INFORMATION

 

The other day, this is what I was watching outside in downtown Seattle:

 

What was the “official” weather data collection station at Sea-Tac Airport reporting?

 

“Factual” information doesn’t always align with one’s experience; it may just mean different things to different people, and just because you didn’t experience it doesn’t mean it isn’t “true.” Seattle doesn’t have an “official” weather data reporting station, although it should, since Sea-Tac’s “official” reporting has been criticized for its accuracy. This was reported on April 25:

 

But something got lost in the translation, and all the previous precipitation data was removed and started from scratch the next day:

 

So we don’t really know what the “truth” of the matter is, and the people who did the “compiling” of the data at the University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences department did not respond to inquiries about the accuracy of the data it was reporting.

Anyways, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to do a post on “information” or “incompetence”--both applied here--but I think what the latter is can be dispensed rather quickly with the latest story about so-called “judge” Aileen Cannon from The New York Times:

Reversing one of her own decisions, the federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case granted his request on Monday to postpone the deadline for a crucial court filing in the criminal proceeding, increasing the chance that any trial would be pushed past the November election.

The ruling by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was made in a bare-bones order that contained no factual or legal reasoning. It did not schedule a new deadline but erased the one she had set almost a month ago ordering Mr. Trump’s lawyers to file by Thursday a detailed list of the classified materials that they intend to introduce at the trial, which is set to take place at some point in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla…

…That Judge Cannon agreed to push back the deadline suggests the extent to which she has given Mr. Trump’s legal team a wide berth in their efforts to defend him. Over and over, Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, has treated seriously arguments that many, if not most, federal judges would have rejected out of hand.

Of course words like corruption and contempt (for the rule of law) also fit, but we are at the point where we know that Cannon is probably paying more attention to the hush money trial in New York than to her own case, which is of course fine with Trump, who is after all her benefactor; thus we see this incompetent bungler merely doubling-down in the face of media exposure. As such Cannon only proves that the Federalist Society, which seemingly hand-picked all of Trump’s judicial appointments, cares less about competency in the law than with slavering to an extremist ideology. The hypocrisy and danger of the right cannot be more apparent than this.

But back to “information.” Last week I stumbled upon Netflix’s 2022 adaptation D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and I have to say that it was the best film version of the story (certainly better than the sex-challenged 2015 “re-imagined” version). I think this because it had a more satisfying ending, much like the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice did over both the book and 1995 BBC mini-series. Like nearly all of Netflix’s recent output it is not yet out on video disc (likely never will be), but there is a website that supplies HD and Blu-ray downloads for the price of premium service which I can copy to BD-R, so Netflix is the loser there.

OK, big deal you say. The British actress playing the title character, Emma Corrin, recently came out as a “non-binary” lesbian. Oh great, what a letdown. But wait, she currently is in a “romantic” relationship with American actor Rami Malek, who at least looks more like a male than she does these days even with her semi-shaved head (it's a close call, though). I sought out information asking the question of why if she is “gay” she is in alleged relationship with a heterosexual man. Apparently no one else was interested in asking for that information, as Google came-up with nothing.

It’s like asking the question about why so many East Asians (especially new arrivals) are rude and seemingly racist. I mean, didn’t Joe Biden just talk about how countries like Japan and India have exclusionary, race-based immigration policies, which made them “weaker” rather than “strong” like us? It was mostly recent immigrant Asian groups that fronted anti-affirmative action lawsuits at Ivy League schools, and  stormed the capital building in Olympia to protest the passage of lifting the anti-affirmative action I-200, and who then supplied the deciding vote in a narrow initiative over-turning the over-turning of the previous racially-motivated initiative. All this despite the fact they are vastly over-represented in colleges and universities to eventually take mostly office jobs that a high school graduate can do. 

You Google “Asian racism” and all the "information" you get is pages and pages of stories about “racism” against Asians—which basically means if you want to talk to Asians about racism in their community, they call you a “racist” for asking the question. Does the fact that convenience stores operated by Indians only hire other Indians discriminatory and break anti-discrimination laws? If so, why are they allowed to ignore the law? This given the fact that most recent immigrants bring that anti-immigrant (or caste) attitude in their home countries with them to the U.S., to use against other minority groups who have been fighting racism for centuries, only now to see it “imported” back.

And while we are at it, why should we trust any information coming out of China or from its leaders these days, who refuse to come clean about or provide relevant data concerning Covid? Under dictator-for-life Xi the country acts like a put-upon-child (much like Russia under Putin), and it only puts out information for its own public consumption, and then expects the rest of the world to buy this misinformation (or disinformation). India, of course, could also be accused of the same thing, such as in reporting only a tiny fraction of its actual pandemic deaths while bodies are thrown in rivers or bonfires. 

