The Minds of People on Social Media

A MAGA classic from somebody called Insurrection Barbie on Twitter/X:

In 2022, NBC was reporting that Joe Biden lost his temper with Zelensky because he wasn’t grateful and he was very demanding.

That’s in 2022.

Wait, the media didn’t tell you about this? I wonder why…

So is NBC not part of "the media"?

Avocados, Giant Ground Sloths, and the Machine of Popular Science

You may have heard that avocados evolved to be eaten by giant ground sloths. After all, most nutrient-rich fruits exist to get seeds deposited in a pile of poop, and what animal could be swallowing and pooping out the huge seeds of avocados? The idea that this might have been giant ground sloths goes back to a biologist named Dan Jansen in a paper published in 1982, but Jansen only offered it as a suggestion in a study mainly about other things, and he did not defend or analyze it. Then a popular science author named Connie Barlow found that obscure paper and put the notion in a book called The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms (2002).  From there it spread across the the whole landscape of popular science: Atlas Obscura, Smithsonian, etc.

But is it true? According to this this video from people who call themselves Sci Sho (transcript here), it is not. These people claim that 1) we have a lot of data about what ground sloths ate, from analysis of their bones and vast quantities of fossilized poop – some giant ground sloths slept in caves, and they pooped on the megafaunal scale – and it mostly points to leaves and grass, not fruit; and 2) avocados seeds used to be much smaller, 1-2 centimeters instead of the 5-6 centimeters of modern varieties, and that the seeds grew large thanks to domestication by humans. But they cite no sources and don't really radiate reliability.

So I started searching to see what I could find out. One thing I learned very quickly was that the ideas in that video are spreading, so you can get a lot of results if you search for the Myth of Ground Sloths and Avocados. 

But once something gets dubbed a "Myth" in this kind of discourse, you should start to suspect that it might have some kind of truth in it. So we must look deeper.

Somebody on Reddit who calls himself 7LeagueBoots says this:

Just regarding the avocado/giant sloth connection, there is a lot of misinformation embedded in that. There are a lot of different kinds of wild avocados, some with very large seeds, some with seeds about the size of an olive. They're reproducing just fine in the wild right now without any giant sloths running about. The fruit portion of these wild avocados is eaten by a wide range of animals, including bears in South America, birds all across their range, squirrels, and many more. The fact that these wild avocados, including those with large seeds, still persist places a very large question to the oft cited presumption that the were depended on giant sloths that have been extinct for around 11,000 years at this point. The research papers I've read on this subject say that it's a possibility that the trees were dependent on the giant sloths, but they all fail to address the elephant in the room. I worked in Ecuador for a while tracking Andean Spectacled Bears and one of their favorite foods was these wild avocados.

So he basically agrees with Sci Sho, although he says wild avocados have a diversity of seed sizes. But one of the responses to that post, from somebody called Bromelia_and_Bismuth, still comes down hard for ground sloths.

So I decided to look into avocado domestication. This very techincal paper on the avocado genome says that modern avocados are hybrids of three distinct wild "races" that were domesticated separately, and have been selectively bred so they bring out the desirable characteristics of each wild ancestor. And this:

The avocado is heterodichogamous, with 2 flowering types: A and B. Type A trees are female (receptive to pollen) in the morning of the first day and shed pollen as males in the afternoon of the following day. In contrast, type B trees are female in the afternoon of the first day and male in the morning of the next day.

This is presumably to limit self-fertilization, but, wow. Genderfluid trees.

Anyway.

This 2009 article on domestication says, "The large size of the avocado fruit appears to have developed before humans arrived in Mesoamerica, and then changed little in size or shape under human influence." Which seems to be a direct refutation of the claims made by Sci Sho. And on the subject of the three landraces, a term of art new to me, "Fruit size does not help differentiate between domestic and wild avocados due to the variation in fruit size caused by environmental factors and individual tree traits." This is important because the oldest archaeological evidence of avocado consumption by humans comes from mountain caves, so the small size of the seeds in that environment may tell us nothing about the size of ancient avocados in the tropical lowlands.

The data on ground sloth diet has a similar problem, because the surviving coprolites are found in mountainous areas with caves, and they only tell us what ground sloths ate in that environment. We don't have any data on what ground sloths ate in the tropical lowlands where most  avocado trees grew. Tropical forests are just a terrible environment for the preservation of anything.

So far as I can tell, this remains an open question. Avocado fruit are nutrient rich, so just about any herbivore could have eaten them. The fact that wild avocados of recent times survive without ground sloths seems to show that the dependence was not absolute, but it does not rule out ground sloths as key transmission vectors or co-evolution between them. After all there is no real "wild" place left in Central America, and all the forests have been shaped to one degree or another by humans; just as acai palms are a wild species that in practice mainly grows around old human settlements, wild, large-seeded avocados may in practice grow mainly where humans have encouraged them.

There is neither fact nor myth here, just an ongoing struggle to understand.

Which brings me to my real point, the perilous state of popular science writing. To get attention, the science press is constantly proclaiming that things are true when they are at best iffy, revolutionary when they may be decades old, "myths" when they still might be true. Sometimes much of the fault resides with the scientists themselves, who exaggerate their findings. But in this case the scientists are blameless. All Dan Jansen did was wonder what used to eat tropical fruit and suggest that somebody should investigate the possibility of ground sloths, which was a great idea. It might be true. But we don't know, and I hurl foul oaths and imprecations at anyone who says otherwise, and no I don't care what you have to do to get clicks. Tell the truth as best you can or shut up.

