Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  Deconstructing commercial advertising to reveal its false and grasping heart is like shooting fish in a barrel. But advertising is so fundamental to our way of life, so accepted and so ubiquitous, that I think it worth doing. And besides, shooting fish in a barrel isn’t easy. The water’s dark, fish move with shimmying speed, and refraction is likely to upset your aim. What I’m trying to do is to empty the barrel, smash it to bits and tip the fish onto the grass in order to have a good look at them. And once you’ve had a clear view of these fish you can’t help spotting them in different barrels. They get everywhere, the slippery little buggers.

  For example, it is now well over a year since the earthquake in Christchurch that killed close to 200 people. The initial effect was like the kicking of an ants’ nest. People scurried in panic, then set to work patching things up. Gradually the frenzy subsided and people are now looking long rather than short. There has been a commission of inquiry into all the earthquake deaths to which many engineers and building owners have been summoned to justify their actions. They have not enjoyed the experience. Though no blame has been specifically attached, they have felt very much under scrutiny.

  In the wake of that inquiry a number of buildings that had survived the major quakes and the 10,000 or so aftershocks have suddenly been closed, causing many people both inconvenience and financial hardship. No one wants to be found culpable, so they have become hyper-cautious.

  The local paper ran a substantial article on this subject. It focused on the opinion of a man whose wife died in a collapsed building. He held the view that all buildings potentially vulnerable to further quakes should be abandoned until rendered safe. Of course one sympathizes with the man concerned. He has suffered grievously. This makes him an authority on the subject of grief. But not on risk. There is no reason to believe that his opinion on what level of risk is acceptable is any wiser or better informed than yours or mine. Indeed you could reasonably argue that his experience will have distorted his view of things. The point, once again, is the illegitimate transfer of expertise.

  It’s common in politics too. Apart from being actors, what do the following have in common: Robert de Niro, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon and the ever-present George Clooney? The answer, according to an article I have just found on the internet, is that they all publicly endorsed Barack Obama in his 2008 bid for the presidency. (I did as well, as it happens, but for some reason my name was left out of the article.)

  Most Americans vote either Democrat or Republican throughout their adult life. So every election is decided by the comparatively few who swing. These are the people any aspiring politician needs to persuade, and celebrity endorsements are part of the process.

  Donald Trump, for example, came down on the side of Republican Mitt Romney. Mitt was thrilled. There was television coverage of Mitt pumping Trump’s hand and grinning like a chimp. Quite why Mitt should have been so pleased, I cannot say. If I needed a little extra something to persuade me that Mitt Romney is iffy, Trump’s endorsement would do nicely. That the Obama supporters I listed are all actors, and therefore skilled at dressing up and pretending, ought to make them less trustworthy than most people. But it clearly doesn’t. Their skills in the field of entertainment are presumed, subconsciously, to bleed into the political field.

  Two other names on the 2008 list of Obama supporters were Ethel Kennedy, widow of Bobby, and Warren Buffett, the ‘legendary investor’ (and that phrase can wait for attention). On the face of it, these endorsements would seem to carry more weight. The woman carries a political aura, the man an economic one.

  But again the impression is inexact. Mrs Kennedy’s political experience was a long time ago and at one remove, and as the mother of eleven children she presumably had little time for taking part in her husband’s political life. And since his death she has played no part in politics other than to endorse candidates from time to time and host the occasional fundraising dinner. Her political experience hardly merits the word expertise. Warren Buffett’s expertise consists of spotting companies he believes will prosper and putting his money into them. And though that is undoubtedly a form of expertise, it carries no whiff of political awareness or policy analysis. So endorsements from these two are of little more value rationally than those of the acting troupe.

  Spectacularly absent from the list of Obama’s endorsers are the names of people well qualified to judge the matter. There are no Harvard professors of public policy. No theoretical political scientists. No moral philosophers. I would imagine that many such people did endorse Obama and vote for him, but their names have not found their way into the public domain. The difference between them and the luminaries is one thing only, the fairy dust of fame. Sprinkle it and reason wilts.

  5

  The god of post hoc bull

  The end of winter approached. The people gathered at the sacred site. Onto the stone they hauled the struggling goat. It bleated piteously. The shaman or high priest or whoever currently held the direct line to the goddess raised his blade to the sky, muttered an incantation, then slit the animal’s throat. The hooves kicked for a few seconds, then fell limp. An acolyte held a bowl of beaten metal to catch the still warm blood. One by one the people filed past to dip a finger and smear their foreheads.

  The beast was butchered and roasted on a fire made with wood from a sacred tree, and the best cuts of meat were offered to the goddess. When she didn’t turn up to eat them, the shaman did. There was no point in wasting good goat.

  In this way, the goddess of fertility, or spring or sun or weather in general or any of the other things the people relied on but could not control, was appeased. Within weeks, days even, the air warmed and crops sprouted. The sacrifice had worked. And the tribe had fallen for the oldest and most persistent variety of bullshit known to our species, the fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, or after this and therefore on account of this.

