Unhealthful News 196 - Reports on censoring bird flu research lack realistic context


A lot has been written already about the recent request(?) by the US government for a couple of journals and researchers to censor the discovery of how the "bird flu" virus (influenza H5N1) can be changed to allow airborne transmission (it is currently believed that the only transmission vector to humans is contact with birds) and related research.  The press has reported this being a case of "biosecurity" (which Phil Alcabes appropriately ridicules) concerns about an incredibly deadly flu, pitted against the problem of censorship and losing the free exchange of valuable scientific information.  The thing is that almost none of these exciting motifs accurately describes the situation.

First is a point I have written about at greater length before, so I will offer just an abbreviated version here:  People who write about infectious diseases, including most of the ostensible experts, never seem to learn that when a novel disease appears, there is a huge bias toward identifying only people who have gotten extremely sick from it.  After all, who shows up in a hospital to get diagnosed, thus leading to the discovery of a brand new or rare disease?  This is even more true in extremely poor populations where medical care is mostly limited to when someone is on the verge of death.  So the observation that half the people who get the disease die from it (a common claim in the hype about H5N1 right now) really means that only half the people die from it among those who are treated after they are on the verge of dying from it, when combined with those diagnosed on autopsy who could not afford any medical care.

How many others got/have the virus, having suffered only an everyday bout of illness, or perhaps nothing at all?  No one knows.  Only the rarest of nasty diseases would not have 100 like that for every one that went to the hospital, and 1000 or 10,000 is quite plausible.  A million is possible.  So is bird flu an utter terror, that is deadlier than contracting Ebola, or is it a fairly typical disease of its kind that kills perhaps as many as one out of every 100,000 that get it?  And for that matter, might it already be airborne in the wild, but just not virulent enough to notice?  We really do not know.

On top of that, there is no evidence that there are any significant and capable international terrorists who are waiting to use information like this.  (Indeed, the place to end the previous sentence might be before the qualifying phrase, "who...".)  There are lots of ways to engage in untargeted random destruction, and no one seems to be employing them.

So, the possibly low risk might argue for protecting the tremendous value of communicating the new discoveries and avoiding the horror of censorship.  Except that avoiding publishing the details represents be almost no loss of useful communication or genuine censorship.  I would guess that there are a couple of hundred people in the world who could make good use of the information that is being kept secret, and I would bet that most of them will still have access to it if they want.  In a matter of years, technology will evolve so that more people could make use of that information somehow, but by then it will inevitably be common knowledge.

As for censorship, this qualifies in only the most technical sense.  Censorship matters when it results in suppression of information, not the mere suppression of someone's words.  Everyone is being told the publicly relevant information, and indeed the dispute has called far more attention to that information than it otherwise would have gotten.  It is government suppression of useful health science when, for example, the CDC quietly hides relevant data it has about the benefits of tobacco harm reduction, as they do, and people are widely misled.  But if they reported the general result or the data and merely refused to tell us some highly technical detail about how they did the research, that would be a welcome relief from the self-censorship.

Or consider an analogy:  It was suppression of the worst kind that the US military prevented any reporting about a gunship crew gleefully killing a group of civilians in Iraq until Bradley Manning (or if not him, whatever hero actually did it) leaked the video.  It would not have been censorship in any important sense of the word if the they had allowed the incident to be reported, but prevented publication of some technical details about the weapons used that could benefit an actual enemy.  All the useful information would be out there, and the withholding would have been explicit and purposeful.

So what we really have is a case of withholding information that probably is no threat, and that will inevitably be public before long anyway, but that is probably actually still available to those who really need it, and is a situation where preventing the technical information from being made public does not constitute the kind of censorship we should fear.  Yawn.  Now I forget why this seemed important to write about.

Unhealthful News 195 - "News" about effects of alcohol and the HPV vaccine: misleading readers while accurately reporting the science



Two stories in this morning's New York Times inspired me to get back to Unhealthful News blogging.  They are both great examples of bad reporting that takes something that is obviously true and manages to report it in a way that communicates something that is false, and not by misrepresenting the results.  One story offered the headline, "Prevention: Beer and Martinis: As Healthy as Wine?" and the other, "Patterns: HPV Vaccine Is Not Linked to Promiscuity".  They were both authored by Nicholas Bakalar.

So, you might ask, what is misleading about reporting the following?
Now an analysis in the January issue of The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs suggests that martinis and beer may be just as effective at extending life [as wine]. Wine may have appeared to be better only because the people who choose it are generally healthier.
and
A survey has found that girls ages 15 to 19 who are vaccinated against human papillomavirus, or HPV, are no more likely to be sexually active or to have more partners than unvaccinated girls.
The answer is that there is absolutely nothing misleading about these reports.  What is terribly misleading is the implication that there was ever any question whatsoever that these claims were true.

The fact that alcohol, without regard to which of its many delightful forms it is served in, is beneficial has been well-established for about two decades.  In fact, it was never the case that the evidence supported the claim that wine or red wine was more beneficial.  There was, once upon a time, a hypothesis that red wine had some particular properties, offered as a possible explanation for the "French paradox" in which it was observed that the French were much healthier than their macronutrient mix would suggest they ought to be.  (The real explanations:  Fats, particularly milk fat, are not actually worse for you than carbohydrates as was believed for a while; the French eat reasonable portions, slowly, and mostly whole foods; and they are less often physically inert compared to their Anglo peers.)

The original research that discovered that alcohol was beneficial (reducing cardiovascular risk) was partially inspired by the that French non-paradox, but as soon as the epidemiology started coming in, it became clear that there was no measurable difference in effect between different sources of alcohol.  A few bad studies, those that failed to control for the fact that in the USA wine drinkers tend to eat and otherwise behave healthier, sometimes did show an advantage for wine.  But it was always clear that this was the confounding.  More generally, there was the confirmation bias in which the studies that showed the opposite (random noise happens) were ignored.  Sometimes in the history of a scientific discovery, there is a moment where the best evidence of the day strongly supports a claim that later turns out to not be true.  This is not one of those cases.

For the case of the HPV vaccine, there was never any doubt that the vaccine would improve the benefit-cost tradeoff for having sex, but the effect would be slight.  Very slight.  When compared to the many huge benefits and costs of choosing to have sex, the very small risk of cervical cancer thirty years in the future and the even smaller though potentially sooner risk of oral cancer are absolutely minuscule.  This is especially so when we consider that adolescents are not exactly focused on the distant future when making decisions, and that the more proximate oral cancer risk is pretty much never mentioned in the pro-vaccine information (if people realize that most non-geriatric oral cancer seems to be caused HPV, it will be difficult to blame it on smokeless tobacco, and the "public health" people do not want to risk that).

So, the vaccine ought to create a tiny increase in someone's probability of choosing to have sex with more partners, but nothing that could possibly be picked up in the data from a survey of 1243 girls/women.  And that is even if there was not the huge confounding problem due to girls who get the vaccine coming from very different families from those who do not.  The effect would have to be more than a 5% change in probability to have any hope at all of showing up in a study that small (even with impossibly perfect control for confounding).  The availability of contraception and HIV prevention (i.e., condoms) ought to make that big a difference, but it would be irrational of girls to react to that extent to the HPV prevention (and irrational in the opposite direction from normal teenage irrationality).