"Weak" Speech and Gender Stereotypes

A few years ago I read an article by a female reporter who heard somewhere that journalists quote men much more often than women. So she checked found that this was true of her own work. She resolved to stop doing this and tried hard to achieve equality, but failed; even when she was able to quote equal numbers of men and women in her pieces, the editors always cut out many of the statements by women. Because, she said, men are just more quotable according to the standards of modern journalism. Which brings me to this NY Times piece by Adam Grant about women and "weak speech."

“Stop using weak language.” If you’re a woman, you’ve probably gotten this advice from a mentor, a coach or a teacher. If you want to be heard, use more forceful language. If you want a raise or a promotion, demand it. As the saying goes, nice girls don’t get the corner office.

Weak speech means peppering your discourse 

with disclaimers (I’m no expert, but …), hedges (sort of, kind of), and tag questions (right? wouldn’t you say?).

Or always saying, "in my opinion," "I think", etc. Which is way the reporter whose name I have forgotten quoted men more often even when she tried not to; all those disclaimers make a statement weaker and less interesting for a short segment on the news. On the news, you want people to take bold, simple stands, not qualify themselves or explain. Explanation and nuance are boring.

Incidentally I have noticed that this is true of the subjects Tyler Cowen interviews for Marginal Revolutions. All of these are really elite people, CEOs and authors of prize-winning books, but the women still qualify their speech a lot more than the men do. I have also noticed that the trans women of my acquaintance are still completely masculine in this regard.

Anyway, Grant's piece is an argument, backed up by a bunch of studies, that women speak this way because this is what actually works for women:

It turns out that women who use weak language when they ask for raises are more likely to get them. In one experiment, experienced managers watched videos of people negotiating for higher pay and weighed in on whether the request should be granted. The participants were more willing to support a salary bump for women — and said they would be more eager to work with them — if the request sounded tentative: “I don’t know how typical it is for people at my level to negotiate,” they said, following a script, “but I’m hopeful you’ll see my skill at negotiating as something important that I bring to the job.” By using a disclaimer (“I don’t know …”) and a hedge “(I hope …”), the women reinforced the supervisor’s authority and avoided the impression of arrogance. For the men who asked for a raise, however, weak language neither helped nor hurt. No one was fazed if they just came out and demanded more money.

In the United States and in many cultures, gender stereotypes still hold that men should be dominant and assertive, while women should be kind and caring. When women violate these stereotypes, they often get punished. In a meta-analysis of dozens of studies, when women asserted their ideas, made direct requests and advocated for themselves, they were judged as less hirable. Although they were seen as equally competent, they were liked less than men who engaged in the exact same behaviors.

New evidence reveals that it’s not ambition per se that women are being penalized for. . . . The problem arises if people perceive them to be forceful, controlling, commanding and outspoken. These are qualities for which men are regularly given a pass, but they put women at risk of being disliked and denied for leadership roles. (Not surprisingly, the backlash is even stronger when a woman is Black). Instead of being judged just on their performance, they are dinged for their personality. Overbearing. Too abrasive. Sharp elbows.

Grant does the performative thing in blaming this on men – "It’s outrageous that women have to tame their tongues to protect fragile male egos" – but the studies he cites don't support that; they find that the bad reaction to pushy women is just as prevalent among women as among men.

It seems that as women achieve dominance in certain fields of business, like publishing, it hasn't happened because women have become more masculine; it has happened because the habits of aggressive men have become less associated with leadership.

Unvaccinated People are Different

Fascinating poll from Canada showing that people who have been vaccinated for Covid-19 have different views of Ukraine and Russia than non-vaccinated people:

The article is paywalled, but according to my source  the survey found that 26 percent of unvaccinated people in Canada believe Russia invading Ukraine is justified, vs. 2 percent of vaccinated people. My source suggests the unvaccinated are becoming pro-authoritarian, but I would say they have a strong reaction against whatever narrative is being pushed by the mainstream. If the government and the press say Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine the victim, that must be wrong.

I find this a fascinating insight into how people form opinions and how the media landscape is evolving. Information about either vaccines or Ukraine is not likely to change opinions because those opinions are rooted in a deep attitudes toward the world, or at least toward information flows.

Joan Didion's America, and Mine

Like a lot of Americans, I read Joan Didion as a teenager and was captivated. I devoured her essays, felt I had encountered a writer of extraordinary gifts, her keen insights conveyed in brilliant prose. She showed to me a side of America I had never seen but knew existed out there somewhere. Her famous essay "Slouching towards Bethlehem" begins like this:

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

For me at 17, this was revelatory. All I knew (outside of books) was middle class suburban and small town life among what I saw as thoughtless people leading meaningless lives. Didion set up for me another pole of America: on the one hand was the tedium of a highly structured and tightly constrained bourgeois existence, on the other the collapsing fringe where life dissolved into drugs, promiscuity, and despair. 

So when I rebelled against the tedious miasma of high school, I also seethed with disgust against those who sought to escape it with drugs, free love, Maoist nonsense, and tie-dye. 

