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Cherries jackpot.

August 17th, 2018 (Permalink)

A Cherry-Picking Study1

One key to understanding reports of medical, health, or nutrition studies in the news media is to pay attention to the terms in which their claims are framed. Often such reports give an impression of making much stronger claims than they actually do because the claims are qualified by hedging words and phrases. For example, here's a headline from a recent press release:

New emerging research suggests Montmorency tart cherries may help enhance gut health2

The research reported on in this headline is hedged by the word "emerging", but just what is "emerging research"3? It's research which produces "emerging science"4 based on "emerging data"5. In other, unhedged words, it's preliminary research that hasn't been replicated and is therefore inconclusive. This doesn't mean that the study is necessarily bad, or poorly done―after all, somebody has to be the first to research something―but a single study is seldom conclusive.

In addition to "emerging", the headline includes the hedging words "suggests", "may", and "help", as does the following excerpt from the article beneath the headline―I've highlighted the hedges:

Montmorency tart cherries may play a role in improving gut health, suggests a first-of-its kind human trial of nine adults…. An international team of scientists found that Montmorency tart cherries helped to positively impact the gut microbiome….2

In addition to all the hedges, the claims made for the cherries are weak: "improving gut health" and "positively impact[ing] the gut microbiome". In the next paragraph we read: "The gut microbiome holds great promise…although the research is still evolving and larger, long-term human intervention studies are needed.2" "Evolving" is another hedge to add to "emerging", and both of these words indicate that this research is new and unsettled.

I certainly don't doubt that Montmorency tart cherries are good for you, but are they any better than pomegranates, which were a fad about a decade ago, or blueberries, which were the fad fruit before that6? The press release gives no reason to think these other fruits aren't also "gut-friendly" ones that "positively impact" your microbiome.

This press release was put out by the Cherry Marketing Institute (CMI), which describes itself this way:

The Cherry Marketing Institute, a not-for-profit organization funded by U.S. tart cherry growers and processors, provided financial support for the study. … CMI’s mission is to increase the demand for Montmorency tart cherries through promotion, market expansion, product development and research.2

Now, my point in drawing your attention to this fact is not to dismiss the study out of hand. However, it's important to take into account where this information is coming from, and the biases of its source. The press release was not written by a neutral reporter, but by someone working for the CMI, whose job is to sell you cherries. In other words, the article is really an ad for tart cherries masquerading as a news story. This wouldn't be so bad if you realize that it's a press release, but many of the news media reports on this study are no more than rewrites of the release7. Some are not even rewrites but simply reposts of the release with no notice that it is a PR document8.

Thankfully, this study has been thoroughly evaluated by the Health News Review9. It's a good idea to check this or some other reliable source before acting on the basis of a press release from a marketing group about an industry-sponsored study.

Notes:

  1. Thanks to Lawrence Mayes for drawing this study to my attention.
  2. "New Emerging Research Suggests Montmorency Tart Cherries May Help Enhance Gut Health", Cherry Marketing Institute, 8/7/2018.
  3. "Emerging Research", 6/18/2009.
  4. "Emerging" Science, 3/26/2009.
  5. "Emerging Data", 8/7/2017.
  6. See: Verena Dobnik, "Pomegranates the newest fad fruit", The Seattle Times, 6/4/2008.
  7. For instance: Alexandra Thompson, "Drinking tart cherry juice for just five days can transform gut health, finds study", Daily Mail, 8/8/2018.
  8. For instance: "New Emerging Research Suggests Montmorency Tart Cherries May Help Enhance Gut Health", New Kerala, 8/14/2018.
  9. Michael Joyce, Kathleen Fairfield & Kathlyn Stone, "Big Cherry claims about health benefits leave a sour taste in our mouths", Health News Review, 8/10/2018.
August 10th, 2018 (Permalink)

The Paranoid Style in American Journalism

Last month1 I pointed out an error in Sharyl Attkisson's new book, The Smear, but that was just a warm-up. The error itself wasn't very important, but it suggested that Attkisson's research was at best superficial. On the same page where that error occurred, Attkisson continues her pseudohistory as follows:

Postwar, the CIA remained in the forefront of the propaganda game. The spy agency was apparently responsible for promoting the phrase conspiracy theory for use as a powerful device in the lexicon of the smear artist. Before the covert CIA effort, which we can pinpoint to a secret memo in 1967, there was nothing controversial about discussing or exposing "conspiracies." … Yet after the CIA secret memo, the public and media were brainwashed into dismissing out of hand those labeled as "conspiracy theorists"….2

First of all, let's assume that Attkisson's factual claims in this passage are correct, and examine her reasoning. She claims that before the memo "there was nothing controversial about" conspiracy theories (CTs), but after it "the public and media were brainwashed"―except for Attkisson, I presume. This before-and-after claim is the only evidence that she provides for thinking that it was the memo that caused the "brainwashing" of the rest of us. A clearer example of post hoc3 would be hard to find.

