Study finds political bias skews perceptions of verifiable fact
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
Or, take the fact that the US lags Denmark in inter generational income mobility. Which is true, but it’s also true that the difference is due mainly to taxes and transfers flattening the whole distribution instead of fundamental structural differences that enable more movement: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/09.... Put differently, it’s not that the welfare system allows the son of a gardener to become an engineer, but that massive income redistribution reduces the disparity between gardeners and engineers. (For many Americans, that distinction could be dispositive in whether you support an expanded welfare system.)
So take these facts the next step. The authors studied these things in the context of support for reducing income inequality. Isn’t there a very plausible argument here that the experience of poor Asians shows that there isn’t a systemic structural problem keeping people in the bottom 20%? Or, isn’t it plausible that the generous welfare state doesn’t really fundamentally change people’s’ trajectories, but just reduces the divergence between those trajectories? And if you teach people the first set of statistics but not the second, are you educating them to make up their own minds, or feeding them facts to support a preconceived notion?
Stepping back: experts should certainly understand these facts. But what do we expect ordinary people to take away from them? Consider the work done by Piketty and Saez on income inequality: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/10/16850050/i.... Defining "income equality" actually is quite a quagmire. For example, in their 2003 work, P&S excluded the effect of tax transfers (such as the earned income tax credit) which significantly overstated the degree of inequality. Or, they mention that marginal tax rates were higher in the 1960s, but exclude the fact that the tax bases were narrower, such that the actual average tax rate on the top 1% hasn't changed dramatically over the decades: https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high. And there are so many other confounding variables to account for. The immigrant population today is almost triple what it was in 1960. Because immigrants often start at the bottom of the ladder, an increasing immigrant share could make incomes seem stagnant even though they’re growing within each different demographic. You also need to account for household sizes, major differences in marriage rates, etc. There are an enormous number of variables.
I'm not trying to take a side on this issue, I'm just using it as an example. These are issues of vast complexity. The facts are things experts can fight over. But do we really expect people to make political choices based on this information? Invocation of "facts" and "experts" have an intuitive appeal, but the "fact" is that for almost any disputed political issue, the facts are far from clear. So people use heuristics: ideologies, knee-jerk reactions, general principles, values. It's not clear to me that's wrong.
For most of these topics, if you think the solution is simple, you almost certainly don't understand the problem. The worst part is that most people have no interest in increasing their understanding, they just care whether they're scoring points for their team. And of course they do, because they've made their membership on this team a huge part of their identity.
I have had far too many acrimonious arguments with people I love because one or both of us have only been interested in strengthening our position. It is a tough habit to break - believe me. At this point, if somebody is not interested in exploring the possibility that either of us could be way off base, then I have no interest in talking with them.
Exactly. Amy Chau wrote a great book called The Triple Package that points this out and the fact that its not just Asians (which broadly lumps Indians and all other Asian cultures together): Nigerian immigrants, Cuban exiles, Lebonese, Mormons, Iranians, Jews, all see roughly the same phenomena of surpassing average American household income. Its considered taboo to point out that income inequality is largely cultural.
I wouldn't say "cultural" because that's pretty loaded. My point is more that if there were something structural about the economy that kept people in their class (big banks, bad public education, etc.) you wouldn't see high mobility in certain sub-groups. There has to be other factors in play--who knows what they are. But I wouldn't assume they're necessarily "cultural."
It may be loaded, but our cultural differences need to be considered. On average Asian and Indian cultures place a stronger emphasis on grades. This plays a large role in why they have been very successful by some metrics. If certain questions are taboo, then we might overlook factors that are setting them back. That doesn't mean that external factors aren't relevant, but we need to consider everything.
We need to ask uncomfortable questions. That's not bigoted in itself. Look at the gay community. A lot of gay men engage in very risky behaviour that can lead to the spread of STIs. As an LGBT person myself, I can tell you that it is still quite common. We need to be able to ask if they are doing self harm. In fact, we have asked these questions, which has led to measurable progress (STI prevention strategies have helped significantly).
It's very difficult to actually get to ground truth, especially with the rate at which social media and the news cycle moves. It's a constant onslaught of (mis)information and we don't have reliable institutions to make sense of it. Worse, it turns out facts don't really matter as far as this game is concerned. Each side is able to live in their own reality, able to look at the same thing yet come to opposite conclusions. It's highly predictable. Whatever Team A is for, Team B easily finds a way to be against. And vice versa. Sometimes the teams even switch positions in unison, since consistency doesn't matter either.
It's full on Kayfabe: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783
Democrats: 25.6% Republicans: 27.1% Reality: 5.5%
It seems the bigger bias comes from the general media than any particular party political bias.
From TFA: >> First and foremost, Republicans and Democrats tend to seek out very different news sources so they often get very different information.
It should raise red flags for everyone that news sources vary so much on reporting the same thing. We should be selecting news sources based on the types of things they report rather than the spin. Of course a lot of people taking in politically biased news are only aware of bias in news slanted the other way, and their own.
You can report nothing but verifiable facts and still add plenty of spin just by selecting the types of things you report. E.g. "here are the details of police deaths and injuries during the riots" versus "here are the details of protester deaths and injuries caused by the police".
Two versions of the same data:
- Bad outcome X rose by 55% over last year (under Party Y, those scoundrels)
- Bad outcome X affected 17 people this year, up from 11 last year, out of a population of 35 million
Here's a passage from the book that coined the term (as a word from an alien language)
> Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.
We exist at a particular moment in time, and language is a tool that is used to be understood. If one wishes to use arcane and literal etymologically-derived definitions of words, it is necessary to say so.
