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August 12th, 2017 (Permalink)

What's New?

I've added a new contextomy to the Familiar Contextomies page. Well, it's not a new contextomy―in fact, it's a fairly old one―but it is new to the page. Also, despite its age and the fact that it's been previously debunked, it keeps rearing its ugly head. It's dead but it won't lie down! Check it out.

Contextomy: Al Gore, Familiar Contextomies

Weird Science-Fantasy
August 7th, 2017 (Permalink)

"Emerging Data"

Like "emerging science"1 and "emerging research"2, "emerging data" is data that's not quite there yet. Much of medical journalism consists of reports of preliminary results that are often weak and haven't been replicated. As I discussed in an earlier entry 3, words such as "possible" and "suggest" are often used to report results when the evidence is weak. "Emerging"―whether applied to research, science, or data―is another word to add to that list.

"Emerging", "may", "suggest", and "help" are all hedging terms4, which are words used to weaken a claim. As Robert Fogelin explained:

If we weaken a claim sufficiently, we make it completely immune to criticism. … On the other hand, if we weaken our premises in this way to avoid criticism, we must pay a price. The premise no longer gives strong support to our conclusion.5

And this is just the problem with "emerging" data, namely, that it gives weak support to the claims made in the research. For example, a relevant passage appears near the beginning of a recent report on a meta-analysis of research on artificial sweeteners:

Consumption of artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame, sucralose and stevia, is widespread and increasing. Emerging data indicate that artificial, or nonnutritive, sweeteners may have negative effects on metabolism, gut bacteria and appetite, although the evidence is conflicting.6

I suppose that the data is only "emerging" because "the evidence is conflicting". However, as with conflicting research or science, conflicting data may emerge in the opposite direction. Perhaps when fully emerged the data will support the conclusion that there are no negative effects of artificial sweeteners.

I don't use artificial sweeteners, but not because of this unemerged data. I just don't like the taste of them. If you do, I would suggest waiting until the data has emerged before you decide to stop.

Notes:

  1. "Emerging" Science, 3/26/2006
  2. "Emerging Research", 6/18/2009
  3. Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffery, 6/11/2017
  4. Robert J. Fogelin, Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic, 2nd edition (1982), pp. 46-47. The third edition of 1987 substitutes the word "guarding" for "hedging", for some reason; see pp. 40-41.
  5. Fogelin, 2nd edition, p. 41.
  6. "Artificial sweeteners linked to risk of weight gain, heart disease and other health issues", Medical Xpress, 7/17/2017

Acknowledgment: The illustration is the altered title of an old EC comic book.

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July 28th, 2017 (Permalink)

Passage of Propaganda

Nixon as Hitler

I was recently reading the book Age of Propaganda1 by Pratkanis and Aronson, when I came upon the following passage in the chapter entitled "The Fear Appeal":

…[I]n 1932, Adolf Hitler inspired his fellow countrymen and women with the words:
The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might, and the Republic is in danger. Yes―danger from within and without. We need law and order! Without it our nation cannot survive.

Millions of Germans gladly embraced Hitler's National Socialist party.2

This seemed vaguely familiar to me because the same quote appears in a scene from a movie I had seen, Billy Jack, which was released in 1971. In the scene3, a cute, eleven-year-old girl reads the quote to a town council meeting then asks who said it. When no one answers, an older girl leans in and says that it was Adolf Hitler in 1932. It's a rousing scene, with only one problem: it's not true. Hitler never said that.4

This is not a contextomy, nor is it a misattribution or mistranslation; rather, it was simply made up out of whole cloth and falsely attributed to Hitler. Not only that but it was known to be a bogus quote before Pratkanis and Aronson's book was published, for Boller and George had included it in their book of fake quotes first published in 19895.

It's not known who created this false quote, but an early appearance was in a column by Jerome Beatty, Jr. in Saturday Review magazine from 19696. According to John Lofton, who seems to have been the first to research the alleged quote:

A check with Beatty reveals that he got the quote from a monthly newsletter edited by Dixon Gayer, a professor of journalism at California State College at Long Beach. Gayer got the quote from a Professor Leroy Hardy in that school's Political Science Department who said that he had copied the quotation from the office door of Professor Larry Adams of the Political Science Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Professor Adams is unable to remember where he obtained the original quote.7

And so the trail goes cold in early '69.