At 17, my answer was to get beyond all this mediocrity and soar on wings of intellect. My joys were science, history, and ethnography, and my greatest love was for the long ago and far away. My idols were the thinkers who penetrated the veil of existence; but I also had another class of heroes, the skeptics who doubted everything, both the common wisdom and the uncommon nonsense found in the social fringe. I believed myself better than all of this: I thought I understood what others did not, and recognized the folly of senseless, self-destructive rebellion.

It worked, for a while anyway.

But back to our subject. 

For many people, including Didion, revulsion against the doings of hippies and outcasts was a conservative impulse. At the time she was a Goldwater Republican and behind her reaction to drugs, casual sex, and social breakdown, one could sense a longing for some sort of structured normality. But Didion always had admirers all over the political spectrum; to some leftists she was describing the inevitable collapse of capitalism, and the blame for all of this lay with the Man. She never suggested solutions to the problems she documented, nor did she get very deeply into causes. She simply described what she saw, and connected it to her own personal sense that everything was bad and wrong.

If anything defined Didion's career, it was a sense that everything is going to hell. A reviewer once asked, "Can no one cheer this woman up?" No, was the answer. After exhausting national collapse as a theme, in old age she turned her attention to personal losses, chronicling at length the deaths of her husband and daughter and her reactions to them. I've never read those books but many people admire their cold-eyed clarity; after all Didion lived her whole life expecting the worst, so she was ready when it came. I don't mean to dismiss that; there is a value to having death and loss described for us in the clearest words and most powerful sentences. Yet something about Didion always rubbed me wrong.

Look closely at Didion's writing and you see an intense devotion to fragmentation. If she receives good advice, she frames it as "Someone said to me that. . . ." The identity of this wise person, and her relationship with that person, are hidden, leaving Didion as lonely and adrift as possible. It was just something she heard, another voice in the chaos. The narrative leaps around in time and space with no transitions or explanations, and the quotations are carefully chosen to make the speakers seem confused and out of place. Wandering around San Francisco talking to hippies she meets one man determined to get rich as a music promoter. He lectures her about the disposable income of the young, tells her things he read in business magazines. But in Didion's telling he pops up in between one strung-out hippie and the next, so different from them that he seems, not a representative from a saner, more self-sustaining America, but another jagged fragment of a reality that makes no sense. I wanted to ask, ok, if you despise hippies, why do you also despise people trying to keep their heads clear and make a living? But in Didion's America businessmen were always sharks out for a fast buck, just another part of the chaos and cruelty. Wherever sanity, order, and moral strength were to be found, it was not among either capitalists or would-be revolutionaries. 

As the sixties settled down, Didion turned her attention to other crises. Her politics drifted left, and she devoted attention to racism. She opposed the "tough on crime" movement of the 1980s, penned a stirring defense of the Central Park Five. She came to believe that the drifters she chronicled had not just dropped out of civilization, but had been driven out by a callous system. She despised the idealized American past she had been raised on, believed it was a lie and a fraud, and also that it was silly to imagine the 1890s had meaningful lessons for how we should live now. 

But she never fit in on the left either, never found a movement she could join. She once described herself as 

a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people.

There is a view of contemporary life, to which I partially subscribe, that goes like this: You can walk the narrow path of bourgeois rectitude, carefully placing one foot in front of another, getting up every morning to brush your teeth, go to work, and do all the other required acts, or you can fall off into who knows what. You can believe that this is wrong and evil, or that it is just how life has to be, but that doesn't matter to you. All you face is the choice. Didion shot to fame as the chronicler of the who knows what, the cleverest answerer of the question, "what if we really threw it all over and just walked away?" Her characters are either trapped and desperate to escape, or on the road fleeing from everything, free because they have nothing left to lose.

When I read that Joan Didion had died, I almost immediately had two thoughts. One, she got famous because she believed American life is awful and wrote about it with style and cleverness; two, she got famous because she was at least partly right.

"No Evidence" = Terrible Communication

Scott Siskind has a terrific post pointing out that the phrase "no evidence" is used in two contradictory senses in a way that muddies understanding of science and knowledge.

For example, early in the pandemic you might have read articles with titles like "No evidence for airborne transmission of novel coronavirus" or "no evidence linking Covid to indoor dining." Which did not mean those things were not true, just that nobody had yet done a real study about them. Once people started studying them they were quickly shown to be correct. But

On the other hand, here is a recent headline: No Evidence That 45,000 People Died Of Vaccine-Related Complications. Here’s another: No Evidence Vaccines Cause Miscarriage. I don’t think the scientists and journalists involved in these stories meant to shrug and say that no study has ever been done so we can’t be sure either way. I think they meant to express strong confidence this is false.

You can see the problem. Science communicators are using the same term - “no evidence” - to mean:

1. This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure.
2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.

This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism.

I agree completely. I think one of the reasons people don't trust science is that science journalism does not explain to what extent things are known and accepted; the results of the latest cutting edge experiment are presented the same way as something like orbital mechanics that we can calculate to five decimal places. 

It is not enough to say that studies show something, or that scientists accept something, without at least attempting to convey the strength of the evidence and the degree of the agreement. Unfortunately science journalists are under huge pressure to offer yes-or-no, true-or-false takes on every question, because that is all a big portion of the public will accept. But they could do a lot better.

