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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me that it is none of the things in that diagram, and there is a sort of supraproblem above all of those, which is the ongoing and increasing societal rejection of knowledge and facts.

It's not just anti-intellectualism, it is more like "anti-realityism", in which simple things aren't knowable, in which facts and opinions aren't different.

We've gone from corporate propaganda like "global warming isn't real", which is a lie but an understandable one, to this incomprehensible new state of "What is the murder rate? How high is unemployment? What is the purity of the drinking water? THESE THINGS ARE NOT KNOWABLE!!! ANY VALUE MAY BE ADVOCATED!!"

And literally not one problem on that list can be solved in such an environment...

View on HN

What I've noticed is that folks are taking a pretty healthy mistrust of the establishment and turning it into the opposite extreme without realizing what they're doing. Instead of maintaining skepticism towards both the establishment and anti-establishment (of which Trump was a part), they do two things:

(1) elevate their moderate mistrust of the establishment into total, exhaustive mistrust (i.e., they assume everything from the establishment is a lie with a malicious motive).

(2) place total, exhaustive trust into the anti-establishment (i.e., Trump is perfect, every cabinet pick is perfect, every EO is perfect, everything Spicer says is completely true, everything Trump says is completely true, etc.).

It's this extreme warping of trust which causes people to be so incredibly susceptible to genuine fake news.

When you combine (1) and (2), you end up with conspiracy theories and lots of people who sincerely believe them with no evidence. The idea that Clinton is/was running pedophilia and child sex trafficking rings out of pizza shops is a great example.

Yup. I was listening to someone talk about the anti-vaccine movement as coming from a mistrust in big-pharma. They were also talking about how are brain plays these association games that have bad wiring. They gave the example, "A warehouse burned down that was improperly storing flammable materials." Your brain implies there was a fire started from flammable materials. Even after later facts revealed that there wasn't any flammable material the brain still implies that it was started by flammable materials.

That means you can convince them things they knew were incorrect, but they'll still believe incorrectly about certain aspects. ./flush_cache.sh

It's known as belief perseverance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance). A well-studied recent example is how people changed their beliefs after it became known that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction as was first suspected: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586... (PDF)

I've seen the same. There's a stunning lack of nuance in public thought. Thinking in degrees is difficult, so things get reduced to good vs evil, black vs white, all or nothing. Even amongst friends I respect, I have a hard time getting people to do the hard work of looking past high level simplifications and enumerating specific costs and benefits of any decision or proposal.

I know it's not popular to say but I blame the Internet. When people start getting their news from social media and the so often heard "I go straight to the comments because that's where the article is always corrected" then authority flies out of the window. It has caused a distrust in science and the media and the government.

The last generation had news pundits and we have social media stars. Journalism used to have a self-regulated code of ethics but that's gone now. I don't know what the solution is other than to regulate news on the Internet.

I haven't read the article yet, I jumped straight here to view the comments first...

We each have echo chambers, to which we endow trust and allow the source material to be filtered and pre-judged for us. The internet didn't start that. It's embedded in our tribal natures. But it sure does act as an effective crowd-fueled amplifier.

The problem has long, long, long predated the Internet. Though the Internet's not helping.

1. Look up H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippman, among others. Both were newspapermen and had tremendous insights, though they came from very different backgrounds.

2. I.F. Stone as well. His 1974 interview on "Day at Night" is on YouTube, and a very worthwhile 30 minutes or so. There's also a website devoted to his writings, highly recommended.

3. Changes in media and communications have profound influences on society, and always have. Look up Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980). Her "Preliminary Report" (1968) is much shorter and gives the general spirit of the argument: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/240164 (Full text available via http://sci-hub.cc)

Regulating news, and carrying penalties for intentional disinformation, seems one approach.

But who do we trust enough to regulate the news? Is there any entity that even the two political extremes in the USA could agree to do that regulation? Much less the ability to scale it up to an international level.

Also, how do we continue to trust whomever holds that power, given that such power will be abused eventually if not immediately? There is a common phrase about how power has a corrupting impact.

>and the so often heard "I go straight to the comments because that's where the article is always corrected" then authority flies out of the window

That's partially due to laziness, but in a large part due to a sort of Pavlovian conditioning that has happened due to how bloated and ad-infested the internet at large is. Even with ublock origin/adaway on, I rarely click on links unless it's a domain that I positively associate with or something that really piques my curiosity. For all its flaws, I think Google's AMP is doing a good job, at least for me, since I click on things more often that I would without it. That is creating a different sort of bias too, but at least Google is creating some incentives for making simpler, more readable websites.

There's blame to go around. First, certain people, predominantly conservative, realized they could monetize stupidity. That saying outrageous lies would create great wealth for them, and they gleefully jumped in. Look how wealthy Rush Limbaugh became, or how Michael Flynn, an advisor to the president, was involved in pushing Pizzagate, a theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from a pizza shop [0]. This man was briefly our national security advisor.

   Six days before the election, for instance, Mr. Flynn posted on Twitter a 
   fake news story that claimed the police and prosecutors in New York had 
   found evidence linking Mrs. Clinton and much of her senior campaign staff to 
   pedophilia, money laundering, perjury and other felonies.

I also blame the institutions themselves.

The Catholic church turns out to have been, if not an organized rape group, then certainly one that openly tolerated such. The church went to extraordinary lengths to (1) preserve access to victims for priests, and (2) hide from culpability. See eg hiding records and witnesses in Rome, or a priest in WI who raped 200 deaf students [1] while Cardinal Ratzinger -- who became Pope -- personally shielded him from consequences. An excerpt from [1]:

   Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was 
   sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to 
   criminal or civil authorities.

Or remember when George Bush promised there were WMD in Iraq, and fired Larry Lindsey for saying the costs of the Iraq war might reach $100B [2], and fired General Shinseki for correctly estimating how many troops would be required [3]? Right before we proceeded to kill a half million Iraqis and 5k+ Americans for what?

Remember when we were assured by all and sundry that there certainly was no real-estate bubble circa 2007? That real estate was an investment that only went up?

Remember Katrina, when George Bush decided to hang out and watch 1800 Americans die on our own soil, while his pet horse judge mismanaged the federal disaster relief agency?

Or Enron, or Bernie Madoff, or law school is a good investment, or ...

Our institutions themselves have given us myriad reasons to distrust them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flyn...

