I will - at my great peril! - offer a comparison to confirm your assertions about lack of willingness to consider history.
My great peril arises in that I will mention the issue of climate change. Not that I deny it is changing, you understand - obligatory disclaimer! - but that context is important.
First off, we are constantly being told that we getting to warmer and warmer temperatures and it does seem so to me. Having said that, there is little context to that claim; there is no consideration to the scare in the 1970s and 1980s about global cooling (including arguments by the saints who now argue "in favor" of the concept of global warming!). There is no consideration in those current comments about what happened as recently as, oh, the 1960s, the 1970s, etc. There is no consideration about the medieval warm period when talking about "highest ever" or the "little ice age," what, about four hundred odd years ago and so forth.
So, my point is that the current "analysis" is not at all analytical. I expect that climate IS changing; after all, it always does change. The real issue is much more complicated than the headlines make it and I, therefore, accept in full your thesis. And, just for the record, perhaps mankind is responsible, etc.... and then, what do the various data truly tell us? The headlines certainly don't care.
Well said! Excellent article. Hyperbole abounds in today’s media. There seems to be a lack of critical thinking skills. A good reminder of the importance of perspective.
Unfortunately, Dan, you failed to lead off with the quote, sort-of-from Samuel Langhorne Clemens:
"'There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Of course, with that omission (intentional?) your reader is likely less apt to realize what appears to be a reason for so much use of ‘statistics’ in your writings, because, calling again on a quote from the guy more commonly known as Mark Twain:
"Statistics is the art of never having to say you're wrong."
In closing my comment, this reader fully realizes that your stories are simply expressing your opinions, and as you wrote in a Vancouver Sun Op-Ed, way back in 2008 … your quote:
“On any given day of the week, readers send e-mails in response to what I have written. Some say nice things. Others are not so happy. But in almost every case, my correspondents feel it important to tell me that they do, or do not, agree with me. So let me say collectively to those of you who write: I don't care.”
Excellent as always. To which I respectfully add two other factors at work here as well. Hindsight bias and fun with charts.
As you know, hindsight bias is the tendency to unconsciously adjust our memory of a previous opinion to overstate our predictive abilities and construct a sense of inevitability and foreseeability. Respectively “I said it would happen”, “It had to happen” and “I knew it would happen”. (I’m paraphrasing Neal J. Roese and Kathleen D. Vohs Hindsight Bias, Roese and Vohs Perspectives on Psychological Science vol 7, issue 5 .)
I’m no expert but it’s akin to its more famous cousin confirmation bias already referred to a comment. Both give us a sense of comfort and control. Together they account for the appeal of what you call shoddy history or its shoddy treatment as a library to be plundered rather than studied.
Fun with tables, is something I think you may have already written about. I’m sure I haven’t because I fall prey to it all the time. The first chart, showing the “spike” in violent crime is not only selectively brief, as you note, but also misleadingly scaled, in the sense that it doesn’t have one and appears to show nearly a doubling of violent crime.. The second chart shows the spike was around 17 more violent crimes per 100,000 from 2019 to 2020, or somewhere around 5%. Significant and tragic but no reason to vote for Trump.
Is not some of the challenge that these sorts of broad statements link up nicely with our expectations. There was a bit in the old Colbert Report, I think, where he noted that something was not supported completely by the facts but we still believed it because it had ‘truthiness’. It was taken as a given that children were being massively hurt by the pandemic - remote schooling producing unrecoverable loss of learning, social breakdown, loneliness, anxiety, etc. It makes sense that something so consequential to society will leave an equally large negative impact. And we have seen articles making claims based solely on how parents or teachers feel or on early and partial data. And those articles have been widely accepted and spread because it feels right. As the data is arriving now, the picture seems far more mixed and up for debate. For example, the early fears that suicide amongst teens had risen due to the pandemic seems now not to have been true.
Kind of with you until you cite Pinker, whose heaps of "data" have been so comprehensively challenged by heaps of historians. Live by pointing to the complexity of what history shows in relation to a contemporary feeling or mood, die by the complexity of what history shows.
perhaps those who write about comparisons are not old enough to have had experiences like previous generations. I can still remember my anxieties, and have discussions about and compare them with those of my children. It helps putting some perspective to the headlines. Thanks for the analysis.
Thank you, Sir.
I will - at my great peril! - offer a comparison to confirm your assertions about lack of willingness to consider history.
