Absolutely loved this read - thank you! I know you are pleading for a more recent sense of history, but as a historian of the much more distant past (I love CE dates with 3 digits), the same can, judiciously, be said for any historical perspective.
Seeing things in terms of 100- or 1000-year patterns doesn't mean I don't care about what is happening now but it helps to quiet the panic and identify the really big stuff (which often isn't headline-grabbing). As you rightly say, no comparison, no making sense!
I agree entirely, of course. What I pointed to is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. A concerted effort to push back our temporal horizons would be most welcome, but, for now, baby steps.
My feeling is that, if thinking historically becomes more habitual, people tend to start being more creative and flexible with their temporal horizons anyway. It is interesting to me that in lots of British newspapers of the 19th century, references to antiquity were very common. All sorts of things about that also pointed towards huge social and ideological problems - a historical perspective doesn't fix everything, but it suggests that, as your post points out, it is a habit we've gotten into of not looking over our shoulder at all. Again, many thanks for a great piece.
I don't know if that's true. I wish it were. But... In finance, for example, I can think of numerous examples of people using remarkably shallow looks at the past as the basis for very consequential decisions today. In fact, people have built careers on looking deeper than others precisely people who understood the importance of drawing inferences by looking to the past were so consistently shallow. My favourite example is the c.2005 housing bubble. Lots of analysts look at the rate of growth in prices and declared nothing unusual was happening because, in recent years, that was perfectly normal! Only Robert Shiller had the good sense to look back to the 19th century and put together a proper index of prices -- and discover that over the long term prices didn't rise at all, so what we were seeing was a radical break with the past, and therefore evidence of a bubble. Pop! Shiller was right.
That said, you may be right in that people who learn to look deeper into the past than what comes intuitively and easily to any of -- a quick glance over the shoulder, as it were -- will naturally continue down that path.
Would be interested in your view on another angle to context in journalism. Take a complex issue that a journalist thinks is important for people to learn about. Seems unlikely that an article which opens with lots of stats and context will attract interest. So, the article will begin with an example story about an individual or a family. This does the trick and I am more likely to read and to be drawn in to learn more because there is emotion, risk at play. I can see myself in that situation and how I might feel. Hopefully, at this point additional context is provided that allows me to understand if this truly might affect me, my community or my country.
Unfortunately, very often we are presented with an issue, risk or problem only or primarily from that emotional perspective. Multiple individual narratives might be provided, all of which are emotional and seem risky and scary to me. I am drawn to think that my family is also at great risk. This is especially the case if the potential consequences are serious and significant. And this is easy to conclude as I have just read about or watched a person devastated in a hospital bed or gutted by the loss of a loved one. For a recent example, I am thinking about multiple stories on the national news about equine encephalitis. The death of a baby from this disease was tragic but it took a long time to learn it was one of 8 (I think) cases in Canada.
Or a couple of years back a week long series about sexual predators within the youth sports world. Each incident cited presented a debilitating situation for the individuals and families concerned. And numbers provided seemed large - hundreds of coaches convicted of sex offences against their athletes. Reports eventually made it clear that this was over a 20 year period but nowhere did it indicate over how many coaches overall. Hundreds of such cases are devastating in each case but does not help me decide whether the risk to my children in sport is so great that I should consider not registering them.
This journalistic method may draw my attention but its focus on emotion (and negativity as you point out), leaves too many people believing that they and theirs are directly at risk of many things where they are massively unlikely to be affected. And this is a standard part of commentary on social media where a single lurid incident is used to generalize a problem or a person’s position/argument. Which then also seems to justify ‘solving’ a complex problem with one preferred answer.
Yes, I wrote about this in Risk. The focus on an individual story -- the more emotional, the better -- is an almost inevitable consequence of human nature. Numbers don't move us. Stories do. The job of a good journalist is to work with that human nature, get the story that grabs and moves, then use it to build out a deeper sense of reality informed by data, reason, etc. Done well, that's the gold standard. But it's seldom done well.
