Two Kinds of Knowledge

Here's an interesting article about two kinds of knowledge, that of science and that of indigenous peoples.  "Traditional knowledge" should partner with science, it's argued -- and let's face it, it is difficult to argue with that as long as we don't go too far afield into the wacky.  But here's a really good point:

“Indigenous peoples know what kind of information they need to make the right decisions, but it is difficult for them to access the information. Scientists, on the other hand, have a lot of information, but do not know what the indigenous peoples need. So we need you to tell us.”

I am writing less this summer.  Why?  Because it's summer, dammit.

Our Brains on the Internet

There's been an argument of sorts going on about whether the Internet in general (and Google in particular) is changing our brains and the way we think.  Today's column in the New York Times continues this debate, taking the side -- and one I sympathetic with -- that nah, not really, our brain is always changing in small ways as we learn but not in big, huge ways some suggest.  If anything, the Net may be teaching us to pay less attention or less deep attention since multitasking is a myth, but beyond that it's not really molding the way we think.

Economics Knowledge ... kinda

Here's a terrific column that criticizes a terrible poll designed to -- it says -- measure knowledge about economics.  Apparently this poll has been used elsewhere as support for various arguments, despite its flaws.

Loving the Millennials?

Millennials are those born after 1980 (like my two kids).  They're fun to, well, make fun of, but as this column points out, millennials also pose an opportunity for news organizations.  People in this generation may love tattoos and sleep with their cell phones, but they're also better educated and more interested in the world around them.  There is potential there for news organizations, and some hints in the data that that this group is better informed than previous generations.

Are We Divided? Or are the Elites Divided?

My headline above sums up an old political science argument -- are political divisions the stuff of real people, or just the stuff of political elites?  This brief but excellent The Atlantic column gets into it.  Ultimately he blames the elites, the chattering class, not regular folks, for the festering political divide.  And the data kinda support this, that most of the partisan divide can be found among political elites, chatterers, and news junkies -- not real live regular people.

The Power of the Probe

A probe in survey lingo is a follow-up question prompted by a respondent's failure to answer a previous question.  For example, in the 2008 ANES, respondents were asked to identify Nancy Pelosi.  If they could not or did not answer, the interviewer was trained to prompt with "Well, what's your best guess?"

That's a probe.

Not all surveys probe an initial lack of response, and this can make a significant difference if we're studying something like political knowledge.  For example, the ANES made available a redacted version of the open-ended responses to certain questions, including those measuring political knowledge (download a zip file here of the Excel document).  It's interesting.  You can see the various open-ended responses, which I've blogged about previously, but they also include a column of the probes.  If a respondent gave an initial answer--right or wrong--the probe code is 5 (no probe) or one of the other codes that signify other stuff. 

A "1" in the probe meant they asked for a respondent's best guess.  And sometimes, the probe resulted in a respondent "guessing" correctly.  How often?  There were 1,294 instances of probes of the Pelosi question.  Roughly counting, I estimate at least a hundred instances, perhaps more, where the probe resulted in a correct answer.  And that's only looking at the Pelosi question. 

In other words, a probe can definitely influence the results, which I suspect has some bearing in analyses.  And this doesn't even get into what is considered a "correct" versus an "incorrect" response.

If I was so inclined, I'd do a paper on the power of probes to elicit a correct versus an incorrect response, and then position these competing approaches to political knowledge against key variables to see whether the probe improves results.  Honest, I'd do it, except I don't know where the heck I'd publish something like this.  Public Opinion Quarterly?  Dunno, cause I'm not sure I'm smart enough to successfully publish there.  It's full of folks far brighter than myself.

Lesson Time: Knowledge

I blog here about recent research or new angles to what people know about politics and public affairs or how they learn from the media.  Today it's lesson time, a quick primer on knowledge.  Cognitive scientists break knowledge into a number of categories.  I know, just typing cognitive scientists makes me want to take a nap, but hang in there and let's look at the different types of memory:

Episodic Memory -- events or personal information about ourselves, such as our birthday or hometown.  When we talk about memory in everyday life, this is the one we most often mean.
Semantic Memory -- how we store words and facts.   The how here is important.
Declarative Memory -- the system for retrieving the "whats" of our knowledge, such as who is our congressional representative.  Often what we measure in political knowledge tests.
Procedural Memory -- the system for retrieving the "hows" of our memory, such as how a bill becomes law.  It's really hard to study this system.

So why do these matter?  Because there is a long (in milliseconds) process involved here in retrieving stored information, and a lot can get in the way.  Imagine the typical text news story in inverted pyramid in which the most important, or more recent, information is presented first.  On the Louisiana oil spill, the lede today is about BP trying to divert some oil with another dome, but if you haven't been following the oil spill at all, the lede won't make a lot of sense to you.  There are no semantic details to draw from to make sense of a "most important or recent first" approach to newstelling.  This is where we -- the royal journalistic we -- fail to engage some readers, especially young ones with little background info.  And this is why television news often works best for people who don't know a lot about the news, because in part the way its structured, in part the way video is used to "ease" folks into the news.

Print, in other words, is for those who already have a clue.

This raises all kinds of interesting problems for those who provide print news.  But that's another post for another day.