Waiting for Goffman -- to understand how the New York Times' election coverage got so bad, you have to look beyond their election coverage.

[written before the election, but it still seems valid]

This pair of posts from almost nine years ago superficially would seem to have nothing to do with our ongoing discussion of the New York Times' catastrophic failures covering politics over the past few years. Other than a passing mention of Hillary Clinton's emails, the topic of elections doesn't come up at all and, to the extent that the NYT story showed an ideological bent, it was decidedly liberal.

But if you look deeper, the problems discussed here, particularly in the second post below, are highly relevant to the problems that have made the paper of record's coverage of the last few elections so bad. The common factor in all of these issues is the paper's culture which is arguably stronger than that of any other major news organization in the country. That, along with its sense of identity, exerts an obvious and well documented influence on everything we see coming out of the NYT.

The staff and especially the leadership of the New York Times operates under the axiomatic belief that theirs is the best paper in the country, arguably the world. It is not difficult to find statements that explicitly make this point while ones that implicitly make it pop up on literally a daily basis. The inevitable result has been a hostility to external criticism and a nearly complete inability for real self-examination. (There are people at the paper who can and do ask the right questions. They just don't tend to stay with the paper all that long.)

One more note. While the current problem with the New York Times go back at least to the nineties and there is much to admire about Dean Baquet (he is by practically every measure better than Joseph Kahn), he still has a great deal to answer for.

Monday, January 25, 2016

More thoughts on the Goffman story

Andrew Gelman set off an excellent discussion of the lingering questions about Alice Goffman's On the Run triggered by these two posts by Paul Campos. It's an interesting debate but not really in my area of focus. I do, however, want to weigh in on the way the New York Times Magazine chose to cover the controversy in this profile by Gideon Lewis-Kraus.

The first thing that struck me on reading this piece was how numbing will he formulaic this type of journalism has become. The stick-to-the-template structure, the pretentious tone, the straight-out-of-central-casting character sketch, the standard narrative arc of the bright young person with vision rising rapidly to great heights then brought down by attacks only to climb back up.
But with time, my reaction has shifted somewhat with more focus on the ethics of the piece than the aesthetics.

These full-access profiles are always problematic. Everything about the arrangement tends to bias the journalist in favor of his or her subject. Of course, many journalists are able to maintain their objectivity and make the arrangement pay off in increased information and improved insight, but even with a masterpiece of the genre like Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, these concerns cannot be entirely dismissed.

Based on an interview I heard Tom Wolfe give, both he and Ken Kesey have said that there were parts where Wolfe softened his account so as not to make the Merry Pranksters look bad and that the work suffered as a consequence (“Wolfe got most of it right, except he tried to be nice.”).

Lewis-Kraus is no Wolfe and he arguably crosses the line to apologist a number of times. Here's the passage that bothers me in particular. [emphasis added]:

Goffman has declined to make public the long, point-by-point rebuttal of her anonymous attacker, but after we got to know each other well, she shared it with me. It is blunt and forceful and, in comparison with the placidity of her public deportment, almost impatient and aggrieved in tone, and it is difficult to put the document down without wondering why she has remained unwilling to publicize some of its explanations. She acknowledges a variety of errors and inconsistencies, mostly the results of a belabored anonymization process, but otherwise persuasively explains many of the lingering issues. There is, for example, a convincing defense of her presence in the supposedly closed juvenile court and a quite reasonable clarification of the mild confusion over what she witnessed firsthand and what she reconstructed from interviews — along with explanations for even the most peculiar and deranged claims of her anonymous attacker, including why Mike does his laundry at home in one scene and at a laundromat in another.

Many claims against her are also easy to rebut independently. Some critics called far-­fetched, for example, her claim that an F.B.I. agent in Philadelphia drew up a new computer surveillance system after watching a TV broadcast about the East German Stasi. If you search the Internet for ‘‘Philadelphia cop Stasi documentary,’’ a substantiating item [http://articles.philly.com/2007-08-06/news/24995208_1_mapping-informants-dots] from The Philadelphia Inquirer from 2007 is the second hit. When it comes to Goffman’s assertion that officers run IDs in maternity wards to arrest wanted fathers, another short Internet search produces corroborating examples in Dallas, New Orleans and Brockton, Mass., and a Philadelphia public defender and a deputy mayor told me that the practice does not at all seem beyond plausibility. The most interesting question might not be whether Goffman was telling the truth but why she has continued to let people believe that she might not be.