Our current society needs more statistical literacy. Educators are trying. Math books that parents can buy for kids, like, ages 10 on up, typically include a statistics section. Current schools are teaching middle-schoolers to create graphs. This is already an improvement. I never created a graph until I was in college. Related question: Historically, did journalism majors not get enough training in critical thinking? Is this changing?
regarding statistics, less than one percent of Americans no more about statistics than "mean" because they don't need to know statistics to achieve their goals in life. Good luck trying to make a sated horse drink...
I agree with you that "trying to achieve goals in life" is a primary motivation for learning, inventions and intellectual change. Funny, in the history of science, human's need to know statistics to achieve life goals was precisely what drove the major insights into statistical dynamics. Probability theory emerged precisely because professional gamblers in Blaise Pascal's era wanted an edge beyond standard numeracy skills that people acquire through daily life. The modern knowledge that underlies actuarial tables and medical predictions emerged when people tried to understand deaths from disease connected to the sewage dumped into the Thames in the 17th-19th centuries. This same thirst to predict and understand events has only accelerated. Statistics is a popular major and minor on college campuses; many uni's now offer an undergraduate degree to Data Science. Popular magazines like the Economist are studded with graphs. Statistical literacy is at all time high.
Yes, i have an MS in Data Analytics (data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence). It is founded on statistics and gradient descent.
Still, even with "statistical literacy at an all time high", that represents a tiny portion of the population. People being forced to take a statistics course doesn't mean they learn or use statistics.
> How many people study statistics outside of a programmed education (el-hi, undergraduate, graduate studies)? I hypothesize it is a small number...
> So, that essentially leaves people that get a degree in statistics or a degree founded on statistics. About 25% of Americans get a college degree. Statistics, data science, economics, chemistry, biology, physics, engineering, and PhDs represent 2% or 3% of college degrees...
and, having worked at an insurance company for 41 years, the only people that understand statistics are the actuaries (10 to 20 of them)... maybe a couple of underwriters... process engineers (25 to 50) know a tiny bit for design of experiment, and some analysts doing marketing analytics (which has recently been growing rapidly so 100 to 200). however, out of 30,000 employees and 100,000 third party, 300 people knowing how actually use statistics is a tiny portion of the population... statistically significant?
Also "people being forced...." What about "students being exposed and then deciding they like statistics..." I see this all the time. My own elementary school-age kids preferred the probability chapters of the math workbooks I bought them (to other math) Undergrad psych majors come to me for advising and brightly share that they declared statistics their minor. It wouldn't take a lot for our culture to view statistics as cool (e.g., Freaknomoics book).
i think statistics is an awesome field of study but most people with a college degree never take another class, unless required to by their employer, and a significant percentage of graduates don't bother to ever read another non-fiction book. reality is reality
actually, much of it is disinformation... misinformation is an error, disinformation is intentional. in the hypothetical unemployment example Dan used, the start date of the graph was almost certainly selected with the intention of distorting the truth - disinformation...
"And look at that smooth curve from 2010 to today — as if who’s in the White House matters less to the macroeconomic picture than people think it does." That's a compelling perspective that's hard for ordinary readers to grasp. If only more news media would fact-check politicians' frequent claims that they created jobs or economic growth.
i disagree that it is "hard for ordinary readers to grasp". it is just easier to read an emotionally charged headline that supports the readers point of view...
The topic on which historical perspective is MOST lacking is climate change. If people were given the historical context for temperature, flooding, hurricanes, forest fires, droughts, etc., they would realize that the past century has been pretty normal in every way. If people understood that the planet was almost starved of atmospheric CO2 leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and we needed to add much more of the stuff for plant life to thrive, they would be eager to subsidize the burning of fossil fuels. If they knew that during the "Cambrian Explosion" of life the concentration of atmospheric CO2 was 16-20 times as high as it is today, they might appreciate this life-giving molecule a bit more....
Maybe you answered your own question. They want the new and spectacular. A graph would show that there's nothing new and nothing spectacular. They're in the money making business, after all. Not the inform the reader busniess.
Also, I think journalists are bad at everything that involves the graphic. They're typists, not graphic designers.
History matters. I admire @justinling who typically prefaces his Substack dispatches with a story from the past that situates his article within an historical context. Very effective.
Someone should invent a board game or computer game that unobtrusively requires and teaches fact-checking, logical reasoning, contextual thinking, numeracy skills. Or, does it exist?
