"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."
I'm glad Matt owns up to this because this is a perfect example of how dangerous this phenomenon is. The California voters were told they could have $50 high speed rail from LA to San Francisco in less than 3 hours for $9.95 billion (matched by federal funds to total $19.9 billion). The entire thing was a lie. The project is already up to $100 billion, the first segment (which almost nobody will ride and which will not cost $50 to ride) on flat land between Bakersfield and Merced is many years away from completion, and the project's designers have not demonstrated that it is even possible at reasonable cost to go from Bakersfield to Los Angeles (a long story that I tell on my own Substack).
The point is, this is more than a folly-- this was fraud and theft. Sponsors of a project that is likely impossible to actually complete convinced California voters to authorize billions of dollars of spending that could have been directed to solving other problems in our state. Heck, we could have subsidized clean air zero-carbon bus trips for everyone who wants to travel by land between Los Angeles and San Francisco with that money and THAT would have even been a better use of it.
And yes, it was fraud. The project organizers chose $9.95 billion for the same reason that your local supermarket marks apples at 99 cents instead of a dollar-- to make the price tag look as low as possible. They HAD to know that it would cost a lot more-- the arguments against the ballot initiative in the ballot pamphlet rationally predicted a $90 billion cost. Even the opponents estimated too low!
This is not the way to do liberalism or government. You tell the public the truth. If the public votes against you, it's OK. You told them the truth and that's democracy.
The plot in True Detective season 2 was about people trying to get a slice of the high speed rail boondoggle, which was spending a lot of money and not building much.
A big problem with that season is that Nick Pizzolatto had no idea at all how the politics of high speed rail works so the whole season is based on a bunch of absurd things happening.
My strong impression from reading even positive reviews of "True Detective" is that "the whole season is based on a bunch of absurd things happening" could be used to summarize each season of the show.
Season 1 is really good though in terms of characters and ideas and a the big story of Russ and Marty's relationship over 15 years. Season 2 doesn't really have that.
The most annoying thing is that they could have built the whole thing for $50 bn. But they'd have had to change California real estate law in some fundamental ways - include in the initiative the power for CAHSR to seize any non-federal land in the state at a price to be determined by CAHSR, with short notice period (one month would suffice), and that the only power that any former landowner would have would be the right to sue to dispute the valuation, in which case CAHSR would be liable to pay the difference in valuation (without any interest or penalty). Rely on Kelo as the constitutional justification
They'd also have had to get a competent organisation (ie not an American one) to do the construction - French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, any would do.
The absence of any penalty - let alone any *interest,* sounds like a bridge too far to me. Slight systematic overvaluation of eminent domain seems like a massively better problem to have than any kind of systematic undervaluation.
Totally agree. Allow for interest and reasonable attorneys fees (eg 33% of the undervaluation) and there is less incentive to shaft property owners. You might also limit valuations to 125% of assessed value to reign in run away finders of fact.
I'm mostly trying to avoid a situation where CAHSR has to hold an enormous contingency budget against the risk of losing legal actions and getting rinsed by former property owners who can convince a judge to approve an enormously inflated valuation.
If there is a reasonable limit to the losses, then they can take some land, pay $1million for it, stick $250K in a contingency fund and then the only part of the organisation that has to care is group legal. That's probably the practical version of what I propose. But Kelo should mean that blocking eminent domain rather than arguing over valuations is impossible, yet CAHSR was prepared to sit and argue over a valuation rather than just picking their own valuation, seizing the land, and then arguing about the valuation later in court. I don't know if that was lack of legal authority or lack of political will, but it was a massively expensive problem.
They'd also need some variances on various regulations (particularly environmental), but those would be mostly because the way that too many US regulations are enforced is that people sue and then get injunctions to stop construction - give CAHSR a variance that if they had a reasonable compliance plan then you can't get an injunction unless you can demonstrate that that compliance plan was not reasonable (ie, just because it doesn't comply, you can't stop them building, you have to show they weren't even trying to comply).
