firstly I feel a little embarrassed by the fierce defense Jack has given me. I dont know if I deserve all that effort.
I can illuminate the weather example though. Of course I dont know exactly how the weather maps are produced. I know enough to know that the maps are an elaborate abstraction. Abstracting doesnt bother me in the slightest. Abstractions are the name of the game in economics all the time and the full complexity of reality needs simplification in many situations. The weather maps were meant as an illustration of how even the most simple things on the news are in a strict sense a fabrication but they are not presented as a fabrication. I didnt know better until quite recently that pressure maps were the absolute truth. I had no idea they were predictions. Now, people can profess their smartness all they want, but I find it hard to believe that there wouldnt be large slabs of the population who still dont know better than that the weather pressure maps (i.e. those describing events of the previous 24 hours) convey the absolute truth. What I would like to see is weather presenters telling us we’re looking at abstractions rather than pretending they are quoting the holy scriptures. What goes for weahter goes for finance and nearly everything else: why cant journos tell us when they are presenting simplifications? It is true that the weather example is a little silly because at the end of the day ‘who cares?’ but its a perfect illustration of the ‘truth’ factory. The really important example in my list was of course the Taliban example where what we are fed may be completely made up and where we as a public may be lead to ignore gross misdoings. Once the public is desensitised to expect to be told fabrications without due warnings however, one should not look surprised when they’re not that critical with the more important issues either because they will simply not ne prepared to expend the mental energy to keep track of ‘truth’ in the way Nick suggests.
There’s one point of the discussion above I want to comment on further, which is whether someone is allowed to say something about a subject even if (s)he does not know 100% of the issues. I fully agree with Jack that not knowing a 100% about something should never proclude anyone from saying something about them. Not only would it mean no-one could say anything of interest because there’s simply more being written about any single important topic than one could possibly read, but it would mean an abandoning of the democratic ideals in which each person is supposed to form an opinion about everything based on very limited information. Those who believe that only supposed experts have a right to an opinion, even if one only needs a subset of the information on that subject, are on the road to a very nasty political regime indeed.

“The way of presenting a predicted pressure chart imposes certain limitations on what can be presented (even if in only the level of detail). The fact that these limitations mean that we aren

Paul

‘…in all its glory…’. Cheeky bitch.

Ken’s idea sounds a good one. Don’t know if I’ll end up participating but always happy to see a good argument.

How about if you send it to me by email and I’ll post it as a document in the Troppo Wordpress database and then create a hyperlink to it here in the discussion thread? That way people can read it in all its glory without making the discussion thread too physically long and slow-loading. Email to ken dot parish at cdu dot edu dot au .

No argument with your first par, and I don’t think that’s quite what I was arguing. Certainly wasn’t my intention. Apologies for any perceived slight to anyone here.

I see where you’re coming from in the second and third pars, but I could only concede those points painlessly and quickly if I ‘chickened out’ of this thread and accepted the kind of circular terms of debate that, to me, beg precisely the question that needs unpacking in detail. You write: “…the examples given were a mixture of contentious, slightly silly or outright wrong”. I write: no, outright error on the 500 aside, whether or not those examples are as you say here, by what criteria this is assessed, and how legitimate those criteria are…are precisely the contentious meta-points under debate in the post. ‘My arguments are sounder than yours’, which is what you are effectively saying here, is not an argument in itself. So: par two is where we diverge, and par three carries that divergence further. Not only would I be very happy to defend any of Paul’s (non-500) examples, Ingolf, I would concentrate on what by thread consensus seems to be the ‘silliest’ one. Paul’s ‘weather forecast/pressure line’ example, in its near reductio ad absurdum of the epistemological stakes up for grabs in this Information Age, presents the most lucid illustration of what he, or at least I, mean when I talk about the battle between ‘style’ and ‘substance’.

