Nobody likes a show-off. Just look at the superior looks on these faces. As if covering oneself with insects is in any way desirable. Am I the only one who suspects there is something abnormal going on here – who really considers this an acceptable way to spend one’s free time?

According to the British gutter-press, this stunt was pulled as part of a wedding.

Li said: “I have been working with bees for two decades and it was the obvious choice for us for our big day.”

It doesn’t seem all that obvious to me. Does a farmer get married covered in cows or pigs?

His new wife added: “It was an amazing feeling to have a carpet of living bees moving over my body. I could feel them as they moved around — it was amazing. I have always loved bees but this was a totally new experience.”

Forgive me, but these people sound like perverts. They are clearly getting some sort of sexual gratification from having bees move around their body.

This is clearly the Chinese equivalent of the cult of celebrity that permeates modern culture in the West.

The BBC presented another of its ‘Conspiracy Files’ programmes, this time on a selection of the theories surrounding the 7/7 bombings in London. It cites the usual viral youtube videos as its inspiration, and sets out to rubbish them in an entertaining way with mission impossible style music running throughout.

The basic formula of these shows is always the same. A number of ludicrous conspiracy theories are introduced, and left hanging for 20 minutes while the programme fakes a serious tone, only to knock them apart with relative ease in the last 10 minutes of the show. As documentary making goes, this is utter schlock, appealing only to a very casual audience with no knowledge or any real interest in the subject.

So ‘campaigner’ Nick Kollerstrom happily presents his theories about how the so-called terrorists were never in London early in the programme. And he seems like a nice if slightly doddery old chap with a decent point to make. But wait – in the last 10 minutes he is uncovered as a holocaust denier, and confronted with clear evidence that blows his silly allegations out of the water – he wibbles into the camera a little bit. You actually do feel a little sorry for the nazi-sympathising old twat. If his silly claims weren’t a disgraceful insult to the victims of a terrorist attack you might almost be tempted to just give him a biscuit and a cup of tea.

Well-known British oddball Tony Gosling doesn’t fare much better. Confronted by the fact that two of the major proponents of 7/7 conspiracy theories also claim they are the messiah, he warns us that they may still have good points to make despite their Jesus-complexes and not to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. Truth is, most viewers could imagine these loons throwing babies with bathwater in any which direction.

As usual, this documentary won’t persuade conspiracy theorists of anything other than the fact that the BBC is in on the conspiracy. You can’t shift years of idiotic accusations with a glossy 50-minute documentary – there’s no time to even begin to engage the myriad of claims made by the fantasists. And the truth is that any attempt to actually engage with these issues would be deeply boring television. Conspiracy theorists simply sit in front of their televisions or computer screens getting annoyed and shouting “Yes, but…”. These theories never really end, they just shift endlessly from claim to claim, often in ridiculous circles.

The only real benefit of the programme might be to prove to British Muslims that the conspiracy theory that many of them have bought into was peddled by an internet youtube amateur with a wispy white beard who thinks he is Jesus Christ and that the ark of the covenant is buried under a hill near his house. The basic truth that most conspiracy theorists are slightly short of the full picnic is a very obvious observation to make, but perhaps it’s good to remind everyone of that fact from time to time.

Richard Gage is one of the most vocal advocates of the 9/11 truth movement. He believes that the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on that day were actually demolished, and did not collapse as a result of plane impacts on the twin towers. Donning a suit and tie, and with a reserved and studious appearance, he represents the acceptable face of a movement that often suffers from a bit of an image problem.

Conventional wisdom has it that the planes hit the towers, and the force of their impact combined with the raging office fires that followed weakened the buildings to the point at which they collapsed. Within days of the event a paper by Zdenek P. Bazant and Yong Zhou was published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics ASCE which suggested the theoretical basis for the structural collapse of the twin towers. NIST, a government-funded body, produced two colossally-detailed studies of the inception of the collapses in an investigation that has lasted over 7 years, and has suggested many amendments to existing building codes for high-rise buildings.

But Gage rejects these analyses. And he has set up a website to promote his alternative theories, called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. It is often referred to by other truthers as one of the more prominent and credible public faces of the movement.