Like the poster shown above, the purpose of the spurious quote was to tar Richard Nixon by associating him with Hitler. In 1968, Nixon ran for president and won on a platform of restoring law and order to a country in turmoil. In that awful year, there were political assassinations―MLK and RFK―riots in many cities, including Chicago during the Democratic convention, as well as on college campuses. So, even though we don't know who wrote the passage in question, we can be pretty sure that it was produced in '68, because it was at this time that the slogan "law and order" was popularized.

In other words, the phony quote is propaganda, and lying propaganda at that, at least in the case of whoever it was who wrote it. Yet, a book on propaganda treats it as if it were a genuine quote. What more could the propagandist ask than that his lie be accepted as true by the writers of textbooks on propaganda?

It's now nearly half-a-century since this faux quote was created, and almost as long since it was debunked. Yet some people continue to quote it as though it were for real, including some online quote sites. It's a zombie quote: it's dead, but it keeps coming back from the grave, and it wants to eat your brain. As Keyes writes:

Do we really want to know when we misquote? It's not always clear that we do. … This is understandable. … In many cases, we prefer blissful ignorance. Even quotations known to be apocryphal―Hitler on disorderly youth…―live on long after they've been debunked. … A good misquote never dies.8

Notes:

  1. Sic: no "The".
  2. Anthony Pratkanis & Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (1992), p. 161. Another offender who should have known better is Howard Zinn, in Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1990), pp. 108-9 & 315.
  3. See: Hitler quote scene from Billy Jack, YouTube (Accessed: 7/20/2017).
  4. Ralph Keyes, "Nice Guys Finish Seventh": False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (1992), pp. 19-20.
  5. Paul F. Boller, Jr. & John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1993), pp. 45-46. Boller & George's version of the passage is the same as that given by Pratkanis & Aronson, except for slightly different punctuation, but after an ellipsis it continues as follows:
    Elect us and we shall restore law and order. We shall, by law and order, be respected among the nations of the world. Without law and order our Republic shall fall.

    The ellipsis is a nice touch, since it seems to indicate that the passage was quoted from a speech and some intervening words were left out. However, every indication is that the entire passage was simply invented and it isn't a quote of anyone, let alone Hitler.

  6. Jerome Beatty, Jr., "Trade Winds", Saturday Review, 5/17/1969, p. 10.
  7. John D. Lofton, Jr., "About That Hitler Quote", National Review, 4/21/1970, reprinted in Congressional Record, 5/7/1970, p. 14757.
  8. Keyes, pp. 190-191.

Fallacy: The Hitler Card

Weird Science-Fantasy
July 14th, 2017 (Permalink)

Java Jive: A Second Cup1

Check out the following newspaper headlines:

Drinking Coffee Can Help You Live Longer2

Why You Need to Ignore the Latest Misleading Study Glorifying Coffee3

You might think these headlines were from articles in different newspapers, but these dueling headlines are both from the New York Observer. Or, you might think that the articles were published months or years apart, but they appeared one day apart. Or, you might think that they're discussing different studies, but both are about the same two studies.

The article under the first headline is short and egregiously credulous, while the second is longer and appropriately skeptical. Since the second is dated the day after the first, it could almost serve as its retraction4. The Observer's new slogan could be: "Two newspapers for the price of one!"

Here's a sort of critical reader's digest version of both articles, side by side so that you can compare and contrast their treatments of the studies:

