Ed Dowding

Murdoch is like a redneck with an AK-47 shooting wildly into a herd of BBC elephants. “These slow good for nothing beasts! Stomp all the grass for my cattle! HAHAHA!! BANG! BANG!! Take that, Dumbo!”

But that’s all just opinions and metaphor. Numbers, let’s look at numbers. These put some perspective to Murdoch’s power grab.

So to recap:

1. Murdoch makes more money, has lower costs, and makes crappier programmes.
2. The BBC is owned by the public and run in the public interest, creates plenty of creative employment opportunities, raises the statesman-like esteem of the UK internationally, and costs considerably less.

Hmm. Pipe down, James. Grow up and stop trying to undermine the value of what we have built so that you and your barrow-boy friends can pedal more mediocre banalities and stuff your already overflowing pockets with just that little bit more cash.

Sources: BBC HYS, Today Programme, 2 Mar 2010, Yahoo Finance

‘How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?’ 30 Million People Wonder

All agreed that disposing of what would eventually amount to 50 tons of thermoplastic polymer resin wasn’t the end of the world.

“It’s not like I don’t care, because I do, and most of the time I don’t even buy bottled water,” thought Missouri school teacher Heather Delamere, the 450,000th caring and progressive individual to have done so that morning, and the 850,000th to have purchased the environmentally damaging vessel due to being thirsty, in a huge rush, and away from home. “It’s really not worth beating myself up over.”

“What’s one little bottle in the grand scheme of things, you know?” added each and every single one of them.

Source: The Onion, again

In other news, please please please please don’t buy or drink commercial bottled water. It’s such a patently ridiculous idea, which consumes so many resources so utterly unnecessarily to deliver something which is cheaply and abundantly available that it brands anyone who drinks it as a naive idiot. Like driving your children half a mile to school in a Hummer, it’s only really justifiable if you’re in an desert war-zone.

And please don’t come back with that “but they give their profits to charity” plea. Unless of course you have £100,000 and would like to invest in my ethical landmine company? We’re going to change the dirty world of weapons by working at it from within. Biodegradable plastics which only start decomposing once the product has been used, and fair-trade, recycled explosives! (We’re providing as many as TEN jobs for Congolese amputees, just another of the ways we’re changing this dirty business! Even our workforce of amputee employees will be sustainable!)

I’m so glad we live in an age where people are doing large scale psychology studies, trying to discern the facts about our behaviour which our perceptions mask.

This has fed into the mainstream thanks to books like Nudge and Freakonomics, and is being used politically to great effect (viz Obama). (There are fears that it just means that those in power have more opportunity to exploit us, but that has always been the way. Now we are more aware of the collective effects of our cognitive fallacies, and availability of knowledge and information is never a bad thing.)

It’s a shame it’s not being used more by the green lobby, but .. well I digress.

The point is that some great psychology and neuroscience studies were published in 2009. Here are a two from a recent list which I hope you’ll find interesting:

If you have to choose between buying something or spending the money on a memorable experience, go with the experience. According to a study conducted at San Francisco State University, the things you own can’t make you as happy as the things you do. One reason is adaptation: we adapt to all things material in our lives in a matter of weeks, no matter how infatuated we were with the coveted possession the day we got it. Another reason is that experience, unlike possession, generally involves other people, and fosters or strengthens relationships that are more edifying over time than owning something.

Playing video games could be an unlikely cure for psychological trauma. Researchers at Oxford University hypothesized that playing Tetris after witnessing violence would sap some of the cognitive resources the brain would normally rely on to form memories.  A well-structured study in the journal PLoS One confirmed the finding–Tetris acted like a ‘cognitive vaccine’ against traumatic memory. Memory research suggests that there’s about a 6-hour window immediately after witnessing trauma during which memory formation can be disrupted.  The results of this study indicate that if you happen to have Tetris or a game like it handy during those six hours, it’s the cure for what ails you.

Source: Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About on BrainSpin

I’ve just been watching ‘The World According to Monsanto’. It’s pretty compelling stuff. As one of the contributors says,

“Seed is more powerful than bombs, more powerful than guns”

and given that, you’d have thought that we’d be a little more careful about what we do it.

70% of the food in the USA contains bio-engineered ingredients. They are not allowed by law to label if a product contains GM ingredients.

Monsanto has repeatedly falsified studies, bribed, and spread misinformation, sometimes even allowing their agents to masquerade as scientists to run a smear campaign against those scientists who contest their studies.

This is simply bad science.

I’m not anti-GM crops, but I do think that progressing at such speed, with such scant and ambiguous positive evidence, is dangerous folly. This is, after all, the whole world’s food supply we’re talking about.

