But when I started to dig around, I found that there’s nothing new about Big Data. People have been complaining about the data deluge since the 1600s.

“One of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched andbrought forth into the world,” thundered Barnaby Rich in 1613. He himself contributed 26 books to the multiplicity and eventually gave his name to the Barnaby Rich effect: “a high output of scientific writings accompanied by complaints on the excessive productivity of other authors.”

What about the fact that new technologies are allowing us just to throw gobs of data at the wall, see what sticks, and turn that into a new theory, rather than starting with a hypothesis and laboriously collecting the data to confirm or refute it? In an essay just out in Prospect I’m forced to conclude that hypothesis driven science has always been a bit of a myth, shaped more by the way science is funded than by the need to create or maintain rigour.

I had fun writing the essay because it gave me an excuse to sit in the rare manuscripts room of the glorious Wellcome Library, rummaging through books written 300 years ago by the fathers of data mining and scraping, John Graunt and William Petty. As I note in the essay:

In one of his “Essays on Political Arithmetick,” Petty took death rates collected for another purpose, stirred them with a couple of wild assumptions on population, and seasoned them with a dash of prejudice to conclude that British hospitals were much less likely to kill their patients than French ones, where “Half the said numbers did not die by natural necessity but by the evil administration of the hospital.” In a precursor to the World Bank’s habit of pricing productivity lost by ill-health, Petty goes on to calculate the cost of the unnecessary deaths, valuing the French at £60 each, “being about the value of Ariger Slaves (which is less than the intrinsik value of People at Paris).”

English commentator trashes French health system. Indeed, there’s nothing new about the way we use data…

Yes, yes, I’m playing to completely unjustified sterotypes. Except that they are not completely unjustified. Could I have predicted that we’d have to listen to a rant about the evils of porn, the fact that lapdancers have post-traumatic stress, the fact that women still don’t get paid enough? Yes. Did I know that when my guest introduced herself as a prostitute and dominatrix there would be brows beetled in fury that one of “them” had managed to infiltrate? Yes. The Cat among the self-righteous pigeons did (just as predictably but with much greater humor) defend her right to be heard; those who seek as good feminists to silence her pulled the normal “she’s too traumatised to know she’s traumatised” nonsense. The whole discussion was old, tired, and without obvious point. (Except to appeal for more “grass roots feminism”. Grass. So last century.) The question of whether women might be paid less because they often choose, perfectly sensibly, to spend less time at work and more time doing other things, was raised, and rather rapidly dismissed. The question of whether we might, actually, be better at some things and worse at others than men was dealt with through the curve of normal distribution. At the mean, the sexes basically have the same capacities. It’s just that men are more scattered than women, so there are more male geniuses, and more male morons. But that doesn’t mean we’re fundamentally different. Our reproductive organs are different, our hormones are different, but our brains (apart from the map-reading bits) — no way.

Then today I went on-line at my new day job. I’ve been hanging around the Wellcome Trust so much lately that they’ve given me a desk. And what’s the lead story on their website this very day? New research shows that the appropriately named doublsex gene sculpts not just the body of males and females, but also the brain. It’s just in fruit flies so far. But mammals have the dsx gene too…

I’ve been following this issue a bit recently — in fact I wrote a little a piece about it for this month’s Prospect — and I was keen to go to the meeting in Parliament which Cath mentions. Sadly, I’m unable to assess her contribution to the debate. I got through parliamentary security with a bottle of wine and a cheese knife (!) but couldn’t get past the feminist bouncers who were turning away anyone who is interested in actually debating the future of prostitution in this country. Also turned away: colleagues from the World Bank, staff from the offices of MPs supportive of rules that will make sex work safer, and (needless to say) anyone who actually chooses to sell sex for a living — the people the meeting organisers don’t believe exist.

“As everyone in the room agreed, it’s time to bring an end to the selling of women and girls: who could possibly disagree with that?” concludes Ms Elliot. The organisers didn’t need to police the crowd to get everyone to agree on that point. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe that selling people is wrong. Not anyone outside the Premier League, anyway. Selling sex, on the hand, is not wrong, in the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who choose it as a profession. Oh but wait, they don’t exist….

The truth is that they do exist, just as the ex-Nevada hooker who left the profession with debts because she hadn’t managed to save any of the $2000 + a week she earned while on the game exists. Some women who sell sex do it because they are forced to. They are trafficked, and we already have laws against that. Some do it for the same reason people work in McDonald’s — because it is the best job they can get for the skills they have (though you tend to earn more selling sex than burgers, and the hours are more flexible). Helping people who hate their jobs (in prostitution or McDonalds) to “exit” is surely a worthwhile thing to do. But some women (and men, of course) sell sex because they want to. Forcing them to stop by criminalising punters would be like promoting welfare in the restaurant industry by outlawing fast food. The distinction between the voluntary and involuntary sale of sex is an important one, and one that the draft policing and crime bill is inching its way towards recognising. Trying to keep willing sex workers out of the room is both undemocratic and unhelpful.