There is now fine cottage industry in vitriolic disdain aimed at those who tout homeopathy, crystal healing, vaccine denial (and the rest), admirably spearheaded by the likes of Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh and Robin Ince over here, Penn & Teller and James Randi in the US and Sanal Edamaruku in India, who famously challenged holy man Pandit Surender Sharma to prove the claim that he could kill another human being using only mystical powers.

Edamaruku offered himself up as a willing guinea pig on live TV where Sharma spectacularly failed to shuffle his rationalist opponent off this mortal coil. Likewise, politicians who indulge in what Mark Henderson pithily calls “Evidence Abuse” in his forthcoming book Geek Manifesto should, it is argued, be subject to a public drubbing.

Irrationalism, though, is very human, and the nearest place to see someone who cherry picks evidence and is ruled more often by emotion than reason is in the mirror. Even the most outwardly rational of us harbours a festering pit of assumption, un-evidenced opinion and prejudice. Our most iconic scientists are not immune, as Michael Brooks’ recent Free Radicals brilliantly documents. On a personal note I’ve seen more than a few scientists rendered about as rational as Charlie Sheen by alcohol, love disasters or a perceived snub by a colleague.

This then is where science and critical thinking skills come in — a framework of checks and balances, putting some filters around our bug-ridden brains so that what eventually dribbles out is something approaching the truth. And let’s be honest, science has been astonishingly successful at curbing our in-built nuttiness. One can only admire how this cognitive safety harness has continually come up trumps for its nutty creators.

But is there a middle ground to be found in the snake oil wars? One that admits we all choose which irrationalities we’ll indulge in (and allows us to practice them) while admitting they may be harmful?

Here’s a suggestion. I call it the “pseudo science and quackery emissions trading scheme”. It works in a very similar fashion to carbon trading, where a cost is put on your CO2 emissions. In these schemes you can continue to emit CO2 but there is a financial consequence. The more you emit, the more you pay.

Why not then set up a similar scheme for emissions of pseudo-science? So, as a homeopath you can continue pushing your placebos, but if you claim them to be anything more you will be sent a bill at the end of each quarter calculated against a number of evidence abusing criteria — the size of your customer base, how many times you appropriate sayings from eastern philosophy without understanding them much, and your client-facing hours. The money would then be given to, say, a medical research charity.

Everyone wins. Crystal healers can carry on trading but they at least know there is now an actual financial cost to peddling nonsense (a tax that would have to be itemised on any client’s bill). Some rationalists might even begin to see practicing quacks as good thing — generating a much needed extra revenue stream for genuine medical research. And homeopaths, faith healers and crystal wizards could legitimately claim that they were now doing something to fight cancer.

In fact we could have fundraisers where rationalists actively go to homeopaths and ask to have their intellects abused. “Dilute it some more!” they might cry… knowing that for every moment the charade continues extra pennies go towards the rationalist cause.

Mark Stevenson is a writer, businessman, comedian and founder of the League of Pragmatic Optimists. His first book An Optimist’s Tour for the Future (Profile Books) is out now.

This piece first appeared in the December 2011 issue of the British Science Association‘s magazine, People & Science.

It’s a common refrain that the grand challenges facing today’s world have largely been visited upon us by the actions of corporations. The reality of globalisation (for all its benefits) coupled with vested interests and corporate greed have left many of us deeply dissatisfied and cynical about how business operates to serve itself, while remaining blind to wider environmental and social issues. But while we’re deeply aware that corporations are a large part of the problem we must also be ready to embrace their role as a large part of the solution. This is, understandably, difficult for long-term ‘deep’ greens to accept. In their eyes corporations are, and always will be, entirely self-serving, corrupt, and morally redundant. But just as new gene therapies seek to edit out mutations responsible for genetic conditions held in our cells’ DNA, so we must encourage analogous work being done in the corporate sector.

In researching An Optimist’s Tour of the Future I made a house call on the legendary John Seely Brown, former director of the Palo Alto Research Centre (famous for the invention of laser printing and graphical user interfaces). Nowadays he works independently, helping organisations adopt and adapt to new technologies. He told me a story.

