The infinit’th monkey

Why do people get so aeriated about the question of who wrote Shakespeare? I’ve been listening to the Shakespeare-on-ipod podcasts (website / iTunes) and finding them increasingly unsettling.  Which is, surely, rather odd?  What does it matter who wrote the plays?  What matters is the plays themselves.  You’d think.

It does matter, though.  The traditional version is that a relatively uneducated midlander walked to London some time towards the end of the 16th century and, once there, he fell in with a rag-tail bunch of players and hustlers and wrote poetry of such startling humanity and expressiveness that it tops anything anyone else has ever written, anywhere.  Ever.  (Personally I find the plays bloody hard work, and only manageable on stage performed by really good players, but there you go).

The traditional version is demotic.  The Bard was of the people.  He was one of us.  The infinit’th monkey.  So the argument which says that whoever wrote the plays and sonnets must have been better educated, more aristocratic, had more political access and been better travelled than Shakespeare, is an argument which means that Shakespeare is no longer Everyman.  He’s no longer one of Us.  He’s one of Them.

I think the fact that it’s a conspiracy theory in doublet and hose is a side issue even though conspiracy theories are designed to be unsettling.  We like certainties, us monkeys.  If we didn’t, then we’d accept the answer “nobody knows” and conspiracy theories wouldn’t gain any credence.

You see, the dispute over who wrote the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare is about History, and evidence, and whether or not there’s enough of it to know for sure that a thing happened or didn’t happen. Its not just about the 16th and 17th centuries, it’s about History as a whole.  There’s the unsettling implication that most historical “facts” are merely hypotheses and ones which cannot be tested at that.

What history and science have in common is their reliance on evidence; but there’s no direct evidence to tell us who wrote the plays and sonnets and no possible experimental test.   What’s important isn’t who wrote the plays and sonnets, it’s that there isn’t enough evidence to answer the question.  This suggests that just about anything you learned in a history lesson could have been made up.  Now that’s subversive.  It’s also probably true, which makes it spectacularly unsettling.

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If you want to know more, then Wikipedia has an accessible and well written entry on the dispute, and several on William Shakespeare himself.  By contrast, the Shakespeare-on-ipod podcasts focus on the pros of de Vere and the cons of “Shaksper”: unfortunately Mark Anderson argues from incredulity - he cannot believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, he fails to mention anything that counters his argument and doesn’t admit that he’s speculating.  By contrast, the Shakespeare Authorship site is more credible because it’s much clearer about the limitations of the evidence.  What recently re-ignited my curiosity about the subject was the (reduced) summary of the authorship question by the Reduced Shakespare Company.

Just going outside

In what world does someone who dies of illness or in an accident leave their job “voluntarily”?  Suicides yes, if you push the logic that far.  But if I choke on a carrot in the canteen I haven’t left this vale of tears of my own free will, now have I?

However, I’d be classed as a “voluntary leaver” by most HR statisticians.

Phffah!

Large employers like to keep track of all sorts of things including the number of people they hire, the number of people who “don’t work out” in the first year, and the number of people who leave even though the company would prefer to keep them.  The “involuntary leavers” represent errors of judgement on the part of the people hiring them, and you can see the sense of tracking those numbers.  “Voluntary leavers” on the other hand are the people the employer will be put to the inconvenience of replacing because they have been offered a better job elsewhere, decided to return to full-time education, or left to set up in business for themselves.  Or selfishly gone and died.  Without giving notice.  Where’s their team spirit? (I exaggerate for cheap effect).

What the employer is tracking with these figures is the employer’s wish or intention (volition) not that of the employee.  But HR being the sweet and fluffy discipline it is, it doesn’t spell it out as crudely as that.  Ho no. How much nicer to pretend that what you are measuring is what your employees want.  The caring face of statistics.

War is peace.  Love is hate.  People are our greatest asset. The dead are voluntary leavers.

Who needs thought when you’ve got jargon

A friend of mine who knows my weakness for jargon and my aspirations to critical thinking sent me a couple of texts the other day which he’d garnered from his work.

Purpose
The WhizzyDooDad is designed to provide customers with a variety of resources that, when used as part of a learning program that incorporates learning courses, will effectively apply professional competencies and reinforce learning content from those courses.

