The Future Place Blog

More sense about free will

The New Scientist recently reported an experiment that somewhat deflates the nonsense that has become the popular interpretation of Benjamin Libet's 1983 experiment relating to measuring the brain activity involved in moving a finger. The popular interpretation is that the signal to move the finger precedes the decision, implying that there is no such thing as free will.

Despite not being in the least bit qualified in this area, I have always felt that Libet's results did not show an absence of free will, simply that we did not understand the process as well as we thought we did, and that the interaction between the conscious and unconscious parts of the brain were closely linked, even in a task that we might have previously thought was entirely in the conscious domain.

The experiments by Jeff Miller and Judy Trevena added an auditory cue to the process, and explored the difference between the left and right sides of the brain (by making the respondent choose whether to move a finger on their left of right hand). 

The implications for market research (other than the big philosophical issue about free will) is that we still need to understand that most (possibly all) decisions involve much more than the rational, conscious part of the brain, which is why things like rating scales and intention to buy scales are such poor tools for predicting individual behaviour.

A must read article by Ben Goldacre

Many of you will be familiar with Ben Goldacre and his Bad Science articles, blog, and book. In Bad Science Goldacre exposes bad science and challenges us all to stand up and be counted.

He has just released and extra chapter to his last book and it is downloadable for free here.

The article details how vitamin pill salesman Matthias Rath is responsible for the deaths of thousands in South Africa, and the way that supporters of alternative therapy have failed to withdraw support from him, despite the growing death toll.

I was talking to my teenage sons this evening and they put forward the view that science should be a compulsory subject at every level of education, dropping science at 16 should not be an option (in the UK it is the norm to drop science at 16) - and I think they are absolutely right.

Fuming about smoking science

Last week’s New Scientist has an interesting warning about the way that evangelical anti-smokers, including some scientists, are distorting figures and attacking scientists who want to stick to the facts. The article starts with the case of Michael Siegel who has been attacked and removed one key online group, despite of regularly publish articles about the harmful effects of passive smoking and has testified in more than 50 US cities in favour of indoor bans on smoking.

The article by David Robson highlights a wide range of cases where claims made by some anti-smoking groups go beyond the data and the science. The article highlights a claim from the US branch of ASH “Breathing drifting tobacco smoke for as little as 30 minutes (less than the time one might be exposed sitting on a park bench) can raise a non-smoker's risk of a fatal heart attack to that of a smoker.”. There is evidence that passive smoking for 30 minutes increases the stickiness of blood, which could be damaging for somebody already on the cusp of an attack, but would be harmless to most people. Regular passive smoking is bad for you, but for most people one 30 rest on a park bench next to smoker is going to have (according to the report) no impact for most of us.

The danger to science, not just to the anti-smoking bit of it, is that if scientists get in the habit of lying for what they perceive to be the public good they forfeit the right to be believed on any topic, ever. In the UK we are already a long way towards that position, the number of people who disbelieve the science of climate change may well be in a majority.

Pseudoscience and Dr Sigma’s Attack on Facebook

Last week there was a ridiculous story in the media about a paper by a Dr Aric Sigman claiming that using Facebook and other social media can lead to all sorts of bad results, including cancer. 
Sigman’s argument was:

1. Loneliness has a negative impact on people’s health, a claim with is not particularly outrageous.
2. The use of social media leads to less face-to-face contact and therefore more loneliness.
3. Therefore, the use of Facebook and similar result in long terms health problems.

The big and obvious problem with Sigman’s analysis is that there is not sufficient evidence that using social media reduces conventional social contact.

I wanted to blog about it but last week, but I was really busy, so I did not have a chance to surf for the references.

Luckily, Ben Goldacre has made a much better job of it than I would and has had a swipe at Professor Susan Greenfield at the same time. Goldacre has done the hard yards and shown that Sigman’s analysis is highly selective (cherry picking is the comment Goldacre).

Is the problem that dodgy academics publish rubbish, pseudoscience claims, or that the media are so willing to pick them up?

As a by-product of the story I have realised how many people are questioning the motives and behaviour of Professor Susan Greenfield. When she spoke about neuromarketing I was worried about the science, but assumed that she was in a better position than me to take a view on the likely consequences.

However, it is Goldacre’s claim that Greenfield has form in the area of making sensationalised claims that are not adequately backed up by the science, which is poor form for the head of the Royal Institution (whose website describes themselves as “The Royal Institution is an independent charity dedicated to connecting people with the world of science.”).

Abuse of Science

The New Scientist has a scary report that two people have been found guilty of murder in India on the basis of brain scanning technology. The technique used is called brain electrical oscillations signature (BEOS). The claim of the authorities is that BEOS can tell the whether a scanned brain ‘remembers’ facts.

The process appears to be that the investigator reads out the details of the crime, and if the suspect was there, key bits of their brain ‘light up’. They further claim that they can tell the difference between memories created by being there and memories created by reading or hearing about the crime.

This story raises concerns on so many levels. At present, this approach is about as scientific as using a ducking stool! None of the technology has been validated, and the general scientific opinion seems to be it could not work.