Dilan Esper's point (in the article he linked) that the *first* part of the line to build is the line through the Tehachapis is well-taken, though. I suspect that if you got a Japanese or a Taiwanese engineer to design your railroad, you'd get told exactly how to route it so it was earthquake-safe, but neither I nor Dilan are railroad tunnel engineering experts.
Also @Dilan, one of the nice things about high-speed rail is that it's, uh, fast. That means that if you do have to go a relatively long way around (e.g. going up the coast to Oxnard or Santa Barbara before crossing the mountains), then you can do that - you can add a lot of miles in diversions at 200mph before you really start affecting the travel time. AIUI, from talking to some of the engineers who worked on the UK's HS1 and HS2 routes, you work out where you can cross a mountain chain and then you work backwards from there to identify the routes to get to the crossing. This is why the Lyon-Turin line under construction takes such an odd route on approach to the Alps - because they picked the tunnel route first and then worked out how to connect it to the rest of the system.
So the problem with going up the coast is there are tons of curves. I am not saying it is totally impossible to do but you can't use the existing SP coast route- and in addition to increasing travel time slowing down for the curves there are all the practical problems of the coastal act, rich landowners who don't want the train, etc.
Neither of us knows enough about seismic protection and tunnelling to say where the mountain crossing should be. And neither do the "Lines on Map" people. And nor does CAHSR. Honestly, I doubt anyone in the USA (or the UK) does. You want a Japanese or a Taiwanese engineering firm to do a survey, and identify where to do the crossing, and then you start designing the rest of CAHSR from there: if you cross the mountains in X place, then you have to get the track from X to LA Union Station, so you design a route from X to LAUS. Then you have to go up the Central Valley from X, so that determines which Valley cities can be reached.
Similarly in the Bay Area, you start with the mountain crossing between the Caltrain line and the Central Valley, and then you work out how far the track comes up the Valley.
I've always wondered if the southeastern US would have been a better choice for HSR.
Atlanta/Orlando is one of the busiest domestic flights in the US, there are no mountains on this route, and the distance is only a bit longer than LA/SF. My impression is that labor and land are both much cheaper in the southeast than in California.
I do wonder if swamps and crossing state lines would be huge hassles for getting HSR done though. And I suspect that a lot of the Atlanta/Orlando flights are tourists connecting via Atlanta on a theme park visit to Orlando, so connecting HSR to the airport in Atlanta would probably be a necessity.
This is correct, but... historically, a lot of the large infrastructure projects in this country were built on fraud and misinformation. The financing structure for 19th century railroads certainly wasn't anywhere close to sound (and directly lead to repeated panics and recessions). But we still had the railroads, which people could use and provided a great deal of benefits.
I guess I struggle with where you draw the line between "outright lies to voters to build something useful and long lasting" (where California HSR mostly falls) to "boring technical discussions of how this will go which is over the public's head and will be subject to its own misinformation campaign" (e.g., Obamacare). At some point, people have to accept the fact that we want government to get shit done and it ain't gonna be perfect (and if my own experience with big business is any indication, it's not much different in the private sector). So we try to mitigate the bad as much as we can and push for the good.
There’s a big difference between a terrible, criminally irresponsible process that builds something useful and one that doesn’t, especially as time passes
You are right that it is a difficult line. But nonetheless lowballing government programs is incredibly risky. The Crédit Mobilier scandal could have easily killed the whole project. They were playing with fire and got very lucky.
This was a central part of the Robert Moses strategy, correct? Dupe the state legislature into a significantly smaller cost, and then once construction has already commenced, reveal the grand plan. Although, I guess the difference between that and the LA/San Fran line was that Moses actually built things.
"Dupe the state legislature into a significantly smaller cost, and then once construction has already commenced" this is more or less basically how every weapon system the Pentagon wants gets made as well. We call this system democracy.
The HBO TV Movie The Pentagon Wars is great on this as well and pretty much sums up the process we see with transit and affordable housing as well (and anyone who's worked in software design would be familiar with this dynamic too) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA
Also why people don't much like this anymore! Moses built things without much regard for whether it was a good idea. The backlash has been with us for over 50 years now.
It's ironic that I'm listening to the "Big Dig" podcast right now* (I grew in MA when this project was ongoing so of particular personal interest to me) because it's clearly a companion piece to your post about CA HSR.
