Commentary

Use the right statistic

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged statistics writing on by

Mark Twain talked about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Lying with statistics isn’t always intentional; sometimes a writer doesn’t understand their meaning or applicability.

Recently I saw a news article on the COVID-19 infection rate in northern New Hampshire. It reported a higher positivity rate than in previous weeks. That doesn’t tell us anything about whether infections are increasing or decreasing, though. If the positivity rate goes up, it could mean one of several things:

  1. More people are infected.
  2. More of the people who are infected are getting tested.
  3. Fewer people who aren’t infected are getting tested.

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Abusing the nominative 2

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged grammar writing on by

Alexander James Adams has a song which is quite nice yet makes me grate my teeth. Its refrain is “There’s only the music between you and I.” An occasional grammatical violation in a song is OK, but one that occurs in every verse is painful. There are plenty of good rhymes for “me.”

When a pronoun follows a preposition, it has to be in the accusative case, also called the objective case. “With me.” “To them.” “Behind her.” The favorite grammatical error of snobs is to use the nominative case instead.
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The black swan fallacy

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged logic research on by

A while ago I ran into a report of an alleged side effect of the COVID-19 vaccine. It was a “this happened to my cousin” story, so it’s low on credibility. Some news outlets, though, claimed it couldn’t be true because there was no previous report of this effect.

That’s not a valid refutation. The vaccines are fairly new, and it’s plausible that a few people could have side effects that weren’t previously recorded. The media argument amounted to “We never heard of it before, so it couldn’t have happened.”
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Don’t treat your readers like children

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged bowdlerization writing on by

In an alarming development, the US National Archives has slapped warnings of “harmful language” on the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. The source makes it especially disturbing; archivists should stand strongly against scaring people off from important documents.

Update: According to some sources, the National Archives stuck this warning label on all the documents in its online catalog, which is sloppy and makes the warning useless. As an analogy, if you rate all movies R, you might as well rate none of them R.
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Disagreement isn’t refutation

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged logic research writing on by

Websites with an agenda to promote will claim that someone has “refuted” a claim when all the person has done is express a contrary view, with or without supporting evidence.

Refuting a claim or argument means showing that it’s invalid. It doesn’t require proving that the contrary position is true, but it requires thoroughly knocking the props out from under a claim. Here are some ways to refute an assertion:
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Fighting dairy censorship

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged censorship on by

It’s a curious and little-known fact that the dairy industry is a leading advocate of censorship. It demands the suppression of words such as “milk” and “butter” for non-dairy products, even where their meaning is clear and their use is well established. If the dairy lobby had its way, you wouldn’t find “peanut butter” or “soy milk” in stores. Its puppets include several members of Congress, and it’s especially powerful in Wisconsin, where it was long illegal to serve yellow margarine.

More surprisingly, the dairy lobby appears to have bought the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The CDFA sent a demand to Miyoko’s Creamery demanding that it stop using terms such as “cultured vegan butter.” Indeed, the government’s demands went far beyond that, saying that Miyoko’s couldn’t call its products “cruelty-free” or show a picture of a woman hugging a cow. The letter’s thinly disguised purpose was to hamper competition with the dairy industry.
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Judges assault First Amendment

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing Writing as business and tagged First Amendment law liberty on by

A recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th circuit should seriously worry writers. It says that the government can ignore the First Amendment when it feels like it. In the case in question, the court acknowledged that website design work is “pure speech,” which means it’s protected by the First Amendment. “Appellants are forced to create websites — and thus, speech—that they would otherwise refuse.” But then it argued that the State of Colorado has a “compelling interest” in forcing a website designer to work for the plaintiff. It ruled that, in spite of the plain First Amendment violation, the designer can be forced to create speech.
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How writers can fight unreason

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged ethics honesty reason on by

American society is being torn apart by widespread efforts to deceive and distort. Two broadly defined groups dominate these efforts. One is associated with the Republican Party and Donald Trump and has the support of many elected officials. It has significant representation among media outlets but a limited presence in the academic world. The other is associated with the Democrats but tends to be on its fringes. It doesn’t have a lot of outright support in the mainstream media, but many outlets are reluctant to challenge its outrages. It’s very strong in academia.

The two factions always at each other’s throats, but they’re similar in many important ways. Their goal is power. Keeping their own group in line is as important as attacking those who disagree with them. The important thing is to control their followers and promote hatred of non-followers. They use similar techniques to deceive and control. They want fear and hatred to replace reason.

Writers of nonfiction (and even writers of fiction, in a less direct way) should be on the front lines to challenge all promoters of unreason, taking on their false statements and identifying their methods. It’s a tricky challenge. We’re all subject to manipulation when we let our guard down. We can’t always tell facts from fabrications. We’re each well-informed in some areas and ignorant in others.

Each of us will make mistakes, but we can all contribute to rebuilding a culture of reason. Always double-check the facts and look for logical fallacies. Be ready to call out any of these stunts:
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Negotiating a world of suppressed information 1

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary Writing and tagged coronavirus writing on by

When information on a topic is broadly suppressed, what are we writers supposed to do? There are two easy answers, both error-prone. One is to reject all claims that there’s suppression and call them a “conspiracy theory.” The other is to assume that whatever is being suppressed is true.

Let’s look at the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan and somehow escaped into the population. I don’t know if that’s true, but the circumstances make it a possibility worth investigating. There have been many attempts to discourage an examination of the question. A Vanity Fair article by Katherine Eban summarizes the battle.
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