At least, when market researchers looked at using neuroscience in market research, it was relatively harmless, as opposed to this shocking case in India.

However, another question arises about what society should do at some point in the future, if this sort of technology ever became possible?

The Bad Science Column

Following my rant, yesterday, about the decline in the application of rationality, as evidenced by the UK campaign against twin bin refuse collection, Mario (who has a blog here) recommended Dr Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science site.

The Bad Science column has been a regular feature of the Guardian since 2003 and specialises in exposing bad science, faulty thinking, and exposing the sleight of hand of some PR, marketing, and advertising types. I have spent the last hour or so reading back articles on Bad Science, and can warmly recommend it – many thanks Mario.

More on Neuroscience

Phil Harris from Colmar Bruton has added a really interesting comment to my post on neuroscience. Phil talks about how Colmar Brunton is using a different technique, steady-state topography. To go straight to the post and comment click here.

[Declaration of Interest, Colmar Brunton are a consulting client of The Future Place]

The Pluto revolt has started!

Even faster than I had expected there is outcry over the IAU’s (International Astronomical Union) decision to relegate Pluto from the list of planets and their confident assertion that the rest of the world would rush to amend school books and quiz answers to agree with them that there are just eight planets.

The BBC have reported that “A fierce backlash has begun against the decision by astronomers to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.” and CafePress have joined the fray by promoting a “Honk if Pluto is still a planet” bumper sticker.

The BBC report that the lead scientist on Nasa’s mission to Pluto has called the decision “embarrassing”, whilst a leading member of the IAU has accused a faction he calls “dynamicists” of hijacking the issue, by winning the vote when most of the other delegates were not in the room (although 2500 attended to conference, only 424 were present for this key vote).

It is not clear what the future of Pluto’s status is likely to be, but it is clear that science has shot itself in the foot, it has made itself look silly, arrogant, and it will find it even harder when it is asking for money.

Who decides Pluto’s future?

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has decided, at its 2006 AGM in Prague, Czech Republic, that from now on there are only 8 planets. They have decreed that Pluto, along with an unknown number of distant, massive bodies will be known as Dwarf Planets. The BBC report that the IAU expects text books to be re-written, and for schools to start teaching that there 8 planets, just as people who were educated before 1930 (the year Pluto was discovered) were taught.

However, the IAU may find that the public, in true Web 2.0 fashion, are not willing to have this top-down edict imposed upon them. The IAU is a largely self-perpetuating body, comprising 8,796 individual members plus 62 countries who have national members (by contrast the United Nations has 192 countries represented and no individual members). The individual members are hardly the most typical representatives of the world’s view, they are mostly PhDs, 87% of them are male, they are drawn from just 85 countries, and in order to vote they had to be one of the 2,500 who were funded to travel to Prague for the AGM.

What happens if the rest of the world rejects or ignores the IAU’s decision? Do they have any sanctions? The IAU is recognised by Governments as the body responsible for things like naming planets, but Governments are also susceptible to public pressure.

Listening to the astronomers speaking about their decision, such as Professor Iwan Williams, chair of the IAU panel working on the definition of planets, quoted by the BBC, one is struck by the confident way they assert that what they have decided is right in some ‘abstract’ sense. Like some quantitative market researchers, they seem to believe that all problems can be reduced to a set of logical and consistent rules, and that rules need to be consistent, as if there were some theoretically ‘correct’ anser . However in the real world this is usually not so.

We can all agree that light comes in three colours (Red, Green, Blue), that absolute 0 is about -273 centigrade, and that the probability of throwing a 6 with a fair die is one-sixth. However, politicians, scientists, and market researchers often behave in too dogmatic a way when talking about their observations of the real world. Is Scotland a country or a state of the UK? Is a whale a suitable animal to hunt and eat, indeed is any animal suitable? What exactly constitutes a continent, why are Asia and Europe considered to be two separate continents, is Australia an island or a continent? Is that new user segmentation rarely useful?

There has been growing concern about the declining influence of reason and the growth of what Francis Wheen has termed Mumbo Jumbo. Several reasons for this have been put forward such as:

• Science mistakes such as the UK Government’s scientists saying cows could not contract the disease that we now call Mad Cow Disease and saying eating beef was safe (over 150 have since died).
• Scandals such as Hwang Woo-Suk, the South Korean cloning expert who was shown to have fabricated his results.
• Science for hire, such as all those scientists who worked for the cigarette companies in the 60s, trying to show smoking was safe.
• The ‘dumbing down’ of our media and of the wider society.

But surely 2,500 professional astronomers, mostly male, drawn from the richer countries, voting by waving yellow cards in the air, without any attempt to carry the wider public with them, is the sort of behaviour that will widen the gap between “experts” and “the rest”.

Evidently that key and influential group of pseudo-scientists, the astrologers, have no plans to downgrade Pluto, they assert that it still dominates Scorpio. It is a worrying reflection of the poor standing of science that I suspect many people will be as willing to believe their star signs as the astronomers.