Dave Hitt Is Still A Twat
Dave Hitt is a very prolific pro-smoking crank who I wrote a long page about in the past. For the sake of completeness, I shall summarise it here: Dave Hitt emailed a lot of people who’d reported the dangers of passive smoking and asked them to name three people that it had killed, and then he wrote a webpage about it, which (implicitly) says that their failure to provide names shows that their numbers are wrong and reveals “blatant dishonesty”, when in fact it doesn’t. I had a long email conversation with him in which he admitted as much, but didn’t alter his webpage, and I held that his various carryings-on show that he is a twat, and so far I’ve not been convinced otherwise. My page was entitled “Dave Hitt Is A Twat”, and is now the second website returned by a Google search for “Dave Hitt” (with or without quotes).
More recently, he posted this on his website*. It’s a brief story about someone who asked a newspaper for the source of some numbers they’d printed and been told they were made up, and these closing comments:
Here’s a fun project for a rainy weekend. Scan the news for ass numbers. Pick one that seems really outrageous. If you like, you can do some research on your own to see if there’s any truth to the number, or even to find out what the real number should be, but that’s optional. Now send some e-mail to the reporters who wrote the story and any sources quoted in the article. Ask for specific sources of the numbers. ... A while back I did just that with ten different nicotine nanny organizations and individuals. You can read the results here.
I took issue with this, because he didn’t do “just that” at all; he asked for a list of names, when the source of the numbers was most likely a statistical analysis. He’d written a good post about an interesting story, and then spoilt it by trying to attach his own pet delusion to it – he wasn’t just passing on something he’d read and enjoyed, he was hi-jacking a well executed piece of investigative blogging to try and push his own, far less well executed, agenda. So I posted on his page and said so. He replied to me, and said two things. First:
You claim ‘He repeatedly asserts that smoking is safe,’ a comment I would never make. Every single nanny I’ve ever dealt with is an unrepentant liar. I’ll make you a wager, Andy boy: $100 American says you can’t find a single instance of me saying that anywhere on the internet. Is it a bet?
Now I did use those words in that order referring to him. Here is the entire paragraph:
Dave Hitt, in common with much of the world’s other anti-ban propaganda artists, believes that any statistical survey that produces less than a 100% increase in risk is inconclusive. Passive smoking does not double the risk of cancer, and as such no (properly performed) survey could ever prove to that standard it is dangerous. ‘Some risks’, to use his words, ‘are just too small to measure.’ He repeatedly asserts that smoking is safe, implicitly on the grounds that nobody has yet managed to prove that it isn’t, and dismisses any study that suggests that is isn’t as invalid.
I think it’s safe to say that in context it is clear that by “smoking is safe” I mean from the perspective of people other than those doing the smoking. Hitt took that phrase out of context and only after I showed him an instance of him saying exactly what I said he said did he explain that he wanted me to prove he said that smoking is safe for the smoker, which obviously I couldn’t, but then I never said he’d said that, and then called me a liar for not being able to back up a statement that I didn’t in any meaningful sense make. In the original Dave Hitt Is A Twat page, I criticised him for not having a public comments section on his site, and now he does, but after I disagreed with him three times he banned me from it, so what he has in actuality is a fake public comments system: it looks like people can comment, but any actual discussion is cut short. That said, I just posted there anyway* and he appears to have made a less than thorough job of banning me. Possibly only I can see it in some kind of crazy Tachy Goes To Coventry system. I invite all of you to post on his blog as rationally and as often as you would like, though.
Here is the second thing he said:
When I started out the Name Three project I knew that if just one of these so-called experts pointed that out that statistics don’t work that way I’d be dead in the water. But none of them did. Not one! Why not, if they’re such experts in the field?
Well this I found interesting. This is a valid argument! At last! And I agree with him: the people he emailed should (unless they had some names, I suppose) have told him he was making an unreasonable request. But again, his “Name Three” page didn’t make that argument. I’d emailed him several times and I’d never heard this argument before. That is not the aim of “Name Three”. I know this not least because there’s nothing about it on the whole page, but I can be absolutely sure because he sent me several emails refusing to acknowledge that Statistics Don’t Work That Way. I suspect he’s making excuses. He said, and I quote:
Primary smoking can, and often is, blamed for specific deaths. So why should secondary exposure be exempt from the burden of proof?
So either he did know that Statistics Don’t Work That Way – and was deliberately using an argument he knew to be invalid* – or he didn’t know that Statistics Don’t Work That Way, and is now lying rather than admitting to having made a mistake and being expected to apologise*. I don’t think there’s any other way that things can be.
Dave Hitt, you’ll be glad to hear, Is Still A Twat.
*This is the kind of thing a twat might do.