Home
Weiye Loh's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
"18 of the 20 outlets were left of center. The only two that were not were the Washington Times and Fox News’ Special Report with Brit Hume.
Our findings, however, contradicted a few claims of conservatives. For instance, they showed that some mainstream news outlets are nearly perfectly centrist, albeit still left-leaning. Two were ABC’s Good Morning America and [PBS's] The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Also, we found that many supposedly far-left news outlets were not that far left. For instance, we found that National Public Radio was no more liberal than the Washington Post, Time, or Newsweek. And we found that it was less liberal than the average speech by Senator Joe Lieberman...
Our study was denounced by hundreds, and maybe thousands, of left-wing blogs, including Media Matters, the Daily Kos, and the Huffington Post. At one point if you googled “crap UCLA study,” most of the first ten listings would refer to our study...
-
The chairs of the departments of sociology, religion, and German and Russian languages were especially angry, and they called it “offensive” and “scandalous.” One said “The study isn’t research. It’s agitprop for the conservative blogosphere.”
-
… In that lay part of my objection, and here I have to say that it’s not to your work qua research at all. Rather, its presentation on the website made a pretty categorical claim about bias that taps into a charged political environment. There are difficult issues that underpin the website headline, and your study is complex and sophisticated enough to treat many of them; far more subtle and nuanced than the journalistic reductio. There are of course issues outstanding or open to discussion (what’s included by way of news sources, whether conceptual categories like liberal and conservative have veridical legitimacy as identity markers, where and how one designates boundaries of same [i.e., you can call something X and cite as reason a widely accepted standard, but that in no way means that the thing really is X, or so a philosopher would say], how one categorizes constellations of dispositions, how one treats what Bakhtin called dialogism in discourse analysis, and so forth. …
- 1 more annotation(s)...
How many people died? It's one of the first questions asked in a war or violent conflict but it's one of the hardest to answer. In the chaos of war many deaths go unrecorded and all sides have an interest in distorting the figures.
The best we can do is come up with estimates but the trouble is that different statistical methods for doing this can produce vastly different results — see the Plus article Body count which reported on controversy surrounding the death toll of the last Iraq war. Statisticians know how well different methods do in theory and under ideal assumptions, but wars rarely adhere to these. And we can't concoct a war in the lab to see which method does best.
But recently a unique document has helped throw some light on the question of how to count the dead.
-
two methods that are commonly used. One is based on household surveys: a random sample of households from around the region are asked to name their dead and statisticians estimate the total figure from the responses, much like an opinion poll gauges the mood of the nation from the opinions of a random sample of people.
The other involves taking two independent samples of deaths recorded throughout the region and comparing them. If the overlap between the two samples is large — if many deaths appear in both — then chances are that the overall number is relatively small, as you've managed to "catch" many deaths twice. Conversely, if the overlap is small, then the overall number is probably large. There are mathematical equations that make this intuition rigorous and give you an estimate of the total number. The method was initially developed for ecologists trying to estimate the number of animals that live in an area. It's called capture/recapture, as in this case the method works by capturing a number of animals, tagging them, releasing them back, and then capturing another sample to see how many animals got caught twice.
-
numbers are essential in establishing truth. It's important to get them right. Exhaustive approaches like the Kosovo Memory Book take years to complete and, in the absence of complete information, all you're left with is a statistical approach.
- 5 more annotation(s)...
if practical ethics should take empirical uncertainty into account, surely it should take moral uncertainty into account as well. In many situations, we don’t know all the moral facts. I think it is fair to say, for example, that we don’t currently know exactly how to weigh the interests of future generations against the interests of current generations. But this issue is just as relevant to the question of how one ought to act in response to climate change as is the issue of expected temperature rise. If the ethics of climate change offers advice about how best to act given empirical uncertainty concerning global temperature rise, it should also offer advice about how best to act, given uncertainty concerning the value of future generations.
-
The standard account of making decisions under uncertainty is that you ought to maximise expected value: look at all hypotheses in which you have some degree of belief, work out the likelihood of each hypothesis, work out how much value would be at stake if that hypothesis were true, and then trade off the probability of a hypothesis’ being true against how much would be at stake, if it were true. One implication of maximizing expected value is that sometimes one should refrain from a course of action, not on the basis that it will probably be a bad thing to do, but rather because there is a reasonable chance that it will be a bad thing to do, and that, if it’s bad thing to do, then it’s really bad. So, for example, you ought not to speed round blind corners: the reason why isn’t because it’s likely that you will run someone over if you do so. Rather, the reason is that there’s some chance that you will – and it would be seriously bad if you did.
If a group rests its beliefs (in the case of creationism) or its moral standpoint (in the case of gay rights) on a set of claims which cannot be borne out by the evidence, then it risks losing its beliefs, or sacrificing its moral standpoint, when the facts can no longer be denied.
Gay people — including those whose feelings of attraction are largely out of their control, as well as those who have some elbow room for how they self-identify — deserve to be treated with love and respect. The moral goal is clear. But if that moral goal must rest on a false or confused premise, then undue risk creeps in for defending it. Specifically, once the relevant facts become widely understood, the right-wing persecutors of gay men and women will be able to claim victory, and harness the data to their side. That’s the danger Cynthia Nixon was referring to when she spoke of ceding the terms of the debate to “the bigots.”
