99.873% of statistics are made up
Today I was involved in a Twitter argument with two Prominent Liberal Democrat Bloggers. I’ll leave their names and the precise details of the argument out, because it’s not germane (and also because I may inadvertantly misrepresent one of them in the very abbreviated precis that follows), although anyone who really wishes can look it up on Twitter. But the argument went something along the lines of:
Prominent Liberal Democrat Blogger 1: Sign this petition banning the distimming of doshes!
PLDB2 : But that says that studies show that distimming causes gostaks to go blind. In fact all the studies show it causes them to grow an extra foot!
PLDB1: That doesn’t matter! Just sign the damn petition! Distimming is wrong!
PLDB2: I’m not signing a petition with things in it that are demonstrably untrue!
PLDB1: But you can never be 100% accurate, so just sign the damn thing! Anyway, you can prove anything with statistics!
Me: Are you seriously saying that just because absolute inaccuracy is not possible, you shouldn’t make any effort to remove obvious falsehoods?
PLDB1: Don’t sidetrack the discussion! This is about distimming! Anyway, people will argue over anything, no matter what you do.
And then on, for many more 140-character responses, essentially going round in circles.
Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this attitude recently – a couple of weeks ago there was a storm in a teacup over a famous campaigning organisation running a campaign for an excellent cause, but with a headline figure that was not very accurate. I won’t link to anything about that (although most politically-minded people reading this will have a good idea what I’m talking about), because I don’t want to give ammunition to the kind of people who will use the inaccuracy against the cause itself.
But the thing is, I shouldn’t have to do that. I shouldn’t have to choose between telling the truth and discrediting a worthy campaign. Using misleading or outright wrong facts is the kind of thing we excoriate the Mail or Express about, and we shouldn’t be doing it ourselves. Were the Mail to headline “75% of people think immigrants should be hanged!” then we’d be all over the article, tearing it to shreds, but the same people would be silent if they saw something saying “75% say ID cards are wrong”.
Citations of studies and statistics can be very useful, as can using raw numbers. Amnesty are currently campaigning to stop 128 executions in Iraq., for example, and that’s an important campaign. But it stands or falls on the 128 number, so they’ve ensured they’ve got it right. If it turned out there were only five people being executed, and the other 123 were being given free chocolate instead, Amnesty would quite rightly argue that the death penalty is still wrong, and that any executions are too many. But they would look idiotic. (Sadly, this is not a case where the numbers are wrong…)
We need, as ‘progressives’ (whatever that very devalued word still means) to be at least as strict with ourselves as we are with the other side. In particular, we need to acknowledge unpleasant evidence. We can’t say, for example “Cannabis should be legal, as it’s harmless” – it’s clearly *not* harmless, as the many people suffering from cannabis psychosis would attest. But we *can* say “Cannabis should be legal, *even though it can cause harm*, as the harm it causes is less than the harm caused by denying adults the right to do as they wish with their own brains”. Saying “the minimum wage doesn’t have any negative effect on jobs” is wrong – the minimum wage clearly prevents the creation of some small number of very low-paid jobs. But saying “the overall positive effect of the minimum wage – which prevents workers from living on starvation-level incomes – more than offsets its small negative effect” is truthful.
If our arguments are right, we don’t need spurious pseudo-evidence to back them up, and if they’re wrong we shouldn’t be making those arguments in the first place. Using factoids, rather than facts, is one of the things that makes people think ‘they’re all the same’ – because sooner or later one of those factoids will contradict the listener’s personal experience, and s/he will write the source off as a liar.
We can’t get everything right, but it’s not difficult to find a reliable source for any statement of fact you make (if it can be done for Wikipedia it can be done for a political campaign or petition) and if you do find such a source, at least you can then say “It was in reliable newspaper X or peer-reviewed journal Y”, rather than imitating Reagan and saying “facts are stupid things”.
