On supermyths and the braced myth subtype

Supermyths, of which braced myths are a sub-type - are ironic unintended, or else a deliberate and disingenuous, consequences of fallacy dissemination. Supermyths have three very specific components:


1. the creation of a fallacy, myth or error by an orthodox expert

2. it being used by another expert who in turn promotes it as being ‘true’ and

3. whilst still thinking that it is true, promotes it as a good example of the need to be healthily sceptical of bad scholarship. Moreover, fourthly:

4. Braced myths are supermyths that have been pointedly deployed by orthodox scholars in order to bust another specific myth or fallacy. The braced myth hypothesis is that using one myth as a specific mythbusting device in this way braces the supermyth to make it further entrenched and therefore more difficult to prevent it being credulously disseminated as veracious knowledge.

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On Supermyths

What do we know about the impact of modern myths on society by way of their misinforming and therefore misdirecting central and local policy making, professional practice, teaching, learning and the media?

The above question is of core importance in a topical area that is likely to grow in popularity, not least because international recognition of the importance of veracity in a wide variety of areas is reflected in a growth industry of recent publications that both inform and reflect the increasing number of experts and the international growth of interest groups promoting anti-quackery and skeptical inquiry in the natural and social sciences.

What is a supermyth?

The modern myth is defined simply as a widely believed falsehood, which sets it apart from the older notion of myths as stories that are understood at some level to represent deep and enduring truths about social, spiritual or other psychological conditions of mankind. I hypothesize that the supermyth is a most powerfully influential sub-type of the modern notion of myth.

The starting point of a supermyth is when an orthodox expert in its subject area publishes a statement of purported fact that is based upon an error in reasoning (fallacy) or else upon a factual error. That published claim then takes on a life of its own as it is credulously reinforced as veracious by numerous orthodox respected sceptics who each cite it unquestioningly in their own scholarly publications, in news paper articles, on television and websites.

According to my thesis, what sets my idea of supermyths apart from other fallacies and myths serves as a unique and timely warning for those promoting the virtues of skeptical inquiry, because the great irony is that, unlike ordinary myths, what I have named supermyths are created by respected orthodox scholars and then credulously disseminated by other experts distinctively in the spirit of promoting skeptical enquiry.

As if the existence of supermyths is not enough to be sceptically concerned about, I have refined the concept further by way of the identification of what I call braced myths. Braced myths are supermyths that have been reinforced by other scholars in that they have not just been disseminated by but also been utilised by credulous experts who have erroneously deployed them as ‘argument winners’ to bust other myths. By using a myth to bust a myth, I argue, these experts have braced the supermyth by dint of such powerful association with expert myth busting verity. Put simply, a braced myth is influential counterknowledge (misinformation packaged to look like fact) that is created by an expert authority and then believed by credulous yet highly influential skeptics, who not only fail to adequately check its accuracy by way of primary data sources and/or fail also to question the rationality of its premises. They then promote it as veracious ‘knowledge’ and, with unintended irony, ignorantly deploy it as an intellectual myth busting weapon targeted at specific knowledge claims made by others.

The Spinach Myth is not only the first supermyth discovered it is also the first braced myth. This widely believed myth goes as follows: A published 19^th century decimal point error in the iron levels of spinach led bio-chemists to reprint the error without checking the iron levels of spinach for themselves leading to generations of children being forced to eat unpalatable spinach, above other tastier leafy vegetables, for no good reason and this ten-fold error is the reason that Popeye ate spinach for strength.

The Spinach Myth was finally busted after I was kindly assisted by clues provided by a friendly US skeptic who emailed me after reading my initial publication of a primary research paper that first bust the Popeye part of the myth. Further research led me to discover that it was firstcreated by Professor Arnold Bender (an orthodox nutrition expert) at his inaugural lecture at Queen Elizabeth College, London in 1972 and then spread  by many other respected academics, who, believing it to be true but not checking the facts, used it unwittingly in what ironically turns out to be a number of deeply embarrassing, hypocritical and self-defeating exhortations of the general need to be healthily skeptical by always checking the primary sources of claims made by others.The myth was then braced when a number of other credulous 'skeptics' portrayed it as an exemplar of veracious knowledge to criticize various specific research findings.

I have written several articles on the Spinach Myth: the first one as a primary research paper on the importance of adequate citation and the second, which completely busted the myth here on the Best Thinking site.

Other Supermyths

The second braced myth that I have discovered is the only other known example of the braced myth sub-type identified to date. I named the Zombie Cop Myth, and this one is a widely believed myth about beat policing. You can read about it here on the best thinking site.

