Asymmetrical Information

Not to be critical, but if you're going to try to get some of your own back, you should probably fix the last link ("accepted money on behalf...") to tie it to something that explains what the hell you're talking about. I might be missing something, though.

Thanks, Tim, now fixed.

Jane - You are missing the point. Campaign finance reform, like environmental regulation, national health care, and gay marriage, is an important cause. It's critical that such things be adopted and supported by society. Thus, since the motives are pure, it's okay to lie, cheat, and mislead to accomplish these goods. Accepting money to write favorable articles about campaign finance reform is only "bad" in the sense it limits the amount of money that can be used to buy ads, bribe politicians, and otherwise further this important work. But, hey, a journalist's got to eat and a publisher's got to pay for paper and ink. So, taking the money just helped cover the necessary expenses of getting the message out. Telling the public these stories were, in essence, paid advertising would have diluted the stories' ability to help shape opinion. This isn't the first time truth has been sacrificed for a greater good! Nothing to be ashamed of or apologize for here. They had a job to do and they got it done.

You, on the other hand, wrote articles for a publication that is supported by a fundamentally evil organization. It does not matter that you were not told what to write nor does it matter that you may have written items disagreeing with the opinions of this evil organization. By writing for them you gave them a credibility they don't deserve. Can't you see if no one would write for them they couldn't publish? You are no better than the coal miners who, in 1935 mined coal that, through a very long and convoluted supply chain that no one fully understands, eventually ended up (the coal) being used to make tanks in Nazi Germany! It matters not that, in 1935 the miners had never heard of Hitler or had any idea their coal would end up in his hands. Their work was in furtherance of evil. Had they not mined that coal, Hitler could not have risen to power. Had you, and others, not written those articles, DCI could not have gotten it's evil word out. We might forgive the coal miners for their ignorance, but you, you are a world famous economist and should have known better!

Why can't you see that these two situations are completely different? What you did was wrong. What they did was right. How can you dare ask for an apology? Have you no shame?

Um, I work for the Washington Monthly, not the American Prospect.

Kevin Drum, count me confused. I can't find your name anywhere in the post or in the links or even in the few comments. Who is it who said you worked for TAP?

I'm with Michelle on this one. Where do you fit into this Kevin? Are you just going around making this clarifying statement on all sorts of blogs? Well, okay -- thanks for letting us know.

re: Kevin Drum's name - Jane originally had his name in the post, then removed it (and replaced it with Yglesias's name, I think).

Kevin is linked to under the words "fellow who published that 'astroturfing' allegation." Nicholas Confessore was the (an?) editor at Kevin's publication--"The Washington Monthly" which is the link I suspect she is making.

Whoops that is a washingtonmonthly link not a 'Political Animal' link.

You've got them there, Jane - the American Prospect is also a fake magazine with no journalist standards of accuracy started by a bunch of former lobbyists, who explicitly says they'll advocate whatever you want for a price. Or not.

"And not only that, accepted it with the stated aim of covering certain topics at that organisation's behest, which no one I know who is associated with Tech Central Station, from editor Nick Schultz on down, has ever done."

'No one I know' is carrying an awful lot of weight in that sentence.

Can I please have a cite for where Tech Central Station has explicitly said that it will advocate whatever you want for a price? Or that it has no journalistic standards of accuracy? The fact checking procedure I went through is pretty similar to that at other publications I've written for which people generally agree are real publications: Salon.com, the New York Sun, the New York Post.

You mean like this -http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/la/scandals/

Ok, on searching, I have to retract the explicitl pay-for-play accusation; I'm thinking of Steven Mallory. Continuing:

You're telling me they actually have fact checkers? Ok then, I thought the explanation for their appalling global warming articles ( http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/science/georgia.html ) was that they didn't have one.

