----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Minette" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <brin-l@mccmedia.com>
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 3:50 PM
Subject: Data Cuts, Normalization, and Analysis for Politics L3
1) Even reports which, as given, could not be true can be mined for
critical information:
The application to politics is two fold. First, even when one has good
suspicion that there is some bias in a report, one should still accept the
presentation of that report as a fact. In some cases, like the National
Inquirer, the fact that there is a report of a secret prophecy that Bigfoot
will marry Elvis, who's been living with space aliens, probably has minimal
correlation observables.
In other cases, one finds a much better correlation between observations
and reports, after things have time to be sorted out. I'll give an example
involving the president GWB's DWI was quickly confirmed, while the
report based on forged records of GWB's National Guard duty had to be
retracted.
Taken together, we have a discernable pattern. I realize that folks on the
right state that the liberal media has it in for GWB and thus finds
spurious things to accuse him of. But, it was the same liberal media which
reported the stories questioning the accuracy of the report. Articles were
written both attacking and supporting the position that the forged report
was true....until the propensity of the evidence required a conclusion. It
doesn't always work out this well, mind you, but it this is not the
behavior of a group that is ideologically bent on getting one message out.
Instead, the data seems to support a different hypothesis: news
organizations are very interested ratings, readership, taking the lead in
stories. So, they look for scoops that will raise their rating. This
holds particularly true for news magazine shows, I think. I've developed a
model that's fairly consistent with observations that indicates that news
shows, in general, are biased towards stories that create buzz.
Given this, we can develop a rule of thumb concerning revelations. When
they first come out, they should be taken with a grain of salt. After
other organizations get their teeth into the revelation, one should quickly
see if it is immediately confirmed, if it will take a while to confirm, or
if questions are immediately raised.
One advantage of using this technique should be clear: it is not based on
the ideological impact of the news. Therefore, it is fairly well insulated
against the risks of confirmation bias that may exist with the person using
the technique.
While there are additional aspects to this, they probably fit better under
the points listed below, so I'll cover them there.
2) Having a teammate with a significantly different perspective look at
the problem is usually very helpful:
Translated to politics, this involves having friendly debate partners who
have different outlooks than your own. Two of mine are my Zambian
daughter, Neli and Gautam. When I come up with a reading of the data, I
often determine how I could defend it with data in such a manner that my
debating partners will see the merit of the argument, even if they read
things differently. So, they help me, even before I discuss things with
them.
>
3) What I have found successful is establishing a hierarchy of likely
causes.
There are a couple of obvious carry overs from engineering to politics
here. First, the hierarchy doesn't actually reject possibilities; it
assigns lower probability to them. Second, as described in my previous
post, the ranking of the probabilities is adjusted as more data comes in.
Thus, as data comes in, one is guided by technique to reconsider one's own
position and, perhaps, modify it slightly to better fit the expanded data
set.
4) Calibrating against past observations is very helpful.
In particular, it is helpful if as many observations as possible are
included in the calibration. If one suspects a bias towards a particular
viewpoint, it is not enough to catalog past instances that support that
view of the bias. One must also accept past instances that are
inconsistent with that view.
Let me give an example. We can compare reports on conventional fighting
that have come from the administration vs. scoops that have come from
various people. Among them was Seymour Hearsh, who claimed that the US had
many more people killed at the start of the Afghanistan war than
reported...and that the Ranger raids were disasters.
On the whole, if you compare the predictions of the Administration with
those of the various pundits; the Administration's predictions were
superior. Allowing a modest error bar for the fog of war, you would see
that the GWB administration did a pretty good job representing the progress
of the conventional war phases of both the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.
Now, a good Bush Republican will point this out as a stellar example of
media bias. They might argue that the media always seems to be looking for
how the US can fail. I've heard some say that it was as if the liberal
media was pulling against the US.
But, this isn't the whole story. One can also look at the Administrations
views of post-war Iraq, and the Administration's views on the presence of
WMD. In those cases, a different bias is seen. The administration has
been seen to have certainty with respect to the existence of WMD that the
intelligence merely indicated. One way of looking at this is that they
calibrated intelligence as always underestimating risks and weapons
development (with cases such as the A-bombs of India and Pakistan as
examples), and thus overestimated the WMD.
The Administration's view of post war Iraq is now seen to be far too
optimistic. Their optimism interfered with taking prudent action in post
war Iraq...and contributed to the problems there. As a result, any
optimistic pronouncements by this Administration is taken with a pillar of
salt.
Many liberals have taken this as proof that the Administration's
pronouncements are inherently false. Stronger leftists may argue that they
also show that the news media has been taken in by this administration, and
thus gives reports that are skewed towards the Administration's viewpoint.
In particular, the lack of skepticism concerning the existence of WMD is
considered proof of this.
I'd argue that one needs to take both sets of data and try to fit one's
viewpoint to the combination. With respect to the administration, one
could see that they are pretty good at evaluating purely military
questions. Their real-time analysis of the conventional military actions
in both conflicts was within reasonable bounds of what we now know in
hindsight. They were closer to the truth than the median value of folks
who did analysis real time.
When political actions needed to also be considered, their analytical
ability suffered tremendously. They seemed to suffer from confirmation
bias: accepting any evidence that supported their views and labeling as
unreliable those data that contradicted their views. So, I'd conclude that
this administration is good at military evaluation, but tends to believe
what it wants to believe when it comes to more complex activity, like
reconstruction or the analysis of spotty intelligence data.
With respect to the news media, I'd argue that the best conclusion
concerning the data was that they have more uncertainty than they might be
allowing. It is true that they barely questioned the existence of WMD, but
my memory from before the war was that there was little debate among folks
that have studied Iraq concerning whether WMDs were being hidden; the
argument was over the extent. It still doesn't make sense that Hussein was
playing games with the inspectors when a South Africa style open door
policy would have prevented the invasion by the US. So, the news media
accurately reported the views of those who had the best backgrounds for
guessing about the WMDs.
They were too skeptical about the administration's pronouncements on the
progress in the actual fighting. Most of the catastrophic scenarios that
were suggested as possible or likely didn't happen.
With respect to the aftermath of the war, I think that the journalists were
totally confused concerning what sources of information they can trust.
The administration was accurate in saying that they missed good news
stories. But, they didn't miss nearly as many good news stories as the
administration missed risks and ignored bad news stories, so they aren't in
much of a position to comment.
The purpose of this example is to show that calibration against as much
data as one can obtain is far superior to calibration against a cherry
picked subset of "critical" data. Partisanship can bias data cuts; but
technique can help fight against that tendency.
In addition to applying principals borrowed from engineering, I'd like to
add a couple that pertain to politics that are not borrowed from
engineering.
1) Establishing the fact that your government has lied to the nation does
not establish the fact that the enemies of this government are telling the
truth. The classic example of this, for my generation, was the embracing
of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong by a sub-set of the anti-war
movement. This is of an ironic sort of black and white thinking.
2) Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
This applies very well to this administration's foreign policy, I think.
The hypothesis that two generations of Bush presidents have been acting in
high treason, deliberately helping their Saudi masters against the best
interests of the US has a lot of difficulty. A much simpler explanation is
that mistakes were made; particularly by GWB.
Well, that should be enough for this post; I will apply it to the debate on
GitMo next.
Dan M.
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