Unlike the Spinach Myth, which is solely based upon an error of fact, the Zombie Cop Myth is based upon a combination of unrealistic assumptions about the nature of foot patrol beat policing that informed an exercise in arithmetic ‘on the back of an envelope’ - to demonstrate the lack of efficiency of beat policing - and an error of fact concerning the widely held belief that the origin of the findings of such lack of efficiency lay in an empirical study of real police officers on the beat. My jointly authored paper on this myth explains in detail the origin of the myth, where and how often it has been perpetuated, how it has been used, and most curiously how it has begun to mutate.

The third supermyth that I have identified is the myth that the widely accepted Routine Activities Theory and Situational Crime Prevention Theory notion of opportunity can be a cause of crime. Myth busting Crime Opportunity theory with logic reveals precisely how the widely accepted criminological notion of crime opportunity is based upon a simple error of reasoning. In a number of papers on the subject I have discussed the harmful implications for society of basing such theories upon irrational premises, or within irrational frameworks for theory building. I would recommend my paper Opportunity Does Not Make the Thief as a useful place to begin reading abut the Crime Opportunity Myth.

Conclusion

Here on Best Thinking, I have revealed several cases, which I have so far discovered, where highly respected experts - whose work is in turn supported by respected scholars in the same field - all failed to check the evidence and have been found to have accidentally created what appear to be influential supermyths. More research is required to seek likely causes and to understand the nature, known progress and impact of such myths.

It is my hypothesis that supermyths are particularly deeply socially and academically embedded and harder therefore to limit than other modern myths. Furthermore, supermyths remind all who promote themselves as experts in their field to pay more attention to fact checking primary sources, providing adequate citation to statements of fact and to consider more thoroughly the premises upon which accepted theories and approaches are built.

I began this brief article with a question and so it seems fitting to end it with another. The particularly telling question I would like to ask here is designed in part to serve as an embedded warning of the dangers of failing to check primary sources and of taking for granted the premises of theories. It is this: Might braced myths, such as the Spinach Myth and the Zombie Cop Myth, rank among the most exquisitely ironic discoveries of the unintended consequences of mankind’s purposive action?

Cambridge Empirical Study Adds Support to My Theoretical Criticism of Crime Opportunity Theory

A new book released by Oxford University Press - Breaking Rules: The Social and Situational Dynamics of Young People's Urban Crime   , by Per-Olof H. Wikström, Dietrich Oberwittler, Kyle Treiber, and Beth Hardie - reports on the findings of a study that followed the lives of 700 English teenagers for five years.

The study, which is hailed as providing findings that will be of major importance for crime reduction policy and policing, reveals that a mere 4 percent of teenagers were responsible for half of all youth crime in the cohort group studied.

Head of the study, Cambridge Professor Per-Olof Wikstrom, is quoted in today’s Independent on Sunday newspaper    (p.6):

“The idea that opportunity makes the thief – that young people will inevitably commit crime in certain environments runs counter to our findings.”

Here, then, is important and solid empirical evidence that supports the theoretical arguments - published as a peer-to-peer article on the excellent Best Thinking website in “Opportunity Does Not Make the Thief”. In that article I present a logical case for why Crime Opportunity Theory is irrational and so cannot be a cause of crime. Moreover, I produced an earlier and identical argument, to that made by the authors of the Cambridge 700 Study, that current USA and UK policing practice and crime reduction policy, based on Crime Opportunity Theory, results in ineffective crime reduction methods.

While Crime Opportunity Theorists are notorious for paying scant regard to dis-confirming evidence, hopefully, police and policy makers will now begin take notice.

Repeat Victimization by Theft: Re-configuring Crime Reduction and Policing Post-Ratortunity Mythbusting

With theft, nothing is certain, nothing ‘known’ until the act is over

As I am only too aware, I have rather tiresomely written quite a number of blogs and articles over the past year in order to argue the case that two major criminological theories: Crime Opportunity Theory and Routine Activity Theory are wrong. And that they are wrong because both theories are based on the premise that the characteristics of a criminal opportunity are certain. Yet, as I argue (e.g: see Sutton 2012a), only once a crime has been unsuccessfully attempted, or successfully completed, are its offender and guardianship characteristics certain. Only then does the opportunity relinquish all its uncertainty. Up until that point, offenders are rolling the dice. They might think those dice are loaded in their favour, sometimes they might think the opposite and still attempt the crime. But they never ‘know’ how the dice might bounce and land. Therefore, the Routine Activity Theory notion of ‘opportunity’ cannot be a cause of crime (as Crime Opportunity Theorists claim) and is not – at least according to any dictionary definition or rational understanding of the meaning of the word – an opportunity at all. For the purposes of the blog, as I have done elsewhere, I will refer to it hereafter as a ratortunity.