This is questionable in any number of ways. Goffman is allowed to present her rebuttal in a manner that completely shields her from any kind of scrutiny or fact-checking. All of the information we'd need to evaluate her claims is withheld. Instead, a highly sympathetic journalist who is in her debt (let's be blunt.  Goffman did Lewis-Kraus a huge professional favor by allowing him this level of access) assures us repeatedly that we should take her at her word.

The lack, or perhaps more accurately the level of detail here is bizarre. In Goffman's apparently long and detailed document, there is no argument or piece of evidence that can be shared with the general readers. We aren't even given metadata. We have no idea whether these claims are supported by data, documents, arguments, or something else. We aren't even told the extent to which these were or weren't checked by the reporter.

The document is not, however, so sensitive that it cannot be shared with a journalist or that the journalist can't list specific charges that are rebutted.

I don't want to weigh in on the veracity of Goffman's book or on any of the related discussions. More than enough smart people are seriously engaging in this debate. If anything, I'm concerned that the controversy over relatively details is distracting from genuinely important points about racism, class bigotry and mass incarceration. But journalistic standards and culture are also important. You can make the case that bad, grossly unethical reporting decided the 2000 election and it is difficult to discuss the run-up to the Iraq War without mentioning the name Judith Miller. More recent (and relevant for the topic of this post) are the NYT fiascoes with the Clinton emails and the San Bernadino shooters. In both those cases, the paper allowed sources to feed inaccurate information to the public while agreeing to withhold information that might have helped readers evaluate the claims.

Obviously, there are valid reasons for a journalist to agree to withhold parts of information provided by a source. but Lewis-Kraus explicitly tells us that he knows of no reason not to share Goffman's rebuttal or give us any information that might help us evaluate it.

The decision to give Goffman's side of the argument without actually stating her arguments puts Lewis on shaky ground to begin with, but he then proceeds to present her case in the most favorable possible light while only briefly mentioning her more reputable critics from publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New Republic (neither Paul Campos nor Steven Lubet is mentioned by name).


I can understand the temptation to let valuable sources have too much say in the editorial process, but I'm surprised that a paper as proud of its standards as the New York Times would be so consistently quick to give in.  

 

________________________________________

 

Monday, February 1, 2016

The Other Half of the Problem

You probably all remember the issues the New York Times had with bad information from anonymous sources on the Hillary Clinton email story and the social media accounts of the San Bernardino shooters. More recently, our blog had a long post questioning the ethics of a New York Times Magazine piece that allowed a controversial scholar to present her side of an academic dispute in the most favorable conditions imaginable.

These and other incidents certainly suggest that the NYT needs to re-examine its standards and practices regarding sources, but to get a full sense of the problem you should take a look at the following from TPM's account of the reaction to the Sean Penn/Rolling Stone interview with "El Chapo":

New York Times editor Dean Baquet told Margaret Sullivan, the paper's public editor, on Monday that he "would have walked away from the interview." The newspaper's standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, said the paper does not grant "prepublication approval to anyone."

Pretty much anytime you point out an issue with the New York Times' ethics or quality control, this will be the other half of the problem: The paper really does see itself as a gold standard, not perfect perhaps, but far better than any of its peers. This attitude effectively prevents any serious self examination let alone real attempts at reform.

Would have New York Times have published the Sean Penn piece? I have no idea. Have they recently published articles that gave sources an inappropriate level of influence and thus misinformed their readers? Unquestionably. What's worse, the Rolling Stone piece came with a disclaimer.

The New York Times simply leaves it to us to it figure out on our own.

Sunday must read by Josh Marshall

This is Joseph.

I found this piece by Josh Marshall to be a really good reply to the waves of doom and gloom that I have been seeing lately. It's really thoughtful.

I especially liked: 

Even the history isn’t as simple as you may think. It’s actually very hard to convert a democracy into an autocracy. And the great majority of states where it’s happened are ones that only had a functioning civic democracy for a couple decades at most. Consider some of those other countries I noted above: Russia? Perhaps a decade of extremely tenuous democratic rule. Hungary? Maybe two decades, depending on how you choose to count. Weimar? At most a decade and really no more than half a dozen years of nominal stability before the onset of the Great Depression and the slide into electoral autocracy which preceded the Nazi seizure of power by about three years. The case of Turkey is more complicated but it’s features of electoral democracy were always highly, highly circumscribed. Every example is one where democracy had thin and recent roots, very different from the quarter millennium in which an evolving form of civic democracy has existed in the United States.

