confirmation bias

Personal Taste Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In a Sunday post on Powerline, Scott Johnson, an unrepentant Hall & Oates fan, begins a review of a recent John Oates concert by writing, “John Oates is one-half of what is generally recognized as the most successful duo in music history.” And thus did he fall into the eternal trap awaiting those who state matters of personal taste as fact.

I’ve fallen into it myself. It is hard not to: once your mind has locked itself into an opinion about what is “best” and what/who/where is better than whatever/whoever/wherever, confirmation bias takes over, and objective thought is nearly impossible.

Johnson was, as I knew the second I read that sentence, dragged to the metaphorical woodshed by his readers. Wrote one, in the second comment on the post, “John Oates is one-half of what is generally recognized as the most successful duo in music history? Maybe by sales. But in terms of their work, let me introduce you to the music of Simon & Garfunkel. Then the Everly Brothers. Then the Carpenters. Then Ike & Tina Turner.” Another wrote, “My guess is that Scott included that appraisal just to raise some feathers.
‘Maybe by sales.”‘Actually, I’d guess that the first three you mention sold way more records than Hall and Oates. Musically speaking, my candidate for the most successful duo might be Steely Dan, which, for most of its tenure, was really the duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker with various backing musicians.”

Next came this: “Yes to Simon and Garfunkel. Yes to Phil and Don. No to the Carpenters and heck no to Ike and Tina.”

Now in my case, and by my tastes, I would rank Simon and Garfunkle way ahead of Hall and Oates, and the Everly Brothers as well. No, of course The Carpenters aren’t in the same league, though Karen Carpenter was the greatest vocalist ever to sing with any rock or pop duo. Another group didn’t last as long, and perhaps this is because my college room mate played their Greatest Hits album day and night, but I rank the Righteous Brothers ahead of Hall and Oates as well.

Such absolute verdicts also risk being incomplete and ill-informed because of bias blindness. I wondered about another duo who made their mark in the decidedly uncool genre of “easy listening” music, but they were damn good, and lasted a long time. The piano duo Ferrante & Teicher recorded over 150 albums, were fixtures on the variety TV shows of the Fifties and Sixties, and sold over 90 million records worldwide during their career. From the 1950s until they retired in 1989, they earned 22 gold and platinum records, dwarfing the output of both Hall and Oates and Paul and Artie.

You have to admit, as that video of them playing one of their biggest hits, “The Theme From Exodus,” the piano boys did what they did as well as it was possible to do it, for a long time, and with a lot of admirers.

I Am Increasingly Reaching The Conclusion That We Can’t Trust Anyone, “Experts,” Researchers and Scientists Included: My Dan Ariely Disillusionment

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

We’ve had some interesting discussions here about “experts” here of late, notably this post. I am rapidly reaching the point where anyone who appeals to authority to justify his or her position, particularly if the authority is a study, a report, an “expert” or a scientist, immediately inspires my skepticism and even suspicion. Now what?

Once again, Duke professor and researcher Dan Ariely is in the news, and not in a good way. Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business is named 636 times in the more than 3 million additional Epstein files released on January 30. He may be innocent of any wrong-doing and he and Epstein may have just played in a Fantasy Baseball league together, but the problem this creates for me is that I have been using Ariely’s work as authority in my ethics seminars for as long as I can remember.

For more than a decade, I told incoming members of the D.C. Bar as part of their mandatory ethics training that such sessions as mine were essential to making their ethics alarms ring. To support that thesis, I related the finding of research performed by Dan Ariely when he was at M.I.T. Ariely created an experiment that was the most publicized part of his best-selling book “Predictably Irrational,” giving Harvard Business School students a test that had an obvious way to cheat built into it and offering small rewarde for the students who got the highest scores. He tracked how many students, with that (small) incentive to be unethical, cheated. He also varied the experiment by asking some students to do simple tasks before they took the test: name five baseball teams, or state capitals, or U.S. Presidents.

None of these pre-test questions had any effect on the students’ likelihood of cheating, except for one question, which had a dramatic effect.  He discovered that students who were asked to recite a few of the Ten Commandments, unlike any of the other groups, never cheated at all. Never. None of them. Ariely told an NPR interviewer that he had periodically repeated the experiment elsewhere, with the same results. No individual who was asked to search his memory for a few of the Ten Commandments has ever cheated on Ariely’s test, though the percentage of cheaters among the rest of the testees is consistently in double figures. This result has held true, he said, regardless of the individual’s faith, ethnic background, or even whether they could name one Commandment correctly.

