consideration of issues can lead us to more robust – even if sometimes surprising – conclusions!

Who will be speaking?

Chester Missing, Cecilia Haak, David Spurrett, Eusebius McKaiser, Sarah Wild, Gareth Cliff, Jacques Rousseau and Barry Bateman

For more, visit: http://thinkingthingsthrough.co.za

Contact: Jacques Rousseau / Jacques.Rousseau@fsi.org.za

More lessons in bad science (and reasoning) from Noakes

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date October 27, 2013
Categories In Academia and teaching, Morality, Science

In case you missed it, there’s a 1400 word comment from Prof. Tim Noakes on my previous blog post. Seeing as the bulk of his comment is entirely unrelated to the subject of that blog post, I thought it offered a handy opportunity to provide an additional example of reasoning gone wrong, this time both in basic logic, and again in science. (Also, I’d need another 800 or so words to match his word-count.) So, below you’ll find block-quotes of his full comment, and an explanation of the errors committed. If you want to see his quote in context, please visit the original piece, Lessons in bad science – Tim Noakes and the SAMJ.

Apologies, but this will be somewhat lengthy. I’ll try to keep each unit of quote and response comprehensible on its own, though. Those of you who get bored, please do scroll down and read the bit headed (in bold) “A very important bit” before you leave.

And a reminder – my post the other day wasn’t about the diet itself. This post isn’t about the diet either. It would be fantastic if Noakes/Taubes and the rest were correct in this instance, in that they would have re-discovered or popularised a highly cost-effective way to treat an a highly significant public health problem. Or, various problems, including obesity and diabetes. That would be something to be celebrated, and I’ll be one of those celebrating.

However, if we can arrive at that outcome while supporting (and reinforcing) the scientific method and basic logic, surely that’s an even better outcome?

Noakes begins by re-stating a powerful anecdote:

What is really so funny is that this is a report of how 127 people felt their lives had been dramatically improved by following a particular diet. Included were 14 who claimed they had been “cured” of Type 2 diabetes – confirmed in 3 cases I investigated further. To my knowledge the SAMJ has never before carried a report in which patients with an “incurable” condition (type 2 diabetes) were cured of that condition. One doctor who had told his wife he would be dead in 7 years because he had 5 “incurable” conditions, was completely healed of all conditions (no more medications required) when he restricted his carbohydrate intake.
Everything else he had ever tried (according to his conventional medical training) including treatment by the best medical specialists in Cape Town had done little for his health. Naturally this medical practitioner who had never in 57 years been exposed to this information (why not?), concluded that the dietary advice I gave him had produced a “miracle”. He now includes this method in his treatment options for his patients with obesity/diabetes/metabolic syndrome. He now informs me at least monthly of how much success he is having with this dietary treatment for these patients.

After the words “felt”, “claimed” and then the quotation marks around “cured” in the first two sentences, the thing you’ll note about this anecdote is that it uses language that is entirely inappropriate to the level of evidence available. Imagine yourself to be someone who has Type 2 diabetes, or who is overweight, and who then reads the two paragraphs above. If your level of scientific literacy was that of the average person, you’d come away thinking that there’s something akin to certainty that this diet is effective.

If you’re a marketer, this tactic is completely understandable, and appropriate. But science should be a domain of reason and evidence, not of hyperbole, and not of presenting contested evidence as if it obviously demonstrates something that it is not known to demonstrate. Second, as I’ve said in my original piece, if the evidence exists, you wouldn’t need the anecdotes. Unless, of course, Noakes has so little confidence in the acumen of his peers that he thinks that they would be equally persuaded by either.

Paragraph two contains the quite typical injection of conspiracy theory, with its suggestion that something must be afoot for this medical practitioner to not have heard this dietary advice before. And yes, it’s possible that something was and is afoot – that there is a systematic bias against this approach to diet. If so, that’s a problem that should be remedied. But it has no bearing on whether the advice is in fact good or bad advice. It can have a bearing on how much evidence we have, in that research might have been stymied or inappropriately directed. (Noakes, however, keeps insisting that the evidence is clear, so it seems that this problem is surmountable.)

I wrote the article to alert my colleagues to the fact that there is a simple dietary option that might be able to reverse the very conditions that our profession finds so difficult to treat – obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome. I also referred to the extensive scientific literature showing why and how this dietary intervention does and should work for people with these conditions. The explanations are simple, obvious and proven.
But then perhaps you need a training in the medical sciences to understand those mechanisms, Without some understanding of biochemistry, it is not possible to follow that argument. What one cannot understand, one naturally dismisses as irrelevant.

As I’ve asked before, if the “extensive scientific literature” makes the case, why do we need the anecdotes? As above, the use of the word “proven” massively overstates the case, and again indicates a failure to understand why he comes across as pseudoscientific in these regards. If it were “proven”, there would be far less disagreement in the medical profession than there seems to be about this sort of diet’s efficacy.

In general, though, to quote from a comment I made on the previous post, “the issue is that if non-anecdotal evidence for the same conclusion exists (as he asserts), that evidence would be sufficient by itself. So, either it doesn’t exist, and he needs to rely on the anecdotal evidence (which teaches a bad lesson regarding scientific reasoning), or it does exist, but he thinks that the anecdotal evidence adds weight to the conclusion (which it doesn’t, as he should know)”.

The last paragraph contains another fairly typical tactic for Noakes, namely an attempt to discredit an opponent through focusing on something irrelevant or personal, as we saw in the “fat-shaming” comment in the previous post. Because there are two possibilities here: first, that he’s right that we need medical training to understand this. If so, I’m mystified as to why Noakes does all this public speaking to laypeople, and also that he writes on these matters in (almost exclusively) lay publications and books as much as he does, seeing as he knows none of those audience-members can understand what he’s saying.

Alternatively, he’s subtly suggesting I’m too thick to “get it”. But again, seeing as my post was not about the diet, but about what evidence and arguments look like, I’d have to protest and tell him that I “get that” very well, and that of all the medical practitioners who have commented or Tweeted about the post in question, everyone except Noakes thinks I’m on to something. Not, I again remind you, about whether the diet is good or bad, seeing as I don’t express a view on that, but simply that this sort of “research” or “study” sets a very low standard in terms of what we should aspire to as scientists.