Which leaves the following items, off the top of my head:

* Is the American Prospect co-located with a lobbying shop whose views it consistently shares and has a remarkable ability to time-coordinate issue publishing & PR pushes with?
* Is the American Prospect actually published by a lobbying outfit?
* Did the American Prospect refrain from informing anyone that it was published by a lobbying group until someone wrote an article about it?

Jane, I enjoy your blog, but I'm sorry to see you've joined in this idiotic attempt to manufacture a "scandal". First of all, whatever Ryan Sager thinks, the role of foundations in pushing campaign finance reform has not exactly been a secret: see this 2001 article, for instance; see also this article from the Pew Foundation's own website.

Second, unlike TCS, the articles published by the American Prospect do not promote the economic interests of its sponsors. Nobody has suggested that Carnegie and Pew stand to gain economically from campaign finance reform, in the way that DCI benefits from stopping open source licensing, cutting back on antitrust enforcement, etc. Now, if TAP were to run a bunch of stories on the glories of not-for-profit foundations, you'd have more valid grounds for taunting.

BTW, I don't think you're a hack for writing for TCS.

Sponsors have interests beyond economic. Pew and Carnegie were quite happy to part with tens of millions of dollars in return for campaign finance reform.

Jane: Good points, but your summary skipped my favorite aspect: the secret millions were spent to get special-interest money out of politics. Oh, the irony!

Peter,

"Nobody has suggested that Carnegie and Pew stand to gain economically from campaign finance reform"

You're right. They only stand to gain power, by suppressing competing voices so that their voices carry more weight.

And their role may not have been secret as in "nobody can find it out"; but it was certainly secretIVE, as in, "we're doing everything we can to obscure it."

For evidence on TCS's lack of journalistic standards see here. As for writing stuff for money, why are they so totally opposed to Open Source?

Oooh Tim, you're such a smart boy, showing up those TCS people as being so dumb. Here's an award for you! <Hands you the Smart Ass Award>

If you took 100 journalists and asked them to explain the terms "statistically significant" and "confidence interval", I feel comfortable in guessing 95 would probably give you an incorrect definition or example. (Aww, 95... how cheeky of me.) Yet, the inability to correctly communicate these terms demonstrates a "lack of journalistic standards". Oh yeah, that makes sense...

Tim, as to the latter question, probably because the articles are written by economists and not programmers. The true value of open source software is hard to calculate, but the loss of revenue for companies like SCO (boo! hiss!) is right there in black and white. Black and red. Whatever. Also, economists just plain don't account for the values system of geeks, where money often comes second or third.

It's a worthwhile question, and one I'll try to take a further look at.

Don't forget that Matt Yglesias, in addition to TAP, has also written for TCS. Guess he's just another rightwing corporate shill.

Jason McCullough: No webzine that I'm aware of has factcheckers per se, other than an editor informally double-checking things once in a while, a practice that Michael Kinsley cogently defended when the Stephen Glass scandal broke. As Kinsley put it, "We do have a group of people whose duties include making sure our writers are as accurate as possible. They are called 'writers.' And we have another group of people who skeptically examine what our writers produce and try to catch errors of fact (or of logic or analysis or spelling or taste or—in the case of poetry—rhyme and meter). These people are called 'editors.'" Most newspapers (though not all) have the same system.

Tim Lambert: If your evidence of lack of journalistic standards is that they published an opinion piece where the analysis is flawed, then journalistic standards don't exist, anywhere.

The problem with the TCS article I linked was not that the author did not explain statistical significance correctly, but that he did not know what it meant and falsely claimed that something was not statistically significant when it was. This wasn't a "flawed analysis", it was getting a basic fact wrong. This is, unfortunately, quite typical. Here is another example. And another.

Interesting Tim. Apparently Fred Kaplan at Slate is also part of the massive pro-Bush conspiracy to cover up the horrors of the Iraq war, because he said the Lancet study was a piece of crap as well.