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-prie...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey

[3] http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-ira...

I upvoted you because it's disheartening, especially in the context of this thread, to see your mini-rant downvoted when it's mostly just a bunch of easily-verifiable facts that may make some people uncomfortable.

One quibble: are those people really "conservative"? Even if so, is that the attribute that is most relevant to this discussion?

Flynn is a perfect example: he's ostensibly "conservative" but he's also a pretty twisted combination of a gullible rube, a liar, and a batshit-crazy whack job.

I don't quite have a word for that combinational trait, but I think that's the key attribute.

There are quite a few people who self-identify as "conservative" but don't fall into this additional category of truth-impervious objective-reality-deniers.

I assume you believe Republicans are conservative? Trump is a Republican, as is Flynn. Senate Majority Leader McConnell: "[...] proceeding with [the Republican] agenda which is exactly the same as the Trump agenda" [1].

I challenge you to find anything similar to Pizzagate, or Obama is a gay Kenyan, or denial of anthropogenic global warming, or similar that is widely believed and publicly supported by Democrats elected to national office. I'll admit some wackos on the left are vaccine truthers, but again: they do not hold national elective office. It's really all conservatives, and there aren't Democrats in national office speaking in glossolalia.

[1] http://www.voanews.com/a/trump-budget-priorities-speech-cong...

Yes, but most Republicans I actually know (granted, definitely not a representative sample) were aghast that Trump won their party's nomination, and didn't vote for him (thought most made it a protest vote of some kind, not voting for Clinton either).

They are "conservative" but they assumed that Trump's continuous barrage of easily-debunked lies and blatant disrespect for the intelligence of his audience would prevent his victory.

Still, I will concede your point that the "conservative" population in the USA seems to be more greatly affected by this kind of "reality rejection syndrome". I don't think Trump really has any coherent political ideology; I think he just chose to pwn the Republican party because they had the most rubes susceptible to his brand of snake oil.

(I feel like that might just be because a big segment of that population is angrier than most people, but who knows.)

Sure, but Flynn was plenty defended and people calling it a "hitjob" getting him resigned.

At some point you need to start including Pence, Preibus, Chaffetz, Mcconnnell, etc. While I fully agree that the Venn diagram doesn't include all conservatives in the reality-rejecting circle, there is a too large of an overlap to ignore.

I'm not including Miller and Bannon in conservatives, because they're clearly motivated by something else/worse.

But it's like Christians in America, or radical Muslims. Terrible things are neither inherently Christian nor Muslim, but it's not too difficult for atheists to lump those traits to bad actors.

TL;DR: I agree, to a point.

I'm not sure I believe this myself, but just to throw out a more optimistic alternative, could we perhaps teach people how to use the internet to research, corroborate information, apply critical thought etc.?

Sigh... It's so damn disheartening but unfortunately I have to agree with you. We all seem to be living in our own personal reality-distortion fields.

>It has caused a distrust in science and the media and the government.

The Vietnam War proved that our government cannot be trusted, and that happened before I was born. It hasn't gotten any better since then. What gives you the idea that this government is trustworthy and has moral goals?

We are getting to a point where "trust" is the biggest issue. Can you trust govt, big corporations, universities?

It's like everyone is optimizing for their gain and deceiving the other side with what they need to hear.

We are in the era of information overload without a good way of filtering fact from dogma.

I hope there is some development of good AI that helps the average Joe hunt this facts down for him/her.

Google's fact verification algorithm is in the right direction. Can we trust it? I hope Facebook implements something similar but that's unlikely since they're in the entertainment and ads business.

I really hope orgs like openai are able to create something like this for the world.

How would an AI know the truth?

In the short term, only by comparing an article under review to "trusted" sources. But if there were any such sources available to tell us the ground truth, we wouldn't need the AI.

I can totally imagine AI knowing the truth, by the virtue of throwing lots of compute at Bayesian inference.

The more difficult question, I think, is: why should an average Joe trust the (presumably government or corporate) AI over their favourite worldview-confirming sources?

Bayesian inference based on what evidence?

Observational. Reality has to add up to a coherent whole, so I imagine a sufficiently smart AI getting a good picture of it through just observing a lot.

There's no truth in most matters, just perspectives and interests.

Truth is not an inherent reality of the universe. There is matter and energy in various juxtapositions, but no 'truth', except if by truth we mean correctly describing a physical order of things. But that's hardly the interesting part or what we usually want to know when we speak of truth.

At best, truth in things like politics and such requires a definition first, and so the problem of what's true is just moved to "according to whose definition?". Is "wealthfare harmful", for example, is not about knowing or not knowing its cost, but more about whether you think the costs are justified. One can legitimately believe that poor people should be left to rot if they can't afford healthcare, for example.

Second, why would an "advanced AI" stick to the truth any more than a human would? Especially if distorting it brings large benefits for it?

That's how the world goes downhill. Instead of getting at the truth, people are - well, literally - playing politics.

When I ask someone if "welfare is harmful", I ask for their opinion on the relative impact it has on various issues we want to optimize for, which mostly boil down to short and long-term happiness of people. It's a difficult question, but still a factual one. The list of things we want to optimize for is finite, there is some ordering to it, and the impact of various actions on those things is, in principle, calculable.

Even the question of "can welfare be justified" is an objective one. There is some model for "justified" that you have, and the data either lets you justify welfare or does not (and tells you the degree to which it is so, if your thinking process is worth anything).

It's only when people start pushing their stupid agendas and start putting their personal interests in focus that the whole thing gets "difficult".

Either way, I only said that a sufficiently smart AI could know the truth (or at least a good approximation of it). I didn't say it will necessarily tell it to people who ask. But an AI that can't correctly from data would be a pretty shitty AI. It's enough that human brains have this problem.

"The list of things we want to optimize for is finite, there is some ordering to it, and the impact of various actions on those things is, in principle, calculable."

I think you might be surprised at the diversity of answers you get for this, particularly if you actually get people's unfiltered opinions and not what they think you want to hear. Try it, sometime - ask 20 random people (not connected to yourself) what their biggest problem is and what they most care about in their life. You'll get some commonalities (earning a living is a big one, as is social acceptance & validation), but as soon as you start digging into how do you wish to earn a living and what do you consider an ideal world, it very rapidly diverges.

"It's only when people start pushing their stupid agendas and start putting their personal interests in focus that the whole thing gets "difficult"."

