The Power of Numbers to Deceive

Large numbers are impressive, so people often fail to put them into perspective. That’s why advertisers and advocates love to use them to get more sales or to garner support for a cause. Examples pop up daily, especially in this age of COVID-19.

 

Every day the local and national news media blast out the latest coronavirus totals. Millions of cases and over one quarter million deaths get our attention. In fact, relative to other causes they are very big numbers. It is a serious problem, but no one reminds us that 15 million is less than five percent of the population. Furthermore, I have never heard a news organization report on the number of people who have recovered. It’s sure to also be in the millions. It seems that people come out on two extremes: they either don’t take it seriously enough or they are unnecessarily terrified of catching it and dying. Perhaps if the news gave a more honest, measured account, more people would have an appropriately moderate reaction.

 

I found another example in a health report. “The Federal Trade Commission is sending 70,142 checks and PayPal payments totaling $3,864,824 to consumers nationwide who bought Quell, a wearable device that supposedly would treat chronic pain throughout the body when placed below the knee.” The company was fined almost $4 million for misrepresenting their product! Consumers who were gullible enough to buy the product will be reimbursed. That’s about $55.10 each for a device that is advertised on sale for $99 – not exactly a money-back guarantee – but the $4 million fine seems impressive.

 

Class action lawsuits are also typical. Chipotle, accused of falsely advertising its food as GMO-free, settled for $6.5 million. After the lawyers took 30%, that left their customers with a claim of $2 per meal with a cap of $30 per household, but it “could be less than this depending on how many claims are made.” Again a big number reduced to peanuts per person.

 

Similarly Johnson & Johnson, a favorite target for lawsuits, was ordered to Pay $6.3 million in the Infant’s Tylenol Settlement. That came out to $2.15 a bottle.

 

The number of home burglaries in 2018 was 685,766, about half of total burglaries (1,230,149), and about half of those happened when people didn’t lock their doors. But when buying a home security system you will hear, “A burglary happens once every 26 seconds.”

When big numbers are spread across many people, it doesn’t add up to very much.

 

In some cases, the news media implies big numbers just in their tone. A couple of years ago they wanted us to believe that school shootings were common, but what happened to school shooting news when the presidential campaigns got into full swing? The problem didn’t go away, but the news did. 

 

According to Education Week, twenty-five incidents occurred on school grounds or during school-sponsored events resulting in five student deaths, only one under the age of 14. Any such deaths are tragic, but that’s five out of 56.4 million students. Should anyone panic over such minuscule probability?

Headlines about these extremely rare events like shark attacks are easy to ignore, but when kids are involved, it’s different. Parents are terrified at the prospect of their child being abducted. Nosey neighbors report them for letting kids walk alone and authorities respond. An elementary school in South Carolina won’t let the kids whose mother wants them to walk home, leave school without an adult. “Today, only 10% of American kids walk to school, down from about 50% in 1969.” 

Reuters tries to assure parents: “Kidnapped children make headlines, but abduction is rare….On average, fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year since 2010.” Then Parents.com tells them, “Every 40 seconds in the United States, a child becomes missing or is abducted.” But they don't tell them that 0.1% are abducted by strangers, over 95% simply ran away and 99.8% are later found alive. 

 

It’s an endless battle against the media, politicians and charities selling products or ideas and raising  funds using big numbers. The best defense is perspective.

Flashback – (Mis)understanding Insurance

If they learn economics in journalism school, they must quickly forget everything upon graduation. Furthermore, when the facts don't make a compelling story, they resort to the usual tactic of trying to make stories fit their worldview or make things look scarier than they are. Here is a prime example I gave in December 2016.

[As I was reading the transcript of Scott Pelley’s "60 Minutes" interview with House Speaker Paul Ryan, I noticed that he seemed uninterested in hard news or in-depth information so much as he was interested in tripping up the Speaker, trying to put him in a position of disagreeing with his new boss, making one or the other of them look bad, or uncovering something potentially embarrassing.

He asked how often the two speak on the phone and who initiates the conversation. The answers were almost daily and both. No news there. How does he answer the phone? “He doesn’t say, ‘This is the president-elect?’” No. “Have you told him being president is not being CEO of the United States, that the Congress is going to have a say?” 

Instead of asking how the two got together after a contentious election, he asked, “Who apologized to whom?” It’s clear by now that Pelley has no liking or respect for Donald Trump, thinks he is a bully and a racist, and is searching for evidence to back up his views. Better yet, he would like to get Ryan to agree on any point that might make it seem he is of the same opinion.

The silliness and self-serving finally comes to a close, and Pelley asks a number of questions about policy issues. Soon he gets to the details about possible changes to Obamacare and the sniping continues. At one point Pelley says “And women will pay the same as men? That didn’t used to be the case.” This is a question designed to get an answer that will incite outrage. He is trying to get some admission of Republican bias against women, but showing in the process that he does not understand how insurance works and counting on the fact that many Americans don’t either.

Insurance usually works by assessing the risk and charging premiums accordingly. If you have homeowner’s insurance you expect a discount for having a working alarm system. Teen drivers are generally less safe than more experienced drivers, but boys have more accidents than girls. Auto insurance for a young man 16-25 is higher. There is no outrage there. It’s not unusual for companies to charge smokers more for their health insurance benefits. Owners of cars with higher repair costs pay higher premiums. Older cars are cheaper to insure due to the lower replacement cost. Those who don’t drive as many miles sometimes pay lower premiums. Costs of auto and homeowners insurance vary by what part of the country and by the size of the town or city you live in. And since women outlive men and take fewer chances, they pay less for life insurance. Older people pay more, as do those who participate in dangerous hobbies like skydiving or juggling chainsaws.