I'm only halfway through, but it lays out in pretty painstaking detail the delays in getting the project started, the cost overruns and yes what appears to be outright lying from Bechtel corporation about timelines to complete. Specifically, it seems like Bechtel corporation basically lied about the timeline it would take to complete a tunnel across the Fort Point Channel.
In other words, you're post has some interesting familiarity to it. And yet, I think the consensus now is that it was "worth it". From a quick google search, the following benefits are noted:
- Housing: The project led to the development of 7,700 new housing units, including 1,000 affordable units
- Office and retail space: The project added 10 million square feet of office and retail space
Hotel rooms: The project added 2,600 hotel rooms
- Traffic flow: The project improved traffic flow by 62% compared to pre-project levels
- Travel time and vehicle operating costs: The project saved travelers an estimated $167 million per year on travel time and vehicle operating costs
- Urban design: The project led to new residential development near parks and open spaces
Now this is a quick google search with AI driven response, so feel free to nitpick some of this. But I think the basic contours is correct. And I think this underplays the impact. That housing, hotel and office space is located in some of the valuable real estate in all of the country. Furthermore, the beautification effects of not having an elevated highway surely has led to knock on urban development of restaurants and shops that otherwise wouldn't have exited as proximity of the highway would have meant going to certain neighborhoods that are now trendy an uninviting proposition. Lastly, I wouldn't discount the impact of the Zakim Bridge. There's a reason it was heavily featured in the movie "The Departed" as it's become a pretty iconic (and beloved) part of the modern Boston skyline.
The point being, I think there is a very strong case to be made that the "Big Dig" was worth it despite the cost overruns, extreme amount of time it took to complete and what appears to be outright fraud involved.
Which comes back to kind of the tragedy of HSR. The concept I actually think is sound. If this project was built by the Spanish I'm guessing it would be done years ago. So in theory this is actually a good project that would probably have been "worth it" with Big Dig style cost overruns. But at this point, the complete lack of progress means it probably should be junked. Someone involved in this project needs to read up again on "Sunk Costs".
* Great podcast and worth your time. Feel like it's catnip for Matt and his audience. One thing the first few episodes did was make me more sympathetic to NIMBY or I should say sympathetic to the historical reasons why NIMBY became so strong starting in the 70s (which the podcast gets into). Because listening to the show, it really hit home to me how much of this impulse is about highway building. Matt bemoans (Rightly) how much the building of highways through the middle of cities was absolutely devestating. But I feel like listening to this podcast that people put highway building in the same mental bucket as building apartments; big government + rich people building stuff to enrich themselves without any care of how it impacts the little guy. And the fight in the 60s about a highway through East Boston really hits home to me that the impulse to stop construction just generally comes from a pretty understandable place.
It's fine to say that where you have already completed something, it is worth it.
But even in the best case scenario, which the Big Dig or the transcontinental railroad is, there's some massive negatives:
1. If you fail, you end up with a white elephant that reminds the public of the folly of big government. Those exist- there are unused subway tunnels around the country, bridges to nowhere, ghost ramps and highways to nowhere, etc. And each one tells a story of how government wasted taxpayer money.
2. Even if you succeed, developing the reputation (as people are arguing here) that all projects run over is not good for the cause of big government. Remember when the Pentagon had those $600 toilet seats? I bet supporters of increased defense spending loved hearing that one brought up over and over again over the next decade plus when they asked for appropriations!
3. The public will think we are a bunch of liars and that every spending program explodes. This is a big reason, by the way, that there's a lot of green eyeshade budgeting and honest scoring of Democratic initiatives in Congress. Obama did not want the story of Obamacare to be how he promised this program would pay for itself with some minor tweaks to the tax code and modest Medicare cuts and then it blew up the budget deficit! Had that happened, maybe the Republicans get that last vote they needed to repeal it! Plus the next time we propose something, we'd get "remember Obamacare? You can't trust them".
Plus, I realize there isn't a lot of morality in politics, but this really is immoral. You don't have to be an anti-tax crusader to say that when you ask the voters for pay for something you think will be good for them, you tell them up front and reasonably accurately what you think the price tag will be. You owe them that in a democracy.