That's called "being human". What would you rather they do, defer to your agenda?

>The list of things we want to optimize for is finite, there is some ordering to it, and the impact of various actions on those things is, in principle, calculable.

I don't think it's calculable, even in principle. Except in trivial issues, people can (and do) disagree on very fundamental ideas about what we want to optimize for and which direction we should optimize them.

>It's only when people start pushing their stupid agendas and start putting their personal interests in focus that the whole thing gets "difficult".

Why wouldn't the people put their "personal interests in focus"?

Whose interests they should put to focus? And says who?

"""There is some model for "justified" that you have, and the data either lets you justify welfare or does not (and tells you the degree to which it is so, if your thinking process is worth anything)."""

Your mistake is assuming the data is objective in the first place, and doesn't, a) contain the societal bias at the time it was written, b) contain the bias of the authors that made the study, and c) contain any inherent bias in the metrics used.

Of course the data may be biased. But as I said, reality has to add to a coherent whole (that's basically an axiom of reasoning without which we may as well pack our bags and go back to living in caves) - so with enough data, an AI should be able to filter out the bias.

You assume that all of the biases will eventually cancel out. This is not necessarily correct, especially in the case of societal bias -- an example of this is racism, where everyone went out of their way to find reasons why PoC were inferior to white people; we know this to be false (At least, the majority of the world does. America is still having some problems with this), but still have hundereds of years of biased data to the opposite effect, because of societal attitudes. This trap falls hand in hand with the fact that large amounts of scientific data is not being published (Example, clinical research: [1][2][3])

All the AI knows is the training set. This is given a necessary bias by the researchers in the process of creating the AI. The best an AI can do is exaggerate the biases that it learned from the training set (Which is, after all, the main point of using AIs -- to exaggerate favorable biases to produce data that the researches believe is valid).

[1]: www.badscience.net/2009/10/and-now-nerd-news/ [2]: https://www.researchgate.net/topic/Negative-Data-in-Science [3]: http://www.nature.com/news/half-of-us-clinical-trials-go-unp...

>(At least, the majority of the world does. America is still having some problems with this)

The rise of far-right politicians in Europe indicates that America is not alone here.

>But as I said, reality has to add to a coherent whole

External reality might. Reality of what people want, what we think is best, etc, doesn't.

And even the external reality part is close to impossible to access and convey to others whether it "adds to a coherent whole" in all situations or not.

Sufficiently smart, and having direct, unfiltered observation of the world.

I think we're talking about different things: the current state of AI vs (what's currently) science fiction.

Come to think of it, we might be. I assumed we're talking about a hypothetical strong AI. After re-reading the subthread I see that 'nojvek probably meant state-of-the-art machine learning kind of AI, something that we can build now.

Half of my response still applies though. The thing with trust is that you can always call it into question. Give people a powerful AI-powered fact-finding engine, and there will still be those questioning whether you could trust the tool.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth

This isn't a greenfield.

> How would an AI know the truth?

There's been some research on this. I think I even saw at least one article about it here on HN, though I can't find a link any more.

What I remember seeing is a kind of world (?) map of the Internet with a set of different-colored interconnecting webs of sites.

There is one set that deals mostly in verifiable facts, usually based on genuine, usually academic research. Universities are major nodes in this net, but you get some overlap with "mainstream" news sources, Wikipedia and so on.

There's another major set that includes InfoWars, Collective Evolution, Natural News, Deepak Chopra, Mercola and other Anti-Vaxxers, various AGW deniers, and other well-known sources of bullshit.

Both of those networks have many more connections within themselves than to the other clouds, and have their own frequent-viewer audiences who will frequent the one set more than the other.

There were, as I remember, other sets that were less significant.

Purely on probability, a story will be dramatically more likely to be true if originated and/or propagated in the first of those clouds than the second.

Mapping these webs is a pretty mundane mechanical task, yet it can provide an excellent filter for some classes of information.

Other stuff is "squishier" because it's more opinion than fact. Politics and policies will be found here, and you're likely to see (I don't remember if the article I have in mind showed this) "conservative" vs. "liberal" networks rather than "fact" vs. "bullshit". On the other hand, there are experts on many aspects of politics, and if you're looking for ideas on policy that are informed by history and research, you're more likely to get them from professors of history, economics and law than from Fox News or televangelist channels.

I suspect there are a lot more inferences that can be drawn, via probability or Bayes, from the Internet sources of information, its propagation behavior, and the shape of the networks it travels.

Similarly, there's a wealth of information to be gained from analyzing the language of an individual page. Emotional words vs. dispassionate ones; weasel words like "probably" or "it was said" as opposed to "according to" or links to other sources. Bullshit is often simplified for consumption by simple people, while academics often carelessly lapse into "high-bred" or technical language.

Some of those features could be gamed, simulated, faked, and certainly will be. Many bullshit articles in the health, field, for instance, now link to "outlier" or discredited papers in PubMed to enhance their credibility. But like our grandparent poster, I think AI, working patiently and dispassionately, will be able to continue to find hints to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.

Well there has also been a long story of abusing trust on the good people's side. For example on feminism (where I've unwillingly studied the topic), the feminist version of the story is broadcasted loudly and men who don't agree are fired – happens to both laymen and CEOs. It's one thing to want equal rights and opportunities for everyone, it's another thing to impose unfair advantages. To me, people's unbeatable trust for Trump's racism and sexism just shows people are fed up with that.

To me, whether in US or Europe, people start rejecting "facts" because the centrist people take them hostage with "vote reasonably, and we'll shove more illegal immigration down your throats, more Europe, more women rights, more Muslims, etc".

So people go up the chain of politics and reach back to journalism which allowed these politics to exist, namely every article titled "SCIENTISTS PROVE AGAIN THAT MEN ARE PAID 31% MORE THAN WOMEN!" where you had to dive deep in the text to notice that this wasn't for equal work.

It's not that they trust Trump, it's that parties from left to right have entirely abused this trust to exhaustion, and journalism has badly participated.

This view is too simplistic. Many people believe that truths are being hidden from them or intentionally distorted. Distrust of the media and belief in conspiracy theories are rampant. So it's not rejection of facts, it's rejection of the corrupt elites that are reporting them.

Obviously I don't believe this and I find it hard to empathize with these folks. I spent the holidays listening to my cousin tell me how naive I was for believing what I read in the New York Times, then rant for hours about how mass shootings are all staged hoaxes.