Gage’s primary analysis of the twin towers is printed on the front page of his website – “…the Twin Towers’ destruction exhibited all the characteristics of destruction by explosives”. This list is an ever-changing one, and has at least evolved to exclude some of Gage’s more preposterous claims – he never notes all the fallacious claims he has made in the past, but simply quietly deletes them without apology. He currently lists 14 characteristics of demolition that he has noted from the evidence available on the twin towers. Put in a bullet-point list, this can look impressive – if there are really 14 reasons why the twin towers were a collapse, then that is fairly conclusive evidence, no?

Unfortunately this approach is utterly flawed from inception. It’s a fairly basic logical fallacy – the presence of characteristics alone does not necessarily imply or support a certain outcome. It is called ‘affirming the consequent‘ according to Wikipedia. Straight edges are characteristic of a square. A triangle has straight edges. It does not therefore follow that a triangle is a square.

Here are 14 of my characteristics, all of which are characteristics of a crocodile.

1)A nose
2)Two eyes
3)A tongue
4)Two nostrils
5)A long body
6)I have basked on riverbanks
7)I can swim
8)I eat fish
9)I sleep for a proportion of each day
10)I often lie quietly on my own
11)I can look menacing
12)I’m deeply uninterested in chick-lit fiction
13)I haven’t seen the recent Transformers movie
14)I was created by God in the garden of eden.

Unfortunately, despite this mountain of evidence that may prove otherwise, I am not a crocodile. Logically that means I must be an alligator.

It is hardly surprising that a collapse and a demolition may share characteristics – a demolition is a collapse, but one that is created by demolition companies. Gage notes lots of dust, a rapid onset of collapse, the pulverisation of materials, and the total building destruction – these are theoretically created both by a demolition and a collapse.

Gage doesn’t note characteristics of demolition that are missing. For a start any evidence of the intense preparations undertaken before a demolition – the best the truth movement can do is cite building work or maintenance done before 9/11 and imply that it was a cover for such preparations. Gage cites witness recollections of flashes and explosive noises, but there is no clear consensus among witnesses hearing the clear and extremely loud blasts of the charges that normally precede demolitions. And of course, the twin towers collapsed from the top down, initiated at the floors around which the aircraft hit, totally different characteristics to any conventional demolition.

One of the best critics of Gage comes from within the truther ranks. Gregory Urich, a contributor to the Journal of 9/11 Studies, has published an open letter to Richard Gage in which he outlines his problems with Gage’s list. He cites technical papers from within the truth movement that simply disprove Gage’s claims about dust and pulverisation. He points out that Gage is mistaken on a basic claim about the physics of collapse – in no way is the collapse through the path of greatest resistance. He asks Gage to explain why many of the characteristics support a demolition theory over a conventional gravitational collapse theory.

Gage has not, to my knowledge, responded to these criticisms. He continues with his campaign of public engagements and appearances on local radio, television, or anywhere else that will have him. He is spreading his word, based on what I think is an illogical premise, while refusing to acknowledge his errors, or respond to clear arguments from critics.

I remain totally unimpressed by Gage’s arguments, and thoroughly suspicious of both the man himself and those who profess to follow him. I think his basic argument is simply wrong.

I’m still hung up on this expenses scandal here in the UK. Members of the public are still sounding off ad nauseum about their disgust with politics and politicians, and it’s all quite nauseating. Of course this sort of anger in the UK can only stir up angry letters to The Times. “I was so angry I changed my status on Facebook”. We are such a docile breed now as the public.

The trouble with this debate is that a significant percentage of the public seem to be casually suggesting the idea of just tearing up our democracy with the vague notion that we would be better off ’starting again’. Whereas in reality there is no hope for that sort of process.

It’s an idle threat. “You’re never getting chocolate again” is what we say to our kids, both with the full knowledge that it’s a course of action we would never actually have the stomach to carry through.

Imagine we tore it all up or went communist or anarchist, or started some new and independent and highly successful system of self-governance. I guarantee that within five years the US would invade on some humanitarian pretext, if our closer neighbours in Europe hadn’t got there first. Start fucking about with our current system of government and we’d simply be swallowed up by those whom it threatens.

All we really want to do is vent our anger – we want our indignance noted. It’s not very healthy is it. It’s the equivalent of shouting down the phone at some poor dogsbody in India because you’ve been charged extra on your overdraft.