Many conspiracy theory (CT) sites on the web make a stronger claim than Attkisson, namely, that the CIA "invented", "created", "developed", or "coined"4 the phrase "conspiracy theory". To Attkisson's credit, she doesn't go that far, but before we return to her book let's examine this as an example of the sort of claims made by conspiracy theorists (CTists).

The following is an excerpt from historian Richard Hofstadter's 1956 book The Age of Reform:

The financial argument behind the conspiracy theory was simple enough. …[W]hat both the Greenbackers and free-silverites held in common was the idea that the contraction of currency was a deliberate squeeze, the result of a long-range plot of the "Anglo-American Gold Trust." Wherever one turns in the Populist literature of the nineties one can find this conspiracy theory expressed. …One feature of the Populist conspiracy theory that has been generally overlooked is its frequent link with a kind of rhetorical anti-Semitism.5

Hofstadter's book is a history of the period in American politics "From Bryan to F.D.R.", according to its subtitle. He examines both the progressive and populist political movements of this period, and one of his concerns was the tendency towards conpiratorial thinking among the populists. For instance, he writes:

There was something about the Populist imagination that loved the secret plot and the conspiratorial meeting. There was in fact a widespread Populist idea that all American history since the Civil War could be understood as a sustained conspiracy….6

So, in this book, published over a decade prior to the CIA memo, Hofstadter uses the phrase "conspiracy theory" three times in its contemporary meaning, which is enough to debunk the notion that the CIA "invented" it in 1967.

Attkisson does not make the false claim that the phrase "conspiracy theory" did not exist until the CIA cooked it up in some secret memo; rather, she writes that "[b]efore the covert CIA effort…there was nothing controversial about discussing or exposing 'conspiracies.'" That this is also false can be shown by a later article also by Hofstadter, and a resulting book, published a few years before the memo, both entitled: "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"7.

Hofstadter's phrase, "the paranoid style", did not catch on the way "conspiracy theory" did, but it refers to what gives rise to CTs, as can be seen from the following excerpt from the expanded, book-version of the essay:

I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. … In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy.8

The phrase "conspiracy theory" has gained wider currency since Hofstadter wrote in the mid-'50s9, but President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. This was the assassination that launched a million CTs, so it's no great surprise that the phrase took off in its aftermath: after all, we needed a term for the type of pseudotheories that began to spring up around it. Hofstadter's use of the phrase was probably not as negatively charged as it is nowadays, but it has had over three score years to pick up negative associations because of all the CTs we've been inundated with.

But what about that memo? Have I forgotten all about the infamous CIA memo? Perhaps it contains a "smoking gun" revealing the CIA's conspiracy to brainwash us. Prepare to be disappointed: the phrase "conspiracy theory" does not even occur in it, though the phrases "conspiracy theories" and "conspiracy theorists" occur once each. Here is the entire passage:

Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization [the CIA], for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.10

That's it. We've already seen that the CIA did not invent the phrase in question. Where's the "smoking gun" indicating a plan to spread or promote it? As you can see from reading the entire dispatch, and as is summarized in the above quote, the purpose of the document is to counter the spread in foreign countries of CTs about JFK's assassination. It offers suggestions of arguments and an example of how to do this. Among those suggestions, there is nothing about spreading or promoting the use of the phrase "conspiracy theory". In fact, the appended article supplied as an example of how to counter JFK CTs does not even use that phrase in any form11.

Instead, the two occurrences of the phrase in the dispatch undermine the claims made by contemporary CTists that the CIA either invented or promoted the use of it. The fact that the author of the document referred to "conspiracy theories" by "conspiracy theorists" with no explanation or definition offered indicates that the phrase was in sufficient currency not to require either. Moreover, the author was writing about how to counter theories that there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK, as opposed to the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. It's only natural, then, to refer to "conspiracy theories" by "conspiracy theorists". If anything, it's surprising that those phrases only occur once apiece.

Fittingly, the notion that the CIA was responsible for the bad reputation of CTs is itself a "conspiracy theory" in the contemporary sense of the phrase. Apparently, CTists just assume that their audience will not bother to actually read the "secret memo" that they base their claims on, and I guess they must be right in doing so. If you wonder why CTs have gotten such a bad name, don't look to the CIA; look at the fallacious reasoning and lousy research of the CTists themselves.