I agree. The 99 tunnel project in Seattle was a good idea and worth it despite its cost overruns which is why I would have supported it with more accurate costs estimates up front but when when everything ends up costing twice what they say it will then when folks are honest people mentally double it and then vote down good ideas.
In my business, I am required by the court to charge by the hour rather than offer a flat rate for many cases. I usually will give clients a non-binding estimate of the total costs. I always make that about 50% more than I think it will likely cost. It gives me some buffer if things go wrong. Since clients are buying a thing that they have basically no idea what it "ought" to cost, 99% of the time they agree because I have good reviews and/or I came highly recommended by a friend. When the case almost always ends up costing less than they expected they are very happy about. I've even had a few of them feel bad and try to "tip" me the difference which I always decline. I've gotten flowers sent in response to my final bill or cookies dropped off at the office for the staff from happy customers.
But many attorneys do the opposite and give a low ball estimate and then run up bills that shock the clients. (They are frankly also sometime just generally shocking and reflect a lot of unnecessary work.) They have a hard time getting paid and generate negative goodwill from clients. In my experience they often low ball because they are pretty desperate for work and think it makes it more likely they will get the job. But since I have a 99% hire rate for my practice in terms of initial consultations signing up to be clients, I think the idea that those low ball estimates are getting more people to say yes aren't necessarily as true as micro economics would lead you to believe since attorney pricing is so lacking in transparency that client usually can't really compare prices effectively when making choices. In fact, their desperation for work in a space where many of the rest of us have months long wait lists for appointments is probably reflective of the fact that they don't have good reviews or get many referrals from prior clients.
My sense is that with most infrastructure projects the public wants something and they have no idea what that thing would cost and whatever that thing would cost is going to a large number well beyond people's day to day financial understanding and approaching the range where humans only abstractly understand. If policy makers gave a slightly inflated cost estimate, built it with inhouse management and limited subcontracting and mostly came in "under budget and ahead of schedule" with only a few projects that hit unexpected snags hitting or going over the estimates, I think people would view that as a great success even if they would have viewed that same cost as a bungogle if they had lowballed it and run over cost and time as almost all projects seem to do.
I think particularly in Blue areas where progressive ideas and projects have generally support we would be having more popular figures to put up for national elections if we were honest with a bit of padding for what things will cost, actually actively managed projects with competent people and delivered a bit more than expected.
Oh I'm actually not sure I disagree with you at all. I think my point is big infrastructure projects (often) carry huge long term benefits above and beyond initial projections.
I'm not finished with the podcast but the host has alluded to the "tragedy" of the Big Dig and I think for reasons you're getting at. The cost overruns and the giant extended timeline to finish has put a huge headwind against getting infrastructure projects proposed and funded. For the exact reasons you lay out in bullet point two.
I'm living it now. I now commute to work via the LIRR to Grand Central station. I can now walk to the office as opposed to needing to take a crosstown subway journey. Considering how many people had to make that same journey previously, the impact on shorter commute times should be enormous. But there was an apparently lack of forethought as to how new train schedules would effect service to Atlantic Terminal and whether new trains needed to be ordered. So schedules are messed up the primary effect has been to increase transfer times at Jamaica station from 2-3 minutes to upwards of 10-15 minutes. For all trains, which means not only are you not saving on travel time by going to Grand Central (it should be about a 10-15 minute reduction in travel time going right to Grand Central), you've now increased travel times to Penn Station! Like..ugh!
And yet! And yet. If Albany and the city can actually get their heads straight and get transfer times at Jamaica back down to where they were, the actual impact on commutes should huge give the number of LIRR commuters. And if Long Island can actually get it together and not be the worst NIMBYs in the country this side of San Francisco, the economic benefits of the new access could be absolutely enormous.
But because this screw up happened, a lot of long islanders and New Yorkers are understandably not in a mood to throw money to the MTA and commuter rail. Which by the way, if you don't think this is a factor in Kathy Hochul's terrible U-turn on congestion pricing I have a bridge to sell you two miles south of me.