At no point in the article is the claim ever made that this is an attempt at a scientific proof of a particular diet. That is why the title includes the words – Occasional Survey. It is simply a group of case reports showing that some patients achieve remarkable cures for their intractable medical conditions simply by following advice, the key point of which is that it normalises hunger. For the truth is that these patients are not dying of obesity etc, so much as they are dying of hunger. Once their hunger is controlled by simple dietary advice, they can start to cure the conditions caused by the overconsumption of addictive, highly processed, carbohydrate-rich foods (made worse by their insulin-resistant state).
I have been in science long enough to understand how people try to divert attention from the message. I wrote about this extensively in Challenging Beliefs. First they always question the methods. The methods I used in this study are entirely appropriate for the extremely limited goals of this paper. That simple goal was to show that some people benefit dramatically and in some cases miraculously from this simple advice. Whether or not they would have benefitted equally from other advice is utterly irrelevant since I am not trying to prove (in this article) that one treatment is better than another. Of course I would guess that 100% of the 127 had all tried the conventional advice and it had failed for them. But I only made that claim if I it was supported by the information I had.

A group of “case reports”? I don’t know about you, but that seems an awfully strong description for a series of self-reported and completely uncontrolled and in most cases unverified narratives. But it’s nevertheless a legitimate description, with a track record in medical literature.

However, because a large group of case reports, as in this case, can create an impression of generalisability or significance where there might be none, we find Johns Hopkins, for example, requiring IRB (institutional review board) clearance for any case studies (or a case series, in this instance) involving more than three participants. No clearance is mentioned in this case.

Again, I remind you that I’m simply saying that the study offers little of scientific merit, and that the SAMJ erred in accepting it for publication – not that the anecdotes are false. (It’s that we can’t know whether they are false or not that is part of the problem.)

As for “I have been in science long enough to know” – I refer you to the point about deflection and conspiracy mentioned earlier. The fact that methods are questioned isn’t evidence that the scientist is a martyr for the truth, as Noakes seems to want to imagine himself here. As Occam’s Razor suggests, it might also be because the methods are questionable.

It’s entirely relevant to question whether the participants would have benefited equally from other advice, precisely because 127 cases offers an impression of significance or generalisability. The goal was “to show that some people benefit dramatically and in some cases miraculously from this simple advice” (my emphasis) – and how do you show that through 127 unverified self-reported anecdotes? If the science already shows this, then it can stand alone, with the anecdotes as illustrations if one so desires. Noakes says (in the paper) that this “data” is “of value” and “challenges current conventional wisdom” – and yes, it would, if we had reason to believe it was replicable. It might well be replicable, but the anecdotes are not evidence for that conclusion.

A key point about South African medical ethics is that if there is more than one treatment options it is ethically unacceptable for a South African practitioner to prescribe only one. My ethical responsibility as an educator and scientist is to bring the attention of my colleagues to the established fact that there is more than one option for the treatment of obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome and that the scientific evidence for this is well established in the literature (as recently accepted by the highest Swedish medical authorities).

Having been involved in high-level research ethics myself, of course I’d agree in the main. Except, Noakes is leaving something crucial out of the summary: it’s not only when there is simply “more than one treatment option”. Instead, it’s when there is “more than one effective/proven/viable/etc. treatment option”. This might well become known to be one of those options, perhaps even the best one. But it isn’t known to be that as yet, which is a reality Noakes again evades in the above quotation.

A very important bit

Above, Noakes says “as recently accepted by the highest Swedish medical authorities”. This, in a nutshell, demonstrates his rather casual relationship with reality when it comes to promoting the conclusion he wishes to. You’ll note, as a starting point, that the language is unambiguous – a trusting reader will be left utterly convinced that the Swedes have accepted LCHF as obviously the recommended diet. So, let’s look at the evidence. The quote from his paper reads as follows:

The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare has concluded that ‘low carb diets can today be seen as compatible with scientific evidence and best practice for weight reduction for patients with overweight or diabetes type 2, as a number of studies have shown effect in the short term and no evidence of harm has emerged … ’

It’s a direct quote, so you’d expect a reference (and quotation marks, which might look a little alien to some potential readers). We have both in this case, and the reference given is to the Swedish Board in question…. oops. No, sorry, my mistake – the reference is to a blog post titled Low-carb for You. The Swedes are eating more butter! In another interesting development, the full quote reads (my emphasis):

Professor Christian Berne, one of Sweden’s leading diabetes experts, had carefully investigated the case against Dr. Dahlqvist and presented his findings to the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. He said, “…a low-carbohydrate diet can today be said to be in accordance with science and well-tried experience for reducing [obesity] and type 2 diabetes…a number of trials has shown no effects in the shorter run and that no evidence for it being harmful has emerged in systematic literature researches performed so far. [There is] no scientific support yet for treatments in excess of 1 year. A thorough evaluation of long time treatment results is therefore an important demand on the practitioner.”

So what we learn here is:

In the source Noakes refers to in order to support a very strong claim, we find Berne reporting findings to the Board
But that quote is presented by Noakes as a resolution of the Board, rather than an opinion expressed to the Board
An important bit of the quote is left out, because it’s inconvenient (namely, that there is no scientific support for treatments “in excess of one year“)
Notice that this question – around long-term efficacy – was a central theme of my previous blog post that inspired this Noakes essay in response – and his own source makes the same point
Lastly, we learn that quotation marks don’t mean the same thing for Noakes as they might to you, in that a sentence like “a low-carbohydrate diet can today be said to be in accordance with science and well-tried experience for reducing [obesity] and type 2 diabetes” morphs, in Noakes’ version, into “low carb diets can today be seen as compatible with scientific evidence and best practice for weight reduction for patients with overweight or diabetes type 2” (I’m not asserting here that he changed the meaning – it’s just odd to quote-and-not-quote at the same time).

The SBU (Swedish Council on Health Technology Assessment) have however published guidelines on diet and obesity – but unfortunately, they’re not yet available in English, so Noakes couldn’t easily have quoted from them in an English-language journal. But let’s see what Google translate can do for us, seeing as we’re able to take such liberties on a blog post.

