We really should have come back to this one more often. We also should have spent more time reminding everyone what a terrible writer, thinker, and human being Steven Landsburg is.
Not to be confused with Steve Landesberg. That guy was great.
How our inability to distinguish between independence and contrarianism
encourages Steve Landsburg to be, let's just say, a less effective
pundit
[I decided that the tone was getting a bit sharp in this debate so
I'm dialing things down a bit. This entailed some very slight rewriting
but none of these changes the substance of the post]
Before
getting to the main thesis, let's confirm just how bad this incident
was. A radio personality with millions of listeners grossly
misrepresented the comments of a private citizen speaking out on an
issue then used those distortions to make offensive and badly-reasoned
attacks on the the woman. The situation at that point was bad enough
but we don't really achieve horrible until Landsburg jumped in. Not
only did Landsburg throw his reputation behind Limbaugh's illogical and
factually challenged comments, he actually added additional [poor]
arguments to the abuse this woman has had to put up with.
Noah Smith,
Scott Lemieux,
my co-blogger and others have done an excellent job addressing the lies and idiocy of this affair (check out how this blogger
dismembers
the I'm-mocking-the-postion-not-the-person defense) . The question for
now is how this happened. How did a mid-level economist manage to
reach such national prominence by writing a series painfully sophomoric
books and articles?
Part of the answer, I'd argue, lies in the
way journalists and editors now treat the counterintuitive.
Publications like Slate give us a steady diet of pieces that take some
claim that seems obviously true and argue the opposite. These
publications would have us believe that this practice is a sign of
intellectual independence and healthy diversity of opinion. It's not.
Contrarianism
is closer to the opposite of independence, a point that's easiest to
explain if we think in the idealized terms of a simplified fitness
landscape. and draw an analogy between the defensibility of an argument
associated with a certain position and the fitness of a phenotype
associated with a certain genotype. (more on
landscapes here)
Of
course, it would take a lot of variables to realistically describe
this landscape but the basic concepts still hold even if we simplify it
to a bare-bones x, y and v(x,y). For every position (x,y) you can
take, there's a resulting viability (v). Some positions are easy to
defend (v is high). Some are difficult (v is low). Pundits and news
analysts who try to find the best positions to argue are therefore
performing an optimization algorithm (though most probably never
thought about it in those terms).
For the most part, we can place this commentary and analyses in three general categories:
Neighborhood
Independent/semi-independent
Contrarian
The
neighbor searcher tries to find the most defensible position within
the neighborhood of a starting point. The best example I can think of
here is the work David Frum specialized in until fairly recently. Frum was
not being independent with his pieces in the Wall Street Journal or
public radio (the terminal point of his searches was almost always
within the neighborhood of the established conservative consensus) but
he was arguably doing something as or more important, thoroughly
exploring the landscape of the region and encouraging evolutionary
shifts to sounder, more defensible positions.
The
independent searcher, by contrast, goes where the search leads
regardless of the starting position. The semi-independent searcher adds
the condition that the terminal point has to be original (in other
words, you can't end up on a point that someone else has already
argued). Technically, originality and independence are in opposition
here but in practice, they tend to complement each other.
And
the two categories tend to complement each other as well. To grossly
oversimplify, one group searches x+1 to x-1 and y+1 to y-1; the other
group searches everywhere else. Given the fact the consensuses
originally form around what seem at the time to be good ideas, it makes
sense to explore their neighborhoods (if it helps, you could think of
this in terms of Bayesian priors), but it also makes sense to keep
exploring new territory. David Brooks and Frank Rich refine and improve
their relative corners of the political landscape while writers like
Jonathan Chait or William Safire range further and are more likely to
reach unexpected conclusions.
The contrarian approach is to start
with a position (x.y) that seems obviously true (often because it is
true) then jump to either (-x,y) or (x,-y) and argue from there. It can,
at first glance, look like the result of an independent search,but it
is actually far more constrained than the neighborhood searches of Frum
and Rich. Both of those writers would shift positions based on their
reasoning and would insist on finding a defensible point before sitting
down to the keyboard.
The typical contrarian piece hews so
closely to its initial (-x,y) that there's no indication of a search at
all. By all appearances, the writer simply jumps to the contrarian
position and starts typing.
Contrarian writing crowds out good
journalism and pumps misinformation and faulty arguments into the
discourse. This would be bad at any time, but in the current state of
journalism, it's disastrous. Here's a list of dangerous trends in
journalism from an earlier
post (with a link added from a different paragraph):
1. Reliable information sources like the CBO are undermined;
2. An increasing amount of our information comes from unreliable subsidized sources like Heritage;
3. Journalists suffer no penalty for publishing inaccurate information;
4. Journalists also fashion for themselves an incredibly self-serving ethical rule
that lets them, in the name of balance, avoid the consequences that
would have to be faced if they honestly assigned responsibility for
screw-ups;
5. A growing tendency to converge on a narrative makes the media easier to manipulate.
All
of these factors make it more difficult for our society to deal with
bad data and contrarians are a rich source of some of the worst.
In
a healthy journalistic system, counter-intuitive claims would be held
to a higher standard (at least if we think like Bayesians) and if a
logically or factually flawed argument made it through, both the authors
and the editors would feel pressure to see that it didn't happen
again.
In our current system, counter-intuitive claims are held
to a lower standard (because they generate traffic) and serial
offenders can actually build careers by badly arguing points that
probably aren't true. Editors have lost all interest in fact-checking
and outside efforts at debunking are usually treated as he said/she
said.
It's easy to object to the positions Landsburg takes, but
perhaps the truly offensive aspect here is the way Landsburg and the
other contrarians reach those positions.