Desired Outcomes

• Application of e-learning to real business situations and needs
• Increased competency and productivity through the application of new skills and knowledge
• Leveraged investment made in learning and classroom training
• Increased use of learning/training programs
• Projects or initiatives can be related to and/or integrated with a blended solution.
• Learners have increased potential for actualizing new skills and behaviours “on the job”.
• Learners take on new roles as facilitators and/or observers of skill transfer
• Promotion of a learning environment/culture.

I’ll spare you the rest; I’ll even spare you my sarcastic analysis.  You’re intelligent.  You can supply your own.

My friend rewrote the thing entirely, without any reference to the original. Here’s an excerpt from the new version:

The introduction of WhizyyDooDad means that those of us who work in the department can easily find someone to give practical advice on whether or not an app [ie a software application - AB] is the best choice for a particular task. It also makes it  easy to find out what apps we already use and save money by choosing the ones we already have licenses for, instead of going out and buying something entirely new which does the same thing. We are no longer limited by what we know as individuals and in our local teams - we all share our knowledge.

The second paragraph isn’t particularly elegant, it still includes jargon and the last sentence is fluff, but it is at least clear fluff.

When I pointed out that the two texts say completely different things - the first talks about customers and training courses and the second talks about finding experts and reducing license costs - he shrugged, so far as you can shrug on Instant Messenger. “That’s what happens when you substitute jargon for thought”, he said. Which is a fair point well made. It is still one hell of a leap from Text A to Text B.

Quacktitioners III - a little bit of ‘me’ time

Oh dear, this isn’t going to be popular. And the reason it isn’t going to be popular is because I’m suggesting that women go to alternative practitioners for the same reason that men go to sex workers - for rest and relaxation or, as the women’s magazines call it, “a little bit of ‘me’ time”. Hear me out before you dismiss me as salacious or simplistic: it’s a conclusion it’s taken me a couple of years to arrive at and it’s one I’d like to test in debate.

When we ask “what do alternative therapists offer that doctors don’t” the simplest answer is “45 minutes of undivided attention”. There are plenty of other answers the most worrying of which is “hope”, but this post is not about desperate searches for a reprieve from a death sentence, it’s about healthy people who go time and again to alternative practitioners. I know what they’re like. I’m one of them.

In my time I’ve spent thousands on alternative therapists.  I’ve had pins stuck in my flesh, candles balanced on my ears and my aura captured in photographs.  I’ve had my chackras re-aligned, the state of my gut diagnosed by the strength in my arms and been annointed with everything from marigolds to onions.  One osteopath refused to chant over me on the grounds that “it’s a bit too shamanic for Cheltenham” but he was willing to do it in Stroud. Make of that what you will.

It was all money fantastically well spent even though none of it cured anything, though the shamanic osteopath did free up a neck muscle which had gone into spasm. But I got a bargain every time, because what I was really buying was 45 minutes of uncritical attention.

Men go to sex workers for this, though in their case they want orgasms rather than attention, but then they’re from Mars. Vive la différence.

So here is my two pronged observation:

• Firstly, that what pays alternative therapists’ rent and rates is a predominantly feminine need for someone else’s considered attention and non-threatening touch
• And secondly that men tend to sexualise sensations, and women tend to de-sexualise them, and alternative therapists and beauty therapists offer some decidedly odd services in a women-friendly way

If you’re not sure about my second point, ask yourself why it is that if men want a massage or colonic irrigation or to be wrapped in cling-film or put in a sensory deprivation tank it’s sexual and they look around on the scene or go to a sex worker, but if women want any of those things it’s beauty treatment and they go to a health spa?

Please think about this for a while because it’s probably one of those things that you’ve taken for granted for so long that you’ve never realised just how strange it is. Yes, I know that health spas will happily take a man’s money and wrap him in mud and cling-film, but let’s face it, men who really want this sensation see it as a form of bondage (it’s called “mummification”) and find other fetishists or go to some highly specialised sex workers. And equally, if having your insides washed out with warm water is your thang, then women want Enya playing in the background and the gentle aromas of neroli and ylang ylang floating in the air and men, um, don’t.

But think how peculiar this is. Same physical sensation interpreted in very different ways. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s very odd and very interesting.

So, what do we do with this observation? I dunno, and there isn’t room here for my thoughts and speculations on the subject. But if the medical profession is serious about casting a harshly critical light on to alternative therapies, then it should consider what it is that people are buying, and if you ask me, it’s attention.