On the other hand, it's not surprising that a lot of people have a feeling that everything is "rigged". Because it is; there is real conspiracy in our world, and it has always existed, but it is the invisible kind, and it exists in many forms, some less innocuous than others, some rather insidious. For example, racist bias of the kind exerted upon African-American citizens since the days of slavery is a kind of social, systemic, tacit conspiracy.

There are of course plenty of kooks out there (like Alex Jones and his followers) who miss the point completely, but some of the anger and anguish coming from that direction seems genuine, even if it's misdirected at actually credible institutions like the NYT. (Not that NYT doesn't share some blame in propping up the establishment, but their elitism (which is not that egregious) is mostly a problem of monoculture, not politically reactionary ideals.)

What happened with the 2008 financial crisis is that a lot of people woke up to the idea that the very fabric of a large part of the US was a kind of conspiracy of wealthy elite versus everyone else, and this feeling was confirmed when almost nobody was punished for causing the largest economic upheaval in many decades. It came at a time when a wave of globalization made it apparent to people that "the American dream" was becoming pretty unrealistic.

At the same time, this apparent conspiracy is sufficiently elusive that it's hard for people to assemble in opposition to it, because who and what do you attack? Most people don't even understand how any of it works. Occupy Wall Street tried and failed because it didn't have a specific goal it could reach. It didn't surprise me that Trump was elected, because it was the one thing an ordinary person could do that could change anything (or at least feel like changing anything). For the worse, it turns out, but still.

That's certainly an interesting theory, that voting for Trump gave people the illusion of agency in bettering their lives.

I've often thought of a Trump voter as akin to a Bernie Madoff investor. Madoff's investors were promised, and at least for a time, were delivered great returns. Trump supporters have been told that their good paying jobs will be restored, the government will be fixed, and a whole host of conservative ideals will be implemented, all immediately. Madoff's investors were unwilling to critically examine their investments, because that would be looking a gift horse in the mouth. Trump supporters seem willing to overlook any logistical concern with achieving Trump's plans, because the promised outcome is everything they've ever wanted, and must be preserved.

In both cases, a judgement has been made that the payoff is so irresistible, that any critic can be easily dismissed as someone who doesn't want the "mark" to receive what they believe they are about to receive.

In this context it is understandable why Trump supporters are so keen to accept a single correlation as causation, instead of cautiously evaluating why assertions might not be true. It is human nature to desire positive change in one's life. The more significant or positive that change, and more imminent that change appears, the less likely a person is to balance their emotional response with logical examination.

The similarities between the Trump 2016 and the Obama 2008 campaign are rather underlooked, IMO. While the two people couldn't be more different in substance, their campaigns have striking similarities.

They were both outsider candidates, promising to fix Washington politics. Both made outrageously unrealistic promises, and had strong campaign slogans evocative of building a better future. "Make America Great Again" and "Hope and Change" / "Yes We Can" both hold very similar promise.

The last person to build a slogan on quiet good governance was George W. Bush with "Compassionate Conservativism" back in 2000. Promising significant change seems to be the path to success these days.

Another similarity: Obama was heralded in 2008 for being the first "social media" candidate, but Trump made that look like child's play with his campaign. For all the complaints about the "media" being biased against Trump, he sure played most of the traditional news organisations like a fiddle, both in the primaries and in the general election.

I think that can be explained by who Donald Trump is. He is financially independent, held no previous office, and already had a reputation of making baseless claims. Whereas most politicians are self preserving, Trump has nothing requiring preservation. The media continually and incorrectly predicting his campaigns demise, actually gave him credibility with his supporters, showing his resilience. It also hurt the media's credibility with his supporters because he was able to conflate the media's predictions as attacks, instead of being based on events that have precipitated previous campaigns ending.

> a lot of people woke up to the idea that the very fabric of a large part of the US was a kind of conspiracy of wealthy elite versus everyone else

and so what seems especially insane to me about this election is that our president is indisputably part of that particular elite. he is, much more than HRC's early 90s inner-city bogeyman, the super-predator that his own constituents should fear.

> For example, racist bias of the kind exerted upon African-American citizens since the days of slavery is a kind of social, systemic, tacit conspiracy.

yes, just want to agree with that and say thanks for pointing out a fact that many still try to gloss over or deny.

I don't believe everything I read in any publication, especially not one that employs Paul Krugman. I also don't believe conspiracy theories that don't have hard evidence.

There is plenty of criticism of mainstream media done by people who cite all their sources and have intellectually honest arguments. Don't conflate the absence of unfettered trust in the media with flat-earthers. Skepticism is healthy.

Can you give an example of Krugman lying (not failing predictions and not personal opinions)? I agree though that he writes in offensive way to conservatives.

He uses his "intellectual" status to make political commentary and pass it off as fact. He contradicts himself again and again to whatever stance aligns with his political allies.

I'm on my phone now so I can't find the best examples but just take a look: https://twitter.com/kevinwglass/status/818465909996134400

That's certainly one example in which he clearly drifts from economics to politics:

> [Republicans are] going to blow up the deficit mainly by cutting taxes on the wealthy. ... Meanwhile, it will make the rich richer, even as cuts in social spending make the poor poorer and undermine security for the middle class. But that, of course, is the intention. [emphasis added]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/opinion/deficits-matter-a...

And as that tweet pointed out, he's now arguing that deficits matter (conveniently, at the same time Republicans took power), while just a few months ago, predicting Hillary would win, he argued that deficits don't matter.

> The good news is that elite discourse seems, finally, to be moving in the right direction. Five years ago the Beltway crowd was fixated on debt and deficits as the great evils. Today, not so much.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/time-to-borrow.ht...

Has the economy really changed so much in a few months - or have only the politics changed?

Here's a paper on economists that change their position based on the political winds. Krugman is by far the biggest offender: https://econjwatch.org/file_download/430/BarkleyMay2010.pdf?...

The conclusion on Krugman is as follows:

> To my knowledge Krugman has not addressed his overt partisanship. Until he does so, it is difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt. Krugman has changed his tune in a significant way regarding the budget deficit when the White House has changed party.

He's loose with his wording, but he makes a clear distinction between "borrow and invest in infrastructure" vs "borrow and refund wealthy people"

> Now, government borrowing can still be justified if it serves an important purpose: Interest rates are still very low, and borrowing at those low rates to invest in much-needed infrastructure is still a very good idea, both because it would raise productivity and because it would provide a bit of insurance against future downturns.