Looking for Solutions

About a decade ago the word "solutions" swept America. Among those caught up in it was the company I worked for at the time, which rebranded itself "Louis Berger Solutions." The NY Times brought in David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg to create a column called "Fixes" which reported on solutions rather than problems.

Bornstein and Rosenberg are now ending their column, and in their final number they have some interesting reflections on their run. They complain about how much more media attention crises get, as opposed to resolutions. Rosenberg: 

We journalists have been conditioned to believe that “news” actually means “bad news,” and that you can’t talk about solutions without falling into public relations. Back in 2015, I wrote about the Ebola vaccine’s startlingly rapid development. Everyone knew about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014. But I was shocked by the number of readers who had no idea there was a successful vaccine. There’s a successful treatment for Ebola now, too — how many people know about that? Here’s a lesson: if we report on the epidemic, we should report on the cure.

Bornstein:

You find what you’re looking for. If journalists go out looking for harmful actors, we’ll find them. On the other hand, if we go out looking for helpful actors — people who are, in good faith, trying to solve problems — we’ll find them, too. A lot of them. At one point I had a spreadsheet with 800 story ideas.

I thought this from Rosenberg was especially important:

This is a strange lesson for a column about new ideas and innovation, but I learned that they’re overrated. The world (mostly) doesn’t need new inventions. It needs better distribution of what’s already out there.

Some of my favorite columns were about how to take old ideas or existing products and get them to new people. As one of our columns put it, “Ideas Help No One on a Shelf. Take Them to the World.” There are proven health strategies, for example, that never went anywhere until some folks dusted them off and decided to spread them. It’s not glamorous to copy another idea. But those copycats are making a big difference.

One of the results of all this solutions talk is a couple of internet databases that track stories about solutions to problems, like the Solutions Story Tracker. The goal, I suppose, would be that if you are confronted by a problem you would Google it and find all the different ways other people around the world have solved it. Which is, I think, a noble dream. Come to think of it, the whole "life hacks" thing might be another side to this; if you find yourself wasting a lot of time with some task, do a quick search and see if someone else has found a better way. 

If we could deploy the world's knowledge, we could make life better. We don't need a revolution in either morals or politics, just a consistent effort to be good and do our work as best we can. So here's to David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg for all the work they put into spreading that message.

Fake Pandemic News in Brazil

Vanessa Barbara reports in the Times that Brazil is still awash in fake news stories about the pandemic. Despite hundreds of debunkings of hydroxychloroquine, many people still believe:

After all, just the other day a friend’s cousin forwarded a headline on WhatsApp claiming that all I.C.U. beds in the city of Miracatu are empty because the mayor adopted President Jair Bolsonaro’s “early treatment” — consisting of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and azithromycin — for Covid-19. OK, Miracatu does not have a hospital. But still: How can we be sure?

That’s just one of dozens of fake news stories about Covid-19 treatments circulating on social media — including one that advocates “nebulized” hydroxychloroquine, Mr. Bolsonaro’s new obsession. Well over a year into the pandemic, false claims still swirl. Is it true that face masks reduce the flow of oxygen to the lungs and can cause cancer? Is the coronavirus a biological weapon created by China? What about the involvement of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros?

Even now, after the death of half a million citizens, Brazilians are forwarding delirious claims that hospitals are empty and people are being buried alive to inflate coronavirus statistics. Last year, as daily deaths soared, stories about empty coffins and staged burials abounded. It’s almost as if Brazilians couldn’t — wouldn’t — accept that things could really be so bad and took refuge in paranoia, suspicion and conspiracy. In this, of course, they had a guide: Mr. Bolsonaro, at every turn, has sought to spread mischief and misinformation.

In my better moods I believe the US will survive the flood of false news stories on social media. The real danger is in other places; after all, India and Sri Lanka have already seen flash mob attacks on innocent people accused on Twitter of kidnapping and the like. Could there one day be a flash mob revolution, inspired by a fake story, that succeeds?

Awesome plot for a thriller, anyway. Too bad I'm busy writing a different one.

Frank Bruni Ponders the Role of Columnists in the Nation's Poisonous Discourse

Columnist Frank Bruni, retiring from the Times, says his regrets are all about the times he took cheap, partisan shots:

I owe Ted Cruz an apology.

One day in 2015 when I had a column due in hours and couldn’t settle on a topic, I took the easy route of unloading on Cruz, who was one of many unappealing contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. He was fair game for rebuke, no question there. But did I illuminate his dark character, enlighten my readers or advance any worthwhile cause by comparing him — repeatedly — to the unstoppable entity in the horror movie “It Follows”?

No. I just swam with the snide tide.

I did that too often. Many columnists do.

Starting, well, now, I’m a columnist no more. . . . Ten years is a long haul in any assignment, and while this one has been amply challenging and deeply rewarding, I always had misgivings.

I worried, and continue to worry, about the degree to which I and other journalists — opinion writers, especially — have contributed to the dynamics we decry: the toxic tenor of American discourse, the furious pitch of American politics, the volume and vitriol of it all.

I worry, too, about how frequently we shove ambivalence and ambiguity aside. Ambivalence and ambiguity aren’t necessarily signs of weakness or sins of indecision. They can be apt responses to events that we don’t yet understand, with outcomes that we can’t predict.

