Quotulatiousness

October 18, 2023

The greatest sin of Twit-, er, I mean “X” is that it allowed us hoi polloi to peek behind the curtains of governments, universities, and major corporations

Filed under: Books, Education, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The latest book review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf begins with a brilliant explanation for the coming fall of western civilization at the hands of Twit-, er, I mean “X”:

The greatest gift bestowed by admittance to elite institutions is that you stop being overawed by them. For instance, there was a time when upon hearing “so-and-so is a Rhodes Scholar”, I would have assumed that so-and-so was a very impressive person indeed. Nowadays I know quite a lot of former Rhodes Scholars, and have seen firsthand that some of them are extremely mediocre individuals, so meeting a new one doesn’t phase me much. My own cursus honorum through America’s centers of prestige has been slow and circuitous, which means I’ve gotten to enjoy progressive disenchantment with the centers of power. Trust me, you folks aren’t missing much.

I have a theory that this is why Twitter has been so destabilizing to so many societies, and why it may yet be the end of ours. Twitter offers a peek behind the curtain — not just to a lucky few,1 but to everybody. We’re used to elected officials acting like buffoons, but on Twitter you can see our real rulers humiliating themselves. Tech moguls, four-star generals, cultural tastemakers, foundation trustees, former heads of spy agencies, all of them behaving like insane idiots, posting their most vapid thoughts, and getting in petty fights with “VapeGroyper420.” There’s a reason most monarchies have made lèse-majesté a crime, there’s a level at which no regime can survive unless everybody pretends that the rulers are demigods. To have the kings be revealed as mere men who bleed, panic, and have tawdry love affairs is to rock the monarchic regime at its foundations. But Twitter is worse than that, it’s like a hidden camera in the king’s bedroom, but they do it to themselves. Moreover it seems likely that regimes like ours which legitimate themselves with a meritocratic justification are especially fragile to this form of disenchantment.

This is also why the COVID pandemic was so damaging to our government’s legitimacy. I’ve been inside elite institutions of many different sorts, and discovered the horrible truth that most of the people in them are just ordinary people making it up as they go along, but one place I hadn’t quite made it yet was the top of our disease control agencies.2 So in a bit of naïveté analogous to Gell-Mann amnesia, I just assumed that there was some secret wing of the Centers for Disease Control which housed men-in-black who would rappel out of helicopters and summarily execute everybody in Wuhan who had ever touched a bat. And I was genuinely a little bit surprised and disappointed when instead they were caught with their pants down, and a bunch of weirdos on the internet turned out to be the real experts (the silver lining to this is that now we all get to be amateur scientists).

So much for public health. But if there’s one institution which still manages to shroud itself in mystery while secretly pulling all the strings, surely it’s the Federal Reserve. You can tell people take it seriously because of all the conspiracy theories that surround it (conspiracy theories are the highest form of flattery). And there’s a lot to get conspiratorial about — the Fed manages to combine two things that rarely go together but which both impress people: technocratic mastery and arcane ritual. The Fed employs a research staff of thousands which meticulously gather and analyze data about every aspect of the economy, and they have an Open Market Committee whose meeting minutes are laden with nuanced double-meanings that would make a Ming dynasty courtier blush, and which are accordingly parsed with an attention to detail once reserved for Politburo speeches.

And they also control all of our money! Is it any wonder that people go a little bit crazy whenever they think about the Fed? I can’t think of a more natural target for the recurring cycles of ineffectual populist ire that characterize American politics. So it is with great regret that I’m here to report that they, too, are making it all up as they go along.

    1. And that lucky few have much to gain by maintaining the charade. A stable ruling class is one that has much to offer potential class traitors, so they don’t get any ideas. It’s when the goodies dry up, whether due to elite overproduction or to a real reduction in the spoils available, that things fall apart.

    2. That’s not quite true: I did once attend an invite-only conference at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The food was awful, and I wasn’t even able to find the lab where they created crack cocaine, HIV, and Lyme disease.

May 29, 2022

We’ve evolved to the point that you don’t even need to turn the page for Gell-Mann Amnesia to kick in

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray has an almost unbelievable example of Gell-Mann Amnesia … literally on the same page of the site, two stories show how un-self-aware — and reflexively critical of non-progressives — the media can be:

Take exactly the same argument about exactly the same event and wedge it into two very different frames. Watch the result.

Here’s Politico, today, attending the NRA convention in Texas in the aftermath of a mass shooting at a school …

… and finding that NRA members are still gun-addled idiots who deflect concerns about guns by inventing a stupid fantasy argument — a conspiracy theory! — about mental illness:

    Here, amid acres of guns and tactical gear inside a cavernous convention hall, the proximate cause of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was not a rifle, but mental illness, shadowy forces of evil or, as one man in a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt put it, the “destruction of our children” by the teachings of the left.

These idiots, can you believe that? They were actually dumb enough to argue that the rifle didn’t cause the shooting, and instead they blamed — wait for it, because OMFG — mental illness. What morons! Imagine being so caught up in stupid far-right conspiracy theories that you’d blame a school shooting on mental illness.

Okay, now. Watch this.