The classic moral rules, he concluded, reminded the students to consider right and wrong. It wasn’t the content of the Commandments that affected them, but what they represent: being good, or one culture’s formula for doing good. The phenomenon is called priming, and Ariely’s research eventually made me decide to start “The Ethics Scoreboard” and later this ethics blog.

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Sears Cartoon Addendum: The Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Waay back in 2012, Ethics Alarms presented “The Knight Scale,” described as a “ten point scale for rating the outrageousness of race-card sightings.” I named the scale after a race-baiting L.A. blogger who insisted that the cartoon above, suggesting that First Lady Michelle Obama was taking on imperial airs as the Obama departed for yet another lavish family vacation, was “racist.”

I revised the Knight Scale in 2017, writing in my introduction that…

” Race-baiting has been one of the primary features of public discourse embedded in our culture by having a black President, was well as one with so many unscrupulous race-obsessed supporters and so much evidence of incompetence and dishonesty to try to defend. Its widespread use, tacitly approved if not orchestrated by the White House, has also contributed to the vastly deteriorating race-relations in the U.S., along with the racial distrust and anger fueling it. I have stated, and strongly believe, that this will be, above all else, Barack Obama’s legacy. The tragedy this represents cannot be over-stated. I am offering now and belatedly a revised Race-Baiting Scale, running from 1, the least offensive and significant form of race baiting, to 11, the worst and most unethical.  Two notes: 1) All entries are based on the assumption that no actual racist or bigoted conduct has occurred, and 2) It is stipulated that all actual racist conduct or bias is unethical and should be called out and condemned.”

Here is the current version of Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale (I’m retiring “Knight”). The race-baiting flagged in the previous post is a classic #11.

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Gee What a Surprise: NOAA “Adjusts” Its Historical Weather Data Just As “Climate Change Deniers” Claim They Do

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Of course, the corrupt news media sees no problem with this. As ABC helpfully points out, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information “adjusts weather data to account for factors like instrument changes, station relocation and urbanization, and it does so through peer-reviewed studies that are published publicly through its federal website.”

And factors like the need for climate scientists to show that the climate change apocalypse that they constantly predict for us is based on convincing data, when in fact it is based on flawed data, as the scientists admit once you cut through the jargon. For example, traditional glass thermometers have been replaced with more precise digital sensors warranting “adjustments” to accurately compare readings between the two instruments. Sea surface temperatures used to be taken manually from a bucket off of a boat, unlike the network of buoys and satellites that are used to gauge water temperatures today. Then there is the “urban heat island effect”: Cities heat up more than rural areas due to human activity, infrastructure and the concentration of buildings, roads and other heat-absorbing materials, causing higher temperatures in cities compared to surrounding areas. This can distort temperature data, making an area appear hotter than it is. So the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration makes adjustments to account for that too.

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“This is Basil. Though He Is a PhD, a Professor, and a Democratic Political Consultant, Bias Has Made Him Stupid and Ridiculous. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductable Donation to Help Us Find a Cure For Basil and Victims Like Him?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

 Confirmation bias may be the most destructive bias of them all, creeping into the best of minds and casing them to malfunction wildly, and, in tragic cases like that of Basil Smilke, causing them to say and do things that destroy their credibility while making them look ridiculous. This is the bias that makes human beings see and believe what they want to see and believe when a conflicting reality is right in front of them.

I actually did a Danny Thomas spit-take when I read Smilke’s opinion column on CNN’s website titled, “Kamala Harris is not a liability. She may be Democrats’ best weapon.” I got a mouthful of coffee on Spuds, who was lying on me, and he was not pleased. Reading the headline, I was prepared to see that the crazy thing had been authored by a student at Madame Louisa’s Home for the Bewildered, but no. Smilke appears to be well credentialed and to have all his faculties, not that being a professor and director of the Public Policy Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute of Hunter College is the highest step on the academic ladder, but hey: Hunter has more credibility than Harvard, and it doesn’t allow plagiarism.

