confirmation bias

“Studies Prove BMW Drivers Are Jerks”….And So It Begins

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments
"Look at THAT jerk. What's he up to, I wonder?"

“Look at THAT jerk. What’s he up to, I wonder?”

If you would like to ponder on how prejudices, stereotypes and bias worm their way into our brains, look no further than here, a Yahoo! report, via the Wall Street Journal, about how research backs up the widespread belief that drivers of BMWs are jerks. (Full disclosure: my son drives an old BMW, and loves it dearly. I love it less, because repairing the damn thing has required me to moonlight by entertaining at kids’ birthday parties and rodeos…)

Various studies, we are told, show drivers of the car are less likely to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks and to take the upper hand at four-way stops. In addition,

“…in the U.K., motorists were asked to identify the make and color of the car from which they have most frequently suffered road-rage incidents…The study of 2,837 motorists found men between the ages of 35 and 50 driving blue BMWs were most likely to be reported as having engaged in road-rage behaviors such as aggressive driving and swearing.” Continue reading →

Your Incompetent, Biased, Lazy, Untrustworthy News Media At Work: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
Remarkably, Norman Rockwell accurately predicted how news would be reported in 2013!

Remarkably, Norman Rockwell accurately predicted how news would be reported in 2013!

Last week, the Huffington Post breathlessly reported that McDonald’s could double its workers wages, thus giving them a “living wage,” by raising the price of a Big Mac by a mere 68 cents. This obviously had appeal to the HuffPo’s liberal sensibilities, more proof of how a big corporation was needlessly lining its pockets while exploiting the lowest rungs of the workforce. The “proof” was in a study that had been represented as a being run by a “University of Kansas researcher.” The study results looked so good that the fine progressives at the site just knew it had to be right—after all, it perfectly confirmed their own beliefs. This, I’m sure you have guessed by now, is confirmation bias in its purest form.

The Huffington post writer and editors didn’t check the source, and didn’t check the study. And as some non-biased, at least in the same direction, reviewers quickly found out when they did, neither held up. The “researcher” was an undergraduate (Arnobio Morelix, whose wonderful name alone would have made me want to check him out) , and the “study” might have been a term paper. The paper’s assumptions, conclusions and math didn’t hold up, as is fairly common for undergraduate papers. The Huffington Post had to retract its story, five days later.

Alas, too late! Continue reading →

Jackie Mitchell, The Girl Who Struck Out Ruth And Gehrig: A Legend And Ethics Conundrum

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

jackie-mitchell

The Jackie Mitchell saga is a great, feel-good story ruined by ethics rot. On one level, it is exactly the kind of tale that compels the treatment recommended by the old newspaper editor in John Ford’s “the Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” On another, it is an ethics mess, which might explain why I had never heard of Jackie Mitchell, once a proto-feminist icon, until I cracked open my new issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

Mitchell was a Depression era Chattanooga teenager who had been taught how to pitch by her friend and neighbor, Major League ace Dazzy Vance. A star on local women’s baseball teams, the tomboy southpaw was signed to a pro contract by the promotion-minded owner of a local AA level minor league team, the Lookouts, in 1931. Her big moment came when the New York Yankees came through Chattanooga from Spring Training on the way to opening the season up North. Lookouts owner Joe Engel arranged for two exhibition games against the Bronx Bombers, who, you baseball fans should know, included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Engel promoted the game as a David and Goliath showdown with Jackie playing David, and he was rewarded with a full stadium. Then this happened: Continue reading →

What Good Are Think Tanks If Only Partisans Will Believe Them?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments
Better to be blind than to be proven wrong?

Better to be blind than to be proven wrong?

As you probably have heard, the conservative Heritage Foundation, one of the most venerable think tanks, now overseen by former GOP Senator Jim DeMint, has released a report showing that the proposed immigration reform will cost over 6 trillion dollars. Naturally, no non-conservatives are treating it as anything other than a partisan document and a biased study. The same thing happens regularly when the Urban Institute or Brookings puts out a study, though the press, being tilted the same way, tends to treat these with more deference.

