Yesterday evening saw the Skeptics in the Pub (the skeptics being of London and the pub the Penderel’s Oak) to hear Martin J Robbins (twitter @mjrobbins), of layscience.net and the Guardian, talk on ‘the impossibility of debating homeopathy’.
Martin has kindly agreed to send me the slides from his presentation and I will post them here in due course.
A brief write-up of the evening follow after the fold and immediately below are Martin’s slides as a Flash presentation. You can also view them as a fullscreen presentation or download them as a PDF or PowerPoint.
The Westminster Skeptics in the Pub gathered last night in a different pub, the Old Monk, for a different type of event- a discussion on ‘what difference does political blogging really make?’
The evening focussed around a couple of questions; what is the relationship between traditional journalism and blogging, and is it sustainable; and what influence do blogs actually have? The event certainly attracted a diverse crowd, many of whom were new to Skeptics in the Pub, which is to be welcomed, and BBC Parliament were there to record proceedings for posterity.
A writeup follows below, but I will start with some general comments.
Although I enjoyed listening to Nick Cohen, Mick Fealty and Sunny Hundall, I’m afraid that I found Jonathan Isaby to be unremarkable; he seems to be a better writer than he is a speaker, although I suspect that he was restricted, for one reason or another, in what he could say.
On way home from #sitp polital blogging. Learned that Guido serious about nothing but Guido. Narcisist not journailist.
Being something of a political nerd, it’s no surprise that I blog a bit, and I’ve heard all the points that were made at the event before. It comes down to the funding model for blogging vs volunteerism and whether blogging complements or replaces traditional journalism. Different people have different views. This is not a simple case of the jury still being out, but something more fundamental.
There is no such thing as blogging.
There isn’t even any such thing as political blogging. As we know, there are blogs that concern themselves with everything under the Sun and a little bit more mixing of sometimes siloed conversations would be good. Political blogging could certainly benefit from a healthy dose of skepticism.
However, to group even all political blogs together makes as much sense as saying that the Financial Times, the Daily Sport, the New Statesman and the Downing Street Years should be grouped together because they’re all printed on paper.
There are, within the political realm, blogs that range from the single issue to the generalist, from the ultra-local to the global. They aim to inform, provoke and proselytise. If we look at the question – what difference does political blogging really make – we can’t just look at the Westminster bubble or even just national politics. We have to look with much more detail and much finer granularity to gauge the differences between UK-wide, London, Northern Irish and so on blogging. I am convinced that the distinctive blogospheres in London, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are to do with the devolution of powers to those regions and that further regional blogging will only take off in concert with devolution of powers from Westminster regarding England.
Equally, a blog like the excellent Jack of Kent, focussing on legal matters, is only tangentially part of the main political blogosphere when it should, IMHO, be required reading. Ditto Ben Goldacre and various others.
Moreover, other social media, particularly Twitter, act as a force multiplier so that a given story or action can be replicated by many people with ease and speed.
Anyway, vesti la giubba; a writeup follows beneath the fold.
I had the very great pleasure of listening to two first-rate speakers at Skeptics in the Pub Westminster this evening – Professor David Nutt and Dr Evan Harris MP.
Professor Nutt went through the advice that had been given by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to Alan Johnson and the frankly poor way in which that advice was dealt with, as well as briefly mentioning why he was sacked. As Evan Harris pointed out, this was largely for publishing an article in a scientific journal whose readership is not large. Continue reading “David Nutt and Evan Harris at #sitp Westminster”→
The speaker at this month’s Skeptics in the Pub London was David Aaronovitch, speaking on his new book, Voodoo Histories and the subject of conspiracy theories more generally.
It was an enjoyable evening, and Aaronovitch made a cogent set of interesting arguments – I will probably buy his book – but I can’t help but feel that is lacked a certain killer punch.
I was pleased to see that Simon Singh was in attendance, and that the emphatic support he received was in no way bogus.
