Morris E. Chafetz M.D.

Alligator Epidemic

If you've paid any attention to the news the last week or so, you know that alligator attack is suspected as the cause of the deaths of three young women in Florida this month.

Typically, alligators are blamed for approximately one death every three years in the Sunshine State. So the recent reports suggest a tenfold increase in alligator fatalities in Florida this year -- and the year isn't even half over. Even if there are no more fatal attacks by alligators this year, were the trend to continue there would be 30 deaths by alligator next year, 300 in 2008, 3,000 in 2009, 30,000 in 2010, 300,000 in 2011, 3,000,000 in 2012, 30,000,000 in 2013, and in 2014 alligators would devour the entire population of the United States! What are we to do?

Nothing, of course. The trend will not continue. Anything that happens to three people out of a group the size of Florida's population is statistically insignificant -- statistically the same as zero. Mind you, this is small comfort to the families of the women who were killed.

What makes alligator attacks newsworthy is precisely the fact that they are so rare. How many people do you suppose died of, say, injuries received in automobile accidents in the period of time spanned by the alligator attacks? Yet no special fuss was made over those unfortunate persons, even though their violent deaths were probably every bit as dramatic as death by crocodilian.

One of the most important points I seek to make in Big Fat Liars is that it is extremely dangerous and generally impossible to accurately generalize. Yet the attempt is always made and the results are often misleading. Is being a woman a risk factor in alligator attack? Is being a woman in 2006 a risk factor?

The chances are good that the victims knew the slight risk of alligator attack when they went outdoors on what turned out to be their last days. As did the millions of Floridians who knew that risk on those days and went out without anything bad happening to them (or to then succumb to a car wreck or a sudden heart attack or a pistol's slug). The one indisputable cause of death is birth. The death rate is 100 percent. The only issue is timing, with most of us seeking to put as much time as is reasonably possible between birth and death.

Some people, surely, are devoted solely to prolonging their own lives, at the expense of the quality of those lives (unless merely being alive is all that pleases them). The rest of us weigh risks against the rewards we hope to receive as a result of engaging in "risky" activities. It's our choice to make, and it ought to be.

A statistic that proposes to tell you you're 10 times more likely to get eaten by a giant reptile in Florida this year than you were last year ought to be goven consideration equal to its statistical significance -- zero -- as you decide where to vacation.

Doom for Dollars

A few weeks ago, on a night when a large number of thunderstorms and their associated tornadoes were ravaging central Illinois, a person seeking information on these storms and therefore turning to the Weather Channel would have found instead a program called "It Could Happen Tomorrow." That show describes some terrible event that might happen someday. Viewers might be excused for having tuned in hoping to see "It's Happening Right Now," a program that was somewhat more urgently needed

Likewise, people heading off to bed and thinking to get a sense of the next day's forecast first might turn to that channel, only to find "Storm Stories," a program about weather in other times. Describing what the weather was is oh-so-much easier than predicting what it will be. And there are better pictures, television in the minds of programmers being all about pictures.

There is a swarm of television channels -- Discovery, History, History International, National Geographic, Times, Science, Learning, and one or two others -- that seem to be run out of the same closet somewhere, sharing about 50 programs that pop up on each in turn. Added to their mix this year are some highly speculative disaster programs similar to the one the Weather Channel ran that night instead of reporting on the destruction of Illinois's capital.

There seems to be money in predicting doom. And it is safe to say that something terrible will happen someplace sometime. When one can predict a horrific event with any more precision than that, it can be a real cash cow.

One has to wonder, then, how much of the panicked reporting of "avian flu" has been real and how much is hype. For well over a year we have been warned that any day now this apparently virulent strain will mutate such that it can be easily spread and by the time the contagion has cleared as much as a quarter of the world's population will be dead before its time.

And one has to be a little bit amused at a story in today's New York Times under the headline "Avian Flu Wanes in Asian Nations It First Hit Hard." It turns out that in the nations where a quick and factual (as opposed to feelings-based) policy is imposed, the contagion can be knocked down before it has much of a chance to mutate. The amusement comes in seeing, also today, this from the Stamford Advocate: "City braces for possibility of bird flu." The headline alone conjures images of residents of that affluent Connecticut city cowering in their homes, perhaps peeking through the curtains from time to time to see whether the menace has made it any farther up the street.

