Are we turning into “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”? (Don’t answer that) There are way too many rants as compared to raves.

So this is a rave about D and D online. It will be out in March sometime and it is in beta now. To be frank, I have only back-seat driven it but it seems really good so far. It’s shaping up to be what World of Warcraft promised – but failed – to become. That is, it seems to involve more than just endless killing of endless monsters in the same way. It also doesn’t make you spend half the game trying to find your way back to be reborn.

Some AD&D experinece will help but isn’t necessary. The player interaction can be as interesting as playing AD&D for real. (Except you don’t get to roll d20s but you don’t have to do endless calculations either.) It is a faithful adaptation of the game, with the human element but added good graphics. There are lots of wierd moves that various characters can do.

I think the Ohio state link mentioned below (http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5263.html) is a good example of legitimate science serving as “bad science”. The words “Research shows that a positive self-concept is more important to academic success than a high IQ score” are pure bad science. Clearly, a child who respects him or herself and is confident of his or her abiliity is likely to do better in life than one plagued by nervousness and self-loathing. However, encouraging children to become confident is an activity that fits into the moral category of making your children as happy as you can.

I refuse to belive there is any evidence that it will make them do better at school. Kids who are more confident in school are likely to have experieneced success at acdemic things and to come from a background that encourages academic success and therefore confidence. So academically successful kids are already acdemically confident . Just as people who are good at sports are likely to be more confident on the pitch. Confidence probably wouldn’t improve your goal-scoring average and I suspect that few people who can’t score goals would do better if they had more confidence.

Whose “research” is this? Isn’t a high IQ score already a piece of bad science which has been written into our educational polices? At least it’s measurable. There is no baseline indicator of confidence. Surely it varies enormously throughout the day, according to the situation one is in.

Anyone who has ever filled in one of those self-defining questionnaires will know that a respondent’s answers to any question are never true or consistent.

I also read the New Scientist report but don’t have it to hand. It claimed low self-esteem was not usually a factor in creating bullies, as was widely assumed. The report argued that bullies tended to be pretty full of self-esteem. It was their less fortunate victims whose self-esteem went down the tubes. Sorry, I can’t find the reference either but the title was something along the lines of “Raising self-esteem no panacea for bullies”

Bad Science is really good at pointing out the nonsense in the unsupported dietary and medical advice that seems to be everywhere in the media now. There seems to be a huge market for any theory that mixes a few bits of knowledge or insight with a lot of prescriptive nonsense to create a bizarre new set of quasi-medical instructions. The Guardian’s own alternative health column is one of the worst offenders, sadly.

 I’d also like to see some discussion of  actual “scientist-produced” bad science. A fair number of experiments reported in the popular science press seem pretty dubious ethically and logically. I will collect some examples and post here.

 

Reading the recent post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/02/16/presenting-both-sides/) reminded me of a guy on tv who was spouting nonsense this morning.

One of the guests on the “Wright Stuff” on Channel 5 this morning (I was off work so had nothing better to watch) was talking about confidence.

As part of his raison d’être he claimed that studies showed children with high self esteem / self confidence did better academically and as a result of this, raising a childs self confidence will impove his or her academic performance. Now, if you find no problem with this then I suspect you really should stop reading now. (note, this is something often repeated – http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5263.html for example)
Before I go on, I am not trying to say people shouldnt raise children’s self confidence or that having a high self confidence is a bad thing. I am also not (at the moment) trying to disparage studies which use blatantly self-assessed values (like “happiness,” “self-confidence,” etc.)

My issue revolves almost totally around the causal effects here.

The man (never bothered to find out who he was) has assumed that A causes B and therefore doing more of A will mean more of B. In reality there is (based on his evidence) no way of knowing that.

Self confidence and self esteem are products of a persons sucess. If you are good at something, and praised for it, there is the tendency to become confident about doing it. Logic screams out that children who are academically sucessfull will be more self confident when questioned (as the questions are in an academic context and relate to academic type work) which in effect implies A does not cause B but is caused by B. The claims that improving a childs self confidence will mean they “do better in life” does not really hold true based on the evidence. If anything, improving self confidence without basing this on actual sucess is more likely to create a situation where the person will fall down spectacularly.

Sadly I no longer have the back issue and cant find it on the online search, but New Scientist did an article on this last year (or 2004) detailing research that had in fact identified improved self confidence was not a causal agent for sucess, and more often lead to bulying and arrogance.

CSS is brilliant in concept. So why is it almost impossible to apply in any rational fashion?

Antiquated html table tags might be a pain to create, but once you had drawn a table, you know where things would turn up. CSS positioning can be an umitigated nightmare.

And given that CSS is supposed to be cross-browser- why does the toughest bit to code in one browser  – the positioning – turn out to be the one bit that’s not?

There seems an almost unwritten law in newspapers and magazines where journalists feel compelled to present what they see as “both sides” of the argument.

Now, at first glance it seems like this is a “reasonable” approach to take but is this always the case? Personally I think not, and it is the warped idea that this has to be done which has allowed real crackpot ideas like ID to get a foothold.

It is very easy to pass scorn on the “mainstream” press for this fallacy, but science journals (which really should know better) can be just as guilty. In todays New Scientist magazine, in the In Brief section there is an article entitled “Melatonin Myth?” [New Scientist, 18 feb 2006, p 21] – which is available online from http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg18925394.900 – and in this it explains that Nini Buscemi (et al) from the University of Alberty carried out a review on the use of Melatonin to fight jet lag. Their research implied that there was “no evidence the hormone helps people get to sleep sooner” and “at best it added 10 mins of extra sleep for every 8 hours in bed.”

In the sprit of presenting both sides, New Scientist helpfully adds in this reply from the “Surrey Sleep Research Centre” (Guildford, UK) “Dont knock it.” Fantastic. What an excellent refute of the Buscemi study. The reply is from “Jo Arent” (not listed on the SSRC staff list so I cant correctly attribute her scientific credentials) and she says “some studies are negative because subjects were not instructed to take melatonin at the correct time.”

Now call me old fashioned, and to be honest this is completely without seeing the studies she is talking about so I may well be wrong, but this sounds suspiciously like the argument Homeopaths use to justify thier witchcraft.

I get the impression, that as western society works hard to undo the enlightenment we suffer from journalists who feel the need to appear balanced (at times, the New Scientist staff are happy to present weak causal links elsewhere without retort) which in turn creates confusion and mistrust within the general public.

It is this hotbed of chaos which has allowed ID (and homeopathy, “alternative medicine” fools and cranks like Gillian McKeith) to gain a foothold in society. People are confused about science and as more nutjobs get on the news, the more confused people become. It is shocking.

Partly “science” itself is to blame. What once was fairly simple (basic science and “human scale” physics is straightforward enough for most people) but as we get into the realms of DNA, Quantum Mechanics etc., it seems people are feeling left behind. As this happens we create an environment where the lunatic can seem as reasonable as the next man.

This is not a Good Thingâ„¢.