I’ve spent a very pleasant evening in the company of the Sceptics in the Pub London, where the speaker was Dr. Aubrey de Gray, Chief Scientific Officer with the SENS Foundation. In brief, de Gray (Wikipedia article) set out the work of the SENS foundation which, as I understand it, looks at ageing as a disease which it then sets out to cure as a problem of regenerative medicine. While that is the primary aim, it has the effect, if successful, of increasing both quality and quantity of life; that is to say, making something approaching immortality not only possible but desirable.
De Gray set out a paradigm whereby metabolism causes damage, and damage then causes pathology. In this model, gerontology attempts to intervene in the first step – problematic because of the great complexity of metabolism – and geriatrics intervenes in the first step – problematic because damage has already caused pathology and is at best palliative. He sought to reverse accumulated damage before it became pathological.
Initially, this would allow for an extension of the useful human lifespan by perhaps thirty years. Once that first step was accomplished, refinements in technique would allow, excepting being hit by cars and so on, to continue for arbitrarily long periods, through the possibility of increasingly eficacious treatments before the eficacy of repeated cycles of previous treatments lost eficacy.
You can get a flavour of his speech from this TED talk.
Broadly, I would raise three problems with de Gray’s plan.
Firstly, the scientific. I can’t assess his science, but a number of people there raised fairly substantial problems with his paradigm and with the conclusions he drew from it. That is probably one for the peer reviewed papers.
Secondly, the technological. The very long, four-figure lifespans suggested depended not just on continuing improvements in the (speculative) set of technologies, bit that those improvements happened faster than people died because of a loss of eficacy as described above. The examples de Gray cited in support of his position were the motor car and the aeroplane. Unfortunately for him, the equally plausible alternative of the jet pack was raised: theoretically possible, desirable even, and can be turned into a prototype that can fly for half a minute, but can’t be turned into a production model (because the amount of fuel that can be loaded onto a human is finite and less than what’s needed for useful flight). Another example would be power from nuclear fusion, which has been ten years away for fifty years. It is a prediction based on little more than fiat.
Thirdly, the socio-economic. In answer to a question from yours truly about the cost of the treatments, de Gray was quick to observe, thousand-year life spans would have major effects on world society, meaning that we could throw much of traditional economics out of the window. If we do that, though, we throw political economy out of the window. Thus, de Gray’s assetion that the state would pay for its citizens to have these treatments is distinctly problematic as the state, as we know it, would not necessarily sill exist. Even if we accept that the state still exists in a recognisable form and that it makes economic sense for states to pay for these treatments, it does not follow that they will pay for them. As de Gray thought equality was a major issue, it’s worth going into at slightly greater length.
The basis from which de Grey works is that regenerative medicine is medicine like any other, albeit with remarkable effects. As we know from the current debate in the US, there are plenty of people who see taking money from them to pay for the healthcare of others as morally wrong. There are also plenty of countries that would like to provide comprehensive healthcare, but cannot afford it. De Grey provided no explanation of how we would roll out this treatment when we cannot at the moment give people with economic potential very cheap drugs – say, hydration salts for diarrhea – that would have similar economic benefits to the de Grey treatments but at vastly lower costs per dose. From the point of view of the state, it doesn’t matter whether a day’s work is done by a thirty-year-old or a three hundred and thirty-year-old. Given that states do not have to provide pensions or old age healthcare now, and that the mechanism by which they will be convinced to do so is absent, it seems as reasonable to conclude that arbitrarily long lives will remain the province of the wealthy as to conclude that we will enter this brave, new world. A nightmare scenario would be lots of people having access to these treatments but not making the necessary lifestyle changes. If we kept dropping kids every twenty or thirty years over a thousand year life, we’d very quickly overpopulate the planet.
I hope that de Gray’s science is more thorough than his statecraft.
Of course, if de Gray is right, I look forward to seeing you at the February 2317 meeting of Sceptics in the Pub London – assuming someone hasn’t already booked the room.
I had the very great pleasure of listening to two first-rate speakers at Skeptics in the Pub Westminster this evening – Professor David Nutt and