So why were these study results portrayed as surprising discoveries, and why is it so non-surprising that Bakalar and the press more generally reported them this way?  Because the press, science and otherwise, can be counted on to carry water for well-funded extremist liars, reporting their claims as if they had merit and never calling bullshit.  Usually the dishonest extremism comes from what gets called the political right wing, like the economic claims of the Republican party or pseudo-Christians who oppose the HPV vaccine because they want to punish people for having sex.  But what usually is thought of as the political left, "public health" people, can be equally extremist and dishonest.  In this case the pseudo-Christians and the pseudo-public-health people have basically the same goal:  To mislead people, and thereby keep their health risks greater, in order to support an abstinence-only agenda.

The good news is that manipulating people with lies like those is really tricky, and most of the prohibitionists are just not that smart.  The playing up of red wine gave wine makers license (almost literally) to make health claims, promoting the category, without preventing knowledgable people from learning that other drinks are healthy too.  When it became clear from Swedish studies that snus caused no measurable cancer risk, American anti-tobacco extremists tried to claim that this did not apply to similar American products, though the evidence suggested no difference.  Finally the marketers realized they could not overcome that propaganda, so they just started selling "snus" in America.  Truth that improves the public's health will usually eventually win out over its opponent in "public health".

Unhealthful News 194 - Public health terrorism, Pennsylvania date rape edition



In my last post I wrote about (and plan to revisit) a pseudo-public-health campaign to vilify the common practice of parents co-sleeping with their infants, which might cause a net increase in risk when done properly, but might not, and the net effect is clearly very close to zero.  I pointed out that this type of destructive extremist behavior by nanny-state actors seems to trace to anti-tobacco extremism emerging, since the 1990s, as the tail that wags the dog of public health.

Chris Snowdon recently posted a scathing takedown of an extreme (which is not to say rare) commentary that argued that since society has accepted policies that deny people the freedom to use tobacco, therefore government should take the same action with regard to other health-affecting choices.  Not every health affecting choice, of course -- just the ones that a certain ilk of people does not approve of.  As Snowdon has argued at length, this is one of the dangers of allowing an exceptional set of actions (government restrictions on free choice) to deal with an "exceptional" problem (the high risk from smoking).  Granting such exceptions to the ethical standards of free Western society almost inevitably creates a situation where extremists want to use the same tactics to deal with any similar phenomenon that they declare to be a problem.

A related but slightly different concern about such disregard for ethical public policy, beyond curtailment of personal autonomy via prohibitions, is curtailment of autonomy via manipulative messaging.  The worst of this, along with simply lying, is emotional violence that is designed to hurt people (for their own good, of course) and usually harms orders of magnitude more people than it causes to behave differently.  The most obvious example is the disturbing, often gory graphics on tobacco packages, which proponents have managed to trick everyone into calling "graphic warnings", even though they are most certainly not.  (A warning communicates accurate information that is not already known for the purpose of facilitating better informed decision making.  The tobacco graphics fail the "communicate information", "not already known", and often the "accurate" bits.)

The authors of the anti-co-sleeping campaign clearly drew inspiration from (and maybe even apprenticed in) the lavishly funded anti-smoking emotional violence campaigns which adopted a mentality of "say/show anything that might accomplish the goal, regardless of whether it is true or what damage it does."  In the case of the anti-co-sleeping, the damage includes the problem that it is impossible to offer advice about how to safely co-sleep (specifically, don't do it when you are under the influence of mind-altering drugs, legal or otherwise).  When the over-the-top message that co-sleeping is as bad as putting baby to bed buried in covers and cuddling a large sharp knife, there is not room to say "but if you do, make sure to...."  Further damage comes from making some of the many co-sleeping parents feel bad about their choice based on incorrect information.  And for any parent whose child died while co-sleeping the message might as well be "nyah nyah, you were an idiot, you deserve to be grieving for the rest of your life".

Fortunately there are very few such parents.  But, a lot more women have suffered date rape, and that is a lot of nasty flashbacks resulting from this (pictured) anti-drinking message that depicts a disturbing image of the legs and half-removed clothes of a young woman lying on what appears to be the floor of an low-quality institutional bathroom.  The guilty organization in this case was the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, which pulled the ad after one day following an outcry by rape victims and advocates.  At least that agency does not claim the mantle of "public health" in their title, though it is kind of annoying that the state secures for itself a monopoly over liquor and wine sales, and this agency that is the monopoly seller is using the profits for nasty messages like this.  (Fortunately there is something of a free market for beer and, for those of us living in the southeast of the state, there is the state of Delaware, home of low price booze, only a few minutes away -- something that seems even more worthwhile given this fiasco.)

Is our state liquor monopoly an extremist "anti" organization that is just trying to twist women to their agenda.  Well if you go to their webpage that is linked from the rape graphic, you will find such statements as:
Heavy drinking is usually defined as consuming an average of ... more than 1 drink per day for women
Also you will find such demonstrates of knowledge as:
...binge drinking is a pattern of alcohol consumption that brings the blood alcohol content (BAC) level to 0.08% or more. This pattern of drinking usually means 5 or more drinks on a single occasion for men or 4 or more drinks on a single occasion for women, generally within about 2 hours.
For most men and most drinks, less than 3 drinks in 2 hours is enough to get above 0.08%.  My personal favorite, though, was:
The more alcohol you consume, the more intense the effects 11.
What makes it funny is that "11" there is a reference note.  They felt the need to cite to some FAQ at the CDC website to make that claim.  For amusement value, this just edges out this one, in their list of "myths":
MYTH: Alcohol is an aphrodisiac.  Alcohol reduces inhibitions and may stimulate your interest in sex...
But apparently that does not mean it is an aphrodisiac or anything.

In short, the PLCB behave like the typical pseudo-public-health nannies when it comes to this messaging, both in terms of the message and the intelligence with which it is delivered.  On the website, their message is the usual scattershot collection of claims about how terrible a behavior is; date rape risk is a minor part of the arguments they heap on.  So why do they emphasize that in their graphic?  Because it evokes visceral horror among many women, more so than does the threat of choking to death in one's sleep or dying in a car crash.  The action being taken is ostensibly one of communication and warning, not prohibition or regulation.  But the act is actually designed to terrify the audience, through creating fear and other emotional reactions to a memorable image, into being less likely to drink, regardless of whether they might make that decision based on a rational calculation of the risk.  Even setting aside the practical problems with this (e.g., those most likely to be terrified are those who are already most cautious), this is not a legitimate role for government or anyone supposedly acting in the public interest.

In contrast with the anti-co-sleeping message, where the advice is not actually supported by the science, it is undoubtedly true that less drunkenness will result in less rape.  But that does not justify a tactic that is designed to provoke as much reaction as possible (even if it is paranoid overreaction).  As with the anti-co-sleeping message and tobacco, the prohibitionist approach makes it impossible to offer useful harm reduction advice.  This is particularly striking since the text accompanying the graphic is actually addressed not to the victim, but her friends ("when your friends drink, they can end up making bad decisions...that leave them vulnerable....").  So here's a thought:  If you see your friend drinking about to pass out, do not let her go unaccompanied toward the bathroom with a man she just met.  Even better, the message could be "as with a designated driver, make sure someone in your group has the job of guarding against such occurrences (and avoid fraternity parties entirely)."