But they don’t make for bold sentences or tidy talking points. So we pundits are merchants of certitude in a world where much is in doubt and many questions don’t have one right answer. As such, we may be encouraging arrogance and unyieldingness in our readers, viewers and listeners. And those attributes need no encouragement in America today.

I don't blame Bruni; it was his job to build the Times' readership, and readers like snide partisan attacks. But he is right that no one really benefits from that kind of discourse. 

Twitter and Nigeria's President

Nigeria is having a bad spring. Rebel groups are active in at least three regions, including the southern areas where people tried in the 1960s to create the separate state of Biafra. A week ago, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari tweeted this: 

Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War. Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.

Twitter quickly deleted the post for violating its rules against fomenting violence.

Which makes me wonder; when you're the President of a country where rebels kill and kidnap your citizens every day, isn't threatening violence sometimes part of your job? Seems to me completely appropriate for the President to remind rebels and their supporters where their actions might lead. 

Twitter is of course a private company free to decide for themselves what messages they will ban, but this decision still seems very odd to me. Threats are part of the normal language of diplomacy. The President is known to be in contact with political leaders in the south, figuring out how to deal with rebels and work on the people's grievances. Who is Twitter to decide what threats are not acceptable in that situation?

The President responded by banning Twitter. Commentators say the removal of his tweet was just a pretext, and that he has wanted to do this for some time because political separatists are using Twitter to organize their movements. Which means that Twitter allows political grievances to be aired, so long as they don't openly threaten violence, even if they point much more directly toward civil war than anything the president said.

Very strange.

And let me take this opportunity to wonder about Nigeria. By some metrics Nigeria is thriving. The economy is growing, inflation is under control, and the country's arts scene is one of the most vibrant in the world. Whatever art interests you, from film to abstract painting to traditional sculpture to every sort of music, Nigerians are making tons of it. They have a democratic government and a rambunctious press. And yet they have terrible problems as well: corruption on a gigantic scale, criminal violence, terrorism, political turmoil. How do these things coexist? 

I suppose it is an old story; from Renaissance Italy to Southern Song China, the most artistically creative periods have often been eras of violence and turmoil. But I still find it very confusing.

How the American Media Shut Down Debate over the Origins of Covid-19

Matt Yglesias has a long essay laying out the timeline of the theory that Covid-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, and especially the media coverage of that theory. (If that link won't work, try accessing from Marginal Revolution). Despite what you could have read in the Times and many other places, there was never a scientific consensus that the virus emerged from the Wuhan wet market. The very first serious western publication about the pandemic's origins, in The Lancet in January 2020, pointed out that several of the first cases had no connection to the market, including the earliest case so far identified.

Then Senator Tom Cotton, a noted China Hawk, started saying the virus might have escaped from the Wuhan virus lab and demanding more information. For this he was attacked across many media outlets on the left and the right – remember that at that point Trump was downplaying the virus and saying the Chinese had it under control. The fact checkers at Politico 1) said Cotton had claimed the virus was a Chinese bioweapon, and 2) gave him a "pants on fire" rating for that claim, which he never made. 

And so it went. Many media outlets said it was the "scientific consensus" that the virus came from the market, which it never was, and many equated the claim that it escaped from the lab with the claim that it was an engineered bioweapon, when those are totally different things. Scientists who tried to argue that the market theory was implausible were shouted down on Twitter and called "conspiracy theorists" in the press.

What especially interests Yglesias is the manufacturing of a "scientific consensus" where there was none:

Beyond the gross irresponsibility of the earliest media coverage, I think the story of Dr. Chan and her struggle to be heard illustrates the perils of expert dialogue on social media.

Social media is truly social in the sense that it features incredible pressures to form in-groups and out-groups and then to conform to your in-group. Unless you like and admire Cotton and Pompeo and want to be known to the world as a follower of Cotton-Pompeo Thought, it is not very compelling to speak up in favor of a minority viewpoint among scientists. Why spend your day in nasty fights on Twitter when you could be doing science? Then if you secure your impression of what “the scientists” think about something from scanning Twitter, you will perceive a consensus that is not really there. If something is a 70-30 issue but the 30 are keeping their heads down, it can look like a 98-2 issue.

I do not know a lot about science, so I will not opine how generally true this may or may not be.

But in economics, which I do know well, I think it’s a big issue. If someone tweets something you agree with, it is easy to bless it with an RT or a little heart. To take issue with it is to start a fight. And conversely, it’s much more pleasant to do a tweet that is greeted with lots of RTs and little hearts rather than one that starts fights. So I know from talking to econ PhD-havers that almost everyone is disproportionately avoiding statements they believe to be locally unpopular in their community. There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.

My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution.

Why People Hate the Media

 Tyler Cowen from 2016, recently called out as one of his best posts:

Haven’t you noticed this? I have a simple hypothesis. No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status. That’s even true for this blog, though that is never my direct intention.

But now you can see why people get so teed off at the media. The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. You hold more of a grudge from the status slights than you get a positive and memorable charge from the status agreements.

In essence, (some) media is insulting your own personal status rankings all the time. You might even say the media is insulting you. Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered. It’s like they get to throw a media pie in your face.

In return you resent the media.

A good rule of thumb is that if you resent the media “lots,” you are probably making a number of other emotional mistakes in your political thought.