Personally, I think that the alternative practitioners are providing a service as necessary and helpful to society as the service provided by prostitutes, and while I’m certainly in favour of regulation, I don’t think banning either helps.

Quactitioners II - The mystery of medical history

The Jobbing Doctor has an excellent quote on his blog:

One reason why medical history is not much taught in medical schools is that so much of it is an embarrassment - Lewis Thomas (1992)

Thomas put his finger firmly on one of the problems with the debate between scientific medicine and alternative medicine: scientific medicine’s reluctance to face the fact that in the bad old days doctors were as ignorant and dangerous as anyone else. This is counterbalanced by the fact that alternative practitioners are reluctant to accept that modern evidence-based medicine is safe. Established orthodoxy has moved on and the rebels haven’t, and this is causing wires to be crossed.

It would assist the argument enormously if medicine owned up to its embarrassing history, and then disowned it, staking its claim to be the truly revolutionary movement and the real alternative to the dangerous practices of the past.

You’ve seen the full version of this grid before. However that was a 20th and 21st century version. This version shows the situation in the 19th century when there was little science, and practice was based on observation and experience rather than trials.

Despite this, medics and sceptics frequently talk and write as if there have always been two separate paths - scientific medicine (good), and alternative medicine (bad), and I’m not convinced of this.

18th and early 19th century doctors were a dangerous bunch, as ignorant and hopeful as the herbalists and homoeopaths but with a fondness for powerful drugs, and frequently with an arrogant attitude. They killed millions of new mothers by giving them “child-bed fever” because they didn’t know that infection can be communicated by touch. They’d treat just about anything by drawing blood. Their favourite medicine was calomel which induced vomiting and acted as a laxative because it’s toxic. Their patients became addicted to opium in the form of laudanum. (When a showed a draft of this to a young doctor he pointed out that his predecessors used to massage women to orgasm to cure “hysteria”. It’s not called “doctors and nurses” for nothing). Dodgy sexual practices aside, it was no wonder that Samuel Hahnemann and Edward Bach devised gentler alternatives, even if the reason these alternatives did no harm was because they did no good.

So, if doctors were as ignorant as other practitioners in the 18th and early 19th centuries, what has changed? And what hasn’t?

The big change of course is that medicine now works. It cures diseases and in the main it doesn’t kill people. We now benefit from antibiotics, immunisation and increased standards of public health, not to mention treatments for everything from athlete’s foot to cancer. And all as a result of acute observation, empirical testing, double-blind clinical trials, and a widely-published and peer-reviewed evidence-base. The roll-call of conditions which are a thing of the past is awesome, and medicine has done away with these in the last 100 years or so.

By contrast, not much has changed in the practice of alternative therapies. This is partly because “traditional” is “good”, and partly because clinical trials are expensive and will either show that the interventions are not very effective (herbalism) or not effective at all (homoeopathy). Ben Goldacre rightly criticises homoeopaths for their lack of self-criticism and for treating their founder’s approach as dogma, and they most certainly aren’t the only ones. He contrasts this complacency and stasis with the continuous questioning of the scientific approach and the constantly moving medical frontier.

Another thing that hasn’t changed is the rhetoric of the alternativists. They still talk about medicine as if its practices were as dangerous and untested as they were in the 18th and 19th centuries. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this, including the difficulties the lay person has with medical science because of the poor quality of science education in our schools, the challenges in creating and interpreting drug trials (listen to R4’s excellent edition of More or Less on the subject), and the confusion that understandably arises about where and why to draw the line between things science can be certain about and things it can’t. Oh, and demonising doctors is good for business, of course.

But has the rhetoric of the doctors changed either? The science has, and the outcomes of the science most certainly have, but has the rhetoric? (I genuinely don’t know).

I’m asking because, as I said right at the beginning of this piece, if modern medicine admitted its murky past, it would make it much easier for us all to point out that the alternative practitioners are still living in it.

Quactitioners I - Sincerely WooWoo

Ben Goldacre’s recent Radio 4 programme seeks to place current food faddists (I assume he’s thinking of Gillian McKeith and Ian Marber) in the long tradition of American snake oil salesmen and mountebanks.  His programme discusses the history of these travelling showmen and also of food faddists turned businessmen such as Kellogg, Graham and the seller of Hadacol.  It’s a good programme, and I recommend  it.