This all happens without a stir. Everyone seems to understand that certain classes of people are at a higher risk for either the frequency or the size of insurance claims. Hence they should pay more. The ones in the classes with higher premiums don’t like it, but they pay. So why would people be upset that some women, especially those of childbearing age, might have to pay more? That “used to be the case” and it didn’t have anything to do with prejudice or victimization.

Apparently the government and some group of citizens have now decided that charging women more for health insurance can be explained only by prejudice. Everyone must purchase the same insurance for the same cost or there will be an uproar. And Scott Pelley and others in his profession are more than happy to incite and later fan the flames of that uproar, because it makes their job of reporting the news so much easier. Their job is not to inform or to educate; their job is to attract views and clicks. Nothing does that better than a good demonstration or protest, even those grounded in fundamental misunderstanding.]

P.S. I have often said that problems with healthcare costs must be solved on the basis of costs, not by tinkering with health insurance, but that’s for another discussion.

MSG and Elections

Throughout the years under a number of different topics, I have made the point that people tend to strongly hold onto ideas, whether they are true or false. They may have heard them repeatedly, heard them from an authoritative source or just liked the idea because it reinforced their favorite biases. In any case, ideas tend to stick.

 

Just a few weeks ago I reran a flashback about the misconception that electric power lines are health hazards. This idea was passed around by the news media back in the 1980s based on flimsy evidence. The idea stuck despite it being firmly disproved within ten years. People still believe it today.

 

In "More Secrets to a Longer Life" on September 28, I discussed the myth that vitamin C reduces the duration and intensity of a head cold. Companies take advantage of this decades-long misconception, making money by offering vitamin C in several forms. I also made reference to other persistent misconceptions: the power of cranberry juice to treat urinary problems; that cutting back on fat is the key to a healthier lifestyle; and the exaggerated benefits of antioxidants.

In light of that, I read some interesting information about monosodium glutamate (MSG) in Bill Bryson’s book, The Body. Here is part of the first paragraph on page 106:

MSG has had a hard time of it in the West since1968 when The New England Journal of Medicine published a letter – not an article or a study, but simply a letter – from a doctor noting that he sometimes felt vaguely unwell after eating in Chinese restaurants and wondered if it was the MSG added to the food that was responsible. The headline on the letter was “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome,” and from this small beginning it became fixed in people’s minds that MSG was a kind of toxin. In fact, it isn’t.

Further investigation bears this out. From the MSG Fact Sheet: “The scientific research supporting the safety and benefits of monosodium glutamate (MSG) is extensive.”

Another source, the Healthline website states, “While some people assert that the glutamate from MSG can act as an excitotoxin, leading to the destruction of nerve cells, no human studies support this.”

After discussing common complaints, the Mayo Clinic summarizes, “However, researchers have found no definitive evidence of a link between MSG and these [reported] symptoms.”

 

There is no scientific or medical evidence, yet people still report symptoms because they heard it and believe it.

 

What does this have to do with elections? 

 

If you can expose voters to enough misrepresentations, quotations taken out of context, made up stories and unfounded accusations against an opponent and get them to buy it, why not say them over and over and arrange for others to repeat them? Most people don’t do the research/critical thinking; they hear it and it sticks, especially if their mind is already made up. (Right now people on each side are thinking I am talking only about lies spread by the other side!)

 

Politicians and biased news organizations (aren't they all?) do it because it works. And the tactic continues to get more intense. The underlying cause is that voters let them get away with it. They get so stirred up by the "news" that doing cool, critical thinking becomes more difficult than usual, and every new lie stirs them up more. 

 

It reminds me of a casual definition to explain differences in drama: comedy is when the protagonists get what they want; tragedy is when they get what they deserve. By passively following along, buying all of the drama served up by politicians, the media and partisans on social media instead of critically challenging the talking points; Americans will continue to get the leaders and the government they deserve. And it will be a tragedy.

Flashback – Fear of Power Lines

Irrational and unsubstantiated fears have been good examples of a lack of critical thinking. People hear a rumor or supposed scientific truth and latch onto it without questioning or doing any research. 

Back on December 5, 2014, I explained one of these unfounded fears, the concern that power lines emitted some kind of dangerous radiation that makes people and animals sick. That was almost six years ago, when Facebook and other social media were in their relative infancy. Today Americans are exposed to this kind of news almost constantly as social media users pass along scary information with no attempt at verification. 

As they did in this case, news organizations will sometimes pick up these stories or interview the believers without any attempt to explain or debunk the beliefs. They merely want to capture “eyeballs.” Fear sells, and fake news is nothing new.

Here is the original post. 

[If you are old enough, you remember the big scare in the late 1980s about power lines causing cancer.  In fact, if you are not old enough to remember the news reports of the time, you have probably heard about this idea from someone who was. There was a great deal of concern, but after over 30 years of further research, it appears to have been a mistaken assumption. Still the fear persists.

The fairly short (7:46) NY Times Retro Report is worth watching.

It begins with replays of news reports from all the major networks from 1987. It was big news at the time, and this review is very informative, showing in retrospect how the news business operates when breaking news has the potential to stir up a lot of fear based on very limited data. A voice-over talks about how power lines may cause cancer while showing the picture of a small bald child, apparently battling cancer (but not from power lines) – sneaky.  When seven children in one Denver school developed cancer and parents blamed it on nearby power lines, one reporter says that it could be a “tragedy of enormous proportions.”