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ 20: The Fires Of Vulcan
My definition of ‘week’ is getting quite elastic, isn’t it? Oh well, this is a series about a time traveller, after all…
One of the things Big Finish have always done well that the TV series never did much of after William Hartnell is the pure ‘historical’ story. Stories like The Marian Conspiracy or Son Of The Dragon, which put the Doctor and his companions into Earth’s past without any alien invaders or mad scientists or monsters, have actually provided many of the best moments in the audios, and much of the identity of the series. Big Finish has been at its best when exploring genres that 80s Doctor Who never had time for, and at its worst when trying to do ‘Doctor Who stories’.
With that in mind it’s rather odd that their stories with the Seventh Doctor, where they have the most room to manoeuvre and do different stories, have almost all been pastiches of the New Adventures books and/or of the last series, and have been generally the worst of their stories by a long way (the McGann stories have often been dull, but there’s not been a McGann as fanwanky as Master or outright repellent as Flip Flop).
However, rather oddly, the stories featuring the Seventh Doctor and Mel, which one would imagine to be the worst of the bunch (having seen the truly awful TV episodes in which the two team up, easily the worst period of the show’s history by a very long way) break this tendency and are actually often enjoyable (except the repulsive Flip Flop…)
Fires Of Vulcan, by Steve Lyons, is easily one of the better Seventh Doctor audios for these reasons, and because unlike so many of them it’s *about* something. Actually, it’s about many things – all of them Doctor Who perennials. By dropping the Doctor into Pompeii on the day of the eruption of Vesuvius, a day when the Doctor already knows his TARDIS will get buried in the ash for the next 2000 years, Lyons gets to rub two of the oldest morals in Doctor Who – “You can’t change history, not one line” and “Where there’s life there’s hope” – together and see what sparks fly off. A little ‘you must take responsibility for your own actions and not stand around waiting for a god to save you” is also thrown in for good measure.
What’s impressive about this is that there are no truly unsympathetic characters here – the characters who do things we would think of as ‘evil’ are usually behaving correctly according to the morality of the time. The gladiator who tries to kill the Doctor because the Doctor has dishonoured him does so because the ‘dishonour’ could have very real consequences for someone who relies on the goodwill of the public to stay alive after losing a fight – consequences the Doctor completely overlooks in his willingness to trick and humiliate him publicly (although of course the Doctor knows that there are no long-term consequences to interference in Pompeii).
The story is a genuinely good one, with the companion for once taking the lead while the Doctor mopes about going ‘we’re all doomed! Doomed!’ and persuading the Doctor eventually that it is possible to save themselves. Interestingly, the Doctor asks Mel if they should stay as soon as he realises where they are, saying it must be her choice but not giving her the information he has (that the TARDIS will be discovered buried there in 1980) and it’s her decision to stay that convinces him everything has gone wrong. This suggests that in the Doctor Who ‘universe’ ‘free will’ and possession of information are antithetical – predestination exists for anyone who has information about the future, but not for anyone else. This would fit with a lot of my own fanwanky ideas about the TARDIS and time travel (as well as the ideas in the About Time books, which I’ve been reading obsessively for the last few weeks) and provides for many story possibilities (ones which have unfortunately not been followed up).
Apparently the ‘canonicity’ of this story is in doubt now because of an episode from the last series of nuWho, which featured nuDoctor going to Pompeii himself. While this was apparently the best episode of the series (according to Alex) and was also the only episode I considered watching from the last series (purely because it was a crossover with the Cambridge Latin Course), if it means people are less likely to bother with this story because it’s no longer ‘canon’ (and that sort of thing does bother people – see the endless comment thread of doom here ) then I think it’s a real shame, as this is far and away my favourite piece of work featuring McCoy’s Doctor.
Off delivering Focuses now, Superman Beyond 3D review when I get back. In the meantime, I’ve joined that Twitter thing that all the cool kids are doing. For I am down with the kids and their hippity hoppity music and their emu haircuts and their hula hoops. If you are interesting in following me as I twoot, then my username is stealthmunchkin. Not sure how much (if at all) I’ll use the thing though…
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