If science has any authority, it derives from transparency: you can check the claims against the working. Sometimes you hit a brick wall. Sometimes you might consider a shortcut. Let's look at three types of checking. First, in the Sun, a child has been born at 7.43, just like their two siblings (though one was in the evening). The Sun says the odds on this are 300 million to one. This is easy to check because the information is all there in the paper.
The Sun is wrong. There are 60 minutes in each hour, 12 hours on a clock, that's 720 minutes. The first child can be born in any minute – we're not interested in the chance of three children being born at 7:43 more than any other minute, just the chances of three being born in the same minute. So after the first there's a one in 720 chance of the next child matching on birth time, then a one in 720 chance of the next matching too. 720 x 720 makes the odds of three matching birth minutes 518,400 to one.
As there are 167,000 third or more-th children born in England and Wales each year, you'll see this coincidence once every three years, and more frequently if the midwife squints at the clock and says: "Oh, was the last one born at 7:43? Well …"
Our next case involves an experiment and its interpretation. Scientists at Lancaster University, say the Daily Mail and the BBC, have devised paedophile identification software. It reads your messages and decides if the person you're chatting to on the internet is another young person, or an adult pretending to be young.
This is a tricky problem to solve on a handheld device. There is a press release on the Lancaster University website explaining that this device has been studied and found to work. I asked to see the paper. The paper is secret. Neither you nor I are allowed to read it.
Nobody can know what these scientists measured, how they measured it, what the numbers were like, how closely the experiment mirrored a real world situation, or anything at all. When the Raelian cult said they'd cloned a baby, but we weren't allowed to see it, nobody took them seriously. Until someone's willing to tell me what they measured and how they measured it, they might as well be Raelians.
Is this flippant? We live in a big world, filled with amazing scientific work to read. It can be overwhelming, and you need someone to walk you through the forest. This brings us to our last form of checking: how do you know if someone has fairly represented the findings of an entire field, or cherrypicked the results that suit them, to build a story?
Zoe Harcombe sells diet books. This week in the Daily Mail she was explaining that fruit and veg are no good for you. There's a fascinating conversation to be had about the evidence base on the relationship between diet and health: would you start with Zoe's work?
We all rely on heuristics, or shortcuts. Trusting an authority is one. Harcombe boasts that she is "studying for a PhD in nutrition", but admitted to me that she's not registered for a PhD anywhere (although she is thinking about doing one in the future).
Does it matter? We read a precis of research as a shortcut, but once you lose trust, to double check if someone has fairly represented an entire field, you'd have to read that field's canon. Whatever your other conclusions were, the strongest would be that any timesaving benefit from reading a precis has been annihilated. In a busy world, I'm not sure I see the point of a Zoe Harcombe.