  The fallacy lies in the word therefore. The only relationship between killing the goat and the arrival of spring is that one preceded the other. There is no evidence that one caused the other. It would be as legitimate to argue that because I bought two pillows on 10 September 2001, which I did, at Briscoes in Salisbury Street, I caused terrorists to fly planes into the World Trade Centre the following day. A temporal relationship is not, of necessity, a causal relationship.

  But it is easy to see how goat sacrifices came about. We are all guilty, I suspect, of equally superstitious and shoddy thinking. As a young cricketer I always used to put my left pad on first (and still do on the rare occasions I play). It would be bad luck not to.

  What I sought, I suppose, was some sort of consolation, however imaginary, in a situation that scared me. I desperately wanted to score runs — I was absurdly keen — but there were forces out there that I could not control, primary among which were fast bowlers. I felt I needed Lady Luck on my side so I invented a ritual to propitiate her. In other words I started a private religion, inventing and personifying an imaginary power, then doing what I could to please her in the hope that she would favour me. For left pad read goat.

  I can no longer recall how I developed the superstition. Presumably I made a conscious decision one day to don the left pad first and then scored runs. And on the post hoc principle I persisted.

  Occasionally thereafter I scored a century. Far more often I didn’t. The obvious conclusion to draw was that putting the left pad on first made no difference. But I never put that to the test by reaching for the right pad first. I didn’t dare. I was a bright child and had been taught the scientific method at school, the application of which would have banished the left-pad superstition to the pavilion rubbish bin. But in a business that mattered to me I preferred the warm comfort of misplaced belief to the cool demonstrability of reason. The human tragedy writ very small.

  The post hoc fallacy retains a grip on our minds and wallets. Today’s shamans are the direct descendants, effectively unchanged, of the go
at slaughterer. They rely every bit as much as he did on their adherents preferring post hoc hope over rational sense. Consider, for example, the pope before the present one, the charismatic John Paul II. Frail but indomitable, heroic yet humble, he resembled an elderly, male Princess Di. The faithful flocked. When his body lay in state the queue of mourners was apparently visible from space. This was excellent for the church and they were understandably keen to capitalize on it. So they put the dead John Paul on the fast track to sainthood.

  The church has a protocol for making saints, though where they got it from and how they justify it I have no idea. But they like to put it about that it is a rigorous business. You can’t have just anyone being canonized. One of the requirements is that the would-be saint has to be shown to have worked a miracle or two. These are generally medical. Two have been ascribed to the intervention of the late pope.

  The first was the complete cure of Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, a French nun who had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Her sisters in the convent prayed to John Paul and suddenly she was cured. (Or may have been. It is not entirely certain that she had Parkinson’s, nor is it entirely certain that if she did, it has gone.) The other miracle happened to a Polish boy with kidney cancer. He was so sick he could barely walk. But he was taken to visit the tomb of the former pope and shortly afterwards he, too, got better. And of course I am pleased for him, just as I am pleased for Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, if she is cured, and if indeed she was sick in the first place.

  In order to determine whether these events should be considered miracles, the Vatican appoints both a theological and a medical panel. These panels consist of intelligent human beings who debate matters with great seriousness. Yet not one of them ever thinks, or perhaps dares, to point out the post hoc fallacy.

  It may be true that the sisters prayed to John Paul and that shortly afterwards Sister Marie Simon-Pierre was cured. But the only demonstrable relationship between the two events is that one preceded the other. There is not a scrap of evidence that one caused the other. The same is self-evidently true of the Polish boy’s trip to the tomb and his recovery.

  Yet there is abundant evidence, overwhelming evidence, of the absence of a causal relationship. That evidence is the millions, perhaps billions, of prayers biffed at John Paul to no effect whatsoever. That evidence is the thousands of sick nuns who’ve both prayed and been prayed for but have then died. That evidence is the stream of sick children who have visited and continue to visit John Paul’s tomb and wake up the following morning still sick. Has John Paul got something against these mites?

  You must almost admire the devotion of the Catholic church to its dogma and its insistence on defying reason and affirming hocus pocus based on a demonstrable fallacy, a fallacy that was identified and named by the evolving human mind several thousand years ago, but that continues to thrive like a goat-blessed crop.

  6

  Holy water

  The word infomercial is transparent bullshit. Infomercials are screened during the inexpensive hours when only the sad, lonely or drunk are watching television, so the advertisers can afford to make their ads longer. Thus they gain a resemblance to marginally more informative programmes to which viewers might be inclined to give some credence.

  The same bullshit lies behind the word advertorial. It means an advertisement that consists mainly of text, rather than catchy slogans or emotive images. Thus it superficially resembles a newspaper editorial, that sonorous opinion piece supposedly emanating from the editor’s throne itself. To stress that illusory resemblance it has appropriated half the word.

  The following is taken from an advertorial for the Homeopathy Centre in Christchurch. The homeopathist begins, encouragingly, by confronting the truth. ‘“Most conventional scientists and physicians have expressed scepticism,” says owner Elisabeth Fink.’ (They’ve actually done a bit more than express scepticism, but let that be.)