And little old me with my Engineering degree can probably be ignored when I say that a result of X +- X, might as well be zero for all the use it is. When you get a result like that it means that your measuring device is not sufficiently accurate to tell you anything other than it is somewhere close to zero(within the error of the device)

Basically, if the civilian death toll in Iraq were like an IC lead I was trying to measure the width of, the lancet study would be like the odometer of a car.

And, you know what? If every complaint you made so far were valid, it would still put TCS on a journalistic par with the "news" articles of the AP, the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc. And considering that these are all just opinion pieces... well, they have the integrity of the people who write them, which should be judged on an individual basis, not tarred with some shadowy conspiracy that exists primarily in your mind.

Bill, I did not say that there was a conspiracy, pro-Bush or otherwise to cover up the horrors of the Iraq war. What we actually have is a whole bunch of people who did not like the results of the Lancet study and who don't have a good understanding of statistics, making bogus arguments about why the study was wrong. Mostly those people are pro-war who don't want to admit the consequences of the war they supported. Kaplan's problem seem to be that he thought the study contradicted the Iraq Body Count, something he believed to be accurate.

Ummm, Mr Lambert. (Sorry, Dr.). About that TCS article I did on the Lancet report. I think it would help if you referred to my withdrawal and apology for my claims following the criticisms from you and Daniel Davies. I mean it would be nice to give the full story would it not? It is mentioned on the original piece, prominently (I would rather my mistakes remain public than quietly vanish), on a subsequent piece at TCS on the same subject, at John Quiggin’s blog, at mine, I think (although this may be an error of mine) at your blog as well, although you seem not to see fit to include it in the piece you link above. From memory even the CT discussion on it points out that I retracted it.
Just for the record, I was not assigned the subject, not given a line on it, nor talking points. I screwed up mightily, you and others pointed that out to me and I apologised.
As I say, to give a complete picture of the situation at TCS it might be worth mentioning all of that.
In the year I have been writing for TCS I have been assigned (actually, it came in the form of "Tim, would you like to write about this"? along with an idea from Nick Schultz that maybe I should mention robber barons) only one article, on Nordhaus’ research into the levels of Schumpeterian profits in the US economy, which became a piece called "Entrepreneurs of the World Unite". One which Professor Nordhaus himself kindly agreed that explained his economic points at least adequately.
All the other 50 odd pieces, including that Lancet disaster, have come from me, the subject, approach, style, quotes and all.
I have no objection to you disliking what I write, none at all to your distaste for my general worldview, you are quite at liberty to think of me as a hack selling my soul to an astroturf operation but I would be happier if you would at least remember that when I do screw up, I retract and apologise.

As to my own opinions? TCS is exactly what it appears to be, a forum where people get paid to write about whatever it is that yanks their chain, just like an op-ed page.
Just as TAP is, just as The Nation, Atlantic, Mother Jones and The Ecologist are.

And yes, I have had a giggle over the various stories about the Pew etc subsidies. The biter bit as it were.

I often wonder if it is immaturity, misconception, manipulation or a combination of the three at the heart of arguments akin to those that Mr. (Dr.?) Lambert makes.
Children will point to specifics and say "see, this one thing proves such and such".
Ironically, lawyers occupy this space as well.
But much like understanding electron charged field theory, when you step back from a situation or issue and look at it in toto, you find that the spirit (the essence - not to be confused with that vast religious right wing conspiracy) is far different from the specific letter.
Arguing a point certainly entails defining the specifics to develop an overall appreciation however maintaining certain specifics at the expense of the majority is at best a questionable position to maintain.

Jason,
From your link:

" It is true that it is possible for internal energy to change without affecting the temperature if there is a phase change, but the atmosphere stays way above the temperature of liquid nitrogen, so this makes almost no difference to temperatures."

Are you suggesting that phase changes in water do not occur within the atmosphere and between the atmosphers and oceans? I am not certain on the exact figure, but I believe that the entire energy content of the atmosphere above the ocean is is matched by the energy content of the first meter of ocean below it.