The Times calls the episode “Power of Fear” with the message that once this type of fear is introduced into our society it never really goes away.  

The researcher who first suspected the problem now explains that further research has ruled out any problem.  With the number and density of power lines, this should have developed into a major health problem, but it didn’t.  “That suspicion (of a cancer risk) was simply wrong...The likely impact (of power lines) is zero.”  Scientists in the 1990s conducted hundreds of experiments exposing rats, other animals and human cells to intense EMFs (magnetic fields around the power lines) over long periods of time with no change in the cells.  “In 20 years of looking, no one has found a way that power line fields can do anything at all to cells of animals; unless it can do something to cells, it cannot cause cancer.”  The National Academy of Sciences confirmed this by reviewing 500 studies and releasing their findings in October 1996.  Nothing since then has altered the conclusion of no danger.

The association was always “suggestive, but very faint” but correlation does not prove causation. Yet the idea, the fear, persists and is still spread by some public figures, some advertisers who use the scare tactics to sell real estate service and by word of mouth – now with the added power of social media.

Why do some Americans believe these sources and continue to fear the presence of power lines?  Psychologists tell us that risks that are invisible, that might cause suffering before death or that might affect children have uncanny staying power, even in the face of firm evidence to the contrary. This highlights the need for critical thinking, to put aside emotional responses and listen to the facts. Don’t we have enough stuff to be afraid of without dredging up errors from the past?]

Is The News Making Us Sick?

It began one morning with two seemingly unrelated items: a story about mountain climbing on BBC Future and a panel from the comics section of the newspaper.

The BBC article, “The placebo effect is well known for its medical benefits, but there is evidence it could give athletes an edge, too,” began with an experiment where mountain climbers were given oxygen to boost physical performance at high altitudes. In a laboratory simulation, they were first given tanks of oxygen to improve performance. When they were later given empty tanks, their brains expected similar improvement and caused the body to adjust appropriately.

It went on to explain how placebos like this can improve athletic performance in other areas, for example, sugar pills believed to be performance enhancing drugs could have the same effect. 

The effectiveness of placebos applies to many areas. A summary of studies shows that “antidepressants are effective for depression about 31-70% of the time, while placebos are effective 12-50% of the time…. So, while antidepressants appear more effective than placebo, only a fraction of the benefit we see in patients is likely from a direct neurobiological impact of the medication itself.” Effectiveness depends on the amount of faith patients have in the product. Placebos taken as part of a test of more powerful drugs tend to have more powerful effects; and patients often report some of the same side effect as the drug itself.

This led me to another BBC article explaining the opposite effect, sometimes called nocebo. In this example the treatment was merely the words the doctor used. The doctor, talking about serious osteoarthritis, says that he has “bad news,” that the knees are “worn out” and the medicine may “help a bit,” but may damage the stomach lining. The doctor has set the patient up to expect the worst. This kind of presentation can unintentionally cause the brain to deliver the opposite of a placebo effect: less positive, possibly negative, outcomes.

A conclusion is “when prescribing treatments, the doctor should emphasise the positive effects of the medicine, while framing the negative side-effects so they seem less frightening, and being careful not to over-emphasise their risks.” They should be honest, but with an optimistic tone.

This led to yet another BBC article, this one from 2015, about how negative thoughts and ideas can not only make you sick, but actually kill you. This effect applies to any authority figure or respected expert, not just doctors. “In the same way that voodoo shamans could harm their victims through the power of suggestion, priming someone to think they are ill can often produce the actual symptoms of a disease.” Hence, people can die of fright or become sicker based on the message and their faith in the authority of the messenger.

Each of these articles is interesting, but coincidentally they came to my attention on the day I saw “The Flying McCoys” at the bottom of the page of an on-line newspaper. The idea is almost too true and too common to be funny and typical of many news programs.

Based on the information above, what is this doing to the overall health of the American people, this constant barrage of fears and anxiety over the virus and whether opening the economy too soon will be a mistake, the emphasis on the ever increasing number of cases and deaths, the constant skepticism about the actions and predictions of the task force, the criticism of any encouraging remarks – especially if they turn out to be overly optimistic; and for years now, fanning the flames of  divisiveness within the country – all with the express intention of putting us on edge, amplifying the fear and anxiety to get everyone to continue to tune in. 

Remember, placebo, the strong mind-body connection cuts both ways. Between the news media, social media and politicians, it’s surprising we are not all physical and emotional wrecks.

The news can be both addictive and unhealthy. One defense is to watch less. Another is to use critical thinking and see it for what it is, big business trying to attract “eyeballs,” and act accordingly, increase our skepticism, lessen our faith in the source and discount their predictions of a fearful outcome at every turn. 

The Opposite of True

Some ideas are repeated so often that large numbers of Americans believe them without question. This makes a handy tool for politicians, advertisers and fundraisers. They get our support to fix problems that either don’t exist or have been exaggerated out of proportion. I covered some of these, stories about child abductions and clean air problems, about two years ago. Here are a few more examples.

Police killed in the line of duty:

Watch the news and you would believe that this issue is at an all-time high. There is a war on; blue lives matter! But the data tell a different story.

This website lists all deaths in the line of duty by cause and by year. The overall figures match fairly well with this other site, so I believe the information is accurate. 

Ignoring causes like accidents, heart attacks, etc., I looked only at gunfire, assault and vehicular assault, that is, purposeful acts. The total for 2019 was 58, somewhat below average. Of the last ten years, the highest were 2010, 2011 and 2016. The lowest were 2013, 2015 and 2017. There seems to be no pattern or trend.