And speaking of that man, the ad campaign did not acknowledge his existence  Due to the apparent lack of a perpetrator and blaming the booze, the rape can only be seen as the victim's fault entirely.  The outrage about that is probably what got the ads pulled in a day, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer and via the Associated Press, though the stories also tell us of the outrage the victims of date rape expressed about having that imagery forced on them.  It is tempting to say the news reports were good, because they report the complaints and the sensible outcome.  But thinking about it more, the stories failed the basics of news reporting.  There was no inquiry into what possessed those idiots to create this in the first place, or to think it was acceptable.  The report is about one battle, without realizing that it is part of a war.

Returning to the message, why did the PLCB not offer advice about how to avoid date rape even when you are drinking?  Because they do not actually care about date rape.  Their mission was just to discourage drinking, by any means available.  The typical current behavior of "public health" told them that exploiting the existence of date rape was ok.  Yes, they folded when someone insisted that it was not ok, but their willingness to fold may have been because they were not quite as committed as the extremists are; the funding for the effort comes from the profits of the agency's liquor stores, after all.  It is not difficult to imagine the extremists (the Milwaukee public health unit in the co-sleeping case, most everyone in the business in the case of tobacco, and quite a few in the anti-alcohol groups) arguing that the importance of their cause justifies terrorist tactics, blaming the victim, and causing flashbacks for thousands of previous victims.

I do not want to imply there is some huge divide between these tactics and direct government control over people's actions.  Indeed, the prohibitionists depend on disinformation and emotionally violent messages to create the social situation where they can impose policy-enforced restrictions on behavior.  Demonization and abuse of smokers would not be possible if a couple of generations had not been "taught" how evil they are and how they really all just want to quit but are too weak to do so without "help".  But the two bits should not just be lumped together, if for no other reason because the messaging approach is commonly practiced by ostensibly respectable people.  As a real and credentialed public health person, I am more bothered by them than by the prohibitionist extremists that they empower and cover for.  It is like the southern "gentlemen" in Washington for over a century talked about states' rights and such to provide cover for lynchings and other acts of racism that they pretended to not support.  There are always thugs out there for any cause; there are not always credentialed, skilled, and apparently respectable propagandists making it possible for them to act.

Unhealthful News 193 - Public health extremists try to arm babies with cleavers


If you are reading this in a way that does not display pictures, you will want to click to the original to see the image.  Yes, that is a real anti-public-service poster/ad from the city of Milwaukee's department of health, intended to inflict emotional violence on mothers who make the possibly maybe slightly risky (bear with me -- I discuss the evidence and other specifics of the message below) lifestyle choice to co-sleep with their babies, a radical behavior that is practiced by crazy cultists like... well, like the majority of humans alive today or who have ever lived.

Most of my regular readers who are familiar with my writings about tobacco harm reduction and its extremist prohibitionist opponents (and the related issue of the free-choice rights of smokers or other drug users) will find this hauntingly familiar.  Those who are not familiar (and I have been told that writing on this topic will draw some new readers even though I am late to the story) need a bit of background:

Anti-smoking started as a legitimate and properly modest public health effort to educate people about risk and try to persuade them to reconsider their choice to smoke.  But by the late 1990s, anti-tobacco had transformed into a multi-billion-dollar extremist industry, bent on eliminating not just smoking, but low-risk smokefree alternatives (which are about 99% less harmful), and willing to use any tactics, no matter how destructive.  It became the tail waving the dog of public health, and the result has been terrible for public health's social and scientific reputation.  Even though smokers in Western countries are well aware of the risks (indeed, most of them actually overestimate the risk) the extremists push for inflicting more and more emotional violence on them, in the form of general abuse and denigration, as well as disturbing ad campaigns and labels.  If people will not choose to quit if they know the truth, the extremists will pursue other avenues to make them so miserable that they have to quit.  For their own good, of course.

To those of you, dear new readers, who may be adamantly anti-smoking and may not have thought this through before, and so perhaps are thinking "yeah, that sounds reasonable", think about the classic "first they came for..." warning.  As soon as it became acceptable, as well as a comfortable career path, to exaggerate risk and inflict emotional violence on people who do not conform to the demands of the "public health" community, it was no longer just about smoking.  It metastasized.

There is little doubt that the authors of the nasty anti-co-sleeping poster drew their inspiration and got their tutelage from anti-tobacco propaganda.  As anti-tobacco has trained a generation of activists who believe it is ethical to do whatever it takes to "improve" people's behavior, they have moved into other areas of what used to be public health.  Various observers have done a good job of showing how anti-tobacco extremists are actively and openly tutoring anti-alcohol extremists to aid their prohibitionist efforts, and it is trending toward overweight and fast food.  But even if you are not an aficionado of nicotine or alcohol or junk food, and so you do not feel like speaking up, because you are not among the targeted, they might well be coming for you if you do anything they do not approve of.  Like eating salty food, or not exercising, or choosing to raise your baby in a particular way.  So far, the decidedly dangerous act of transporting your baby by car, or crossing the street with him, is not in their crosshairs.  So far.

In terms of justification for the cleaver graphic, every news story (examples) seemed to quote only one statistic, in various forms:
"Is it shocking? Is it provocative?" asked Bevan Baker, the Milwaukee health commissioner.  "Yes. But what is even more shocking and provocative is that 30 developed and underdeveloped countries have better infant death rates than Milwaukee."
Should we be impressed?  Center-city Milwaukee is a pretty awful place, as America goes.  I would guess that 50 countries have higher average income and better health outcomes in general, and probably 100 have better educational attainment.  So on a propensity score basis, the city might actually be doing better than expected on infant deaths.

But the biggest issue is that hyping the magnitude of a problem, the typical tactic of public health activists, is a fundamentally dishonest method of trying to justify a particular intervention.  The intervention needs to be defended based on whether it will meaningfully contribute to solving a problem, not whether there is a problem.  (Readers who are familiar with tobacco policies will be finding this to be quite familiar.)  The high infant death rate in Milwaukee is mostly due to premature births to young poor mothers.  Even if one accepts the morally dubious "ends justify the means" claims, there actually need to be some ends.

So, does proper co-sleeping increase infant deaths?  The evidence supporting that claim is, at best, weak.  There are definitely infant deaths that are directly caused by being in an adult bed.  These seem to most often involve a parent who is passed out from drugs (be they FDA approved, legal, or illegal), or piles of fluffy bedding.  That is where the "proper" in the previous sentence comes in; all advice about safe co-sleeping makes clear that these situations are bad.  If we take out those cases -- which should be blamed on parents not knowing how to be safe or not being competent to follow advice, which bodes ill for their babies wherever they sleep -- it is not entirely clear what the net effects are.  There are still some identifiable deaths caused by co-sleeping, even absent a stoned mother or inappropriate blankets.  But there is also evidence that mysterious sudden infant death (crib death, cot death) is reduced by co-sleeping.  The data is so poor (the stigma created by anti-co-sleeping campaigns makes it very difficult to find out the prevalence of incident-free co-sleeping) that it is difficult to be sure.  But it is pretty clear that the worst that can be said about co-sleeping is that it creates a small risk, in the same range of such risky behaviors as running errands with the baby in his car seat.  The only obvious candidate for the title of America's leading scientifically competent source of advice about raising babies, Barry Sears and company, recognizes co-sleeping as a very reasonable option and offers some recommendations for keeping it safe.