Yours is the kind of psuedo argument that destroys the credibility of your side. It is not an argument per se, it is an appeal to authority. Type enough blather to give the illusion of thought just to make your readers feel better about swallowing your point whole without actually understanding it.

And since thermodynamics is politicized, Wikipedia cannot be counted on as a reference. Better to have gone to the standard texts.

And what I mean by thermodynamics being politicized is this. If a person has a specific agenda, for instance to prove that the warming we have experienced since the end of the little ice age is human caused, it is possible to selectively provide a lot of indisputably true information, while leaving out other relevant countervailing facts, making that true information nothing but window dressing since the ultimate conclusion may well be false.

Can we all at least agree that "Tech Central Station" is the dumbest (and most inaccurate) name of any political site on the Web?

If anyone here knows the story behind the name, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to hear it.

Well, Tim, you sure made it sound like TCS was engaging in some kind of misinformation campaign on behalf of Bush.

And you obviously haven't read the Fred Kaplan article. Here's a taste

It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)

This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.

You know Tim, I think by your rules I've just accumulated enough evidence to prove that you lack "journalistic standards".

Tim Worstall, I acknowledge your correction on my blog more than once. The point of my post was about TCS's non-existent fact checking. And while they posted your correction, they posted it with another erroneous critique of the Lancet study by Michael Fumento. And that one was never corrected.

Fact is, on subjects where I am knowledgable enough to check the accuracy, TCS is abysmal, worse than any other publication that springs to mind.

Bill, what is worthless is Kaplan's critique. See here and here.

Ohhh, the Lancet Study! The Holy Grail of NIMN. Sorry - I'd meant to stay on topic, but I can't resist. Let me tell you something about the warrior class, boys.

In a nation of almost 300 Million, there are about 1 Million of us in all our forms (DOD wide). And despite what you hear on NPR, we love what we do. How is this relevant?

Trust me, if we had really got the 100K ROI on what we expended, you'd be hearing about it from us.

Same story at GITMO. More than 4000 work-a-day Joes and Jane's have now cycled through there. 75% of 'em are Guardsmen. Cover-up? CHrist. I've never been to J-School, but I'm pretty sure I could find one or two of 'em, back at their civilian jobs, and offer them some $ to talk - if there was anything to talk about...

Tim Lambert. There is a correction on the piece itself.
It is also true that you have seen fit to "correct" articles at TCS where you clearly did not have the knowledge to check the accuracy, for example Glenn Reynolds on bookselling, corporate structures, workforce empowerment and agency theory. But that’s fine, we all make errors and it’s how we react to them and learn from them that’s important.
I am, quite seriously, grateful to you and the others for what I learnt via the intellectual reaming provided. Just as long as when people stray into error in fields where I do know what I’m talking about I am allowed to do the same.

Bill, yes I have read Kaplan. His piece came out after mine. So it doesn’t change whatever I did or should have said about mine.

I will admit that I don’t understand how an Englishman, living in Portugal, writing unprompted, shows that a publication is running a misinformation campaign on behalf of Bush, let alone anyone else.

To quote from another piece of mine at TCS (9/29/2004)

"I'm not the biggest Bush partisan on the planet, quite apart from the fact that I'm a foreigner. I would have bones to pick with his trade policy, with the absurd Farm Bill, with some of the moves by social conservatives in his administration, worries over the Patriot Act, there are even some areas where I like the policies of his opponent, John Kerry (only a few, but some)."

Just doesn’t strike me as being part of a partisan campaign that. Sounds more like what I said above, and still think the site is. People writing about what yanks their chain.

Lambert? You guys are a riot. I read your link, but was only able to get this far before laughing:

..."In order to believe this, if you have read the paper, you have to be prepared to accuse the authors of telling a disgusting barefaced lie, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so."

Have you not read the most recent Scissors Burger news?
http://instapundit.com/archives/022165.php

Tim

Every time you refer to an "inaccurate" or "erroneous" article at TCS you provide a link to your critique at your website instead of a link to the article itself. You can see how this creates a credibility problem for you, can't you?

