From Matt Yglesias: Elite misinformation is an underrated problem
The whole notion of “misinformation” as conventionally construed has taken some blows lately, including scandals in the misinformation research field and, more importantly, some great work from Brendan Nyhan, Emily Thorson, and co-authors showing that “in our review of behavioural science research on online misinformation, we document a pattern of low exposure to false and inflammatory content that is concentrated among a narrow fringe with strong motivations to seek out such information.”
From where I sit, that’s all to the good — I’ve been complaining for years about the problems with this framework as an explanation for political outcomes. It is true that there is fringe content circulating on the internet and also that some of your political enemies probably believe some of it, but there’s little reason to believe that such content exerts an important causal influence on American politics.
If you’re wondering if he talks about his old quotation where he talks about it being okay to be dishonest and, yes, he does:
There’s an old tweet I wrote over a decade ago defending a lowball projection of high-speed rail construction costs on this kind of means-ends grounds. People sometimes throw that one back in my face, and fair enough — it was a bad take. But I think I’ve done my penance over this, and my work over the past 10 years has really emphasized how challenging it is to actually build complicated infrastructure projects in a bad epistemic environment.
Thanks for linking to that article. it was interesting, although I’m not sure what the word “elite” was doing in the title, or how it may have affected the author’s thinking. Maybe it was a way to break it to the reader that people as smart as the reader can be wrong? But how little respect do you have for your readers if you think they don’t know or won’t admit that? I dunno; maybe it tied in more to the first couple of paragraphs about academics.Report
Well, the elephant in the room is Covid.
But the fact that he’s using it about tackling environmentalism issues is a good way to talk about that sort of thing without immediately raising the emotional defenses of more than half of his audience.Report
“Elite” here basically means “people in positions of governmental or cultural power.” All the time spent kvetching about how the proles are being willingly fooled would be better spent looking at how the decision makers themselves were and are making bad decisions due in part to similar “misinformation”, with wider impact.Report
I dunno. The two main examples in the article (maternal mortality and fossil fuel subsidies) aren’t examples of powerful people receiving misinformation; they’re examples of powerful people issuing it. Maybe the author was afraid that a more accurate title would make him sound like Alex Jones.Report
Perhaps, but then you’re not really questioning the term “elite”, you’re questioning the direction of the arrow of misinformationReport
“Elite,” in a very loose sense of the term, describes the kind of people who most eagerly lapped that slop up. Intellectual fashions among the top 10-20% of the population in terms of SES dictated uncritical acceptance of these narratives.Report
I feel like he’s not quite addressing his past issues:
“my work over the past 10 years has really emphasized how challenging it is to actually build complicated infrastructure projects in a bad epistemic environment.”
uh-huh. “Was I wrong? Well, yeah, I guess I was wrong to expect a better outcome from all you assholes…”Report
The top comment to MattY’s post is talking about Californian High Speed Rail:
Eventually, “don’t you think it’s *IMPORTANT* to have HSR?” will not succeed at shutting down the debate.Report
See, I don’t think Cal-HSR as much of a scam as everyone says. Or, rather, it’s not a scam on the voters in California.
First off, “100 billion” is the current estimate for total cost to complete the project, they haven’t spent a hundred billion dollars on anything and they aren’t going to.
Second, related to that, most of the money spent so far has been Federal funding, and it’s mostly been spent to pay California operations (the contracting and construction firms doing such work as has been done.)
So really, what’s going on here is that the California state government has worked out a way to get the Federal government to pay for keeping the state’s train-line-construction industry in condition while there’s nothing much going on otherwise. Like, sure, they’re building a train line to nowhere, but they’re doing it on Uncle Sam’s dime, and a train to nowhere is still a train, versus all the people in the customer/regulatory apparatus quitting in favor of McKinsey and all the people in the construction management side quitting in favor of Toll Brothers and all the people doing the labor quitting in favor of Fentanyl and the dole.
“What about all those people who actually did want there to be a train?” Well I want a solid-gold toilet but some things just aren’t in the cards, baby.Report
I hear there’s a guy in Manhattan who may have to sell one at firesale prices to pay some large civil judgements.Report
If your political information filter isn’t set to “cynic” you’re either naive or complicit.Report