“SBU has previously addressed food for people with diabetes [link to English pdf]. The results for people with obesity and diabetes, pointing at large in the same direction.”

That direction, according to the English diabetes report, includes bits like this (my emphasis):

Scientific evidence is not available to evaluate the long-term safety of moderate and extreme low-carbohydrate diets. This includes cardiovascular morbidity and other complications of diabetes.
There is strong scientific evidence that lifestyle intervention, combining a low-fat diet with high fiber intake and increased physical activity, prevents diabetes in people that would otherwise be at high risk for the disease

Back to the Google translate version of the obesity report, which also says (my emphasis):

In the short term (six months) is advice on strict or moderate carbohydrate diet more effective for weight loss than low-fat diets advice. In the long run there are no differences in efficacy between weight loss tips on strict and moderate carbohydrate diet, low-fat diets, högproteinkost, Mediterranean diet, diet focuses on low-glycemic load diet or a high proportion of monounsaturated fats.
After that obese people have lost weight they can maintain their weight better with advice on low-fat diets with low glycemic index and / or high protein content than with low-fat diets with high glycemic index and / or low protein content. There is no basis for assessing whether even advice, eg, low-carbohydrate diet and the Mediterranean diet is effective in preventing weight gain after weight loss

Once again, it might one day be common knowlege that Noakes et. al. are right. But that day doesn’t seem to have arrived yet, and in the meanwhile, it certainly looks as if support is being appropriated where it doesn’t quite (as yet) exist. This, again, is bad science, if not simply dishonest.

Back to the Noakes comment

The reasons why this information is not taught more widely across the world is not material to this article and whether or not there is a conspiracy is not relevant. The point is that students in South Africa (as in most other countries) are currently taught only one side of a two-sided story. As far as patient care is concerned, that is unethical.

Sentence one, and then two and three seem somewhat contradictory. If students are being misled into providing unethical patient care, surely that must be relevant? But in any case, my point was that if something was obvious, and as evidence-based as Noakes keeps asserting, it would be taught all over the world. He constantly refers to conspiratorial reasons why that isn’t the case, rather than considering the possibility that others don’t think the evidence is as clear as he thinks it is.

Three years ago I decided that it my ethical responsibility to acknowledge publicly that my advice on high carbohydrate diets for runners, widely read in Lore or Running, was wrong for those with insulin resistance/type 2 diabetes/metabolic syndrome since it would contribute to their ill-health in the long term as it has to mine. This article is one outcome of that admission.
I could have kept quiet and hidden my error but I chose not to. Now that this article has been published in the SAMJ (and I have spoken about it at the most recent SAMA conference), South African medical practitioners, perhaps for the first time, have been exposed to the evidence that there is an alternative option that they might like to consider in future for the treatment of these conditions.
The result is that if the 127 patients reported here are any indication, many patients in South Africa with these conditions will be offered another treatment option that before they would not have been offered. I suspect that many will do much better on that therapy than if they continue to follow advice that does not work (for them).

Nothing to add here, except to repeat that the point is precisely that we have no reason to believe that the 127 patients reported here in fact are any indication.

So this focus of this discussion should not be about whether or not I am a good scientist who understands what is and what is not good science.

Erm, no. I choose what the focus of the discussion is on my own website, thanks.

Fortunately in science, there are simple markers of our standing as scientists that are based on hard measureables and not on the opinions of others. These are the h-Index and the number of citations. Anyone who wishes to determine my status as a scientist is welcome to find those numbers and what they mean. Those are measures of scientific influence over a life-time, not as the result of one single good or bad article.

Yes, they are indeed “simple” markers. “Crude” might be another appropriate word, as Prof. Noakes knows full well. They offer a valuable heuristic in making snap judgments, but they aren’t any sort of guarantee of sense or quality in perpetuity. I don’t dispute, and have no reason to dispute, that Noakes has done tremendous work in the past. But that tells us nothing about the present topic, except to make it statistically more probable that he’s worth paying attention to here than many others might be, because of that track record. This doesn’t mean that – once you look at a particular case – you need to grant extra authority to that person if they present weak arguments.

To do so would be to commit the informal fallacy of making (or rather, falling for) an appeal to authority. It’s particularly disappointing when the authority him or herself makes the appeal on their own behalves.

It is sad that this article which should be a celebration of how simple dietary advice may be able to reverse intractable medical conditions in some people (it would have been valuable even if it had reported just a single “cure”) has been used by some to argue what a dreadful scientist I am, who is trying to push some sort of devious agenda that has no scientific basis.

It’s arguably more sad when eminent scientists start practicing bad science, and then doubly so when they defend it as weakly as this. “This article”, meaning my blog post, is about that topic, not about the diet. Readers, or subjects of a post, don’t get to say what a post “should be” about. Furthermore, nobody is being described as being “devious”, or having an “agenda”. Someone is being described as making poor arguments for a conclusion.

My agenda is clear. I want my profession to teach more than one option for the management of obesity/diabetes/metabolic syndrome and to understand that our current dietary advice is in my opinion the cause of so much of our ill-health.

My agenda is also clear. I teach critical thinking, and the Noakes paper, and his responses to criticisms of it (and, general criticisms on social media) provide great classroom examples of how reputations are no guarantee of good sense.

I have spent 3 years researching this topic and am happy that the scientific evidence supporting this position is as powerful as any evidence I have touted in the past (see Challenging Beliefs). However the topic is much more important that anything I have ever tackled since it is the single most important medical problem in the world and is currently out of control and getting worse by the day.

Agreed entirely, which is why I want the science supporting it to be beyond reproach, especially on such obvious grounds.

What this paper shows it that there may be simple answers for what seem to be intractable conditions. That is why the final sentence of the article calls for a properly funded and designed study to test the hypothesis (not proof) advanced by the finding of this Occasional Survey.

As argued above, the occasional survey doesn’t present a case for doing so, because of the quality of the data. Furthermore, we are told by Noakes that non-anecdotal evidence exists – and if this is the case, the anecdotes are superfluous. This was the topic of my last post, so I won’t repeat the argument here.

I would be only too happy if that trial disproves me. But if it shows that a carbohydrate-restricted diet can reverse intractable obesity and some cases of Type 2 diabetes, then we will have shown that the causes of the obesity and diabetes epidemics are much simpler than we believe and that we might be able to do something to protect our future generations from these diseases. Of course, it there is a conspiracy, then it will do all it can to insure that we do not ever make that finding.