Now, I recognize that Smilke is also a Democratic Party political operative and consultant, so there is an alternate explanation for the piece that doesn’t make him look like a confirmation bias-infected moron. He could be lying to the public and to Kamala Harris in the hopes of getting a job. That would be unethical, of course, but then he’s a Democratic Party political operative and  consultant.

His opinion piece—and why would even CNN publish something this absurd?—reads like it was written under the influence of some powerful mind-altering drug. Here is his argument:

  • Harris has been unfairly savaged by Republicans and conservatives (and a substantial number of Democrats, but he doesn’t mention that) because she is a black woman. It’s all sexism and racism. “Biden’s second-in-command, a former US senator and California attorney general, is being dragged down by a barrage of tropes, the kinds of chatter that many women and racial minorities frequently confront in politics.”

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Regarding Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town”

/ Jack Marshall / 78 Comments

Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like

Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you’re tough

Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town

Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they’re gonna round up
Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck

Try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town

Full of good ol’ boys, raised up right
If you’re looking for a fight
Try that in a small town
Try that in a small town

Try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town

Try that in a small town
Ooh-ooh
Try that in a small town…

Suddenly, a fairly standard issue Country Western anthem released in May by a singer I had never heard of is a battleground in the culture wars. I’ve listened to it several times now. Woke Central Command apparently put out a memo declaring that the song is an existential threat to democracy, or something, and the mainstream media has rallied to the cause. State Representative Justin Jones of Tennessee (Guess which party!) condemned the song on Twitter, describing it as a “heinous song calling for racist violence” that promoted “a shameful vision of gun extremism and vigilantism.” The Washington Post, incredibly, has published six op-eds attacking it in hysterical terms. The song is a call for lynchings! It’s advocating vigilantism! Major Tipton would like a word…

For heaven’s sake: the song is an unsubtle paean to traditional values, individual rights, respect for the law, and community harmony, while impugning the priorities and values of urban centers. That’s all. It’s hardly an unusual theme for a Country Western song. Far more significant than the song is the extreme reaction to it on the ideological Left. The song’s sentiments represent a threat to Woke World’s mandatory conformity with the progressive agenda, so the song itself must be censored, canceled, wiped out of public consciousness.

These people are getting desperate.

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More Disney Ethics: The NYT Movie Critic’s Review Of “The Little Mermaid” Highlighted What’s Wrong With Disney’s Wokism, But Conservatives Didn’t Notice

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Ah, the curse of confirmation bias! So determined are conservative pundits and bloggers to condemn the New York Times as being a full conspirator in the effort to wokify U.S. society and culture that it missed the paper’s movie critic admitting that the movement wasn’t working. Wesley Morris, who is clearly Democrat, progressive, and an African American, began his review of the already controversial live action version of “The Little Mermaid” thusly:

The new, live-action “The Little Mermaid” is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing. The movie is saying, “We tried!” Tried not to offend, appall, challenge, imagine.

“Dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions.” That’s a perfect, if incomplete, description of what political correctness and the cultural fascists of the Left have wrought. But because the critic appended  “kink” at the end of “joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor,” the qualities he felt the movie was missing, that word was all the critics of the critic could see. “NY Times ripped for piece lamenting lack of ‘kink’ in new ‘Little Mermaid’: ‘The left sexualizes kids'” Fox News announced, and it was typical.

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San Francisco Spin, Brought To You By The Great Stupid: “Since Bob Lee Wasn’t Murdered By A Drug Addict, Homeless Person Or Coddled Criminal, The City Is Safe After All, So There!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It’s come to this.

San Francisco is one of many irrationally woke cities falling apart in chunks because of “social justice” policies that encourage crime, make responsible citizenship difficult, and devastate local businesses. “The City by the Bay” is a particularly depressing case study in the nationwide phenomenon, with the city’s most storied locations marred by human feces, discarded drug paraphernalia, and obstreperously entitled homeless. Meanwhile, businesses are fleeing because shoplifting has become epidemic.

When Bob Lee, the former chief technology officer of Square and one of the founders of Cash App, was stabbed to death ten days ago, his high-profile murder was pointed to by social media critics and conservative pundits as more evidence of San Francisco’s decline as its culture embraces progressive cant over the lessons of civilization. Ah, but this week a rival tech entrepreneur was arrested for the murder, prompting the city’s defenders–and the defenders of its bonkers policies— to launch into one of the most bizarre victory laps ever conceived.

