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REALITY_GAP

                                              July 6, 2014


A version of this was published
at the dailykos as "1% gets the 97%".
                                          http://www.dailykos.com/blog/doomvox/

So, you know that famous study that found that 97% of climate
scientists are convinced that human-induced global warming is
for real?  It turns out it's famous only among a select few,
which we might just label "us"-- and "we" are a tiny
percentage on this one: polling shows that there's little
public perception of this scientific consensus.  John Cook--
who worked on that 97% study-- wrote about this problem as
the "consensus gap" back in 2013: "Closing the Climage Change
Consensus Gap":                                                          http://www.wunderground.com/earth-day/2013/closing-the-climate-change-consensus-gap

Interestingly, even among the liberal/left, there's very little
grasp of how strong the scientific consensus actually is, as John
Cook wrote recently over at his "Skeptical Science" site: "An
Externally Valid Approach to Consensus Messaging":                       http://www.skepticalscience.com/externally-valid-approach-consensus-messaging.html

If you look at the graph he presents there, it appears that even
among the hard-left they tend to assume that the consensus is only
as strong as 70% or so.

There's been quite a bit of discussion about this and it's
implications over at culturalcognition.net, between Dan Kahan,
John Cook, and others: "... Communicating 'scientific consensus'":       http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/5/22/on-the-science-communication-value-of-communicating-scientif.html

This is what I think this all means...

I submit that even liberals don't really trust the left to get the
facts right: what's expected is that the left is sincere, and that
they really care about the issues involved-- but that's almost the
precise opposite of what you'd hope for in a reliable source,
where something like independant neutrality (if not quite
"objectivity") is the frequently sought ideal.

Every activist is directly engaged with trying to steer the public
in the right direction, so the activist press always has an eye
toward spinning things just right-- excuse me, *framing* the issue
correctly-- even if we do often just look at this as correcting
for the other side's spin.

The left does not *really* inspire confidence in it's ability to
ferret out facts-- rather I fear we tend to parrot the things we
hear that support our conclusions.  And yes, I know that the Right
is far worse at this point, but that just highlights how bad the
problem is: the Right is so *obviously* full of shit, why doesn't
everyone get it at this point?

The public is effectively adrift without any reliable source of
information, and without the time, energy, (and perhaps
intellectual resources) it would take to evaluate what they hear.
Instead they fall back on things like "the truth must be
somewhere in between", though obviously that rule-of-thumb can
fail badly-- it's hardly a logical impossiblity for the truth to
be close to one of the extremes: sometimes one side is really
wrong.

And perhaps worse, a faction interested in gaming public opinion
can take advantage of this flawed heuristic: they can put out a
story to make sure it looks like there's some sort of controversy,
and use that to move the public perception of the middle.

Given this analysis, there are different directions you might
go. I'll make two points and stop:

(1) If you're going to speak out on an issue, it's not enough to
just be on the right side, you really need to make sure that what
you're saying is well supported, and that it *looks* like it's well
supported.  What's at stake is not just the immediate issue, but
the credibility of your side, on the problem at hand and all
future problems.

(2) I think there's a missing, badly needed institution, though
I'm not sure what form it should take precisely-- how do we bridge
that gap between reality and perception?  What sort of information
source might be created that would be trusted by the distracted
and only partially engaged public mind?



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