So be it, but how might this new knowledge that ratortunity cannot be a cause of crime configure the way we actually tackle crime any differently? To answer that question I have taken the following text from my latest article on Best Thinking (Sutton 2012b), which is based upon two incidences of ram-raiding of my neighbour’s garage this year.

My Neighbour’s Garage: a specific and real-life example of disconfirming evidence for ratortunity as a cause of crime

Dr Mike Sutton 2012Used only with express written permission

My Neighbour's Garage

In January 2012 my neighbour’s garage was broken into and two top-of-the-range bicycles were stolen with a total value of £6,000. The thieves gained entry through an up-and-over steel door that had a lock at the top and two deadlocks at the bottom. They drove a motor vehicle through the door so that it buckled the door sufficiently to gain entry. The break-in followed an episode where a team of convicted offenders had been on ‘community pay-back’ sweeping up leaves on our road, which is in a desirable leafy Nottingham suburb, and conservation area that is characterized by large Victorian and Edwardian houses. My neighbour said that at least two of the young men sweeping up leaves had made cat calls to her and shouted comments about her having a nice bike, while she was putting it into her garage. The break-in happened a week later. It may have been a coincidence, of course. But for the purposes of the forthcoming thought experiment, below, let us assume that it was one or more of these convicted offenders who stole the bikes.

The January break-in was the first time that any of our garages had been broken into in the 11 years that I have lived in my current home. That said, I did have a petrol hedge cutter stolen from my own garage one night when I forget to lock the door because I had returned home late from visiting my son's home many miles away and was rather tired.

Folowing the break-in, my neighbours had their garage door replaced within a brand new, stronger one set in a steel (rather than wooden frame). Last night it was broken into again using the same method as before, whereby a car was driven into the door to buckle it off the runners set in to the steel frame to gain entry. Only this time the garage had been completely empty.

A thought experiment

It intrigues me to imagine the two most prominent proponents of the ratortunity notion of crime causality, Professor Marcus Felson and Professor Ronald Clarke, walking past our garages every day for the past decade and remaking each day on passing that the reason they have not been broken into in an entire decade is because the level of guardianship (locks and steel doors) protecting the suitable targets inside has provided a level of guardianship that is greater than the abilities of offenders. Professor Clarke remarks to Felson: "Of course the fact that on the one occasion Sutton forgot to lock his own garage door resulted in him being victimized proves that opportunity makes the thief."

I imagine them then on the morning after that night in January. The two professors stop by the buckled steel door and remark now that the reason for the break-in is that the capabilities of offenders was greater than the level of guardianship, and that that was the most important cause of the theft. Felson and Clarke have no need to inquire about why offenders were so motivated that they resorted to using a car to ram-raid a domestic garage, because their infinitely variable explanation for crime is, being post-hoc and a truism, always right.

Then, between February and May the two eminent professors walk past my neighbour's new steel framed garage door each day and both are satisfied that the level of capable guardianship, increased as it is, proves their Crime Opportunity Theory, because the garage has not been broken into since the last time.

Continuing the thought experiment, I imagine now Clarke and Felson standing and looking at the newly buckled new garage door in this morning in June armed with the knowledge that this time nothing was stolen. This time there was not even a suitable target inside the garage to complete their RAT crime triangle. But in my thought experiment this presents no problem for our eminent professors: “You see,” says Professor Felson, “the door itself is the suitable target for the crimes of attempted theft and criminal damage. Our theory is irrefutable. Because the weaker door provides incapable guardianship when in the presence of the more capable offender who is armed with a motor vehicle. On this occasion also, as always, our own RAT notion of opportunity is the cause of the crime. It matters not that nothing was actually stolen. because our explanation still works perfectly well.”

But the sensible, rational and useful lesson to be had from the saga of my neighbour’s garage is that Felson and Clarke's explanation for crime is next to useless because the offenders – even in the first break in - could not absolutely know in advance (a) that the door was incapable of resisting their ram-raiding or (b) that the garage actually contained the valuable bicycles they had spotted the week before, or anything else of value. In the second break-in (assuming they are indeed the same offenders as before) the offenders would have “hoped” that new bicycles (perhaps bought following a successful nsurance claim) were in the garage - or else some other thing worth stealing would be found inside – but they could not have known that for sure – as is perfectly demonstrated by the fact that their hopes of finding new loot were as dashed-in as the door they ruined for no return.