Naturally, no one should feel good about any number above zero. Every case is a tragedy. The problem is a lack of progress, not an escalation.

Vietnam Veterans:

After so many years the stereotype of the mentally scarred Vietnam veteran still rings true in the public imagination. Reality is surprisingly different.

Research done early this century and summarized by Peter Rowe in the San Diego Union-Tribune found that those who served in Vietnam were “more likely to be married, college educated and gainfully employed than other members of their generation.”

Furthermore, a Harris poll of returned veterans “revealed that 90 percent said that, ‘looking back,’ they were either ‘very glad’ or ‘somewhat glad’ to have ‘served their country.’ Eighty percent said that returning home was ‘about the same or better’ than they had ‘anticipated.’” A large majority rejected the popular notion of the former soldier struggling to readjust, haunted by flashbacks and nightmares. 

Scam Victims:

We hear it over and over on the news and public service announcements: Make sure grandma and grandpa don’t become victims of scams. As a senior citizen who doesn’t answer the phone unless I recognize the number and who dumps in the spam bucket those weekly messages that my email is about to expire unless I follow the link, I resent the implication! The truth is that younger people are more susceptible to scams. 

This is true in the US, but I have seen similar reports from the UK and Australia. Here is an Experian article about a Better Business Bureau report. “Americans ages 18 to 34 were more susceptible to scams (43.7% were victims) than Americans 55 and older (27.6% were victims). However, while occurrences are less for older Americans, seniors still lose more money in scams than younger victims.” (They probably lose more only because they have more.) 

The Inc. website reports the same tendencies.

Going back to the Experian numbers, there is something fishy about their numbers. In the article they show a graph of those scammed by age group, which they took from the original report.

To get 43.7% they merely added 25 + 18.7. That’s like saying if 10% of first graders have red hair and 10% of second graders have red hair, then 20% of the whole group have red hair. WRONG! The right answer is 10% provided the classes are of equal size.

So their report of 43.7% for the younger people is really closer to 22%, and their number 27.6% for the seniors is less than 14%. The conclusion is still the same but the math is pathetic! (Remember, Experian is one of the three companies that calculate your credit score and they have trouble with this simple calculation!)

The overall point here is that we are often fed stories that are no more than stories that someone wants us to believe to raise donations, increase their ratings or get support for passing a new (unnecessary) law. 

More Idiocy From the Media

Not wanting to break the spirit of Flashback Fridays, I refer to “Why Aren’t We Insulted?” from just a few weeks ago, but this is really a slightly different subject.

On March 1 I wrote, “When companies and politicians treat us like compete idiots or pander to us by latching on to the latest trends, I think we should be insulted. We are being manipulated, but continue to respond predictably.” Equally insulting is a new trend in reporting on the coronavirus. The media treats us like fools and idiots without any pushback from readers and viewers.

I’ve heard it many times on local TV news as well as national network news, and I see it in print: “The death toll from coronavirus continues to rise.” Here are just a few quick examples from CBS, US News and the Baton Rouge Advocate.

Think about this for a minute. The death toll from anything is always going to rise unless there are zero deaths. The latest death toll, the one they refer to and display on the screen, is calculated by adding new deaths to the ones already reported. If there is only one more death, the toll goes up. And unless someone miraculously rises from the dead it will never decrease! In the middle of a pandemic, few additional deaths would be cause for some optimism. But optimistic news takes a back seat, and breathlessly reporting of “continuing to rise” is more frightening and better serves their purpose of keeping everyone in a panic, tuning in and anticipating their next breaking-news bombshell.

As critical thinkers, we should be insulted by such misleading headlines, but apparently we are not. We get the news that they want to serve up in the format they want to use and with built in bias. Journalism is, for the most part, dead. We get the news we respond to (or at least tolerate). We get the news we deserve.

They keep advertising "We are all in this together," but imagine the shock and surprise if just one reporter at the daily press conference asked the simple question, "What can we do to help?"

Flashback - What Are The Odds?

[I wrote this in October 2011 about how often the public is bamboozled by heartwarming stories of seemingly miraculous events. Often the storytellers are fooled as well, denying the possibility of a coincidence and attributing the occurrence to whatever higher power they believe in. This is comforting, but misguided.]

I recently ran across this article about identical twin sisters having babies on the same day in the same hospital. It reminded me of an Oprah show some years ago about a young boy and young girl who were best friends in a Russian orphanage, were adopted separately and were reunited by accident in a restaurant in Michigan. I may not have all the details right, but the details don’t matter. The point is that the audience oohed and ahhed over the seeming miracle. A story about such a coincidence always causes people to look for connections or causes and ask the question: What are the odds?  Well, let’s do some critical thinking.

The question is not about the odds of these two particular youngsters meeting again or of these two women giving birth on the same day. The question is about the odds of the producers of the Oprah Show going out and finding such an extraordinary situation or the odds of a newspaper reporting an unusual coincidence. (There have also been stories of a mother and her daughter giving birth on the same day.)

Consider that there are over 300 million people in the US doing their daily activities, including being born or adopted, having traffic accidents, going on vacation, shopping, working, dying, attending schools and sporting events and movies and concerts and restaurants, climbing mountains, skydiving and a full range of other activities. It is very likely that several unusual coincidences would arise somewhere over a period of time just by chance. If part of your job is to look for heartwarming or freakish stories, as a news agency or a television show would be, they should be relatively easy to find. Notice that we are not specifying that we find a story about twins giving birth on the same day or anything else. The requirement is only to find unusual coincidences. The odds of doing so are high.

