Archive for December, 2005

18
Dec

Wikipedia and accuracy

   Posted by: rew   in General, Tech

There’s been a lot of interest lately in Wikipedia, the freely-available, freely-editable online encyclopedia. An awful lot of people are still unfamiliar with the power of collaborative anything, and simply can’t conceive of how Wikipedia could be what it is, or why it works.

Helpfully, Nature recently sponsored a comparison of science entries in Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is still the gold standard in print encyclopedias. The results are here, and are startling primarily to people who simply Don’t Get It. In short, Wikipedia compared very favorably in accuracy to the EB.

But here’s the advantage to Wikipedia that makes it more or less inevitable that it will win, and that giant print encyclopedias will lose: if Nature chose to reveal what the specific errors in Wikipedia were, they’d be fixed within minutes. That is, by the close of the day in which the score was EB: 123 errors, Wikipedia: 162, the game would have changed, and the new score would be Wikipedia: 0, EB: 123.

The very thing that makes many people question Wikipedia’s accuracy - the fact that anyone and everyone can edit and update information - is the thing that gives Wikipedia an insurmountable advantage. It can be fixed, in real-time, as soon as anyone sees a problem.

I remember reading John Seigenthaler’s plaintive whine about the Wikipedia entry on him. It was immediately apparent that he Didn’t Get It. After all, if you find an article on Wikipedia that’s wrong - fix it! Instead of writing a long article in USA Today and complaining to Bellsouth and everywhere else, he could have just fixed the entry.

Update: Factual Error Found on the Internet! :)

18
Dec

The Media’s Top 10 Economic Myths of 2005

   Posted by: rew   in Politics

The Free Market Project’s excellent article The Media’s Top 10 Economic Myths of 2005 is a delicious antidote to those who still think that the MSM is a useful source of anything but amusement. (H/T to the Club for Growth).

13
Dec

Lileks on Astrology

   Posted by: rew   in General

I would read James Lileks’ columns just for the fun of seeing how much good writing he can wring out of the banalities of daily life. But as a bonus, there are gems like this one:

“What’s astrology, daddy?â€? “It’s a system of belief for people who cannot handle the intellectual demands of Scientology.”

Go, James, go. :)

6
Dec

It’s the economy, stupid - or is it?

   Posted by: rew   in Politics

Bizzy Blog has a great post about the bizarrely negative polling numbers on the economy. Quoting this column by Brian Wesbury (who is a great writer as well as an extremely perceptive economics guy), he also adds some great source information. Go and read it, then come back; I’ll wait. :)

Wesbury says:

During a quarter century of analyzing and forecasting the economy, I have never seen anything like this. No matter what happens, no matter what data are released, no matter which way markets move, a pall of pessimism hangs over the economy.

Bizzy, Wesbury, and several others linked in that article all make a similar point - the economy is demonstrably robust, by almost every common measure. And yet the reporting on it is almost uniformly doom-and-gloom amongst the WORMs (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, as Bizzy calls them; I love that!).

One comment is instructive, though:

You seem to miss the obvious reality here.

Instead of blaming the public for being so stupid as to be manipulated by the evil MSM, you should recognize that when people are asked for their opinion of the economy, they answer from their own perspective, according to their own sphere of expertise. The general public are not trained economists, able to plumb reams of economic statistics in order to make meta-level judgments about the state of the economy as a whole. They answer on the basis of their own economic situation, and the situation of their family, friends, and (very) local communities.

That the economy as a whole is healthy, but that over 40% of the people feel that THEY are in a recessionary situation, should illuminate the problem that republican economic policy tends to bring about. The persistent lack of effective trickle-down from policies that explicitly favor those at the top.

Buzz! Nice ideological backflip, but no dice. TBlumer ably rebuts it:

There’s a vast difference between how people see their own situations and that of the economy. Part of it may be anecdotal (knowing neighbors, friends, or relatives who are struggling), but I doubt that it’s much of a factor, because if it was, it would rub off into worrying about their own situation a lot more.

SO the vast majority of the explanation for the difference between how they feel about their own situation and prospects and how they see things for the economy as a whole is that they’re hearing a constant drumbeat of pessimism about the economy from the WORMs,

In his September 19, 2005 “Digital Rules” column, Forbes editor Rich Karlgard notes an ABC News/Washington Post poll from July which claimed that 59% of Americans were not happy with the economy, but also that 59% liked their own financial condition. He says these conflicting sentiments make no sense.

Well, they do make sense when you realize that the liberal press relentlessly hammers home a message of economic doom and gloom. What’s more, they relentlessly say that everyone around you, all your neighbors, are unhappy and losing their jobs. But individuals look at their own financial condition and realize that everything’s great for them, and then assume that theirs must be a special case and that everyone around them is hurting or otherwise the news wouldn’t be so bad. It makes people think that all their neighbors are broke or losing their jobs, so that makes them unhappy with the economy as a whole.

Of course, the news is trumped up or carefully spun to make it almost unrecognizable. It’s done that way in order to try and harm a president that the press unanimously loathes. But when it’s almost uniformly reported as fact that the economy’s bad and people are having a hard time, lots of people tend to believe it, in spite of the evidence to the contrary in their personal situations.

It’s kind of like if everyone on the block has a great marriage, but they’ve heard that everyone else is getting a divorce, so they don’t say much (don’t want to make the neighbors feel bad over their failed marriages) and they fret publicly about the state of matrimony.

Karlgaard notes in his December 12th, 2005 column:

Sorry, grinches, but the U.S. economy looks like Santa’s sled is being powered by GE/Rolls-Royce jet engines. The third quarter clocked a 3.8% GDP growth rate. The third quarter! Recall: This was the quarter of Katrina, Rita and $70-a-barrel oil. The buckle-your-belt, we’re-going-down quarter. But we didn’t go down. We went up. So did the stock market–up 5% since President Bush raised Ben Bernanke to Alan Greenspan’s throne at the Fed.

TBlumer concludes:

And I finally understand (a bit) why some allegedly conservative politicians in Washington who should know better are considering a tax increase (known in some circles as “repealing the Bush tax cuts”). Please, ladies and gentlemen - ignore the polls, vote the reality.