Monday, June 8, 2020

Differently insulting

There is an interesting language/statistics issue floating around.

The mainstream media is deservingly mocked as their reporters stand in front of riots and destruction desperately trying to convince us to ignore our own lying eyes and believe that it is a mostly peaceful protest.



The BBC has gotten into the act.



But seeing them struggle to hide the facts does prompt an interesting language point. We know journalists are, on average, extremely bad at thinking empirically or statistically. Is there a way to see their wording in a fashion that doesn't make them straight-up fools and liars. I think there is. It is just a matter of framing.

Part of their schtick is, of course, using definitional ambiguity to fudge reality. When does a peaceful protest end and violent riot begin? Waving signs and chanting - peaceful. Destroying property and looting - violent riot. But there is a phase change at some in there. When?

A water bottle tossed? A water bottle with urine? A lunge forwards? Brandishing a weapon? Throwing a brick? Where is the line? Look at this recent footage from Portland Police.



Peaceful protest or violent demonstration? I think it is a fair question. I would put it at the rowdy end of a protest and just about the point where it could tilt either way. Are the police wrong to fire tear gas? I doubt it. Is it premature? Possibly.

How many journalists, wanting to represent these as peaceful events, are simply playing language definition games? A lot I would imagine. They are intending to deceive by misleading language ambiguity.

But there is another way of looking at this, not more flattering to journalists but differently insulting. We know journalists are language people and rarely comprehend empiricism and measurement, particularly statistics.

Say the BLM protest started at noon and was peaceful all the way up to 8pm. 8 hours of peaceful protesting. Then Antifa steps in, smashes a few windows, burns a few cars, some of the less disciplined in the crowd start helping themselves to loot and in no time there is a riot up and down mainstream with the forty stores looted and destroyed and the rioting not brought under control until midnight and ten police injuries and thirty civilian injuries.

Is this a "mostly peaceful" protest? From a childish or naive perspective, yes. Eight hours peaceful and four hours rioting. Mostly peaceful. 65% peaceful for those inclined.

The other way of viewing it is to look at the population of BLM protests. We have had twenty BLM protests in the past two weeks and in all twenty, the peaceful demonstration ended in violent rioting. From that perspective, the peaceful protesting is just the cover band for the main event which happens 100% of the time. There is a complete correlation between protest and riot.

Which perspective is true? They both are. But the first is a tortured way of understanding risk and the latter much more useful. If 100% of protests evolve into riots, then call them all riots because that is what they are.

If only 20% of them end in rioting, then indeed, one can make the argument that the protests are mostly peaceful.

I think journalists are working a partisan scam here and deliberately trying to deceive but there is a non-commonsense way for them to be correct. And I don't put it past some of them to have been reporting for 12 hours and sincerely believe that the majority of the hours, the first eight, were the most important and that therefore the protest was mostly peaceful.

Straining at a gnat but conceivable.

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