Finally, my misgivings about Attkisson's minor error were justified, because this is not a small mistake. This is itself an attempt to smear those of us who are critics of CTs and CTists, by suggesting that we are dupes of the CIA. If anyone is a dupe, it's Attkisson who has been misled by the CTists' shoddy excuse for research.

Notes:

  1. New Book: The Smear, 7/23/2018.
  2. Sharyl Attkisson, The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote (2017), pp. 12-13. Italics in original.
  3. See: Post Hoc Fallacy.
  4. I've seen all of these words used on conspiracist webpages, but I refuse to link to them because I don't want to send them traffic. However, you can easily check this for yourself with a websearch, which is generally a good practice to adopt. If more people would do so, then the CTists would lose their audience.
  5. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1956), pp. 74-75 & 77. Emphasis added.
  6. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1956), p. 70.
  7. Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", Harper's Magazine, 11/1964. See the following note for the book.
  8. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965), pp. 3-4.
  9. Google's Ngram Viewer shows that use of the phrase "conspiracy theory" in books has increased steadily since the 1950s, except for a plateau in the '70s. See here: "conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy theorist", Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed: 8/9/2018.
  10. "Dispatch: Countering Criticism of the Warren Report", section 2, emphasis added. Attkisson, with her usual lack of scholarship, gives no citation for this document beyond calling it "a secret memo in 1967". However, the above dispatch is the only one cited by the various CTists that claim the CIA either created or promoted the phrase "conspiracy theory". Moreover, the dispatch was classified as "secret", dated 1967, and uses variants of the phrase. Finally, I've been unable to find any other CIA memo from 1967 that seems to have anything to do with CTs. For these reasons, I'm assuming that this is the memo that Attkisson refers to.
  11. The dispatch refers to a second appended article taken from Look magazine, but it is missing from every copy of the dispatch that I've seen. See section 3b and the appended "Background Survey of Books Concerning the Assassination of President Kennedy", page 3, section 6. I haven't been able to find a copy of the Look article, so if any reader has access to it please let me know.

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July 30th, 2018 (Permalink)

A Once in a Lifetime Puzzle

What occurs once in a second, once in a minute, twice in a day, but only once in a lifetime?

Solution

July 23rd, 2018 (Permalink)

New Book: The Smear

Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.7

I had just begun reading reporter Sharyl Attkisson's latest book, The Smear when, in the first chapter, "Birth of the Modern Smear", I came across the following dubious quote. In discussing Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, Attkisson writes: "…[A]pplicable remarks found within the pages of the Goebbels diaries include: … 'The truth is the greatest enemy of the State.'1"

I'll leave it to you to check Randall Bytwerk's "False Nazi Quotations" page to see the reasons for thinking this alleged quote spurious; it's the first quote on the page2. Anyway, it's not my purpose here to discuss why the quote is probably not Goebbels', but what it's doing in Attkisson's book.

In a previous entry3, I discussed the role of factual statements in fact-checking. Attkisson's claim is certainly a statement, that is, it's either true or false that Goebbels wrote that in his diary. Moreover, it should be possible to search the diaries for this statement, at least theoretically, which means that it is a factual statement. So, this is the type of statement that fact-checkers should check. Unfortunately, there is no citation given for this quote in the book, other than the attribution to the lengthy diaries, which makes it exceedingly difficult to verify4.

The quote is exactly the sort of thing that should have been fact-checked, if not by the author herself then by the publisher. It's not difficult to find out that the correctness of the quote is disputed by experts: all you have to do is cut and paste it into a search engine, and Bytwerk's page on fake Nazi quotations should be one of the first few results. Doing such a search and then reading Bytwerk's page would have taken only a few minutes.5

Attkisson has done some good reporting in the past, but this shows either non-existent or extremely lazy research. Whatever reasons Attkisson herself may have had for making this mistake, where was the publisher? The electronic copy of the book that I have was published by Harper, a reputable and long-established publisher. Apparently, it no longer does even minimal fact-checking on what it publishes, assuming that it ever did.

Now, you may think: big deal! Sure, she made a mistake, but it's trivial. True enough, but it would have also been trivial to check. While in itself the error is small, what effect should it have on our confidence in Attkisson as a reporter and her book? Can we be sure that the big claims she makes are correct? If she, her researchers, or her publisher fail to do a fact-check that takes a minute or two, can they be expected to do so when the research is long and difficult?

This case reinforces a point that I've made before6, but it's worth repeating. In this time of fake news and punditry masquerading as reporting, we need to be willing and able to do our own fact-checking, because many of our institutions are failing to do it.

