I was wondering if you'd bring up Wakefield. The scary thing is how easily the lie latches on and how hard it is to dislodge. Even though his study---which arguably kicked off the anti-vax movement---has long been discredited, there's no shortage of people who now treat "Vaccines cause autism" as an axiom.
Yes. This sort of misinformation is so pervasive, and that has really disappointed me in the past. I no longer have such lofty expectations for human reasoning and intelligence as I once did.
Yup, I've felt like that about the wave of Orwellian-level of misinformation coming out of Russia after the Euromaidan protests in 2014 and watching real people take it at face value. That was my learning moment, I think.
Strange, I don't recall any yuge, monumental decisions made in the US in 2016 that affected anything of any significance. And let me tell you, I've got the best memory. They come to me and they tell me, "Daniel, your memory is unbelievable!" I remember more things than Wikipedia, believe me. I'm the best memorizer in the history of all nations. Nobody remembers things like I do, folks.
Ha! I mean, Trumpism was a big part of it, but it was far from contained to the US, sadly. Brexit is the most visible of all the changes from that year, but that's also when the system's dam started to break and authoritarianism everywhere got a huge boost.
The eternal optimist in me wants to believe that these lunges to the right and/or authoritariarism are temporary pendulum swings around a line that's otherwise trending towards more liberal and inclusive societies, but it sure is hard to feel like that's true at some points.
It is not directly cherry-picking (However, it is possible he was only cherry-picking those points that can be easily ridiculed, thereby sidestepping the more substantial and serious evidence presented in the Surgeon General's report). Still, someone using anecdotes to explain, especially a person who wrote a book about "How to Lie with Statistics":
Darrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie with Statistics, was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent surgeon general’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies.” Huff peppered his attack with amusing asides and anecdotes, lampooning spurious correlations like that between the size of Dutch families and the number of storks nesting on rooftops—which proves not that storks bring babies but rather that people with large families tend to have larger houses (which therefore attract more storks).
I have read a book with the above name, too. Both these books are interesting reads.
Daniel also wrote "How to Lie with Smoking Statistics" but never published it. The Tobacco industry funded it. Here is a link for the partial manuscript of Huff's book (I have not read it):
Maybe we should vaccinate those immigrating and those visiting from countries that do not have immunization... instead of giving our infants 12 shots and continue to invite diseased people...
It would of course mean less money for big pharama....
Yup, a helpful tool for confirmation bias. On a semi related note, I was in a support text chat today with someone whose name - chosen perhaps by hippie parents - was Cherry Garcia.
People say data doesn’t lie. What you’ve cleverly simplified into a great (and very shareable) analogy is that while ‘data doesn’t lie’, how the data is cherry-picked to tell a specific narrative is a manipulative form of the truth. This is glaringly obvious in today’s media and narrative. Now as David mentions above, the amount of data available is mountainous and there is no way to include it all and keep an audience. This ‘forces’ you to pick a narrative and using supporting data to help enforce the narrative. Ideally you have a neutral party examining the cherry tree to spot both the ripe and ready cherries and the cherries who’ve succumbed to some bird nibbles or old age, and who can then proclaim without partisanship which cherry trees actually produce the best cherries. But in reality, it’s all cherry-picking. I spent several years as a Client Partnership Manager for a fleet leasing company. We invested more and more funds into technology to gather more and more data on the fleets behavior. The more data we had, the better recommendations we could make for improving their fleet management (expenses for fleet are often in the top five expenses of a company, particularly those in service industries like plumbers, exterminators, contractors, etc). My primary role was to analyze a client’s data and make recommendations to reduce their expenses, improve efficiencies, etc. Coincidentally, we usually had another product or service they could add-on to help achieve those goals. Also coincidentally (?) I was compensated based on my ability to sell those add-on services. I was always surprised by the amount of trust my clients gave in my presentations of their data and the resulting recommendations. It was rare anything was questioned. Now in this situation, you are fostering what you hope to be long-term clients so you really do want to help them achieve success. In today’s media, it’s all about quick hits and click-bait - the shiniest and sparkliest of the cherries available. The moral integrity of the data-analyzer and transparency of data is underrated and under-valued. I may have gone off on a tangent here, but the last eight years or so of political reporting has made me wish everyone had the opportunity to realize all data is manipulated to tell a specific story. Stories are what capture people and engage them, as in the vax narrative, and make it so hard to reverse. And until you really ‘do your own research’ you’re gullible to those being compensated for their story-telling.