While I agree that we should spend more on infrastructure, that too is a political argument (deciding what's "an important purpose").

Krugman has every right to express his political views, but it should be clear that he's doing so.

We know to a high degree of confidence that investments in infrastructure give a good return on investment. The trickle-down theory has remarkably little evidence to support it. It's a perfectly reasonable economic argument that deficit spending on infrastructure is sensible, while running a deficit to fund tax cuts is a bad idea.

> We know to a high degree of confidence that investments in infrastructure give a good return on investment.

No, we know that some investments in infrastructure give a good return on investment. Some don't (bridge to nowhere, for example). The problem is that Congress can take useless make-work pork-barrel trash, and label it "investment in infrastructure". Don't automatically believe the labels that Congress applies to bills; they often are political smoke screens.

Note well: There is real infrastructure investment that is needed, and will give a good return. All the more reason to reject the waste - we need the money for real things; don't waste it on pork.

Every time a factory moves to a new location with lower taxes, or a wealthy person transfers assets to a tax haven, or a company refuses to repatriate earnings because of taxes, we see evidence that lower taxes have economic benefits.

Locally and short term that is the case, but looking at the bigger picture a race to the bottom can lead to worse outcomes overall.

Not saying that is definitely the case at any particular tax level, but it's not as easy as looking at the individual cases.

I honestly have never seen that evidence. I've heard it used as an excuse the last 40 years to lower high income taxes though.

Any sources/links/examples?

You haven't heard about the hundreds of billions of dollars companies like Apple and IBM are holding overseas, or the number of companies that have invested in operations in (for example) Ireland?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/05/ireland-attrac...

> A major draw for US firms is Ireland’s low 12.5% corporation tax rate and numerous controversial tax breaks. The government has promised to phase out the latter.

> The corporate tax rate, which remains a sacrosanct part of Irish industrial policy, has been so successful in wooing US investment that the country’s neighbours across the border want it too. The Northern Ireland assembly passed legislation this week allowing for corporation tax powers to be devolved, with politicians at Stormont aiming for a similar rate.

Oh, I have.

I have however not seen any proof that it benefits the country other than employment (how are the salaries?).

If you look at tax revenue as percent of GDP it's almost had a freefall [1], which could be okay if the GDP is high enough.

In direct numbers however Ireland as of 2014 was not even back to 2007 levels in tax revenue (pre economic crisis) [2], and ignoring inflation. And only counting corporation tax, not even back to 2002 levels.

[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS?locati...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republi...

We should separate the arguments "lower taxes benefit the economy" from "lower taxes increase tax revenue".

Both of your observations address the latter, while I made the former.

You're right, they're two different arguments. But I don't think it's a far leap looking between different countries to say that good infrastructure, healthcare, welfare and through sensible regulations an empowered workforce is also good for the economy.

Looking straight at GDP (even if it's a blunt instrument), Ireland hasn't reaped a lot of rewards there either [1].

[1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/ireland/gdp

Ireland was hit hard by the financial crisis; change the time scale on the graph to MAX to see the rewards Ireland reaped before that.

And their growth over the past few years appears to be back to pre-crisis speed.

They started lowering the corporate tax in 1995, so if you look at the graph from 1995 to now and compare it to the US graph from 1995 to now, the curves are nearly identical, only the US is much less fluctuating.

If by nearly identical, you mean growing twice as quickly.

That page allows displaying both on the same graph (compare to "US GDP") and when placed by side by side it's easy to see that Ireland has grown at least twice as quickly since 1995.

The links below are all clearly marked "opinion." You are going to distrust the paper's news-gathering process because of who they invite to write op-ed pieces?

It's more subtle even for news-gathering. Here's a similar perspective from the Left: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPp69gKVe9o

I highly recommend watching the whole thing.

I am constantly surprised by how many intelligent, generally rational people I meet also believe in (what I consider) absurd conspiracy theories. I've had people talk to me seriously about chemtrails, free energy devices being suppressed by oil company assassins, flouride in the water for mind control...

Conspiracy theories are sort of a hobby of mine - I've gone from feeling disappointed that they almost never turn out to be true (since they often make interesting claims) to fascination with why people believe them.

Most conspiracy theories start with a false premise to which logic is then applied -often correctly. A trivial example popular among geeky music lovers is that instruments and whole compositions sound better tuned to 432Hz rather than the more common 440Hz. Much effort i devoted to showing why 432 is more numerically interesting than 440, and since 99% of music is about the juxtaposition of numerically interesting frequency rations, the arguments are superficially quite convincing, especially from an aesthetic point of view.

Where it falls down is right at the beginning - not in the idea that 432 is an interesting number (it is) but in the idea that 432 cycles per second is important. People tend to forget that the second is a pretty arbitrary time division; we're just used to think about time as a fact because it is convenient in everyday life. Pro musicians and sound engineers are constantly thinking about frequencies to the quantity of a second comed to seem as real as the pull of earth's gravity to an aerospace engineer.

In my experience, the longer the argument between an initial false premise and the conclusion, the more firmly the proponent will resist attacks on the theory, perhaps because it has required a higher initial investment of work to validate all the logical steps.

432 Hz is (by definition) once every 21279240 + 5/24 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. Super aesthetically critical number right there.

But only at zero Kelvin. Once you punch that Caesium 133 up to room temperature you need the extra 8Hz to achieve aesthetic purity. On really hot days, you need to go to 440.1 or even 440.2.

I suspect one of the causes of this is that it's so incredibly easy now to find articles in the Internet that support your viewpoints that can then be shared rapidly amongst your filter bubble.

It used to be the case that there was a non negligible barrier to get an idea published and in front of the eyes of millions of people. You had to find a publisher, pay for publication, and then convince stores to carry a book/magazine/whatever.

With the Internet, you can put up a blog post and share it on Facebook with a budget of $0 (or bus fare to the library).

It's just as simple to find websites that support a view of the moon landing not happening as it is to find websites that do. Both are just a Google search away.

And before there was a huge barrier to entry you had many small news papers and Gadfly's.

And then before the printing press the barrier to entry was high again.

This is only seen as a problem if the experts are seen as beneficial.