Really, this is the real point. It is one thing to acknowledge that some very poor policy decisions are about to be made and that there will be some real costs to American society. That is both real and true. But it is also the case that you can't assume that one side is forever in disarray while the opposing side is filled with high discipline people willing to act against their own self interest in the pursuit of one person's crusade for power. Life is always more complicated than that. 

When I am doing better, I will have some comments about my views in terms of micro and macro, but this is less the time for self reflection and more a time for moving forward. 

Randall has forgotten about induced demand

A rare math nerd/transportation nerd twofer.

From XKCD

Twelve years ago at the blog -- people still bothered to think about Freakonomics

Check out Steven Levitt's Wikipedia page.

Steven David Levitt (born May 29, 1967) is an American economist and co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics and its sequels (along with Stephen J. Dubner). Levitt was the winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal for his work in the field of crime, and is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago as well as the Faculty Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change at the University of Chicago^[2] which incubates the Data Science for Everyone coalition.^[3] He was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published by the University of Chicago Press until December 2007. In 2009, Levitt co-founded TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company.^[4] He was chosen as one of Time magazine's "100 People Who Shape Our World" in 2006.^[5] A 2011 survey of economics professors named Levitt their fourth favorite living economist under the age of 60, after Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw and Daron Acemoglu.^[6]

 It's easy to forget just what a big deal Levitt was in the early 2000s, and just how quickly he devolved into a hack after he turned forty.

Friday, October 26, 2012

When you start a sentence with "one good indicator of a person who’s not so smart," you should be extra careful about what you say next

Andrew Gelman spends some time on this latest quote from Steven Levitt on the rationality of voting:

DUBNER: So Levitt, how can you in your life, when you wander around, tell the difference between a smart person and a not-so-smart person?

LEVITT: Well, one good indicator of a person who’s not so smart is if they vote in a presidential election because they think their vote might actually decide which candidate wins. . . . there has never been and there never will be a vote cast in a presidential election that could possibly be decisive.

Gelman has been riding this beat for a long time, repeatedly pointing out the flaws in this strangely persistent argument. He makes a good case (part of which I basically paraphrase in point one), but there are other problems with Levitt's claims.

Here's a brief and certainly incomplete list of objections.

1. Every vote affects the probability distribution of a race, and since the difference in outcomes is so large, even a tiny change in probabilities can conceivably create a detectable change in expected value

2. Every vote in every race. Except for undervoting, we're talking about the combined impact for the entire ballot.

3. This isn't binary. The margin of a win can affect:

Perceived mandate and political capital;

Officials' decisions (particularly in non-term-limited positions). Congressmen who win by large margins are less likely to feel constrained about unpopular votes;

Funding. A lopsided defeat can make it harder for a candidate or a state party to raise money;

Party strategy. How much effort do you expend finding a challenger against an official who beat you by more than ten points last time?;

Media narrative.It's possible to come back after press corp has labeled you a loser, but it isn't easy.

and finally

4. The system works better with higher response rates. It's more stable and harder to game. Perhaps even more important, it does a better job representing the will of the governed.

That's the top of my head list. Undoubted, I missed some.

Gelman goes on:

I would not conclude from the above discussion that Levitt is not so smart. Of course he’s very smart, he just happens to be misinformed on this issue. I applaud Levitt’s willingness to go out on a limb and say controversial things in a podcast, to get people thinking. I just wish he’d be a bit less sure of himself and not go around saying that he thinks that Aaron, Noah, Nate and I are not so smart.

He's being overly diplomatic. Levitt isn't just misinformed; he's willfully misinformed. In issue after issue (drunk driving, car seats, solar energy) he has used sloppy reasoning to reach a controversial position, then has done his best to turn a deaf ear to those who pointed out his errors. We did get a partial retraction of his claims on driving*, but on others he has doubled down and occasionally resorted to cheap shots at those who disagreed with him.

Levitt is very smart. That's what makes this sort off thing so difficult to overlook.




* Though still leaving potential errors unacknowledged, such as the likely possibility that drivers in accidents are more likely to be checked for intoxication than pedestrians, that a stricter standard might be used, that many of the most intoxicated are prevented from driving and that intoxication is more likely to be noted in official records for drivers

 

Back on Mars – – houseplant edition

 [Picking up where we left off with our long neglected CSI:Mars thread.]

The way we discuss and think about the future of space has come to be dominated by a nonsensical mixture of magical heuristics, sci-fi tropes, inappropriate analogies to colonialism and the "settling" of the American West, and often libertarian ideology. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than with supposedly serious speculations about man's future presence on Mars.

