Knowing False Things

Thanks to colleague Karen Russell for pointing this list of eight false things the public "knows" prior to the election.  It is, of course, a list designed to reinforce the job the Obama Administration has done over the past two years, just before the GOP eats the Dem's lunch.

If you did deep enough in the comments you'll find challenges to some, but not all, of Dave Johnson's points. But even if half of his list are "false" things people believe about the economy and such are correct, that says a lot about what people perceive as true versus what is actually true.

Ironically, in about two hours I'm giving a lecture to 25 or so Honors students about more or less the same topic -- how being uninformed is conceptually, theoretically, and pragmatically different than being misinformed.  I'll be using the myth that Obama is Muslim as my anchor.  Unfortunately I have a really sore throat, so I'm gonna swallow several Tylenol beforehand.  And if that doesn't work, I'll use interpretative dance instead.

Perceived and Actual Knowledge

There's what people know, and what people think they know.  In this piece, Nicole Skibola in a Forbes blog notes:

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki discusses how disconnects between status and knowledge often lead to inefficient outcomes in decision-making processes. Groups, and obviously business organizations, tend to give deference to individuals with perceived or actual status, often with little to no correlation with actual knowledge.  As the group coalesces around one perceived knowledge holder, minorities are less likely to share their own perspectives, despite the fact that minority opinions make groups wiser as a whole.

Think of it as a micro version of the spiral of silence in which minority viewpoints tend to spiral into, yes, silence, because the majority speaks up so much, and so loudly, and our fear of isolation is such that we don't dare speak out.

I should point out that, despite what the book suggests, actual and perceived knowledge are typically correlated with one another.  Not perfectly, mind you, but there is a tendency for those who know something to also believe they know something.  I note the imperfection of the relationship because I've been reading a study on misinformation and how confident people are in their completely irrational beliefs, such as whether Barack Obama is Muslim.  The more misinformed, some studies suggest, the more confident people are in that misinformed belief.  In other words, it's damn hard to shake someone loose from crazy beliefs, even with facts.

Being uninformed, and being misinformed, are two conceptually distinct matters.  More on this another time.

Bamboozled

Even with fact checks on the web, on TV, on buses and billboards, the public still got bamboozled in the recent campaign, or so say well known researchers in a Newsweek article. Great analysis of Annenberg data to examine the disinforming of the American electorate. Worth the read, and a weekend special because I happen to be near a computer. There is a slight ideological/partisan tinge to the piece, a nah-nah aimed at McCain and his supporters and anyone who spread misleading info about Obama, or hell, any info that didn't paint Obama in a perfect halo, but that's just the hard news guy in me coming out.

I thought the Obama worship was over, that we'd moved on. Hell, I voted for the guy, but I'm not putting in to the pope to reward the guy with sainthood. At least not yet.