"And yet, I think the consensus now is that it was 'worth it'."
Andrew Odlyzko has a very interesting manuscript, entitled "Collective hallucinations and inefficient markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s", in which he argues that a lot of financial bubbles form from precisely this phenomenon: investments that absolutely are worth it *in the long term*, but is unclear if their benefits will arise soon enough for the project to be a worthwhile investment at current interest rates.
Yes! But in the case of the Seattle Big Dig there actually hit a legit, unexpected problem. There were apparently some large iron structures that were included in the fill area where they dumped the dirt from the Denny regrade that were not in any city records and the drill hit on and broke. That obviously let to cost overruns and delays. I think Seattle took it well in part because everyone was expecting the Seattle Big Dig to turn in absolute money pit based on the experience in Boston so people's expectations were so low that it more led to an "I told you so" than a revolt. But the tunnel is lovely to use and the increased land for surface development, reconnection of the waterfront to the rest of the city and massive improvements in the views for much of the City made its actual cost totally worthwhile in a way I think few people deny. (Plus it won't come crashing down on large parts of the city in an earthquake like the old viaduct was set to do so that is a plus.) Ironically the toll they set on it to help cover the costs and cost overruns is actually one of the closest things to congestion pricing I have seen in the West. Granted it isn't a charge to go into town but a charge to be able to get through downtown from the north of the city to the south of the city actually probably cover more daily commutes in our weirdly shaped and decentralized city than a downtown congestion price would do.
That's a problem but it is not the problem. The problem is that it was impossible to do at the cost that was promised (and it indeed is impossible to do the most important segment, Bakersfield-LA at any reasonable cost) and they lied to voters by lowballing the cost to get it passed and now we've sunked a ton of money that could have helped deal with our state's many problems into a boondoggle.
Are you saying that it was never achievable from a materials cost perspective? Engineering challenges? Labor? I admit it's not clear to me why it would be difficult to build that segment.
The right way to build it is, as you said, build LA-Bakersfield first, or at least the first step should have been launching the TBMs.
I'm not as convinced as you are that it's impossible to cross the mountains anywhere that is earthquake-proof (note that modern TBMs mean you're not restricted to the passes; you can tunnel right under the peaks as well, see Mont d'Ambin in the Alps), but the right approach would be to pick a tunnel route and then work out how to connect it to LA and what the right route up the Central Valley should be, rather than picking a route first and then working out how to cross the mountains, as CAHSR actually did.
Either way, neither of us are tunnelling engineers or seismologists, so I don't think there's any serious prospect of us debating the question - neither of us has the knowledge to make a serious assessment of the risks.
But, yes, CAHSR, the project as conceived, is a deceitful money-sink; I expect the eventual "solution" to be that they build a slow route (probably Grapevine) from LA to Bakersfield and then run actually fast from Bakersfield to SF, and claim that it's high-speed because the average train speed between LA and SF is still going to be 100mph or more.
You can't go up the Grapevine without massive tunneling which gets you the earthquake issue. Grapevine Canyon is a series of switchbacks with 6 percent grade.
Don’t they already have the ROW land acquired and through CEQA, and it does that weird loop above the grapevine and avoids that pathway so that politician in north LA county can be happy?
A major cause of cost overruns in infrastructure projects in the US is the start stop start stop nature of construction caused by litigation and permitting. There are huge fixed costs to infrastructure construction and it seems that we pay those costs for every project because of the time gaps between completed and new projects.
Curious to know about some of the govt boondoggles you’ve seen in Florida - we hear so much about this in California, and somewhat Texas, but I feel there must be a lot in Florida too
Boy, I so want liberal government to succeed. And then I see the California HSR and the Kathy Hochul pratfall in New York and it pushes me toward despair. Do better, our team!
You are only allowed to wallow in liberal despair for 10 minutes a day maximum. Hope is a moral obligation. Despair is the enemy of justice because the struggle for justice requires courage, persistence, and faith and all of these spring from a reservoir of hope. But, I also would really fucking like to see our team doing better.
As a licensed professional engineer I'll tell you that very large and complicated infrastructure projects almost ALWAYS go over budget and over schedule. Humans have trouble estimating ands sensing the unknown unknowns.