Take for instance the following paragraph from the endlessly embarrassing Atlantic article:

What’s more, the power to generate and distribute something as basic as oxygen will give what Cockell called “levers of control” to specific, corruptible individuals. At one point, this inspired Cockell to create a tongue-in-cheek poster to illustrate one of his papers: alluding to classic British posters from WWII, its slogan read, “Grow Houseplants For Liberty.” “The idea,” he said, “is that the more people who grow plants on Mars in their habitats, the more oxygen that’s produced for the Martian atmosphere, and the less that needs to be produced by machines. There’s quite an interesting potential link between agriculture, plant growth, and freedom.” The more you control your own oxygen supply, in other words, the less the Martian state—or a predatory private oxygen firm—controls you.

Here, as in many discussions of the settling of Mars, oxygen takes on a role analogous to that of water in an old cowboy movie with and added element of mysticism layered on. In these narratives, plants often take on a magical quality and in this particular case, a strange political significance. Having a houseplant becomes an act of resistance, a way of declaring your independence from a tyrannical power.
Controlling the populace through oxygen supply has been a central plot point in countless science-fiction stories, but oxygen is only the beginning of your worries in this situation.

Almost none of these popular "what life will be like on Mars" articles come anywhere near addressing just how inhospitable the planet is. This is a freezing world with an incredibly thin atmosphere constantly bombarded by radiation. Given the amount of shielding necessary for surface dwellings, most of the habitats will have to be buried using heavy equipment. Once in place, everything necessary for sustaining life temperature, food, water, air pressure, will be dependent on extremely elaborate systems requiring constant maintenance. The idea that just having a fern in the corner will give you some extra measure of independence is absurd.

Of course, the entire conversation is even sillier when you take into account that despite the ubiquitous artists' renderings of space miners tapping away, even if someone comes up with a viable business model based on Martian mining, virtually all of the surface work will be done by robots who don't mind the high radiation, the intense cold or the near vacuum.  Given this and the difficulty and expense of transporting  humans and keeping them alive under these conditions, we'd expect a skeleton crew of absolutely essential workers. Less like the wide open mining camps of space operas, and more like a deep sea rig only with no shore leave.

Six years ago at the blog -- we've been meaning to get back to Mars (rhetorically speaking)

Going through the draft folder, I realized we had left this thread half finished -- there's a lot to mock here -- but rather than just jumping back in, here's the start.

I've done some googling and I still can't find any evidence that the Antarctica anecdote actually happened.

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Or you could have just taken away the bullets

I have all sorts of problems with this Atlantic piece [How Mars Will Be Policed by Geoff Manaugh] but before I get into those big complaints, there is a smaller point that bothers me.

When I asked Kim Stanley Robinson—whose award-winning Mars Trilogy imagines the human settlement of the Red Planet in extraordinary detail—about the future of police activity on Mars, he responded with a story. In the 1980s, he told me, a team from the National Science Foundation was sent to a research base in Antarctica with a single handgun for the entire crew. The gun was intended as a tool of last resort, for only the most dire of emergencies, but the scientists felt its potential for abuse was too serious to remain unchecked. According to Robinson, they dismantled the gun into three constituent parts and stored each piece with a different caretaker. That way, if someone got drunk and flew into a rage, or simply cracked under the loneliness and pressure, there would be no realistic scenario in which anyone could collect the separate pieces, reassemble the gun, load it, and begin holding people hostage (or worse).

First off, I wonder if this really happen. It's told in an apocryphal, urban-legend style that makes me somewhat skeptical. More to the point, I'm trying to think of what dire emergency which was likely to occur in an Antarctic research base would require a gun of any kind. It's hard to imagine what external threats they might have been worried about and the "let's have a gun around in case someone goes crazy" theory has one of those flaws that you'd like to think smart people would catch in the planning stage.

If it didn't happen, there is an obvious problem with it being presented as fact, but if it did happen, there is almost as great a problem with the lack of identifying information or collaborating detail. Has anyone out there heard this story before?

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

In 21st-century journalism, being completely debunked is no reason to drop the narrative.

As previously mentioned, there is much to object to in this recent Atlantic monthly piece "How Mars Will Be Policed" by Geoff Manaugh – – if I have the stomach for it, there is easily enough material here for a half dozen highly critical posts – – but perversely enough, it is the one really good part that best illustrates one of the worst aspects of modern journalism.

