tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10856048.post7148157706480391547..comments2024-03-12T12:23:10.033-04:00Comments on Secular Perspectives: Costly Signaling for Lay SkepticsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10856048.post-43401075785393057572011-03-12T13:02:15.534-05:002011-03-12T13:02:15.534-05:00arensb
This discussion of regular folks news ana...arensb <br /><br />This discussion of regular folks news analysis is a timely, important topic that I think about. So thank you for the posting. I imagine we could have extended discussions on it. <br /><br />About 10 years ago I volunteered to help Stephen Fromm on his web project to act as a clearinghouse for knowledge: as<br /><br />"an attempt to achieve economies of scale in the dissemination and organization of information, both current and historical, relevant to politics and public policy. The project’s primary long-term goal is to help individuals access the current sphere of knowledge more efficiently and avoid needless duplication of effort. Furthermore, describing the current and past state of the world will be emphasized over normative statements of how the world should be. "<br /><br />You can still see the site, which stopped in 2004, and some analysis at http://www.truthandpolitics.org/<br /><br />One of the ideas of what we were doing was to use analysis try to converge on ground truth/closer to reality when complex topics are discussed. This is not simple, but we were hoping that with more things being published on the Internet we might be able to assemble enough facts etc. to make cases clearer. We never had enough resources to do much of this and Stephen couldn't attract $$ to fund the effort further.<br /><br />I think that the situation, of getting to ground truth, has even gotten harder in that there are most costly signals being thrown. That is, we have funded efforts to put disinformation out and advocates use viral techniques to manipulate people's opinion through their hot buttons. It's costly to create such signals, but that is what the wealthy can do, so it may be a reasonable strategy to be skeptical of these costly signals. <br />We are victims of our limited rationality and increasing limited time to sift through the info glut that now is the state we find ourselves in. To simplify things we sometimes resort to some naive version of balance as if there were 2 equal sides to all issues. This is often a false dichotomy.<br /><br />One thing that I might suggest is to think of the situation organically. As info consumers we have to develop and validate "filters" for things coming in our environment. A filter might be a trusted source such as Paul Krugman, who has credentials and a history of prediction on things such as the financial meltdown. So follow him over time and assess how well he does. Some predictions don't hold up. (A funny example of this was done some time ago asking Prophets to predict what things would happen in the first 10 years of the new century. Other examples have chimps picking sports winners to see if they are as good as experts.) <br />I would say this converging evidence approach is an important aspect of Climate Change. Here well funded efforts create messages that make it hard to hear the growing, supportive data. Did we have a colder than normal winter. It is hard for a regular person to know, but even in this area WAPO keeps track of warming degree days for the season and if you look at the back of the Metro section you will see that we needed slightly less heat so far this season than last year or the average (about 15 out of 3000 degrees days less, while this summer we needed about 1000 out of 4000 more cooling that the average, so summer was hotter and winter is about average this year).<br /><br />In the Truth and Politics effort we were trying to assemble such info as sort of a meta-filer for people to look at ad use. I think that we all have filters of some kind but even here we often don't have time to validate them. We need help....Gary Berg-Crosshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00104267265989624672noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10856048.post-27870335247129945132011-03-10T20:24:44.452-05:002011-03-10T20:24:44.452-05:00Reproduced results is the essential confirmation o...Reproduced results is the essential confirmation of good science. The post was talking about average people determining the accuracy of claims in news stories. Those would seldom have a careful examination of other science results but it certainly should give the reader more confidence if confirming science is cited.Don Whartonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11874733311091724239noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10856048.post-5662075725534262011-03-10T19:05:47.951-05:002011-03-10T19:05:47.951-05:00Possibility to reproduce the results.Possibility to reproduce the results.lucettehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00030477404014229609noreply@blogger.com