Archive for December, 2011
Before obsessing on arsenic risks in apple juice which the news cycle most likely has forgotten about by now, here’s an exploration of something likely to become a current topic of discussion. Over on io9 there’s an article titled “Democracy Needs Ignorant People Too” which riffs off of the Miller-McCune post which isn’t titled much better – “Why a Democracy Needs Uninformed People”, both of which are riffing off of a paper by Iain Couzin of Princeton published last month in Science. It’s behind the firewall which means a trip to the library before I can comment on the specific paper. However, based on these news accounts, the key message seems to be that the group dynamics of decision-making are influenced by having a diverse mix of “informed” and “uninformed” opinions – which is something different from what’s conveyed in the headlines of the articles; the articles capture the research findings better than what’s reflected in the headlines. I wouldn’t have bothered reading these and commenting on them without the sensational headlines, and I’d rather think that the editors are kind of clever in coming up with eye-catching headlines to draw attention to a geeky story about evolutionary biology research rather than being stupid or corrupt or both. It puts the “information dilution” concept (from the previous post) in a new light.
I’m actually dealing with this problem at work right now (a small group of vocal and opinionated subject-matter experts are driving decision-making about how to solve a problem, and possibly not in a good direction either).
Originally published in July 2005. Edited slightly to accommodate now-dead links.
From Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom Weblog I linked to a great article by Edward Tufte about how the findings of primary studies gradually lose their power and meaning, when they become repackaged and redistributed by secondary organizations (journalists, public relations firms, think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, governmental agencies, and on and on – see the posts from the previous couple of days):
In repackagings, a persistent rage to conclude denies the complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties of the primary evidence. A substantial selection bias also operates: news wins out over olds, as recency of evidence decides relevance of evidence.
You must see the original to get the subtext behind the phrase “rage to conclude”, which is a wonderful quote from Flaubert.
It was easy enough to be dismissive when Dr. Oz was flogging the issue of arsenic in apple juice being purchased by U.S. consumers. However, the issue just doesn’t seem to be settling to the level of importance that it deserves, which, in the larger scheme of things environmentally-healthy-related, is not much. Thoughtful journalists and those not-so-thoughtful seem to feel compelled to make it grow unduly in an already overgrown media landscape. The proximate cause of this media attention is the current issue of Consumers’ Report, which by itself appears to be a reasonably insightful discussion – more on that later – through once again through the magicks of short attention spans and the news cycle, momentary uproar and alarm and another opportunity to be stupid about this issue have been created. Read the rest of this entry »