The democratic world really needs to come to terms with the idea that democracy requires a LOT of work. It is NOT the laziest form of government! You can have someone else tell you what to do and think, and that seems to be very appealing to a lot of people in the world.
Political polling ‘results’ are another prime example of cherry-picking data. Ironically, those same people being told what to do and what to think are the first to claim to have ‘done their own research’.
Cherry picking data is appropriate when evaluating the moral character of others. We should give more weight to people’s good qualities and less to their negative attributes. Giving others the benefit of the doubt can’t happen without a little cherry picking.
When you write history books and essays, as I do, it is impossible to explain everything about what you are writing about in detail, as there is only so much time you can logically work and only so much time an audience is willing to employ to read your work. (The era of the multi-volume history books of Gibbon and Macaulay is long gone.) As a consequence, you have to cherry-pick what factual information you are going to discuss and cite in the footnotes/endnotes (as you are required to do) so that you can shape it into a proper-length narrative. For my first non-fiction book, I collected a great amount of quotes and data that I used in the text, but also a lot that I didn't, but I keep it all at hand for the next time it needs to be used.
I was wondering if you'd bring up Wakefield. The scary thing is how easily the lie latches on and how hard it is to dislodge. Even though his study---which arguably kicked off the anti-vax movement---has long been discredited, there's no shortage of people who now treat "Vaccines cause autism" as an axiom.
Yes. This sort of misinformation is so pervasive, and that has really disappointed me in the past. I no longer have such lofty expectations for human reasoning and intelligence as I once did.
Yup, I've felt like that about the wave of Orwellian-level of misinformation coming out of Russia after the Euromaidan protests in 2014 and watching real people take it at face value. That was my learning moment, I think.
2016 for me. I was very cynical about our system, capitalism, etc long before waking up to how dumb everyone is.
I jest a bit and oversimplify a great deal, but I really did hold out hope for human intellect for a long time.
Strange, I don't recall any yuge, monumental decisions made in the US in 2016 that affected anything of any significance. And let me tell you, I've got the best memory. They come to me and they tell me, "Daniel, your memory is unbelievable!" I remember more things than Wikipedia, believe me. I'm the best memorizer in the history of all nations. Nobody remembers things like I do, folks.
Ha! I mean, Trumpism was a big part of it, but it was far from contained to the US, sadly. Brexit is the most visible of all the changes from that year, but that's also when the system's dam started to break and authoritarianism everywhere got a huge boost.
Agreed. Brexit was also a massive shock.
The eternal optimist in me wants to believe that these lunges to the right and/or authoritariarism are temporary pendulum swings around a line that's otherwise trending towards more liberal and inclusive societies, but it sure is hard to feel like that's true at some points.
It is not directly cherry-picking (However, it is possible he was only cherry-picking those points that can be easily ridiculed, thereby sidestepping the more substantial and serious evidence presented in the Surgeon General's report). Still, someone using anecdotes to explain, especially a person who wrote a book about "How to Lie with Statistics":
Darrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie with Statistics, was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent surgeon general’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies.” Huff peppered his attack with amusing asides and anecdotes, lampooning spurious correlations like that between the size of Dutch families and the number of storks nesting on rooftops—which proves not that storks bring babies but rather that people with large families tend to have larger houses (which therefore attract more storks).
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics."
I have read a book with the above name, too. Both these books are interesting reads.
Daniel also wrote "How to Lie with Smoking Statistics" but never published it. The Tobacco industry funded it. Here is a link for the partial manuscript of Huff's book (I have not read it):
https://www.refsmmat.com/articles/smoking-statistics.html
Maybe we should vaccinate those immigrating and those visiting from countries that do not have immunization... instead of giving our infants 12 shots and continue to invite diseased people...
