There are quite a few stock phrases I wish people would be more careful about using. I don’t want to hear even one more reporter, for example, start a sentence with ‘police say’. If the reporters have no intention of actually investigating, why are they on the scene at all? Why not just take their news reports from police spokespeople at police headquarters, and stop pretending to any objectivity at all?
It’s not just that the police might falsify their reports. Proving that this happens is an uneven task–it often succeeds, and as often fails. It’s also that the police, almost without exception, are not PART of the communities they patrol. They can’t be objective, because it’s not possible to be objective about subjects: about people, and their lives and decisions. But they also can’t be biased in favor of individuals, because they don’t live and work among those they patrol. So, necessarily, they’re biased against anybody who’s not part of their self-isolated community.
The same, of course, applies to reporters. Unless reporters are residents of the communities they report on, they fail of understanding in one way. If they are residents of the communities, they fail in other ways. So there need to be BOTH local and outside reporters in any case. But since reporters rarely have any kind of coercive authority over people (only persuasive authority, usually, if that), reporters are by definition able to be less biased than the police. That’s the main reason why we want NON-police reporters to cover stories. Which becomes pointless, if the reporters only report what ‘police say’.
Other reportorial rhetorical habits are just annoying. Quite a few people, for example, have a tendency to insert the phrase ‘if you will’ before any analogy. The analogies are valid or invalid Whether I will or NO.
These customary usages are nuisances, but they don’t necessarily cause serious problems in interpreting data. Most viewers, listeners, readers etc know how to read between the lines of police reports; and irritating vocalisms are fit material for drinking games, but don’t necessarily need to be a hindrance to ferreting out accurate facts.
‘Experts say’, on the other hand. is a serious barrier to accurate understanding. Who can quarrel with ‘experts’, who by the very designation are presumed better able to understand their subjects than we benighted laypersons, however educated we might be?
Worse yet, since we have no idea who these unnamed ‘experts’ are, we can’t analyze their results. We don’t know where they say what they say, or on what basis, or what kind of axes they have to grind. And we’re solemnly informed that there are forms of expertise which are completely esoteric: which even the best informed people in other fields can’t possibly manage to parse or criticize.
And to make matters worse, reporters often abjectly accept the argument that they and their audience are not ABLE to critique what the ‘experts’ say. So they not only fail to ask critical questions themselves, they don’t provide the audience with the information necessary to do it for themselves.
Take a subject the late-night reporters often cover. It’s not even debatable whether sleep deprivation is a serious detraction from quality of life and work–whether it has impacts on people’s physical and mental health. We don’t need ‘experts’ to tell us that this is so. What we need, mostly, is quantification of HOW and WHY it’s so.
And, given what the ‘experts’ are quoted as saying, it’s evident that they’re not even marginally objective. They argue that any schedule outside the canonical ‘9 to 5’ inherently leads to sleep deprivation, because no humans (they imply) are naturally nocturnal. They argue that anybody who’s up at night is an ‘insomniac’, even if the nocturnal people are, in fact, getting as much sleep as their diurnal neighbors.
Worst of all, these unnamed ‘sleep researchers’ keep insisting, nonsensically, that there’s such a thing as ‘oversleeping’. Despite NO credible evidence that (outside of a few very clearly demarcated sleep disorders) anybody in the last two hundred years or so has been getting ‘too much sleep’. and despite a completely inaccurate accounting of how much sleep humans genetically require (as large primates, humans should have at least 9-12 hours sleep out of every 24), there’s still a rabid and rapid response arguing that people do in FACT get ‘too much sleep’, and that this essentially nonexistent phenomenon is ‘as harmful as too little sleep’.
And since these ‘experts’ are almost never cited, either by name, or by reference to their studies, it’s next to impossible to give them the lie. Despite the obvious fact that thousands and even millions of people have been killed as a result of bad decisions by the sleep deprived (remember Chernobyl?), and no evidence at all of any deaths or ill effects from ‘oversleep’, how can we refute unnamed ‘experts’ making ex cathedra statements from behind cover?
Even when the ‘experts’ ARE identified, and the papers and reports they produce are properly cited, a major problem is that too few people have any training at all in how to critique scientific and other studies. I personally often complain that I was never given a course in such criticism until I was in a post-Master’s course.
Why is this important? Because we’re all of us required to make ill-informed choices from late infancy. We’re exhorted to get goods and services we may or may not need, with no real information about WHY we would or would not need these things.
Children should learn to question the bases for things they’re told from preschool. This early training need not be very deep: it doesn’t require detailed statistical training to realize that we must take something that’s seriously counterintuitive with a healthy dose of skepticism. Training in doubting ‘common sense’ is rather harder come by, but it still needn’t require excessive amounts of mathematics, at least early on.
I began to have this kind of training at a very early age. I attribute this largely to my father, who was wont to say such things as “If you want your food crunchy and golden brown, why not eat paper bags?”, But it was not just training in skepticism of commercial claims. Very early on, as an unusual person, I learned that I couldn’t take other people’s word for what I would or would not like the taste of or what I would or would not be able to do.
This is a good start: but we all of us also need to know terms like ‘statistically significant’. We need to know how to detect things like when a graph is not based at zero, which inflates perceived significance. And we need to learn it young, and in school, For example, If we don’t even know how to check ‘experts’ roughly, how are we going to recognize order-of-magnitude mistakes? I personally know I’m prone to such mistakes: so I try to check my own sums before I publish them: but how can I be sure I’ll catch them? And more importantly, how can I be sure others will catch them in their own or their peers’ work?
For today’s more obscure question, why is it that I keep hearing about bad prescription drug reactions from LAWYERS? By the time that it’s discovered that a particular medication triggers bladder cancer in some recipients (oops!), it’s ALREADY too late for people who have been prescribed that medication for years, without any real way of checking the pre-release laboratory studies. And what in the world good is it going to be to get MONEY when you’re suffering from bladder cancer? Where was this money BEFORE the drugs were released, and pressed upon often reluctant patients? An ounce of prevention, after all…
treraia 