For instance, even on HN people love to take potshots at nutritional guidelines that resulted in low-fat/high-sugar diets, or boneheaded regulation holding back [new cool disruptive thing]. It's not even relevant why (if the experts were just wrong, or bought off, or what), but the more examples you see, the less you'll just trust what "the establishment" tells you.

I think this is a cause of individualism in society today and the lack of proper debate as it was intended. The effects of this are as you say. People are forming their own realities and picking bits and pieces of the truth from wherever they frequent for their news and discarding anything that they don't agree with. That in turn is spewed out in many different forms which will eventually spread its way into society. The effect is only amplified by everyone being always connected and able to share their thoughts. I think this is one of the more pressing issues we deal with as a society today.

Ken Wilbur would say that the end result of post-modernism is narcissism and nihilism.

Wilber

This is because it's become quite common knowledge that wherever there's management to the numbers or the numbers relate to any kind of political issue, the numbers are rigged in some way. Want to make it look like the U.S. has a lower life expectancy? Include preemie deaths (The U.S. has the highest rate of trying to save premature babies. Many die. In other countries these deaths are not considered part of the life expectancy measurement) Want to show gun violence is bigger than it is? Include gun suicides. What's the unemployment rate? Are you including people looking for work or people who have given up? How about the under-employed?
Now it's perfectly fine to argue the points and definitions on any of these stats and measurements, but the average person has realized that stats are all like that. Any stat that includes the human experience across multiple dimensions is suspect.
I'm fortunate in that I remember back the "old days" of the net where we had the same amount of political BS but fewer sources of "facts". We'd argue for a while then somebody would take an hour or two and dig up an academic study and that would quiet things down.
This is no longer the case. What happens now is that no matter your opinion, there are studies and internet sites dedicated to providing you with supporting material. Add in a few rhetorical tricks you see on TV and you can carry on any argument based around "science" ad infinitum.
So I don't see this as some new form of anti-intellectualism. Rather I see it as people -- perhaps people who aren't so smart, admittedly -- figuring out what the game is and moving on to more personally important things in their lives.

You can call it stupidity and it keeps growing since many years. I guess TV started it. Main reasons for it are a mixture of loss of introspection and completely unrealistic expectations due to constant medial input and constant communication with peers.
You want better people? Make parents sit down and talk to their children every single day: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/diet-is-4-letter-word/2...
Of course it will take at least one generation to undo the damaged that has been done. Don't keep searching for simpler reasons or solutions. I don't believe there are any.
The rest of this post is a repost from me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724851:
We live in the age of fear because the hose of information that floods us is constantly opened further: Letters → Telegram → Telephone → Radio → TV → Internet → Mobile Internet.
Human beings need time to manage their emotions. Time spent waiting. Time being bored. Time when NO new information, not even positive, is arriving.
We are constantly distracted and thus increasingly unable to sort out our feelings. That is the reason.
And distracted parents that can't give their children at least 15 minutes of absolutely undivided attention per day worsen their offspring's ability to manage emotions even further.
That is why Zuckerberg/Facebook's idea "just flood everyone with everything and it will get better" is dead-wrong.
What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.

I guess the reason I feel it's different than "stupidity" is I think of that as a trait, whereas this thing feels like a new (or at least increasing) behavior.
Not like "you cannot derive basic conclusions from simple inputs because you were unfortunately born without ability to do that", but more like "you refuse to derive basic conclusions from simple inputs because _________________."
The reasons aren't clear and are possibly complex and subconscious, but it seems more about refusing to do the basic mental processing, despite having the capability to do it.

I mostly agree, but I'd like to propose that "the capability" you speak of is one that needs training. I may have the capability to figure skate, but you don't want to watch me try!
I think the big point here is that reasoning, critical thinking and assorted mental disciplines are no longer taught, or at least downplayed in contemporary education. People won't practice, and certainly not enjoy, skills they've never been acquainted with.
Conspiracy theories say that this is something the Powers That Be inflict on us intentionally. I can't be sure but I think the blame could just as easily rest with simple bungled priorities and seemingly expedient cost-cutting measures.

Refusing to do mental processing, despite having the capability. Sawing at the branch you're sitting on. That fits my description of acting and behaving stupid.
The reason are emotions, many of them subconscious, like you said. Emotional patterns can be complex, but the solution isn't: Less pressure and fear mongering. More appreciation, time and space for children to grow into responsible adults.
I don't think we're able to steer the ship around though, unfortunately.

I'm really surprised healthcare isn't an bigger concern for people. Even while having good employer provided health benefits, I'm still worried about the costs --to employer or to out of pocket payers. The more money as a percentage spent on healthcare, the less available for other things, including compensation.
It's really something which needs to be brought under control. Without healthcare we don't have a healthy American workforce.

I agree. Mid-range $700/mo insurance plans on health exchanges have deductibles approaching $12K, meanwhile 62% of families have less than $1K in savings.
This means that even after paying $8,400 per year in insurance premiums, a moderate illness automatically puts an average insured American family into a medical bankruptcy.
The honorable American corporate tradition to have company-wide fundraisers to support the families of (insured!) employees who have gotten sick is... terribly out of place in a 21st century / 1st world country.

These fundraisers happen? Are they common?

Yes. And middleman capitalism, as always, is right there to skim some money off the top: https://www.gofundme.com/medical-fundraising.

Well, the more politicised something is, the less "knowable" it is without serious research.
For example if we were to talk about unemployment rate (e.g. discouraged workers vs total labour force participation vs e.g. push towards counting long term unemployed as disability, statistical corrections for season, definition of temporary versus permanent) it's possible to pick a metric which will satisfy almost any narrative.
Taking into account changes in definition, policy changes and then segregating by demographic to create factoids at will and yeah, I do think that's a real problem.
Just out of interest, do you believe unemployment is up or down compared to this time last year?