"But," gasp and sputter the self-appointed masters of our health-affecting decisions, "if even a single life can be saved, this is justified" (to paraphrase statements in many of the stories about this).  Really?  Would saving a single life justify a strict nighttime curfew for everyone in the violent city of Milwaukee?  How about banning driving for a month -- that would almost certainly save some lives, including kids.  Oh, what's that you say?  There are other considerations that mean we should not blindly attack any freedom that might cause one person to die?  Oh, I see.  So the "if even a single life" game only applies when someone is doing something that you personally would not choose to do, Mr. Public Health Official.

Co-sleeping -- like nicotine use, drinking, other drug use, playing sports, travel, eating junk food, etc., or having a baby in the first place -- is a major lifestyle decision that involves health risk.  Different people make different decisions, and some find that making one particular choice is extremely important, and worth the small risk.  In the case of co-sleeping, there is not only the important choice about how to relate to one's child, but for some babies and mothers there are important health benefits (better feeding, mother or baby able to get enough sleep, etc.).  Providing misleading information, like claiming co-sleeping is as dangerous as a baby cuddling with a sharp knife, will result in suboptimal decisions.  Moreover, telling parents that they are being criminally irresponsible by making a particular (common, reasonable, culturally acceptable) choice will often not change their behavior, but might make them feel bad about what they have done, thereby inflicting gratuitous emotional harm.  And in those rare cases where a death seems to be attributed to co-sleeping, this messaging starts to seem a lot like those who tell parents that their decision to vaccinate caused their infant's death -- nothing but harm comes from such lie-based sensationalism.

Moreover, there is the classic prohibitionist problem:  If you try to prohibit something it becomes very difficult to regulate it.  One result is that banned drugs are often contaminated or used in needlessly dangerous ways.  In the present case, by staking out a position that co-sleeping is an unacceptable evil, it is impossible to offer the nuanced advice about how to do it most safely.

How did the unhealthful news handle this story?  Badly, of course.  As is typical, the health reporters presented random useless claims on both sides of the issue, typically the claims above from the "public health" people and the equally useless counter quoting one mother who co-slept with her babies without incident.  Worse, many reported the story of one recent death in Milwaukee that was attributed to co-sleeping without ever mentioning whether the mother was stoned.  Accompanying these uninformative factoids was absolutely no mention of the evidence of whether there was net risk, or even an acknowledgment that such evidence might be a bit useful in the discussion.  This absence was glaring even in the few good articles about the incident and issue, like those in Time Magazine's health blog (which has somehow become one of the most complete sources of health news out there, exemplifying both the good, like these, and the bad, as in the link about overweight above).

The worst unethical behavior from anti-tobacco activists often traces to funding of the anti-tobacco industry by Big Pharma, which profits from selling their (almost useless) quit-smoking products.  Could there be a Big Crib that is (ir)responsible for these ads?  Strangely enough, the answer is sort of yes.  The phone number printed on them rings to a QUANGO called "Cribs for Kids", which offers to provide cribs for those who cannot afford them (as if that lack is the main reason for co-sleeping!).  Gee, I wonder who is paying for such giveaways and who profits from it (kidding of course -- there is no need to wonder).  Presumably the Big Knife industry, though prominently featured, contributed nothing, since if we take away the misleading words we can just interpret the posters as suggesting "do not sleep with an armed baby".  That seems like good advice.

[Update:  The first comment by KMN and my reply have some content that I wish I had included in the original post.]

Unhealthful News 192 - "Public health" oligarchs trying to hijack anti-oligarchy movement



A recent commentary by my friend Jeff Stier inadvertently called my attention to a disturbing behavior by some nanny state types, trying to imply they are akin to the Occupy movement, and how the media (including Jeff!) seem to be letting them get away with it.

In the commentary Jeff heaps justified ridicule on the "Food Police" who sought to ban Happy Meals in San Francisco by banning the giving away of toys with food.  This rule affected only McDonald's, as far as anyone could tell, but in a bit of dishonest policy making was written to try to hide its targeting.  So, since there was no actual ban on Happy Meals, McDonald's responded to the ban on free toys by charging a dime for the toys and donating that money to their own children's charity.  This caused the law's proponents to go berserk about McDonald's subverting or skirting the law, which is to say, about McDonald's obeying the law.  Personally, I think that it is a bad thing that people eat at McDonald's, but it is quite funny to see dangerous and destructive policy initiatives fall on their face.  (Chris Snowdon also wrote about this humorous incident.)

Elsewhere in the editorial, Jeff stakes out a stance against regulations that require chain restaurants to post the calorie counts of their menu items, a rule that I think is pretty much a perfect public health intervention (information for better decisions; no coercion for those who do not want to change their decisions).  But that is a story for another day.  But the most striking bit was that the Food Police are trying to claim that their cause is somehow akin to Occupy, declaring their efforts to be #OccupyBigFood.  It is easy to see why the Food Police might want to try to steal some of the legitimate cache of Occupy.  It is not so obvious why the press and other commentators let them get away with it.

As far as I can tell, the only thing the Food Police have in common with Occupy is that they do not like something that is being done by some large institutions.  Occupy is about protecting the 99% from the confiscation of the commonwealth by a growing oligarchy of barely-regulated financiers, the corrupt or otherwise mis-aimed government, and a few tens of thousands of other masters of the universe types.  While it certainly attracts people who have various political views and plenty of radicals, the Occupy message itself is not opposed to the free market or supportive of particular regulations.

The nanny state wing of public health is mostly orthogonal to Occupy, but to the extent it runs parallel, it seems to run in the opposite direction.  The nanny staters want to be masters of a tiny little universe and deny opportunities to the rest of us -- i.e., they are like those that Occupy is fighting.  To put it most charitably, they want to "protect" the 99% from our own propensity to make "bad" decisions.  The financial oligarchs and associated politicos inflict harm on people and our society that individually we can do nothing about, so muscular collective action is needed.  No such action is needed for someone to avoid any harm that might be inflicted upon them or their Happy Meal-aged children by McDonald's food.  Rather, those who would restrict choices are trying to exercise power, and some popular action is needed to keep them from banning salt and otherwise lowering people's welfare.

(Note that this analysis does not address arguments that particular foodways contribute to environmental damage, cruelty to animals, and other external costs, and should be regulated based on that.  The "Food Police" activism is based on trying to enforce particular behaviors based on the health effects on those making the decisions, a restriction of freedom not an attempt to correct for external costs.)

