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Comment by DFHippie | Hacker News Reader

This is a fine sentiment (double entendre intended), but some people, enough to sway public policy, cannot be reached by a simple presentation of facts. If these people control policy, and one party to the debate has no qualms about controlling them through appeals to their gut, what should one do? If in 100 years humanity is reduced to an impoverished remnant living in the ruins of its greatness, will they be grateful that we kept our rhetoric pure? (Note, I'm not talking about lying, only about presenting information in a way designed to appeal to the audience's emotions.)

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But this is just different sentiment. Personally, I think that people are very skilled at identifying when they are being spoken to unhonestly or dismissively.

> But this is just different sentiment.

My point precisely.

> Personally, I think that people are very skilled at identifying when they are being spoken to unhonestly or dismissively.

How? By consulting their gut? Why do certain people lie so frequently if lying doesn't work?

Besides, we aren't talking about lying here, only presenting true data such that it has a particular emotional appeal. The goal is not to produce any false belief or any action contrary to the audience's interest. It is only to get the audience to register the information with the organ they use to process such information effectively: their gut.

Why do people lie? Maybe people are prone to exaggeration when its an idea they like or it's somehow attached to a position or stake they have taken (of)themselves.

But really the point I was trying to make by saying it's just another sentiment: perhaps the number of people put off by incomplete statistics is more than the people swayed by the dramatic results

I wouldn't say they are skilled, given the enormous false positive rate.

I'm trying to get you to invest in my fund. I give you a set of cherry picked graphs that indicate I'm earning an unbelievable amount of money with minimal to no variance. Then somebody else shows you a complete graph showing my longterm profits (which are rather different than what I lead you to believe) and other data indicating that I was being somewhat less than completely honest with you.

What's going to be your opinion of the value of my fund? Of me? Did I do anything wrong, or can I just claim I was only trying to "appeal to the audience's emotion"? Myopic thinking and Machiavellian logic are a great combination to undermine the very ends you aim to achieve.

In your example you are attempting to deceive. That is the immorality. Not the appeal to emotions.

What if he really believes in the potential of his fund, and simply choses the graph that better conveys his belief- even if someone else might object that it's not the complete or most neutral representation?

If he isn't deliberately omitting information that would lead to a different conclusion -- deceit -- or using emotional manipulation to imply facts not in evidence -- also deceit -- then he's simply wrong.

In the case we're talking about, the emotional impact intended is simply that the information is alarming. You can drily say "the house is on fire", or with flushed face and wide eyes exclaim "the house is on fire!" The latter involves emotional information in addition to the relevant facts. If the house is not on fire, both statements have the same problem: they are false. If the house is on fire, the second is more likely to prompt action. The absence of emotional cues in the first statement will itself be taken as an emotional cue by an ordinary audience. "The house can't be on fire in the way I would normally interpret 'the house is on fire' because that would cause panic, and the speaker isn't panicking. Ho, hum. Are there any sports on?" In fact, the dryness of the presentation is frequently presented as evidence that climate change is a fraud. Denialists say "if you really believed this is true, you'd be doing X, and you aren't, so ha!" The beauty of this gambit is that the goal posts are so mobile. If you do X, they pull secret expected behavior Y out of their pocket and repeat the argument. These measures of sincere affect are like sharks teeth. There is always another if you pull out the one you see. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. So, setting aside these particular denialists as insincere, one's best bet is to try to indicate your affect in your presentation, because this is a heuristic ordinary people use to gauge the honesty of their interlocutors: does the implied urgency of their argument match their tone.

Take the presentation data and contrast it against the longterm patterns seen in temperature [1]. This presentation absolutely omits information and relies on emotional manipulation to imply facts that are not in evidence -- in particular that the change in temperature is unprecedented and practically linear. This is literally selective sampling to present a misleading picture -- the identical behavior in our little metaphor.

If you genuinely think you're right, you don't suddenly turn to something very much bordering on falsehoods to make a point. In any discussion the strength of an argument is generally going to be measured based on the strength of its weakest point. And arguments, such as this article presents, are incredibly weak as they appear to be deeply misleading when one is presented with big picture data. And suddenly everything you've ever said becomes tainted, even if the other 99% of it was completely and wholly accurate.

[1] - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Global_te...

Ironic to complain about misleading visualizations and then link to a graph covering the last 800,000 years to imply that the recent change is just business as usual.

Do you not see the extremely recurrent pattern? One that has been occurring since before humanity even existed? This is really what makes things so incredibly challenging, and also why articles like this are presenting data in a less than honest fashion. We are undoubtedly going through a cyclical upswing as part of a regular cycle of climatic activity, but at the same time we're also adding a significant amount of additional CO2 to the cycle. The point is that it would be negligent for people to not consider human activity as a contributing factor, but it is no less negligent for people to not understand that we're also going through an ongoing warming phase that would have happened even if we were a 0 carbon output species. What would change is not the warming, but the magnitude.

Instead, like on so many topics in the social media era, people 'pick sides' and radicalize on these issues. And media like this is published to help further the radicalization. All the while in this process people on both 'sides' ends up voluntarily retarding their own logic and reasoning by working backwards from a predetermined conclusion instead of working from the breadth of data towards whichever conclusion (or lack thereof) that they find the most logical position.

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