Agreed entirely. And of course a scientist should be happy to be corrected (even if it’s sometimes difficult to swallow).

Perhaps we can move the debate forward by focusing on what this paper actually found and how that might be of value in trying to understand what is causing the obesity and diabetes epidemics globally. Then we will be making a positive contribution to the future health of the world.

No, there are different debates. Noakes, and his peers, can move that debate forward. My focus is critical thinking, logical fallacies, the standard of education and so forth. That’s the debate I’m going to “move forward”, and these sorts of examples are great resources for doing so. In fact, they allow for us to make a positive contribution to the current – and future – health of the world too, by helping to inculcate and reinforce clear and cogent reasoning, without which medical science is doomed.

Thanks for the opportunity to express myself more fully and I look forward to your contribution to that agenda should you think it sufficiently important.

It’s vital. But also, that agenda is not my field. This one is.

Lessons in bad science – Tim Noakes and the SAMJ

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date October 24, 2013
Categories In Morality, Science

As I’ve said before, Professor Tim Noakes might well be right in his advocacy for a low carb, high fat diet. Whether he is right or wrong is however – to some extent, at least – a separate issue from whether he’s providing an example of sound scientific reasoning in reaching the conclusions he does.

It’s understandable that people outside of science, academia, or any overtly evidence-based work might confuse personal experience, anecdotes and badly drawn samples for good evidence. However, the principles of scientific reasoning (even as taught to first-year students, as I’ve done for years), remind us of these and other common errors. Once you know about confirmation bias, you shouldn’t flaunt the fact that you deploy it, but rather regret that you (like everyone) are prone to quite typical errors.

As a practitioner of evidence-based something-or-other, you’d know and understand counter-intuitive things, for example that a conclusion can sometimes be the correct one, regardless of how poor the argument for that conclusion is. And, that a good argument can sometimes result in a false conclusion.

Most important, perhaps, is that you’d know of the various resources we have for making it more likely that we reach the correct conclusion, and you’d know of the sorts of errors to avoid because they tend to lead us to false conclusions. And given that you care most of all for getting closer to the truth of the matter, you’d be aware of your responsibilities to set an example to others of sound reasoning about science – especially if you are perceived to be an authority figure.

When a scientist like Noakes seems willing to ignore most of these principles in favour of promoting a conclusion – through whatever support comes along – he doesn’t sound passionate, committed, maverick and so forth. He sounds like a quack (and sometimes, even a conspiracy theorist, at least when citing some of the reasons why his “obvious” (to him) truths are somehow not adopted by everyone). To Noakes, all research that disagrees with him is “industry-funded” or otherwise tainted, but never treated as counter-evidence.

Among those that Noakes has quoted in support of either his view or his approach to science are the evolution-denier and proponent of scientific racism that is Louis Agassiz, and the anti-vaccine Weston Price Foundation. He’ll tweet links to pieces arguing that carbohydrates might have played a role in the Newtown shootings. And when challenged on whether his approach is sound, he says things like this:

@Jonathan_Witt @Julius_S_Malema But at least we have a following. The great failing in science is not to be wrong – it is to be irrelevant.
— Tim Noakes (@ProfTimNoakes) September 15, 2012

Worst of all, he doesn’t seem to really understand what the stakes are, even as he speaks of a decades-old diet lie that is apparently killing us all. He’s embraced the false dichotomy that we have a choice between the “orthodox” dietary advice (that is harming us) and his model (that will make us thin, cure diabetes and so forth). On his model, choosing option B (his model) has no risks, even though we have no long-term data regarding the possible harmful consequences of a high-fat diet.

@WestCoastVino Overlooked: If I am wrong, all that suffers is my reputation. If diet-heart is wrong, billions suffer. Scary responsibility.
— Tim Noakes (@ProfTimNoakes) March 4, 2013

This doesn’t mean people won’t be persuaded by Noakes. They will be and are being persuaded in their droves, thanks partly to positive short-term results on the diet, and also to some very engaged PR on Twitter, radio, magazines and television. But they’re also being persuaded because – like most people – they are prone to overstating the value of anecdotes in supporting a conclusion.

The fact that they are persuaded is not, however, further evidence for your conclusion.

Yet, according to Noakes, perhaps it is. And sadly, South Africa’s flagship medical journal, the SAMJ, has published a Noakes paper that is a textbook example of bad science in this and other ways. Somehow, this paper got through peer-review, but I can pretty much guarantee you that if we did a Sokal-type experiment, submitting this under fictitious names, it would never get published. It’s solely on the basis of the authority of the “name” of an acclaimed scientist that it was published as a study, rather than on the letters pages or somewhere less notable.

Here’s the 140-character summary of why this shouldn’t have been published as a study, or made it through peer review:

Some people tell a guy they lost weight and it's published in a medical journal. #BadScience http://t.co/q01WtVqe0S
— Martinique Stilwell (@NikiStil) October 24, 2013

Basically, the “study” is confirmation bias run amok. If I were a UFO conspiracy theorist, and led a society dedicated to discussing our abduction experiences, the letters I might receive from prospective members might appear to me to be further evidence that UFOs exist. But I’d be wrong. They’re not, because my letter-writing audience are self-selected (we can predict, in advance, that they are likely to share my conclusion) and unreliable (they are offering anecdotes, and we have no idea how reliable their testimony is).

People who try the “Noakes diet” to no effect will not write letters to him saying so. And as for those who do write, we have no knowledge (or control) over any other factors relevant to their weight-loss experiences. It’s plausible that someone trying a new diet will, for example, also be motivated to exercise more – but we can’t control for that.

In response to these and other criticisms on Twitter, Noakes asked his critics why we were focusing on the anecdotes, rather than the controlled trials that agreed with the anecdotes. But this again misses the point – one wouldn’t need the anecdotes to make the case if the data did so already. To include the anecdotes means that you see them as adding some value, and you shouldn’t do so.