On the very same day, Politico posted this story, right underneath the NRA story on the front page:

And this is what Politico says those professors found:

    POLITICO: Can you take us through the profile of mass shooters that emerged from your research?

    Peterson: There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

The professors go on to say that the start of the solution to the crisis of school shootings is to improve the quality of childhood mental health services: “We need to build teams to investigate when kids are in crisis and then link those kids to mental health services. The problem is that in a lot of places, those services are not there. There’s no community mental health and no school-based mental health.”

Same publication, same day, same page.

November 19, 2021

Viewing-with-alarm … from afar

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Simon Evans explains why he finds British commentary on US hot-button issues like guns and race to be frequently uninformed but remarkably certain of itself:

What many Brits believe every American carries in their pickup trucks or on their persons, probably.

As a Brit, there are few things less edifying, nor more unintentionally hilarious, than an American newspaper reporting on any very English scandal. A breach of some obscure royal protocol, perhaps, or an aspect of parliamentary procedure, often involving Black Rod, which despite the capital B, the Washington Post will have to explain, is not a racial epithet, or an ill-advised tribute act.

A personal favourite is when a provincial dietary preference has caught the New York Times‘ eye, having unexpectedly “caught on” nationwide. It is an innocent enough pleasure, watching Americans trying to distinguish black pudding from haggis, or indeed gravy from “chippy sauce”. Like watching the Dutch discuss the morality of bullfighting, or Korea debate a proposed rule change in top flight Buzkashi.

Yet put the sneaker on the other foot and watch British commentators angrily contend the moral and legal thrust of a case in which an American is on trial for using lethal force with a firearm, and we suffer something very like Gell-Mann Amnesia by proxy. We forget how important a little local knowledge might be, and our seasoned, tolerant, bemused respect for tradition and culture and specialist knowledge are gone within moments. Watching the Kyle Rittenhouse case approach a verdict, British commentators are a-froth with indignation at the palpable miscarriages of justice seemingly running unchecked only five short hours away across the globe. My God, he had a gun ! What more is there to say? And – do I have this right? – he crossed state lines ! The man’s a monster.

Not since the proroguing of parliament two years ago have so many people become acquainted so quickly with something so arcane as the crossing of state lines with intent to do mischief. Putting aside the fact that the weapon itself did not cross this fabled demarcation, what is striking is the evident lack of enthusiasm for certain other state lines, such as the one somewhat further to America’s south, or indeed the one etched around the British Isles, that currently seem to get crossed on a pretty frequent basis, with who knows what intent? Drawing attention to those lines is clearly racist.

It was GB Shaw who first made the observation that GB’s shores were separated from the US’s by an ocean of incomprehension, concealed by our sharing a common language.

Rather like urban Canadians, most British readers and viewers tend to agree with the opinions expressed in US mainstream media based largely in urban coastal areas:

So, we don’t get the full spectrum argument. Instead, we gratefully share the apparent horror and shame of the coastal elite, with their tertiary education and their teeth that meet in the middle, when confronted with their inland, inbred in-laws. We deplore the multi-decade epidemic of what seems, if you read the Washington Post and the NYT, to be the largely white, Wild West assassination culture that 2A concedes. Bullets sprayed around schools. Shopping malls, synagogues and mosques running with blood. A death toll out of all control. Murder, cold-blooded and cruel – and largely in the service of a bigotry, as often as not a racial bigotry, as old as the Appalachians hills.

This is, to put it as mildly as one can without choking, not quite the whole story. Do your own due diligence, it isn’t hard. The editors of the NYT can’t stop you acquainting yourself with the FBI crime statistics, and they put some of the more notorious outbreaks of flying lead into useful perspective.

But generally, we instead swallow like sugary cough syrup (believing it good for us, no matter how delicious it also is) the narrative that guns are largely in the hands and lovingly tended racks of homicidal white supremacists, paranoid death-spiral redneck survivalists, and a police force that is barely superior in discipline, racial enlightenment or legitimacy to a rounded-up posse of ad hoc lynch-happy vigilantes.

July 20, 2015

QotD: Good rioting weather

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I slept through the only riot I was ever sent to cover as a reporter. Having traveled a long way I was very tired, and by the time I woke the riot was almost over. Still, I was able to describe with some vividness the acrid smell of burning rubber in the streets and the smashed glass and emptied shelves of the storefronts, and I did see a few people adding fuel to the flames of a barricade not far from my hotel (I later saw one of the perpetrators in an expensive restaurant). Such was my description that no reader would have guessed that I had slept peacefully through the violent proceedings. Strangely enough, my experience of being a foreign correspondent, if that is what it was, has never caused me to doubt the veracity of what I read in the newspapers, which I swallow as a boa constrictor swallows a goat.

However, I have followed riots around the world vicariously ever since, and it seems to me that the principal precondition of such events in the modern world is clement weather. The association is much stronger than with, say, injustice, partly because there is complete agreement as to what constitutes clement weather, whereas what constitutes justice has been in dispute since at least the time of Plato. We all recognize good rioting weather when we see it, but injustice — well, we could go on arguing about it for days. Everyone can contain his anger in the rain.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Indulging in Destruction”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-08-24.