“I was recently asked to suggest the innovation in the last three hundred years that had generated more wealth for mankind than anything else. I knew why I’d been asked – they pre-supposed I was going to talk about the microprocessor and I disappointed them dramatically. I said, ‘the innovation that’s generated more wealth than anything is the limited liability corporation because that enabled you to accumulate, invest and leverage your wealth but with limited liability. That is what actually unleashed the power of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, that one innovation.”

The limited liability corporation was an example of institutional innovation, a new structure for organising people and capital that has shaped our world just as fundamentally as the institutions of religion or government. But like many religious and governmental structures, corporate models of organisation appear to have fossilised in most cases – and as such have become desperately out of step with the needs of humanity and our home planet.

But slowly things are changing. Some corporations are getting it, and by ‘it’ I mean they’ve realised that, as a species, we’ve moved from being tenants on the planet to being the landlord, which means they have new responsibilities.

In May this year sportswear giant Puma, aided by the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the environmental research group Trucost, became the world’s first major corporation to publish a set of ‘environmental profit and loss accounts’. It has now set itself the target of reducing carbon, waste, energy and water use by 25% by 2015. Executive Chairman Jochen Zeitz said, “To continue disregarding externalities is no longer effective to the health and long-term prospects of a business, nor to our planet. We no longer have a choice but to be accountable, ethical and responsible to our environment.”

This environmental accounting is just the sort of institutional innovation we need – and in November Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent announced they will be following Puma’s example. That said, let us not for a minute suggest that any of these brands have suddenly become whiter-than-white, cuddly guardians of the biosphere (Puma’s sponsorship of Formula 1 hardly sits comfortably in this picture). But in my work with business I’ve become convinced that when some corporations talk of taking their impact on the environment into account they’re serious. The cynic in us all says ‘yeah, right’, but you know what? I’m happy if just one in ten of them are genuine. Because this is only round one. Once one of them turns in the right direction it becomes easier to steer the others. By round two, it’s a game of one in nine, by round three, a game of one in eight – and by the time 30% of an industry has moved, the rest will follow. If we got depressed about the nine out of ten, instead of fighting for the one, we’d never start. In addition when corporations and professional services companies like PwC start to take this stuff seriously they bring a set of rigorous analytical skills to bare on the green agenda. Well run businesses understand how to manage their assets and what the depreciation of those assets means for the company, whether the asset in question is a piece of machinery or an environmental resource we all depend on. It’s often hard for deep greens to swallow, but when experienced entrepreneurial and business thinkers get their green epiphany they often approach the challenges presented with a damn sight more rigour and process than a particular brand of neighbourhood treehugger. Seeing the treehugger realise that is both an amusing and painful experience. Sometimes it’s almost impossible for them accept that the suits have something to offer.

And so, in my work with corporations I’ve had a renaissance. I’ve come to realise that not every activist chains themselves to the railings (although I fully applaud those that do). Some sit in boardrooms and are quietly steering their businesses in a planet-friendly direction. My newfound heroes you will never hear about. These are people who work in businesses changing them (sometimes painfully slowly) from inside, while suffering brickbats both from colleagues of the old-school, who resist change, and external critics, who damn them for working for ‘the man’. They are to corporations what gene therapy promises to be for genetically inherited diseases. They’re recoding business.

We know that corporations can change the world, because they have done it plenty of times before. Don’t think I’m letting governments off the hook here, they have a crucial role to play in passing and enforcing appropriate legislation, but for all their frustrations the corporate sector can move quicker. As one of my clients (one of the world’s largest manufacturers) said

“We understand that the world is Darwinian, even for corporations, and that those that do not adapt to changing realities will struggle. We believe that addressing climate change and matters of social justice isn’t a threat to the company, but an engine for growth. A company that does not take into account a wider world-view will stifle innovation as it fails to attract passionate employees, a company that becomes a market follower rather than leader. We’d rather lead.”