It makes me wonder if I’m just out-of-step with the general public. I have always assumed that politicians are power-hungry and money-hungry wankers – the expenses scandal tells me nothing that I didn’t feel I already knew. Is the public shock faked? I have to wonder. Are the public only shocked because the Telegraph tells them they should be?

Tom Dalyell is an interesting example. He claimed 18,000 pounds expenses to build a bookcase and was eventually given £7800 for the project. String him up? But he was one of the handful of MPs who actually vocally opposed our aggression in the middle-east, and thus one of the handful who blessed British politics with some sort of reasonable alternative in a crucial debate. His agitation may have saved lives. What do his bookcases matter in the face of a genuine political debate?

The biggest irony of the last week comes from some of the suggestions that the Queen exercise her right to dissolve parliament – I’d take a wild guess that the idea that anyone should live like royalty at the expense of the public probably doesn’t disgust the Queen too much.

I’m still bewildered by the book The Wisdom Of Crowds, the popular science book that renowned playwright Tom Stoppard (no less) called “brilliant and fascinating”. It’s thesis is that “the many are smarter than the few”, and it sets out to prove why ‘groupthink’ can outperform individuals in many situations.

Here’s an insight from the book describing the meticulous laboratory conditions of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire studio. Contestants ask questions to win a million, but of interest here is the ‘lifelines’ they can us to answer a question they are stuck on, one of which is a call to a colleague who they consider an ‘expert’, and another is a chance to open up the question and see what the whole audience’s answers might be. Can you see where this is going?

…The ‘experts’ did okay, offering the right answer – under pressure – almost 65 percent of the time. But they paled into comparison to the audiences. Those random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio picked the right answer 91 percent of the time.

There’s a nice blog piece on the matter, which wonders aloud just how and why the group in this case perform so much better than the expert. The point made is that actually the group is as likely to randomly guess the right answer as the wrong one in a 2-way question, or 25% of the time in a 4-way multiple choice format. If all the others chose randomly, it would only take a handful of the group to actually genuinely know the answer for the audience to correctly answer. If 5 of a 100 actually know the answer in a 4-way question, and all the others vote randomly, then the correct answer is likely to be around 30%, while the incorrect answers would be at around 23%. There’s no group wisdom at work there, simply 5% of the audience know the answer and 95% do not – a very reasonable expectation for any general knowledge question.

There’s another issue here – when the audience favor an answer with less than 50% of their vote (in a 4-way question), that is presumably taken as a ‘correct answer’ by these statistics. But in many ways it is not – a minority of the audience actually favor the given answer. 40% of the audience may favor answer A, but 60% think that A is wrong – it’s all about how you express the statistics. If the majority of the audience don’t know the answer, you could just as fairly describe that as the audience simply not knowing. Their best guess is simply the answer they consider the least wrong.

If an audience member doesn’t think they know the answer – do they just guess? Maybe they are encouraged to, but I wouldn’t – if you’re ignorant of the answer it helps the contestant more if you just stay out of it. Far from the book’s thesis about crowds being wise because of the range of intellects on offer, this could simply be a case of members of a crowd being wise enough not to be part of the crowd.

Of course the expert’s experience is very different – under pressure, and without the luxury of the written question in front of them. Their evidence seems to have been collated into right and wrong answers. Of course, the reality on the show is that the individual experts sometimes fail to give an answer at all in the time allotted. On other occasions they have only a vague hunch that the contestant only acts upon if it confirms what they were already thinking. “I don’t know the answer, but I would guess at answer C” – if that proves correct or false, it’s hardly a glowing endorsement for any simplified reading of their performance.

But here’s the biggie – the fact that blows these silly statistics totally out of the water.

Any contestant with half a brain knows that you should only ask the audience a question you think they can answer. Something about popular culture that most people know but maybe you don’t. Or something that you think is general knowledge but you just can’t remember. These, almost by design, tend to be some of the earlier, and generally easier, questions. A good rule of thumb is that the first 5 or so questions are questions that the question-setter expects you to be able to answer – so if you can’t get them, you can be damned sure the audience will know.