A randomly related note is this news story about how some of those "just pour in boiling water" instant soup cups have a propensity to tip over, and how reported research shows that products on the market with other perfectly functional package shapes are much safer.  Given the surprisingly large number of serious burns caused by spilling these cups, as reported in the story, this seems like a great candidate for regulation.  Unlike unhealthy food, which someone might rationally choose because of other benefits (price, yumminess), no one wants a cup of soup that is more dangerous than it needs to be because of its shape, but few people are aware of the hazard so the market does not solve the problem.

So can we agree to intervene to solve an obvious simple problem?  Probably not, because of how rare the clear thinking of the core message of the story is.

The comments posted on the story quickly degenerated into bickering about the healthfulness and naturalness of the instant soup itself.  Given that inability to focus on the remarkable simple observation that is the story, I suppose it is little wonder that the press cannot tell the difference between activism that is about collective action to protect us from avoidable external threats and activism that is designed to prevent us from exercising our preferences.  Meanwhile, it is probably a safe bet that if someone does propose a regulation on cup-of-soup container shapes, the usual suspects will start screaming about the oppression inflicted by Big Government, taking away our right to decide to needlessly risk severe burns.  And when this hypothetical story is reported, you can bet they, along with those who want to ban instant soup entirely because it is salty, will be given as much ink as the sensible analysis about the tipsiness of containers.

I guess there is one thing that Occupy's calls for economic action and regulation and discussions of product regulation have in common:  Both of them suffer from the widespread popular ignorance that is caused by the media reporting scientific information as if was a sporting match or a celebrity scandal.

But Enough About Me

Rob McLennan included me in his 12 or 20 Questions project at http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/ :

Tuesday, November 29, 2011



12 or 20 questions (second series) with Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover's most recent poetry collections are Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009), consisting of 56 formal versions of Shakespeare’s sonnet of that number, Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006), and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005). A new book consisting of two poems, Desolation : Souvenir, will be published by Omnidawn in early 2012. His volume of literary essays, Fables of Representation, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. With Maxine Chernoff, he edited and translated Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn, 2008), winner of the PEN-USA Translation Award. The two also edit the literary magazine, New American Writing. With Nguyen Do, he edited and translated the anthology, Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008) and Beyond the Court Gate: Poems of Nguyen Trai (1380-1442), published by Counterpath Press in 2010. He has won the Frederick Bock Award for poems that appeared in the June, 2010, issue of Poetry and, with Sharon Olds, the Jerome J. Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in American Poetry Review in 2002. Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, he edited the widely adopted anthology, Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and currently curates the poetry reading series at the deYoung Museum of Fine Art in San Francisco.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Letter to Einstein Beginning Dear Albert, was published in 1979, and it changed my life to a small degree. I was 33 at the time, and my students had been asking me, “When are you going to publish a book?” So they were relieved, and I’m sure I was, too. The book had a generous blurb by John Ashbery and was “thick” in language, in the sense that Péret is thicker than Desnos and Breton or Bruce Andrews is thicker than Lyn Hejinian. The last couple of poems in the book, including “Nature Poem,” turned toward a more casual, everyday phrasing I would use later on, in balance with the “thick.” Irony has long been a feature of my writing, but in recent years I have varied my idiom, from the lyrical tone of Poems in Spanish, Edge and Fold, and the Desolation : Souvenir (Omnidawn, 2012) to the proceduralist Sonnet 56 and “Gravity’s Children,” a book-length series of poems based on the Books of the Old Testament.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My first real engagement with poetry began when, as a senior at Manchester College in Indiana, I took the Modern Poetry class taught by James Hollis, who went on to become a noted Jungian therapist and author. My term paper for the course was on William Carlos Williams, a useful choice as it turned out. I hadn’t written any poetry yet and didn’t trust poetry as a mode of writing. I had been writing short stories under the influence of Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. I didn’t begin to write poems until I was 25 and working as middle manager at a Chicago hospital. Based on the ten or so poems I’d produced, I was accepted by Paul Carroll to the fledging Program for Writers at University of Illinois Chicago. Two key moments in those years were James Hollis asking me to get a PhD and return to Manchester to teach with him, and Paul Carroll telling me, beneath an umbrella in a spring sun-shower, that I was a “true poet” and he wanted to include me in the second edition of his anthology, The Young American Poets.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I keep notebooks, but only occasionally make use of them. The major instance was in writing a series of five book-length poems, each in a single 24-hour day. Only two have been published, “The Reading,” which appears in Edge and Fold, and “At the Sound,” published by Beard of Bees as an electronic chapbook. I became more conscious of the structure of my books when I started writing long poems. The book Poems in Spanish was built around a concept: poems written as if in Spanish. In “Edge and Fold,” my first attempt at the serial poem, I decided with the first poem on a specific “look” to the page: no caps, no punctuation, each page consisting of hesitation, application, swerving, and silence. Once I’m engaged in a project, I’m persistent and work every day on it. As a result, I seem to work quickly.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A phrase or concept is enough to begin, if I’m open to writing that day. It also helps enormously if I’m working on a series. In my last three books, I had the concept from the start. With “Gravity’s Children,” I knew would begin with Genesis and end with Malachi, one poem for each book of the Old Testament. But I had no idea of the tone of the book and had not read the Bible to any degree before starting. In a serial poem like “Edge and Fold,” each page is made to cohere by a lash or knot of language that also sits well with neighboring pages. All the relatedness comes in the moment of making, not in advance, by intuition rather than a map.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy giving readings and believe that the best test of a poem is to read it in front of an audience. But there can be a great difference in audiences, and some poems aren’t designed for a general audience. Charles Bernstein has a lot of fun with this theme in his recent book, Attack of the Difficult Poems. The rule is generally: the more avant-garde your work, the less a general audience can understand you. I prefer to feel a perfect absorption of the poem by the audience, which can literally be heard as a silence from the place you are speaking. It’s this exchange of attentions that probably led Robert Creeley to define a poem as “an act of attention.” Difficulty can receive such attention, too, as long as the poet reads her work in its true cadence and intention—that is, from the inside, with an active interest—as Gertrude Stein does in her recording of “Would He Like It if I Told Him: A Portrait of Picasso.” When the poet places her feelings outside the poem, attention immediately wavers, and the audience sends back signals of unease and impatience.

The success of Flarf, conceptual poetry, and Newlipo is due in large part to their perfect accessibility. Such works carry with them a clear announcement of what they are and what they are not; that is, their concept and form speak in advance of their words. They declare: (1) I’m a 900-page transcript of an issue of the New York Times; (2) a series of prose poems employing only the vowel “a,” “e,” “i,” “o,” or “u”; (3) a poem consisting entirely of language found online with search engines. Such works may seem easy, because you don’t have to read them very carefully to comprehend their value. However, virtuosity and craftsmanship still pertain in the case of Christian Bök’s Eunoia or Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge. Flarf craftsmanship lies in the sculpting of tone, conceptualism in the crafting of concept. When conceptualist Vanessa Place reads her book-length work consisting of the letter “u,” she gives up after 60 seconds, realizing that she, too, is bored by it. Such conceptual works are never fulfilled by performance, but rather exhausted by it. This doesn’t mean they are any less as conceptual works. Better to hold the weighty book in your hand and muse silently on its material existence.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’m not after anything in my poems that I know how to name, theoretically or otherwise. Nor do I have questions for the poem. It raises its own questions. We seem to be at a moment when the materialist motive is gaining ground and subjectivity is at low ebb. Taking sides in that battle does tend to prepare the poem in advance by muting or enhancing irony and desire. I believe that poetry will always remain more or less expressive at base. Finally there comes a parking lot so dark you have to whistle your way across it.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The rise to political influence of the Mexican poet Javier Sicilia following the death of his son would never have occurred in the United States. We say the right things privately, we give money to causes, but, intimidated by the Homeland Security act and the specter of disappearing into an offshore torture site, we fall silent. When Maria Baranda, Eduardo Hurtado, David Huerta, and a dozen other poets of Mexico City announced a march to bring peace in the war on drugs, 40,000 people showed up in the Zocalo on three days’ notice.