Bring on round two.

In my work I am often preaching the value of a good mistake. Over a thousand years before Rene Descartes came up with his famous philosophical maxim “I think, therefore I am” Saint Augustine said, fallor ergo sum: “I err, therefore I am”. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame nailed it when he said, “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

So, mistakes are to be learnt from.

However, if you’ve made a mistake that has impacted on others, learning from it is not the whole job. It’s important to apologise.

The problem is, how do you apologise to 400 people who are no longer in the same room?

On Saturday I made one of my worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) mistakes. I’d been invited to talk at The Boring Conference after meeting one of its organisers, William Barrett, at a School of Life event – and proceeding to drink too much wine afterwards. I knew nothing of the conference except the proposed line-up had some names on it I recognised from my brief time as a stand-up, notably Robin Ince (who didn’t appear in the end) and Josie Long. William asked me to come and talk about why I found pessimism boring. I asked if I could talk about why I find cynicism boring instead and the subject was agreed. And that was it.

And so it was that I found myself on a plane the night before thinking I’d better finish writing something on the matter. I let my inner polemicist spurge (replete with prodigious swearage) onto the page – always a useful technique for finding out what you might feel about something – but usually something that needs a judicious edit afterwards.

I was returning from giving a keynote speech at a conference that I’d been really nervous about talking at: an address to some $250billions’ worth of the world’s super-rich about how they might need to reboot some of their assumptions – and start to see their worth by acts of creation rather than ownership. This had gone surprisingly well and so the Boring Conference (a short 5-10 minutes) seemed like it would be something I didn’t need to think about too much – and in doing so I did the event and the audience a disservice. Because I’d been so nervous about talking to the super-rich (I’m talking stupidly rich here) I’d researched the event heavily, attended all of it – and re-wrote my talk at least four times while I was there. I was following one of the best pieces of advice I ever received in my brief flirtation with stand-up – namely that a really great speaker says what they want to say, but in the way the audience wants to hear it.

By contrast I turned up at the Boring Conference having done no research into what it was about and assuming it was something like a Friday night comedy slug-out. As such my sweary rant went down about as well as an appearance of Satan at a five year old’s birthday party. Boring is a nuanced, charming and abstracted event about the non-obvious and what we can learn from paying attention to the things that often pass us by. It was about pausing to think. I’d done exactly the opposite of what was required. I’d told the audience what I wanted to say in exactly the way they didn’t want to hear it. I was shouting about something in grand arm-waving, polemical full flow, when the event was about the whispers of experience we need to learn from. My performance was akin to Ian Paisley interrupting an Eva Cassidy song. It was staggeringly wrong in pace, tone and intent.

As I walked off the stage I began to feel the sticky hot embarrassment of a real cock-up trickle down my neck – and it got worse as the evening went on. Having Twitter on in these moments is instructive. I was ‘the guy that everyone hated’ and ‘a terrible human being’ (this from another of the speakers, Greg Stekelman, whose musings on Tube lines were as perfectly judged for this audience as my rant was ill-judged). I think the tweet ‘Brilliant #Boring2011, apart from Mark Stephenson, who is a cunt,” probably summed up it up for a lot of the audience. (This from @mumoss).

I learnt a whole bunch of stuff from that experience – and I learnt it real quick. But learning, as I said, is half the job.

So please accept my apology. Sorry Boring. All 400 of you. As Greg Stekelman tweeted “Rarely has one man misjudged the mood so badly.”

I’ve been meaning to put this post up for a while. It’s a simple ‘thank you’ to The Postcard Underground who have this rather nice remit of sending encouraging postcards to people they think are doing something positive. So, out of the blue and over a period of 3 weeks I received 11 postcards from total strangers (all living in America) who took time out of their day to send me supportive messages. It’s hard to describe just how warming this is – to be on the business end of a generous and selfless act – and also how invigorating it is too. It’s a deliciously simple yet powerful idea. All hail the postcard underground and their fine attitude to making the world a better place. You really did make my day.