If the question is something tougher, that you think is a specific bit of information that only an expert would know, then you phone the expert. Experts get the tougher questions. The way the game plays out is almost always that the audience is used on a fairly easy question, and the expert is used for a harder question. And usually as a last resort – often an expert is called upon in desperation as the last lifeline used.

In conclusion I don’t think the laboratory of the gameshow offers us much insight here. I think experts get the tougher questions. Audiences get the easier ones. Audiences are allowed to offer a vague indicator of the answer, rather than a definitive decision. Experts are under pressure. Audience members get to see the question for a few minutes beforehand. Analysis suggests that a very few audience members who know the answer can totally sway the statistics – this isn’t wisdom, it’s maths.

Renowned playwright Tom Stoppard may be fascinated by the book’s brilliant observations, and I certainly have no reason to doubt the reputation of the man who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, one of the most celebrated plays of the last century. But I must say I’m disenchanted by this book’s thesis. But then I am not a crowd, I am one person, and if the many are smarter than the few I am undoubtedly wrong, as the book was a bestseller and Tom Stoppard is a world-renowned playwright.

Are most conspiracy theorists loonies?

It seems normal to think so. That’s why we don’t have newspapers full of the heartfelt opinions of holocaust deniers and people who think the World elite are alien lizards. Instead we choose to read more rational opinions about MMR, weapons of mass destruction and revolutionary underpants embedded with bio-crystals that make cellulite vanish!

I don’t think journalists in the media have this quite right – they may think that conspiracy theories are irrational and plain wrong, but somehow they shrink from their duty to publicly reflect this. If you hold a heartfelt belief, and you find that the rest of the world seems to ignore it, you wonder why it is being ignored. On internet sites conspiracy theories are flourishing, and the ‘conspiracy of silence’ in the mainstream media only encourages them that they are right.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that conspiracy theories are unconvincing. If you watch the right video on the internet, or read the right article, you can be convinced of virtually anything. Read the heartfelt testimony of those who say they felt explosions in the twin towers before the planes ever hit, or the woman who swears she was sexually abused as a child by world leaders. You have to deny these people’s very essence to dispute them. Read the testimonies of Jesus’s disciples and tell me that you deny their essential belief – it’s not always easy.

It has happened with climate change. As the consensus has grown that climate change is man-made, the minority who disagree have found themselves given less and less of a platform in the media, and rather than just accept that more scientists believe one explanation over another, the idea that there is a conspiracy at work has grown. It’s a siege mentality. Whatever you believe in, you would like to see it given more column inches. It is this factor, over and above any of the scientific evidence, that has created this political divide.

As the 9/11 conspiracies grew virally on the internet, they found themselves left virtually unchallenged in the media. Soon a small army of internet investigators were uncovering thousands of anomalies in the 9/11 events that the media never bothered to address on their behalf. Left to their own devices, and with no legitimate form of redress, they have flourished. The force of the campaign promoting the ‘inside job’ theories of 9/11 has simply been left unchecked for far too long, creating a mountain of mistaken beliefs that it will take decades or even centuries to undo.

The Kennedy assassination conspiracies are a long-term example of this – the controversy around this event will never ever die. Millions of enthusiastic man-hours have been sunk into this conspiracy theory. Oliver Stone made a movie about it. It is so embedded in popular culture that you can be almost guaranteed that one of your friends will believe that Lee Harvey Oswald could never have killed Kennedy. And I think now that the Princess Diana theories will exist as long as time itself.

How did it come to this?

I think part of this comes down to the mistaken belief that conspiracy theorists are loonies. That they are slightly loopy eccentrics who, while fairly harmless, are not really to be engaged – leave them to their imaginary worlds. The idea that if you talk about them, it only encourages them and gives them unwelcome publicity.

In my dealings with conspiracy theorists, I have found some people I would describe as loonies. But by far the majority are people who simply have got the issues muddled in their heads, and have been left to their own devices to interpret them. Most are honest and some spend a lot of time on their campaigning activities, man-hours that could have been spent on something more progressive and less… wrong!

I blame the media as an entity. Or the establishment in general. For always peddling the middle line, and ignoring the polarised ends of every issue. For dismissing certain researchers as crackpots but refusing to tackle the actual content of their debate. For thinking that if you ignore something it will just go away – that doesn’t work.

