Is he the best British newspaper columnist?
This is yesterday's column from The Guardian's
Life. I'll dig through his old stuff and see if I can find some more:
Sperm counting
Thursday July 14, 2005
And so our highly improbable Popular Statistics with Sperm series continues: I've locked myself in the Bad Science office with two weeks' worth of baked beans and they haven't been able to sack me yet. This week we look at cognitive illusions: they're a major reason we use statistics, to avoid falling prey to our tendency to detect patterns and causality in random patterns. Studying cognitive illusions - a bit like optical illusions, only for beliefs - can help us understand why people can wind up believing weird things such as, for example, that alternative therapies work, even when they don't.
One important contributor to this is our failure to spot something called "regression to the mean". We live in a state of constant flux. You can see, now, how easily I could pass over to the dark side, and start writing self-help books. Anyway, we live in a state of flux, as in, things get better, then they get worse, often randomly. Maybe you have back pain. It comes and goes, sometimes it's very bad, sometimes it's not. If you roll a six, the chances are your next roll will be closer to three and a half, the average or "median" score on a dice: the same if you roll a one. That's regression to the mean.
Sporting chaps in America talk about the "Sports Illustrated Jinx": if you appear on the cover of the magazine, bad things happen to your game. Bless them. If you appear on the cover of the magazine, it's because you're performing extremely well, unexpectedly well perhaps. This will be through a mix of talent and luck. Luck, or noise, generally passes, or regresses to the mean, by itself, just like with the dice. If you fail to understand that, you start looking for another cause for that regression, and you find ... the Sports Illustrated Jinx.
Let's say someone has a theory that rubbing semen into your face is good for spots. Again. Just go with it. So for various reasons, you might only cave in and rub it on when your spots are really bad. They were probably going to get better anyway, from their worst point, by regression to the mean, but you don't read Bad Science, so you didn't know about that, so you ascribe causal significance to the semen. In fact, you become an evangelist for the stuff. Or alternatively you can learn about statistics: because if we use a sample size of greater than one, and we have a control group to compare with, we can avoid this kind of sticky mess.
― Huey (Huey), Friday, 15 July 2005 15:06 (twenty years ago)
This is a definite favourite:
Penta tonics
Thursday March 10, 2005
The great thing about Bad Science is the column just writes itself. Like when Penta Water wrote in to say "Sleep well tonight and think about how and why you tried to fuck us over and practice [sic] keeping one eye open." It may have apologised, but the curse of Bad Science has struck again: this time, through the mighty hand of the Advertising Standards Authority.
Someone - I like to fantasise it was one of you - wrote to the ASA to complain that Penta's adverts "misleadingly implied the product had health benefits over and above those of ordinary water" and that "the claims 'restructured' and 'it might be just H2O, but it's no ordinary water'" were misleading. Here are some of the quotes from Penta that worried them: "Easy to drink - Proven faster, better hydration - No sloshing or fullness Penta is ultra-purified, restructured 'micro-water'. Groundbreaking science - proven by patent. Just H2O in smaller stable clusters." Nice. "You too can use Penta (1-4 bottles a day) to enjoy what we call "Bio-hydration" optimal cellular hydration that makes your body come alive ... Penta is proven to hydrate more efficiently due to its unique structure." And the proof? "It's been shown by researchers at the University of Calif. at San Diego that Penta water hydrates cells faster and more effectively than other waters. Researchers at Moscow University demonstrated that Penta improves the environment within your cells ...Unique patented structure ... proven at the prestigious General Physic Institute."
Now check this. The ASA can be even more patronising than me: "They [Penta] submitted research papers that they believed showed scientific evidence of restructuring... The authority took expert advice and understood that the scientific evidence submitted did not prove that Penta had health benefits over and above those of ordinary water, or had been restructured to form stable smaller clusters. It also understood that hydrogen bonds in ordinary water were a weak type of chemical bonding that allowed the formation and reformation of temporary clusters of water molecules in liquid phase water many times per second."
So the ASA has told Penta not to repeat claims that imply its product is chemically unique, has been restructured or molecularly redesigned, or improves physical performance better than tap water. I can't help wanting to ask, only I'm too scared to phone them again: how is Penta going to flog this water now?
― Huey (Huey), Friday, 15 July 2005 15:19 (twenty years ago)