Lambert's butchery of thermodynamics (internal energy of a fluid does not equal internal energy of a system, for example) in his "fact-checking" of Paul Georgia's article (linked in his comments above) is not a stellar example of TCS "getting a basic fact wrong." Georgia's attempt at transcribing Essex's technical description was flawed, but not as badly as Lambert's attempted debunking.

Ummm, Tim Worstall, I wasn't talking to you...

And Tim Lambert, I read your links and was unimpressed. The central problem is the massive confidence range. Crooked Timber basically engages in a lot of handwaving. If a poll was published that said support for a measure was 50% with an error margin of 48%, would you take it seriously? After all, 50% is still the most likely result, no? That was the defense CT used.

In reality you would toss it in the trash. Out here in the real world we have rules of thumb, and one of them is that when the confidence margin is that large, the study is useless. You're just making yourself look silly at this point.

Can we all at least agree that "Tech Central Station" is the dumbest (and most inaccurate) name of any political site on the Web?

If anyone here knows the story behind the name, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to hear it.

Tim W, you claim, falsely, that I do not have the knowledge to check the accuracy of Reynold's piece claiming that there was a market failure in the bookstore industry. But Reynolds' piece was inaccurate and I correctly pointed it out. Incidently, I sent my post to Reynolds and he made a correction, but did not acknowledge the source of the correction.

Nowhere did I say that TCS was running a disinformation in support of Bush (why would they?), and I have pointed this out in a previous comment as well. I did suggest that they were running one for Microsoft, but you want to go after a straw man rather than deal with what I wrote.

Bill, that is a false analogy, and the reason was given in the link that apparently you didn't read very carefully. 0 is not in the interval, so we are more more than 95% confident (close to 98%, actually) that the war has increased deaths. A poll analogy would be a poll that gave 55%-95% support for a measure. While we wouldn't know the exact level of support, we would still know that there was majority support.

Spork,
In 50 or so articles I think I’ve done that two or three times. Not quite my definition of "every".

Tim L. You and I continued that discussion on book stores at my blog. Your knowledge of the subject at hand was inadequate.

Assuming "Jane Galt" (sic) to be a nom de plume, I find Ms. Galt's position to be a particularly amusing contrast to her namesake's:

Ms. Jane Galt:

"I was one of the lucky few singled out as partisan hacks for writing for Tech Central Station, because it's funded by DCI, a lobbying group... There were dark intimations that I was a knowing sellout....."
Mr. John Galt:

"Iam a trader. I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don't force anyone to trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit"

"http://www.working-minds.com/galtmini.htm

Tim L.

Instapundit not crediting your correction on the Border's story seems to really nag at you - it's on your site in the original posting, and you feel compelled to bring it up again here, despite its irrelevance to your point and its age. As I recall, there was a wave of corrections propagating across the blogosphere - yours was probably one amongst a deluge that the impossibly-busy Reynolds received. Let it go, man.

I can't speak to how much you might know about bookstores, but I can attest that your extensive study of thermodynamics at Wikipedia has not given you much insight into thermo as it's taught at the undergraduate and graduate level. Essex's and Georgia's point is that defining a thermodynamic state for air requires measurement of two state variables (typically temperature and pressure) and the humidity. Averaging temperatures without reqard to the other variables may thus give misleading results (this may not be significant, however).

By mistaking the internal energy of a substance (which you discuss in the posting at your site) for the internal energy of a system, you have reduced the number of variables from 3 to 1, and completely missed the point of the original article. You were quite derisive of Georgia's attempt to explain how energy and temperature are not identical, but your own errors are even larger and more embarrassing. In the world defined by your treatment, engines, vapor compression refigeration, and weather would not exist.

Tim W, on your blog you offered a different argument to Reynolds -- you didn't try to defend his argument. Your argument was wrong as well, as I explained in comments.