I do believe that writers and intellectuals should have political influence, as happened when Robert Lowell, Bertrand Russell, and Norman Mailer headed the march on the Pentagon. Perhaps the problem is that intellectuals have ceased being celebrities in the U.S. Our most effective political philosophers seem to be George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie. And there’s no Dick Cavett or David Susskind in the mass media to remind us how important our intellectual lives are.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

There should be more editing rather than less. When a chapter of my novel was published in The New Yorker, the editor changed nearly every sentence to suit the house style. But I changed much of it back for the novel publication. Rusty Morrison of Omnidawn is a good line by line editor and improved several passages in Poems in Spanish. Usually there isn’t much in the way of content editing in poetry; it’s easier to eliminate the entire poem.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
You’re only as good as your last poem (Dean Faulwell). Run straight to the heart of the battle as if already dead (The Book of the Samurai). The greater the distance, the clearer the view (W. G. Sebald). Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.

10 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I’ve made several genre shifts from poetry: writing three plays one summer in the 1970s; writing a novel in the 1980s (Saigon, Illinois, Vintage Contemporaries, 1988); writing critical prose in the 90s (Fables of Representation, University of Michigan Press, 2004); and translating Hölderlin, Nguyen Trai, and San Juan de la Cruz. Each of the genre crossings was instructive to my poetry, but translation has had the greatest impact. Prose doesn’t have much appeal for me right now. I can’t imagine writing another novel, what a lot of work! The poetry genre is the fairest of them all, but you would never know it by reading critical prose. You have to stand in the mirror of a great poem.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
If I’m on a writing project, writing begins the first thing after breakfast and continues until I have to eat lunch. Then I work a little more, until around 2 p.m. I’m happiest when I’m writing every day.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I listen to recordings of poets reading their work or open a volume of Stevens or Vallejo. Lorine Niedecker and Stevie Smith are also very helpful.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Poison (Christian Dior).

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Films are inspiring to me, also gallery visits, especially photography. I rarely listen to music but love good classical music when I chance upon it.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Italo Calvino, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Traherne, and John Clare.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel to Italy.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
It would be nice to run a small movie theater, where I’d have a small windowless office near the concession stand. I enjoy physical tasks, so I might also have thrived as a welder or carpenter.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t think there was ever another option. In the eighth grade, I wanted to be a scientist because Mr. Blazer, our science teacher, was a very nice man, wore well-tailored suits, and ran successful experiments. My father used to speak of having a “calling” in the church. I don’t think one calls on poetry; it appears to you one day on the street, both arms laced to the shoulder with wristwatches, whispering something you have to lean close to understand.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m not sure it’s a great book, but I loved Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric by Daniel Tiffany. The most emotionally satisfying movie I’ve seen recently is the Japanese film, Departures (2008), about an out of work cellist who takes a job ceremonially dressing dead bodies, as is the custom, in view of the family. My favorite movie of all time is The Last Picture Show.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m between projects, so I’m tinkering with two completed manuscripts, “Gravity’s Children,” which I’ve already described, and “The Windows,” which consists of proceduralist works. I’m supposed to be writing an introduction to my translation, with María Baranda, of the Poesías of San Juan de la Cruz, but I’m getting a slow start due to other tasks like teaching, editing New American Writing, judging poetry contexts, and writing a book of essays about the moral aspect of poetry.

Unhealthful News 191 - Absurd claims about the effects of smoking place restrictions, North Carolina edition (Part 3)

(Links to Part 1 and Part 2.  Sorry for the long delay in finishing this the series.  First I was at the tobacco harm reduction sessions that were part of the TabExpo conference which I blogged about at the tobacco harm reduction blog, then my computer broke and I wanted to wait until I could access what I had written it rather than rewriting it, and then holidays.)

In the previous two parts, I offered a back-of-the-envelope assessment of the possible impact of a restaurant/bar smoking ban on heart attacks.  I estimated that the effect, if it exists, would be in the order of 1% of the population’s total, and only that high if we take near-worst-case estimates of the effects of second-hand smoke and assume, without scientific support, that intermittent medium-term exposure accounts for much of the effect.  Let us now set aside the latter parts of that sentence and just assume that we are trying to detect a 1% decrease.  

Is it possible to detect a 1% change in something?  Yes, of course, but only under the right circumstances.  If we have a rigid object with a length X, and we are about to do something that we think will change the length to .99*X, then two measurements -- one before and one after -- would suffice to confirm this, assuming we have an accurate measuring device and were very confident in our ability to use it precisely.  But, of course, for the heart attack case we are not talking about something that was fixed and constant for all time before the event and again after at its new value.  The most important difference is that we are counting up random events that result in a series of realizations of an incidence rate that we are hypothesizing has dropped by 1%.

Is it possible to detect a 1% change in such a probability of a random draw?  Yes, of course, but only if you have enough observations and that some other conditions hold.  Imagine you have a coin that you have altered so that you hypothesize that when you flip it, it lands heads only 49.5% of the time, a 1% decrease from what it did before.  Could we throw the coin enough times to detect the change with a good confidence?  Yes, but the number of heads we would need to throw to have confidence in the observation would be greater than the number of heart attacks observed in the North Carolina results.  What does this mean for those results?  It means that even setting aside other complications, pretending that the pattern of heart attacks was as regular and reliable as flipping a single coin, we would still have enough random noise that it would be difficult to detect the signal.

In that scenario in which heart attacks are like coin flips, however, it would be extremely unlikely that we would err so much as to estimate an effect 20 times as great as the plausible true maximum.  So what happened?

The problem was that the "some other conditions hold" caveat I stated was not met -- not by a long shot -- and the analysts tried to deal with this by forcing the data into a complicated model.  Instead of just looking at before and after collections of a few tens of thousands of coin flips that vary only as a result of the one change, they were trying to deal with a series that showed lage changes over time that had nothing to do with the event they were trying to assess.  In particular, there was a downward trend in heart attacks over time.  So obviously if you just compare before the change with after, the latter will show a reduction.  This is exactly what some of the lowest-skilled dishonest analysts have done over the years, effectively claiming that the impact of the downward trend that existed before the smoking ban was due to the ban when it continued afterwards.