You make a good point. Especially if the definition of "politicizing" something includes "lying, subtly or blatantly, about something in order to advance your agenda". (Which I think it always has.)
That does make things harder to know, and unemployment is a good example.
To answer your question, off the top of my head I think the unemployment rate is about the same (+/- 0.5%?) as it was this time last year, and rounds to 5%. However I am pretty sure that the reason I think that is because that's what the US Dept. of Labor says.
It's an interesting example because it's not a topic on which I have expertise, so I've (tentatively, maintaining some uncertainty) decided to go with what I perceive to be the most credible authority on the matter.
I've heard many of the alternate narratives, but haven't been convinced, probably because I usually perceive some ulterior motivation along with them (leaving aside candidate Trump's insane "42%" claim, which is something different).
This is exactly what makes me despair of the current environment; I don't want to do a bunch of my own research to tease out the unemployment rate. I would much prefer it if society would promote achieving an accurate consensus on this kind of issue, by collectively punishing blatant liars and diminishing their credibility, and on the other hand reacting with outrage if the official government statistics were politicized.
That seems not to be the trendline we are on, though...
P.S. Am I wrong to place my trust in the official unemployment statistics? ;-)

I think my perspective is quite close to yours. Definitely agree that the idea of facts as "unknowable" is hurtful.
Thanks for your reasoned response! In terms of trusting "offical" unemployment figures I actually think they're not too bad. At least compared to say, money supply and accessible economic metrics :)
For unemployment we can talk about things like "Oh, you mean U6 or U3?": http://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/12309/has-the-wa... - and then be prepared to understand changes in how they are measured, which are a little contentious but IMHO not too bad in U.S. over last 20 years.
In the end, questions like "how many jobs are there?" or "how much money is there?" are not really that simple to answer. From this perspective, the "current environment" is not really any different to how it's always been, but I think people are much more sensitive to difficulties in measurement and definition right now. It looks a lot like an environment where you get to make up facts.
Political candidates shouldn't get to make up facts. For example, if they rely on narrow definitions of employment increasing or decreasing in making arguments, the exact definition in use should be made clear and if an unusual or non-standard metric is used that should be highlighted. Unfortunately this looks increasingly like an unattainable level of political discourse.

> I don't want to do a bunch of my own research to tease out the unemployment rate.
Conspiracy theorists and the people who sell them newsletters don't want to do that either. That's why most of these conspiracist stories boil down to either amateurishly misinterpreting existing measures - e.g. alleging that the unemployment rate must be 100% minus the employment/population ratio - or trying to spin conspiracy where it doesn't exist, say by alleging that the US government is fudging statistics by not reporting the higher/wider U-6 measure of unemployment more prominently (U-6 is about twice the "official" unemployment rate at any given time - and has been for ever).

I wonder if any of this could be related to the past couple of decades trend in education that has reduced the emphasis on memorization of facts. People arrive at adulthood with very little objective factual knowledge, leaving them unable to discern fact from fiction or even really understanding why they should.

People are clearly better educated than they used to be. What was the literacy rate in 1900, for example? How many people had college degrees in 1960?
I think it's simpler than that. When anyone can pull out their smartphone and record someone or criticize someone in a blog post, it's hard to hide behind the naive notion that the authorities know what they are doing. For any given person or position you can find hundreds of examples of dishonesty, incompetence, or pure stupidity.
In that environment, why would anyone trust the traditional gatekeepers? They aren't the gatekeepers anymore and in a bid to remain relevant they often sacrifice objectivity in search of cheap gimmicks and entertainment.
Fareed Zakaria has put forward the notion that elites in the 50s and 60s used to see themselves as having a civic duty. That doesn't exist anymore. An easy comparison is the Ivy League generations of Bushes vs Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom
...This is then applied to America to argue that the increased democratization of American society and culture is what has caused the perceived failures of the government and governing elites.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/overdoing-democracy....
It sounds WASPish on its face, but there are some good points.

I like your idea that being inundated with information is part of the cause. That seems likely.
Still, I feel like the phenomenon that I'm trying (perhaps poorly) to articulate is distinct from education. I mean related to some degree, certainly, but I see it in highly educated people as well as the uneducated.
E.g., a mechanical engineer with multiple degrees from prestigious universities going on about how the Sandy Hook mass murder of 20 young children was actually a hoax perpetrated by the US government as part of an elaborate scheme to rescind gun rights.
He's a smart guy, at least in other contexts in which I've interacted with him; he should be able to use the information readily available to him and come to his own conclusion that this idea is completely preposterous. And yet, he can't.
Or less heart-stopping but still baffling: a fake news item I actually saw people I know professionally forwarding around during the election: "Outrage: Obama bans national anthem from all major sporting events!"
I mean you don't have to click through to know. That's not real; it can't be real; no president has ever or would ever do that; etc...
And these people are educated, I mean they are at least college graduates, mostly...
I agree that trust in gatekeepers has declined, but I think that makes sense.
I suspect though, that people in America are also declining in their ability to serve as their own judges of information, and that is the thing I am talking about.
It's of course possible that I'm wrong; maybe it just used to be less evident how many people were unable to arrive at a plausible conclusion from a set of facts, and now it's more obvious because the culture normalized confidently spewing completely unsubstantiated horseshit, while the technology has emerged to let anybody who feels like it do it all day long...

I think you're really on to something here. We're more educated, in the sense that we're attaining higher levels on average (i.e. tertiary education). But this also means our knowledge is far more specialised. It almost seems like the more proficient someone is in their specialist field (mechanical engineering, for instance) the more likely they are to mistake this highly specialised proficiency for a more generalised one. It's only my anecdotal experience, but I find that these specialists are much more likely to believe all manner of crazy nonsense in areas outside their speciality.
And I suspect this is compounded by the fact that at least some people will see a highly proficient mechanical engineer/author/ex-playboy model and think 'Wow, that person is smart. There really must be something to this whole vaccine thing.'

For proof, you can check out the well known book by Archibald MacLeish: https://www.amazon.com/National-Stevenson-Archibald-MacLeish...
or Stewart Alsop on the decline of the WASP elite (early 1970s)

I suspect it is more of a result of changes to the overall societal context as a whole, of which the formal education system is just one part.
For instance, we are certainly all much more exposed today to people ranting pure bullshit than we were in decades past. That seems likely to be part of it... seeing so many people spouting absurd nonsense, and then seeming to "win" the interaction, must normalize that behavior and encourage people to try it themselves.
But I think it is not just about "knowing fewer facts" but also about "having less ability to reason about things and derive a fact (or reasonable hypothesis) for yourself, even about simple matters".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise

Probably related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American...

I do agree that the problems listed are more on the order of symptoms than fundamental causes. I'm not convinced that anti-realism is that fundamental cause, though it's quite certainly a major confounding factor.
Cory Doctorow in a recent Boing Boing article:
"we're not living through a crisis about what is true, we're living through a crisis about how we know whether something is true. We're not disagreeing about facts, we're disagreeing about epistemology."
https://boingboing.net/2017/02/25/counternarratives-not-fact...
I see the problems as of limits and distributionalism, most fundamentally. That's a longer story.