Mr. Gardner: A thought, perhaps naïve since I'm no journalist, either by training or inclination. "If it bleeds, it leads." News organizations, bar ones such as Pro Publica, are in business to make money for stockholders. They do that by selling advertising, not subscriptions. They're run by people with a bias (including PP above and ones that claim to be and even try to be without one). It's a fight for eyeballs. "Dow Drops 425 Points" is just more seductive (if you will) than "Dow Drops 425 Points but Overall Up 3,257 Since January".
The news is what'll sell, so long as it's not outright libel. And, yeah, what makes a point the editor thinks the publisher wants to make. As you wrote, at least implied without intended insult, most people don't want thumb-suckers. And the second headline would even seem to some as...what?...opinionated? Maybe prejudicial? Politically motivated?
You make a valid point. I fervently agree with it. But journalist's, from junior reporter to senior editor to publisher, aren't dummies (well, most, anyway, and less and less, I'd bet, the farther up the staircase you go). If your idea were workable, surely it'd have been thought of and tried out before now. A journalist friend of long duration told me that when he started out, his editor told him, essentially, "You write the facts. You tell the truth. But you remember who writes your paycheck."
There's no contradiction between what I'm recommending and the grabbing of attention. You still tell the sensational story. You just do a little more, too. In fact, done well, I strongly suspect these graphics could be quite appealing in themselves to readers who appreciate being able to make more sense of stories.
The lack of historical context in stories of recent changes is at least partly due to the training that journalists get. Favouring emotional appeal is a time-honoured strategy for attracting readers, but these days there are journalism professors encouraging students to incorporate their personal feelings into news stories.
Absolutely loved this read - thank you! I know you are pleading for a more recent sense of history, but as a historian of the much more distant past (I love CE dates with 3 digits), the same can, judiciously, be said for any historical perspective.
Seeing things in terms of 100- or 1000-year patterns doesn't mean I don't care about what is happening now but it helps to quiet the panic and identify the really big stuff (which often isn't headline-grabbing). As you rightly say, no comparison, no making sense!
I agree entirely, of course. What I pointed to is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. A concerted effort to push back our temporal horizons would be most welcome, but, for now, baby steps.
My feeling is that, if thinking historically becomes more habitual, people tend to start being more creative and flexible with their temporal horizons anyway. It is interesting to me that in lots of British newspapers of the 19th century, references to antiquity were very common. All sorts of things about that also pointed towards huge social and ideological problems - a historical perspective doesn't fix everything, but it suggests that, as your post points out, it is a habit we've gotten into of not looking over our shoulder at all. Again, many thanks for a great piece.
I don't know if that's true. I wish it were. But... In finance, for example, I can think of numerous examples of people using remarkably shallow looks at the past as the basis for very consequential decisions today. In fact, people have built careers on looking deeper than others precisely people who understood the importance of drawing inferences by looking to the past were so consistently shallow. My favourite example is the c.2005 housing bubble. Lots of analysts look at the rate of growth in prices and declared nothing unusual was happening because, in recent years, that was perfectly normal! Only Robert Shiller had the good sense to look back to the 19th century and put together a proper index of prices -- and discover that over the long term prices didn't rise at all, so what we were seeing was a radical break with the past, and therefore evidence of a bubble. Pop! Shiller was right.
That said, you may be right in that people who learn to look deeper into the past than what comes intuitively and easily to any of -- a quick glance over the shoulder, as it were -- will naturally continue down that path.
Great article. Thanks.
Would be interested in your view on another angle to context in journalism. Take a complex issue that a journalist thinks is important for people to learn about. Seems unlikely that an article which opens with lots of stats and context will attract interest. So, the article will begin with an example story about an individual or a family. This does the trick and I am more likely to read and to be drawn in to learn more because there is emotion, risk at play. I can see myself in that situation and how I might feel. Hopefully, at this point additional context is provided that allows me to understand if this truly might affect me, my community or my country.
Unfortunately, very often we are presented with an issue, risk or problem only or primarily from that emotional perspective. Multiple individual narratives might be provided, all of which are emotional and seem risky and scary to me. I am drawn to think that my family is also at great risk. This is especially the case if the potential consequences are serious and significant. And this is easy to conclude as I have just read about or watched a person devastated in a hospital bed or gutted by the loss of a loved one. For a recent example, I am thinking about multiple stories on the national news about equine encephalitis. The death of a baby from this disease was tragic but it took a long time to learn it was one of 8 (I think) cases in Canada.