More sophisticated dishonest analysts used complicated models to try to trick naive readers (i.e., policy makers, news reporters, and 99.9% of everyone else) into believing that they had accounted for this obvious problem.  But before getting to them, what would an honest and sophisticated analyst do?  The answer in this North Carolina case is:  

Give up without even bothering to try.

As I already noted, merely being able to detect the hypothesized signal in the noise, assuming the ban is the only change between before and after, requires a bit more data than all that was used for this analysis.  Using up some of the statistical power to model the downward trend, even if it were a very simply shaped curve and you knew the shape, would leave even less power to detect the impact of the policy shock.  So an honest analyst who knew what he was doing would insist on getting a lot more data before doing the analysis.  And as it turns out, honest analysts who have gathered such sufficient data, for much larger populations with longer periods for estimating the time trend, have found no measurable effects on heart attacks from smoking bans.

So what did the present analysts do?  The only approach that would have any hope of working would be to assume that the downward trend was constant (in some sense, such as the percentage reduction from year to year was constant) except for the effect of the ban.  But that option did not work for the government employees who were tasked with "proving" that their department's pet regulation had a big effect. Sadly for them, the time trend clearly flattened out, so the gains after were less than those from before.  If the trend had accelerated they might well have claimed it was caused by the ban, but because it decelerated, they were not willing to do that simple analysis, which would blame the reduction in reduction on the ban.  

So they set out to use other data to try to explain the time trend.  This is not wrong in theory.  After all, the time trend is being caused by something -- it is not just a magical effect of calendar pages turning.  So if we had all the data in the world and knew what to do with it, we would not have to deal with the trend itself since we could predict the rate of heart attacks at any given time, however it was trending, with the other data.  But here we run into the problem again of not having nearly enough data, not only not enough observations (events) but not enough other variables to really explain the changes over time.  Very sophisticated analysts with lots of data might attempt to explain complicated phenomena like this.  

Such sophistication is more common in economics, but there are a few examples in public health, like the attempt to estimate the mortality effects of outdoor air pollution:  By collecting daily data on mortality, air pollution, weather, and many other variables from multiple cities for years, researchers attempted to estimate the effects of the air pollution.  Unfortunately, this was extremely difficult because hot weather is strongly correlated with high air pollution days, and the hot weather itself is at least ten times as deadly as the worst case estimate for the pollution, so basically the estimate for the effects of pollution is determined by exactly what is estimated to be the effect of weather -- make the estimate for that a bit low and it will look like pollution is doing a lot more harm than it really is.  The air pollution research is notorious for the researchers making a technical error in their first published estimate, and having to revise their estimate down by half.  (Added bonus lesson for the day:  Do not believe the oft-repeated claims about how many people are killed by outdoor air pollution.  They are little more than guesses.)

In the case of the smoking ban, it is the time trend that has effects in the order of ten times the hypothesized effect, but the implication is the same:  Unless you have a very good estimate of the effect of that other factor, or have enough data to figure it out, there is no way to estimate the effect of interest.  So, once again, no honest analyst who knew what he was doing would attempt this.  

A dishonest analyst, however, would find that he had all manner of options for getting the result he wanted by using different combinations of the variable he has and employing many different statistical forms.  The analysts could experiment with different options and report only one of them, as if it were the only one tried and as if it were somehow the right choice among the many different models.  This is the most nefarious type of what I labeled publication bias in situ, and is almost certainly what the smoking ban advocates have done in the various cases where they used complicated analyses to “show” that the effects of the ban are far greater than is plausible.

Finally, we might ask what an honest research might do if tempted to just give this a go, even realizing that the chances are that it would not be possible to get a stable estimate (i.e., one that does not change a lot as a result of whims of model details or the random sampling error in the data).  One thing that would be required would be to do some tests to see if the estimate was sensitive to reasonable changes in the model or data, and most importantly to report the results of those tests.  To their credit, the authors of the NC study actually did a bit of that.  You would never know it from reading the political documents surrounding the study, like the press release, but they did one of the more telling tests:  They took their model and calculated what it would estimate the effects of the ban were if it had been implemented at a different time.  That is, they kept the same data and used the model to estimate the apparent effect of a new regulation that started at a different time from when it really did.  The results for the two alternative times they report are a 27% decrease in heart attacks (recall that the touted “result” of the study was a 21% reduction) and a 12% increase.  That is, during months when their estimate of the effect of the new ban should have been zero (since it did not happen then), the estimates ranged from bigger than their estimated effect from the actual ban to a substantial effect in the other direction.  Put another way, their model is generating noise, and the 21% result is just an accident of when the ban was implemented and the details of their model; had the ban been implemented a month sooner or later, the same data would have "shown" a very different effect, though almost certainly one that was still far larger than was plausible, one way or the other.  They could have just as easily have gotten any other number within tens of percentage points.

And maybe they did.  That is, maybe they tried models that produced those results and buried them.  But I am thinking maybe not.  After all, the analysts would not have even reported the results of the little validation analysis if they were trying hard to lie.  If they were ASH-UK or Glantz, they would have buried those results or, more likely, never done the test.  If I had to guess, I might go with the story that the analysts tried to do an honest job and report that their model could not really find anything, but their political bosses insisted that they report something favorable without caveat.  The analysts left in the information that shows the political claim to be a lie because they could get away with that in the text.  The “public health” politicos are not smart enough to understand what that means, if they take the time to read it at all.  If that is really the story, however, it is not so good -- anyone who would allow the politicos to claim that their analysis showed something that it clearly did not, and who stayed in their job and accepted the behavior, shares much of the guilt even if they tried to sneak the truth in.

So, that's pretty much the story. We can estimate how bit the effect might theoretically be, and that tells us that it is either very small or zero. We can observe that there is not enough data to see an effect that small. But some random luck will generate an impressive overestimate of the true effect a lot of the time, and intentional misrepresentation of what the data shows can almost guarantee it, we hear about bit "effects". Everyone involved in the exercise to show that bans of smoking in a few places have miraculous effects is either dishonest, clueless about basic quantitative analysis, or both. There is simply no other explanation.

Madam I'm Adam















Madam Ad Imam
Madam Ad Maim
Madam Amid Ma
Madam Amid Am
Madam Maid Ma
Madam Maid Am
Madam Mad Aim
Madam Dam Aim
Mama Dad Imam
Mama Dad Maim
Mama Add Imam
Mama Add Maim
Mama Amid Mad
Mama Amid Dam
Mama Maid Mad
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Mamma Ad Amid
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Mamma Dad Aim
Mamma Add Aim
Mamma Aid Mad
Madam Mama Id

[painting of edwin denby by alex katz]

A Thousand Buddhas: Hong Kong

I Traveled to Hong Kong last week for an international poetry conference. Among those invited by conference organizer Bei Dao were Regis Bonvicino of Sao Paulo, Maria Baranda of Mexico City, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko of St. Petersburg, Russia, Tomaz Salamun of Slovenia, C.D. Wright of Providence, Rhode Island, Bejan Matur of Turkey, Paul Muldoon of Ireland and Princeton, Vivek Narayanan of India, Silke Scheuermann of Germany, and Xi Chuan of Beijing, who has a book coming out from New Directions in English translation. Also present were Yuan Jian of Yunnan and Yao Feng of Macao, whom I'd met on a trip to Yunnan in 2005. One afternoon, Maria and I encountered these figures at the nearby Thousand Buddhas Temple.