I was looking forward to reading Attkisson's book, but now I'm not so sure. If she can't be bothered to fact-check her book, I don't think I can be bothered to read it.

Update (8/1/2018): In Attkisson's book, four additional quotes are attributed to Goebbels' diaries. I was a little doubtful about a couple of the others, but I concentrated on the one above because it was all I needed to make my point. Randall Bytwerk has now looked into all of these quotes, and I leave it to you to check out his findings8. I will just add that a pattern seems to be emerging.

Notes:

  1. Sharyl Attkisson, The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote (2017), p. 12.
  2. Randall Bytwerk, "False Nazi Quotations", German Propaganda Archive, accessed: 7/23/2018. Last year, I discussed quote 4; see: Who is Adolph Hitler and why does he keep saying these terrible things?, 9/11/2017, and quote 5; see: Passage of Propaganda, 7/28/2017.
  3. Fact Vs. Opinion, 6/22/2018.
  4. There are no footnotes, endnotes, or other citations in the electronic version of Attkisson's book that I have. Notes are not just a scholarly affectation: they make it possible for the reader to check quotes or factual claims for themselves. It's for all practical purposes impossible to prove that Goebbels never wrote this, but the burden of proof is on the quoter to establish that the quote is genuine, and Attkisson has failed to meet this burden.
  5. I checked this today (7/23/2018) in Google, where it was the second result; Bing, where it was first; and DuckDuckGo, where it was also first. Checking all three search engines took less than one minute.
  6. The End of Factchecking, 5/17/2014.
  7. Luke 16:10 (NIV), added: 7/28/2018. My thanks to a pseudonymous reader who reminded me of this saying.
  8. Randall Bytwerk, "Sharyl Attkisson Uses Dubious Quotations", Goebbels Didn't Say It, 8/1/2018.
July 6th, 2018 (Permalink)

Poll Watch: Is President Trump more popular than the FBI?

According to the following headline, he is:

Trump Approval Jumps As Attacks From Critics Backfire;
Trump Now More Popular Than FBI: IBD/TIPP Poll1

The July poll found that 41% approve of the job Trump is doing. That's the first time he's been above 40% since March 2017, and just 1 point below his highest approval rating of 42% during his first month in office.1

So, an alternative headline for this story would be:

Trump's Approval Rating Unchanged Since Taking Office

But you won't be seeing that anywhere but here.

Here's what supports the headline's comparison of Trump's approval rating with that of the FBI: "The poll found that just 39% have a favorable view of the FBI1." So, the difference between Trump's approval and that of the FBI is two percentage points. Most modern public opinion polls have a margin of error (MoE) of at least 3 percentage points, so this is not a significant difference. A more accurate appraisal of this result would be that Trump and the FBI are about equally unpopular. At the end of the article, where they always hide this information, you can read5:

Methodology: IBD/TIPP conducted the July poll from June 21 to June 29. It includes responses from 900 people nationwide, who were asked questions by live interviewers on phones. The poll's margin of error is +/-3.3 percentage points.1

This is actually a slightly small sample for a national public opinion poll, and the difference between the President's and the FBI's approval ratings is well within the margin of error2. There's another logical problem with the reporting of this poll, the first sentence of which reads:

Increasingly bitter and aggressive attacks on President Trump managed to bolster his approval rating, which climbed 5 points to reach the second highest level of his presidency, the latest IBD/TIPP Poll finds.1

This sentence claims that attacks on Trump served to "bolster"3 the approval rating, meaning that they supported it, which is a causal relation. However, the most that we know from this poll is that Trump's approval rating increased 5 points from the previous IBD/TIPP poll, and the attacks in question presumably happened either before or during the time that the poll was taken. Of course, it's possible that the attacks may have actually backfired, but it's also possible that Trump's approval rating would have increased even more if it hadn't been for those criticisms. Also, it's possible that the 5 point change was simply a random fluctuation. So, inferring causation in this case commits a causal fallacy4.

This is one of those polling reports in which, if you remove all the exaggeration, speculation, innumeracy, and illogicality, nothing much is left.

Notes:

  1. John Merline, "Trump Approval Jumps As Attacks From Critics Backfire; Trump Now More Popular Than FBI: IBD/TIPP Poll", Investor's Business Daily, 7/2/2018.
  2. See: How to Read a Poll: Margin of Error Errors.
  3. A bolster is either a long cylindrical pillow that is used to support the human body, or a structural part of a building that provides support. So, as a verb, to bolster means to support something.
  4. See: Causal Fallacy.
  5. I originally wrote here that the difference between Trump's approval rating and that of the FBI was only one percentage point, but it was two. The paragraph has been corrected.

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