It is precisely the importance of what is at stake for “gay rights” (which I see as being indistinguishable from individual rights) that compels me to argue for firmer ground on this issue.
If you really want to excel as a Privileged Person® you need to learn to value data, statistics, research studies and empirical evidence above all things, but especially above Lived Experience©.
You can pretend you are oblivious to the fact most studies have been carried out by Privileged People® and therefore carry inherent biases, and insist that the Marginalised Person™ produce “Evidence” of what they‘re claiming.
Their Lived Experience© does not count as evidence, for it is subjective and therefore worthless.
-
the very capacity to conduct studies, collect data and write detached “fact-based” reports on it, is an inherently privileged activity. The ability to widely access this material and research it exhaustively is also inherently privileged. Privileged People® find it easier to pursue these avenues than Marginalised People™ and so once again you are reminding them you possess this privilege and reinforcing that the world at large values a system of analysis that excludes them, and values it over what their actual personal experience has been.
-
When evidence is actually seen as a bad thing, there really is no point talking anymore.
In a recent article in The Guardian ’s “Comment is free” opinion section, Keith Ward defends religion as a source of factual knowledge that eludes science. Thus, Ward rejects (as do I) the principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) advocated by Stephen Jay Gould - according to which, religion and science, properly construed, have separate epistemic territories or areas of authority. According to this view, religion and science investigate different sorts of questions and so can never give conflicting answers unless they stray from their legitimate roles.
Instead, Ward argues that, “Many religious statements are naturally construed as statements of fact – Jesus healed the sick, and rose from death, and these are factual claims.” I agree with this - various religions do make factual claims that could be just plain false: false in an empirical sense.
-
the kinds of claims I’ve discussed so far are (sometimes) intended in a metaphorical or otherwise non-literal sense. A particular religious person who claims that Jesus rose from the dead might, for instance, mean something like, “Jesus provides us with an inspiring example of personal transformation through self-sacrifice.” I take it, though, that the traditional Christian idea of the resurrection is quite literal. Most Christians think something to the effect that the corpse of Jesus of Nazareth literally recovered and resuscitated, coming back to life after the functioning of organs and organ systems had irreversibly ceased (as judged by our usual understanding of what is irreversible).
-
I am what is now known as a non-accommodationist: i.e., I think that it is, at best, misleading to claim that religion and science are “compatible”. There may be some kinds of logical consistency between certain religious claims and certain scientific claims, but, overall, the relationships between religion and the various forms of scientific inquiry into facts about the world are such as to create worries about religion’s truth claims. So it appears to me. I don’t, however, take the position that religion makes no factual claims at all, or that it is somehow illegitimate for it to do so. That would actually make religion and science oddly compatible. It would be a version Gould’s NOMA principle.
even if the facts are out there, they do not exist in a vacuum. They need to be held up by something. For instance, a scientist works to collect a wide range of facts, but she doesn’t stop there. She then works on a theory to explain said facts. This theory is based on the facts, but it is distinct from the facts themselves. It is better thought of as an explanation of those facts. Beliefs are our expressions of confidence in the facts and the theory (and the process by which we gained them). Your degree of certainty that a certain explanation is true is based on the facts — the more the better — but there is still the need to state your degree of confidence in the facts and the theory. This leads to the psychological phenomenon we call belief.
-
What is a belief? Broadly speaking, a belief is a proposition a person holds to be true. It is an attitude toward some suggestion about how the world is. I submit that there are at least three ways to use the word belief.
-
The first is to believe that things and objects exist. A simple example would be that you believe that you are reading from a sheet of paper or computer screen (laptop, desktop, Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc.) at this very moment because your senses are relaying such information to your brain and you see no good reason you are being deceived. A more complex example would be your belief that a country exists, even if you have never visited the country. You can still believe such a place exists because you have read about it, observed photos, and other people you know and trust have told you about their visits. There is little reason to doubt them, and little evidence for a global scheme to invent countries.
- 7 more annotation(s)...
THE battle about climate science is, at its heart, a battle about science itself. Climate science represents the material world in abstract form. It turns the everyday experience of weather and other phenomena into a language that speaks beyond a particular place or thing. Think of global average temperature - built of myriad data readings drawn from direct and indirect sources going back centuries - or of sea level rise. They are abstract constructions that contribute to another, larger picture of reality.
-
Sheila Jasanoff, historian of science and technology, has observed that science represents rather than mirrors reality. The work of science ''tends to erase specificity and remove traces of the human mind and hand: all the moorings that tie scientific claims to local, subjective and contingent circumstances are cut loose so that claims may float freely and persuade people as objective facts … scientific facts arise out of detached observation whereas meaning emerges from embedded experience''.
-
climate science is uncertain: it is out of the clouds of data and the millions of hours of observations that we begin to see, imperfectly, the shape of things around us.
- 2 more annotation(s)...