However, it’s disingenuous of him to let his listeners infer that there are only two kinds of people providing health services - scientists and quacks.  He’s not alone: most of the sceptical commentators out there make a clear distinction between the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, the disinterested practitioners of empirical science and the cynical and opportunistic pedlars of sugar-pills.  In fairness to Ben Goldacre, he’s more a much more subtle thinker than that, but even he tends to simplify the message to make it easy to convey.

It seems to me that there is no neat correlation between sincerity and science, and that it’s more useful if we consider that there might be four categories of people offering to help us with our health.

To make things snappy, I’m calling them the Good Doctors, the Celebrity Surgeons, the Profiteering Quacks and the Sincere WooWoos.

1. The Good Doctors are scientifically-minded as well as scientifically-trained, they are men and women of integrity who frequently work in shitty areas and research shitty diseases
2. The Celebrity Surgeons specialise in “diseases of the rich”, as Tom Lehrer put it and can be found practising perfectly good plastic surgery in Florida and dentistry in Harley Street.  Big Pharma can come into this category of profit-motivated scientists.
3. The Profiteering Quacks are the ones Goldacre really dislikes - they don’t let truth, logic or inadequate training stand in the way of getting tv deals and book deals and products on shelves - they know it makes cents.
   And finally:
4. The Sincere WooWoos are good people let down by a lack of critical thinking. They are troubled by modern medicine, particularly the cynical and profitable kind, so they they train as homoeopaths or acupuncturists or naturopaths, and then the Hawthorne effect and the Placebo effect builds them an anecdotal evidence base which reinforces their sincere belief in their success

The problem is that the debate ends up at cross purposes.  Too many sceptics restrict their criticism to the profiteering quacks without addressing the question of what is troubling about modern medical and surgical practice.  And likewise, far too many alternative practitioners throw out the baby of medical science with the bathwater of the profit-motive.

People like Ben Goldacre and John Diamond rightly argue that Profiteering Quacks are dangerous and leech on the vulnerable and insecure simply to make money out of them.  But those of us who defend science and evidence-based medicine need to accept that the group that I have flippantly categorised as “Celebrity Surgeons” do exactly the same thing, the only difference being that their interventions which are frequently unnecessary do in fact work - think of Jordan’s boobs and Michael Jackson’s nose if you doubt what I’m saying.

It isn’t enough to attack the woolly-thinking which leads trusting people to accept alternative practices like acupuncture and homoeopathy, we must also understand what it is about these practices which attract patients and practitioners, and what it is about “scientific” or “western” practices” which repel them.

Good Reading:

Bad Science - Ben Goldacre’s blog in the Guardian - eg his column about Gillian McKeith
Snake Oil - John Diamond’s searing criticism of alternative practitioners

Good Listening:

Skeptoid - a weekly 10 minute dose of evidence-based good sence
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre’s infrequent podcasts

An atheist’s guide to wrestling pigs

Richard Bandler, one of the co-founders of NLP , points out rather smugly that the word “generalisation” is just five syllables wrapped around the word “lies”. We all know that generalisations are false, but still we make them. What bugs me immensely about atheists who are anti-religion, rather than those who are just indifferent, is their tendency to see all christians as prejudiced zealots. Takes one to know one, of course. No projection there.

The thing is, there are as many kinds of Christians as there are kinds of people. Yes, some are bigoted, narrow-minded and spiteful, but not all. Not all, at all. There is a specific kind of Christian that I find compelling and attractive; the ones who are intelligent and questioning, funny, socially sensitive, tolerant of others and who quietly get on with making surprisingly substantial changes in the world. I’ve known rather a lot of them and I’d quite like to be one myself. In my dreams. They put me into a cognitive spin because I find the whole premise of Christianity so illogical that I simply don’t understand how anyone with two brain cells and a synapse can find it makes sense. How can anyone so bright be so dumb, I ask myself. They probably feel the same way about me.

When rabid anti-religionists start attacking Christians, I don’t recognise the form of Christianity they attack. I’ve known a few creationists, fundamentalists and people who have a personal relationship with their saviour and lord, and the internet constantly reminds me that they aren’t actually that unusual. I guess in the UK we are blessed with agnosticism and are spared the lunatic excesses of religious tv, evangelism and fundamentalism. I once visited the Bible Society head office in Swindon, though; it was like walking through a toothpaste advertisement made in Stepford.