Whenever I had a research project due in a year, I was always confident I could meet the deadline fairly easily. The source of my confidence was that, while my schedule was currently packed which made immediate progress very difficult, that schedule would surely ease up in a few months and then I'd have plenty of time to finish the work. You won't be surprised to learn that this kind of future discounting typically led to tears down the road when said schedule was just as packed as it was at the earlier moment.
I don't know if this kind of budgeting is cynical or a form of blackmailing or just part of human cussedness to be hopelessly optimistic about future states.
I mean, I understand- they want the bid- but there's a point behind my admittedly rhetorical question. If it was just an ordinary process of "guess the costs in good faith", shouldn't, with all the experience people have, some of the guesses come in too high instead of too low?
So what does that say about what is really going on-- good faith estimates that just missed the mark, or deliberately lowballing the costs for contracting and/or political reasons to hook the public in so they are forced to pay the real price?
So, the bid is the thing, right? There is a related phenomenon in government work (work done by government organizations on a reimbursable basis for other government organizations) constrained by budgets but without a real bidding process. It turns out that it is common to significantly overestimate the initial costs of a project and then as more information becomes available and the schedule firms up the initial estimate usually (not always) comes down. Some of the pressure to reduce the estimate admittedly comes from the "customer" who does have an appropriated budget limit. The high initial estimate is how the service providers hedge against the risk of the "unknown unknowns."
I imagine at this point it would be counterproductive to accurately estimate the time and cost involved; people are by now used to undershoots so they'd assume your project would be more costly than it is if you correctly announced its cost.
i'm sure you're right that the price presented was unrealistic, but i think it is always important to point out that a great deal of the increase in estimated total project cost is just a function of the increase in real estate values. if they are to ever build the socal portions of the project they'll need to aquire a lot of privately owned real estate and the price they'd pay is much higher now than it was 15 years ago.
most of the land "in the middle of nowhere" has already been purchased, so those costs aren't going up. but the southern california segments have not been purchased, and the value of that real estate has sky rocketed.
The initiative put a $9.95 billion price tag on the whole thing!
In fact they NEEDED to start there first because LA-Bakersfield was the most important need. We have plenty of passenger rail in central California but none between LA and Bakersfield. So you start there first.
Again, the plan was always to lowball the cost and then try to blackmail the public to put up whatever obscene sum would actually be needed to get over the Tehachapis.
It's not fraud when a politician says "elect me and there will never be a cloudy day" because we all know he is lying.
But it is fraud when advocates- including many subject matter experts- say "approve this taxpayer funded program because it will only cost $9.95 billion and will yield $50 a trip less than 3 hour train trips between LA and San Francisco" knowing that isn't close to true.
But this just shows why California's system of "government by referenda" is pretty bad in my view. It's not "rule of the people" it's rule of the interest groups and campaign professionals who specialize in running ballot initiative campaigns. Personally I'd just change the system rather than trying to enforce rules that the Don Drapers of the political world have to be honest about everything all the time because of course they aren't going to do that, no more than Don Draper is going to admit that buying lipstick isn't going to make you happy.
California's system of government by referenda is how we got marijuana legalization. The politicians were NEVER going to touch this because they are so afraid of looking soft on drugs. It was only because there was an option to bring this to voters that we got the ball rolling.
It's a good system. If it requires that sponsors of projects be more honest about them, that's a good thing too.
In any event, even in a purely representative democracy, this sort of activity can still discredit advocates of government. Eventually, the voters may get sick of being lied to, and some projects will turn into white elephants such as freeway stubs that constantly remind voters that the folks who promised progress just stole their money instead.
It did. But parts of three strikes were later repealed. We also reformed our auto insurance system by initiative.
I am highly protective of our system. It's great. We allow our voters to make choices. Some of those choices are bad, but we also are able to do things to circumvent politicians when politicians are acting anti-democratically. This is how things should work.
You can argue we need a higher signature requirement. That is true. But the general notion that the voters should be able to overrule politicians is sound. It's more democratic than the alternative. And if you don't like it, don't live here.