It’s not everyone else’s job to defeat your anecdotal evidence (that should never even be presented). It’s your job to gather non-anecdotal evidence. And if you don’t have that as yet, it’s not someone else’s responsibility to get it for you, as in comments like

@NicDawes @jacquesr @nikistil Mail and Guardian and you guys prepared to fund the RCT to disprove these "anecdotes"? If so we can start now
— Tim Noakes (@ProfTimNoakes) October 24, 2013

(This, because of another elementary principle of scientific reasoning, namely the burden of proof.)

To wrap this up: I agree that a trial is needed. But there’s a different issue at stake also, and this is that Noakes is encouraging incompetent and pseudoscientific thinking on matters of science, and encouraging a cultish adherence to a model that hasn’t yet been scrutinised in full, and for which we have no long-term data. This is irresponsible, and an abrogation of his responsibility as a scientist and an educator.

But these are no doubt all irrelevances to Noakes, even perhaps evidence of bias or conspiracy. After all, at the end of the day, the ultimate evidence is remarkably elegant: the thinnest person in the argument wins, and obese people can’t be right.

Obese dietician from British Dietetics Assoc tells us on BBC News that @DrAseemMalhotra article is wrong. Will believe her when she loses wt
— Tim Noakes (@ProfTimNoakes) October 23, 2013

P.S. Prof Noakes has left a substantial comment below. Unfortunately, it does his cause absolutely no good, as I explain in this follow-up post.

The Afrikaner Broederbond – a legacy of racial nationalism

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date October 23, 2013
Categories In Culture, Politics

Liberalism – liberal ideas, or self-identified liberal parties – has caused its fair share of trouble in South African politics over the years since Alan Paton’s formation of the Liberal Party in 1953. But for all the argument liberal ideas can provoke, an argument can be made that an ideology premised on individual freedom is never provocative of necessity.

In other words, there is no reason to assume that there is a logical inevitability of liberalism leading to distrust, anger or violence, particularly of the physical rather than verbal sort. By contrast, nationalism – and particularly racial nationalism – is rooted in and reinforces conflict. This is because it sets up a necessary opposition between them, and us, however those groups are defined.

With this in mind, I regard the formation and trajectory of the Afrikaner Broederbond in 1920 as a key element in recent South African history. This is thanks to the way in which it set a tone and laid the foundations of racial nationalism, leading not only to very fertile ground for National Party dominance and the normalisation of apartheid in white culture, but also in setting a precedent for the racial nationalism of today’s African National Congress.

The AB grew out of an organisation called Jong Suid Afrika (Young South Africa), formed in 1918 (O’Meara, 1977). But understanding why it was formed and had the influence it did requires looking back to the South African War of 1899 to 1902, where the Afrikaners were defeated by the British (Encyclopedia Brittanica, 2013).

The “scorched earth” policy of the British during the war devastated farmlands, particularly in rural areas. Tens of thousands of Boer women and children died in British concentration camps. On top of this privation, there was gloating – Lord Milner’s policy of Anglicisation serving to rub salt into very open wounds.

Not only did this defeat leave the Afrikaners humiliated, but it also set the stage for what was to follow: the formation of the Broederbond, the National Party and also the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism in general.

While a class divide always existed amongst Afrikaners, the war helped to accentuate it. Some Afrikaners suffered financial as well as other forms of defeat in consequence of the war – poor conditions in agriculture, and deaths due to influenza, crippled families who had already suffered internment, or death in battle. Other families, especially in the Cape, enjoyed relative prosperity (O’Meara, 1977).

Responses to this crisis amongst Afrikaners varied, but the political consequences were undeniably profound. In 1913, the split in the South African Party was one consequence, with Louis Botha having dissolved his cabinet in the face of irreconcilable differences of opinion regarding how to deal with the competing interests of the Dutch and the English.

The National Party was a product of this split. It was founded in 1914 on a platform of “two stream” development, with Hertzog insisting on the Dutch and English pursuing their interests in parallel channels, by contrast to Botha’s ‘one stream’ policy whereby the two groups would converge as one people, in union (South African History Online, 2013).

There should however be no doubt that Hertzog and Botha were of similar mind when it came to black traditions and interests. While views differed on the two white groups in question, they agreed that black South Africans should be on an entirely different stream, totally segregated from whatever might occur with regard to white interests.

Except, of course, when white interests required black labour. As agriculture recovered and expanded, white interests were placated through measures such as the Native Land Act of 1913, that assisted in the recovery of the white farmers while crippling the interests of black South Africa.

Contemporaneously to these developments, 1912 saw the formation of the Native National Congress, later renamed the African National Congress. Despite the fact that some within the ANC championed the cause of non-racialism, the existence of such a strong climate of Afrikaner (and, white) nationalism cannot help but have informed the motivations and strategy of the ANC. When moderation, open debate and equal consideration of interests seem to be off the table, why waste ones’ time pursuing those goals?

Still smarting from the humiliating defeat suffered in the war, and still trying to rebuild their families, as well as their economic structures, the Afrikaner – or at least, some proportion of Afrikaners – now had to also contend with a growing voice of black dissent.

In one hypothetically possible version of history, the fact that Afrikaners knew full well what defeat and humiliation felt like might have inclined them to listen to the concerns of black South Africans, leading the country closer to the sort of equality we now enjoy (at least in law, if not entirely in reality).

But that sort of unselfish, forward-thinking attitude proved to be impossible, at least in those years. Much of this had to do with the formation and subsequent power – even if often behind the scenes – of the Broederbond.

As Schönteich and Boshoff put it in ‘Volk’ Faith and Fatherland. The Security Threat Posed by the White Right (2003), “the Afrikaner Broederbond was born out of the deep conviction that the Afrikaner volk has been planted in this country by the Hand of God, destined to survive as a separate volk with its own calling”. If God insisted on a separate destiny, one might think, who is man to quibble?

The origins of the Broederbond are in feelings of persecution – of being threatened by enemies known and unknown, but also of being proud, stubborn, and resilient. Even though the enemy might have been the British at the time the organisation was formed, that was only tangentially the point. The point, instead, was that whatever adverse circumstances were encountered, the Afrikaner would prevail.

Prevail they did, as all South African born before the 1980’s knows full well. The Broederbond was a key part of their success, in that not only did the Broederbond launch several cultural organisations as breeding grounds and reinforcements of Afrikaner values and culture (gathered under the umbrella Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge, or Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Societies), but they also ensured linguistic and cultural – and thus, racial – “purity” in positions of influence in education, commerce and politics.