Repeat victimization: Proposing The PEC-TAP-PEC Hypothesis

The story, to date, of the repeat victimization of my neighbour’s garage proves that ratortunities do not exist in advance of the successful completion of a crime.

In terms of understanding something useful for repeat victimisation, now that we can demonstrate that ratortunity cannot be a cause of crime we can think clearly enough to hypothesise that the same offenders would not break into the garage a third time unless they once again actually saw that it contained something expensive. And we can hypothesise that those who broke into the garage on the second occasion perceived a reasonable likelihood that the garage would contain expensive bikes once again.

If, when my neighbour’s garage door is replaced for a second time, the garage remains empty (as I suspect it will because their bikes were in fact not insured when stolen and my neighbour's drive a company car, which they park on the road) and is then ram-raided a third time, that would provide disconfirming evidence for what we might here name the Perception, Expectation, Contingency, Target Actually Present, Perception, Expectation Chain Hypothesis (PEC-TAP-PEC) for repeat victimisation that: If potential thieves see (perceive) P that a premises contains a suitable target, they will break into it immediately, or else later when the target may not be actually visible from outside the premises but they have a reasonable expectation E that it is still there - whether actually it is or not is contingent C on the behavior of the property owners and their agents (and in some cases other thieves who may have got there first) - and that if the target T is actually A present Pthen a repeat break-in is then likely to follow due to the offender’s perceiving P another reasonable expectation E that the stolen items have been replaced. Only when the suitable target items are not replaced and offenders break-in for no other reward, are caught while trying, are imprisoned, go straight, are incapacitated, or unable to gain entry, will the particular repeat victimisation chain C cease – or be less likely to continue.


Considering this hypothesis, even if it is indeed supported by evidence, it may appear futile because one might conclude that the only policy recommendation that could possibly flow from it being confirmed would be that people should be advised to not replace stolen items - or else to secure their premises with exceptionally expensive, tough and cumbersome target hardening measures and other forms of guardianship that would thwart the most motivated and otherwise capable offenders. However, from the property owners perspective, it shows that the chances of them being re-victimized - in terms of suffering both theft and property damage - would be less if they waited longer to replace items stolen earlier; and, moreover, if they were, anyway, by-chance re- burgled before previously stolen items, which they intended to replace promptly, were replaced. The telling question is this: So long as active offenders never again saw my neighbours storing any more expensive bicycles in their garage, would those bicycles be safer in the future than they would have been (had they been in the garage) the day before yesterday? And if the answer is yes, then that provides a clear research-informed policy recommendation to crack down on active offenders who are surfing areas for crime ‘opportunities’. And here by ‘opportunity’ I mean typical dictionary definitions of the word – not the irrational ratortunity notion. Moreover, there may be further findings from future research into how offenders perceive opportunities that would question the current practice of assigning convicted offenders on 'community pay-back' orders to residential areas, where they can legally loiter in order to better spy suitable targets. And finally, if research does not disconfirm the Pec-Tap-Pec hypotheses, there might be a need to reconsider the effectiveness of beat policing and other police work – not in terms of the numbers of offenders caught in the act of stealing but in terms of what serves best as an effective deterrent for those who are currently out walking and driving around our streets with criminal intent by purposively scouting for opportunities to steal.

References

Sutton, M. (2012a) Opportunity Does Not Make the Thief: Busting the Myth that Opportunity is a Cause of Crime. Best Thinking.com

Sutton, M. (2012b) Contingency Makes or Breaks the Thief: Introducing the Perception Contingency Process Hypothesis. Best Thinking.com

Higher Superstition Posing as Science

Natural scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (1994) are authors of a biting critique of the claptrap that many postmodernist social scientists have published on science. Yet, like so many writers on the so called academic Right they have paid scant regard to the claptrap published from those claiming to be among their own ranks. Here I refer to the self-proclaimed crime scientists, who claim to be natural scientists, and yet seem to understand nothing of the lessons that science teaches of:

1.       The need to seek disconfirming evidence for your own hypothesis,

2.       the meaning of causality,

3.       the need to keep scientific explanations separate from the data you are seeking to explain and

4.       the need for explanations that are both refutable and difficult to vary.

Crime Science, Crime Opportunity Theory, Routine Activity Theory (RAT) and Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) each breach the 4 points above because all of them are founded upon the RAT ‘Crime Opportunity’ (ratortunity) premise that the three essential components of a successful crime in commission (which can only be known to exist after the crime has been successfully completed (Sutton 2012) combine to create an essential causal opportunity for the commission of any crime.