It would of course mean less money for big pharama....
Who doesn’t like cherries?
Me, that's who. =P
I'm not really an enormous fan either, although admittedly that's because I'm uber lazy and spoiled. I don't care for pits and stems.
Yup, a helpful tool for confirmation bias. On a semi related note, I was in a support text chat today with someone whose name - chosen perhaps by hippie parents - was Cherry Garcia.
Let me speculate a bit further that those parents might also be huge fans of Ben and Jerry's!
Point being - another well done thought provoking article about poop
Not literal poop, but definitely shit that can stink.
People say data doesn’t lie. What you’ve cleverly simplified into a great (and very shareable) analogy is that while ‘data doesn’t lie’, how the data is cherry-picked to tell a specific narrative is a manipulative form of the truth. This is glaringly obvious in today’s media and narrative. Now as David mentions above, the amount of data available is mountainous and there is no way to include it all and keep an audience. This ‘forces’ you to pick a narrative and using supporting data to help enforce the narrative. Ideally you have a neutral party examining the cherry tree to spot both the ripe and ready cherries and the cherries who’ve succumbed to some bird nibbles or old age, and who can then proclaim without partisanship which cherry trees actually produce the best cherries. But in reality, it’s all cherry-picking. I spent several years as a Client Partnership Manager for a fleet leasing company. We invested more and more funds into technology to gather more and more data on the fleets behavior. The more data we had, the better recommendations we could make for improving their fleet management (expenses for fleet are often in the top five expenses of a company, particularly those in service industries like plumbers, exterminators, contractors, etc). My primary role was to analyze a client’s data and make recommendations to reduce their expenses, improve efficiencies, etc. Coincidentally, we usually had another product or service they could add-on to help achieve those goals. Also coincidentally (?) I was compensated based on my ability to sell those add-on services. I was always surprised by the amount of trust my clients gave in my presentations of their data and the resulting recommendations. It was rare anything was questioned. Now in this situation, you are fostering what you hope to be long-term clients so you really do want to help them achieve success. In today’s media, it’s all about quick hits and click-bait - the shiniest and sparkliest of the cherries available. The moral integrity of the data-analyzer and transparency of data is underrated and under-valued. I may have gone off on a tangent here, but the last eight years or so of political reporting has made me wish everyone had the opportunity to realize all data is manipulated to tell a specific story. Stories are what capture people and engage them, as in the vax narrative, and make it so hard to reverse. And until you really ‘do your own research’ you’re gullible to those being compensated for their story-telling.
The democratic world really needs to come to terms with the idea that democracy requires a LOT of work. It is NOT the laziest form of government! You can have someone else tell you what to do and think, and that seems to be very appealing to a lot of people in the world.
Tangent or not, thanks for sharing this.
Political polling ‘results’ are another prime example of cherry-picking data. Ironically, those same people being told what to do and what to think are the first to claim to have ‘done their own research’.
Cherry picking data is appropriate when evaluating the moral character of others. We should give more weight to people’s good qualities and less to their negative attributes. Giving others the benefit of the doubt can’t happen without a little cherry picking.
Good example, Eli. David P here also made the observation that there's a whole other category, too: necessary cherry-picking.
When you write history books and essays, as I do, it is impossible to explain everything about what you are writing about in detail, as there is only so much time you can logically work and only so much time an audience is willing to employ to read your work. (The era of the multi-volume history books of Gibbon and Macaulay is long gone.) As a consequence, you have to cherry-pick what factual information you are going to discuss and cite in the footnotes/endnotes (as you are required to do) so that you can shape it into a proper-length narrative. For my first non-fiction book, I collected a great amount of quotes and data that I used in the text, but also a lot that I didn't, but I keep it all at hand for the next time it needs to be used.
Great example of a category I'll call "necessary cherry-picking."
I specifically asked what types of cherry-picking were useful, but I should have asked about necessary stuff too.
Good example, Eli. David P here also made the observation that there's a whole other category, too: necessary cherry-picking.