Ben Goldacre’s Ladybird book of RCTs — and a free Geek Manifesto extract about RCTs and education

The randomised controlled trial (RCT)  is one of the greatest inventions of modern science — a tool that allows you, more reliably than any other, to compare two or more interventions and determine which is more effective for a given purpose. It’s the standard by which we rightly demand that most medicines are tested before they’re approved. And one of the core arguments of The Geek Manifesto is that RCTs could be profitably applied to public policy in education, criminal justice and social issues much more frequently than they are.

There are, fantastically, voices in the Cabinet Office who agree. Last month, it published the results of a terrific collaboration between Ben Goldacre, the author of Bad Science, Professor David Torgerson, Director of the York Trials Unit, and Laura Haynes and Owain Service, of the Behavioural Insights Team at the Cabinet Office.

Their paper, Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials, runs through several great examples where RCTs have already revealed powerful policy-relevant evidence — such as the effectiveness of sending personal text messages to remind people to pay court fines, and the ineffectiveness of paying people to attend adult literacy classes. It also offers a great introduction to the purpose and structure of well-run randomised trials. Goldacre describes it as the “Ladybird book of RCTs”.

Everyone should read this paper, especially if you work in Whitehall or Westminster. And everyone should email their MP to tell him or her to read it as well.

It’s a good moment to post another free extract from The Geek Manifesto — this time, about the role that RCTs could play in education policy. It begins here:

Teaching to the test

When people are asked what they consider to be the most important issue on the political agenda, education generally ranks second only to health. It is understood and accepted by British politicians of all parties that providing universal access to first-class medical care and providing excellent state schools that offer opportunity to all are among the core functions of government. Yet when it comes to evidence, these two central policy concerns are held to entirely different standards.

In healthcare, we expect drugs and medical procedures to be assiduously tested by the most rigorous appropriate methods before they are licensed for general use and before the state agrees to fund them. For the most part, this means assessment by randomized controlled trials  (RCTs) – the most reliable method yet devised for determining whether or not a particular intervention really works.

The Geek Manifesto on Start the Week

This morning, I took part in Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 — a wide-ranging discussion about science, evidence and politics pegged to the Geek Manifesto.

You can listen to the programme here.

The other guests were Professor David Nutt, who also has an excellent book out about the evidence on drug use, David Blunkett, who took a very thoughtful approach, and Jill Rutter, a former civil servant who is now programme director of the Institute for Government.

The Geek Manifesto is going to every MP

We’re there… At about 11.15 this morning, PledgeBank recorded the 325th pledge to send a copy of The Geek Manifesto to every MP. Pam Lynch was the critical pledger.

As my publisher, Transworld, has agreed to match every pledge to send one, that means we’ve got all the pledges we need to ensure every MP gets a copy of the book.

Many many thanks to Dave Watts for starting the pledge, and to all those of you who have signed up.

We’re now establishing how sending the copies will work. Full details will follow from Dave (which I’ll reproduce here), but broadly it will operate something like this.

We’ll set up a shared spreadsheet with all 650 MPs. Please find your MP, and note that you’re sending (or have sent) a copy. If your MP is taken, pick another one.

Read extracts from The Geek Manifesto for free

Several people have asked me over the past few days whether there is a free version of The Geek Manifesto available. There isn’t a free version of the whole book, but there are several ways you can read significant parts of the book for free.

First of all, the entire first chapter, and the first few pages of the second one, is available to read via Amazon’s “look inside” feature. Click on the book cover on the Amazon page.

I’ve also posted two whole sub-chapters here on this blog.

The section on GM crops is here.

And the section on “The Limits of Evidence”, explaining why evidence is nearly always necessary for good policy-making, but very rarely sufficient, is here.

I hope to publish further extracts over the coming weeks.

A straw man criticism of The Geek Manifesto, and a supporting extract

Ian Scoones, of the ESRC STEPS Centre, has written today in the Huffington Post about how the Rothamsted GM crop protest and the themes of The Geek Manifesto amount to “scientific self-righteousness” that advocate “a linear technocratic vision”.

