We don't have to look that far for examples of willing ignorance. To the fiscal risk assessment offered by our Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright, recommending planning for sea-level rises that endanger 9000 low-lying New Zealand properties, Finance Minister Bill English said the report was "just speculation".
Surely a similar response was made in 78 AD by the Roman minister in Pompeii who was alerted to the tremors of Mt Vesuvius. The reckoning came in 79. What's desperately needed is more respect for science and better understanding of how science works or how to evaluate the findings. Part of the failure to establish a just outcome in the infamous Peter Ellis case stems from faulty scientific reasoning.
As described in Lynley Hood's page-turner A City Possessed, experts were permitted to establish that child sexual abuse had occurred by the assertion of correlation. They were allowed to state that various behaviours which the children had exhibited "were consistent" with child abuse. Apart from the logical fallacy - it's called post hoc, ergo propter hoc - correlation is not the same as causation.
Children's shoe size is strongly correlated with ability to spell. Bigger shoes, better spelling. It's not their feet that enable them, but their developing brains. A diagnosis of sexual abuse in a child in the absence of physical findings is extremely tenuous.
Too often reports of medication effectiveness turn out to be non-replicable and, at root, sponsored by a company with a financial stake in the outcome. If, in addition, research findings are used to make an emotional appeal, say, as affecting a disadvantaged group, it makes the follow-up of confirmation or disproof more difficult and, simultaneously, more necessary.
This week RadioNZ news aired a plea for the Ministry of Health to permit the importation of e-cigarettes. A UK Professor of Public Policy advocated that e-cigarettes were an effective means to stop people smoking, citing studies from UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol.
Nicotine, the habituating ingredient in cigarettes, is available here, only in the form of gum or patches but not e-cigarettes.
The group allegedly to benefit most from introduction here of e-cigarettes would be those with high smoking rates and limited incomes, ie, Maori. The ministry said more study was needed before changing the law.
The trouble is that e-cigarettes don't actually help stop smoking. That's from a study on the website of the organisation of the same British expert, UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol. A US study published in the April 2015 Journal of Public Health finds that e-cigarettes may make quitting harder. Nicotine products are intended for short-term to enable smoking cessation. Otherwise, using e-cigarettes is the substitution of one profitable addicting vehicle for another. Princeton astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson promotes science this way: "... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behaviour fill the vacuum left by ignorance."
-Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who immigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
