So I have changed the theme, restarted facebook comments, made the site easier for google to find and worked out how to autotwitter and automatically add to my facebook status. If you like wordpress, this site may be of some help.

I have critiqued a fair number of people in the last week or so for using ad hominem arguments. Matt has a tutorial for those of you who did not have exposure to Latin at school… or philosophy before deconstructionism. Well worth a look. Dr Helen reminds us that misinformation is always harmful: it means that policies are based on factoids (that if not lies, apply to different populations).

We should expect policies based on poor premises to fail: if we choose to do something we should have some data to indicate it should work. I continualy find it illogical that a physician or psychologist is expected to be able to give the data behind their advice — the jargon  for this is “evidence based” — but the policy makers and managers seem to have no need to do so when their decisions can cause greater harm than any clinician (or teacher, or pastor, for that matter).

You see, it doesn’t really matter what we say, or feel, or truly believe.  Many sincere people have spent their adult lives providing psychoanalysis, or working within socailism. Both psychoanalysis and socialism were total ideologies — and after a century of effort, both have failed to meet their goals. Our poor friends who truly beleive that L Ron Hubbard has the truth and spend their lives practicing Scientology have fallen into the same error. In all of these cases, because some guru (Marx, Freud, Hubbard) said it — does not make it logical, or true. Just because I am sincere and I feel it will work does not make it true.

Within the social sciences we need to do pilot studies and clinical trials to see if any intervention will help people. Randomized clinical trials are tedious. Ideology appears to be faster and cheaper — as Kurt Lewin said — “there is nothing as practical as a good theory“.  However, an idea is not a theory unless it has empirical data to support it. And most people from the chatterati do not have the patience or stubbornness to wait until the data is available. They jump into short cuts. Which is the error of Lysenko: they sweep facts away to make room for their ideology