I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
Read I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That Online
Authors: Ben Goldacre
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Ben Goldacre 2014
Ben Goldacre asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
‘Dr Goldacre Doesn’t Make Everything Better’ by Jeremy Laurance © the
Independent
/
www.independent.co.uk
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007462483
Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780007505159
Version: 2014-09-18
To whom it may concern.
And Archie.
And Alice.
Contents
Why Won’t Professor Susan Greenfield Publish This Theory in a Scientific Journal?
Cherry-Picking Is Bad. At Least Warn Us When You Do It
Kids Who Spot Bullshit, and the Adults Who Get Upset About It
Existential Angst About the Bigger Picture
The Glorious Mess of Real Scientific Results
Is It OK to Ignore Results from People You Don’t Trust?
Foreign Substances in Your Precious Bodily Fluids
Academic Papers Are Hidden from the Public. Here’s Some Direct Action
Pink, Pink, Pink, Pink. Pink Moan
Guns Don’t Kill People, Puppies Do
Datamining for Terrorists Would Be Lovely If It Worked
Benford’s Law: Using Stats to Bust an Entire Nation for Naughtiness
Sampling Error, the Unspoken Issue Behind Small Number Changes in the News
Scientific Proof That We Live in a Warmer and More Caring Universe
There’s Something Magical About Watching Patterns Emerge from Data
Care.data Can Save Lives: But Not If We Bungle It
A New and Interesting Form of Wrong
‘Hello Madam, Would You Like Your Children to Be Unemployed?’
When Journalists Do Primary Research
Anecdotes Are Great. If They Really Illustrate the Data
The Strange Case of the Magnetic Wine
What Is Science? First, Magnetise Your Wine …
What If Academics Were as Dumb as Quacks with Statistics?
Brain-Imaging Studies Report More Positive Findings Than Their Numbers Can Support. This Is Fishy
Twelve Monkeys. No … Eight. Wait, Sorry, I Meant Fourteen
Medical Hypotheses
Fails the Aids Test
Observations on the Classification of Idiots
If You Want to Be Trusted More: Claim Less
Is This the Worst Government Statistic Ever Created?
More Than Sixty Children Saved from Abuse
I’d Expect This from UKIP, or the
Daily Mail
. Not from a Government Leaflet
Andrew Lansley and His Imaginary Evidence
Why Is Evidence So Hard for Politicians?
Politicians Can Divine Which Policy Works Best by Using Their Special Magic Politician Beam
Over There! An Eight-Mile-High Distraction Made of Posh Chocolate!
As Far as I Understand Thinktanks …
Meaningful Debates Need Clear Information
Building Evidence into Education
A Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz
NMT Is Suing Dr Peter Wilmshurst. So How Trustworthy Is This Company? Let’s Look at Its Website …
‘We Are More Possible Than You Can Powerfully Imagine’
Science Is About Embracing Your Knockers
The Noble and Ancient Tradition of Moron-Baiting
After Madeleine, Why Not Bin Laden?
Who’s Holding the Smoking Gun on Bioresonance?
Aids Denialism at the
Spectator
Wi-Fi Wants to Kill Your Children … But Alasdair Philips of Powerwatch Sells the Cure!
Why Don’t Journalists Mention the Data?
Yeah, Well, You Can Prove Anything with Science
Evidence-Based Smear Campaigns
All Bow Before the Mighty Power of the Nocebo Effect
So Brilliantly You’ve Presented a Really Transgressive Case Through the Mainstream Media
Health Warning: Exercise Makes You Fat
The Caveat in Paragraph Number 19
Why Don’t Journalists Link to Primary Sources?