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Ethics Alarms On The New York Times’ “Most Important Debates” Of 2021, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Part I set some kind of Ethics Alarms record for reader disinterest, which I much admit, I don’t understand. These are all topics we have covered in some detail here over the last year, and the analysis of them by the alleged “newspaper of record’s” experts is, to say the least, perverse and revealing…yet the post’s first installment inspired just a single comment. Well, the Times’ take on the remaining issues are arguably worse. I find it fascinating, anyway. Here’s the rest of the highlights…

Can we save the planet?

It is embarrassing for a supposedly respectable news organization to frame an issue in such a hysterical and intentionally fear-mongering manner, which assumes one side of a debate is correct without reflection of nuance. The Times’ author on this topic, Farhad Manjoo, is a tech reporter, not an expert on climatology, so he has been given a platform to opine on something he doesn’t understand sufficiently to discuss reliably. On the topic of climate change, this is, sadly, typical. His article contains the kind of sentence midway through that would normally make me stop reading because of the bias, spin, hyperbole and mendacity: “During the Trump years — as the United States tore up international climate deals and flood and fire consumed swaths of the globe — unrestrained alarm about the climate became the most cleareyed of takes.”

There were no “climate deals,” just unenforceable virtue-signaling and posturing like the Paris Accords; the link between present day “flood and fire” and climate change is speculative at best, and unrestrained alarm is never “cleareyed,’ especially when those alarmed, like Manjoo, couldn’t read a climate model if Mr. Rogers was there explaining it. Then, after telling us that the Trump years were a prelude to doom, he says that since 2014, things are looking up. Much of what he calls “bending the needle” occurred under Trump.

Should the Philip Roth biography have been pulled?

This one is so easy and obvious that the fact that the Times thinks it deserves special attention is itself a tell. The answer is “Of course not!,” as an Ethics Alarms post explained. An absolutely competent biography was pulled by its publisher, W.W. Norton, never to be in print again, because its author, who had written other acclaimed biographies, was in the process of being “cancelled” for allegations of sexual misconduct toward women. I wrote,

“…[P]ublisher W.W. Norton sent a memo to its staff announcing that it will permanently take Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth out of print, as a result of allegations that Bailey sexually assaulted multiple women and also behaved inappropriately toward his students when he was an eighth grade English teacher.

If that sentence makes sense to you, The Big Stupid has you by the brain stem.

It apparently makes sense to the Times, although its review of the matter doesn’t answer its own question. Why not? This is also obvious: as journalists, the idea that what a writer writes should be judged by what a writer’s personal life has involved is anathema, but the Times’ readers are so woke that the paper would dare not say so. Integrity! Continue reading →

A Follow-Up, An Apology, And A “Bite Me, Daily Wire!”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Charliebrown-1-

The previous post was one of the relatively few in which Ethics Alarms was suckered by bad information. As always when this happens, I am awash with regret and shame. Here is how it now begins, in bold:

“This is the revised part. The retraction is that despite the headline and what I wrote below, Twitter didn’t suspend New York Times columnist Bret Stephens account for violating Twitter’s rules with his recent op-ed calling anti-white measures showing up in the Biden Administration and elsewhere what they are: racism. The Daily Wire, a conservative website that was founded by right wing gadfly Ben Shapiro, wrote the post based on “a Twitter user” as its source,” and I foolishly assumed that the site would have checked out the claim before posting on it. It turns out the Stephens’ account says it’s “suspended” because he suspended it himself, in 2019.

Thus I am made an accomplice to this confirmation bias chain reaction, and I resent it. This is the kind of crap I experienced more than once from Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit, both of which are no longer cited as sources on Ethics Alarms, and whose stories I will not believe unless I find a credible source that independently confirms it. Now I’m adding the Daily Wire to that blacklist. There are plenty of left-leaning sites on that list as well, but since it is virtually impossible to ensure that a story that reflects poorly on the allies of progressive propaganda hasn’t been obscured or deliberately distorted by the mainstream media, conservative media has to be trustworthy and professional, and far too often, it just isn’t. Situations like this make it easier for the mainstream media to call every report they wish would disappear “conservative disinformation.”

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