SafeSpeed wrote:
Ultimately Safe Speed calls for an urgent return to the road safety policies that gave us in the UK the safest roads in the world in the first place ...
At every turn, Paul, you betray the intellectual flaw I believe runs through the heart of your entire premise. You assert without proof the conclusion you wish to draw - that speed cameras, which you assert only coincidentally prevent you from fully enjoying the road to the extent that your particular skills allow, have
caused a deterioration in road safety and therefore must be banned. You provide no evidence for why you think reversion to a set of policies designed for road conditions that prevailed prior to their introduction would be successful under the road conditions that prevail now. Nor do you explain why you select road cameras as the principle factor from all the other environmental factors that have changed during the period, and dismiss all other factors that are at least as plausible as the one you champion.
You provide no evidence beyond a series of correlations you admit offer no more than possible causation. Instead, you work backward to manufacture a set of peculiar statistics and (by your own admission) half-cooked theories - which, although the product of 10,000 hours of your research and apparently good enough to sell advertising and £18,000 worth of membership fees on, you assert would take months to present to Independent Safety specialists to verify and might never be ready for publication because they are too progressive for conventional experts to appreciate - in the hope that some of it sticks (or, as you put it,
"to report correlation as yet more evidence of possible causation").
Finally, for your theory to be successful, you need to posit the existence of either an incompetent or malign government that systematically fails to act in the best interest of its citizens, an ignorant population of drivers that is susceptible to a series of bizarre behavioural phenomena, an ignorant general public that is incapable of detecting the widespread manipulation of public information or reflecting on their own experience without your help, and an incompetent or corrupt body of independent Safety Specialists.
In short, you are engaging in a humdrum attempt to coerce reality into fitting your theory. The continually lengthening list of reasons why now is not a good time to offer it up to independent scrutiny should surprise no-one.
SafeSpeed wrote:
I'm proud to have set appropriate priorities in the public interest
Who are you to determine what is and isn't in the public interest? I
am the public - a member of the majority who voted for this government and its policies, a member of the majority that approves of speed cameras, and who is prepared to abide by social limits even if I disagree with them. To me, until you have had your work independently scrutinised, you are just a self absorbed, frustrated activist peddling speed camera detector advertising, the product of the sort of naive individualism that so often arises amongst those who would enjoy the benefits of living in a society but who would refuse to be forced to go along from time to time with decisions that go against them.
Once you have had your work independently scrutinised, I'll consider the merits of your case and whether or not they are in my interest. Until then you are indistinguishable from any tuppence-ha'penny self-approving grievance group. That's why your prevarication on this matter of verification is so fatal to your ultimate cause.
SafeSpeed wrote:
I'd be amazed if you can find any [logical fallacies] on the web site...Perhaps you next need to specifically identify problems with 'conclusion and methods employed' rather than make extremely vague and unsubstantiated comments.
In what way could I have been any more specific in
this post? To remind you, I didn't pick this example -
you sent it to
me by email as primary evidence of a causal link between speed camera convictions and road deaths. You supplied no qualification, either in your email or on the page itself, that the data is intended to be viewed in the context of some other piece of data. I have demonstrated quite clearly how in the form you present it it is indistinguishable from a
post hoc logical fallacy.
On this thread, you state this example is now meant only
"evidence of possible causation", yet on the page itself you state categorically, and without reference to any other evidence than that which is contained on the page, that
"... speed cameras and the policies that support them are now costing over 1,000 lives every year." You have linked a conclusion that you hope is true to a piece of data no more substantial than "flu deaths go up when vaccinations are given", passing one off as evidence of the other thereby committing a
post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy of reasoning which you should remove.
However, your question continues to evade the real point. Why are you asking me to find (more) logical fallacies in your arguments - why are you not taking up the panel of Safety Experts offer to do so?SafeSpeed wrote:
I can think of nothing worse than trying to publish information unprepared and out of context.
By publishing, I presume you mean bring to public attention, which from your assertion of its success in supporting your pressure group, you believe your website has done. Then by your own admission, your entire website is unprepared, and no part of it appears to be readable without reference to other contextual material that is not specified. And yet from it you advertise appliances intended to undermine a major national safety system, and thousands use it to justify their individual campaigns to destroy public property and safety systems.
It is good to conclude on a point upon which we agree.