Dumpster fires of bad data and worse methodology - après cette, le deluge

A very good piece from Shame evading variants: The new propaganda strains are gonna be real doozies by el gato malo.  We are nearing the end of the eighteen months of authoritarian pantomime where governments, institutions, academics, and experts have all played their role in advancing false narratives and authoritarian propaganda.  El Gato Malo is pointing out that for all the prevalence of false propaganda in those eighteen months, it is going to get worse now.  There are eighteen months of opinions masquerading as facts which have done enormous damage to everyone and which now have to be hidden, suppressed, gaslit, or reinterpreted.

He offers this example from the LA Times.

Click to enlarge.

Not only is the evidence by no means clear but the great preponderance of the evidence supports the argument that the non-medical interventions were a catastrophic destruction of wealth and income with no beneficial reduction in lives lost.  In fact, we are a year or two out from beginning to get a handle on the possibility whether lockdowns and masks may have actually worsened net population health and death rates.

Covid-19 remains new to us (as do the vaccines we created to address it) and there is much we still do not understand, particularly why some geographies remain unaffected for long periods of time and then succumb to it in dramatic fashion, regardless of their medical, treatment, or preventative policies.

Any strong assertions of firm fact still have to be treated as a red flag of deception.  

El Gato Malo's supposition that we are about to see a tidal wave of new propaganda is almost certainly true.  It is one thing to propagate lies and deceptions in the middle of an emergency.  It is quite another to escape attention for those lies and deceptions once everyone begins to realize that they were indeed lies and deception.  

Charitably, some "experts" were victims of muddled thinking and not keeping abreast of all the evidence.  But after eighteen months, those with the firmest and most unvarying opinions in opposition to the known data must increasingly be acknowledged as authoritarian propagandists.

From El Gato Malo (his bolding, my capitalization).

If we’ve learned one thing over the course of the last year, it’s that almost no one really reads the data. No one reads the studies, assesses the methodology, or checks the math. Just about nobody goes back and checks the record or checks the facts.

Sorry, but it’s true.

Public opinion is not shaped from the bottom up by millions of people going out to get the facts, study them, and decide what they mean so they they can develop considered opinions. It’s just not how humans work. It never was.

Which is why we must reclaim our Age of Enlightenment heritage.  Our biology drives us towards useful heuristics such as confirmation bias.  It is our Age of Enlightenment culture which drives us back to facts, evidence, logic, and reason.  Back to objective reality as best we can understand it.

People do not choose leaders based on data. They choose data based on leaders. Your team has a hymnal, and you sing from it. This is, obviously, not true of all people, but it’s true of most. More dangerously, it’s true of enough that the rest barely register in terms of public opinion.

And this is how propaganda works. It does not need to make sense. It does not need basis in fact. It does not matter if the “facts” it cites are invented from whole cloth and the studies upon which it relies are dumpster fires of bad data and worse methodology.

It just has to provide pretext for allegiance.

That’s how you get the cottage industry of garbage studies that have been cropping up to support it. No one trusts simple media assertion, so you gin up some “scienceiness” and publish a pre-print that 2 pals “peer-reviewed” for you and feed the tailor made conclusions to reporters to grandstand with.

This is never going to sway anyone who has really dug into the data. It’s not for that. This is not for refuting carefully arrived at conclusions. This is for waving around and claiming you were right all along, preaching to the choir, and shoring up your hardcore base.

This is about creating some “science” for your side so you can keep claiming you were on the side of science.

Bespoke to suit the client’s needs; neat as marionettes dancing upon purse strings: brand new systems of science, made to measure.

It’s not supposed to work on the people who disagree with you. It’s to prevent the people who are already on your side from listening to the people who disagree with you. You cannot give them nothing. You have to give them something.

Propagandistic science is a talisman to protect them from conversion to other ideas and other data, an inoculation to bind to the receptors that might allow people to change their minds.

It’s terrible science.

It’s worse ethics.

But it’s GREAT propaganda. 

There is a lot of trust needing to be re-earned by governments, institutions, academics, and experts.  These eighteen months have been an intense period of the Great Revealing.  Scratch a vocal advocate or propagandist and you uncover deep authoritarianism incompatible with our age of Enlightenment values and success. 

 Read the whole thing.