Xi recently brought up old information like the "accidental" strike on its Belgrade embassy in 1999 (China will never "forget" or "forgive"), conveniently forgetting that in its aftermath, the US foolishly permitted China to enter the WTO as an "act of friendship"-- or "atonement"--something of which the rest of the world is regretting because of China's bad neighbor trade activities, foreign policy and intellectual and industrial theft.

Not to be outdone, if you Google about domestic violence by women, don’t expect to find any easy “information” about that either. But according to the CDC, lesbian couples report 50 percent higher incidents of domestic violence than gay men couples; whether or not that suggests something about the dynamics in heterosexual relationships, we leave that information to "speculation."

Other information you may not be aware even exists follows you everywhere. TikToc has been accused of being a Chinese espionage app, but unbeknownst to many people is the Google's Maps tracking device can record your every movement. In the "notifications" on my cell phone I discovered this...

...and this:

Note that this tracks where I've "been" for the past seven years. Of course it isn't completely "accurate" information, listing places I allegedly "visited" that I probably only just happened to walk past. Last month a Federal judge ordered Google to settle a $62 million lawsuit for failing to remove such "information" after users turned off the program or even to stop the tracking, which was an unnecessarily complicated procedure and usually didn't work.  That such "information" could used by law enforcement or spy agencies is obvious.

But “information” of a particular evil and dangerous sort has gone “mainstream” for many years, and has merely accelerated in the era of Trump, where conspiracy theories, no matter how ridiculous or how often proven to be false, are accepted as “fact.” Even the right-wing of the US Supreme Court seems confused, for example, on what exactly happened on January 6; hell, nobody even talks about how people died as a result of the insurrection anymore. That isn’t “misinformation” or a conspiracy theory—just factual information that gets in the way of the fake news about the insurrectionists being "peaceful patriots":

 

 

In his recent TIME interview, which to many observers confirmed his cruel and inhuman nature, Trump demonstrates that like all cowardly bullies, he needs vulnerable people to take out his frustrations on—in his case, mainly migrants. He says he if he is elected again, he is going to “militarize” National Guards all over the country to conduct mass arrests of millions of “illegals.” I can’t wait for the civil rights lawsuits from illegal detainment of the 82 percent of Hispanics in this country who are US citizens (What? Is that new “information” to you?).

Of course migrants are not “civilians,” just “vermin” who are “poisoning” the country. And did he just say that the Chinese are establishing its own “army” of “fighting age” males in this country? Is he suggesting that they can be deployed on the border too?

Sir, the Posse Comitatus Act says that you can't deploy the U.S. military against civilians. Would you override that?

Trump: Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren't legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country. An invasion like probably no country has ever seen before. They're coming in by the millions. I believe we have 15 million now. And I think you'll have 20 million by the time this ends. And that's bigger than almost every state.

So you can see yourself using the military to address this?

Trump: I can see myself using the National Guard and, if necessary, I'd have to go a step further. We have to do whatever we have to do to stop the problem we have. Again, we have a major force that’s forming in our country, when you see that over the last three weeks, 29,000 people came in from China, and they're all fighting age, and they're mostly males. Yeah, you have to do what you have to do to stop crime and to stop what's taking place at the border.

We can’t say that this guy is merely coo-coo; he is much more dangerous than that. An editorial in the San Antonio Express-News wondered if this information means anything "important":

Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 could perhaps be excused for not grasping what a Trump presidency would look like, for underestimating his lack of interest in policy, for not taking him seriously about meaning what he said, and for not having the clairvoyance to predict two House impeachments, an insurrection and four criminal trials. But voters in 2024 have no excuse for not knowing what a second Trump presidency would look like. Past is prologue, and Trump has also told us what is to come.

Trump asserts that there will be no violence by his supporters because he is “way ahead” and of course this means he can’t lose the election. But what if he does?

Mr. President, in our last conversation you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.” What if you don't win, sir?

Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win. We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. I don't believe they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time. I don't think they'll be able to get away with it. And if that's the case, we're gonna win in record-setting fashion.

“Record-setting fashion.” This man is completely demented. Trump is not merely a pathological liar, he is well beyond that. He is a psychopath, which according to the NIH is defined thus:

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by deficits in personality and behavior. Personality deficits are marked by interpersonal and affective facets, including pathological lying, grandiose sense of self-worth, lack of remorse and callousness. Behavioral deficits are defined by lifestyle and antisocial deficits, including impulsivity, parasitic lifestyle and poor behavioral controls.

