The trap of assuming what is generally believed is also generally true

Just a couple of examples of low level cognitive pollution floating around out there. The first is Heard Bad Things About Yik Yak? Try Using It by Virginia Postrel. My sidelines impression of the social media tool was much as Postrel describes. I don't use Yik Yak and don't have any desire to use Yik Yak so the entirety of my impression of it is from the judgments of others.

Yik Yak is a social-media app that in just two years has become an everyday part of the American college experience. If you’ve heard of it, chances are you think it’s awful. It has a terrible reputation as a dangerous source of vitriol, threats and ethnic slurs — a reputation only strengthened by recent events.

After protests by black students led to the resignation of the president of the University of Missouri, menacing posts appeared on Yik Yak, which lets people make anonymous, ephemeral notes visible to others within a narrow geographical radius. One of them said, “I’m going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see.”

On Wednesday, police officers in Columbia, Missouri, arrested a man the state university described as “the suspect who posted threats to campus on Yik Yak and other social media.” Later, a student at Northwest Missouri State University was arrested on charges of threatening black students on Yik Yak. (Although Yik Yak posts are anonymous, the company logs users and will share that information with law-enforcement under certain conditions, including imminent threats.)

The stories are typical of those shaping Yik Yak’s media image. Critics, after all, portray it as a clearinghouse of digital hostility. Last month, a coalition of feminist groups asked the Department of Education to force universities to do more to police Yik Yak. They decried it as a tool for “cyber-harassment, intimidation, and threats.” Why would college students embrace such a terrible tool?

I had read about Yik Yak, always negatively, but had never actually experienced it until I was at Princeton last spring, reporting a column on student angst. Students there cited Yik Yak as a way to gauge campus culture, so I signed up and took a look.

[snip]

The Yik Yak I saw came closer to the company’s public-relations aspirations (“home to the casual, relatable, heartfelt, and silly things that connect people with their community”) than to the hate-drenched graffiti its critics had led me to expect. Though largely banal, my samples at Princeton, and later at UCLA and Santa Monica College, revealed Yik Yak posts to be mostly good-natured, often stupid, but rarely evil. At SMC, students typically complain about the parking shortage; at UCLA, they gripe about food; at Princeton they desperately crave sleep. Everywhere they talk about sex.

[snip]

So, yes, Yik Yak does attract nasty posts, including the threats in Missouri. But on a routine basis, the app grownups love to demonize is much friendlier than the Twitter and Facebook feeds I read daily. For reasons built into its structure, Yik Yak offers fewer rewards for mean, grouchy, tribal, and polarizing posts and more for those that are supportive, funny, inquisitive, and community-building. Far from encouraging a free-for-all, the terms of service prohibit threats and abuse, as well as “racially or ethnically offensive language.” More immediately, Yik Yak lets users vote comments up or down, giving them longer or shorter lives.

By wielding their voting power, Yik Yak users develop unwritten rules that tend to keep things friendly and fun, observes Briallyn Smith, a graduate student in rehabilitation science at Western University in London, Ontario, who writes frequently on the intersection of technology and college life. “I’ve been amazed by how quickly Yaks that don’t fit the community’s standards will be removed from view — not by any external moderation, but by the user base,” she writes, noting that “generally you’ll only see negative messages for the first minute after they are posted, after which they are completely down-voted into oblivion.”

This dynamic isn’t an accident. It’s essential to the business. Unlike a website such as Reddit or an Internet-based service such as Twitter, Yik Yak doesn’t draw from the whole world. It can’t survive by attracting a tiny fringe from a huge universe or by aggregating lots of separate tribes. It has to draw most of the potential audience within each local radius, typically a college campus. And everyone sees everything -- no talking only to those who agree. It’s like a small town, but one that people can abandon simply by not logging on. Leaving Yik Yak, unlike other social media, is painless; it won’t hurt you professionally or cut you off from family photos.

If a local Yik Yak provides a place people want to hang out, it will flourish. If it alienates too many users, it will just blow away. The service has spread so fast not because students love to dole out abuse but because they yearn to connect.

A good cautionary tale about untested impressions.

Similarly in The Myth of the Bernie Bro by Matt Bruenig about a meme of which I was completely unaware, namely that Bernie Sanders enthusiasts are mostly men.

In theory, writing an election take about demographic divides in candidate support is pretty straightforward:

1) Identify a demographic divide.

2) Provide a plausible theory for the demographic divide.

Because step one is usually pretty easy, most of the punditry action is at step two. But, as Amanda Marcotte’s take earlier this week shows, every so often, punditry is so bad that it doesn’t even manage to get step one right.

The dig clearly stung, as Bernie Sanders immediately went out on Sunday talk shows to deny Clinton’s insinuation that gender played a role in his remarks about “shouting” during the debate.

From the female-heavy crowds that turned out to support Clinton in Iowa, it seems the strategy is working. And not just on older women, either. Girls, from little kids to college aged women, were out in force for Hillary Clinton in Des Moines over the weekend. Moms with daughters, both little girls and teens, were a dominant force in the crowd. Glitter, unicorns, and Disney princess memorabilia was on full display at the Clinton rally. . . .

While both Clinton and Sanders had plenty of young people of all genders turning out, the young people of the Sanders crowd were just as male-dominated as the Clinton crowd was female-dominated. . . .

This contrast continued inside Hy-Vee Hall, where the dinner was held: More young men for Sanders and more young women for Clinton.

Putting aside the question of how much control eight-year-old girls have over what rally they attend, there is an obvious problem with this gender demography point. And that problem is that it’s not reflected in the polling cross-tabs. Although Marcotte insists that she “couldn’t find good polls on gender amongst supporters, much less age,” data for both are readily available on the Internet.

From a YouGov/Economist poll from a couple of weeks ago:

There simply isn’t a gender demographic divide. There is nothing here to theorize about. The take is dead at step one.

Bruenig then goes on to point out that there is in fact a notable and material demographic difference between the supporters of Clinton versus those of Sanders. Sanders supporters are markedly younger than Clinton's

But Bruenig's point, as is Postrel's, are both supportive of the first question in the Decision Clarity Consulting methodology, "Is it real?" It is too easy to fall into the trap of assuming what is generally believed is also generally true. Often, it is not.

UPDATE: Here's another example, Did the media ignore the Beirut bombings? Or did readers? by Max Fisher.