It was in the 1920’s that the Broederbond became properly organised, and began being properly influential. In 1921, they started campaigning for Afrikaans schools and the preservation of Afrikaans culture in schools, which led to a rapid surge in membership. In 1927, this (now secret) society resolved “to take an active part in the life of the community, leaving no avenue neglected” (O’Meara, 1977).

The extent to which the Broederbond reinforced cultural and racial myopia is clear from its selection and membership criteria. Only “financially sound, white, Afrikaans-speaking, Protestant males, over age 25, of ‘unimpeachable character’, who actively accepted South Africa as their sole homeland, containing a separate Afrikaner nation with its own language and culture” qualified to be members (O’Meara, 1977).

Some highly-combustible elements were therefore being thrown into one pot – a group of pious Calvinists with persecution complexes (thanks to the British and the war), armed with a sense of religious predestination (or more crucially, entitlement), were setting up a structure that ensured that no heterodox thinking would be allowed to penetrate into their structures.

Psychologists and behavioural economists speak of confirmation bias (Wason, 1960) and concepts like the “filter bubble” (Pariser, 2011). Confirmation bias refers to our predisposition to ignore evidence that counts against (or, disconfirms) existing beliefs or hypotheses, and also to over-emphasise the relevance of evidence that confirms what we already believe.

The term “filter bubble” was coined to describe the results of Internet search personalisation, whereby we tend to get search results that play into our confirmation biases – if you tend to read liberal media, Fox News will tend to not show up in your Google results.

Even though the Broederbond didn’t have Google, what they did have was a trusted community of leaders and influencers who would tell them – and you, if you wanted to succeed – exactly what you needed to believe, and usually, exactly what you wanted to hear.

Little surprise, then, that Afrikaner politics was far more concerned with internal power-struggles than with the continued alienation and disempowerment of the majority of South African residents (“citizens” being too generous a term, if we are to be accurate). This incestuous dominance of power structures would enable and buttress decades of apartheid rule, and also allowed for the arrogance that led many within the National Party (in its 1948 – 1994 guise) to never question their divine right to rule, even as the country burned at Sharpeville and elsewhere.

This messianistic, Calvinistic and conservative Afrikaner nationalism, promoted by the Afrikaner Broederbond, was tremendously successful. “Every prime minister and state president in South Africa from 1948 to the end of Apartheid in 1994 was a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond” (Boddy-Evans, 2013), and its members occupied positions of power throughout other areas of South African society also.

The legacy this leaves us is not only racial distrust and tension, as exemplified in the modern-day Broederbond-lite of a Dan Roodt or Steve Hofmeyr, but also in the fact that nationalism, and perhaps tribalism, comes naturally in South African politics. We are attuned to that discourse, which makes the discourse of liberty outside of tribe, language group or race difficult for some South Africans to hear.

Afrikaner nationalism was premised on victimhood, and a commitment to never be victims again. It is perhaps little wonder that some Afrikaners felt – and continue to feel – threatened by the African nationalism sometimes apparent in the South Africa of today, and that the rhetoric of difference continues to prove so successful in South African politics.

This is a trap from which the country needs to escape in order to leave the divisive politics of identity and race behind. Only when African nationalism can mean, simply, a nation of Africans, can we truly say that apartheid has been defeated.

References:

Boddy-Evans, A. 2013. Afrikaner Broederbond. [Online]. Available: http://africanhistory.about.com/od/glossarya2/a/def_AfrikanerBroederbond.htm [8 July 2013]
Encyclopedia Brittanica. 2013. Afrikaner-Broederbond. [Online]. Available: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/8470/Afrikaner-Broederbond [8 July 2013]
O’Meara, D. 1977. The Afrikaner Broederbond 1927-1948: Class Vanguard of Afrikaner Nationalism. Journal of Southern African Studies. Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 156-186
Pariser, E. 2011. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Penguin Press.
Schönteich, M; Boshoff, H. 2003.’Volk’ Faith and Fatherland. The Security Threat Posed by the White Right, Institute of Security Studies. Monograph. No 81
South African History Online. 2013. Louis Botha. [Online]. Available: http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/louis-botha [8 July 2013]
Wason, Peter C. 1960. On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Psychology Press) 12 (3): 129–140.

Social justice and ethical nuance

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date October 19, 2013
Categories In General

There is a hierarchy of ‘badness’ in the world – there’s no question in my mind that various ethical lapses can be categorised as trivial or profound, even if there might be many cases that don’t admit to easy categorisation. Shoplifting is far less wrong than murder, and shoplifting to feed your starving family less wrong than shoplifting the latest Rihanna CD.

But when discussing some of the hot-button issues of the day – often, these days, social justice or related issues like racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia, it sometimes seems that there’s less room for nuance than there should be. You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “I’m not a racist, but…” many times, and that phrase is often a sign that the person speaking is in fact a racist. This doesn’t mean that our endorsements of an overall message can’t ever come with a ‘but’, though.

Emily Yoffe has had to do a lot of explaining of this point in recent days, on the same topic (risk-mitigation versus victim-blaming with regard to rape) where I’ve experienced similar outrage for making the suggestion that any method for decreasing the incidence of rape should be a possible subject for discussion, no matter how unfair it is that some groups (women, mostly) bear a disproportionate burden in this regard. We need to fix that unfairness, yes, but while we do so, we can (and should) simultaneously acknowledge how it might play out in terms of practical solutions for reducing rape.

In the past week, I’ve also been told (in response to this piece, identifying the plagiarism in a blog post on white privilege) that it matters not whether there is plagiarism in the piece in question, because that issue detracts from the main issue, which is white privilege. And, a few racist South Africans have found glee in the columnist in question being caught out, then somehow thought me an ally despite all the public evidence to the contrary.

And such is the intellectually vacuous nature of the blogosphere and social media that people take both of those positions seriously, despite the fact that they are both obviously flawed. This is what treating a particular cause – no matter how just – as gospel does to debate: it dumbs it down to headlines and hyperbole, where the long-term goal of getting everyone to think about what they believe, and why, is done a tremendous disservice.