In fact this whole documentary is basically about bad science: tailoring interpretations to achieve economic ends.  It’s worth having a watch. It’s even conveniently divided up into bite-sized 10 minute chunks.

Summary of arguments against GM crops:

• Don’t do what they say
• Tested to only very low standards, riding on a ’substantial equivalence’ test (NB this similar to how Thalidomide occured)
• Can not be contained and can thus undermine the genes of related and non-related organisms.
• Create dependency on chemical companies
• Take from the soil without putting back
• Reduce biodiversity and encourage monoculture
• Contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance
• Genes can mutate with harmful effect
• “Sleeper” genes could be accidentally switched on and active genes could become “silent”
• They impact on birds, insects and soil biota
• Transfer of allergenic genes, triggering reactions in humans and animals
• Mixing of GM products in the food chain
• Transfer of antibiotic resistance
• Loss of farmers’ access to plant material since keeping seeds it not permitted both by legal terms, and terminator and / or traitor genes
• Intellectual property rights could slow research

Sources: ‘The World According to Monsanto’ Online For Free. | The Good Human and  http://www.fao.org/english/newsroom/focus/2003/gmo8.htm

A company in Ontario has developed an Electro Physiological Frequency Xrroid (EPFX) which aims to.. well, they put it best, so:

Simply put, the EPFX / SCIO is a high-tech complementary biofeedback device that assists health practitioners find stress and energetic imbalances occurring within humans and animals. [...]

During testing, the EPFX device resonates with thousands of tissues, organs, nutrients, toxins and allergens for one hundredth of a second each, and records the degree to which the body reacts. This type of rapid testing is known as the Xrroid process. [...]

Basically, the EPFX / SCIO reveals anything that is negatively affecting health. For example, if someone has digestive trouble, the EPFX / SCIO may show that person to have had some sort of food poisoning as a child, which is causing current health issues to occur. Or if a person is chronically tired, the EPFX / SCIO could show an acupuncture energy imbalance

from Vibrancy Inc.

Sounds kind of cool! Like the scanner in Star Trek where they can diagnose what’s wrong with you from a quick once-over.

Perhaps such one-hit scanners are getting closer. Machines and dogs can detect cancer with 99% accuracy, fMRI scanners allow very detailed scanning of the body, markers can travel through us and pick up reveal superb information. But such a scanner is simply not yet scientifically possible. I mean, if it were, you’d think you’d be hearing about it from someone other than me, right?  I should at least be able to link to some pretty excited news or science website links.

This sounds kind of familiar though..ah yes:

The belief is that the energy will flow through the practitioner’s hands whenever the hands are placed on, or held near a potential recipient. Some teachings stress the importance of the practitioner’s intention or presence in this process, while others claim that the energy is drawn by the recipient’s injury to activate or enhance the natural healing processes. Going further, the belief is that the energy is “intelligent”, making diagnosis unnecessary.

Which is startlingly similar to this:

Practitioners detect minute changes in electrical resistance through the body. Changes in the resistance helps locate problems. Once an area of concern has been identified, the practitioner asks the individual specific questions about it, in order to help them eliminate the problem, and tests again to confirm that the problem’s “charge” has been dissipated and it has in fact been cleared. As the individual progresses, the focus moves from simple problems to problems of increasing complexity.

There are obvious similarities with the EPFX above. But what are these descriptions of? Well the first is Reiki, and the second is a description of the E-meter used in Scientology.

So is there any credibility to this device whatsoever? Well here’s the small print from Vibrancy:

No claims are made of the EPFX-SCIO system or its results and nothing that the SCIO Practitioner does, diagnoses or treats any illness or disease nor replaces any other treatment.

And from the from the Church of Scientology (but only after a judge made them do it):

By itself, this meter does nothing. It is solely for the guide of Ministers of the Church in Confessionals and pastoral counseling. The Electrometer is not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health or bodily function of anyone and is for religious use by students and Ministers of the Church of Scientology only.

We could ask if Reiki should come with a similar disclaimer, but this is to somewhat miss the point, because  the disclaimers are largely about the machines, not the people.

The key question is “do any of these treatments confer a net benefit, psychological or otherwise?”

We human beans have a very strong sense of identity, and we don’t much like to be wrong about things we care about. Indeed, the more we have backed something, the more we don’t like to admit error, and the angrier we are if we are proven to be wrong. (Barack Obama has used this to great effect by mobilising the masses to give money – to literallly put their money where their mouth is – in backing him. This ties them emotionally, financially, and socially (if they tell anyone) to his success, which is great because it means that he has their support for longer, and through tougher times. However it also exposes him to some pretty collosal outrage if he errs from his stated course. If you think MPs expenses have been a fiasco… I mean, they still go on about Nixon…

But I’m going off the point. The more we invest in an idea, the more we associate with it, the more we are allied to it. From Barack Obama, to the coffee house lifestyle at Starbucks, to buying a new pair of expensive trainers to get us running, to buying our own yoga mat to dedicate us to practise, we frequently symbolise our belief with cash. And the more cash we spend, the greater our adherence.