A Fishy Friend, and His Friends
MMR: The Scare Stories Are Back
Prevention Is Better than Cure When It Comes to Health Scares
Roger Coghill and the Aids Test
Here’s My … Foreword to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway Guidebook
Staying Beautiful Is Easy to Do
‘Nanniebots’ to Catch Paedophiles
Be Very Afraid: The Bad Science Manifesto
What Eight Years of Writing the Bad Science Column Has Taught Me
This is a collection of my most fun fights, but the fighting is just an excuse. There is nothing complicated about science, and people can understand anything, if they’re sufficiently motivated. Coincidentally, people like fights. That’s why I’ve spent the last ten years lashing science to mockery: it’s the cleanest way I know to help people see the joy of statistics, and the fascinating ways that evidence can be distorted or ignored.
But these aren’t personal attacks, and I’m not an angry person. All too often, people hoping to make science accessible fall into the trap of triumphalism, presenting science as a canon, and a collection of true facts. In reality, science is about the squabble. Every fight you will read in this book, over the meaning of some data, is the story of the scientific process itself: you present your idea, you present your evidence, and we all take turns to try and pull them both apart. This process of close critical appraisal isn’t something we tolerate reluctantly, in science, with a grudge: far from it. Criticism and close examination of evidence is actively welcomed – it is the absolute core of the process – because ideas only exist to be pulled apart, and this is how we spiral in on the truth.
Away from the newspapers and science TV shows you can see that process, very clearly, in the institutions of science. The question-and-answer session at any academic conference, after someone presents their scientific research, is often a
bloodbath
: but nobody’s resentful, everyone expects it, and we all consent to it, as a kind of intellectual S&M activity. We know it’s good for our souls. If the idea survives, then great; if it needs more evidence, we decide what studies are needed next and do them. Then we all come back next year, tear the evidence apart again, and have another think. Real scientists know this. Only the fakers cry foul.
In short, this book has a manifesto: check the evidence and fight back against anyone who tries to stop you. Along the way, you will get a grounding in statistics, study design, evidence-based policy and much more, in bite-size chunks. Because while my last two books –
Bad Science
and
Bad Pharma
– were polemics with a shape, this is a racing collection of short pieces. As such, I hope it works as a kind of statistics toilet book, bringing satisfaction in short bursts, with a fight and an idea in each one.
So in the section of this book on surveys, we laugh at the stupidity of the nuclear power industry, some silly anti-abortionists and StoneWall (whom I actually adore). Or, if you prefer: we learn about the distortions of ‘participant bias’, misleading question design and a sticky problem involving a complex time-dependent variable. In the first piece of the book we cover some surprisingly unprofessional behaviour from a Baroness, Professor and previous Director of the Royal Institution. Or, if you prefer: we cover post-publication peer review and why the conventions of academic journals are helpful.
These pieces cover two decades of work. There are lots of
Guardian
columns, but also academic papers, a report for the UK education minister, my work in the
Romney, Hythe and Dimchurch Railway Guidebook
, the odd undergraduate essay and more. If I’m honest, it’s pretty soulful (for me, not you) looking back over two decades and seeing what has changed. I was in my twenties and barely out of medical school when I started writing a column in the
Guardian
. As time passed, the targets got bigger, my day job took me through postgraduate qualifications and grown-up battles, and I think I got better at pulling claims apart. There was also discipline from outside: writing about other people’s misdeeds, collecting ever greater numbers of increasingly powerful enemies – and all under British libel law – is like doing pop science with a gun to your head. So for that, thanks.
At the end I might tell you a little about how I work, why I do what I do, who made me, and how things have changed over the past two decades. For now, let’s just say I’m very grateful to all the many companies and people who, by their optimistically bad behaviour under fire, have given narrative colour to what might otherwise have been some very dry explanations of basic statistical principles.
What’s in this book
I’ve written 500,000 words in the last decade, so there is no repetition, and the corpses of folk like Gillian McKeith, the homeopaths and Big Pharma are left in my previous two books (although these characters fight on, like zombies, in the real world). My academic work on statins and Big Data is saved for a fun project that will be launching shortly. Lastly, most of my writing on randomised trials in education, policing and everywhere else is held back, as my book on this topic will come out in due course.