Unless an aware public is the problem. The first step in defining a new reality is destroying any current reality. Not everyone wants truth and facts. People, paticularly the US public, enjoy myths. They want to live the fantasy. They really dont see disconnection with reality as a problem. It is a necessary step towards a more universal acceptance of thier construct. The myth is simple and comforting. It is far easier to accept than gritty reality. But you first have to disconnect. Those who knowingly push disconnection upon others feel they are a force for good.

>They really dont see disconnection with reality as a problem
This is a misrepresentation. They don't see it as a disconnect with reality, they see it as reality. Through all sorts of biases and rationalizations, people will still think their model of reality is true with lots of exceptions that keep getting in the way.
Once you take a belief to be true, you will go through incredible mental gymnastics to explain away any conflicting evidence without even realizing it.

But you forget the class structure of belief. At the top are pushers who dictate a reality to those below them. They don't buy into myths and instead use them. Watch a US senator spew lies and his supporters lap it up. The senator doesn't actually believe the lies, he just uses them to advance whatever agenda he thinks best. The senator thinks he is doing good because his agenda is better regardless of what he needs to do to sell it. The people trust and believe. They find it comforting. Everyone participates even though a chosen few do not believe.
This class structure worked well enough for generations, although lately it is running off the rails. The top pusher appears to actually believe the myth. The monkeys is now his own grinder and nobody knows what will come of it.

But we're not talking about the few at the top. The comment I was replying to is talking about the public.
>People, paticularly the US public, enjoy myths.
I'm stating that the public doesn't think what they believe is a myth.

Perhaps, but I would argue that they are wrong about that.

There's no such thing as "anti-realityism." Yes, we really have this many deluded and/or mentally ill people in our world.

It strikes me that the people who crow about "facts" the loudest are the ones most likely to be conflating facts with their own opinions.
I'm a scientist. I don't believe in facts. I believe in models, explanations, measurements with appropriate error bars, provisional theories and educated guesses, but never facts. When somebody comes to me claiming that they know "the facts" I put up my defences.
Perhaps what people really need is not a better appreciation of facts but a more realistic appreciation of uncertainties. Perhaps if we could all stop arguing about whether the probability of disastrous climate change is 0 or 1, and instead accept that it's somewhere between 0.01 and 0.99, then we could make some progress on the issue.

While I support this sentiment while doing science, I also think it is one of the reasons scientists have a relative small influence on public debate.
If the scientist says climate change will be a big problem with probability between 95% and 98%, what most people hear is that "We don't know if it will be a problem, so we might as well not do anything about it." It is as if it doesn't really matter if you say the chance is 0.01 to 0.99 or 0.99 to 0.999. It is all just probabilities and it comes out as not actionable.

That's exactly why politics is a mind killer. The sad thing is, you either have to join this idiocy or accept that your opinions will have negligible impact, because asking people to think in probabilities for half a second loses the competition with strongly-worded soundbites.

This is also why "every statistician/expert is wrong for predicting Hillary would win".
In a binary mind, a 70% likelyhood of an outcome (more than 50%) means that if the opposite happens, everything that went into the prediction was wrong.

In case anyone was curious to review what election "expert" predictions were: they were Hillary to win with 85% chance (NYT), 71% (538), 98% (HuffPost), 89% (PW), >99% (PEC), and 92% (DK).
But all of these sources made more detailed predictions than a simple binary winner. For example, the probability that Hillary received <=232 electoral votes (as was her pledged total) was ~4.3% according to the New York Times.

How big were the error bounds on the predictions? These things tend to be +-5 or 10%-points, considering the statistical model is even sound, which it is only assumed to be "approximately" however much uncertainty that adds.
Do you have any articles where the statisticians analyze what happened?

Probabilities are "error bounds", of a sort, on a binary prediction (in that they express the degree of uncertainty in the prediction.) Error bounds on a probability don't make a lot of sense.

It can easily make sense.
Consider a very simple model, where each person in the country has a probability `p_i` of the chance that they vote for party A, and `1-p_i` that they vote for party B.
Now if we have access to the values `p_i` of all `n` people in the population, then probability that party A wins can be calculated as
P = sum_{a \in {0,1}^n with |a| > n/2} product_{i = 1 to n} {p_i if a_i = 0 else 1-p_i}
(The precise formula doesn't matter, but clearly it can be computed.) Now assume that we don't have all the values `p_i`, but only the values of `k` people randomly sampled from the population. Then we can calculate `P` on these values to get an estimate of the probability that A will win the election. Our result clearly won't be exact, but we can use statistics to find values `P_1` and `P_2` such that the real value of `P` is in the range `P_1 <= P <= P_2` with high probability over the random sampling of people.
Here we have assumed an underlying random model, which has a probability, and we can estimate that probability within error bounds. We could try to calculate
P* = sum_{way of sampling k people} (probability of sampling this way) * (probability A wins in this case)
But then we don't know how likely a certain set of `p` values is to be sampled, so we have to guess. Hence we are mixing uncertency and probability. Real statistical models have many different levels of uncertainties and probabilities like that.

Probabilities don't usually have error bounds. Some (most?) people even think that the concept is meaningless.

If I give you a coin with probability `1/3` of heads, I can tell you that it is `1/2` with error bounds `+- 1/4`. How is that meaningless?

Perhaps, but good luck getting people to do that.
I don't think the climate change "argument" the American society is currently having is about whether the probability of its existence is 0 or 1; it's about whether it's 0 or not 0.

Not at all, it seems to me it's more like whether it's 1 or not 1. Expressing any skepticism gets you branded as a "skeptic" and then a "denier".
Of course what the "not 1" crowd tend to miss is that you don't need 100% certainty about something before you take action on it. If you're in a plane with a 50% chance of fire on board then the procedures are pretty much the same as a plane with a 100% chance of fire on board.

> Expressing any skepticism gets you branded as a "skeptic" and then a "denier".
Usually I see (and throw out myself) these terms when someone bandies around any of the common denialist talking points like "we used to be concerned about global cooling" or "it hasn't cooled since '98". Unfortunately the "ladder of knowledge" is more of a mouse wheel and the same people will end up using the same arguments, even when they're shown to be wrong.

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