12/11/16

And that’s the truth!  Part II

My fake news website, Need2Know News, was a modest success.  I had almost 3,000 views within a week.  Some folks got that it was fake.  Others not so much.  Which is scary because if you look at the banner, it clearly says that a flying saucer has landed on the Mall in Washington, D.C. And that leads me to this second blog on what’s true and what isn’t.

Here’s the punch line. I’m putting it first because it’s the most important thing in this post: I want you to know how serious I am about the accuracy of what I print here.

It’s come to my attention that some of the readers of this blog believe that what I write is my opinion. If it’s my opinion, I’ll say so.  If I state something as a fact, I have at least one scientific study and probably more to back it up.  Just because I don’t always put in the link to the original study, don’t think I haven’t checked.

People have lots of different ways to determine what is real or true.  For the purposes of my writing here, I’m almost always going with science.  That means I’ve set my bar pretty high. It also means that if I say that say conservatives test higher on measures of conscientiousness, I’m not making that up to make liberals feel bad.And if I say that conservatives are more likely than liberals to test high on authoritarian personality measures and that they're less open to new experiences, that's not to make conservatives feel bad either.  

What it means is that I have evidence, based on real science, that says it’s true. I mean, look at their desks! OK, that’s opinion. The actual study looked at dorm rooms and offices of liberals and conservatives and found them distinctive in predictable ways. Guess which one is the liberal's...

http://2012election.procon.org/sourcefiles/the-secret-lives-of-liberals-and-conservatives-personality-profiles-interaction-styles-2008.pdf

Real science, in its most basic form, works like this:  You make a guess about what might be true.  Then you set up two conditions, one where that thing happens and another where it doesn’t.  Then you compare the results.  And there are techniques and rules to figure out if the results were just from random chance or if it’s likely they are really meaningful.

Same thing if I think there’s a relationship between two things, like political viewpoint and personality. The math is a little different, but the results can be treated the same.

Now here’s the big point: Science is falsifiable.  That means that a fact is only a fact until a better fact comes along.  And if that better fact has better evidence, then it replaces the old fact. That’s the way it works. When you find out you’ve been wrong, you stop being wrong. Yes, it can be uncomfortable.  I was originally trained as a behaviorist.  Now I’m writing about social cognition.  I can’t begin to tell you how big a shift that is!

Here’s an example: The other day I accidentally dropped the F Bomb in front of my 2 year-old granddaughter, only to hear her repeat it. Instantly.  Oops.  Can I blame this on the nanny?  Probably not.  So I got to thinking about profanity. I’ve always assumed people cussed because they didn’t have a vocabulary extensive enough to express what they really feel.  Plop in the F Bomb, and you don’t need to dredge up real words.

But is that really true? Apparently not.  I just finished reading this study that says a big vocabulary of taboo words is an "...indicator of healthy verbal abilities overall rather than a coverup for their deficiencies," and backs it up with evidence.  LINK.  

So now I will change my mind because the evidence says I was wrong. That’s how science works.  You generate a testable hypothesis, test it, and adjust accordingly.

In a perfect world, of course.  Scientists are human and get just as enamored of their theories as anyone else. But when push comes to shove, we go where the data lead us, even if it takes a while.

However, it’s not really feasible to apply that high standard to mainstream media.  So here are two more ways I’m going to use to figure out what to believe.

1.  If it looks strange or sensational, it probably is, so I'll check with snopes.com or truthorfiction.com for verification.  Both have excellent records. I find politifact.com to skew a little liberal, so I'm less likely to believe them.

2.  Instead of particular websites or newspapers, I’m learning to rely on particular people. Folks whose work and fact-checking I trust. These include, at this point, Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham (but not The Washington Post in general and not FOX News, though I'm working on liking Bret Baier) and at least two folks at fivethirtyeight.com: Nate Silver and Clare Malone.  I like that these people deal with ideas they don’t always agree with and that they’re willing to track down information and then change their minds when new information comes in. Oh, and the Pew Research Center, which is the gold standard on survey data.

So that's my goal. I'm far from perfect. If I screw up, call me on it.  I’ll listen to you. 

12/6/16

And that’s the truth!  Part I

I started writing this blog on Saturday evening. I wanted to clarify to my readers how I decide what I believe and what I don’t.  I didn’t post it because I wanted to take the time to set up a fake news site for a few days to see how that worked.  And then the PizzaGate story broke on Sunday.  If you haven’t heard, a fully armed man from North Carolina drove all the way up to D.C., walked into a neighborhood pizza parlor there, and fired several shots, thankfully missing everyone. Quickly arrested, he told police he was inspired to “self-investigate” the claims that the restaurant was a front for a Hillary Clinton run international child-sex-trafficking ring.

Think about that for a minute.

I know.

Apparently there had been a conspiracy theory circulating even before the election that was based on leaked John Podeska emails in which he mentioned pizza.  More than once.  And it grew from there.  No evidence.  Not a shred.  No tunnels under Comet Ping Pong pizza. No kids in danger.  Nothing.  And yet it was enough to put lives in danger from someone who believed it.

As Amy Davidson said in The New Yorker:  ...if you find it odd that any given person in America would, now and again, want to eat pizza; if you think that it is suspicious that people getting together to watch something on TV would do so at a pizza place; if you think that the phrase “I could bring a pizza home” is so bizarre that it must mean something else; or if hearing that something is baked in “a pizza oven” causes you to envision Hansel-and-Gretel-like images of child murder with the possible involvement of international terrorists and money launderers (and that is one of the charges), then this is the conspiracy theory for you.

There’s been a lot circulating on the prevalence of misinformation, especially on Facebook.  Part of that is because the business of news has been augmented by the business of fake news.  Used to be, you had to be capable of publishing and printing and distributing information, which limited news to those who were serious about it.  Or you went to a library, where the information had been curated by professionals. Or you were Art Bell, sending his messages of alien abductions and conspiracies out into the night from deep in the Mojave Desert. With the Internet, anyone can claim to be a news source and publish whatever they please.  If they can make the headline “click-baity” enough, they’ll get hits and eventually money.

So I thought I’d see just how easy it was to set up a fake news page.  Turns out the hardest part was thinking of a fake news name that wasn’t already taken by other fake news sites.   I tried:

The Real Truth

The Real News

The Light Of Truth

All The News

Need To Know

They were all taken, and a bunch of others, too. After a futile 20 minutes, I finally settled on Need2Know News.  I now have a Facebook page where I can post anything at all and make it look like news. Look me up. LINK

Then, after I started putting up posts, Facebook asked me if I’d like to boost my readership.  Click this button, they said, and for $5.00, we’ll start putting your posts out in the wide wide world of Facebook.  Like Alice, I pushed the button.  More than once.  And the looks and likes and comments started rolling in. In two days, I’ve reached close to 2,500 people with this dreck. That’s how it starts.

It’s been an eye-opening experience.  Although I tried to make it obvious it was fake, some people believed the things I posted.  They kept asking if my posts were real, especially the post about Trump appointing Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. There’s even a comment under a post about a cross-country tornado that deposited a live alligator in a west coast swimming pool, telling people not to worry about the effects of chlorine on reptiles. There are, of course, no cross-country tornadoes.

Now, I’m pretty sure none of that will get picked up on anyone’s news feed, but it was certainly easy enough to get started. And kind of addicting, to tell the truth.  Making up stuff is easier and far more fun that looking up research articles and confirming real, actual facts.  More on how that works in my next blog.

To be continued...