This is one more horrible way that bias makes truth-seeking difficult if not impossible. Ideally and logically, all think tanks and research institutions, not to mention the researchers themselves, should be objective. But donors, as they say in professional fundraising, give for their reasons, not yours, and when enough of your funding comes from  those with allied interests, their reasons inevitably become your interests. An American Enterprise Institute study that supported a liberal policy objective, like eliminating the capital gains discount, would have immediate credibility. It would also probably be suicidal. Thus the only think tank likely to examine the issue and show that capital gains should be taxed at regular rates would be one supported by George Soros or others like him…and for that reason, capable of influencing nobody. Continue reading →

Now Showing: “The Benghazi Chronicles,” or “How The Absence Of A Trustworthy And Objective Newsmedia Undermines Democracy”

/ Jack Marshall / 90 Comments
If you think she would lie to Congress, you must be one of those Obama-hating conservatives!

Never mind what the e-mails say: if you think she would lie to Congress, you must be one of those Obama-hating conservatives!

Did you know that the Obama Administration’s handling of the Benghazi fiasco last September and its subsequent explanations to the Congress, the American people and the world is under legitimate scrutiny once again, and that there may be credible and irrefutable evidence that the Administration both botched the response and lied about it? Did you know that at least three whistleblowers—Mark Thompson, deputy assistant secretary of state for counter-terrorism; Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission/charge d’affairs in Libya; and Eric Nordstrom, who acted as a regional security officer in Libya for the State Department—who had direct knowledge of the inner workings of the government during and after the crisis, will be testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, perhaps this week? Did you know that there is a significant possibility that, as Conservative pundits and Republicans were screaming at the time, the Obama Administration executed a deliberate and purely politically motivated cover-up operation designed to withhold the truth about the Benghazi attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and other U.S. personnel until after the elections, if not permanently?

Since this is an important and perhaps transformational developing news story, one would hope that you would know at least some of thus if you have frequented any “respectable” news source over the past few days, and not been spelunking. One would hope, and one would have that hope dashed. There was nothing about Benghazi over the weekend in the New York Times, or on NBC, ABC’s Sunday Morning news show. There was plenty of coverage, all day long yesterday, at Fox, and you know what that means (and is supposed to mean, and in carefully manipulated by the rest of the media to make sure it means), don’t you? The re-opening of the Benghazi issue is a “conservative story,” just concocted, twisted and massaged by the Obama-hating cabal!

To its credit, CBS, via “Face the Nation,” covered the story on Sunday while ABC, NBC and CNN chose to focus almost exclusively on Syria and immigration reform. Bob Shieffer opened the segment by referring to it as “the story that will not go away,” a self-revelatory intro, I think, since Bob, like most of his Obama-worshiping colleagues, probably wishes the story would go away. Yet he quoted one of the so-called whistleblowers, Greg Hicks, who  reportedly told investigators that the Administration, contrary to what Susan Rice was sent out to tell the public and what the President told the world, knew “from the get-go” that the attack wasn’t a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islamic video, but a coordinated terrorist act. Continue reading →

Valentining Bobby Valentine, Victim of Three Biases

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

MLB: Boston Red Sox at Toronto Blue Jays

Hindsight bias is bad, confirmation bias is worse, and naked bias is the worst of all. 2012 Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine was the victim of all three with a vengeance during that disastrous Boston baseball season, and is still. I have been tempted to write about Bobby’s plight since last August, when the Red Sox management threw in the towel on the season and the long knives really came out in the Boston press corps. Now Valentine has been gone for six months, half the team has been replaced, and spring is dawning, yet hardly a day passes in which one of these ink-strained wretches  doesn’t take a pot-shot at the deposed manager, leaving the absolutely false impression that he could have done anything to forestall or mitigate the cataclysm that befell the Red Sox in 2012. Continue reading →

Sandy Hook Massacre Ethics Train Wreck Special: Distortions From The Media, Excuses From The Biased, And A Call For Accountability

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Daily Beast, through the words of columnist David Frum. calls the latest disgraceful example of the news media bending the truth to manipulate public opinion regarding gun control, “The Newtown Heckling Controversy,.” This places that website on this train wreck as a Big Lie player. The classic formula for a Big Lie smear, for those of you who have read your Goebbels followers, is to make a blatantly false assertion, make the target of the unfair accusation deny it, and then treat it as a legitimate “controversy.” There is no controversy here, only liars and those who want to benefit from the lie, because there was no “heckling.” The real news story here is that the United States has not only developed an arrogant and ethics-free media establishment that no longer can tell true from false, it is getting more brazen by the day. There must be accountability.