So they're literally just getting the money back that they paid into it. Probably considerably less, even!
So why should anyone care that they're collecting a benefit that they paid for? I don't get it.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...
(I don't mean to imply anything meaningful by this, just that the answers for that question tickled a memory of world demographics)
Many of these answers will simply be guesses. I think it would be far more informing if these answers were broken down by people who believe they are knowledgeable or who support certain policies.
One trick to circumvent this is to report the OPPOSITE conclusion first, and then say, 'actually, it was the opposite' after the listener says 'well, duh.'
In our own reading, it can be helpful to invert the conclusion and ask how surprising that would seem...
In reality, we don't know until we test... We have a lot of stories and biases that we carry all over the place, some are useful, most are shorthand, and many will lead us to wrong conclusions.
Study finds political bias improves perception of verifiable facts.
I don't think I heard a lot of "well, duh".
> In reality, we don't know until we test... We have a lot of stories and biases that we carry all over the place, some are useful, most are shorthand, and many will lead us to wrong conclusions.
And even when we test, we don't really know, because we don't know whether we're talking about the same thing. What does "immigrant" mean? Are you still an immigrant after having lived in the US for 30 years? Is a naturalized citizen still an immigrant, or does he cease to be an immigrant when he becomes a citizen? Do you consider the children of an immigrant to be an immigrant? If so, for how many generations? Are you absolutely sure that everybody you talk to answers these questions the same way you do?
I'm often surprised how vague these political surveys are and how loose they play with language. And I'm even more surprised when they then use the data to make strong calls.
I'm pretty sure if you define the words, you get different results, e.g. ask about "immigrants in the last 10 years", or say "immigrants who have not become citizens that immigrated in the last 80 years". When you only use vague terms, you're not really asking what people believe the numbers to be, you're asking what people understand the term to mean AND what they believe the numbers to be for that understanding.
A current example is asking about racism, where it's no longer just academia where you might encounter something like "systemic effects disadvantaging local minority populations" as the working definition, while the average person might understand it closer to "discrimination based on race". You'll get very different responses based on what definition the person is working with, even when you ask about the same metric, e.g. "how often do you witness racism in your work place?"
This is one way of flipping it.
What if we go with
Study finds conservative bias improves perception of verifiable facts.
and
Study finds liberal bias improves perception of verifiable facts.
showing each to people who respectively identify with those labels? Then, I think we would see a lot of people going "well duh"
I don't think that "ideology lessens your ability to perceive reality" falls under worldview, though, and I cannot imagine that anybody was surprised by the result itself. That doesn't make the study useless, it's interesting and important to know how strong the effect is, whether it changes over time or can be negated etc. But other than that? Study finds that people shot with guns die more often than control group. I don't think you need to be an anti-gun-activist to say "well, duh".
More importantly: how did independents and apolitical people guess? Were they closer to the "real" numbers?
Which doesn't seem surprising at all to me... After all, is the sky red if Trump says it is?
That's true, but there are different kinds of facts, and the argument isn't meant for all of them. "Is water wet? Study finds overwhelming bipartisan agreement!" Finally some common ground.
In fact, your post on that story was:
> Did you all know that humans need oxygen to survive? And that the ways we consume oxygen can affect our health?
It doesn't seem like you really understood what they were saying. It's much more complicated than this and doesn't warrant that sort of shallow dismissal.
Regulating your breath can be used to regulate your body and mind. There are lots of different techniques that can regulate different things. Heck, let's totally avoid the "hippy dippy" stuff... Valsalva maneuver for example which is used to diagnose Dysautonomia by slowing your heartrate. Or how about the Navy SEALs box breathing to control cortisol levels? Boy am I glad we "waste our time" researching this stuff!
More data here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantcheva/files/slides_ae...
The extreme _regional_ wrongness about economic mobility is particularly interesting; people in places with higher mobility tend to somewhat downplay it; those in places with lower mobility tend to massively upplay it.
Only about 40-60% of the US population votes, and I doubt a majority follow politics closely.
Plus, kids grow up and need to learn things that seem obvious to older folks.
Glad you knew this already, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's interesting to many others.
Better title: political bias skews guesstimates that COULD be verified.
Are we really surprised that people don't know by heart the percentages of income mobility statistics? Also, although the questions, as posed, are technically verifiable, that's not what people really care about - do I care about a statistic of income mobility that includes my parents (soon to be pensioners)? Not really; I care about future projections - the income mobility of myself, and my future kids. That's what policy bickering is about.
Edit: the actual (not HN) title of the article is even more clickbait-y: When we can’t even agree on what is real
There's more to it than just what you pulled out.
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/10/2/29
Sometimes it's better to have uninformed priors if you want to give everyone an equal chance.
When you talk to left wingers and right wingers about the economy of the last ten years the left guys will tell you it was paradise until 2016 and then everything went to hell. The right wingers will tell you it was misery until 2016 and then the boom started. When you look at stock indices, unemployment or other charts you will see a steady rise over ten years. You won’t even see that the president has changed. But pointing that out is futile. Most people don’t want facts.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1358/dow-jones-industrial-averag...
You may not care about facts, but don't generalize too quickly.
I can't see the paper to be sure because it's behind a paywall.
What share of U.S. immigrants receive unemployment? What share of U.S. immigrants are Muslim?
Why do people even hazard a guess at this stuff? Does your average Joe registered voter really think they have such a handle on immigration in their country that they think they know the religion of everyone coming in and who is receiving exactly what benefits?
Talk about the Dunning–Kruger effect...
And if they don't guess, and move onto the next question, then they're eliminated from the aggregated results.
Are you referring to human traffickers?