It is standard in medium to long form reporting, particularly in stories with a speculative or subjective element, to have an article that consists of a string of quotes from experts who are, if not in complete agreement, then are at least taking complementary positions. This chain is broken up by one or two dissenting voices who are completely ignored through the rest of the article.

Manaugh is nothing if not true to the form. Here is the relevant passage that occurs well into the piece.

For David Paige, worrying about crime on Mars is not just ahead of its time, it is unnecessary from the very beginning. Paige is a planetary scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as a member of a team selected by NASA to design a ground-penetrating radar system for exploring the Martian subsurface. Crime on Mars, Paige told me, will be so difficult to execute that no one will be tempted to try.

“The issue,” Paige said, “is that there is going to be so much monitoring of people in various sorts of ways.” Airlocks will likely record exactly who opens them and when, for example, mapping everyone’s location down to precise times of day, even to the exact square feet of space they were standing in at a particular moment. Inhabitants’ vital signs, such as elevated heart rates and adrenaline levels, will also likely be recorded by sensors embedded in Martian clothing. If a crime was committed somewhere, time-stamped data could be correlated with a spatial record of where everyone was at that exact moment. “It’s going to be very easy to narrow down the possible culprits,” Paige suggested.

It is difficult to overstate how effectively this point demolishes most of what has come before. It is completely reasonable to assume that, at least in the near future, any humans living or working on Mars will be constantly tracked. Barring some kind of hack or system failure, we would have a record of the exact position and vital signs of both perpetrator and victim of any crime on the planet. This doesn't preclude the possibility of robbery and murder on extraterrestrial bases, but it does effectively rule out the scenarios spelled out in the rest of the article.

One of the stranger and more malignant tenets of modern journalism is that simply mentioning a counter argument is sufficient for balance. You don't need to adjust your argument or explain why the criticism does not hold. In this case, Manaugh completely ignores the devastating main point, raises some weak and logically questionable objections (we'll go into the absurdity of the space roughnecks claim in another post), then goes back to his stories of mining camp murders and daring bank heists.

10 years ago at the blog – – it is now officially too late to be early.

Nothing like going back and reading the original transcript. (Plus original comments)

The wonderful thing about long-range predictions is that, by the time you can actually check them for accuracy, everyone has lost interest and is busy listening to your new round of long-range predictions. In this case we can't say that the claim was wrong (the Ted Talker gave himself a generous upper bound), but we can say that a general cure for cancer will not come faster than he predicted. That's an important point because many people consider it axiomatic that technological progress almost always happens faster than the experts predicted.

It's an idea so deeply held that people, particularly journalists (who, let's be frank, have an ulterior motive for going along with the story) often treat these conceptual IOUs as actual money in the bank, despite a long history of unpaid debts.

To be clear, we have and continue make enormous progress in the fight against cancer it is one of those fields where pretty much every year sees substantial advances, but it is also perhaps the canonical example of a problem that has shown again and again the dangers of hubris.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Assuming I didn't lose you at "TED Talk"

I need to do more research before I wade into this (or convince Joseph to do it for me), but even with the 10 to 50 year wiggle room, talk of having absolutely total confidence makes me nervous.

[GUY] RAZ: Which they did, an amazing scientific feat. They mapped the code that makes up all human DNA. Now they're still trying to figure out what it means, but they already know what it could mean for the future.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

RESNICK: The world has completely changed and none of you know about it.

RAZ: So how is it going to change the world?

RESNICK: In a bunch of ways. The good news is it's going to help us immensely in treating cancer 'cause cancer is nothing more than a disease of the genome. It's a disease where one cell has certain changes, which cause it to get a little bit worse and then it reproduces. And by the time you've got a solid tumor, you've got this really heterogeneous population of cancerous cells. And if you sequence their genomes, they're a mess. And so right now, prior to genome sequencing, we're taking wild guesses at what the molecular basis of one's cancer is. And now going forward, what we're going to do is say, forget all of that, what is happening at the molecular level because this drug can target only those cancers that have the BRAF mutation, as an example.

RAZ: So where is it headed? What can you imagine in 10 or 20 years or beyond?

RESNICK: I think we will cure cancer. Genomics and sequencing at large will ultimately cure cancer. Whether that happens in 10 years or 50 years or more is difficult to say.

RAZ: That's incredible. I mean, you can say that with total confidence?

RESNICK: Absolutely. At some point, we'll snuff it out. I mean, people will still develop cancer, certainly, unless we get into genetic engineering of humans, which is something we ought to talk about, but it will be curable.