I don’t want to be a party-pooper, rather a devil’s advocate. As you may know a devil’s advocate in Roman Catholic law was an official appointed to present arguments against a proposed candidate for sainthood. The Church saw the appropriateness and necessity for healthy skepticism and critical thinking when making important decisions. Likewise it should be appropriate and necessary for us all to exercise caution, to think things through more carefully before oohing and ahhing and assigning mysterious, psychic or supernatural causes to a surprising event. It’s especially important when we are faced with the “snake-oil” vendors trying to sell us miracle products or services (or people trying to sell us anything) by using amazing stories, fancy scientific-sounding arguments or faulty statistics.

Who Will Tell Us the Truth?

When a large number of people are convinced that certain incorrect facts are true, it is not in the interest of politicians or advertisers to try to talk them out of it. If many people thought the sky was green, Congress would likely pass a resolution praising the greenness of the sky in an effort to garner support. 

When the food industry learns that many people believe that gluten has negative effects, they begin printing labels touting the lack of gluten in their products or take the gluten out while raising the price. They will reinforce errors for votes or sales with no interest in education, while the myths are spread and supported by the news media and social media contacts.

I have written many times before about misunderstandings around the health benefits of dietary supplements, the dangers of GMOs and an irrational fear of everything from power lines to nuclear power plants. All these misconceptions have a cult-like following. 

Likewise, as crime statistics continue to improve, the news media’s search for more and more isolated incidents to report with breathless anxiety leads people to the opposite conclusion. Fear sells. (This is very apparent from the coverage of the coronavirus where they search out and report as typical, anecdotal examples of flaws in the system then ask the President what he is doing to quell the anxiety and comfort the fearful.)

Now here are a few more examples where commonly held beliefs are inconsistent with the facts. 

The first is a campaign trail mantra: the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer. This is clearly not the case. Income is tracked in quintiles, five groupings from lowest to highest. Between 1979 and 2015, real income for all quintiles has increased. 

The Congressional Budget Office reported that, adjusted for inflation, taxes, welfare payments and Social Security, the income of the bottom 1/5 rose by 79%, while the top 1/5 rose by 103% and the middle 3/5 by 46%. There may be more inequality, but the poor are not getting poorer. Furthermore, research shows that the population in each of those segments is less stable than most believe. Individuals freely move up and down, so some of the formerly poor are much better off.

The second case has led to draconian laws in every state ruining the lives of individuals and their families, sometimes with threats of violence and death from incensed vigilantes. Laws require every sex offender to be named on the same registry regardless of the seriousness of their offense. 

The idea is to protect the public, especially children, from these monsters who are likely to strike again without notice. But reliable research shows that people who commit sex crimes are very unlikely to repeat. And a study in New York showed that 95% of those arrested were first offenders – who would not have been on a registry in the first place. 

Finally, is vaping is as bad as smoking? Johns Hopkins says that it’s less harmful than smoking but not completely safe. Most cases of lung injury (EVALI) “appear to predominantly affect people who modify their vaping devices or use black market modified e-liquids.”

The CDC opinion is that “E-cigarettes have the potential to benefit adult smokers who are not pregnant if used as a complete substitute for regular cigarettes....”

The majority of cases of EVALI are strongly associated with Vitamin E acetate added to THC. Vitamin E acetate has not been found in the lung fluid of people that do not have EVALI. 

 Although it’s not legal to sell e-cigarettes to minors since August 2016, and the federal government has just banned flavored e-cigarettes to try to discourage kids from getting hooked, kids have always been able to get cigarettes. Despite new laws, the country is stressing over a teen vaping epidemic. The result of these bans will likely increase EVALI cases as adults and kids that still want the flavors will be shopping on the black market where the real danger comes from. Meanwhile, everyone feels virtuous about leading the fight against another vice and protecting our kids.

It is so easy for people to get extremely upset about invisible threats, e.g., diseases and radiation or threats to our children like abductions or school shootings or rape culture on campus or differences that play to our sense of social justice. When this kind of artificial hysteria takes hold, no one stops to ask: what is the real danger; where did they get the numbers; who conducted the study; was there a study at all or did someone make it up to support their own agenda, job security or beliefs? 

The government reacts with stupid, purely symbolic actions like banning plastic straws. Advertisers print labels or adjust products to meet a demand generated by information with no scientific backing. Myths and misinformation distract from solving real problems. All for lack of critical thinking.

How Can You Believe Those Numbers?

Politicians and other entities trying to raise awareness to one or another kind of problem or injustice love to toss out surprising numbers to gain support for their cause. In many cases these are not real numbers. They could be based on data collected by the program itself with no effort to be unbiased, in fact, the more shocking the better. They may have been based on a single survey that made no effort to confirm results, or they may be in conflict with the results of similar surveys. Like the unverified number of discarded plastic straws based on a small survey for a grade-school project that led to such an uproar, the numbers are often repeated so many times by so many people that everyone assumes they are correct. 

With so many examples, how can we tell what to believe?

Everyone knows that ten thousand steps per day is the recommended amount to stay healthy and to boost longevity – or do they? This NPR piece tells us “the idea of walking at least 10,000 steps a day for health goes back decades to a marketing campaign launched in Japan to promote a pedometer” and is not some kind of magic number. In a recent study published in JAMA, older women who averaged 4,400 steps per day were better off than those taking only 2,700, with little or no benefit over about 7,500 steps. This finding was confirmed elsewhere.

