Tobacco Ads Could Lead To Cancer Cure

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A sure cure for cancer?

A sure cure for cancer?

Today’s headline is true. True means that which is certain, without the possibility of error; that which is not false; that which accords with reality. It means that which is so even if you don’t want it to be; even, that is, if you have attended a sacred Raising Awareness ceremony about the evils of tobacco.

Yes: it is true that the next tobacco ad you see could lead to a cure for cancer. How?

I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t have to know how, either. The headline is still true as long as somebody, sometime, somewhere could describe how, even if the description is only “in theory.”

My powers of imagination are weak, so I’ll rely on you to divine the path from tobacco ad to cancer cure. What I’ll do instead is distract you from thinking about this difficulty and talk about the glories of a cancer-free world.

Hey! No more cancer! Now that would be a fine thing. Right? No more pain, no suffering, no tears, grief, misery. No more mothers burying their blighted-by-disease daughters.

Like Sally Q. Evalston, 42, a Pinewood, Illinois elementary school teacher, beloved three-time winner of Teacher of the Year, who was carried away before her time with capital-C Cancer (which she “battled” with). Just you think about her. Look at her picture, feel for her mother, weep with her students.

This is the sort of tragedy that could be avoided thanks to our truthful headline. Admit it: you feel good thinking about this, don’t you? Isn’t it nice to be part of the cure for cancer, albeit in small proportion? Maybe you can email your Congressman (or woman!) and let him know you’re on his side, that you’d support him if he voted to increase funding for tobacco advertising. You could at least frown with severe disapproval at the next person you meet who suggests he’d rather not see more tobacco ads.

Assimilated all that? Then here is another true headline, “Tobacco Ads Could Lead to Daily Teen Smoking for Kids 14 and Under“.

Wait. Didn’t we just say that tobacco ads could cure cancer and now a rival claim says these same ads could cause kiddies to smoke? We did: both headlines are true. And so is is true that “Tobacco Ads Could Lead To More Cancer”. Just as it is true as true that “Tobacco Ads Could Lead To Mars Mission” or “Tobacco Ads Could Cause Nancy Pelosi To Stop Speaking Gibberish.”

The magic happens in could. Adding it—or might, may, possibly or the like—turns any proposition about the contingent into a truth. (Contingent = not logically necessary.) Anything contingent could or might be true; that is the nature of contingency. So adding a word like could in a contingent proposition merely makes the proposition tautological, and all tautologies are true.

Headlines like today’s are cheap journalist tricks; one of the most common, too. “Could Lead To” headlines and ledes betray the reporter’s prejudices and desires and make at best weak claims about reality. And the following articles usually fall prey to the standard human failing of searching only for supportive evidence, assuming that contradictory theories are the first refuge of scoundrels and “deniers.” No idea of the uncertainty in the claim of the headline ever appears.

Just for fun, I did a search on “Could Lead To” (surrounded by quotes; try this yourself). “Repetitive soccer ball ‘heading’ could lead to brain injury”, “10 nail deformities that could lead to bigger health problems”, “Heavy rain could lead to explosion in mosquito population”, “NYCHA Budget Cuts Could Lead To 500 Jobs Lost”, “Crowdfunding help could lead to a sandwich named after you”, “NHS changes could lead to hospital being sponsored by junk food firms.” An endless, ever-increasing stream.

And isn’t it curious that all of these, tacitly or directly, argue for government intervention?


Unsignificant Statistics: Or Die P-Value, Die Die Die

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“My p-value was this big.”

Must…resist…quoting… from Stephen Ziliak’s gorgeous invective “Unsignificant Statistics” (where I stole today’s title) in the Financial Post.

Well, just a little (all emphasis mine and joyfully placed):

Statistical significance is junk science, and its big piles of nonsense are spoiling the research of more than particle physicists…

But here is something you can believe, and will want to: Statistical significance stinks…

The null hypothesis test procedure is not the only test of significance but it is the most commonly used and abused of all the tests. From the get go, the test of statistical significance asks the wrong question…

In framing the quantitative question the way they do, the significance-testing scientists have unknowingly reversed the fundamental equation of statistics. Believe it or not, they have transposed their hypothesis and data, forcing them to grossly distort the magnitudes of probable events…

They have fallen for a mistaken logic called in statistics the “fallacy of the transposed conditional.”

And that’s just the first part. I couldn’t finish the second because my eyes were overflowing with happy tears.

Ziliak and pal Deirdre McCloskey, incidentally, co-authored the must-read The Cult of Statistical Significance.

Cult, they say. Cult because there is an initiation at high price. Cult because statistical “significance” is invoked by occult incantations, the meaning of which has been lost in the mists of time. Cult because these things can not be questioned!

The p-value is a mysterious, magical threshold, an entity which lives, breathes, and gazes sternly over spreadsheets; a number gifted to us by the great, mysterious god Stochastikos1. It was he who decreed that great saying, “Oh-point-oh-five and thrive; Oh-point-oh-six and nix.”

