Yes, that would be shockingly useful. I would thing what you'd want to do is establish a roster of pundits and politicians from across the political spectrum, monitor the news for things they say, and every time they make a statement that will be falsifiable in the future, put up a blog post on it. Eventually you'd have a ranking of most reliable pundits or politicians, at least in terms of their prospective statements. If this became popular, it would lead to lots of pundits or pols making trivial predictions like, "Scott McClellan will give a non-responsive answer to a question about social security during his next briefing." "Bill O'Reilly will be outraged over something almost no one else has ever heard of." The last would be an especially apt prediction if O'Reilly made it.
That idea occurred to me a coupla weeks ago when Yglesias was explaining that the way of punditry was to make predictions and then forget about the ones that went bad.
One could go back and compare old NRO predictions to new statements.
That would be exciting.
ash
['Hrmm.']
I've been working on something like this, but from a different angle. My thought was just to straight-forward archive events concerning issues I consider important.
What you're suggesting seems to suffer from a certain rub: Insofar as blogs make inferences and predictions, I think people expect these to be reasonable, but not necessarily accurate. Even if someone is consistently inaccurate on a given timetable, his readers, if they believe such a blogger to be reasonable, will be inclined to forgive him, or extend the timetable.
Case in point: Bush Administration's pre-war predictions about post-war Iraq. Remarkably inaccurate, yes, but it's an uphill battle to convince a good number of people that the Administration's predictions were unreasonable.
Basically, I think you're working off the assumption that people care more about accuracy of predictions than they do. On the contrary, I think a person can have accurate predictions but still be disliked by certain people who don't agree with that person's reasons.
I think this attitude partsly stems from the fact that most people, including pundits and politicians, are fairly confused about political issues. A simple correlation such as correctness of predictions is not what they base their sympathies upon.
As far as concentrating critique within the wonk community, I'm doubtful as to what would be the effectiveness of the practice. I'm fairly cynical about the self-regulating nature and standards of the republican sympathizers. I just don't think they care that much about whether their predictions are right or wrong; they're far too wrapped up in ideology and left-hating. ("He may be wrong, but he doesn't want to kill all Americans and elect bin Laden to the Presidency!!!!")
I suppose this is the question though, and I'll toss it back to you: As a hypothetical, do you think right-wing bloggers/journalists will actually give a damn if you're able to present evidence that they're consistently wrong?
I do think such information could be useful if compiled into some statistics and someone distributed to that large portion of America which only peripherally pays attention to politics. But that's sort of the holy grail of blogging.
the weiners and w-lfs-ns of the world will blow a gasket trying to get all of the misspellings in that last post. ha!
the weiners and w-lfs-ns of the world will blow a gasket...
If you can't beat 'em, beat yourself.
As to your substantive point, I wasn't thinking of this as a partisan project. I often wonder, and can't remember, whose analysis and predictions have been proven correct or incorrect. I think it would be nice to know. There are clear cut cases, like the Ritter thing I linked, and there are also possibilities for just noting that there's a consenus among some people that X, and it would be good, with hindsight, to figure out if X has turned out to be the case, and if not, why reasonable people thought it might.
I'm not sure why you think I think this is about bringing wingnuts to heel. I have no hope of that.
*I* mentioned NRO, because I think that would be funny.
However, it would be helpful if people could figure who was predicting what and how wrong they got it.
Sortof a spinsanity for predictions or something.
I admit to at least one seriously wrong prediction in the last five years (note that I was not guaranteeing the outcome) - I thought for sure that if the N.Koreans were going to do anything against the US/SK, then they would attack while we were tied up in Iraq. They did not. In fact old Kim Il Jong (Sung? Mung? whatever) ran away. Also, they evidently have NO gasoline. (Which is not the same as having no gasoline for domestic purposes but plenty of stored gasoline hoarded for milops)
So, got that one wrong. That's ok, I'm glad. But getting it seriously wrong indicates strongly that NK's aggressiveness is wildly overstated. They can't get the job done on the the ground. Nukes do them no good in this situation, except to keep us from attacking them.
Therefore, the SK situation dwindles into unimportance. Which SHOULD (but has not) freed up 29th Division for redeployment to somewhere useful, like Iraq.
However, with no threat from NK, I note that that hasn't prevented anyone from blithering on about the horrors of NK having nukes, and urging assorted idiotic courses of action.
Perhaps if the predictions were well-recorded, we could separate the Truly Concerned from the Pushing-an-Agenda people.
ash
['Was my thought. It is mine.']
If you can't beat 'em, beat yourself.
great, I try a little self-deprecating humor, and he piles on. thanks, buddy.
anyway, as to my apparant assumption, it seems I credited you with too little scientific objectivity. I thought you would have hypothesized that the result of your project would have been a negative for conservative predictions, but maybe not. I'm not even convinced myself. I suppose it would depend on what would count as a prediction. But if you're not suggesting this effort be undertaken with at least some partisan agenda, I'm dubious as to its purpose. It would seem that any serious claim which we would be interested in would have to be made/supported by a group of people. (Why be interested in what only a single person was predicting?) And I'm not convinced that such non-trivial situations are forgotten. At least not by the wonks of the blogosphere.
As I see it, the internets (at least 'round here) exist for two reasons: taunting people when they're wrong and jokes about cocks. People make predictions so often as a cheap rhetorical device, knowing that nobody'll remember six months down the line; Ogged is using the power of technology to give himself (or you!) a leg up on the taunting. The cock jokes you still need to supply the old fashioned way.
(if it actually caught on, you might find people starting to think about the future instead of the argument at hand when predicting things. and a pony.)
If you can't beat 'em, beat yourself.
Inner Beavis just went into a coma.
I was actually not planning to pick on any spelling errors; only to say that my dissertation was more or less on this topic.
Basically, we should care about this sort of thing, because it does give us a way to judge people's credibility. Which gives us a guide as to who we should listen to when forming future beliefs. And here I blog about how the media's complete failure to do anything like this for politicians really does make it difficult for the ordinary citizen to be epistemically responsible.
Now that I'm linking that, I've discovered a couple of sense-obliterating typos in a sentence. Think I'll go fix it.
Well, we should care, but I seem to remember vaguely that someone predicted WMDs in Iraq, and someone else said they weren't there, and well, they aren't, and yet no one seems to give a rat's ass. So I have my doubts.
Well, the thing is that lots of people don't know that they weren't there. See under, media, failure of to perform function of transmitting information, subhead FOX.
I should say "FOX, especially." Most of the other media outlets didn't do a particulary good job of communicating that someone had been proved dead wrong on things they said were slam-dunk certain.
My philosophical point requires should rather than do, anyway.
"I do -- I care."
Especially since I had to tell my then-second-grader that was why we were invading Iraq. (She asked, and you don't blow them off at that age b/c they hear or make up something worse.) I still haven't come out and told her different, but somehow she's lost her infatuation with W. that she had during the 2000 election.
I'm with FL; not finding WMD is largely a rhetorical point. The real problem was the conflation of bio- and chem- weapons with nukes; "WMD" has got to be one of the stupidest categories of all time. That where we let Pubs take control of the language of any debate.
Aargh, FL. Many people thought it was more likely than not that Iraq had WMDs. But I vaguely recall some guy named Hans Blix who at the time was actually doing firsthand checking for WMDs, and not finding any. And, unless you had Moorean certainty that WMDs were there (for non-philosophers, that means you're more certain of a thesis than you could be of the premises of any argument to the contrary), you might have wanted for more evidence to come in before going to war. If you are so completely certain about something so important, and you turn out to be wrong, your credibility takes a HUGE hit.
I mean, there may be days when I think it's more likely than not that I've locked my keys in the apartment. I'm still going to go through all my pockets before I call the locksmith.
Not to mention that the most important thing all along was nuclear weapons--chem and most bio are less dangerous than conventional weapons (compare casualty figures for subway attacks involving nerve gas, and subway attacks involving a can of paint thinner)--and the Administration made a whole mess of demonstrably false statements about nuclear weapons. Remember those centrifuge tubes?
I mean, do we really need to rehash this?
"waited for more evidence to come in"
Matt, Fontana, it will be a hash of a rehash unless you make a distinction between what it was reasonable for the administration to believe, and what it was reasonable for citizens--who were getting some of their information from the administration--to believe. Blix notwithstanding, it was reasonable for ordinary folks to believe that Iraq had WMD, but hindsight shows pretty clearly that the administration knew better, or didn't care to know better.
As for the post-to-the-future suggestion, not every case needs to be clear cut, it's just a way of not forgetting so damn much, which I think is a real problem with political discourse in general, and blogospheric political discourse in particular.
This is going to be a bit disjointed, but here it is: I've been wondering about the erosion of trust in a civilized society, and what our breaking point is. The last few years have seen a loss of trust in a number of institutions -- the Catholic Church, NASA, the CIA, blue-chip accountants, the Red Cross, the White House, the New York Times, CBS...I could go on. On a personal level, and in our daily interactions, we rely on an enormous amount of trust in order to function effectively as a healthy society. We trust that the bank won't run off with our money. We trust that the cars heading toward us will stop at the red light. We trust that our employer will pay us as promised, or if he/she doesn't, we will have judicial recourse in a court free of corruption. We trust that our doctor's medical license is legitimate, or that if it weren't, s/he would have already been imprisoned for fraud. Virtually every social transaction we partake in involves a certain amount of trust, and our world would be far, far different if trust were in short supply.
There has been a very coordinated effort by many in the conservative movement to sow the seeds of mistrust in our society, and I wonder if they understand the kind of forces they're tampering with. Early on, it was "don't trust the government." Then, "don't trust the media." Then, "don't trust anything coming from anyone who can be remotely construed as having a partisal coloring." Now, with manipulation of language, it's difficult to trust even words themselves, when phrases like "Clear Skies" refer to policy changes that allow the skies to be less clear than was previously mandated, for example. And at some point, when we can't trust what we read in the newspaper, we can't trust anyone with different political beliefs, we can't trust our elected representatives, we can't trust the very language we speak in everyday life, whom do we trust? In what do we trust? How do we live normally?
There are other societies that have this problem. It is not so hard to become like them, but very hard to come back. In Bombay, for example, you can't trust that turning on your faucet will guarantee a stream of water. You may need to pay a repairman, who has already bribed the utility company itself to turn the water off, neither of which will ever be held accountable. I read recently that an Indian judge ruled not so long ago that bribes were tax-deductible, since they are a necessary cost of doing business in Bombay. And India is a promising country, fairly well-developed and with a democratic and economic system that is the envy of much of the world.
I don't know if many Americans have ever considered what it might be like to live in a world where the police don't protect you, but instead (for example) impound your vehicle without cause for the sake of a bribe. I don't know if we've considered how easily corruption can take hold of a society, and how difficult it is to eradicate. A lack of trust in our everyday social encounters would literally turn us into a third-world nation. I don't want to buy a loaf of bread and wonder if the packaging is genuine or if someone rewrapped a loaf from five days ago and said it was baked this morning. I want to trust that the bread is what the package says it is. Because otherwise, we would truly have the Hobbesian society that many conservatives perceive, where everyone would be trying to screw everyone else because no one could be trusted. It would be an awful place to live, with very little social mobility or economic opportunity.
Ramble out.
I don't know what "partisal coloring" is, but you shouldn't trust anyone who's got it.
Or, "partisan coloring."
Ogged, I'm in full agreement. My claim is that, even if it was reasonable for the Administration to believe that the preponderance of the evidence at the time favored the proposition that Saddam had WMDs, they knew more evidence was coming down the pike, and they should have waited for that.
I don't even think it was reasonable for the Administration to believe that--they should've known better. But even if it had been, they still should've been willing to let the inspectors finish their work.
As for ordinary folks--the main reason it was reasonable for ordinary folks to believe Saddam had WMDs is that the Administration and its friends were lying to them. Nor have they stopped. That's akin to the point I was trying to discuss in this post.
If I remember properly (and admittedly, I have slept several hundred times since then) Mr. Blix was portrayed in even the more liberal of media as having credibility problems. I dunno if that was the administration's doing, or just the normal "the UN as a body of action is a joke" attitude, or what. And it didn't help that at the time, Saddam and Blix were playng a game of "I'll let you in if I can control what I show you" / "I won't come in at all unless I can go where I want, and if I don't come in then you're in trouble."
So it would have been nice to have a back-trail on all the "See, Blix was right" folks to see if they were buying what he was selling at that time. (Hah, I tied it to the original posting.)
That's a really important point, Joe. One of the most pernicious things happening right now is the undermining of trust in the "MSM," which is, in effect (and probably in intent), an effort to render facts subservient to power, if I may talk that way.
But, one reservation about where you end up: I'm not sure that the common word "trust" is enough to get us from tarnished institutions to the deterioration of everyday encounters that you describe. Even if I believe that the media only lies to me, I don't see why I'll stop trusting my plumber, or why he'll be more likely to take advantage of me.
FL, I understand the point you're making about the widely-held beliefs regarding evidence, but I'm inclined to agree with Matt that that doesn't really make the fact that no WMDs have been found objectively less significant in the big picture. It's sort of like stock trading: you can be wrong for all the right reasons, but if you make a bad call and lose money, you don't get a do-over, and you're still evaluated based on that performance.
The same should be true of the Bush Administration, and frankly, I find the hawks' argument that "everyone thought he had WMD" to be a comlete cop-out (I realize that's not the point you're making). The bottom line, in my estimation, is that we were wrong, and if no one is held accountable in a substantive, public way, then the pre-emption bar will plummet to new lows (hey, another "stock" phrase... get it, stock?). This, in my opinion, holds true regardless of whether a successful democracy is established in Iraq; in fact, the effect on the pre-emption bar will probably be greatly exacerbated if it is successful (another reason why I opposed the war in the first place).
Basically what I'm saying is, I disagree with your point that some people are making this out to be more significant than it really is (assuming, of course, that you're referring to anyone beyond the "Bush=Hitler" crowd). It should be a big deal, especially in diplomatic circles, and the fact that a large chunk of the American public (many of whom, by the way, regularly think and even say things like "Iraq? Iran? What's the difference?") fails to understand why it's a big deal is less indicative of its big deal-hood than it is of the rightward-leaning American public's ignorance and/or blinkered nationalism (and possibly partisanship).
As for those who are knowledgeable and educated, and still insist that WMD is a complete non-issue, well, who knows? I'd say a combination of partisanship, unwillingness to admit a mistake, "end justifies the means" thinking, and possibly, in some cases, idealistic True Believer self-deception. Actually, that list is a little distorted, because I think partisanship is really the 400-lb gorilla looming over and informing all of the other elements.
Even if I believe that the media only lies to me, I don't see why I'll stop trusting my plumber, or why he'll be more likely to take advantage of me.
True; I skipped a few steps, I suppose. I guess the unspoken counterpart to trust in my post is accountability; once that goes out the window,then you can't trust your plumber (at least, that seems to be the logical conclusion). We have trust because we have accountability, and part of that accountability infrastructure is the press. If the press stops playing that role, or if the people don't trust them when they do play that role, then one of our society's major accountability mechanisms is gone. We have others -- law enforcement, the judicial process -- but if those are rendered obsolete or ineffective, or are perceived as clearly benefitting the powerful over the rest of us, then we're done, and if there's no press to report these things (or if no one believes the press), it's hard to ever come back.
Maybe I'm being pessimistic. But I worry about it.
The only reason Hans Blix knew about the no WMD is because he shared a bed with Saddam and Scott Ritter where they made sweet, sweet love every night.
Joe Drymala,
I've been wondering about the erosion of trust in a civilized society,
Oooh, oooh, I do believe I have lived through that. The solution is to "Tune in, turn on, drop out."
No, wait, what about "Power to the people?" Yeah, I think that is more like it. Right on, man!
We did it once, we can do it again.
Huh. Not quite sure how to read your comment, Tripp.
Joe, I agree with your overall point about the problems with declining trust, but I have one question: why exactly should anyone trust a distinctly partisan source? I often doubt even the information that comes from people on my own side, because I know they have an agenda, and I'd rather not try to support my arguments based on falsehoods or misrepresentations. I guess all I'm really saying is that I don't think that one part of what you said doesn't seem to fit with the rest. Skepticism, in my view, is healthy; or to put it a different way, lack thereof is harmful. So yes, the right has engaged in a campaign to discredit the "MSM" for its supposed partisanship, but I don't think the ostensible basis for that campaign (i.e. that partisan sources can't be trusted) is invalid. That being said, it's clear that the real basis of the campaign is partisanship; as Oliver Willis might say: reality is liberally biased.
Walter --
It's a slippery slope, I think. I mean, I'd be hard-pressed to trust anything Jonah Goldberg proposed or endorsed, but what about someone (like, say, Joseph Wilson) who votes a certain way but for most of his life worked in a fairly nonpartisan fashion? It becomes tribalism; any serious criticism of your side by anyone remotely connected with the other side can be written off as plain partisanship, and then we're not having a debate anymore, we're just trying to throw bombs at each other. No one's listening. I'm as guilty of this as the next guy, incidentally.
When I only trust people who I believe are exactly ideologically aligned with me, then I'm not going to hear any legitimate dissent.
I don't know if this clears any confusion up or not. I'm still working all this out in my own brain.
Someone can be both strongly partisan and honest -- the two things aren't at all incompatible. If you think the facts as they exist in reality support your partisan position, you have no reason to lie. Even if the facts don't unequivocally support you, it is possible to accurately report the facts and work around whatever damage that may do to your partisan arguments.
On the other hand, someone who lies to support a partisan position is an untrustworthy liar, not merely a partisan.
I predict that someone will take you up on this idea, and with-in 6 months will have created a popular and invaluable on-line reference source. (I also predict this prediction will post on that site on September 9, 2005).
Joe: I know what you mean about the slippery slope, and I'm not denying that at all; in fact, that was the part I most agreed with in your original comment. What I'm saying is that even though generalized lack of trust has a lot of potential negative consequences, that doesn't necessarily mean it's better to be trusting. If society as a whole trusts in a source of information whose intent is to deceive it, then trust is high, but perceptions are skewed. Personally, I would rather have a highly skeptical public than the rather credulous and apathetic one we have now.
That being said, Lizard makes a good point about partisan honesty. It certainly is possible to be completely honest if one believes the information supports one's views or ideology. However, the obvious problem with this is that it's very difficult to distinguish between an honest partisan and a dishonest partisan, especially for someone who only peripherally follows the news. Therefore, I would still say that it's reasonable to be skeptical of any openly partisan source, and that it's really a relatively small step from skepticism to non-trust... meaning that it may not really be intentional on the part of conservatives to create general lack of trust as opposed to lack of trust in specific institutions.
Still, you both make good points, and to be honest with you, I have no doubt that if the right-wing Strategic Command believed it was beneficial to them to sow generalized distrust, then that's exactly what they'd do. I'm just not sure that that's really a conscious part of their approach so much as it is just the natural state of anyone who's deeply involved in (or just aware of) politics.
I'm just not sure that that's really a conscious part of their approach so much as it is just the natural state of anyone who's deeply involved in (or just aware of) politics.
Sure it is. The right represents two constituencies: the rich and social conservatives. Both of those constituencies have institutions they act through: the rich have business and lawyers, and the social conservatives have churches. The story of the 20th century has been the rise of institutions which counter those of the right: media, government, courts, universities. Each of those must be discredited to return the country to the supposed puritan libertarian utopia.
I'm pretty sure I've seen Bill O'Reilly using the blood of Christian babies in making his falafel.
I'm just not sure that that's really a conscious part of their approach so much as it is just the natural state of anyone who's deeply involved in (or just aware of) politics.
I'm not sure either, but I definitely have my suspicions. Eric Boehlert made that case in Salon a week or so ago.
I would venture to guess that it's less a function of partisanship than it is about being in power. Those in power tend to want to write the rules of reality. "We make our own reality." This, incidentally, was a trait of fascism as well; the state had a monopoly on the truth. This administration flaunts that tendency more egregiously than many of its predecessors, but I'm sure there are other examples from both parties.
This administration flaunts that tendency more egregiously than many of its predecessors, but I'm sure there are other examples from both parties.
I call bullshit. This administration is much more egregious than any administration since at least Nixon's about this. Let's not become what we're carping about, OK?
Fair enough. That there was some full-on ass-covering.
Not only is the administration egregious on this, there seems to me to be a massive tendency to dismantle the credibility and careers of those in institutions who pose a threat to the program of manipulating perception. It comes back to an attack on trust.
There has been a spate of articles in the Austrian press recently (I m at work and am too pressed to link - so PLEASE just trust me) on the readiness of the US government to orchestrate the dismantling of "turbulent priests" within the UN. Maybe THAT is not too hard to do, but it is motivation that worries.
Yeah, that Blix guy (to get back to what I was saying). The point is that it wasn't, really, reasonable to believe there were WMDs at the time because Blix was *on the ground* and *inspecting the sites* and said there weren't. As opposed to just, you know, thinking there must have been WMDs because Sadddam was a Bad Guy and it Stands to Reason that He Would Have Had Them.
And you know, Blix was on the record. But even at the time no one made a point about the questions of 1. who would have evidence; 2. who would have a political motivation for cooking that evidence. Blix *was* dismissed as unreliable, and then later when he came back and said "I told you so," no one really ran with that, either.
So, I still say, it would be fun to keep track of predictions and then say who was right and who was wrong, but it won't make any difference because it'll always come back to people defending their ignorance as "well, it was reasonable to believe that at the time," which if anything makes 'em just sink their heels in deeper.
Joe,
Huh. Not quite sure how to read your comment, Tripp.
Your comment triggered a 60's flashback, hence the 60's slogans. I forgot "Down with the Establishment."
There will be unrest and it will get worse before it gets better. We are really just starting in on it. When cheap oil is gone we'll start into the really troubled times. People will do wacky things. There will be confrontations.
But it won't be the end of the world.
it was reasonable to believe that at the time
The more sophisticated hawks trying to cling to some straw of legitimacy will go that route, but most of the rest of them just say that they're in Syria now. And once we invade Syria and can't find them, they'll be in Iran, then Cuba, then Venezuela, et cetera, ad infinitum.
Conservatives have gotten just about every damn thing wrong over the past five years and it hasn't shaken their faith in the righteousness of slaughtering civilians one bit. Pointing out the evidence carries exactly as much weight as it does when you point out evidence of evolution to a creationist. Facts that don't fit the ideology aren't facts, QED.
Facts that don't fit are theories espoused by:
a) Liberals
b) Evolutionist agnostics
c) Unpatriotic (fill your pet hate of a foreign cause in here) smpathisers
c) Social security recipients
d) The French
e) The Dutch
f) Groups of overproportionally successful minorities
So get wit the programme and just plain admit that Hans Blix was wrong and the defender of the faith was and always shall be right. The weapons of masturba... destruction MUST have existed. QED that Bubba.
Weapons of Masturbation... that's gotta be fuel for a great parody. Speaking of that, I once saw Kerry referred to as the Mass.Debator. Even though it's against our guy, that's still damn funny. You just can't go wrong with masturbation jokes. They're the "cream of the crop" of cock jokes, so to speak.
Well, Walter, masturbating-on-a-pony jokes are actually just that little bit more ne plus ultra.
They're the "cream of the crop" of cock jokes, so to speak.
I think you're thinking of ejaculation jokes.
I think you're thinking of ejaculation jokes.
How did you know? Get out of my head!
Get out of my head!
And into his car...