Monthly Archives: April 2018

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My research suggests they might be baiting you

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Wishes were horses, proverb suggests

Something I’ve noticed on the increase in headlines is the formulation “[Thing] was/is/will be true, research/study/analysis suggests.” More often than not, that weakest yet most important word, ‘suggests’, is dead last. That’s not a mistake – they need you to click through and read the thing so they can get their advert microcredits.

As is demonstrated every few days on More or Less, too frequently the story behind the clickbait is a wilful exaggeration or misinterpretation of the results of a study for the sake of a sexier headline, or, worse, it reports on a flimsy study that no one should be giving credence to in the first place, one with, say, only a handful of test subjects or sloppy methodology or a questionable premise – or all of those. These days, if such an item gets mentioned by one news agency, that almost automatically means dozens if not hundreds of other agencies will reword and republish the same sloppy, questionable story with a similarly misleading or completely mistaken headline. Sheer numbers add up to credence, or at least quasi-credence, because they’re going to appear that much higher in news feeds and search results regardless of their basic veracity.

This formulation reminds me of high-bogosity archaeological programmes that expound things like “This ragged hole in the wall over here where the sun shines through on the vernal equinox suggests this building was almost certainly a highly-advanced astronomical observatory!” Later the structure might be mentioned more simply as ‘the astronomical observatory’, not a suggestion of one. Uh-huh.

Director: “Cut! Look, don’t just say ‘uh-huh’ or ‘yes’ when the presenter says something to you. We prefer you say ‘absolutely’ to make it sound extra true, but you could also say ‘precisely’, ‘exactly’, ‘definitely’, or ‘of course’ in a pinch. Generally speaking, the more syllables for ‘yes’ the better.”

In any case, the tentative ‘suggests’ just doesn’t match with the concrete ‘is’/’was’/’will be’. The proper usage is “Research/study/analysis suggests X might have been/could be/might in future be true”, but I suppose few would click through on my headlines.

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Beautiful Spring

“The people of New England are by nature patient and forbearing; but there are some things which they will not stand. Every year they kill a lot of poets for writing about ‘Beautiful Spring.’ These are generally casual visitors, who bring their notions of spring from somewhere else, and cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about spring. And so, the first thing they know, the opportunity to inquire how they feel has permanently gone by.”

– Mark Twain, in his perpetually quotable speech on New England weather given Friday, 22 December 1876 – the year The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published

Circa 1874, age 39

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US edumacation going grate, just grate

Here are the results of the first question of a February 2018 YouGov poll of 8,215 adults in the US. They probably ought to have asked if antisocial media was involved in any recent formation of doubts, because of course it was, because it’s fundamentally and irretrievably antisocial.

An interesting Venn diagram would show the intersection of 18-24 year-old oblate spheroid-doubters with those of that age who would like to work at a cool place like SpaceX. I would bet a crisp new one dollar bill that it’s not a null set.

“Gee, I’m not sure. Could be a dodecahedron for all I know. Well…if I knew that word.”