The problem is, a story which carries the headline "City makes provision for epidemic when and if it ever comes to pass" would not draw as many readers as the one that has people "bracing" for something -- which the New York Times reports may well be controllable.

It is all fear mongering. I'd be the last to say that there is nothing in the world to fear. I'd also be the first to say (and I was, in the two books you may purchase through the links on the right) that nothing but prurient interest is served by speculative articles and programs which tell us the world will come to an end.

Basic Principles

There are several ideas which run through this blog and through Big Fat Liars and The Tyranny of Experts. It makes sense to list them here:

1. There is no such thing as human science. Humans vary too much to allow useful generalization about any but the most obvious human attributes. In our attempt to go farther, we substitute the numbers game and correlation-as-cause. These do not give us nything of much use. (A perfect example is the recent Vioxx nonsense: A huge number of people were well served by that product. A few were not. The product was withdrawn.)

2. HIV does not cause any disease. AIDS is a syndrome, not a disease.

3. Global warming is scarcely worth becoming upset about, because it is and always has been out of our control. Of course there is global warming. There is also global cooling. That is the nature of things, not the result of some human behavior. The global warming of today is no different in any way than the global warming that occurred before human beings or animals were on the planet. What's more, scientists can scarcely agree as to anything having to do with temperature change or its effects. Where once it was thought that cavemen had wiped out the large prehistoric mammals of North America, it is now thought that a change in temperature brought about those extinctions. What caused the temperature change? Surely not the cavemen in their pre-industrial society.

4. Reading and thinking are for the brain and mind what exercise is for the body. Go without exercise, if you like, but know there's a good chance you'll become flabby and unenergetic as a result. Go without reading and thinking, and your mind may well go dull.

5. There is no such thing as an addicting substance such that anyone using the substance becomes addicted. On the other hand, there is nothing in human behavior or thinking to which one cannot become addicted. The substances don't addict us, we addict us.

6. You can take back control of your own life by freeing yourself of the fears imposed on you by so-called experts.

7. We are all so some extent the sum of our experiences and circumstances. Big Fat Liars asks a question we all might well ask ourselves if we want to be free: Would you feel the way the way you do, would you see the world as you do, would you value what you do, if you were born to different parents, at a different time, in another society?

Think about it.

Gaseous Pains

In Big Fat Liars I discussed the way the news media engage in selective coverage in hope of stirring up the crowd and thereby creating a bigger audience. No better example could be found than the one we're witnessing right now in coverage of the economy.

The fact is, the current unemployment rate, well below 5 percent, is extremely low. Far more people are working than ever before. The nation's productivity is rising. The Gross Domestic Profit is growing at a rate that promises economic health without much threat of inflation, meaning that savings are not likely to be frittered away by a decrease in the value of money. The stock market is near all-time highs, which means that those who have retirement plans can now feel more and more secure in those investments.

Yet consumer confidence in the economy is at a new low.

What's going on here? The economy is better than it has been in years, in some cases better than it has been in decades, yet people are gloomy. The media often say that people "don't feel" that the economy is doing well. This is like the weatherman reporting that people "don't feel" that it's raining -- whether or not it's raining isn't a matter of opinion.

A clue may be found in the "Media Reality Check" published by the Media Research Council. It reports that unless you looked for it, you probably were never told that the economy is growing and that employment is up. While the major networks devoted more than 180 reports in recent days to high gasoline prices, very few reports of good economic news managed to find airtime.

Just another example of why you need to look deeper than the popular media if you want to have facts sufficient to let you make an informed decision on . . . anything.

Science and the Stars

As you might imagine, it's unlikely that I'd ever quote an astrologer, but there's one today worth quoting. In a column today (updated daily, so it will soon disappear), the British astrologer Eric Francis speaks with delightful candor:

[A] horoscope column is made of the writer's thoughts, not those of the reader. If you identify with something that's said here, it's a glorious kind of divine coincidence called a 'synchronicity'. It hints at the possibility of an intelligent cosmic order, which may just mean two minds thinking along the same basic wavelength at around the same time. Yet as far as I'm concerned, you're free to take or leave anything I say about you, or for that matter, anything else anyone says. If the stars vibrate with one message this week, it is: know what is true for yourself, and honour it.