Earth-to-anyone-still-supporting-Trump: this defines Trump in every way possible—and the loyal drones who plan to help him carry out his orders if he is elected again are psychopaths as well. Although Trump seems to be having not too friendly relations with the Senate candidate from Arizona, Kari Lake, this seems more likely because she is out-doing him in psychopathy:

That’s why they’re coming after us with lawfare; they’re going to come after us with everything. That’s why the next six months is going to be intense. We’re going to put on our helmet or your Kari Lake ball cap. We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us, just in case.

Is this for real? Are voters in Arizona listening to this? Enough of them did to prevent Lake from becoming governor, and Sen. Mark Kelly warned that Lake’s violent rhetoric could lead to people getting killed. That is just like the new breed of Republicans these days: if you can’t be lawful or don’t like the law, then fight the law with violent action. 

Of course that is just "talk" for the moment. But in Florida, as Rolling Stone has noted, Ron DeSantis continues his campaign of cruelty without a purpose. Well, actually there is a "purpose" to his latest stunt, which is to sign a law passed by an equally inhuman Republican legislature to ban water and heat breaks for outdoor workers. Most observers say this is nuts, but that is what a state under fascism looks like. Most of these workers are apparently Hispanic, and many of those are immigrants who cannot vote. 

We don't need anymore "information" to know that DeSantis is an ignorant bigot in every possible way, so why would voters in the state condone this? Because they think they way he does? Do you think if most outdoors workers were white and could vote that DeSantis would dare be this inhuman? Hispanics, apparently, are not human to him and to most of the people who vote for him.

TIME did a fact-check on Trump’s interview, and it found that virtually everything that came out of his mouth were lies and misinformation. Even Trump’s repeated claim that “his” economy was the “greatest ever” was subverted by the fact that his mass attack on Chinese imports did not result in more jobs in this country, but fewer (300,000 fewer jobs) and contributed to inflation due to American consumers paying for the tariffs, not China. Mark Zandi of Moody’s told TIME that

The economy was weakening in 2019 going into 2020 under the weight of the higher tariffs. Manufacturing and agriculture were contracting. The yield curve had inverted, suggesting 2020 would be an even tougher year even if the pandemic had not hit. And inflation was sub-optimal at the time, as the Fed was working hard to lift inflation. So, I would not characterize it as “the greatest economy of all time.”

Compare this with the Biden economy, when with the help of those migrants, millions more jobs than expected were filled to expand the economy greater than what would have been expected if Trump and his mass deportations of workers had occurred. If Trump is elected again and does what he says he will do, that recession that we have avoided to date will indeed come.

The website Liberty Street Economics tells us that misinformation requires two actors, “producers” and “users,” and the choices they make at “verification” of the information they either provide or consume. Producers of misinformation have learned that there is a “market” for it, especially given the divisive nature of political, social and “cultural” discourse today:

When encountering a news item, a user can choose to determine its veracity at a cost (of time and effort, for example) before deciding whether to share it or not. The decision to pursue verification thus involves weighing the cost of achieving certainty (by consulting a fact-check article, for example) against the risk of sharing misinformation. The probability of the latter is determined by the prevalence of misinformation on a given platform, which is determined by supply and demand forces. Specifically, producers of fake content benefit when users share such information without first bothering to verify it. As the fraction of these users increases, so does the pass-through of misinformation, thereby incentivizing the production (and hence prevalence) of false content, resulting in an upward-sloping “supply curve” of misinformation.

Liberty notes that many users who recognize obvious misinformation tend to simply avoid the producers of such. Although this theoretically reduces the number of people exposed to misinformation, it is noted that if "verification" was easier, “non-aligned” users who might normally pass on producers of misinformation if the “cost” of verification is high (meaning some level of ‘study”), would be more likely to pass on such information to their friends, exposing more people to misinformation who might become “interested” in it:

A reduction in verification costs has the “unintended” effect of inducing verification by users who were not originally sharing content, but not by those who were already sharing unverified information. Put differently, such a policy induces “entry” by users who originally found it too risky to share when verification was prohibitively costly for them—but since their sharing decisions are driven purely by the possibility of verifying news, the pass-through of misinformation is unchanged.

Interestingly, Liberty’s research suggests that efforts at reducing the “supply” of misinformation online may have the effect of convincing users that those producing fake information are in fact “verified” if they do somehow pass the checkpoints, or are not caught in time:

However, the pass-through of fake content increases because users’ verification incentives are weakened in the process, as news items become more likely to be truthful. The diffusion rate of misinformation—prevalence times pass-through—captures the chance that misinformation is shared among users.