Debating Free Speech and the First Amendment

Thomas Edsall has a round-up today of the debate raging in US legal and academic circles about the First Amendment. On the one side are people who say the amendment is obsolete, because government censorship is no longer the biggest threat to our public debate; on the other those who say public debate has always been difficult, dangerous, and tricky to manage, and government interference remains a dire threat. Lawrence Lessing:

There’s a very particular reason why this more recent change in technology has become so particularly destructive: it is not just the technology, but also the changes in the business model of media that those changes have inspired. The essence is that the business model of advertising added to the editor-free world of the internet, means that it pays for them to make us crazy. Think about the comparison to the processed food industry: they, like the internet platforms, have a business that exploits a human weakness, they profit the more they exploit, the more they exploit, the sicker we are.

Of course a lot of this is driven by fear of Trump and his bodyguard of lies. Tim Wu:

the president creates an entire attentional ecosystem that revolves around him, what he and his close allies do, and the reactions to it — centered on Twitter, but then spreading onward through affiliated sites, Facebook & Twitter filters. It has dovetailed with the existing cable news and talk radio ecosystems to form a kind of seamless whole, a system separate from the conventional idea of discourse, debate, or even fact.

And from the "don't tinker with the amendment" side, Lawrence Tribe:

We are witnessing a reissue, if not a simple rerun, of an old movie. With each new technology, from mass printing to radio and then television, from film to broadcast TV to cable and then the internet, commentators lamented that the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly enshrined in a document ratified in 1791 were ill-adapted to the brave new world and required retooling in light of changed circumstances surrounding modes of communication. . . . the idea of adopting a more European interpretation of the rights of free speech — an interpretation that treats the dangers that uncensored speech can pose for democracy as far more weighty than the dangers of governmentally imposed limitations — holds much greater peril than possibility if one is searching for a more humane and civil universe of public discourse in America.

I am, as my readers know, skeptical of almost any argument that says we face entirely new problems. My favorite judge, Learned Hand, worried all the time about the pernicious effects of radio, which he thought enabled the rise of Fascism. Newspapers used to be plenty bad; yellow journalism helped to give us the Spanish-American War,  and whipped up the Red Scare in a panic that led to massacres of black Americans in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

But that doesn't mean there isn't a problem; nobody wants a repeat of the Red Scare, and the rise of Fascism was one of the worst events in human history.

The problem with imposing limits on freedom of speech is that this involves trusting somebody to impose those limits. Who do you trust? The Supreme Court? The Trump Administration? Congress? 

There are certainly ideas out there that I think are both false and dangerous; right now the most prominent is that Biden stole the election. Most of my friends agree with me about this, and so to the Times, the Post, ABC and CNN. So surely we get to censor the people who disagree with us?

Or do we? I would be willing to bet that if you polled Americans about what ideas they think are so dangerous that they should be censored, you would find that millions of us think the most vital ideas are those that are most bitterly contested. I bet millions would like to censor unqualified praise of capitalism, while millions of others would like to censor all talk of socialism. The same would hold for gun rights, the existence of God, climate change, vaccines, raising animals for food, homosexuality, spanking children, and on and on. I am deadly serious about this. We have already seen in academic circles talk of "climate change denial" as an offense on par with Holocaust denial, and several American states have tried to ban reporting on the horrors of factory farming. (Which the courts have overturned on First Amendment grounds.) Remember that most Americans don't have particularly strong views about politics, but they all do have very strong views about something.

You may be thinking that there is some mechanism by which we could sort out the truly factual from the matters of opinion, but, again, who would do it? There is nobody Americans trust to do that, and nobody I trust to do it. We have seen with Facebook that in fact gatekeeper institutions respond to political pressure, tweaking algorithms to avoid offending whoever has the loudest soapbox.

I think our politics are bad because we are bitterly divided about important questions and do not agree at all about even how to think about those questions: nationalism, race, sexuality, religion, immigration. There are other problems whose existence is widely acknowledged – economic inequality, the education of poor children – which fester, I think, because we do not know how to solve them. And then there is the bad incentive built into our two-party system, which leads politicians to attack whatever the other party is doing, even if they defended it the year before. Republicans in particular have focused much of their energy on sabotaging whatever Democrats want to do, even if it means making the government work worse for everyone.

I think fighting about internet speech is almost beside the point; when people are as divided as Americans are now, they will find ways to shout at each other about it.

Social Media and Race Politics

While most of the outrage in our latest political firestorm has been directed at the police, quite a bit has also been directed at Facebook and Twitter. In the past few weeks I have seen at least a dozen articles arguing that both platforms are enabling racism and white supremacy and myriad calls for them to ban "hate speech."

As one example, let me cite the one I just read, by Charles Warzel in the Times:

The architecture of the social network — its algorithmic mandate of engagement over all else, the advantage it gives to divisive and emotionally manipulative content — will always produce more objectionable content at a dizzying scale. . . . Facebook is too big to govern responsibly. There will always be more work to do because Facebook’s design will always produce more hate than anyone could monitor. How do you reform that? 

Warzel quotes various people saying that the problem is that the leadership of those companies is racist:

The platform will reflect the values of the people that make the decisions. If you have people working at the platforms that are bought into perpetuating a system of white supremacy or unwilling to reckon with it, then that’s what it’ll start looking like.