The myth of 10,000 daily steps is akin to the 8 glasses of water daily. There is no basis. Someone made it up. The best advice, to drink when you are thirsty, continues to be drowned out by the “hydration parrots.”

Other examples include the unacceptably high number of school shootings. The Campus Safety Magazine puts the number for 2018 at 82, “the highest there have ever been since 1970.” They mention that the second highest was 59 in 2006, so it can hardly be called a trend, perhaps more of a blip. They then state that the majority didn’t happen on school property – indicating a rather loose definition of school shooting. Compare that to the Wikipedia list of each occurrence by location with a total of only 36 for the entire year.

A Time article calls into question the widely circulated number of one in five women in the US having been raped. They call that number misleading noting “the striking disparity between CDC figures and the Justice Department’s crime statistics based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (which includes crimes unreported to the police).” This article provides much detail and there is room for doubt (as I pointed out earlier), yet we continue to hear the same number.

Of course everyone also knows that crime and teen pregnancy are worse than ever – not so fast! “Violent crime in the U.S. has fallen sharply over the past quarter century.” Here is a link to that Pew survey from earlier this year showing several graphs on violent and property crimes all heading in the right direction, although you’d never know it from the news coverage. That explains why the public perception is the opposite. Likewise a site called the Seeker reports  “the fact is that teen pregnancy is low and has been dropping.”

Can the recent increase in tornados be attributed to Climate Change? This article from a Carbon Brief posting calls it highly uncertain – with references to the data. “What is clear is that there is no observable increase in the number of strong tornadoes in the US over the past few decades,” adding: “Any role for climate change in affecting the conditions for tornado formation is still very much an open question and the subject of ongoing research by the scientific community.”

Finally, are there more black men in prison in the US than in colleges and universities? It’s a handy throwaway line for a speech emphasizing victimhood, but I picked that one apart very nicely about 5 years ago.

We can’t rely on the orators, advocates, media and advertisers to get it right. Use critical thinking. Question everything.

Food For Thought

Considering consistency by the news media: CBS This Morning has a regular series, "What’s Working," which investigates innovations in America that seem to be paying off. On one particular episode a few weeks ago they went to the University of Vermont to highlight a program to discourage the use of drugs and alcohol and move students toward more healthy activities.

Near the end of the piece the professor who designed the program explained that the brains of college students are not yet fully developed. "You couldn't come up with a worse age to send someone to college than when they're 18.” The reporter feeds back the notion, “The brains are not done developing at 18?” He responds, “Not even close.” 

This was not the only report emphasizing the immaturity of college students, and is not confined to CBS, with some saying the brain is not done developing until the early twenties. Some sources put the age of a fully developed frontal cortex closer to 25. Such statements have been fairly common when discussing various crimes and indiscreet tweets. Then why were these same reporters so excited just ten months ago about the apparent wisdom of a group of high school students lecturing the country on gun policy?

Considering income inequality: If we didn’t have rich people, there would be no designer goods. Nobody would be able to show off for their friends by buying the cheap knock-offs.

Considering trusting medical information based only on endorsements: Bloodletting was a common practice among doctors for thousands of years up to about one hundred years ago. Today bloodletting has been shown to be ineffective and mostly harmful. (A controlled variation is used today only in the treatment of a few very rare diseases.)

Since there would have been no opportunity for controlled experiments, the only way it could have continued to be practiced for so long would be through endorsements and by doctors hyping their own successes. “Marie-Antoinette, for instance, seemed to benefit from a healthy dose of bloodletting while giving birth to her first child, Marie-Thérèse, in 1778” – an endorsement from the Queen! 

Doesn’t this same practice of celebrity and friends’ endorsements and doctors hyping their own successes sound like anything we might see on TV or read on the Internet today for any number of miracle cures?

Considering the cancer conspiracy: Did you know that doctors, Big Pharma and the FDA are working together to suppress cancer research for fear that discovery of a cure will put them out of business? They also try to undermine real cures provided by alternative medicine. Many Americans do believe this conspiracy theory. Wired reported on a video that came out last July on the Internet about a miracle cancer cure derived from moss and available online. It “quickly racked up millions of views.” The video used the usual lure of “what the pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know.”

The problem was the video was intentionally faked for the purpose of education, “teaching people to be skeptical of videos exactly like this one.” Do the same people who endorse this cancer-conspiracy myth also believe that firefighters want more fires and do not promote the use of smoke alarms and the practice of fire safety? Do they think dentists don’t want you to brush and floss? All this is equally hard to believe.

It doesn’t take much research (and critical thinking) to find obvious distortions and contradictions in the news and social media. As always the bad information flies around the world at lightning speed, while the truth struggles to catch up (often just in time to be slapped down by committed advocates or enterprising charlatans).

Effects of Social Media

I recently received an email from an astute reader with a link to an essay by a mom concerned about the negative effects of social media on children and puzzled about how to protect them from these dangers.

It began innocently enough when her daughter asked for permission to use an app called Musical.ly so she can make funny lip-sync videos like her friends were doing.  Before committing, the mom took time to review the app, which turned out to be not so innocent after all.

It was one of many websites without parental controls so she couldn't block overly adult and violent themes. As she points out: “Tweens and teens have an underdeveloped frontal cortex. They’re impulsive and self-centered. They make terrible decisions and they can be meaner than a bull shark.” Some content and behavior is clearly not appropriate for their immature minds.