Drinking Coffee Can Help You Live Longer Why You Need to Ignore the Latest Misleading Study Glorifying Coffee
"Two new studies published in the Annals of Internal Medicine confirm that drinking coffee can lead to a longer life, so start sipping accordingly…. "…[I]s coffee healthy? … You may have heard of two large, recent studies that looked at exactly that question. And, like clock work, articles from across the world started screaming about coffee saving your life based on these very two studies. They were almost all wrong.
The first study, Coffee Drinking and Mortality in 10 European Countries: A Multinational Cohort Study, was quite comprehensive. The researchers looked at more than 520,000 people in 10 European countries and found that drinking more coffee could significantly lower a person’s risk of mortality. … The second study, Association of Coffee Consumption With Total and Cause-Specific Mortality Among Nonwhite Populations, surveyed more than 185,000 African Americans, Native Americans, Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Latinos and whites, and found that the above findings were still true. … Both studies separated the smokers and the nonsmokers, but found that it didn’t change coffee’s effects. … The two studies looked at a number of factors, one in a large U.S. population and another across a variety of European countries. … The researchers took truly massive samples of people5―one almost 200,000 and the other about 500,000―and compared their risks of death after taking into account a huge number of counfounding6 factors. They also looked at the effects of coffee across an enormous range of possible conditions, looking at everything from respiratory disease to suicide over a really impressive period of time. … After taking into account factors like smoking, drinking, weight, wealth, education and more, the scientists found that people who drank more coffee were less likely to die overall. They were also less likely to get any number of serious diseases…. Now, the researchers controlled for a lot of factors to try and iron out a definitive causative benefit from coffee. … But, to quote one of the study authors: "This is an observational study, We cannot say, OK, [if] you drink coffee it is going to prolong your life." … There are other issues with taking these studies as evidence that coffee is protective for health. As the authors note, there could be some reverse causality―people who are less healthy could self-select and choose to drink less coffee.
Regular coffee consumption helps ward off heart, respiratory and kidney diseases, in addition to strokes, diabetes and cancer. … Drinking two to four cups a day lowers your risk of death by 18 percent, in comparison to people who don’t drink coffee at all." These two studies were what is known as observational research. What this means is that the researchers took a group of people and artificially divided them up―in this case by the amount of coffee they drank―and compared these groups on bad outcomes like death. … There's a problem with observational research. You can't tell if the thing you're studying is causing the problems that you are seeing. It's possible that coffee makes you healthier, but it's also possible that this is just a correlation. Basically, there could be an underlying cause that makes people both drink more coffee and be healthy without coffee itself conferring a protective effect. …[H]onestly, the fact that it's observational research is enough to know that it's unlikely to prove that drinking coffee is going to save your life."

Notes:

  1. If you missed the first cup, see: Java Jive, 5/21/2012
  2. Margaret Abrams, "Drinking Coffee Can Help You Live Longer", Observer, 7/11/2017
  3. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, "Why You Need to Ignore the Latest Misleading Study Glorifying Coffee", Observer, 7/12/2017
  4. The second article doesn't explicitly mention the first article, but it does include a link to the first one when it discusses misreporting of the studies. So, clearly, this wasn't a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing; rather, the left hand knew what the right did, but didn't like it!
  5. This is misleading if not outright wrong, since it suggests that the cohorts studied were randomly selected just for these particular studies, which is incorrect. The first study used the EPIC―"European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition"―cohort, which was recruited in the '90s. The second used the Multiethnic Cohort, which was established in the mid-'90s.

    The idea of these large cohorts is to recruit a group of people, gather information about them, and then follow them over the course of many years, during which some will become ill or die. The researchers in these two studies simply accessed the large amounts of data gathered about these cohorts, and then used statistical analysis on them to compare the coffee drinkers to the non-drinkers. See:

    1. "Cohort Description", EPIC (Accessed: 7/13/2017).
    2. "The Multiethnic Cohort Study", University of Hawai'i Cancer Center (Accessed: 7/14/2017).
  6. Sic: it should read "confounding".

Acknowledgment: The illustration is adapted from the cover of an old EC comic book.

July 10th, 2017 (Permalink)

The Puzzle of the Four Jacks

"The Four Jacks", as the police called them, was a gang of bank robbers, each of whom happened to have the first name "Jack". Their last names are, in alphabetical order: Clubb, Dimond, Hart, and Spayd*. However, according to police informant Eddie "the Snitch", there was a falling out between Jacks Clubb and Dimond that led to the break-up of the original gang.

"That's right," Eddie told Detective Davidson, "those two got into it and now they won't work together no more."

Now, another bank has been robbed, and eyewitnesses saw at least two masked robbers in the getaway car. According to Eddie, some of the Four Jacks are responsible for the crime, but he doesn't know who.

"Hart and Spayd are thick as thieves," Eddie informed Davidson, "they was cellmates in the pen, and you can bet that if either one of 'em was in on it the other was, too. But Spayd don't trust nobody, which is why he won't work with just one other guy, not even Hart. Clubb won't work alone with the two of 'em, 'cause he don't trust 'em. That's why he brought Dimond into the gang."

That's all that Eddie could tell Davidson. Assuming that what Eddie told him is correct, which if any of the four Jacks should Davidson arrest?