The incident—or, as journalists who have decided that their jobs are not to report the news but to drive public policy in their favored direction would call it, the opportunity—occurred during the testimony before the Connecticut legislature by a parent of one of the Sandy Hook victims. [Note: I believe strongly that such testimony is itself unethical. Sorry. Legislation should be based on research, analysis, balancing, and objective analysis of what is in the best interests of the the public. There is literally nothing these parents contribute to this process, other than confusion, emotion, and dramatic video footage. They are not experts on guns, violence, the culture, the Constitution or the law. Their position is the epitome of bias. Their opinions are accorded undeserved weight by the media and mush-headed lawmakesr because they have suffered a personal , as if suffering confers sudden wisdom and balanced perspective. I know the practice is virtually routine, but it does no good, a lot of harm, and should be opposed by anyone interested in competent government.] Tearful and distraught, the grief-stricken father, Neil Heslin, said,

” I don’t know how many people have young children or children. But just try putting yourself in the place that I’m in or these other parents that are here. Having a child that you lost. It’s not a good feeling; not a good feeling to look at your child laying in a casket or looking at your child with a bullet wound to the forehead. I ask if there’s anybody in this room that can give me one reason or challenge this question: Why anybody in this room needs to have an, one of these assault-style weapons or military weapons or high-capacity clips.”

He waited, and glanced around the room. Then he said, “Not one person can answer that question!” Whereupon one clear voice with a several  others behind it call out,“The Second Amendment shall not be infringed!”

A moderator then says, “Please no comments while Mr. Heslin is speaking. Or we’ll clear the room. Mr. Heslin, please continue.”

This is what happened..this is what obviously happened. Heslin asked the occupants of the room a question posed as a challenge. Pro-gun advocates did not answer, assuming that despite the ambiguous form of the query—Heslin is not a skilled public speaker—it was a rhetorical question. Apparently Heslin didn’t think it was rhetorical, however, because he waited, as if for a response, and then made a statement that concluded unfairly, inaccurately and misleadingly that nobody in the room “can answer the question.” Predictably, a few then did answer his question, only to get slapped down by the moderator.

The headline writer at the Connecticut Post described this scene—falsely—as “Father of Newtown victim heckled at hearing.” That is a lie. Anyone who watches the video and equivocates in calling it a lie is allowing their judgment to be completely liquified by confirmation bias, or trying to facilitate a deception. Continue reading →

Consequentialism, Bias, Moral Luck and Malpractice on PBS’s “Downton Abbey”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

downton_abbey

The fourth episode of the PBS sensation “Downton Abbey” provided a clinical examination of how bias of all kinds can rule the most important decisions in our lives, and how moral luck so frequently determines our conclusions about whether those decisions were right, wrong, or really, really wrong. It also shed some light on the  current policy conundrum of how best to consider medical malpractice suits—as a fair and necessary means of rewarding the victims of professional errors, or as a decidedly unfair device that distorts the practice of medicine and inflates its costs without improving treatment.

For those who have not caught the trans-Atlantic mania of following the saga of the Earl of Grantham and his extended family as they try to maintain their life of luxury as members of the landed aristocracy post-World War I, here are the relevant plot points of the most recent episode (in the U.S.; Great Britain is a season ahead of us):

Sybil, the much loved but rebellious daughter of the Earl is staying at the family estate (all right, castle) as she prepares for childbirth. (She and her Irish revolutionary husband Tom are on the lam from British authorities, but never mind that). The Earl naturally wants the best medical care for his daughter, and rejects the long-time family physician, Dr. Clarkson, for the task, because he has made some faulty diagnoses of late that led to all kinds of sorrow in last season’s drama. So the Earl calls in a renowned surgeon to the upper crust who is upper crust himself, Sir Philip Tapsell. (He appears to be an arrogant, pompous jerk, but the show’s writers show him giving sage and well-worded advice to the Earl’s non-Irish revolutionary son-in-law on the delicate matter of his sperm count, so we know he’s not a fraud as well.)

The Earl’s American but far too deferential wife Cora (in case you wondered whatever happened to the cute Elizabeth McGovern from “Ordinary People,” the answer is, “This!”) seeks to rescue Dr. Clarkson from a stinging snub by insisting that he come to Downton Abbey and be present for the childbirth as what we would call a consulting physician to Sir Philip, who doesn’t want one. Two head-strong doctors and hostile doctors looking after the same patient—yes, this will work out well.