Yet on this app the children who gain followers are the ones who dress and act in overly adult and sexy ways. “The kids who get it wrong – those not ‘sexy’ enough, funny enough, savvy enough –  are openly ridiculed in the comment section” and may find their embarrassment preserved forever on YouTube. Children are also exposed to subjects like self-harm, suicide and anorexia with no guidance except from other children.

So the answer was “no” on the app, but she has problems with the effects of social media on children in general.  Formerly, any bullying or embarrassment from a bad day at school could be left behind afterward. With social media, the bullying and teasing follow them home and can be with them all the time. “Online, there is no school bell, there is no escape” from reminders of mistakes. The ridicule is permanent. In addition kids may obsess about how many likes they get in this imaginary popularity contest, inspiring them to push the envelope in unhealthy ways.

That mom’s solution is to say no to social media for children and give them flip phones instead, despite the nerdy image.

But that’s just the kids. Don’t we have similar things going on with adults, especially since we’ve learned to weaponize social media?

In a recent example American Greetings was forced to pull a Father’s Day card that they intended as “playful,” when one customer “took to social media” (as the saying now goes).  According to CBS, her “post led to images of the card being circulated online, prompting a stream of commentary on social media and an attempt at making amends by American Greetings.”  The company released a statement saying, "We appreciate the feedback and apologize. It's never our intent to offend any of our guests with the products we sell” but they also felt that objections did not consider the affectionate wording on the inside of the card.

I assure you I am no prude, but I have seen any number of greeting cards on the racks that I would not send to any family member or friend. Someone may have thought the cards were playful but they struck me as crude, in poor taste and mostly not funny. On the other hand, I would never imagine taking to social media to stir up a bunch of disgruntled strangers – and there are plenty out there – to back me up in my attempt to shame the company into pulling them.  I am responsible for my own feelings, not some card company. I also have a responsibility to others whose tastes differ from mine to allow them to buy these cards if they so choose.  (Let the market decide, not a few fusspots with computers.)

But it doesn’t stop with attacks on corporations. Personal attacks abound on social media as those with opposite points of view are accused of being stupid, mean, evil and hateful (sometimes based on faulty information and sometimes based on purposely erroneous information). People excoriate cyber-friends, real friends and even family, arguing, insulting, shaming, un-friending, blocking and trolling. Social media may not have caused this behavior, but it certainly allows and encourages it.

With the speed of technological advances, where is it leading and what are we losing?  Maybe we would all be better off with flip-phones. 

Are We Getting Too Lazy About Truth

Since the latest presidential race, the expression “fake news” has become widespread; not only for politicians, but everyday people use it either as a joke or a jibe or a serious comment.  So when I saw an article about news, particularly fake news, on Facebook a number of questions came to mind. How many people are getting news from Facebook? And why do they expect Facebook to do a better job of vetting the news than anyone else.

A little over a year ago Facebook began putting red flags on news stories debunked by third-party fact-checkers, labeling them as fake news. Unfortunately the scheme backfired causing them to change tactics late last year. “Users who wanted to believe the false stories had their fevers ignited and they actually shared the hoaxes more.” Instead Facebook began showing related articles from trusted news sources. Now, instead of calling attention to news they decide is incorrect, they reduce the size of the link post in News Feed.

But I thought Facebook was in the business of bringing the world together (or something like that) so they can earn revenue by delivering eyeballs to ads, not serving as a news source.  Apparently it’s both. And more people seem to be getting news from there.

A Pew Research poll from the summer of 2016 gives a fairly up-to-date picture.  Overall, most people still get their news from television, though that doesn’t apply to the under-50 crowd who rely more on the Internet. Newspapers, especially among younger Americans lag far behind.  

The survey goes into a lot of detail about news sources.  For example, those who“ever get news on a mobile device” rose from 54% in 2013 to 72% three year later. Of online news consumers, 36% say they often get news from professional news organizations and about 15% from friends, but they trust both sources about the same – having either “a lot of trust” or “some trust” at a level of about 76%. Trust in social media as a source of news is much lower, but still at about 34% in the combined categories of “a lot of trust” or “some trust.”

There seems to be trend, and Pew Research is tracking that trend. Overall, television is losing ground to the Internet, radio is stable and newspapers continue to fall out of favor. As far as the Facebook question, from 2012 to 2016 the number of U.S. adults reporting seeing news on social media rose from 49% to 62% and then up to 67% by last October, with those citing it as a frequent source moving from 18% to 20%. So apparently Facebook is right to be concerned about fake news, as more Americans move from newspapers and TV to the Internet and social media for their news and Congress is eager to grill them and others about why they didn’t intervene when the fake news appears.

This brings up a couple of concerns. First, the worry that people trust news from their friends as much as they do news from professional news organizations, while at the same time some of their friends are more likely to share bogus information that happens to agree with what they want to believe than to share true stories.

The second is the notion that the government holds these companies accountable to, in a sense, censor the news they pass along. With ¾ believing that the professional news sources are biased, what guarantees that the Internet companies can be more responsible?  What prevents them from mimicking their own customers and be more prone to pass along “facts” that agree with what they want to believe?

As everyone gets so busy that they leave these decisions to others, critical thinking goes away and we move closer to the concept behind 1984.

What To Do About The News

Last Monday a local news reporter informed viewers that if they hadn’t filed their taxes yet, they had only one day left to file for an extension.  He added that some, but not all, states give an automatic extension based on filing of the federal form without filing additional paperwork.