But I agree completely with Siva Vaidhyanathan, who says that the real problem isn't Facebook or Twitter, it's social media as a way of communicating:

You see lots of people putting forth a hopeful idea of a new, humane social media platform to rescue us — one that respects privacy or is less algorithmically coercive. But if we’re being honest, what they’re really proposing at that point is not really social media anymore. I think social media have been bad for humans. And we shouldn’t keep trying to imagine we should either fix or reinvent what is fundamentally a bad idea.

The problem with social media is that they fuse conversation with our friends, something we think (or I think, anyway) ought to be completely free and unregulated, with mass media. They broadcast our private likes and dislikes to the world, sum them together to create agglomerations of feeling, and toss us nuggets from the wide world chosen to intensify whatever beliefs or emotions are driving us to go online in the first place. They may even be shaping our beliefs in ways that we don't really see or understand.

The reason social media are full of racism and hate is that millions of people are racists who hate each other, and the only way to remove their words would be a draconian censorship regime that would probably ruin the whole business. If you've never written anything that would be hurtful to someone, either you don't write much or you're a very strange sort of person. I'm a pretty cautious writer and I try not to offend, but the thought of having my speech regulated by the sort of people who campaign under #StopHateForProfit makes me very worried.

That's why I've completely given up on Facebook; I liked "following" my friends and relations but the flow of political rage after the 2016 election made me queasy, as did the thought of laying my whole network of connections out there for the world to see, plus I found it a terrible format for writing more than a sentence, forcing discourse into the simplest and least nuanced forms.

The thing is, millions of people love social media, and they are supremely useful. My eldest son is plugged into anti-fa and protester networks via Facebook and Youtube and is always way ahead of the news in knowing what is happening; he has developed a feel for which sources are reliable and the things he passes onto me always turn out to be right, sometimes after false versions have been in the news for days.

Plus, Facebook was a lifeline for many people unable to get out and socialize even before the pandemic, and in our world anything that decreases loneliness has to count as a plus.

So I think we are stuck with social media and can of ugly worms they have opened.

To me the only answer is to shift our eyes away from the public discourse and look deeper. Political factions have been trying for centuries to control what is said in the press and by public figures. That is still important – Fox News did a lot more to elect Trump than Russians on Facebook – but with social media ideas can spread directly from person to person without amplification from leaders or public bodies. Control of the commanding heights is not enough. So if you want to end racism, it is not enough to ban it from television and Presidential speeches; you have to change human hearts, one at a time. I think the rage against Facebook is born from recognizing the daunting nature of that task.

The Minecraft Uncensored Library

The Uncensored Library is a Minecraft creation that holds thousands of banned books and articles, accessible from anywhere you can play Minecraft. Which includes, for now, most of the world's oppressive countries. What a delightful idea.

What Flattened the Curve?

Well, social distancing did. But why did people comply with social distancing orders? Jonah Goldberg comments on the debate raging on the right over whether the initial estimates of many million deaths were deliberate lies:

It’s almost surely the case that the models were wrong to one degree or another for the simple reason that any model is only as good as the data fed into it. With imperfect information — partly thanks to the outrageous dishonesty of the Chinese government and the grave missteps of the World Health Organization — it was inevitable that the models would never be more than best guesses. We’re far from out of the woods, but the fact that “only” some 60,000 Americans may die instead of 240,000 seems like something to celebrate, not an excuse to scapegoat officials who scrambled to save lives.

Still, there’s an interesting assumption common to both sides of the debate: that the government is responsible for all of this. Both defenders and the critics start from the premise that government diktats are the only variable here. . . .

Information doesn’t just come from governments. The death tolls in Italy and New York probably did more to change behavior on the ground than all of Trump’s press conferences or Dr. Anthony Fauci’s TV appearances.

And this raises another complication for those who think the government can just “re-open” the economy with the flick of a switch. Trump and all of the governors could lift the stay-at-home orders and federal advisories tomorrow. That wouldn’t necessarily fill the restaurants, airplanes, or stadiums. People would still need to be convinced it’s safe. Such persuasion comes via clear, believable information, not orders from on high.

And that’s how it should be in a free society.

I don't entirely agree; there are people who listen to Trump, or to the doctors they put on CNN.  But the news filtering out about star athletes still holding parties and so on shows that if people wanted the flout stay at home orders, they could. If they are not, it's because they have been persuaded that this is a good idea.

The World Mood: Surly and Distrustful

British journalist William Davies asks why nobody trusts the media:

A recent survey found that the majority of people globally believe their society is broken and their economy is rigged. Both the left and the right feel misrepresented and misunderstood by political institutions and the media, but the anger is shared by many in the liberal center, who believe that populists have gamed the system to harvest more attention than they deserve. Outrage with “mainstream” institutions has become a mass sentiment. . . .

The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and the ubiquitous surveillance they enable has ushered in a new public mood that is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair and objective fashion. It is a mindset that begins with legitimate curiosity about what motivates a given media story, but which ends in a Trumpian refusal to accept any mainstream or official account of the world. . . .

The current threat to democracy is often seen to emanate from new forms of propaganda, with the implication that lies are being deliberately fed to a naive and over-emotional public. The simultaneous rise of populist parties and digital platforms has triggered well-known anxieties regarding the fate of truth in democratic societies. Fake news and internet echo chambers are believed to manipulate and ghettoise certain communities, for shadowy ends. Key groups – millennials or the white working-class, say – are accused of being easily persuadable, thanks to their excessive sentimentality.