Or a couple of years back a week long series about sexual predators within the youth sports world. Each incident cited presented a debilitating situation for the individuals and families concerned. And numbers provided seemed large - hundreds of coaches convicted of sex offences against their athletes. Reports eventually made it clear that this was over a 20 year period but nowhere did it indicate over how many coaches overall. Hundreds of such cases are devastating in each case but does not help me decide whether the risk to my children in sport is so great that I should consider not registering them.
This journalistic method may draw my attention but its focus on emotion (and negativity as you point out), leaves too many people believing that they and theirs are directly at risk of many things where they are massively unlikely to be affected. And this is a standard part of commentary on social media where a single lurid incident is used to generalize a problem or a person’s position/argument. Which then also seems to justify ‘solving’ a complex problem with one preferred answer.
Yes, I wrote about this in Risk. The focus on an individual story -- the more emotional, the better -- is an almost inevitable consequence of human nature. Numbers don't move us. Stories do. The job of a good journalist is to work with that human nature, get the story that grabs and moves, then use it to build out a deeper sense of reality informed by data, reason, etc. Done well, that's the gold standard. But it's seldom done well.
Is it any wonder that anxiety plagues our society when emotional impact is relentlessly favoured over historical context?
Our current society needs more statistical literacy. Educators are trying. Math books that parents can buy for kids, like, ages 10 on up, typically include a statistics section. Current schools are teaching middle-schoolers to create graphs. This is already an improvement. I never created a graph until I was in college. Related question: Historically, did journalism majors not get enough training in critical thinking? Is this changing?
regarding statistics, less than one percent of Americans no more about statistics than "mean" because they don't need to know statistics to achieve their goals in life. Good luck trying to make a sated horse drink...
I agree with you that "trying to achieve goals in life" is a primary motivation for learning, inventions and intellectual change. Funny, in the history of science, human's need to know statistics to achieve life goals was precisely what drove the major insights into statistical dynamics. Probability theory emerged precisely because professional gamblers in Blaise Pascal's era wanted an edge beyond standard numeracy skills that people acquire through daily life. The modern knowledge that underlies actuarial tables and medical predictions emerged when people tried to understand deaths from disease connected to the sewage dumped into the Thames in the 17th-19th centuries. This same thirst to predict and understand events has only accelerated. Statistics is a popular major and minor on college campuses; many uni's now offer an undergraduate degree to Data Science. Popular magazines like the Economist are studded with graphs. Statistical literacy is at all time high.
Yes, i have an MS in Data Analytics (data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence). It is founded on statistics and gradient descent.
Still, even with "statistical literacy at an all time high", that represents a tiny portion of the population. People being forced to take a statistics course doesn't mean they learn or use statistics.
> How many people study statistics outside of a programmed education (el-hi, undergraduate, graduate studies)? I hypothesize it is a small number...
> So, that essentially leaves people that get a degree in statistics or a degree founded on statistics. About 25% of Americans get a college degree. Statistics, data science, economics, chemistry, biology, physics, engineering, and PhDs represent 2% or 3% of college degrees...
and, having worked at an insurance company for 41 years, the only people that understand statistics are the actuaries (10 to 20 of them)... maybe a couple of underwriters... process engineers (25 to 50) know a tiny bit for design of experiment, and some analysts doing marketing analytics (which has recently been growing rapidly so 100 to 200). however, out of 30,000 employees and 100,000 third party, 300 people knowing how actually use statistics is a tiny portion of the population... statistically significant?
Agree I am judging the glass to be half-full.
that is a good way to be
Also "people being forced...." What about "students being exposed and then deciding they like statistics..." I see this all the time. My own elementary school-age kids preferred the probability chapters of the math workbooks I bought them (to other math) Undergrad psych majors come to me for advising and brightly share that they declared statistics their minor. It wouldn't take a lot for our culture to view statistics as cool (e.g., Freaknomoics book).
i think statistics is an awesome field of study but most people with a college degree never take another class, unless required to by their employer, and a significant percentage of graduates don't bother to ever read another non-fiction book. reality is reality
My observation is that journalism majors were taught the methods of disinformation.