Sure enough, Sybil’s pregnancy takes an ominous turn. Her ankles are swollen (“Perhaps she has thick ankles!” huffs Sir Philip, pooh-poohing the symptom. “She does not!” replies loyal Dr. Clarkson), her mental state is confused, and there is protein in her blood. Clarkson concludes that Sybil is toxemic and believes she could suffer eclampsia if she isn’t taken to the hospital immediately for a Caesarian section. Sir Philip dismisses him as a hysteric hack, and insists that Sybil’s pregnancy is normal and fine. Since Caesarians were risky in the 1920’s, often resulting in the deaths of the mother, the baby, or both, he believes Dr. Clarkson is giving irresponsible advice. As critical minutes tick away, Lord Grantham asks Clarkson if he can guarantee that Sybil will survive the ordeal of a Caesarian. “There are no guarantees,” he replies, correctly. Not hearing what he wanted to hear, the worried father turns to Sir Phillip and asks how certain the blue-blood doc is that the operation is unnecessary. “Completely certain,” is the ridiculous reply.

Announcing that certainty is a better bet than equivocation, Lord Grantham decrees that Sybil will remain at the castle to have her child, which she promptly does. All seems to be well, too, with a healthy baby, a beaming mother, a relieved family, and a smugly gloating Sir Phillip. But then Sybil goes into the violent seizures characteristic of eclampsia, and it is too late to save her. She dies. Dr. Clarkson’s diagnosis was correct. The family is devastated; Sir Philip is stunned, Cora is furious at both him and her husband, and the Earl of Grantham is feeling guilty.

Got that?

Cora’s anger, the Earl’s guilt and the vindication of Dr. Clarkson are all the result of a bad-tasting recipe of hindsight bias and moral luck. Sybil might have not gone into convulsions. She might not have survived the Caesarian, in which case Dr. Clarkson would be the one looking incompetent, Sir Phillip would say “I told you so,” and Cora would be furious at a different doctor but the same decision-maker, her husband, who would still be sleeping in the guest room. Continue reading →

How Fake Statistics Become “True”: A Case Study From The Newtown Massacre Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments
As predicted, this ethics train wreck keep getting bigger.

As predicted, this ethics train wreck keep getting bigger.

There was a lot to wince about in Diane Sawyer’s “exclusive” interview two weeks ago with former Congresswoman Gabriella Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly. The Arizona couple announced their intention to launch a non-profit organization dedicated to more effective anti-gun violence measures, concentrating, predictably, on the prominent features of the maniac’s rampage in Tucson that left Giffords with brain injuries that will impede her for a lifetime. Nothing to wince about regarding the effort, but Giffords’ diminished state—she can speak in only short burst of words, cannot see well out of one eye, and has difficulty walking—is tragic. It reminded me how unconscionable it was that she held her post in the Congress for more than a year when it should have been clear that her disabilities precluded her functioning as a Representative. The disturbing feeling also arose that Giffords, in her current pathetic condition, is now like the children President Obama used as window dressing for his gun-related Executive Orders announcement at the White House, an exploited figure of sentiment and public manipulation being used in the anti-gun wars. Her name was listed as the author of a first person op-ed in USA Today that contained sentences and perhaps thoughts that she cannot possibly compose. Diane Sawyer told us that she will be dragged into Congressional offices with her husband to seek support from her former colleagues, who will be forced, as Sawyer said, to say no “to her face.”

The most substantive wince, however, came from a statement of “fact” by Mark Kelly, who told Sawyer this:

“You know, how do we get to the point where 85 percent of the children in the world that are killed with guns are killed in the United States. That is a sobering statistic.”

Sobering, and obviously nonsense. Continue reading →

Yahoo Flunks A Confirmation Bias Test

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Just as you always suspected: THIS is the average Fox News viewer.

Just as you always suspected: THIS is the average Fox News viewer.

Be honest now: If you were a news editor and this press release came across your desk, what would you think? What would you do?

Birmingham, Alabama (PRWEB)

December 04, 2012

The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence. Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group.

One test involved showing subjects a series of images and measuring their vitals, namely pulse rate and blood pressure. The self-identified conservatives’ vitals increased over 35% when shown complex or shocking images. The image that caused the most stress was a poorly edited picture of President Obama standing next to a “ghostly” image of a child holding a tarantula. Test subjects who received their news from other outlets or reported they do not watch the news scored an average IQ of 104, compared to 80 for Fox News viewers. Continue reading →