Geoff C, you don't seem to have understood what Essex was claiming. Yes, Georgia mangled it some but Essex claimed that average temperature has no physical meaning. Care to defend that claim?

Tim L.
As you attempted and failed to do in comments.

I often wonder if it is immaturity, misconception, manipulation or a combination of the three at the heart of arguments akin to those that Mr. (Dr.?) Lambert makes. Children will point to specifics and say "see, this one thing proves such and such".

Oh, do you mean like "Michael Moore said something silly therefore all liberals are evil?" Such "immaturity, misconceptions, and manipulation" are indeed rather common, aren't they?

Tim L.,

I took this claim to mean that since temperature is an indirect measurement of the translational kinetic energy of a substance, but does not reflect (by itself) the energy of a system, averaging temperature measurements of local systems does not necessarily give an average temperature of the system (as I said before, this argument, while strictly true, may not be significant).

The definition of temperature itself has been tricky: this site compares 6 different definitions. But if Essex is in fact claiming that temperature has no physical meaning, that would be a very old school interpretation, dating either him or his references.

Geoff, so when Georgia wrote something wrong (Average temperature has no physical meaning) you reinterpreted to mean something different so that it was correct. And when I wrote something correct, you reintepreted so that it was incorrect (Even though I specifically mentioned mass and specific heat, you accused me of ignoring everything except for temperature.)

Essex claims that average temperature has no physical meaning and that the way scientists average temperature is just a convention and that they could just as easily use the harmonic or geometric mean of temperatures.

Tim L.,

Here are the specific problems with your treatment:

1) the simplified formula you use for internal energy of a substance is best applied to solids because for the atmosphere, neither the density, the composition of air (due to humidity), nor the specific heat are constant (specific heat changes with humidity and temperature, although the latter effect is very small). So although you mentioned mass and specific heat, the formula you used was not appropriate. The appropriate formulae support Essex's contention that temperature measurements alone cannot describe the energy content of the atmosphere,
2) Yes, you mentioned mass and specific heat, but these are not state variables for thermodynamic systems, and hence have nothing to do with what I said above,
3) the formula you used ignores the kinetic and potential energy components of a system, which, combined with the internal energy of a substance, form the complete energy picture of non-reactive substances, and
4) you caveat your statements (in your original statements) with an acknowledgement that this would allow substances with the same temperature to have different energy contents (quite true), but fail to appreciate that this can be true even without considering phase change - isothermal compressions and expansions, for example, are cases where the energy within a system changes while the temperature remains constant (sort of a restatement of 1) and 3)).

So I took Georgia's "average temperature has no physical meaning" as: "averaging temperature measurements alone is insufficient to define an average thermodynamic state unless it can be shown that the influences of pressure and humidity variations average out to near zero." Even without my "reinterpretation" (I swear I was only interpreting), there was a tradition within thermodynamics that strictly speaking, temperature was an arbitrary measure that was indicative of physical quantities, but was not itself a truly physical quantity. This was pretty pedantic, and I believe that now most would agree that since temperature can be directly related to the translational kinetic energy of a substance, that it has graduated to being a physical measure. But that's why hearing that average temperature has no physical meaning doesn't raise my eyebrows all that much.

As to which mean is appropriate to use when interpreting the global warming data set - that's beyond my ken.

Back to the original point, though - I'm sure you have struggled with the urge to throttle journalists who butcher their descriptions and interpretations of statistics, just as I've struggled with their articles involving physical sciences. But it happens so often that eventually we become dulled to the inaccuracies and just appreciate the effort. The TCS article took a swing at presenting thermo to the lay public, a subject which has derailed many an aspiring engineering student. Georgia bit off more than he could chew, but he gave it a shot. You took a shot too, but since you're sniping from the sidelines and using your conclusions to disparage TCS's journalistic acumen and integrity, in my opinion you had best be dead on in your criticisms. In a case where you and TCS were equally inaccurate, I'd judge your transgression to be the greater.

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