Excellent article. In fact, not adding context is not journalism; it's just fiction. It's misinformation.
actually, much of it is disinformation... misinformation is an error, disinformation is intentional. in the hypothetical unemployment example Dan used, the start date of the graph was almost certainly selected with the intention of distorting the truth - disinformation...
I can buy that Arthur. Thanks. Drs
"And look at that smooth curve from 2010 to today — as if who’s in the White House matters less to the macroeconomic picture than people think it does." That's a compelling perspective that's hard for ordinary readers to grasp. If only more news media would fact-check politicians' frequent claims that they created jobs or economic growth.
i disagree that it is "hard for ordinary readers to grasp". it is just easier to read an emotionally charged headline that supports the readers point of view...
Great piece..are you the DanGardner that used to write great pieces in Canadian newspapers?
The topic on which historical perspective is MOST lacking is climate change. If people were given the historical context for temperature, flooding, hurricanes, forest fires, droughts, etc., they would realize that the past century has been pretty normal in every way. If people understood that the planet was almost starved of atmospheric CO2 leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and we needed to add much more of the stuff for plant life to thrive, they would be eager to subsidize the burning of fossil fuels. If they knew that during the "Cambrian Explosion" of life the concentration of atmospheric CO2 was 16-20 times as high as it is today, they might appreciate this life-giving molecule a bit more....
Maybe you answered your own question. They want the new and spectacular. A graph would show that there's nothing new and nothing spectacular. They're in the money making business, after all. Not the inform the reader busniess.
Also, I think journalists are bad at everything that involves the graphic. They're typists, not graphic designers.
If it bleeds, it leads.
. . . . and of course that other great news editors quote; 'good news is no news'
History matters. I admire @justinling who typically prefaces his Substack dispatches with a story from the past that situates his article within an historical context. Very effective.
Here's a haiku about not having background, models or rational targets:
Enumeration
Without expectation ain't
Evaluation
🙃🙃🙃🤗🤗🤗🥰🥰🥰
Someone should invent a board game or computer game that unobtrusively requires and teaches fact-checking, logical reasoning, contextual thinking, numeracy skills. Or, does it exist?
Mr. Gardner: A thought, perhaps naïve since I'm no journalist, either by training or inclination. "If it bleeds, it leads." News organizations, bar ones such as Pro Publica, are in business to make money for stockholders. They do that by selling advertising, not subscriptions. They're run by people with a bias (including PP above and ones that claim to be and even try to be without one). It's a fight for eyeballs. "Dow Drops 425 Points" is just more seductive (if you will) than "Dow Drops 425 Points but Overall Up 3,257 Since January".
The news is what'll sell, so long as it's not outright libel. And, yeah, what makes a point the editor thinks the publisher wants to make. As you wrote, at least implied without intended insult, most people don't want thumb-suckers. And the second headline would even seem to some as...what?...opinionated? Maybe prejudicial? Politically motivated?
You make a valid point. I fervently agree with it. But journalist's, from junior reporter to senior editor to publisher, aren't dummies (well, most, anyway, and less and less, I'd bet, the farther up the staircase you go). If your idea were workable, surely it'd have been thought of and tried out before now. A journalist friend of long duration told me that when he started out, his editor told him, essentially, "You write the facts. You tell the truth. But you remember who writes your paycheck."
There's no contradiction between what I'm recommending and the grabbing of attention. You still tell the sensational story. You just do a little more, too. In fact, done well, I strongly suspect these graphics could be quite appealing in themselves to readers who appreciate being able to make more sense of stories.
Touché. No doubt. I defer readily to your much greater journalistic experience.
The question, then, is how to do it. I ain't go no ideas. But thank you much for reading my thoughts.
The lack of historical context in stories of recent changes is at least partly due to the training that journalists get. Favouring emotional appeal is a time-honoured strategy for attracting readers, but these days there are journalism professors encouraging students to incorporate their personal feelings into news stories.
So unbiased context that doesn't align with personal perspective is unhelpful to that enterprise and can even be undesirable.