Unchecked innumeracy

An excellent example of something I have been observing and commenting for a long time.

1/ "There are at most 200K ventilators in the US. One million are expected to be needed." This horrifying news comes from my old employer @nytimes; it's sourced to the Society of Critical Care Medicine.

Only the SCCM didn't say that. At all. Let's see what it did say... https://t.co/TEqlshAewI

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) March 26, 2020

Click for the thread.

The NYT journalist misunderstood the analysis he was reading and ended up misreporting the findings. The mainstream media does this a lot. On average, their journalists have a narrow and shallow portfolio of life experience, they are innumerate, they are only average in their cognitive abilities though they assess themselves as significantly above average and they no longer have anyone reviewing their work to catch even the most obvious blunders. With spellcheckers and grammar checker tools in MS Word, they are good to go, straight from the uncluttered brain of the journalist into print with nary a fact check or reality test.

It is empirically observable that most journalists are college educated, urban located, overcompensated, younger, harder left than the American population at large. This of course leads to skewed reporting, marred by fallacious reporting owing to innumeracy, etc.

The great challenge is that when you combine innumeracy with bias, you get markedly skewed fake news.

The question is whether this is 1) emergent order from contextual circumstances, 2) deliberate and intentional bias, or 3) pure laziness and unprofessionalism.

These three hypotheses could each plausibly explain the manifest poor quality of reporting. Right leaning commentators incline towards Hypothesis 2. Left leaning commentators deny that there are any errors in reporting.

The right position is bolstered and the left position undermined when obvious shenanigans such as this go on.

Please join me on this incredible journey. pic.twitter.com/OM7zFzSNeO

— JERRY DUNLEAVY (@JerryDunleavy) March 23, 2020

I subscribe to Hypothesis 1 with a dash of Hypothesis 3.

I don't think there is much that is deliberate in the implausibly inaccurate and skewed reporting. It is mostly the product of the combination of innumerate and inexperienced reporters in a bubble reporting on things about which they do not know (but think they do) in a context where the business fundamentals are such that there is no quality control and an overwhelming pressure to generate clicks over valuation of accuracy. It is unconscious emergent order. And of course, as a human system, Hypothesis 3 always has relevancy.

It is not easily proven. But in the above case of the ever evolving headlines, it is worth noting that the first version, for a hard left leaning organ such as the NYT, could only have been generated in error. The later rewrites were obvious intentional efforts to mask the initital truth reported, but there is no way that the first headline was printed on purpose. It was a simple accident that the truth slipped through.

Click to enlarge.