They say you should never wrestle with a pig: you get muddy and the pig likes it. Put like that, it sounds kinda fun. And that’s the problem. The best responses to bigoted fundamentalists are ridicule and education, and the best responses to powerful bigoted fundamentalists (like the lunatics who’ve been running the asylum in the USA for the last years) are still ridicule and education. But in the US the Scepticism and Sceptical Humanism movements are getting sucked in to point-scoring and pig-wrestling, when it should in fact be poking fun at the pig. And then ambling off and doing something more interesting instead.

Mind the gap

There’s a reasonably widespread idea that less and less can plausibly be explained by the existence of god because  science explains more and more about the world we live in. There’s even a term for a theology which uses god to explain things which science has not yet understood - it’s “The God of the Gaps”. So far, so widely accepted.

Recently I’ve been listening to Nigel Warburton’s excellent podcast series “Philosophy: the Classics”. (Website - book - iTunes). I very much like listening to Warburton’s quiet and articulate summaries of the canon; I know I’d never make it through his book, and certainly not through the originals, but I am slowly becoming more educated as I drive in to work.

What strikes me though, is just how many of the questions which philosophers used to ask have now been answered by neuroscience. We know that Aristotle’s ideas on vision and matter were wrong, and we also know much more about the questions which the 18th Century philosophers such as Descartes, Hume, Locke and Kant were asking about how we know what we know. These questions are being answered by neuroscientists though, not by philosophers. I am of course not the first to notice this, even though it was a conclusion I came to on my own. The 18th century philosophers were, if you like, the philosophers of the gaps.

The gap which is usefully plugged by philosophy is narrowing as neuroscientists and cognitive scientists do their job. For example, we will soon know whether or not a moral sense is innate and why it might be that some people appear not to have one. This will hardly put the philosophers out of a job - in fact we need ruthless critical thinking more than ever. To take a concrete example related to this issue of why some people have no moral sense: it was another podcast which told me that in the UK and Europe we have a far smaller percentage of our population in prison than is the case in the US, but that if you add those who are caught up in mental health institutions into the mix, then the percentages even out. In other words, in the US they imprison the mentally ill, while in the Europe we hospitalise criminals. These sorts of topics obviously give rise to questions which can be answered empirically: what is the best way to prevent offenders re-offending for example, not to mention the practical ones of how best to monitor people at large? However, they also prompt difficult questions we need to think very clearly about, and this is where philosophers and other critical thinkers can help. Do we want to punish or rehabilitate is the least of it. We can also prepare ourselves for what we do when we discover where the boundaries are between free will and biological determinism.

The gap for philosophers may be narrowing, I’ve no idea whether it is deepening. However, as technology makes us become more powerful and as science gives us answers which we may not want to accept, we certainly need the clearest possible thinking to stop us falling into the ethical and practical abyss between the two.

Y’know

How do you know you know something?  How do you know you’re learning?

I spent a couple of days last week on the first two teaching days of an academic course.  The topic in question is a fluffy subject for magpie minds - the tutor even used the word “eclectic”.

We spent the tutorial days chatting.   The tutor had a dozen or so slides and if he hadn’t had those then it would have felt like we were just hanging out, sharing tales from our various pasts and blethering.  It was a pleasant way to spend two days, but it didn’t feel structured or disciplined and so I didn’t feel like I was being taught stuff and therefore I didn’t feel that I learning.

I had the same experience years ago when I spent enough to buy a newish small car on NLP training, but couldn’t tell if I’d got anything out of it.  I challenged the tutor then saying “this is interesting and it’s cool, but what exactly are you teaching me and what am I learning?”   He said that different people know they know things in different ways and observed that I need to be able to relay something in a structured way in order to know that I know it.  He also said that they’d taken a decision to teach in a way that suited the majority of people who could learn without the need to evaluate their learning.  Or something.  To this day I don’t know if he was bullshitting on the fly or if I really am that anomalous.

In the old days of surgery the method was watch one, do one, teach one.  Teaching something fulfills my need to be able to relay it in a structured way.  I guess the nearest I’m getting to that in my studies is the discipline of writing an essay on the subject which is transparent enough to explain its own subject-matter to an intelligent lay-person.

