Tale Number One: Germany, just over 100 years ago.

Wilhelm von Osten, a mathematics teacher and amateur horse trainer, owned a horse called Hans. And he combined his two jobs by training his horse in mathematics. And very successfully.

Hans was taken round shows and fairs and ‘answered’ mathematical questions. Herr von Osten would ask a question, such as ‘What is five plus two?’ Hans would tap his hoof seven times and stop. Hans could also do subtraction, multiplication and division. He could even answer questions like ‘If Tuesday is the 8th of the month, what date is the next Saturday?’ Hans wasn’t always right, but would normally score about 90% correct.

Hans became known as ‘der kluge Hans’ (‘clever Hans’).

The German Board of Education formed a panel to investigate Hans’ performances. The panel included some teachers, a vet, a zoo-keeper and a circus manager – even a military officer. The panel concluded that Hans was not a fraud.

Enter a psychologist, Oskar Pfungst, who developed a double-blind test that showed that Hans was clever only when the person asking the questions (which did not necessarily have to be von Osten) knew the answer before posing the question to the horse. If the questioner didn’t know the answer, the horse’s success rate plummeted.

Pfungst showed that when the questioner already knew the answer, he would, quite involuntarily, send subtle signals in his body language that the horse was picking up and using to give the correct answer. Specifically, there would be an increase in bodily tension when the horse’s taps reached the right number, followed by a relaxation after the ‘last’ tap of a correct answer. Since these signals were involuntary (in fact unavoidable), Pfungst agreed with the panel’s conclusions that there was no intentional fraud involved. But Hans knew no mathematics.

Neither von Osten nor Hans were particularly happy with all this mucking about by the psychologist. Von Osten would go into rages and Hans would bite.

Pfungst’s findings were accepted by the scientific community, and his experimental method noted for future use. Von Osten rejected the conclusion and carried on showing not-quite-so-clever Hans around the country. Audiences were apparently quite happy to reject the science in favour of ooh-aah-gee-whiz ignorance before they got bored again and wandered off in search of some new sensation to tickle what passed for their intelligence.

It perhaps should be noted that Herr von Osten took no payment for displaying Hans and (apart from the bites on psychologist Pfungst) nobody lost life or limb.

Tale Number Two: Thailand, today.

Replace ‘Hans’ with ‘GT200’ and the story is much the same. We have something that the more gullible among us have convinced themselves works. We have had a double-blind test to prove that it doesn’t.

Thailand, with a sudden respect for commercial intellectual property that is daily flouted in every IT mall in the land, hasn’t looked at the inner workings, if any, of the GT200, just as Pfungst did not dissect Hans’ brain.

And while the conclusion of the tests in both cases was that the claims were incorrect (Hans knew no arithmetic and the GT200 detects no bombs), the true believers still believe.

But there are a few exceptions.

Hans’ failure to really understand what he was doing killed nobody, injured nobody, put nobody in jail. The failure of the GT200 to detect explosives has killed and injured people. Its ability to detect explosives when none are present has led to spurious charges that have put hundreds in detention.

I have not been able to find any psychologist who, after Pfungst’s investigation, persisted in arguing that Hans actually could count. But we do have a so-called forensic scientist here who refuses to believe science and prefers to trust mumbo-jumbo.

And Hans performed free and earned no money for his owner. The GT200 has earned a fortune for its manufacturer, paid for by the Thai tax-payer. And maybe for some others as well.

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).