This is something that Scientology has used to great effect. If you wish to move up the ranks, you have to pay more and more.

The Church of Scientology believes in the principle of reciprocity, involving give-and-take in every human transaction. Accordingly, members are required to make donations for study courses and auditing as they move up the Bridge, the amounts increasing as higher levels are reached. Participation in higher-level courses on the Bridge may cost several thousand dollars, and Scientologists usually move up the Bridge at a rate governed by their income.

Reiki also did the same thing in its early days. Takata, the woman who took it to America from Japan, insisted that there be a fee for treatments and teachings. This was an inspired and brave piece of marketing for a new movement, especially during the free-love 1970s. But it takes its place in a long tradition of financial gestures of faith, and worked a treat at getting people to literally buy into the idea.

Reiki has now grown such a following that it has adopted a more ‘open source’ model. Fundamentally people agree that the raw materials are available for free (it is universal energy after all), but it’s ok to charge for the service, because they’re basically billing for their time.

So the more we pay, the more vested interest we have, the more our egos are allied to an outcome, the stronger our faith in the idea. So far, so simple. But what if the treatment is free? Does that make a difference?

It’s not hard to displace ‘money’ with ’social credibility’ in this process above. If one’s peers are interested in something, it resonates, it grows, and all of a sudden one feels like one really should be in on this. It starts with crazes at school – pencil cases, bouncy balls, and such; progresses up through sports and crushes, bands one likes, activities… all finding our tribe / testing self identity to find out who we are stuff we all go through.  We find a tribe we resonate with, and we adopt the modes of the tribe. (Do you think it’s just a coincidence that homosexuals are frequently so fabulously Dale Winton / Graham Norton / Alan Carr stereotypes?)

Identity is conferred as much as it is discovered.

So it is that if our peer group adopts new beliefs, we tend to go along with it. Smoking, dot-com boom investments, beliefing there’s been an increase in knife crime, thinking shoulder pads are cool, acting on doubts about the MMR vaccine, and so on.

We’re not alone. History has given us Tulipomania, the South Sea bubble, Mormonism, the penchant for wigs, witch mania, Lourdes, and fairies at the bottom of the garden. Little memes which suddenly take off because.. “well everyone else is doing it, and it seems there are benefits, and I wouldn’t like to be left out…”,  “if I’m the only one not wearing a wig to work then…” to the far more insidious “but if I don’t say ‘witch!’ then they’ll think i’m in cahoots with her!”

So it’s easy to see that you don’t need to charge money to get people to have faith in something. If there’s enough social acceptance of an idea there grows a pressure:  “hey that kind of makes sense with a few things I think” urge;  an “I want to feel like that” pull; or an “I don’t want to feel like this” push. So one  brings oneself around to take a look, and once we delve sufficiently far in… well then we have the vested interests of self identity which reinforce the position.

These are then augmented by the “thou shalt not test the Lord your God” type statements from the more organised beliefs, to the hysterically emotive “but children are dying on the streets!” cries which paralyse and drown out attempts at reason.

I would suggest that empathy / awareness, accurate language, knowledge, and reason have the tendency make things clearer, and are intrinsic goods. Can you think of an example where a position has been made worse through the application of these? (In the long run, that is. Obvously one can create short term chaos by pointing out the Emperor has no clothes, or that triple-A ratings on mortgage derivatives aren’t all their cracked up to be.)

By way of example, think of conversations you’ve had about ‘love’, and how confused some people get about it. If we were aware that other cultures have many more terms for love, and we knew that they distinguished more easily between ‘friendly and profound admiration’ and ‘pure, ideal love’ and ‘erotic love’, then how much more informed our conversations could be! How much more self-aware we could be if we had the tools to think about our relationships more effectively.

So if these lights of awareness, accurate language, knowledge, and reason allow us to better understand ourselves, our families, our friends, and our world, then anything which denies these is getting in the way.

So back to the key question: do any of these treatments confer a net benefit, psychological or otherwise?

By deliberately and knowingly bringing nothing to bear on the situation (see the self-declared disclaimers offered at the beginning) these treatments are getting in the way of other solutions which are proven to help more effectively.

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There’s plenty more to say about the viability of folk-medicine placebos, especially in treating culturally specific problems, using the right treatment for the job and so on, (ie I’m saying Reiki may have a very useful role to play) but that’s for another post.