The Media Very Rarely Lies over at Astral Codex Ten. Scott Alexander shows how the NYT and Scientific American do exactly the same sort of thing as Infowars - not providing context rather than flat-out lying. He then turns and applies this to the censorship debate about misinformation and disinformation
But lots of people seem to think that Infowars deserves to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse vaccine data claim, but NYT doesn’t deserve to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse police shooting claim. I don’t see a huge difference in the level of deceptiveness here. Maybe you disagree and do think that one is worse than the other. But I would argue this is honest disagreement - exactly the sort of disagreement that needs to be resolved by the marketplace of ideas, rather than by there being some easy objective definition of “enough context” which a censor can interpret mechanically in some fair, value-neutral way.How To Lie With Statistics shows up immediately in the comments, which also warmed my heart. I almost gave it to the oldest granddaughter this Christmas, but I think it contains enough abstraction that it would be little fun for at least another year. And it's the sort of thing that I want to be enjoyable at first exposure, precisely because it's so important.
There is an internal link to an SSC post from 2015 about a study he took apart about the perception of required ability versus the actual required ability, and that the study failed to account for the very basic fact that the perception that some activities require special ability might in fact be accurate, and not just a made up stereotype.
Okay. Imagine a study with the following methodology. You survey a bunch of people to get their perceptions of who is a smoker (“97% of his close friends agree Bob smokes”). Then you correlate those numbers with who gets lung cancer. Your statistics program lights up like a Christmas tree with a bunch of super-strong correlations. You conclude “Perception of being a smoker causes lung cancer”, and make up a theory about how negative stereotypes of smokers cause stress which depresses the immune system. The media reports that as “Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer, Stereotypes Do”.
This is the basic principle behind Leslie et al (2015).
I said in another context earlier this evening, about men vs women analysing actions and motivations, that stereotypes tend to be half-true. Both romance and mystery novels include a lot of why people are doing what they are doing, however different they may be in style, and women dominate both genres in both authorship and purchasing. I will think about other types of media consumption to see if the other areas where there is a sharp difference between men and women there is also this element that "why people do what they do" is a prominent piece. Right off the top of my head, literature and psychology majors were predominantly female when I was in school - though that was decades ago.
ACX also has it's typical followup after the discussion of something controversial, Sorry, I Still Think I'm Right About the Media Very Rarely Lying. Which is why I love this guy. Some of the outrage was predicatble. It is one thing to say that the NYT and Scientific American don't do the job they should about context and slant, but to even breathe their names in the same paragraph as Infowars is Not Allowed. Well, it's why Alexander is every conservative's favorite liberal.
3 comments:
The last 'graph or two in his response post (your last link) is even better than your quote from him IMO. He's really driving at why you can't create a 'bright line' standard for censorship because nobody is lying in the most classic sense. Every media outlet is picking facts to both include and exclude.
I have the same issue with claims that such and such politician is 'lying', except in some extreme cases. They are all almost always expressing opinions or making forecasts. They may be wrong but that's a different argument and demands a different response.
From AC10
I originally said this mattered because it means “ban misinformation” isn’t a primitive action. Censorship proponents imagine a world where “good sources” are doing something fundamentally different from “bad sources”; the good sources are going out in the world and reporting true facts, the bad sources are just making things up. In this world, you can censor mechanically, without needing to consult your own opinions. But this is a false hope. You will always need to make judgment calls about which sources’ true facts are important vs. irrelevant, which sources’ studies are valid versus flawed, and which sources’ points that you don’t have good responses to are too annoying or conspiratorial to take seriously anyway. These judgment calls will be as subjective as any other attempt to have an opinion on the news. ...
Censorship - like all other decisions - has to bottom out in these kinds of judgments, which are much dicier and more corruptible than “lol, just ban false things”.
You are making something black and white as grey as you can. The media has gone far beyond distorting or cherry picking it’s truths. One merely has to listen to NPR who describes every single moderate republican or any non democrat party member as “far right wing” or “extreme right wing” or how they and the NYT describe their tame “moderates” as “conservatives”. A lot of so called news is nothing of the sort and deliberately blocking ALL coverage of the ongoing twitter files is just another case in point.
Who asks the FBI why they sat on biden’s laptop for over a year and why is Maxwell the only Epstein island visitor rotting in jail? What about all the pedaphiles that visited the island over many years? And no, don’t be like the media and claim Trump “flew” on the
Lolita express without also in the same breath pointing out that most times he had a wife or his kids with him and all the flight were from Miami to Newark.
Oh yeah, the media can’t draw breath in this country without spewing lies , fabrications and things like the completely bogus Russia gate dossier that Clinton commissioned and was used by every single media voice to blacken Trump.
We get both the WSJ and Sunday NYT but the truth cannot be found in either anymore without also reading places such as Instapundit.
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