We can imagine how the "producers" of fake news will run with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson using his sudden increase in “cred” to make the false claim that “we all know” illegal aliens are voting in our elections, which according to the Associated Press is in fact “incredibly rare,” and such instances of “illegal” voting are often by legal residents who mistakenly believe they can vote. 

A Texas law similar to what Johnson is proposing “flagged” tens of thousands of legal voters (mainly those with Spanish names) before a judge invalidated the law, leading to the secretary of state’s resignation. This is just one of many fake conspiracy theories thrown around by the far-right that is only interested in power and not how to use it to actually help “the people” they claim to “represent”; Johnson doesn’t want people to vote who won’t vote for himself or his "Christian" ilk, so he is now proposing a federal law whose intent is to make it more difficult for legal voters to vote--which isn't "Christian" at all.

Many users prefer “monopolistic” producers of “information,” meaning from one source (i.e. Fox News). Everyone in my family (who I have not communicated with in many years, as they live in “red” states on the other side of the country) is “conservative” save me, and when I was exchanging letters with Dad, it was a continual source of frustration that he assumed that everything he was told on Fox News was “fair and balanced” when it has been years since Fox abandoned that charade. The fact that Fox News paid out $800 million in a defamation case involving dissemination of false claims about the Dominion voting machines probably is just a simple “mistake.”

Nature also published a study on the prevalence of misinformation. “Misinformation is problematic because it leads to inaccurate beliefs and can exacerbate partisan disagreement over even basic facts. Merely reading false news posts—including political posts that are extremely implausible and inconsistent with one’s political ideology— makes them subsequently seem more true. In addition to being concerning, the widespread sharing of misinformation on social media is also surprising, given the outlandishness of much of this content.”

Nature found that while “accuracy” is technically "important" to a user, it is not as important a consideration when information is being shared if it furthers a political position—in which case, “accuracy” is defined by its alignment with ideology and prejudices. This was offered as an example:

To illustrate the disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions, consider, for example, the following headline: ‘Over 500 ‘Migrant Caravaners’ Arrested With Suicide Vests’. This was rated as accurate by 15.7% of Republicans in our study, but 51.1% of Republicans said they would consider sharing it. Thus, the results from study 1 suggest that the confusion-based account cannot fully explain the sharing of misinformation: our participants were more than twice as likely to consider sharing false but politically concordant headlines.

One possible explanation for this dissociation between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions is offered by the preference-based account of misinformation sharing. By this account, people care about accuracy much less than other factors (such as partisanship), and therefore knowingly share misinformation. The fact that participants in study 1 were willing to share ideologically consistent but false headlines could thus be reasonably construed as revealing their preference for weighting non-accuracy dimensions (such as ideology) over accuracy.

Nature found that those users of the most frequently criticized for producing fake news or misinformation were the least “attentive” to the veracity of the information they consumed, even when test subjects were given headlines that were clearly meant to be ridiculous. Nature, however, suggests that in many cases “inattentiveness” to a story’s accuracy may merely reflect one’s ignorance about a subject or are too “distracted” to discover its accuracy; however, it cannot escape the fact that fake news and misinformation is being disseminated by people who either believe it or don’t care about its accuracy. 

Of course information can remind of us why we can't afford to be oblivious; sure, Stormy Daniels testimony about her night out with Trump might make people nauseous, but in a way that we hope people will react to it--like, say vote for Biden, not at all, or for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from whom we have gotten all the information we need to know he is not a serious alternative, unless Republican voters think is he a more "intellectual" alternative to Trump.

In the end, most people just want to believe what they want to believe, and it soon becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Did you ever see the 1988 film Stand and Deliver about the sudden success of Garfield  High School in Los Angeles producing supposedly “dumb” minority students passing a college-level advanced calculus  test? That was back when Hispanic actors like Edward James Olmos actually  had enough clout (and will) to convince Hollywood to make films that dispelled with the usually negative stereotypes. 

The story behind it is instructive. Most of what the film portrayed was true, but the Hispanic students who were treated as if they were too “dumb” did not learn calculus in a year, but after the school was persuaded by a new teacher, Jaime Escalante, to offer the appropriate preparatory classes beginning with the freshman year.

Escalante’s math classes became so popular with students that his fellow teachers became jealous, particularly because of his celebrity status. He received hate mail and death threats, and colleagues groused about how his classes were overflowing and theirs were mostly empty—suggesting that his classes were for students who actually wanted to learn, and the other, less competent, teachers got the leftovers. 

When Escalante and his teaching disciples left Garfield, it was treated as “good riddance” and the school subsequently went from a high of 83 students passing the calculus test to 2 in a matter of years. Sometimes the “truth” is only what people believe it to be--and sometimes it is what people want it to be. That is "information" we should become more "attentive" too.