October 28, 2014

QotD: The media’s ability to “shape” the news

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

It is interesting to observe — in oneself — the power of media to implant false impressions on a lazy mind. I noticed this from listening to a television speech by Stephen Harper, after the terrorist event in Ottawa, yesterday. (Harper has now been Canada’s prime minister for almost nine years.) He was described as “shaken” by several of the websites I had consulted for news, and in quickly reviewing the tape of his short talk, I formed that impression myself. It was only when an American correspondent, who had perhaps missed this Canadian media prep, told me Harper did not look shaken to him, that I went back and watched the video again, this time paying close attention to his delivery in both English and French. I realized he was not shaken at all; that his pauses and swallows were characteristic, and would not have been noticed by anyone had he been speaking on any other subject.

[…]

What impressed me, was how easily I fell for the “media narrative” on Harper’s speech, simply by paying insufficient attention. At the back of my mind I was assuming there must be some truth in it, when I ought to be aware that the media specialize in analyses which contain no truth at all. When I am paying attention, with the benefit of my own long experience within the media, I am able to identify the game, and understand what the players are up to.

David Warren, “Ottawa in the news”, Essays in Idleness, 2014-10-23.

October 13, 2014

Statistical sleight-of-hand on the dangers of texting while driving

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

Philip N. Cohen casts a skeptical eye at the frequently cited statistic on the dangers of texting, especially to teenage drivers. It’s another “epidemic” of bad statistics and panic-mongering headlines:

Recently, [author and journalist Matt] Richtel tweeted a link to this old news article that claims texting causes more fatal accidents for teenagers than alcohol. The article says some researcher estimates “more than 3,000 annual teen deaths from texting,” but there is no reference to a study or any source for the data used to make the estimate. As I previously noted, that’s not plausible.

In fact, 2,823 teens teens died in motor vehicle accidents in 2012 (only 2,228 of whom were vehicle occupants). So, my math gets me 7.7 teens per day dying in motor vehicle accidents, regardless of the cause. I’m no Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, but I reckon that makes this giant factoid on Richtel’s website wrong, which doesn’t bode well for the book.

In fact, I suspect the 11-per-day meme comes from Mother Jones (or whoever someone there got it from) doing the math wrong on that Newsday number of 3,000 per year and calling it “nearly a dozen” (3,000 is 8.2 per day). And if you Google around looking for this 11-per-day statistic, you find sites like textinganddrivingsafety.com, which, like Richtel does in his website video, attributes the statistic to the “Institute for Highway Safety.” I think they mean the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which is the source I used for the 2,823 number above. (The fact that he gets the name wrong suggests he got the statistic second-hand.) IIHS has an extensive page of facts on distracted driving, which doesn’t have any fact like this (they actually express skepticism about inflated claims of cell phone effects).

[…]

I generally oppose scare-mongering manipulations of data that take advantage of common ignorance. The people selling mobile-phone panic don’t dwell on the fact that the roads are getting safer and safer, and just let you go on assuming they’re getting more and more dangerous. I reviewed all that here, showing the increase in mobile phone subscriptions relative to the decline in traffic accidents, injuries, and deaths.

That doesn’t mean texting and driving isn’t dangerous. I’m sure it is. Cell phone bans may be a good idea, although the evidence that they save lives is mixed. But the overall situation is surely more complicated than the TEXTING-WHILE-DRIVING EPIDEMIC suggests. The whole story doesn’t seem right — how can phones be so dangerous, and growing more and more pervasive, while accidents and injuries fall? At the very least, a powerful part of the explanation is being left out. (I wonder if phones displace other distractions, like eating and putting on make-up; or if some people drive more cautiously while they’re using their phones, to compensate for their distraction; or if distracted phone users were simply the worst drivers already.)

August 30, 2014

No lose betting – predictions in the media

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Back in 2010, Dan Gardner pointed out that the “risky” business of making predictions to the media is actually a no-lose proposition almost all the time:

We’re coming to the end of the year and the pundits are lining up to tell us what’s going to happen in the one to follow. And why not? People want to hear predictions. And for the expert, there’s no way he can lose. If the prediction hits, he can boast about it and reporters will cite it as proof of his wisdom. But if it misses, no one will ever hear about it again.

Heads, I win. Tails, you forget we had a bet.

Of course the rules of the game would be a little different if, at the end of the year, instead of asking for new predictions, we looked back at what was predicted to happen in the year ending. Think of it as holding people to account for the predictions they make.

So let’s get on with the humiliation.

Whoah! Did I write that? I meant “fair and judicious review of past predictions.” Or, as this exercise might more accurately be described, “a bunch of predictions presented in no particular order and selected for no reason other than that they made me smile.”

Another example of the subtle workings of Gell-Mann Amnesia (although a variant of the phenomenon).

H/T to Bryan Caplan for the (retweeted Stephen Pinker) link.

August 21, 2014

QotD: The “Gell-Mann Amnesia” effect

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

Michael Crichton, quoted in “The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect”, Stephen Bodio’s Querencia, 2012-02-21.

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