So now we have an epistemological problem of our times and thread, Ingolf. As it happens I’ve spent much of my day off today when I should have been thrashing my Strat – more cretin me – working on a detailed argument in defense of Paul’s ‘silliest’ example. It runs to about 2000 words. I reckon it’s not a bad one. I reckon it’s not too hard to read. I reckon it takes this thread to new places, even. But then I would say all that, wouldn’t I?

Do I post it, or not? If not, why not? You tell me, Club Troppo. Let’s do what (I argue) Ingolf just did in par two, and determine the future terms (AKA limits) of discussion on this thread by the defining epistemological un-mechanism of our age, one I reject (and depise, as a near-inescapable cage fiecely guarded by ceaseless incumbents, curse the Boomer Language Professionals Who Will Not Die Off Or Shut Up): consensual attrition.

It’s your site, Troppity Bip, your post, your thread, your money paying for bandwidth, your imprimatur getting tarnished by a loony moonbat like moi, your pub’s gates being gatecrashed. What does everyone who has contributed to this thread so far think? Shall I post my 2000-er? And which will better support my case – a ‘Yay’ or ‘Nay’?

PS: Derrida Derrida, if you need a hand making up your mind whether CT should let me post my next jungle of adjectives, here’s the opening half dozen or so sentences (to give you a feel for its methodological approach and ‘style’ in general):

“It’s your site, Troppity Bip, your post, your thread, your money paying for bandwidth, your imprimatur getting tarnished by a loony moonbat like moi, your pub’s gates being gatecrashed. What does everyone who has contributed to this thread so far think? Shall I post my 2000-er? And which will better support my case – a ‘Yay’ or ‘Nay’?

PS: Derrida Derrida, if you need a hand making up your mind whether CT should let me post my next jungle of adjectives, here’s the opening half dozen or so sentences (to give you a feel for its methodological approach and ‘style’ in general):

The fairly widespread scepticism that greeted Paul’s post was instead, I think, due to two factors. To begin with, the tabloid style headline didn’t help. Second and more importantly, as noted in various responses, the examples given were a mixture of contentious, slightly silly or outright wrong. Not a winning approach when the expressed intent of the post is to discuss accuracy in media presentation and our ability to “handle the truth”.

As to not being able to “tell the difference between style and substance” or “not recognis[ing] which is more important when assessing the merits of non-fiction writing”, I think you’re creating a false dichotomy. If the only choice was between accurate content written in a lousy style and the opposite, I doubt whether many would choose the latter. But of course it isn’t and good style will always multiply the chances that a given message will actually get a decent hearing.

Tah heaps, Paul, both for the generous – and apt – response to what I was trying to say in itself, but also for not mocking me on a ‘meta-level’ by ridiculing my style and length, which I suppose is not so hard to do. I’ve never pretended to be a good or succinct writer stylistically – which is in fact a major part of what drives my main arguments. Derrida Derrida’s cheap shot above is a timely example of my central claim: that many nominally literate people now cannot tell the difference between style and substance, nor recognise which is more important when assessing the merits of non-fiction writing: essentially, what Derrida Derrida implies is that even the truth only deserves a look-in in a given debate if its ‘readability’ i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed in accordance (presumably) with the appropriate writing benchmarks laid down by…well, God knows who gets to decide what is ‘readable’ and what is ‘unreadable’, frankly. Whoever it is, Paul, as I said I’m glad and grateful that you – the post’s author – took the time to give my lengthy response a go anyway, however unruly-looking it clearly was to Derrida Derrida’s eyes. And thanks again for the space, Club Troppo. I really enjoyed this post and this thread. I think this is one ‘pomo, airy-fairy’ topic that will seem less and less so as the fruit of what is increasingly our epistemological anarchy become clear.

This is true not only of journalism, but also of history – which is a story built from a tissue of remains. I recall the press secretary (Tony Ferguson) taking my draft press release after I’d worked for a year on the Button Car Plan. It was as condensed as I could make it – an argument about what we were trying to do in about a page and a half.

“This will never do” he sighed. Then he wrote out four dot points. The plan was to

hold down the price of cars

improve their quality

increase Australian equity in the industry and involvement in car design and

protect jobs

(This is from memory – the actual list may be somewhat different but not much and you get the picture).