But, says Davies, this is wrong. Very few people are actually insulated from mainstream news, or dependent entirely on extreme voices. Many Trump voters and Brexiteers are quite well informed on what the mainstream media say, they just refuse to believe it.

This diagnosis exaggerates old-fashioned threats while overlooking new phenomena. Over-reliant on analogies to 20th century totalitarianism, it paints the present moment as a moral conflict between truth and lies, with an unthinking public passively consuming the results. But our relationship to information and news is now entirely different: it has become an active and critical one, that is deeply suspicious of the official line. Nowadays, everyone is engaged in spotting and rebutting propaganda of one kind or another, curating our news feeds, attacking the framing of the other side and consciously resisting manipulation. In some ways, we have become too concerned with truth, to the point where we can no longer agree on it. The very institutions that might once have brought controversies to an end are under constant fire for their compromises and biases.

Where this ends up, I have no clue. But I think a complete disappearance of any shared account of the world is quite possible, especially as digital fakery gets better and better.

Is the Amazon Burning?

Well, yes, but no more so than in most years and a lot less than in the peak burning era 15 years ago.

And note that this graph counts fires in Brazil, not the Amazon. In the Amazon, most fires burn beneath the tree canopy and are hard to count from satellites. Most of Brazil's fires are in drier areas, as you would expect, and most of the photographs you see in the news are of those hilly scrublands. Fires in scrublands do produce a lot of pollution, but they are part of a natural cycle that his been taking place in those areas for millennia. As in the American west, tight control of fires in those areas just leads to the build up of fuel and more catastrophic fires in the long run. It may be -- some people say this, anyway -- that the intensification of cattle raising in Brazil led to more frequent fires because ranchers set them to clear scrub for grazing land, but if so that process peaked in 2002-2007 and we are now back to something like the normal pattern.

While I am on the subject, there is no evidence that if too much rain forest is cleared it will never grow back. There are places in the world where cleared forests have not regrown, so it is not an absurd idea. But archaeology shows us that between 1000 BC and 1500 AD the Amazon region was densely populated by Native American farmers who cleared vast areas of forest for their fields; after those people were mostly wiped out by European and African diseases, the forests regrew very nicely.

The Amazon is the lungs of the planet! The lungs are being destroyed by fire! Once lost they can never be replaced! This is all silly hype. Rain forest produce oxygen, but probably not as much as you think, because the intensity of life also means a lot of respiration. Cattle pastures and soybean fields also produce oxygen. And the richest parts of the forest are growing on old Indian fields.

The Amazon rain forest has shrunk a lot over the past sixty years, and I think that is a bad thing. But shouting nonsense and insulting Brazilian farmers is not going to help.

David Brooks on Scandal Politics

How we do politics in America:

The sad fact is that Watergate introduced a poison into the American body politic. Richard Nixon’s downfall was just and important, but it opened up the mouthwatering possibility that you don’t need to do the hard work of persuading people to join your side. Instead, you can destroy your foes all at once through scandal.

Politics since Watergate has been defined by a long string of scandals and pseudo-scandals — Iran-contra, Whitewater, Valerie Plame, Benghazi, Solyndra, swift-boating. Politico last year compiled a list of 46 scandals that were at one time or another deemed “worse than Watergate.”

The nation’s underlying divides are still ideological, but we rarely fight them honestly as philosophical differences. We just accuse the other side of corruption. Politics is no longer a debate; it’s an attempt to destroy lives through accusation.

The political media, especially on TV, now has a template it can apply whenever a scandal looms into view, to hook viewers into the speculative story line. According to the Tyndall Report, the three main broadcast networks made the Russia collusion investigation the second-most-covered news event of 2018, trailing only the Kavanaugh hearings, another scandal. . . .

It’s all a wonderful game. You don’t have to know anything about a boring policy subject like economics, poverty or foreign affairs. You can have a long career in politics and media by simply treating public life as an arena of life-or-death gossip.

Maybe this is partly because the real issues facing our country, from immigration to gun control to trade policy, and especially health care, are fiendishly complex and hard to understand. Who wants to listen to hours of argument about tariffs or emergency room fees? Scandal mongering is a way to rile up the emotions without having to engage the higher modules of the brain, and that is just a lot more fun. After all, we already know that our enemies are bad people with bad ideas, so why bother trying to understand them? Easier to accuse them of doing something nefarious and feel smug about our own virtue.

Provocation Sells

Interesting aside from Mark Zuckerberg as he rambled about possible changes in how Facebook polices its content:

He called this “borderline content”––content that doesn’t break Facebook’s rules, but that walks right up to the line without crossing it. “No matter where we draw the lines for what is allowed,” he wrote, “as a piece of content gets close to that line, people will engage with it more on average––even when they tell us afterwards they don’t like the content.”

Borderline content getting more engagement “applies not only to news but to almost every category of content,” he added. “For example, photos close to the line of nudity, as with revealing clothing or sexually suggestive positions, got more engagement on average before we changed the distribution curve to discourage this. The same goes for posts that don’t come within our definition of hate speech but are still offensive.”

People may be offended, but they still look.