Adepts know the meaning of this shorthand. So 0.050000001 is sufficient to cast a result outside the gates where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Yet 0.04999999 produces bliss of the kind had when the IRS decides not to audit.

Members cannot be identified by dress but by their manner of speaking. Clues are evasiveness and glib over-confidence. They say, “The probability my hypothesis is true is Amen” when what they mean is “Given my hypothesis is false, here is the value of an obscure function—one of many I could have picked—applied to the data assuming the model which quantifies its uncertainty is certainly true and that one of its parameters is set to zero and assuming I could regather my data in the same manner but randomly different ad infinitum.”

In the hands of a master, more significant p-values can be squeezed out of a set of data than donations Al Sharpton can secure by marching into an all-white corporation’s board room.

“Statistically significant” does not imply true nor useful nor even interesting. “Significance” is a fog which emanates from a computerized thurible, thick and pungent. It obscures and conceals. It woos and insinuates. It distracts. It is a mathematical sleight-of-hand, a trick. It takes the eye from the direct evidence at hand and refocuses it on the pyrotechnics of p-values. So delighted is the audience at seeing wee p-values that all memory of the point of a study vanishes.

Statistical significance is so powerful that it can prove both a hypothesis and its contrary simultaneously. One day it pronounces broccoli as the awful cause of splentic fever and tomorrow it is asserts unequivocally that broccoli is the only sane cure for the disease.

Both results will be accepted and believed, especially by those manning (and womanning!) bureaucracies and press rooms. Journalists won’t tell you about the deadly effect of either until 10 p.m. Government minions will latch gratefully on to anything “significant” as proof their budget (and therefore power) should be increased.

Time for statistical significance to be slain, its bones cremated, and its ashes scattered in secret. No trace should remain lest the infection re-spread. The only word of it should appear in Latin in tomes guarded by monks charged with collecting man’s (and woman’s!) intellectual follies.


Update Wuhahaha!

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Thanks to Steve E for finding Ziliak’s piece.

1I didn’t think of this; I recall the name from the old usenet days.

Scientists Discover Way To Increase Publication Count

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publish.perishAnybody who has spent any time in a university library amidst the papers of his specialty knows that the absolute last thing which is needed is more of them. Journals abound and apparently breed—asexually, by dividing—when librarians turn their heads.

The reason is obvious: academics must publish whether they want to or not, whether or not they have anything useful to say, and whether or not anybody reads what they write.

The glut appears across all areas of knowledge, but the effects are different in the humanities and sciences. In the former, the world would be a far better place had many of its practitioners obeyed the ancient truism that silence is golden. Over-supply in the sciences is less troublesome because poor and inconsequential works are ignored. The presence of this chaff only makes it difficult to discover the wheat.

In the humanities (which I take to incorporate the gooier sciences, like education) one can say anything, the more outré the better. Not so in the hard sciences where at least some passing resemblance to the truth is expected.

Too much resemblance, as a matter of fact. Editors, reviews, and authors follow a rigid positivistic philosophy: only good news shall find its way into print! Papers with “statistically significant” effects are vastly likelier to be published than are works which admit there’s nothing to see. Failures with billets are as rare as Republicans in English departments.

Then because traditional statistical methods used are fertile in labeling results positive, even when they are not, there exists a tremendous publication bias. Many false things are believed true.

All this is known and of concern to the seventy-plus signatories to the article Trust in science would be improved by study pre-registration in The Guardian. This open letter proclaims “We must encourage scientific journals to accept studies before the results are in.”

The eminences lament publish and perish and say the “publishing culture is toxic to science.”

Recent studies have shown how intense career pressures encourage life scientists to engage in a range of questionable practices to generate publications — behaviours such as cherry-picking data or analyses that allow clear narratives to be presented, reinventing the aims of a study after it has finished to “predict” unexpected findings, and failing to ensure adequate statistical power. These are not the actions of a small minority; they are common, and result from the environment and incentive structures that most scientists work within.

It’s worse than just that. “[J]ournals incentivise bad practice by favouring the publication of results that are considered to be positive, novel, neat and eye-catching.” Although there is no conceivable universe where the string of letters which comprise “incentivise” should be used when ladies are present, we cannot help but agree that the situation is grim.

The “file-drawer” problem adds to the misery. This is when a study which is not a success or isn’t sexy or part of the consensus rests in a lonely file in the forgotten reaches of a scientist’s computer. Lack of negative results in print gives an over-optimistic picture of scientific progress.

The solution the Guardian writers have is to publish “pre-registration” papers, outlines of the studies which are not yet conducted. Journal which air these outlines must agree to publish the eventual results whatever they may be. Thus “questionable practices to increase ‘publishability’” will be “greatly reduced.”

I doubt it. Authors will still aim for high “impact factor” journals for their “pre-registrations.” The “impact factor”, incidentally, is an “arguably meaningless as an indicator of scientific quality”, though always a matter of bragging rights.