For those unfamiliar with Crime Opportunity Theory (ratortunity): the three components of a so called crime opportunity are: (a) a capable offender in the presence of (b) a suitable target and (c) an incapable/absent guardian, which are said to jointly comprise the most important cause of crime. The logic of such a claim that these three elements represent an ‘opportunity’ can only rest on the irrational premise that every successfully completed crime and every failed attempt somehow caused itself to happen (see Sutton 2012    for an exhaustive explanation of the complete irrationality of this claim).

As a useful critical exercise let us consider a powerful and valid criticism of postmodernist criticism of science from Gross and Levitt (1994: p.104) - with the word postmodernism adjoined by [ratortunity]. Readers familiar with the prolific work of the ratortunists and ratortunity's significant, yet weird, impact upon credulously supportive and unquestioning academic publications, policing and policymaking may find this exercise particularly intriguing:

‘…such solecisms as we find in these writings are confidently put forth as scholarly discoveries, with every assurance that something profound is being uttered, one must wonder about the system – and the ideology – that nurtures and rewards them. Whence we must ask, does such grossly misplaced intellectual self-confidence come? The smug hermetic, self referential atmosphere of politicized academic postmodernism [and ratortunity] obviously has a great deal to do with it. In this milieu, there is not much thought given to simple scientific accuracy. The caution and scrupulousness that working scientists are conditioned to expect are swept aside, because in the final analysis, postmodernism [and ratortunity] is in great measure prophetic and hortatory, rather than analytic; it announces and cheers on a sweeping “paradigm shift” within our civilization, a change that is supposed to liberate us all.’

Readers may wish to draw their own conclusions. Those who are credulously teaching ratortunity principles to students, publishing them in student text books and the wider peer reviewed academic press, government policymakers and police services might wish to question the implications of what they are doing for both knowledge progression and the moral obligation to at least seek to spend scarce public resources on crime reduction measures that are most likely to be most effective at reducing crime rather than nurturing and rewarding pseudoscientific claptrap and those who propagate it.

References

Gross, P.R. and Levitt, N (1994) Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. The John Hopkins University Press. Baltimore.

Sutton, M (2012) On Opportunity and Crime. Dysology.org: http://dysology.org/page8.html   

Criminology 101

CRIMINOLOGY 101, CRIMINAL JUSTICE 101 AND CRIME SCIENCE 101

Introduction to causality and explanations for crime: for Crime Opportunity Theory, Routine Activities Theory and Situational Crime Prevention

The Crime Opportunity Theory (Routine Activities Theory, Situational Crime Prevention and Crime Science) notion of opportunity (ratortunity) as a cause of crime is 100 per cent wrong because, unlike ratortunity, good scientific explanations of the physical world are (1) easy to refute (2) difficult to vary. And (3) the ratortunity explanation for crime is a mere truism. I have demonstrated point (3) in my peer-to-peer paper Opportunity Does Not Make the Thief

Crime Scientists, having abandoned social science and criminology, claim now to be natural scientists. I think, therefore, they should perhaps take a look at what scientific reasoning actually is. Oxford scientist and expert in quantum computing, David Deutsch, has recorded a superb video lecture where he explains that easy to vary and impossible to refute thinking such as ratortunity is no better than saying about crime "a wizard did it" because it does not tell us how crime happens with a theory that is either true or false. Ratorunity, therefore, is a hopeless post-hoc explanation that tells us nothing more than that crimes happen because they can    and the classic RAT crime triangle, which is a description of the essential elements of a successful crime in commission, amounts to a useless causal explanation that every crime caused itself to happen. Crime opportunity theory (ratortunity), which underpins Crime Science, is not about opportunity, it is not a theory, it cannot rationally be a cause of anything - never mind a cause of crime - and it certainly is not scientific.

Combined with Karl Popper's definition of pseudoscience as being something underpinned by theories and hypotheses that are irrefutable, Deutsch's own unique reasoning about good explanations being those that are difficult to vary allows us to demonstrate quite clearly that ratortunity (Crime Opportunity Theory) most certainly cannot be a cause of crime. Because the only way that ratortunity could be refuted for crimes in everyday life    is if guardians could be both present and capable of preventing crimes that, somehow, happened anyway.

Criminology students, criminal justice students, crime science students, policy makers   and police officers - this video is essential viewing for you, your professors, and those pseudoscientists that you are paying to play around with inefficient rule-of-thumb crime reduction and policing models    based upon demonstrably irrational premises.