The argument of the geek manifesto is that more scientists should be in politics. Only one of 650 Members of Parliament (MPs) in the UK is a scientist, Henderson claims. More scientists need to be politicians, he argues, and then better policy will result. A linear, technocratic vision is laid out where science leads politics. This is a potentially highly dangerous view. A democratic political process, surely, should have a more accountable relationship with scientific expertise. Scientists should be ‘on tap, but not on top’, as was famously said by Winston Churchill. It seems this is not the idea behind the Geek Manifesto. It states “As those of us who care deeply about science and its experimental method start to fight for our beliefs, geeks have a historic opportunity to embed critical thinking more deeply in the political process. But if we are to achieve anything, we need to turn our numbers and confidence into political muscle.” It continues: “Let’s create a political cost for failing science. Politics has had it too easy for too long. It’s time for a geek revolution.” Bizarrely, the Chinese politburo is seen as a model. Because it is full of highly expert engineers, this is seen as a good thing. It seems issues of representation, accountability and democracy are of lesser importance for the revolutionary geeks!

I’ve responsed in comments, but repeat my argument here. I think this is a criticism of a book he would like to have attacked, rather than the book I have actually written. In particular, there is a lengthy section entitled “The Limits of Evidence” that explicitly explains why science and evidence do not trump democracy. My comment, and the extract, follow:

The criticisms Ian Scoones makes here would be fair and important if they were aimed at the book I have written, rather than at the book it appears he would have liked me to have written.

Do I think science could contribute more usefully than it does to public policy? Yes. Do I think more scientists in politics might help to achieve this? Yes. Do I think geeks and scientists should engage more actively with politicians, and that this would ultimately benefit both groups? I do. But the book decidedly does not make, as Ian suggests here, an argument for technocracy that overrides democracy. In fact, it explicitly argues the opposite.

My publisher will match every pledge to send a Geek Manifesto to MPs

In The Geek Manifesto, I wrote about how skeptics had begun to use a website called Pledgebank.com to assemble a critical mass of people to complain about quacks making unsupported claims. I was delighted when Dave Watts decided to use the same tool for another campaign — to send a copy of the book to all 650 MPs.

I’m equally delighted that my publisher, Transworld Books, has today decided to support the campaign by agreeing to match every individual pledge that’s made. So if 325 people make the pledge, we’ll be able to send a Geek Manifesto to every MP in the House of Commons.

My editor, Susanna Wadeson, explains:

“We thought we should up the ante. If our MPs read just one book this year it should be this one.”

The book’s selling for £9.87 on Amazon, so by agreeing to spend a tenner — and spreading the word — you’ll ensure that a copy lands on the desk of two MPs once we’ve collected enough pledges.

At the time of writing, 168 people have pledged (including me and several other geeks you might have heard of — Simon Singh, Adam Rutherford, Helen Arney). So we’re more than halfway there — another 157 pledges needed. Please do pass on to anyone you think might share the book’s sentiments, and think it worth sharing them in turn with our elected representatives.

You can pledge to send a book here.

An interesting set of Geek Manifesto reviews

Several reviews of the book have hit the papers and the blogs today.

James Wilsdon, in the Financial Times, concludes:

The Geek Manifesto is the most compelling, engaging and entertaining account I’ve read of the relationship between science and politics. Henderson ends with a rallying cry for a political culture “that appreciates the power of science as a problem-solving tool and that seeks to exploit its methods of inquiry to resolve the great questions of the day”. Geek or non-geek, this is a manifesto we should all feel able to endorse.

He also makes a few very reasonable points of criticism, chiefly around the book’s concentration on UK politics rather than international dimensions, and the scope there could have been for covering the history and sociology of science and politics in greater breadth.

Both would indeed have added greater breadth to the book, and it would have been nice to cover them more exhaustively. To do so, however, would likely have added a year or more to the writing and publishing timeline, and my editor and I felt it was more important to produce a contemporary, focused book quickly, so as to capture a moment.