There will always be a level of organised madness in life – I see it as much in the establishment as I do in the outliers who believe in lizards, or so-called religious cults who believe in the second coming of Elvis, or those who peddle what is essentially water as a progressive alternative medicine. Instead the establishment tell us that Jade Goody is some sort of saint, that the values of capitalist society are so superior to the alternatives, that the soap opera of political skullduggery is more important than the issues they are employed to address.

Please point out to me who the loonies are, because I could never work it out.

Have you ever laid awake at night worrying about the expenses claims of politicians?

Apparently everyone in England has, because there is such a feeding frenzy about the fact that some politicians have been fiddling theirs. If you’re a journalist this sort of thing is gold-dust – politicians on the fiddle, an opportunity to whip up a sense of corruption at the heart of British politics, and the opportunity to feign disgust on behalf of the electorate.

The latest casualty is the speaker of the commons Michael Martin (pictured above) – the bloke who basically chides MPs when they speak out of turn in the chamber, and is the ultimate icon for political pomposity. They’ll hire a new one, and nothing will actually change. If a politician goes to prison for fraud over this, a new one will come up in their place.

If you’ve been laying awake at night worrying about the expenses claims of the speaker of the house of commons there can only be three reasons. You are Michael Martin. Or you are his wife. Or you are clinically insane.

I agree with Stephen Fry, who has courted controversy by going against the journalistic line…

“Let’s not confuse what politicians get really wrong – things like wars, things where people die – with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession with whether or not they’ve charged for their wisteria. It’s not that important. It really isn’t. It isn’t what we’re fighting for. It isn’t what voting is about. And the idea that ‘oh we’ve all lost faith in politics, because’… it’s nonsense. It’s a journalistic made-up frenzy.”

There’ll be a lot of journos mumbling about ‘Fry getting his’ and plotting the demise of the greatest living Englishman after that. How dare he piss on their scoop!

But he’s right. Whatever politicians do with their expenses, the issues actually don’t change at all. The story has as much relevance to actual political issues as the plotline on the feeblest daytime soap opera.

What will happen is a general reshuffle as some politicians are picked off and destroyed, while others seize the chance to make political capital from the fallout. A tightening of the rules on expenses may be a good thing, and perhaps a debate about the general level of pay of MPs. It’s a subject about as close to my heart as Pluto.

Does that really help you sleep at night?

I’ve started reading The Wisdom Of Crowds, James Surowiecki’s critically acclaimed tome from 2004. It’s subtitled “Why the many are smarter than the few” and the basic thesis of the book is that when a crowd’s opinions are taken as a whole, they are often more accurate than the opinion of one learned person who may just be wrong.

Renowned playwright Tom Stoppard calls it ‘brilliant and fascinating’ on the back cover. But he’s not a crowd, he’s one person. And many people are smarter than the few. It seems odd to see his individual quote on the back of the book – surely a group of playwrights would be a better judge.

The first case study in the book is from British scientist Francis Galton (one person), who studied the group results of the ‘Guess the weight of the Ox’ competition at a regional country fair…

Galton undoubtedly thought that the average guess of the group would be way off the mark. After all, mix a few very smart people with a some mediocre people and a lot of dumb people, and it seems likely you’ll end up with a dumb answer. But Galton was wrong. The crowd had guessed that the ox, after it had been slaughtered and dressed, would weigh 1,197 pounds. After it had been slaughtered and dressed, the ox weighed 1,198 pounds. In other words, the crowd’s judgement was essentially perfect.

Next case study. The US submarine Scorpion sinks somewhere in the North Atlantic, with no technology available to accurately pinpoint its position. A naval officer John Craven (one person) comes up with a way of assessing a group of experts’ varying predictions on where the submarine may lay…

The location that Craven came up with was not a spot that any individual member of the group had picked. In other words, not one of the members of a group had a picture in his head that matched the one Craven had constructed using the information gathered from all of them… Five months after the Scorpion disappeared, a navy ship found it. It was 220 yards from where Craven’s group had said it would be. What’s astonishing about this story is that the evidence that the group was relying on in this case amounted to almost nothing. It was really just tiny scraps of data.

One more quick one, just to finally put the issue to bed…

A classic demonstration of group intelligence is the jelly-beans-in-the-jar experiment, in which invariably the group’s estimate is superior to the vast majority of the individual guesses. When finance professor Jack Treynor ran the experiment in his class with a jar that held 850 beans, the group estimate was 871. Only one of the fifty-six people in the class made a better guess.