Unhealthful News 190 - Absurd claims about the effects of smoking place restrictions, North Carolina edition (Part 2)

In my previous post, I started commenting on the absurdity of a state of North Carolina claim that their recent ban on smoking in restaurants and bars caused a 21% reduction in heart attacks.  I presented part of a generic analysis, from an unpublished paper I wrote a few years ago, that basically says "if you are claiming that a such a ban caused such a large reduction in a disease rate then you are obviously wrong, regardless of what your statistical model says, and anyone who gives it a few minutes' thought should understand this".  In this post I make basically the same point, looking at it from a different angle, in case that might be clearer for some readers.

Start by considering the epidemiologic estimates for the increase in risk from second-hand smoke.  The evidence, when assessed by someone who is not intent on promoting smoking bans, puts the risk at so close to zero that it is impossible to say from the data that risk definitively exists.  (There are decent theoretical reasons to surmise that there is some risk, so it seems safe to assume that the risk is not zero.  But it is small.)  A few studies of people who have experienced the most extreme long-term exposure get numbers like a 20% increase in risk.  As is inevitable with random sampling and publication bias, there are a few that go tens of percentage points higher.

So let us consider the possibility that the risk is a bit higher that 20% -- that is, a nonsmoker who is exposed to second-hand smoke is over 20% likely to have a heart attack, at all or much sooner, compared to that person not being exposed.  (Re the "much sooner" point, see the observation from Part 1 that a very-short-term harvesting effect would wash out of the annual statistics.)  This number is unrealistically high and at most might be considered a worst-case estimate of the risk for those with the highest accumulated lifetime exposure.  But even if it were the average effect for those with passing exposure at smoking-allowed restaurants and bars, it would obviously be far higher than the effect of that exposure averaged across the whole population.  Only people who were exposed in the first place would have that risk, and only those who go from exposed to unexposed as a result of an intervention can benefit from it.

How many people go from being exposed to restaurant/bar smoke to unexposed as a result of the ban?  It is a bit fuzzy to define this since there will be a lot of people whose exposure is reduced, and a spectrum of how much it is reduced.  But we can start with the observation that roughly half of everyone had approximately zero such exposure before the ban, never or almost never going out to eat and drink, or avoiding smoking-allowed venues when they did.  (To really get this right, we would need to figure out the portion not of people but of total risk -- a 20% risk increase for an exposed 70-year-old would cause a lot more absolute risk than the same percentage would for the 25-year-olds who pack some bars -- but it seems likely this would strengthen the point I am making, since the older highest-risk people tend to go out to party less.)  Thus, even if you believed that exposure at the level of visiting restaurants and bars causes somewhat more than 20% increase in risk, which is an absurd belief in itself, there is no possible way the effect of the smoking ban could be more than about half of the claimed 21%.

Not only are there a lot of people who were not exposed in the first place, but many of those who are exposed are smokers (where do you think the smoke comes from?).  No one seriously claims that the minor increase in exposure from second-hand smoke dramatically increases the risk for a smoker, on top of the already substantial risk increase from smoking.  Perhaps it does somewhat, but it is going to be a lot smaller than the effect on a nonsmoker.  Many others who are no longer exposed in bars after the ban are still exposed at home -- perhaps more since their smoking spouses do more of their smoking at home or in the car before arriving at a venue.  Furthermore, most of the people who experience a substantial reduction in their total exposure -- all but the nonsmoking workers and hardcore nonsmoking barflies, rather tiny percentages of the population -- experience a reduction of an exposure that was far less than the extreme exposures that sometimes generate measurable effects in epidemiologic studies.

This is enough to show that the 21% estimate is utterly implausible.  Taking it further, what does this way of looking at it suggest would be a plausible maximum effect of a bar/restaurant smoking ban?

To start, even a 5% increase in risk from the bar/restaurant exposure would be a high estimate of the effect for everyone except the aforementioned workers and barflies.  We can figure that half of the population was not exposed in the first place, that easily a third of those exposed were smokers, that many of those exposed had very minor and occasional exposure, and that many others that were exposed had only a minor reduction in exposure since most of their exposure was elsewhere.  So it seems unlikely that even one-fifth of the population experienced a substantial reduction in exposure, getting the effect down below 1% of the total.  Even if we allow for a greater effect for the small highly-exposed minority, as well as some small effect for those with a very small reduction in their total exposure, it is difficult to come up with any at-all-plausible scenario that results in a reduction of more than about 2%.  (And keep in mind that this still depends on assuming the 5% increase in risk in the first place, something that is largely speculative.  Thus the real figure could be much lower than even this.)

Perhaps the full details of this analysis might call for more than common sense, but I have to assume that most people who thought about it would realize that claims of 10% reduction, let alone 20%, are completely incompatible with reality.  This brings us back to the question I asked in Part 1:
So, who would be stupid enough to believe this claim?
I suppose I phrased that too harshly to be a general statement:  The average casual reader of the news does not have time to think through most of the claims that they hear -- about the benefits of wars, the causes of unemployment, or health claims -- so their failure to question the claim should not be attributed to poor judgment on their part.  They just do not have time to judge.  But I will not back off on the harsh accusation when talking about news reporters and other opinion leaders who spend more than a few minutes on the topic.

Several North Carolina local news outlets reported the story without a hint of questioning the result.  Once again, it becomes apparent that the journalism curriculum for health reporters no longer includes the classes that teach governments lie habitually and that perhaps when someone (anyone) puts out a press release that claims "hey, everyone, look!  statistics show that the decision we made was a good one and did everything we said it would" it is perhaps not best to just assume they are correct and transcribe their claims.  Can you imagine if these guys were teachers?  "Class, now that you have finished your quiz, I am putting the correct answers up on the screen.  Please grade yourself and write your score on the grade sheet that I am passing around."

The good news might be that the national press was so bored of these claims (not critical, just bored) that it does not appear to have been picked up by any national news outlet.  But that did not stop Stanton Glantz and his junk science shop at UCSF from posting about it (h/t to Snowdon for reporting that post), and you can count on it showing up in future national news stories where these hacks are quoted.  We would not expect the thoughtful analysis like the above from these people; we can count on them to repeat (repeatedly) any absurd claim like the one from NC as if it were correct.  Indeed, we could count on them to conveniently ignore any result that was down in the realistic range.

(Q: How do you know if Stanton Glantz is spouting junk science in support of his personal political goals, damaging both science and public policy?  A: They have not announced his funeral yet.  Interestingly, it is not entirely clear whether he spouts junk because he has not acquired a modicum of understanding about the science in the field where he has worked for decades, or because he is a sociopath-level liar; I am not entirely sure which is the more charitable interpretation.)

So that is the easy side of this analysis, wherein reporters transcribe claims that are obviously wrong and extremist activists embrace them because they are wrong.  In Part 3 I will go into some details of the modeling that are beyond the abilities of reporters and junk-science activists, but that emphasize that those who reported the results are lying and/or are attempting analyses that are way beyond their abilities, and presumably know it.