Yoffe shouldn’t have had to explain her position (even though she did so very well, in the end), and the explanation might not help in any event, because the sorts of misreadings we’re talking about are incredibly motivated, and typically unfalsifiable (conversations about them are a textbook example of goalpost-shifting, ad hominem argumentation and the like).

There is a danger in groupthink (in that it is an obstacle to thinking), and one can agree on a position in a way that doesn’t involve groupthink. Especially when the stakes are highest, and the potential harms the greatest, we should remind ourselves of this. And, allow ourselves to be reminded of it.

Does white privilege also cause plagiarism?

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date October 14, 2013
Categories In Morality

When I saw the 10th or so “you must read this” tweet, linking to Gillian Schutte’s latest piece on the Mail&Guardian’s Thought Leader blog, I finally caved in and read it. With some trepidation, mind you, seeing as I’ve not read anything of Schutte’s since her “Dear white people” tried to tell everyone with low melanin levels what they were supposed to think. If you’ve been here before, you probably know why I reject that form of identity politics, and Schutte seems to be quite heavily invested in it.

But here we were, 10 months later, and given that so many people were endorsing the most recent piece (including a few people whose judgements I trust), I thought I’d give it a try. The piece itself was typical of the Schutte pieces I’ve read – too crude and generalising for my tastes, but all the while making some points certainly worthy of reflection.

Then I looked at the comments, and saw this:

A quick skim of the post linked to there reveals significant overlap in style and content with Schutte’s piece. Compare, for instance, points 31 and 32 in Schutte’s piece with 14 and 15 in the other post. As an occasional member of the opinionista class, I didn’t want to leap to conclusions or make unnecessary trouble for a fellow writer, so I reached out to a senior person at the Mail&Guardian, asking him to look at this possible plagiarism.

It’s 3 days later, and nothing in the post has been edited to reflect the extent to which it’s derivative of the other piece (which seems to be an extract from a published book, Richard Dyer’s “White: essays on race and culture”). Schutte does link to the essay in question (twice, in fact), but simply linking to something falls far short of acknowledging that you’ve borrowed extensively from it. Especially given that there is no indication in the piece that the two links are any different to the other links in the piece – most readers would assume that the links are to additional or supplementary, rather than source, material.

Even worse, what you see in this case is not simply paraphrasing, such that would require something like “as Richard Dyer explains,…”, but rather, verbatim lifting from the source without any quotation marks whatsoever.

In short, Gillian Schutte’s Thought Leader piece is plagiarised, and amounts to Thought Parasitism rather than Thought Leadership (with credit to a friend for that phrase). The extent of the parasitism? 15% of Schutte’s piece is word-for-word the same as Dyer’s. And this, in a piece that takes the moral high-ground, lecturing others on the positions they should take. And if you’re wondering, yes, the problem was pointed out to her, both in the comment above, as well as in two tweets that were cc’ed to her.

If this were a student submission, I’d award 0%, and remind the student of the conventions of citation, which are there so that we can give credit to those who inform our thinking. These conventions are a vital part of intellectual activity, in that they are one of a writers’ vehicles for claiming ideas or phrases as our own. They are a safeguard of originality, and make your achievements in getting a good mark for an essay, or getting your book published, the achievements that they are.

When we don’t respect intellectual honesty and the academic conventions that support that honesty, we devalue everybody’s achievements in this area, because the currency for determining value is being undermined. Yes, you’d explain this to a 1st-year student, and maybe give them a chance to re-submit. I normally wouldn’t refer a 1st-year student to the University’s disciplinary tribunal for this sort of offence, especially a 1st-timer.

Schutte might well be a 1st-timer in this regard. However, she has a Master’s degree. What she doesn’t have is an excuse. And when you think back to the consequences that a Darrel Bristow-Bovey, for example, had to endure for his plagiarism, you’d know that there was a time when South African media consumers and producers took this seriously.

Let’s see if they still do, and let’s see if Schutte does.

Edit: Schutte’s response?

A further edit, seeing as Schutte is accusing me of ‘lying’, never mind being an arsehole. As I say above, those hyperlinks give you no reason to believe they are references to a source. Plus, Schutte doesn’t seem to understand that quotation marks are necessary when you use someone else’s content, word-for-word.

She says:

And that simply cannot be squared with, for example, this (with the red bits being verbatim stolen text):

Jacob Zuma, wives, and the wrath of God

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date October 7, 2013
Categories In Daily Maverick, Politics, Religion

Over the weekend, I had a chat with a man from Nkandla (who will remain anonymous). As you no doubt know, that’s where Jacob Zuma is building his ~~palace~~ private residence, and it’s also the place that his own spokesperson (Mac Maharaj) didn’t want to visit because he feared he’d be unable to defend it once he had (at least, if you trust the interview recorded in Richard Calland’s book, The Zuma Years).

We didn’t talk about the residence, but I suspect that this man from Nkandla would be opposed to the deception surrounding the expenses incurred there, as well as the quantum of the expenses. Another point of agreement between us was with regard to the irrelevance of the number of wives Zuma has, both in terms of his political credibility, as well as to negative judgements regarding what Zuma costs the people of South Africa.

The political credibility part is less controversial, and unless you insist on monogamy for whatever reason, I imagine you agree that this shouldn’t impact on our judgments regarding Zuma (assuming, of course, full volition on the part of the wives and so forth). As for the costs incurred on the public purse, my interlocutor and I agreed that if the law allowed for polygamy, and for public support of the President’s wives, then it’s the law that needs to change, rather than Zuma that needs to change.

One could argue that Zuma should set the example, and defer the marrying of anyone other than who he was already married to (when taking office) until after leaving the position. But this would mean a less than full acceptance of Zuma’s cultural values, and would to my mind run contrary to the cultural inclusivity our Constitution demands. It would be an assertion that norms other than Zuma’s were standard, and that he’s allowed to contravene those – and practice his own, (implied) aberrant or inferior culture, so long as it’s done in a way that’s convenient to the rest of us.

It may be that we don’t want to be as culturally inclusive as the Constitution demands. But that’s not the argument here – instead, this would be an instance of insisting on the primacy of a particular set of norms under the guise of financial concerns. Instead, we should say that financial concerns disallow one set of cultural norms from being as well supported as others (if we wanted to be honest about the matter). Or even more honestly, we could say that culture X is somehow inferior to Y.

