Friday, September 23, 2005
How We Think
Dadmanly is looking at how people take in and analyse data and if we are not predisposed to alwasy see the ugly. His discussion is based on the fact that some of the intel weenies he knows sound amazingly like the legacy media.
Because there is less to count -- we count the exceptional. The means if we are analyzing for negative occurences, by defintion THEY ARE EXCEPTIONAL. Dennis Prager is fond of calling it "a proctologist's view of life." Why not plot the non-violence? Yes, the result is the same as looking at the "white space" in the violence plot, but the impact is oh-so-different.
I am beginning to think the kind of work reporters do (intelligence or media) inevitably leads them to paint the picture with the negative data points, since that's what they see most, and most urgently.He concludes that even if there was an irradication of press bias, reporting would largely remain negative. His analysis is; however, based on asking certain questions, in the example he uses, "What is the situation concerning violence in Iraq?" He talks about analyzing the "white space" in a graph of the violence, but what if we pose a different problem altogether, or at least a different metric?
Because there is less to count -- we count the exceptional. The means if we are analyzing for negative occurences, by defintion THEY ARE EXCEPTIONAL. Dennis Prager is fond of calling it "a proctologist's view of life." Why not plot the non-violence? Yes, the result is the same as looking at the "white space" in the violence plot, but the impact is oh-so-different.