I disagree with Francis only on the matter of timing: knowing what is true for yourself and honoring it is important every day and every week.

What is so noteworthy about Francis's remarks is that he makes them at all. There is no reason to think that there is anything to astrology; in fact, the St. Louis Post Dispatch has a disclaimer that runs atop its astrology column: "NOTE: Horoscopes have no basis in scientific fact and should be read for entertainment, not guidance." What the paper doesn't say -- what no paper ever says -- is that much which is presented as scientific fact also has no basis in scientific fact. Much of the conventional wisdom as to matters scientific and medical has no more to back it up than do predictions of the future based on the positions of the stars.

The astrologer Eric Francis has come out and said it about his pursuit. This is one time when the scientists, the politicians, and the news media could learn much from reading the astrology column.

Other People's Laws

The media have been full these last few weeks with what is euphemized as the "immigration issue." It is not an immigration issue. It is a movement by people who came to the United States in violation of United States laws and who now want new laws passed which will allow them to get and keep the goodies.

The part these people play in our economy is widely debated. What cannot be debated is that these persons have actively demonstrated a willingness to violate such American laws as they find inconvenient. Fair enough, I suppose -- the prisons are full of persons who have been convicted of violating laws which they had decided they did not want to apply to them.

This time, though, there is a difference. There is no movement to legalize ("decriminalize" is the term chiefly used when discussing stylizh misbehavior) bank robbery or murder. There are no demonstrations in favor of driving while intoxicated or even for parking ticket amnesty. People who break the law and who get caught are generally unhappy about the latter but aware of the former. The drunk driver does not proclaim that his actions are good for the liquor, auto body, and undertaker industries and therefore he should be freed and even praised for his actions.

The breathtaking irony in the protests by illegal aliens -- the political incorrectness is deliberate -- is that these people who have already by definition violated U.S. law are seeking a law. Which by definition would apply only to those who, unlike them, do obey the law. The lawbreakers are seeking statutory power over those who are not lawbreakers. And the lawmakers, governed for the most part by political expediency instead of principle, stride boldly forth, finger raised to gauge the wind. It would not be surprising to see other people, for whom principle and an unwillingness to be herded actually matter, and who obey the law not because they especially like it but because it is the law, raising a different finger in reply.

Whatever arguments might be made in connection with the ease of moving to the U.S. or lack thereof, there can be no mistake: the people on one side of this issue are lawbreakers who wish to assert power over you, the law-abiding.

It doesn't seem as if anybody is pointing this out, so I thought I would.

Lots of Numbers

There was an interesting article in last Wednesday's Washington Post, dealing with a new encyclopaedia of statistics about the United States.

The compendium is the Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition. It proposes to distill the history of the country into five volumes of statistics. (One important statistic: it costs $825.00!) What it largely does, it seems to me, is demonstrate the backward causality assigned to statistics.

Don't get me wrong -- in neither of my books have I decried statistics as useless, though in both books I have decried the way they are too often used. When the scientific method is properly employed, a prediction might be made in development of a hypothesis. That prediction might well be put in statistical terms. Statistics might then be gathered in support -- not proof, but support -- of the hypothesis. If the wrong numbers come up, it could be evidence that the hypothesis is erroneous. But too frequently it goes the other way: a statistician comes up with a number and researchers then try to fashion a hypothesis which explains it. (Which they then publish, and which the newspapers then pick up, and before you know it, this preliminary guess is accepted as fact, interested parties pressure lawmakers, and goofy laws and regulations come into being.)

What makes the article linked to above so fascinating is that it illustrates the absurdity of trying to learn anything either true or worth knowing by juggling and comparing statistics. By taking numbers and trying to impose meaning upon them.

"Counting things may have started as an act of faith, giving us control over the universe. If you can count the days, you can determine how much food and firewood you'll need until spring returns, giving you control over nature, or so the builders of Aztec temples and Stonehenge believed," concludes writer Joel Garreau. "But the world doesn't really look like numbers, although it does obey Einstein's laws."