Brian Clegg highlights the results of a recent survey on our bedtime habits, which prompted me to write a comment, but the ideas just kept on coming, so I decided to write a blog entry instead. Having derided the intellectual capabilities of PR types in an earlier post I should say that all such things are relative. PR people occupy a rung on the scala naturae perhaps incrementally higher than the crowded perch on which one might find, clinging, nay, dangling over the abyss, used-car salesmen and estate agents, and below that, there are creationists and militant atheists (each trying to push the others off – pray that they both succeed), and below them, people who work in personnel (nowadays we have to dignify such specimens with the name of ‘human resources’). But at the very bottom, toes brushing the molten lava itself, are marketing executives and their allies, the ad-men.

I make no apologies for this. I don’t care how many marketing types are reading this, nor that you might say that some of your best friends work at this dismal sport. For surveys show that it is marketing executives who are the biggest abusers of statistics; who have no idea that (for example) the results of one in 20 questions in a huge questionnaire will give a spurious result at the 5% level simply by chance; that there is no necessary link between correlation and causation; that there is such a thing as sampling bias; and that, sometimes, people just lie.

Everyone knows the apocryphal story of the marketing firm contracted by a maker of porage oats to discover the breakfast-time habits of the nation, and which discovered that 96% of people ate porage for breakfast – only to reveal later that their sample had been the ‘McPherson’ page of the Inverness Telephone Directory…

I therefore call on all right-thinking bloggers, scientists and intelligent people in general to campaign hard against the so-called surveys that clutter up daytime TV and the pages of newspapers habitually read by the hard-of-thinking.

But even more seriously, I’d campaign hard against those so-called scientists, who seem to have adopted the marketing ethos, by substituting questionnaires for real work, and dressing it up with posh-sounding words [ah, you mean ‘meta-analysis’, don’t you?—ed] which say things equivalent to eating aubergines with carnation petals below the age of 5 predisposes one to Wafel-Wafel-Pipik Syndrome in later years; or that living near an ice-cream factory predisposes people to diabetes; or that those who watch re-runs of The Fellowship of the Ring will grow pointy ears and go around talking in Elvish. By the way, I had porage for breakfast. Does this correlate with irascibility, or, indeed, Scottishness? I don’t know, I did remember to take my medication…