  Homeopaths were often labelled ‘quacks’ and positive treatment outcomes were usually regarded as the placebo effect … [but] when we see the positive results of homeopathy on animals, no one can argue that it is due to placebo effect … One of the centre’s clients came in about her sick dog, who had developed a fever and a hard swollen gland on his neck. The vet thought his problem was caused by kennel cough vaccination and prescribed antibiotics, which made no difference after three days …

  Within a few hours of the first homeopathic prescription given, he started eating and looking happier. The next remedy brought the fever down the following day; still the gland remained swollen, which called for another prescription.

  A couple of days later, I found out the gland had shrunk down and the dog was almost back to normal.

  This is bullshit triple distilled. For it is not only a post hoc argument, it is also a prejudiced post hoc argument and a selective post hoc argument.

  It is a post hoc argument because although the homeopathic prescription preceded the dog’s recovery there is no evidence that it caused the dog’s recovery. It would be just as valid to claim that the dog recovered because it had travelled to the homeopathist’s by car or because I’d been out buying pillows again. Both these events would bear the same temporal relationship to the dog’s recovery.

  It is a prejudiced post hoc argument because the author has prejudged the truth. Because she is a homeopathist she concludes that the dog was cured by homeopathy rather than by the car journey or my pillow purchase. She has her answer in advance and is delighted to see that the facts can be interpreted to fit it.

  And it is a selective post hoc argument because she selects one of the possible causes of the dog’s recovery while ignoring others. It is indeed possible that the dog was cured by giving it water that contains no trace of the alleged curative substance (which is how homeopathy is supposed to operate). But it is also possible that the dog would have got better anyway. Animals recover from all sorts of maladies without medical intervention, just as we do from the common cold, and indeed from the majority of ailments that don’t kill us. That’s the immune system for you.

  It is further possible — and may I be daring and suggest it’s just a little more likely? — that the dog was cured by the vet’s antibiotics. But I can’t prove my case any more than the homeopathist can prove hers.

  If either of us wanted to prove it we would have to do some trials. We would need a statistically significant number of similarly sick dogs and we would need to apply one treatment to some of them and one to others and no treatment at all to yet others and see how they all turned out. Which is, of course, crudely put, the scientific method, and it is also precisely what was done with the vet’s lovely antibiotics before they were allowed anywhere near Fido. Not so the homeopathist’s potions.

  What the homeopathist ignores in her whingeing about the scepticism of ‘conventional scientists and physicians’ is that if homeopathy could be shown to work under such rigorous testing, those same scientists and physicians would cease their scepticism on the instant and would hug the homeopathist to their cynical bosoms. For that is how science works: from the evidence to the conclusion.

  What the homeopathist also ignores is that vets and doctors like to effect cures. It’s both what they’re in the job for and how they make their living. And if they could cure sick dogs with the application of a little distilled water, they’d do it. Think, if nothing else, of the money they’d save. Homeopathists sell holy water. It has the same cure rate as the shade of old John Paul.

  The headline of the advertorial was ‘Homeopathy results: animals don’t lie’. Actually animals do. When I’m fishing I sometimes disturb paradise ducks with a brood of ducklings. A parent duck will immediately pretend to have a broken wing. As I continue up the river the duck stays ahead of me, splashing, squawking and feigning the injury. It can do this for a mile or more. And as far as the duck is concerned the ruse works because I keep following it.

  The duck appears to have fallen for the post hoc fallacy. It faked an
injury. I followed it upstream. Therefore I followed it upstream because it faked an injury, whereas I actually moved upstream only because that’s what you do when fly-fishing. But the duck isn’t thinking like that. The duck isn’t thinking at all. It’s just acting on instinct. It has no choice. And that instinct evolved by a more rigorous process of trial and error than any homeopathy cure has ever undergone, the process of evolution. Ducks that lured predators away tended to succeed at reproducing. Ducks that didn’t didn’t. So deceptive ducks thrived and non-deceptive ducks died out. Evolution never cares why something works. It is incapable of caring. It is a blind unconscious process. But it is ruthlessly efficient. Experimental success is rewarded with survival. Failure with extinction. The natural world never deludes itself. Only people do that.

  No duck or other animal is going to reason its way to an understanding of nuclear physics. But at the same time no duck or other animal is going to persevere with a belief that has been shown to be false. For example, I have taught my dog that if he comes when I call he gets a treat. To the dog there is an evident causal relationship between his coming when called and the delivery of a bit of dried liver. He has tested the hypothesis a thousand times and it has been shown to be true, apart from the rare occasions when I haven’t had any dried liver to hand. But these few occasions can be written off as experimental error.

  If, however, I were to call him ten times in a row and never once reward him, it would challenge his understanding of the world. Initially he would try hard to reactivate the reward system. He would return faster, sit more eagerly at my feet, maybe jump and scrabble at me in order to get the liver flowing. But if I continued not to reward him he would revise his view of the world without a backward glance. Judging purely on the evidence available, in accordance with the most fundamental principle of science, he’d simply stop coming. Which explains why dogs don’t pray.