He then checked with me that none of these things was an outright lie – we hadn’t given the second one a thought though of course we expected increased competition to improve quality.

Then he put it out. The press covered the story with these dot points dominant in the description of the plan. And histories written of what the government thought it was doing with the plan are all written in the same vein.

The factoid rules.

“hey buddy, how about this. read everything, including your favourite authors, with a (for you, massive) dose of skepticism. think, read more, find more evidence, think some more, and come to your own conclusions.

start off with this thought:

start off with this thought: “this is all lies” and you’ll never go wrong. otherwise you’re a sucker.

The S&P index (like the vast majority stock mkt indices, except the Dow Jones) is a market-value weighted index. The weight is well-known. if the market value of the stock is $30 billion, and the aggregate market values of the 500 stocks are $30 trillion, then the weight for this stock is 30/30,000 = 0.1%.

On the other hand, the weights for bond market indicators (for example, Lehmann Brothers) are not known for some institutional reasons.

See also Ingolf above. I guess this exchange is showing precisely what your post was doubting. Do we want to know the truth? Would we recognise it? I think we do want to know when something is incorrect and when we suspect something is porkies it is not too difficult to find a less commercial but more reliable source.

Even in pure commonsense terms, bear in mind that multiple large firms devote considerable funds to arbitraging the index futures against the cash components on a continual basis. In addition, close to US$1.5 trillion is invested in index funds that track various S&P Indices. You really think these guys would accept that Standard & Poors “randomly vary the weights over the day, deliberately add noise, whatever.”? I don’t think so.

Still, it has managed to fill in a space at ClubTroppo.

“a source we are not willing to divulge has told us X” then that could be a 5 star story. This formulation makes clear you dont know X for certain, but thats not the point. You then dont claim X as the truth, but as an opinion in itself.

Similarly, you can say “the police commissioner told us he thinks 3 people died yesterday in a boat incident”. Again, that can be a 5 star story even if they turned out to be 4 since you didnt present it as the truth that there were 3.

Being honest about what level of certainty applies allows you to put a higher rating on your story and doesnt mislead the audience. Or do you disapprove of the whole notion that journos should offer rewards for people proving them wrong (over and above the existing liable laws) because you think we the public should just trust them to be as honest as they can? To quote Brendan, let’s look at this as an economic cost-minimisation problem…

Let’s not assume from this that Paul isn’t touching on an important issue. A lot of news is reported third hand, syndicated but ultimately comes from one source. The media frenzy about the Iraq threat in 2001 is the best example. I guess the web and blogs are potentially independent sources of info but even much of that is driven from the same basic news sources.

5 star story: the journo/paper/tv/scientist is so certain of everything in the story that it is willing to pay a certain amount to the first person who could in a court of law make reasonably plausible that it contains either a mistake / an unflagged simplification / or a false reporting as truth of something that is an opinion.

4 star story: the journo/paper/tv/scientist is so certain of everything in the story that it is willing to pay a certain amount to the first person who could in a court of law make reasonably plausible that it contains either a mistake or an unflagged simplification

3 star story: the journo/paper/tv/scientist is so certain of everything in the story that it is willing to pay a certain amount to the first person who could in a court of law make reasonably plausible that it contains a mistake.

2 star story: the journo/paper/tv/scientist guarantees nothing at all

1 star story: the journo/paper/tv/scientist is so certain that the story is a pure fabriation that it is willing to pay a certain amount to the first person who could in a court of law make reasonably plausible that it does not contain mistakes, unflagged simplifications, and false reporting as truth of something that is an opinion.

The notion that news is biased and simplified is something we probably have to live with. But in my ideal news agency, its made clear in every story what degree of certainty and bias applies to that story.

By the way, on the S&P 500. We all know which shares are in it (duh!) but my understanding from talking to 2 finance profs is that the way they’re added up is a secret owned by S&P (which I believe is American).