Jernalism!

[Friday]

Image used in 2013 by the WSJ attacking Obama's tax plan.

I've hated the WSJ for a long time now.

[Thad]

The editorial page was always a trash fire, but the news section used to be...real. Obviously conservatively slanted, but generally accurate.

Then Murdoch bought it.

[Mongrel]

Chuckle.

[Friday]

There seems to be some fundamental flaw in the human brain that does not allow it to look objectively at why it achieves success.

A study I read a long time ago (I don't have a link) showed that by having players play Monopoly, and starting certain players with an extra 200, 400, or 600 dollars, would usually result in the player who started with the extra money winning the game. And of course, when asked what factors led to their victory, they would almost always reply that it was their own skill.

Now this is funny for two reasons. One; Monopoly is, aside from the trading aspect, a fucking RNG game that has no skill involved. And the trading is so simple (usually people just trade 1:1) that unless you're talking about some sort of master manipulator it's fairly moot. And two; of course, they started with extra money. That's huge; it allows you to start snowballing property and income a lot earlier than your opponents, who have to pass on buying property in the early game simply because they can't afford it.

But despite this, people who started with the extra cash still believed that they had won due to their skill at the game.

[Mongrel]

I mean, that's ego for you.

I think the thing that gets us about these is how the clickbait model has driven EXTERNAL OBSERVERS to support what would normally be individual delusions.

It's an inversion of how the press "should" work.

[Thad]

Bloomberg headline: Capitalism caused climate change; it must also be the solution

[Thad]

Really quite bad article at BoingBoing about how James Randi was bad because he made it harder for people to get funding for ESP research.

Rarely do I say "read the comments", but they're a lot more enjoyable than the article.

[Mongrel]

[Friday]

he got lost

[Mongrel]

Also the proportions on the images they do have are fucked. Is Fox's bizarre image-warping thing spreading?

[Thad]

azcentral/the Arizona Republic has one of those shitty "only show part of the headline on the homepage" things going on this morning.

Homepage shows headline: "In latest batch, Trump gets share of votes he would need to reclaim AZ"

Click through and full headline is: "In latest batch, Trump gets share of votes he would need to reclaim Arizona. But next rounds of ballots present new challenges"

That "But" is kind of fucking important. Me, I'd have gone with the shorter and punchier "Trump could still win Arizona, but probably won't".

Paul Bentz, a Republican pollster with the consulting firm HighGround, said Trump needs to win 57.6% of the 470,000 votes that The Arizona Republic estimates remain to be counted.

"That's almost exactly what he got in the first batch," Bentz said. "He could do it."

But the problem for Trump is that he needs to replicate that performance across all of the remaining 470,000 votes left to count in the state. And he needs to do it across all Arizona's 15 diverse counties, which include areas that are very blue: Pima, Coconino and Santa Cruz counties.

So uh yeah, Trump getting "exactly the amount he needed" (which is a stupider way of saying "the absolute bare minimum") out of a batch of votes from a Trump-friendly county does not put him on track to close the gap and win the state. All it means is that it hasn't yet become mathematically impossible for Trump to win Arizona, merely extremely improbable.

[beatbandito]

It's gotten to the point where I only ever click news links that I have basically no interest in. The "if the headline asks a question, the answer is no" rule has turned into "if the headline seems interesting, it's a lie".

[Thad]

Though sometimes you do get fun half-headlines like "Surging racism in Prescott should not surprise you".

[Thad]

Guys I like Sanders too but predicting that Donald Trump would declare himself the winner based on early returns and then proclaim all results to the contrary to be fraudulent does not make him some kind of goddamn prophet.

The weather report told me it was going to be hot in Phoenix this week, and then it was. For some reason I'm not seeing any headlines about the weatherman looking into his crystal ball and delivering an eerily prescient vision of the future.

[Mongrel]

[Thad]

And with the election over, the "the polls were wrong because I don't know what margin of error is" takes are in full swing. Et tu, Masnick?

[beatbandito]

Can't find the original, but "polls get cucked 'cause only cucks get polled".

I'm not capable of getting in depth to how accurate and specifically what polls are being talked about. But I think we can generally agree that at this point information gets released that is not accurate enough for the majority that will see it to find it remotely useful, yet people on the boarder of understanding it will claim it's a great tool as they share it with those very people. Like using the condition of the stock market to determine general national wealth.

[Brantly B.]

Basically everybody needs to be forced to play X-Com until they understand the true meaning of "95% chance".

[Thad]

Can't find the original, but "polls get cucked 'cause only cucks get polled".

I'm not capable of getting in depth to how accurate and specifically what polls are being talked about. But I think we can generally agree that at this point information gets released that is not accurate enough for the majority that will see it to find it remotely useful, yet people on the boarder of understanding it will claim it's a great tool as they share it with those very people. Like using the condition of the stock market to determine general national wealth.

It probably doesn't help that my first reaction to that statement is "No, the accuracy is fine, it's the precision that's the issue."

I don't think the problem is the polls, I think the problem is the news reporting that neither shows any polling literacy nor attempts to teach any.

Silver's got a tendency to say stupid stuff when he veers into punditry, but he's actually really quite good at parsing polls and explaining what they mean in simple terms and with clearly-labeled visual aids. His headline the morning of election day was Biden’s Favored In Our Final Presidential Forecast, But It’s A Fine Line Between A Landslide And A Nail-Biter. The article explains, in easy-to-read terms, that there were a range of outcomes, most of them led to Biden, and that either a narrow or a massive Biden win were reasonably likely outcomes (and a Trump win, while unlikely, was still possible). I think that's pretty straightforward and easy to understand, and it's immensely frustrating how much of the press doesn't provide that context (including people I respect and feel should know better, like Mike Masnick).

When I talk about polls I usually try to include caveats about how to interpret them and the range of possible factors they could reflect. I don't know if I'm always as clear as I might be, but my perception of the news media is they don't even try; they treat polling data in the same sensationalistic way they treat any other kind of scientific research. "Could these common household products be killing your children? More after the break!"

[Friday]

People understand three probabilities: 100%, 50/50, and 0%. And no, that's not hyperbole.

Anything past 60/40 reads as 100 (or 0) to them. This is why people think "the weather men are always wrong" when they forecast a 65% chance of rain and it doesn't rain.