A More Robust Conception of Truth

Nate Silver tweeted this today:

This is probably an unpopular view, but I think cherry-picking evidence, at a certain level of severity, is morally equivalent to fabricating evidence.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 30, 2018

This is similar to the point I was trying to make in an earlier post. We (rightly) expect that news stories will be factually accurate. A news organization that reports false stories deserves opprobrium. (This is to be distinguished from human error, which inevitably leads to some mistakes requiring corrections.) But what about a news organization that scrupulously reports the facts, but does so in a way designed to mislead its audience?

To state what should be obvious, the epistemological status of that kind of reporting is highly suspect. It is analogous to "publication bias" in science, in which positive results are widely broadcast while negative results get little attention. This is what I think Nate Silver was getting at with his tweet. "Literal" honesty is necessary but not sufficient. This is why, for instance, Rule 10b-5 under the Securities Exchange Act is phrased this way (emphasis added):

It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce, or of the mails or of any facility of any national securities exchange,

(a) To employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud,

(b) To make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading, or

(c) To engage in any act, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon any person,

in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.

The problem is that "literal" truth is much easier to police than a more robust version. On top of that, the more robust version often isn't measurable at the level of a single story. If there's a brutal murder of a white person by a black person, it's not inherently wrong to report it. It's just wrong to report nothing but black-on-white crime. That has to be measured over time, and that's nearly impossible to do in a rigorous or objective way. (It's easier for the SEC because the securities markets are held to a fairly high standard of honesty, and also because investors care about a much smaller set of facts than news consumers do.)

I should also point out, as I did in my earlier post, that I think cherry-picking can be done honorably as long as it is clear what is going on. Advocacy organizations are there to push a narrative. Humans may be poorly equipped to discount reporting sufficiently when it comes from a known biased source, but it's hard to blame the advocacy groups for doing what they do (as long as they are transparent about it).

The other point I would make about this is that there is no clear line to be drawn between responsible news organizations and partisan ones, unless it is based on something like subjective intent. You can think of each person as struggling to accumulate information, with each news source presenting its own biases, conscious and unconscious, that the individual has to navigate to come to a satisfactory idea of the world. Maybe this needs to wait for another blog post.