I decided to trust the tutor last week.  He’s been teaching his subject at various universities for years, with a lifetime of training before then.  There were only four of us, all with a couple of decades of working life behind us and all well on the way through our studies.    The experience with the NLP training is a reasonably successful precedent.   And most recently I’ve discovered that when I am teaching, I watch people to see if they understand the concepts rather than banging on and on until they and I am bored.  I don’t care whether or not they have an “ah hah” moment of epiphany when they realise they get it, so long as they get it.  I do spell it out when I’m asked to, but that’s because leaving people floundering is cruel.

So I decided that last weekend I’d go with the flow rather than floundering, but I’ll only find out what I learned when it comes to writing the assignment.  It’s flattering to be trusted to pick the bones out of our chattering, but it’s also rather scary if the truth be told.

On the cusp?

Do you think we are now as scientific as we will ever manage to be?

Let me explain what I’m asking.

Are we living in the age where more people know more science than ever will in the future?

Technologists don’t need to be scientists, and we can carry on for years on the technological momentum of the science we already know. Technologists ultimately follow processes within existing boundaries. If I want to make a new cheesecake with a recipe no-one’s cooked before, I follow an existing recipe with different ingredients et viola, branston pickle cheesecake. I’m still working within a cheesecakey world. I would categorise engineers, many dentists and doctors, some pharmacists, all software developers, and even some science teachers as technologists. Many are scientists, but you don’t have to be a scientist to do these technology-based jobs.

Scientists need a very specific mind-set to be scientists: put very briefly, a scientist should hold an open mind on a question until such time as enough good-quality evidence has been amassed to make the answer obvious. (Each of those terms could do with more definition, but you have a life gentle reader and so do I, so we’ll take them as read for now). The difference between a good scientist and a weak one shows in the questions that they ask and their skill in devising ways of gathering good-quality evidence. To do this they have to understand their subject area thoroughly, and assume nothing is true until it has been tested. Scientists work on what it is about the biochemistry of the digestive system and the chemistry of sugar, vinegar, onions and curdled dairy fats that make the idea of a branston pickle cheesecake so unpleasant.

To put this in terms of the divisive question of our times, an engineer can be a creationist and still design perfectly effective bridges. However a scientist cannot be a creationist, because the scientific evidence for evolution is too great and there is no evidence for creation at all. (This is not to say that a scientist cannot believe in a divine creator; many do and that is up to them, however they cannot believe in new earth creationism). This wouldn’t matter much if most people accepted scientific conclusions about the world most of the time. However most people don’t. Most people are scientifically illiterate, and far too many accept the validity of subjective comfort blankies such as feng shui, horoscopes and homoeopathy. There’s no shame in scientific illiteracy if you’ve had no education in science, but this is why it is so important that good science and real skills in critical thinking are taught (preferably by good scientists) to every person while they are at school.

So let me bring this back to the question I started with. We live in an age where more people know more science than ever before. My question is are we living in the age where more people know more science than ever will again? Are we going to retreat into cargo cult engineering and medical treatments, supported by medieval superstitions about creationism, mercury fillings, alien abductions and reikei healing?

I think it is possible that we may.

You see, we can get a long way on technology - we can continue to develop all sorts of big brothery surveillance and control techniques just riding on existing momentum. Government likes technology, government can control technology, and government can use technology to control us. But ask Galileo and he’ll confirm that government dislikes science.  Science changes what people think.  Science requires that people actually do think.

The Bush administration is doing all it can to undermine and cut back on science programmes, real, hard, empirical science programmes, and it isn’t the only one to do so. I can see a world where there are fewer and fewer tools for arriving at objective truth, and where subjective truth - gut feeling or god’s voice in the president’s head - decides on what is and is not illegal, what medicine will be developed, who lives and who dies. This last is not hyperbole: being gay carries the death penalty in Iran because god says so.

I don’t know. I really don’t. If you’ve got the time, and like entertaining and informative podcasts, I’m going to recommend Skeptoid by Brian Dunning. If you want to be terrified and sickened by the separation of reality and state in the US, read the NY Times Article by Ron Suskind with his account of a Bush aide who could talk scathingly about “the reality-based community” and claim to be part of an empire which can “create a new reality”. If you want to see this as a cultural and (small-p) political issue, listen to Point of Inquiry. And above all, you’ve got kids at school, keep them in their science classes.