David D. Friedman's Blog, page 26

Media Bias and the Perceived Intelligence of Politicians

My previous post dealt with an incident in which something a politician said was used by her critics as evidence of historical ignorance. In that particular case, for reasons I discussed, they were wrong—what she said did not imply what they claimed and if it had the implication would have been more nearly true than they realized.
But I am sure there are many other cases where a politician says something in public that really is strikingly wrong in one respect or another. Having read transcripts of my own speeches, I do not take that as much evidence against the speaker. In an unscripted context, it is quite easy to say things you don't mean—for instance to leave out the word "not," thus reversing the meaning of a sentence, or to change what you are saying in mid-sentence, with the result that the transcript shows the first half of one sentence followed by the second half of a different one.
What politicians say, however, mostly reaches the ears of voters through the media. That makes possible selective filtering. If you like the speaker, don't report the literal absurdity, on the reasonable enough grounds that he obviously didn't mean it. If you don't like the speaker, do report it, on the grounds that he is enough of an idiot so that he probably did mean it. The voters then conclude that the politicians whom the media they watch or read approve of are much more intelligent and reasonable than ones they disapprove of, whether or not it is true. Where the major media have fairly homogeneous beliefs—Sarah Palin is an obvious example—the result is that most people regard the disliked politicians as stupider and nuttier than they are. The exceptions are mostly the partisans on the other side; nowadays they can get the opposite filtering from blogs and web sites that share their bias, in the past from magazines that did.
As it happens, I know the opinion of two prominent past politicians held by someone who had had considerable first hand interaction with both. His view was that Barry Goldwater was an intelligent man although not an exceptionally intelligent one, and that Teddy Kennedy had a below-average IQ. That is not the view of the two men that one would have gotten from the media back when they were active politicians.

Looking for an honest man: The Palin/Revere flap

In a recent interview, recorded on video, Sarah Palin responded to a question about Paul Revere with:
"…he who warned the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringin' those bells and, um, makin' sure as he's ridin' his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we're gonna be secure and we were gonna be free. And we we're gonna be armed."
Lots of people online (and, I presume, elsewhere in the media) responded by accusing Palin of gross ignorance of American history, since the purpose of Revere's ride was not to warn the British but to warn the Americans. They are wrong twice over.
To begin with, if you actually read (or listen to) what Palin said, the obvious meaning isn't that Revere was carrying a warning to the British but that he was raising the countryside against them and by doing so warning them that they would be facing armed resistance. 
It turns out, however, that Revere did warn the British in the literal sense of the term. In his ride he encountered some British officers, was questioned by them, and told them

"that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the country all the way up."

The quote is from Revere's own account, quoted on a web site. I checked it by googling for part of the passage and finding it quoted in a book written about a century ago.
The first mistake of the people attacking Palin—accusing her of thinking that Revere was riding to warn the British rather than the Americans—is either careless reading or deliberate dishonesty. The second mistake—making fun of the idea that he warned the British—is historical ignorance. I am in a poor position to criticize that ignorance since, until the question came up as a result of Palin' comment, I shared it.
The interesting question is whether any of the people who made fun of Palin for what she said will have the honesty to admit that the mistake was theirs. Googling around, I found a piece by Rick Ungar on a Forbes blog. The comment thread includes ones pointing out that Revere did warn the British. Ungar's response was that Paul Revere didn't fire any shots—true, but hardly a serious criticism of something Palin said not in a prepared speech but in a reply to a question. There was no hint that he recognized that it was his ignorance, not Palin's, that was revealed by what he had written. Rereading his original post, I conclude that he probably doesn't care, since what he made fun of Palin for saying quite obviously doesn't fit what she said.
Which gets me to the title of this post. It will be interesting to see if any of the people who publicly claimed that Palin was falsely asserting that the purpose of Revere's ride was to carry a message to the British admit their error—either the original error of misstating what she said or the subsequent error of insisting that Revere did not warn the British.
Which gets me back to my admiration for George Orwell, which I hope was clear in earlier posts, some of them attacking him. He was an honest man, even if often mistaken—and political controversy would be pleasanter if there were more of them.