This brought home an important point.  The report was local and an overwhelming majority of viewers lived in the same state. Why did the reporter not mention, by the way, into which category our state falls?  It would have taken maybe five minutes on the Internet.  It brought home the point that those so-called journalists are merely reading from a script.  When the one story is over, they move on to the next.  They don’t do their homework.  They aren’t interested in details.  They are not in the business of explaining or enlightening.

They are in the business of passing along dry facts, which are sometimes not even factual, or of repeating someone else’s opinion.  The biggest waste of our time is the speculation by experts, politicians or even fellow journalists on what might happen at a meeting or as the result of a certain decision.  The second biggest waste of our time is reporting on something we all knew would be happening anyway, just to rehash the original event.  An example is that when someone dies in a horrible or unexpected way, we are sure to hear mention of the funeral a few days later just to revisit the original story and reemphasize how horrible or unusual it was.

As the nation gets further and further divided, the bias of the media becomes more obvious.  They decide both what to tell us and how to tell it. Do they put a spin on certain news that will appeal to their viewers or do they omit certain stories that favor the opposition or reflect unfavorably on their political view?  If you don’t believe it, as an experiment, look at the headlines on the CNN website and then go directly to the Fox News website.  It’s almost like reading news about two different countries!

The science stories can be as bad, no depth or research, just a reading from the press release. There may be a comment from their science correspondent that puts things into perspective, but don’t count on that being totally accurate.  Remember, the primary objective of the media is to scare or manipulate customers with the goal of promoting their product and beating out the competition.  These are not a bunch of altruistic enterprises intent on dolling out the truth to all.  They are in business to make money.

That leaves two alternatives:  rely on the news from friends and newsfeeds on social media or critical thinking.

The first alternative may look unlikely, but as of 2016, 62% of adult Americans – get at least some of their news from social media, up from 48% in 2012 according to the Pew Research Center and others.  “I know it’s true; I read it on the Internet” used to be a joke, but today nearly one in five rely on social media exclusively for news.  Whereas network news organizations once required two independent sources, those who post or repost on Facebook don’t feel obligated to check the accuracy or timeliness of any information.  The same false rumors on health or politics recirculate every couple of years.

Unless you are going to count on the cute cats and puppy-dogs seen both on social media, and more and more on the mainstream, critical thinking is the only solution. Some stories make no sense on the surface. Some are not consistent with other known information that does not accompany the story.  Some are just made up stories to fit a particular worldview.

The critical thinker approaches all these with a skeptical mind and does research to find more information or different sides of the story. It’s impossible to find out the truth in every case, but as some sources prove to be more reliable and new subjects are often related to others previously researched, it becomes easier to narrow things down and sort out what's correct.  Also, our scope must be limited because it is impossible to be scared of everything.  Perspective helps focus, while critical thinking helps discover the truth.

Fake News

Last week some real news came out about fake news.  A recent study at MIT using Twitter data from 2006 to 2017 found some surprising and somewhat shocking results – and should be of interest to anyone that believes critical thinking is not a necessary part of everyday life.  “False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth.”

The Washington Post reports:  “In a statistical model that kept variables like Twitter followers and account age equal, falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth. The study authors hypothesized that falsehoods contain more novelty than truth.”  The theory is that new and different items are more interesting or amusing than the dull, boring truth so they spread faster and farther.

Some blame the proliferation of fake news on automated computer programs, “bots” that are built with the intention of spreading rumors or pushing certain stories to go viral.  But the MIT researchers also considered this and discounted the impact of such tactics.  “Using techniques to identify bots, they determined that software-run accounts spread falsehoods and truths equally. Put another way, only human activity could explain the preferential spread of false news.”

But this report is in a sense also misleading.  The headline read: “Fake news spreads ‘farther, faster, deeper’ than truth, study finds.”  But the original study carefully avoids calling it fake news because “the term has lost all connection to the actual veracity of the information presented, rendering it meaningless for use in academic classification. [The authors] have therefore explicitly avoided the term…and instead use the more objectively verifiable terms ‘true’ or ‘false’ news.”  They distinguished between true and false by looking for a consensus of fact-checking agencies.

Both MIT and the Washington Post see no easy solution to the spread of this false information.  Twitter, Facebook and the rest can’t and shouldn’t be expected to police the Internet.  Not only would this be an infringement on free speech but also an inordinate amount of power held by a few to define truth.

Furthermore, the study does not consider the overall failure to distinguish between news and opinion as well as the frequent attempts to disguise advertising as news.

So, as I have argued many times in the past, it’s left up to the individual ability and inclination to separate fact from fiction.  Though the study focused on fears of false news affecting elections, stock market swings and reactions to terror attacks, the dangers are closer to home and more within our personal control.

We continue to be challenged by outright false or unverified claims about health and wellbeing.  Despite advances in medical science, the presence and the reach of the “snake oil salesmen” is greater than ever.  Not only outright fraudulent products but also many so-called alternative and complementary products have no scientific basis and may be dangerous, yet many Americans are devoted to them.  A majority of Americans believe GMO foods are not safe, while most scientists strongly disagree.  The battles about chlorinated drinking water and vaccinations rage on in small segments of the population.  All these erroneous beliefs are reinforced by false stories reflecting firm opinions.  The physical and financial health of individuals and societies rise and fall on the ability to show strong behavior in the dimension of critical thinking.

As I wrote just a few weeks ago (and many other times), in this modern age as we are overwhelmed by half-truths, misrepresentations, misinterpretations and sloppy reporting; critical thinking, being skeptical and doing good research from reliable sources, is more urgently needed to protect your health and your wallet.