There will be a minor flood of papers pre-registering sketchy theories, and these will be all that is remembered. Some authors will publish their negative results, but many will forget them and move on to more fertile grounds. The bulk of these maybe-so works will be taken as positive evidence even if positive effects are never found or if negative effects are published.

Journalists, by nature not very inquisitive, will tout “If these promised results hold…”, and again these reports will be all that is remembered. Retractions will never appear. What’s to retract?

And worst of all will be the huge increase in papers that must be navigated to get to the good stuff. Pre-registration papers will only be “read”—i.e. their abstracts will be glanced at on PubMed—by other authors looking to pad their bibliographies.

No. The real solution is to judge a fellow by the quality and promise of his work, not by its quantity, and not by even a hint of a numerical rating.


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Thanks to Bryan Davies for pointing us to this.

Krauthammer’s Wrong: NSA Spying Not Equivalent To Policing

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We’re spying on you for your own good.

Charles Krauthammer ought to be taken seriously. He said yesterday from his daily perch that he wasn’t concerned about NSA spying on Americans because there hasn’t been any or many complaints or other evidence of abuse, besides the latest. No complaints, no harm.

He compared NSA’s sucking up data to the police carrying guns and using other tools, and that these guns and tools can be used maliciously by those sworn to protect us, and sometimes are, but not to the extent we would disarm cops.

He didn’t use the word “spying.”

The analogy is poor and if considered at length supports the opposite conclusion: NSA ought not to spy on citizens without probable cause. Which is to say, NSA, and every other government agency, ought to follow the Fourth Amendment in its letter and spirit.

If the police suspect a man of crime they must provide sufficient and lengthy evidence to a judge before receiving a search warrant to implement a wire tap (and equivalents). After the warrant is issued, the tap is put in place. Contrariwise, the NSA wire taps everybody first, stores the information, and then swears not to look at it until it receives a warrant from a court with the sole purpose of handing out warrants.

This violates the spirit and letter of the Constitution. Whether our dear leaders come to this same conclusion and voluntarily renounce the power they have awarded themselves is a separate question. Smart money says no: smarter money says these programs will intensify.

Add to this knowledge that the chief law enforcement officer of the country was discovered lying to both Congress and a judge for political reasons, accusing one of his enemies falsely of treason and spying, a double irony (but unfortunately no record).

Police carry guns because crooks do. Except in a very few enlightened locales, such as blood-stained Chicago, any citizen may arm and protect himself in the absence of police. The armament on both sides is in rough parity, with the police holding a slight edge.

There is no equivalent in this case. No citizen can compete with or evade a Dark Star or PRISM, the 007-enemy-like names our beneficent government chose for its programs (this was also Krauthammer’s observation). All a citizen can do is avoid anything electronic: no cell phone, no computer, no medical records (which the IRS will soon have), no credit card, no car, and no heat signature—drones will track these. Remember drones? Only proles and animals are free.

The best comparison is between Stop & Frisk and NSA surveillance. Under Stop & Frisk, cops patrol high-crime areas and detain and search individuals who meet minimal suspicion standards. Minimal is not none. The visible presence of the police is often a sufficient deterrent. Records of Stop & Frisk cannot be used for personal identification.

The NSA can scan records which are minimally suspicious, too. But to do that, they must first collect information on everybody, including people who meet no standard of suspicion. A person frisked on the street knows what has happened to him. The citizen whose records are pored over remains ignorant. The former can complain of abuse, the latter cannot. This is why there are no complaints of harassment.

Revealingly, the government does not claim electronic snooping does deters, only that it discovers. Perhaps people would feel better were they to learn the spying programs have uncovered innumerable foreign spies and stopped countless attacks. The government is understandably reticent to admit these successes, assuming they exist, fearing its enemies will backward engineer its methods and thus countervail them.

However, there is good reason to think the number of these successes is low. For one, our current administration loves to brag, and it has not about uncovering spies. And the failures have been many. The Boston bombers, the shoe and underwear bombers, Mumbai, Benghazi, England’s bombings; many others including Snowden himself. Contradictorily, these will encourage governments to increase its powers rather than admit its programs don’t work.

I had, in the 1980s, a Top Secret SCI etc. etc. clearance, natural for a USAF Sergeant in cryptography. The clearance came with endless briefings about traitorous spies and the damage they caused. These were mostly useless as training to spot spies, because all we learned was that spies excel at hiding. But because spies existed and the government feared them, it thought it should screen for them using lie detectors.

These were not useless: they were able to produce many accusations, all (or nearly all) false. Real spies pass polygraphs. (Incidentally, the attack is psychological: “There seems to be a problem with question seven, Sergeant Briggs. Can you help me with that?” “Nope.” “Are you sure?” “Yep.” “You are dismissed.” Always the same.)

It’s a good guess the same will and is happening with NSA’s terrorist screening. The failures suggest screening is too blunt a tool to catch bad guys, especially well organized and intelligent adversaries.


Update Recommended reading. Liberty in the Tentacular State.