You convinced now? Do you now understand ‘why the many are smarter than the few’? It’s a glorious confirmation of democratic principles, of society, of human being’s one-ness. Or it’s a crock of shit.

What if I were to say that these these examples were simply an illustration of ‘good luck’. Or rather a realistic expectation of a small number of cherry-picked examples to support a certain conclusion. Obviously I am not a crowd, so my judgement isn’t to be trusted. Is any one of these examples a proper experiment, that is even capable of proving this point about the accuracy of group judgement? Of course not.

Let’s imagine a hundred Francis Galton’s going to a hundred country fairs with a hundred Oxes and examing a hundred sets of ‘guess-the-weight’ results. Now if in all of those results the crowd judgement was ‘essentially perfect’ then you have a bit of a phenomena – indeed it might be the most amazing phenomena ever observed in sociological history. But let’s pretend that only one out of a hundred times was the group accurate – that would be the only one we’d hear about in this book. The other 99 Francis Galton’s wouldn’t consider their results to be worthy of any further analysis. My guess is that’s what happened – we’ve heard about the only time the results fit this claim about crowds. Yes it’s just a guess, but it is just as likely as the guess inspired by Galton’s presented experience here.

There are other problems here. It is assumed, for example, that those guessing the weight of the ox were a perfect cross-section of society, rather than a specialised group with a professional interest in the matter, ie the sort of people who might be wandering around a country fair looking at livestock. The writer notes that a number of the guesses were discarded as unintelligible, so it’s only a judge of the wisdom of crowds that have mastered basic writing skills. Imagine how the results might be altered according to the way in which the guesses were made – in small groups perhaps,  influencing each others guesses and colouring the experiment in different ways. Could the guessers see the guesses already made? – this is absolutely crucial to the test!!!

A submarine sank and a ‘group judgement’ was within 220 yards of the actual position of the vessel. Was this a control experiment? No it was a one-off – submarines don’t sink every day. Presumably if one expert had been proven to be bang-on with their educated guess of where the sub was, we’d be reading about their phenomenal performance in a book called ‘The Wisdom of One Individual’. What is hilarious about this example is that it is admitted that there is almost literally no information to work on – unless we believe in some sort of extra-sensory-perception being employed, the result is quite clearly blind luck.

This submarine example isn’t a crowd at all, it is a presumably hand-picked group of experts of unspecified number – if there were only 3 of them for example it totally changes the implications of the results. As noted, these experts were asked to guess on all sorts of things about the sub, the possible problems it encounters, its speed and angle of descent – presumably the group was accurate on all of these things as well, and the writer has just forgotten to tell us. If the group average of the guesses of the angle of descent was way off for example, how smart are the many then?

I included the last ‘experiment’ because of the hilarious line “invariably the group’s estimate is superior to the vast majority of the individual guesses”. Because if you think about it, whatever the spread of the guesses, presuming that there is a reasonable difference between them, the average is likely to be more likely to be reasonable, and also different (or ’superior’) to the majority. That’s the whole bloody point of taking an average.

Funny in this case that the writer claims that ‘invariably’ this jelly-bean experiment works, but strangely this is one claim that they don’t have accurate data for – what a shame, as it’s the only claim which might genuinely have proven their point!

This is not even a measure of the general wisdom of crowds – it is the (supposed) specific wisdom of crowds in certain situations, ie ones where there is a large scale on which to guess, where the actual answer isn’t an unusual ‘outlier’, and where a spread of wrong guesses can be easily averaged into a ‘group guess’. Ask a crowd what temperature magnesium melts at, and see if your average is more accurate than the guesses. Some will know and the rest will guess – it’s as simple as that. If only all judgements were over jelly-beans in a jar, rather than those in the real-world.

Ask a crowd which hand I am holding a coin in – their wisdom might be split 50/50 in that case – no doubt this book would claim that they were only half a hand away with their group guess, which is better than 50% of the crowd’s guesses.

Maybe this book will dispel my initial fears with thorough and convincing analysis based on genuine reason. The reputation of renowned playwright Tom Stoppard depends on it.