He starts with one of this week's more embarrassing displays of innumeracy.
I found it. The dumbest thing ever on TV. It’ll never top this. pic.twitter.com/LbrA8PlP5k
— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) March 6, 2020
Yes. It's hard to watch two talking heads from putatively quality news sources (MSNBC and NYT) credulously making a 4th grade math error.
It's an incredible way of putting it. It's true. It's disturbing. It suggests, you know, what we're talking about here - there's too much money in politics.It reinforces every bias against the establishment media:
They are innumerate.To be fair, we all make stupid mistakes and for those who are paid to be on-air all the time, when they make the same mistakes everyone else does, theirs is just more apparent. But the counterargument is straightforward. They are public media professionals. They are paid not to make obvious errors.
They are credulous.
They are incapable of critical thinking or argument formulation.
Their ideological conclusions are established, they then cherry pick information, even if it is incorrect.
They cannot be trusted to understand what they are talking about.
A lawyer cites an incorrect precedent, an accountant fails to properly classify expenses, an engineer transposes figures. Everyone makes mistakes but in professions, there are consequences when basic errors are made. Severe consequences when the same mistakes are made repeatedly.
That is true except if you are in the "journalist" profession, in which case there are no consequences to making basic and repeated errors.
Which supports the argument that the problem is not that we have careless and innumerate journalists. We don't have journalists at all. We have media entertainers who traffic in news. They don't understand what they are talking about, they are just passing along what they hear at the water cooler.
Martin uses that instance of foolishness to lambast them on innumeracy. He then pivots towards the argument that it isn't that they are innumerate, it is that the media is blind to numbers. Perhaps, but I think he is wrong and making a category error of a sort.
The example he uses to argue that the media is number blind is:
I suppose you could put it down to innumeracy, but I think it's not that complicated. I think they literally don't think about numbers at all. They didn't see that it was silly because it never runs through their heads.General media innumeracy - Given.
Of course, this isn't the only one this week. In my recent VIP piece, I hit one of them. The basic idea was that Trump was lying or something when he said that he had a "hunch" that the real case-fatality rate for COVID-19 would turn out to be much less than the 3.4 percent case-fatality rate the WHO was quoting.
Now, the WHO was saying something precise and with caveats to explain what to draw from the numbers; Trump was saying something else. As I said in the piece, the real rational conclusion was that both Trump and the WHO were right: the current case-fatality rate of confirmed cases was around 3.4 percent and the case-fatality rate will probably turn out to be much less than that. Now, this was widely reported, for example in an article by Anthony Fauci and others in the New England Journal of Medicine, the real case-fatality rate is probably in the range of 0.1 percent to 1 percent. I'm not above noting that my own estimates fall right in that range. (Insert Ana Navarro-esque nail buffing here.) Fauci goes on to say:
If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2It's hard to tell if this is an example of just not being able to think about numbers or a case of Trump trance, where anything Trump says must be wrong, but the real point is that Trump wasn't wrong and a very little bit of informed reading would have shown that.
I would distinguish number blindness and propose something a little more precise. I would characterize it as a general disinclination to think quantitatively. A general disinclination to convert a general rhetorical argument into a quantitative proposition which can then be tested.
Take the media obsession with Campus Rape Culture a few years ago. Sure, it's plausible. A great concentration of young adults enfeebled by incomplete cognitive development (especially young men), an overabundance of alcohol, the release from parental supervision, and at an age of peak hormonal influence. Entirely plausible that young men and women on college campuses might be at greater risk of rape than the population at large.
But plausible is not the same as real. There are innumerable counter-arguments such as that these tend to be higher cognitive kids, higher self-discipline, residential density increases community awareness, etc.
But really, all you have to do is convert the claim into a testable quantitative proposition. Do men and women suffer rape in university at rates greater than the comparable community at large? Very quickly the claim of one in four or one in five falls apart. It was entirely conjured by ideological belief, an aversion to quantification, the equating of sexual assault with rape, and the expansion of the definition of sexual assault to encompass much social interaction.
The Campus Rape Culture Myth was espoused by ideological extremists and then sustained by a complicit media unwilling, disinclined, or simply unable to quantify. Sustained to this very day.
I also suggest that Martin is committing a category error in the sense that the example he uses isn't really all that much about innumeracy or inability to quantify.
I propose that the error is actually one of inattention or failure to recognize patterns. Possibly you could argue that it is an inability to think abstractly.
COVID-19 is just a particular case of a common pattern which we see across multiple fields. Certainly other diseases such as Swine Flu or SARS. It is broader than communicable diseases though. It includes medical conditions such as autism. It includes social issues such as crime, overdose deaths, and suicide. It can include economics and engineering and the sciences.
What is the common pattern? The pattern is that we focus on something, we define it differently or more precisely than in the past, we look for it for the first time and find it much more prevalent than we thought, we eventually put it into context and find it to be less alarming than we anticipated. Over the cycle, there is much uncertainty and much false or incomplete information.
This isn't true for all news cycles, but it is extremely common to the point that it might be by far the most frequent pattern.
What are the contagion rates, mortality rates and incubation periods for COVID-19? We don't know yet and there is much quantification, measurement, and data collection to be done.
But the example Martin uses doesn't really depend on the numerical aspect of the case. It depends on the capacity to abstract the case and observe a pattern. We have sequenced COVID-19 so we can identify it. Having defined it, we are now in the process of looking for it by testing. Looking for it with intent is turning up earlier and wider presence around the globe than we anticipated. The initial numbers in some places are alarming. In other places they are much less concerning.
This is far more to do with pattern recognition than it is to do with measurement, metrics and calculation.
Beyond their innumeracy, the establishment media is oddly blind to pattern recognition and I have no good rationale for why that might be. You would think, being across all the ebbs and flows of stories over months and years, that they would become gifted at recognizing patterns. Perhaps it is not in their financial interests to acknowledge patterns because that would entail throwing water on emerging stories. The establishment media needs eyeballs and attention. Accuracy and truth are incidental.
An example would be Jussie Smollett's fake hate crime allegation. Multiple times a year some dramatic claim of white racism is raised, frequently on university campuses, about some heinous symbolic act involving messages or nooses or some such thing targeting racial, ethnic or religious minorities.
And seemingly just as frequently the claim turns out to be a hoax committed by some member of that racial, ethnic or religious minority. After discovery, it is usually stylized into wanting to start a conversation.
It is a well established pattern. Those on the right observe that we are in the fortunate position of the demand for racist acts far exceeding the supply. Those on the ideological left claim that while this one might be a fake, there are real bias crimes out there.
And they are both correct. But what is especially striking is that the pattern of hate crimes as revealed in FBI crime statistics is far different from the hate crimes which receive the most attention in the establishment media.
Why does the media not recognize that the pattern of racism hoaxes differs so markedly and so consistently from the actual hate crimes? I don't know. Sure seems like they could save themselves much embarrassment and brand damage if they would simply apply a pattern filter.
And to end on a more humorous note, here is Dave Chappelle discussing pattern recognition when it comes to hate crimes. Well, sort of.
Double click to enlarge.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment