Stilgherrian » Hallucinating Goldfish

The Straw Man and the Hallucinating Goldfish

Stilgherrian — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:10:18 +0000

Scientific American explains two media manipulation techniques, the “straw man” and the “weak man”. Know how to spot them and help fight the Hallucinating Goldfish.

In Getting Duped: How the Media Messes with Your Mind, Yvonne Raley and Robert Talisse write:

One common method of spinning information is the so-called straw man argument. In this tactic, a person summarizes the opposition’s position inaccurately so as to weaken it and then refutes that inaccurate rendition. In a November 2005 speech, for example, President George W Bush responded to questions about pulling troops out of Iraq by saying, “We’ve heard some people say, pull them out right now. That’s a huge mistake. It’d be a terrible mistake. It sends a bad message to our troops, and it sends a bad message to our enemy, and it sends a bad message to the Iraqis.” The statement that unnamed “people” are advocating a troop withdrawal from Iraq “right now” is a straw man, because it exaggerates the opposing viewpoint. Not even the most stalwart Bush adversaries backed an immediate troop withdrawal. Most proposed that the soldiers be sent home over several months, a more reasonable and persuasive plan that Bush undercut with his straw man.

The Weak Man tactic is a twist on this…

As Talisse, co-authors of the 2006 paper which coined the term, explains:

[A] person sets up the opposition’s weakest (or one of its weakest) arguments or proponents for attack, as opposed to misstating a rival’s position as the straw man argument does. In a July 2007 edition of Talking Points, Bill O’Reilly took on a claim by the New York Times that we had lost the war in Iraq by saying that “the New York Times declared defeat in Iraq Sunday on its editorial page, and there’s no question the antiwar movement has momentum.” (The editorial actually said that “some opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat,” but let us assume that O’Reilly’s characterization was correct.)

O’Reilly then offered a weak man explanation for the purported defeat: “The truth is the Iraqi government and many of its citizens are simply not doing enough to defeat the terrorists and corruption. The USA can’t control that country. No nation could… Unfortunately, the Iraqi failure to help themselves has come true.” Although Iraq’s failure to aid in fighting terrorism and corruption could be why we are losing the war, the troubles in Iraq could also stem from a host of logistical reasons, some of which may shed a negative light on the current administration. O’Reilly, however, kept any discussion of these reasons offstage, suppressing the various other possible — and possibly more likely — reasons for “defeat” in Iraq. Meanwhile his claims that the “USA can’t control that country” and that “no nation could” deflected blame from the US government.

Hat-tip to 3 quarks daily.

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Oz stock market “crash” in perspective

Stilgherrian — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:59:50 +0000

Yes, there was a 7.1% drop in the ASX All Ordinaries yesterday, the 4th biggest one-day fall in our history. But before you throw yourself out of the window, let’s put that in context.

That’s a graph of the All Ordinaries for the last 20 years, thanks to Robert Merkel in Lavartus Prodeo. See that little wiggle at the far right-hand side? That’s yesterday. Short-term thinking is perilous.

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Any more Hallucinating Goldfish?

Stilgherrian — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:20:26 +0000

My last post explained my metaphorical Hallucinating Goldfish. I’ve been thinking about it for years, and finally wrote that first essay. However I’m thinking about expanding the idea into a book. So if you have any examples of society’s hallucinations or its goldfish-like (lack of) memory, do let me know. I’ll try to post what I find too, hence the new Hallucinating Goldfish category.

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Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish

Stilgherrian — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:16:34 +0000

This is blog post number 801. It’s time for something special. Time for an extended essay encapsulating several trains of thought which I’ve been following for some time.

We are the 801,
We are the central shaft
And thus throughout two years
We’ve crossed the ocean in our little craft (Row! Row! Row!)
Now we’re on the telephone,
Making final arrangements (Ding! Ding!)
We are the 801, we are the central shaft

So sang Brian Eno in the song The True Wheel from his 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

Eno says he wrote the lyrics while visiting New York:

I went to stay with this girl called Randi and fell asleep after taking some mescaline and had this dream where this group of girls were singing to this group of sailors who had just come into port. And they were singing ‘We are The 801 / We are the Central Shaft’ — and I woke up absolutely jubilant because this was the first bit of lyric I’d written in this new style.

Yes, apparently in the 1970s a musician wrote a song while under the influence of hallucinogens. Who’d have thought.

Society generally frowns upon people who make important decisions while under the influence. (By an odd coincidence, Hugh MacLeod posted some vaguely-related thoughts only yesterday, in dying young is overrated, revisited.) However the more I look, the more I worry that we’re governed as if our societies were hallucinating. And even worse, it’s as if they’ve forgotten how to remember the lessons of the past.

I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.

I reckon our societies aren’t just hallucinating. They’re suffering paranoid schizophrenia.

Instead of acting upon real data collected from the real world, we construct paranoid fantasies and then respond to those.

Our tabloid media report every threat, adding every scary adjective they can find, to convince us the world is a threatening place. Our politicians often like this, because frightened people will suspend rational thought and Demand That Something Be Done. Apparently politicians have even been known to help this process along by creating new threats for us to be afraid of.

The Howard government’s NetAlert campaign over-emphasised the potential risk to children online.

The claim in the NetAlert advertising campaign that over half of 11–15 year olds who chat online are contacted by strangers does not appear in the government commissioned research.

In fact, only 14% of the research participants said their mix of chat partners included people they hadn’t met. Even before NetAlert, three-quarters of parents had already discussed online dangers with their kids.
Massive energies are spent in the War on Terror (an abstract noun!) even though, as I’ve pointed out before, you’re far more likely to drown in your own bathtub.
Headlines constantly scream about Wild teen crime waves, even though children are safer than ever before.
Dr Mohamed Haneef.
Adam Curtis’ powerful documentary The Power of Nightmares explains how a vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world has been used by American Neo-Conservatives and Islamic Radical movements alike. The entire film is freely downloadable from the Internet Archive.

Our continual state of hallucinatory paranoia is made worse by a lack of long-term memory. Societies try things, and sometimes they don’t work — but that doesn’t seem to stop us trying them again.

Investors pour millions into Web 2.0 businesses they don’t really understand, even though the lessons of the first dot-com bubble were obvious.
The War on (Some) Drugs continues operating in a prohibition mentality, even though that’s been shown to fail so many times before. I can thoroughly recommend Richard Davenport-Hines’ book The Pursuit of Oblivion: a social history of drugs for gaining an understanding, and this BBC interview might be worth a listen.
When we designed mainframe computers, we learned that security was something that needed to be part of the original design, not grafted on as a “feature” afterwards. Then we connected PCs to the Internet, with fundamentally insecure operating systems like Windows and the original MacOS, and were surprised when they got hacked. We’ve started connecting “smart phones” to the grid, with fundamentally insecure operating systems, and we’re surprised when mobile phone viruses appear. And now we’re about to connect TVs to the Internet too.

Yes, I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.

So what can we do about it?

Well, I’m a big fan of Science. All that Age of Enlightenment stuff. Reason. Logic. Joined-up thinking. We should demand it of our leaders (political, cultural, religious), employers, employees and ourselves.

It’s heartening to see that Chairman Rudd is all for evidence-based policy development.

I’m a Labor moderniser. Always have been, always will be and what that’s on about is good evidence-based policy in terms of producing the best outcomes for this nation, carving out its future in a pretty uncertain century where things fundamentally are changing.

It’ll be interesting to see how PM Rudd handles situations where the evidence runs counter to Labor’s political imperative — particularly when compromise is needed to get legislation through the still-hostile Senate.

There’s a lot we can do as individuals to help kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

Learn how to see though the tricks. I J Good’s paper A Classification of Fallacious Arguments and Interpretations provides a formal list of dodgy tricks, but Wikipedia’s articles on fallacy and propaganda techniques provide a great start. The classic book How To Lie with Statistics and the newer How to Lie with Maps are also great reads.
Turn off the crap. Rid your life of the tabloid media, including shock-horror newspapers and TV programs.
Demand to see the evidence. If someone claims some fact or statistic, don’t take it at face value. Use The Power of the Internet to check it out.
Spread the word. If you spot misinformation or faulty reasoning, tell your friends, family and colleagues. Make your coffee-break conversation more useful than whinging about the boss or prattling on about lame TV programs.

This all reads like a manifesto, I know, and perhaps it is. Reason and logic are supposedly what makes us humans so special. And yet when it comes to managing our greatest creations, our own societies, we discard those skills and give in to the Hallucinating Goldfish.

It’s time to Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.