A new study out of Yale University confirms what argumentative liberals have long-known: Offering reality-based rebuttals to conservative lies only makes conservatives cling to those lies even harder.
-
From the Washington Post article on the study
-
Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.
A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.
In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might "argue back" against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research.
- 2 more annotation(s)...
Over the past decade, an army of psychologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists has been busy trying to uncover the neural “clockwork” that underlies human morality. They have started to trace the evolutionary origins of pro-social sentiments such as empathy, and have begun to uncover the genes that dispose some individuals to senseless violence and others to acts of altruism, and the pathways in our brain that shape our ethical decisions. And to understand how something works is also to begin to see ways to modify and even control it.
Indeed, scientists have not only identified some of the brain pathways that shape our ethical decisions, but also chemical substances that modulate this neural activity.
-
study has shown that the anti-depressant Citalopram can change the responses of individuals to hypothetical moral dilemma scenarios. Individuals given the drug were less willing to sacrifice an individual to save the lives of several others. Another series of studies has shown that when the hormone oxytocin is administered via nasal spray, it increases trusting and cooperative behavior within social groups, but also decreases cooperation with those perceived as outsiders. Neuroscientists have even magnetically “zapped” carefully targeted areas of people’s brains to influence their moral judgments in surprising ways – for example, making it easier for them to lie.
-
the research is advancing fast, and it is almost certain to suggest new ways to reshape our moral intuitions, sentiments, and motivations.
- 5 more annotation(s)...
-
In the words of astronomer Carl Sagan, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
M: Yes, that was Sagan's rendition of Hume's famous conclusion that "a wise man proportions his belief to evidence." -
how did Hume arrive at that conclusion, Marta?
M: Well, he started out by acknowledging that human experience is fallible, and that we have all manners of degrees of confidence concerning specific matters of fact.
D: Right, from what I understand, Hume thought that it is reasonable to doubt in particular alleged facts that have rarely or never been reported before.
M: Exactly. So Hume proceeded to define miracles as violations of the laws of nature, and to argue that the validity of the laws of nature is one of the things we can be most sure of, because we observe it every day. - 2 more annotation(s)...
It is a great American tradition to sell God like Kellogg sells cornflakes. Anybody with a mind to can park a Reverend title in front of his name, declare his garage a cathedral or his back bedroom the Sacred Tabernacle to the Most High, get on the radio, and start trolling. Just tell enough folks what they want to hear and you're all set.
-
That's how Rev. Harold got otherwise bright and responsible folks to give up everything and drive around proclaiming the end was near. He told them they were special, that they understood what others did not. That they were right, that the rest of the world was wrong, and that in the end, everything would work out rapturously well.
It's a sure-fire formula. And if a guy-or gal-is afraid Jesus might seriously disapprove of for-profit prophecy, there's always politics. Be it God, Obamacare or the national debt, something's sure to end the world as we know it - and somebody's just as sure to get elected or rich preaching about it.
-
The beauty is that none of it has to make sense, much less be supported by evidence, facts or hard numbers. In politics and in faith the man who counts the begats is going to gain a following.
Tell the folks their taxes are too high, and the folks not as well off as they have it too easy, and you've started a tea party. That what you're preaching is as factually accurate as accounts of Noah loading dinosaurs on the Ark 6,000 years ago makes little or no difference. It's what the folks want to hear, want to believe. And in faith-based politics, it's the believing that counts.
Nobody's going to let a few pesky facts get in the way of the Rapture.
We are not afraid to be called climate "deniers". In fact we embrace it as medal of honor bestowed on us by our alarmist foes. Galileo was a Denier. It is not an insult. I call this blog "Denier Depot" for that reason.
Welcome to my climate science blog.
I believe that one day all science will be done on blogs because we bloggers are natural skeptics, disbelieving the mainstream and accepting the possibility of any alternative idea.
We stand unimpressed by "textbooks", "peer review journals" and so-called "facts". There are no facts, just dissenting opinion. We are infinitely small compared to nature and can't grasp anything as certain as a fact.
Nothing is settled and we should question everything. The debate is NOT over Gore! When so-called "experts" in their "peer reviewed journals" say one thing, we dare the impossible and find imaginative ways to believe something else entirely.
-
Rosling has maintained a fact-based worldview – an understanding of how global health trends act as a signifier for economic development based on hard data. Today, he argues, countries and corporations alike need to adopt that same data-driven understanding of the world if they are to make sense of the changes we are experiencing in this new century, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
-
the world has changed so much, what people need isn’t more data but a new mindset. They need a new storage system that can handle this new information. But what I have found over the years is that the CEOs of the biggest companies are actually those that already have the most fact-based worldview, more so than in media, academia or politics. Those CEOs that haven’t grasped the reality of the world have already failed in business. If they don’t understand what is happening in terms of potential new markets in the Middle East, Africa and so on, they are out. So the bigger and more international the organisation, the more fact-based the CEO’s worldview is likely to be. The problem is that they are slow in getting their organisation to follow.
- 11 more annotation(s)...
How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
By Joe Keohane
July 11, 2010
-
a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in Facts
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo