Adverse Signal To Noise Ratios
I was quite surprised by the contents of some email I received recently. The mail was from someone whom I know to be conservative but believe to be intelligent. The contents concerned the assertion that the facts clearly showed John Kerry to be a liar because, well, that whole Cambodia thing. I must confess that I haven't been paying all that much attention to the details of the whole Swift Boat nonsense, but was fairly sure that virtually all of their concrete assertions had been debunked. So I went off to Google and did a search for 'kerry cambodia' which turned up quite a few hits. A quick glance would lead one to believe that it was a proven fact that Kerry had made up the whole thing about Cambodia. The problem is that when you start looking closely at those hits it becomes apparent that none of them are factual. Lots of blogs, a lot of references to and variations on an Op-Ed piece written by someone from the American Enterprise Institute. No journalism. Not until you get eight or nine pages into the search results. There you find a couple of news articles, none of which have any evidence that Kerry is not telling the truth. On the contrary, they present evidence which suggest that it is completely credible that Kerry is telling the truth here.
This presents an interesting cautionary tale about internet sources, credibility, and noise; and serves as an excellent example of the dangers of basing one's arguments on purported facts presented on someone's website. It also illustrates that direct links into a reputable source (such as a newspaper) might obfuscate the fact the information being viewed is opinion, not journalism. Disturbingly many people seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between legitimate and questionable sources when making online arguments. This seems to suggest that the internet is encouraging, or at least facilitating bad scholarship in public discourse.
/culture_wars | permanent link | ( ) | edit | trackbacks ()