Current Experiments in Self Publishing

Modern technology, which greatly simplifies self-publishing, raises the possibility that the conventional market structure may be replaced by a new model in which the role of the publisher is reduced or eliminated. That future is here and I am there. My second novel, Salamander, is  up on Amazon.com as a Kindle file and has received its first (positive) review. We will have to see whether it attracts enough readers who like it, review it positively and tell their friends to read it, to make up for the lack of a publisher's endorsement and marketing. I'm not quitting my day job just yet.
That is not my only experiment in online self-publication. My wife and I have produced a collection of medieval and renaissance recipes—about 350 of them, each accompanied by a description of how we make it—along with related articles, and are in the late stages of publishing it as a physical book using CreateSpace, Amazon's POD subsidiary. The process turned out to be surprisingly easy and inexpensive. By the time we are done, it will have cost us less than a hundred dollars, mostly postage for proof copies—it is amazing how many minor errors  can survive one, two, or even three rounds of proofreading. Once we are done—real soon now as one friend likes to put it—the book will be available via CreateSpace or Amazon. All we have to do is collect royalties.
The project is not entirely new; this book is based on the cooking section of the Miscellany, a book on our medieval hobbies which we have  been self-publishing for twenty-some years, nine editions and something between a thousand and two thousand copies sold. The great thing about doing it via CreateSpace instead of Kinko's or OfficeMax is that I will never have to fill another order.
Assuming that the next proof copy is, as I profoundly hope, the last, the book should be available in a month or so. The title, for the benefit of any of my readers who might like to try cooking from very old recipes, is:
How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes.
One way of replacing the marketing efforts of a publisher is online self-promotion. Blog posts, for instance.

Learning from Evidence: Not

This morning I listened to a commencement address by a former judge. It struck me as an interesting example of the failure to modify beliefs on the basis of evidence.
The speaker began by saying that every American had a legal right to health care, education, financial aid. He took for granted, and obviously approved of, one of the major changes in America over the course of the past century, the shift from a system where almost all goods and services were provided by voluntary transactions on the marketplace to one where many are provided by government, paid for by taxes, allocated by government bureaucracy.
Much of his talk dealt with his own experience with the latter system, the result of his and his wife taking responsibility for, eventually adopting, a young relative with severe autism and related developmental disabilities. Under existing law, she was entitled to a wide range of medical and educational services. When he tried to obtain those services for her, however, he found himself involved in a tangled web of bureaucracy, detailed and inconsistent rules, phone conversations with a computer on the other end. He suspected that insofar as he finally succeeded in working his way through that tangle to a successful outcome, it was at least in part because a federal judge was better able to get attention and favorable treatment from government bureaucrats than most other people would have been. He concluded that the young law graduates to whom he was speaking should devote their lives, at least in part, to seeing that poor Americans got from the government the things to which they were legally entitled.
It apparently did not occur to him that the contrast between his experience in getting services provided by government and his experience buying groceries on the private market, where you simply pay your money and walk out with what you have bought, might say something about the relative workability of the two systems for providing goods and services. Nor that if a system introduced in large part on the theory that it would even out differences between rich and poor turned out to serve higher status people much better than lower status people, perhaps the theory was wrong, perhaps government production and distribution was creating, rather than eliminating, inequality. When a judge goes to the grocery store, he gets the same groceries at the same price as anyone else. 
His conclusion was that these were real problems with the existing system, and the solution was to make that system work better. Institutions which, on the evidence of his own first-hand experience, were still functioning badly seventy or eighty years after they were first designed and built, were to be reformed by the wave of a magic wand with the aid of lots of well intentioned young lawyers inspired by a commencement address.
The experience reminded me of a passage by George Orwell that I recently read. Orwell spent his final months in a private hospital, attempting to recover from the tuberculosis that ultimately killed him. Commenting on the difference between that and the (presumably government supported, although he does not say) hospital he had been in earlier, he wrote:
"The routine here ... is quite different from that at Hairmyres Hospital. Although everyone at Hairmyres was most kind & considerate to me—quite astonishingly so, indeed—one cannot help feeling at every moment the difference in the texture of life when one is paying one's own keep."
Orwell was a convinced socialist. One cannot tell from the comment whether it occurred to him that he was observing one of the advantages of the free market. 
That observation would not, of course, have been a sufficient reason for him to have changed his views; he could reasonably enough have pointed out that a few years earlier, before the success of Animal Farm, he could not have afforded the private hospital, and the public one was considerably better than nothing. But one would like to know whether he thought about the question, whether, if he had lived a few years longer and considered the implications of a variety of observed contradictions between his socialist beliefs and his experiences, his beliefs might have changed. 
Unfortunately, he didn't.