My great peril arises in that I will mention the issue of climate change. Not that I deny it is changing, you understand - obligatory disclaimer! - but that context is important.
First off, we are constantly being told that we getting to warmer and warmer temperatures and it does seem so to me. Having said that, there is little context to that claim; there is no consideration to the scare in the 1970s and 1980s about global cooling (including arguments by the saints who now argue "in favor" of the concept of global warming!). There is no consideration in those current comments about what happened as recently as, oh, the 1960s, the 1970s, etc. There is no consideration about the medieval warm period when talking about "highest ever" or the "little ice age," what, about four hundred odd years ago and so forth.
So, my point is that the current "analysis" is not at all analytical. I expect that climate IS changing; after all, it always does change. The real issue is much more complicated than the headlines make it and I, therefore, accept in full your thesis. And, just for the record, perhaps mankind is responsible, etc.... and then, what do the various data truly tell us? The headlines certainly don't care.
Well said! Excellent article. Hyperbole abounds in today’s media. There seems to be a lack of critical thinking skills. A good reminder of the importance of perspective.
Excellent! Perspective is so important.
As if Trump was the only politician ever to overstate his case- or did he overstate it? Perhaps you overstated the case against him?
Compelling. Thank you.
Unfortunately, Dan, you failed to lead off with the quote, sort-of-from Samuel Langhorne Clemens:
"'There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Of course, with that omission (intentional?) your reader is likely less apt to realize what appears to be a reason for so much use of ‘statistics’ in your writings, because, calling again on a quote from the guy more commonly known as Mark Twain:
"Statistics is the art of never having to say you're wrong."
In closing my comment, this reader fully realizes that your stories are simply expressing your opinions, and as you wrote in a Vancouver Sun Op-Ed, way back in 2008 … your quote:
“On any given day of the week, readers send e-mails in response to what I have written. Some say nice things. Others are not so happy. But in almost every case, my correspondents feel it important to tell me that they do, or do not, agree with me. So let me say collectively to those of you who write: I don't care.”
Excellent as always. To which I respectfully add two other factors at work here as well. Hindsight bias and fun with charts.
As you know, hindsight bias is the tendency to unconsciously adjust our memory of a previous opinion to overstate our predictive abilities and construct a sense of inevitability and foreseeability. Respectively “I said it would happen”, “It had to happen” and “I knew it would happen”. (I’m paraphrasing Neal J. Roese and Kathleen D. Vohs Hindsight Bias, Roese and Vohs Perspectives on Psychological Science vol 7, issue 5 .)
I’m no expert but it’s akin to its more famous cousin confirmation bias already referred to a comment. Both give us a sense of comfort and control. Together they account for the appeal of what you call shoddy history or its shoddy treatment as a library to be plundered rather than studied.
Fun with tables, is something I think you may have already written about. I’m sure I haven’t because I fall prey to it all the time. The first chart, showing the “spike” in violent crime is not only selectively brief, as you note, but also misleadingly scaled, in the sense that it doesn’t have one and appears to show nearly a doubling of violent crime.. The second chart shows the spike was around 17 more violent crimes per 100,000 from 2019 to 2020, or somewhere around 5%. Significant and tragic but no reason to vote for Trump.
Is not some of the challenge that these sorts of broad statements link up nicely with our expectations. There was a bit in the old Colbert Report, I think, where he noted that something was not supported completely by the facts but we still believed it because it had ‘truthiness’. It was taken as a given that children were being massively hurt by the pandemic - remote schooling producing unrecoverable loss of learning, social breakdown, loneliness, anxiety, etc. It makes sense that something so consequential to society will leave an equally large negative impact. And we have seen articles making claims based solely on how parents or teachers feel or on early and partial data. And those articles have been widely accepted and spread because it feels right. As the data is arriving now, the picture seems far more mixed and up for debate. For example, the early fears that suicide amongst teens had risen due to the pandemic seems now not to have been true.
Kind of with you until you cite Pinker, whose heaps of "data" have been so comprehensively challenged by heaps of historians. Live by pointing to the complexity of what history shows in relation to a contemporary feeling or mood, die by the complexity of what history shows.
perhaps those who write about comparisons are not old enough to have had experiences like previous generations. I can still remember my anxieties, and have discussions about and compare them with those of my children. It helps putting some perspective to the headlines. Thanks for the analysis.