But until we do either of those things, the point is that it’s not Zuma’s problem that his wives cost more to support than Mbeki’s did. He could act in a supererogatory fashion, and choose to save us all some money, but he’s under no obligation to, and we shouldn’t judge him more harshly if he doesn’t choose to save us that money. That, at least, is what the man from Nkandla and I agreed over the weekend.

We didn’t talk about Zuma’s frequent insertion of religious rhetoric into political discourse, and I suspect that on that point, we would probably have disagreed. As he’s done in the past, when asserting that the ANC will rule until Jesus comes back, or claiming that “humanity has vanished” without fear of God, Zuma again inserted God into the National Elections in an address to the 33rd Presbyterian Synod in Giyani, Limpopo, on Sunday. Zuma is quoted as saying:

If you don’t respect those in leadership, if you don’t respect authority then you are bordering on a curse. Whether we like it or not, God has made a connection between the government and the church. That’s why he says you, as a church, should pray for it.

It’s easy to say that he’s appealing to a lowest common denominator here, in that an estimated 80% of South Africans are Christians. But this goes further than simply drawing on the support of like-minded people in claiming that he is “doing God’s work”, for example. This is divisive and judgemental (on spurious, metaphysical grounds, rather than principled ones), in that he’s threatening voters who might be tempted to vote for someone other than the ANC with being cursed.

Contrary to the entire point of the democratic process, whereby we freely choose our representatives based on their positions and performance in delivering what they promised us, here your mortal soul is in danger if you don’t vote ANC – regardless of positions or performance. Even if Zuma believes this to be true, threats that would be more suited to Medieval times are surely unbecoming of the President of a nation?

Furthermore, the opportunism of the rhetoric is perhaps even more clear in the next sentence, where he asserts that God has made a connection between “the government and the church”. By this, he has to mean that this government is looked upon with favour by a particular (his) god. He can’t mean God smiles on “governments” in general, because then God must also have approved of PW Botha’s government; and he can’t mean that God is only “connected” in some non-judgemental way to governments, because if so, what’s the point of highlighting an arbitrary connection, even as you say voters should pray for the government?

In today’s Business Day, Peter Bruce wonders “how much more can the ANC take“. While Bruce mostly addresses the political processes by which Zuma could be ousted as the ANC leader, this question can also be raised with respect to those who vote ANC. As he did in 2011, he’s blackmailing voters into supporting him through claiming that it’s only through him, and his party, that their souls will be safe.

Shame on him.

Respect to this Muslim on International Blasphemy Day

Post author By Jacques Rousseau
Post date September 30, 2013
Categories In Daily Maverick, Morality, Religion

It’s perhaps an index of the level of ‘debate’ on religion and its place in society that September 30 each year is commemorated (by some) as International Blasphemy Day. Even four years ago, when my own atheism was far more assertive than it is today, I argued that Blasphemy Day was for the most part a bad idea, mostly because even though it certainly gets the attention of theists,

I don’t care about getting the attention of theists, so much as changing their minds. And I can’t recall many times that I’ve changed someone’s mind through teasing them – usually I’ve just made them more intractable.

Of course, Blasphemy Day does commemorate something worth remembering, in that it’s the anniversary of the original publication of the infamous “Danish cartoons” – which, whether or not you think they should have been published, certainly shouldn’t have been met with the violent reaction they encountered, causing (to mention one example) more than a 100 deaths in Nigerian protests.

But when you mock someone’s god (which you have every right to do), there’s no way to target only those followers of that god that do bad things as a consequence of their faith. Your offense is delivered by shotgun, causing emotional harm to anyone who feels strongly about that faith, regardless of how that faith plays out in their day-to-day lives.

So it is justified to think about the costs versus the benefits of this sort of offence – you assert your freedoms, yes, and you might also remind people that there’s no obligation on the rest of us to take what you do, seriously. And, Muslims who are peace-loving, kind, trustworthy and so forth must be rather saddened, in that it would strike them as perhaps gratuitous, but certainly the (indirect) fault of Muslims who seem nothing like them, except for the fact that they both identify with the same (roughly) religious tradition.

Making the distinction between Muslims who regard their faith as a motivation to do evil, or for whom the faith is at least an inseparable passenger to the evil done for political reasons, is not made easy when moderate, sensible, peaceful etc. Muslims don’t join in with the condemnatory voices of something like last week’s Westgate Mall terrorism in Kenya. Likewise with less tragic sorts of religion-related harms, such as the homophobic rhetoric of the Christian Errol Naidoo. Christians should be first to condemn him, just as all who want to claim that “we’re not all like that” should always be first to condemn the exemplars of their faith who are a discredit to it.

It is with this in mind that I must commend to you Kalim Rajab’s piece in the Daily Maverick today, titled “A perversion of my faith“. Others can fight about the accuracy or not of his interpretation of various scriptures. I won’t, not only because I don’t know enough, but mostly because that misses the point entirely.

We know that religion is more and more something quite different from what it was in centuries (even decades) gone by. Yes, there are literalists out there, who insist on some reading of a religious text, and do harm to promote and defend that reading. But outside of certain (increasingly easy to identify) regions, for example Saudi Arabia, to say that both person X and person Y are Muslims, or Christians, is to say very little.

I’m of course aware of the arguments of Harris and others who speak of the moderates giving shelter, or credence, to the views of the extremists. Making a view “mainstream” does allow for a range of expressions of those views, and this mainstreaming is part of the motivation for a counter-movement like Blasphemy Day. But if the moderates speak out against the extremists – just like non-theists often do – Harris’s argument becomes more difficult to sustain.

It remains true that Rajab’s god doesn’t exist (at least, if by “exist” we mean really exist as a consciousness of some sort). One day, I’d hope that this would be self-evident to everyone. But in the meanwhile, even if it is true that Islam tends to cause more violence than other religions, and even if it’s true that this violence is in the service of a fiction, surely we can nevertheless be happy, and supportive, when someone from inside that tradition denounces the harms done in its name?

The point is not always whether god exists. Sometimes – perhaps most of the time – it’s also worth focusing on what you do with that belief, or lack of belief.