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This is why we should teach logical reasoning in school... Bob and Jill both tweet about politics. Bob is 7x more likely to tweet from sources which experts sa

This is why we should teach logical reasoning in school... Bob and Jill both tweet about politics. Bob is 7x more likely to tweet from sources which experts say are more likely than average to spread misinformation. Which of the following is true. A) Bob tweets more misinformation than Jill. B) Jill tweets more misinformation that Bob. C) The presented data is insufficient to make a determination either way. The correct answer is C. In order to select A or B, you'd need to offer up data about the individual articles being tweeted by Bob and Jill. By relying on data about the underlying domains at large, you rely on the ASSUMPTION that Bob and Jill tweet randomly from their respective sources, without any agency whatsoever. By pretending that the presented data is sufficient to say that Republicans tweet more misinformation, Neimanlab is, in fact, spreading misinformation, based on poor logic and lazy analysis.

nescioquid 4y ago
> By pretending that the presented data is sufficient to say that Republicans tweet more misinformation... Or, you'd also have to admit that the conclusion may yet be correct, even if it isn't justified by the data they've collected and the analysis. Even an unjustified true belief is still true (I'm not saying the article/study is correct, just based on your analysis we also don't know that it is actually a false conclusion). But your point is an interesting one in that when dealing with "misinformation", you'd expect some case-by-case assessment rather marking a tweet misinformation because it linked to a domain that is "more likely than average to spread misinformation". I imagine this is really a proxy for whether the outlet depends primarily on official sources (e.g. access to government officials) or whether it contradicts them. In which case, you'd have to ask yourself why a politician would choose one outlet or another?

nescioquid 4y ago

> By pretending that the presented data is sufficient to say that Republicans tweet more misinformation... Or, you'd also have to admit that the conclusion may yet be correct, even if it isn't justified by the data they've collected and the analysis. Even an unjustified true belief is still true (I'm not saying the article/study is correct, just based on your analysis we also don't know that it is actually a false conclusion). But your point is an interesting one in that when dealing with "misinformation", you'd expect some case-by-case assessment rather marking a tweet misinformation because it linked to a domain that is "more likely than average to spread misinformation". I imagine this is really a proxy for whether the outlet depends primarily on official sources (e.g. access to government officials) or whether it contradicts them. In which case, you'd have to ask yourself why a politician would choose one outlet or another?