Solution

*The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

July 7th, 2017 (Permalink)

New Book: Skewed

I haven't read this new book yet, so I can't recommend it. However, I am intrigued by the book's subtitle: "A Critical Thinker's Guide to Media Bias". That's something I could use.

The topic of media bias is a difficult one to discuss in an unbiased way as it's so partisan: the right cries: "Liberal media bias!" and the left responds: "What liberal media?1 Fox! Rush!" However, both sides are right: there is liberal and conservative media bias, but it depends upon the media outlet. The New York Times and MSNBC2 are biased towards the left and the Democratic Party, while The Washington Times and Fox News Channel2 are biased to the right and the Republicans. Any minimally sophisticated consumer of the news knows this.

The author of the book, Larry Atkins, is a more-than-minimally sophisticated consumer of the news3; in fact, he's a professor of journalism. Unsurprisingly, he's also a liberal:

In an effort to be completely transparent, I should note that I am a staunch4 liberal. … In this book, however, I am attempting to give a balanced, objective, and centrist presentation…. I acknowledge that my attempt at balance may not be perfect, but I will try my very best to both acknowledge and critique conservative and liberal advocates.5

Fair enough. It would be unfair to demand perfection.

Like a previous New Book author6, he retracts the book's title in the "Introduction":

Don't be fooled by the title of this book. This will not be a diatribe against the so-called liberal media. … The point of this book is to examine media bias on both ends of the political spectrum, whether liberal or conservative.5

Well, that's good. I'm not too interested in reading a diatribe, though they can have their uses. One topic of the book appears to be what Atkins calls "advocacy journalism", which he describes as follows:

Advocacy journalism…is a type of reporting in which the reporter gives an opinion or point of view and uses stories to advance an agenda. … Yet many people rely on advocacy journalism as their main source of news. Perhaps most importantly, advocacy journalism has a polarizing effect upon society, and I hope this book deepens readers' understanding of this polarization. The book will also explore aspects of media literacy and ways to navigate the echo chamber of modern media. (By "echo chamber", I am referring to the tendency for people to get news and opinions from sources that "echo," or reinforce, their own or similar viewpoints.)5

Despite all that, Atkins adds: "I…wish to admit here and now that I am a fan of advocacy journalism, yet I know that it has its flaws, especially with respect to bias." So, I suppose that the book will be, at least in part, a defense of advocacy journalism. I look forward to reading this journalistic advocacy of advocacy journalism.

What worries me about advocacy journalism is whether the advocacy journalist is a journalist first and an advocate second, or an advocate first and a journalist second. If the former, then I have no problem with such journalism, even if I disagree with the position advocated―I'm not afraid of hearing people advocate positions I disagree with as long as they do so honestly. However, I wouldn't trust a journalist who put advocacy ahead of journalism―that's propaganda, not news.

In many cases, there is a conflict of interest between the advocate and the truth-seeker, so an "advocacy journalist" is in danger of having to choose between the role of advocate and that of journalist. If the truth goes against your cause, should you tell the truth or conceal it to protect the cause? Historically, there have been "advocacy journalists" who concealed the truth as well as those who exposed it even when it hurt their cause7.

There's also a paradox facing the advocacy journalist: an advocate wants to influence people in a certain way, but the ability to do so is partially dependent on the trust that comes from being an honest journalist. I'm not the only one who doesn't trust "journalists", such as Michael Moore, who are willing to put their advocacy ahead of the truth. So, what should the advocate who is also a journalist do? Pretend not to be an advocate? Or be an honest journalist, instead?

These are a few of the questions I hope to see addressed in Atkins' book.

Notes:

  1. See Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (2003)
  2. Among others. Also see note 4.
  3. "…[E]ven though I am liberal, I can recognize that news organizations such as MSNBC and various websites have a staunchly liberal agenda." ("Introduction") It's interesting that Atkins writes "even though" here, since it suggests that it wouldn't be surprising if he couldn't recognize it.
  4. Atkins likes the word "staunch": he uses it three times in a single paragraph, though once as an adverb (see previous note).
  5. See the "Introduction".
  6. See New Book: The Death of Expertise, 2/28/2017. Perhaps publishers ought to allow writers to entitle their own books.
  7. Compare and contrast the reporting of Walter Duranty and Malcolm Muggeridge on the Ukrainian famine. See Ron Radosh, "The mendacity of Walter Duranty", The New Criterion, 6/2012.

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