We need a new business model for public works projects. Contractors must agree to a fixed price and not get paid until the job is completed, with penalties for delays.
Yes, the bids will be much higher in order to cover all the risks, but at least we'll know the cost up front and can make a decision if that new bridge or rail line is really worth it.
No. That contracting model is only acceptable for turnkey projects, wherein the contractor both designs and builds the new infrastructure. Otherwise, either the contract sets the minute details of the project in such stone that neither the contractor nor public officials can adapt unforeseen technical challenges; or the public officials will have the freedom to insert scope creep to the project until the contractor is guaranteed a loss. The only solution is to take the majority of the work in-house.
How will bringing the work in-house improve performance? Who will have skin in the game and suffer the consequences for cost and schedule overruns? Perhaps large, complex projects can be broken into baby steps, with a fixed price for each step, and a chance to negotiate adjustments (as well as consider new bidders) for subsequent steps.
I think you believe that public works officials are not penalized for cost overruns. I disagree with that premise; I think they lack the tools to appropriately prevent contractors from developing cost overruns through incompetence. Consequently I don't think the problem is a lack of "skin in the game"; the problem is insufficient in-house technical knowledge to break down the "large complex projects…into baby steps".
The conflation of externalities with direct subsidies is egregious and one of those things that exemplifies how journalists often are unconcerned with truth or knowing. They just want to sell a salient story. I lost of lot of respect when speaking with journalists on research I did, because of the questions they asked and the responses they were apparently seeking to elicit.
There is a reason why the public has lost trust in experts and journalists over the years and that is because actors in these positions of authority often abuse the trust of the public.
I think this is true, but also beside the point. I don’t think most journalists care if what they write is literally correct. They start with a “vibe,” do enough research to “confirm” the vibe, and then view their job as writing an interesting, possibly inflammatory story that persuades people of the vibe. Their failures come primarily from indifference for objective facts rather than mere negligence. In the legal world, we’d say they have “scienter,” something worse than negligence, though not always “intent.”
As a former journalist I’d say this is not only untrue but unfair.
You’re criticizing journalists for being one-sided and promoting an agenda, while many others criticize journalists for “both sidesing” every story. Which is it? Because it’s hard to see how it’s both.
I also think journalists get held to an impossibly high standard. Most people in most companies aren’t particularly good at their jobs, don’t know how to interpret data or think critically, and propose solutions to problems that benefit them personally. Should we really be surprised that the same applies sometimes to some journalists?
In general - almost all of my colleagues tried to treat their stories and their subjects fairly and tried to relay the facts accurately. Did they always succeed? No. But as I compare it to other industries, the failure rate was pretty low.
As someone who is held to standards of accuracy in writing, I can tell you that it is in fact not difficult to avoid the pitfalls that most journalists fall into. It is, however, hard to do that while also generating clicks. Objective facts rarely are interesting to a wide audience.
The failure rate is exceedingly high. I’d say 60-70% of articles I read on a subject of which I am an expert contain significant false premises on which the article relies and any objective researcher could identify. But these errors are not random-they invariably point towards making a story more interesting or compelling. That is the fundamental bias of the press.
The people criticizing both sidesing typically just want a propaganda piece that confirms their priors. 90+% of the time they shouldn't be taken seriously
My general critique of both-sides journalism is that it’s lazy and uninformative. Often it’s just summarizing the opposing press releases. But that isn’t the issue I’m referring to here. What I find funny is that multiple posters here have chosen to view the issue purely from a political/partisan lens. My problem, and I think Matt’s, runs much deeper.
The Fallacy of Trust occurs when a person who is an expert on foreign policy picks up a newspaper, flips to the foreign policy section, and cries out “balderdash!”
This isn’t the problem. The problem is that the same person will often read the rest of the newspaper without complaint, quietly updating their opinions bit by bit.
Meanwhile, the expert on local politics will cry out “balderdash!” in the local-politics section, but read about foreign policy without complaint.
If we assume that the newspaper is mostly wrong on both topics, then neither expert is gathering information very effectively.
"You’re criticizing journalists for being one-sided and promoting an agenda, while many others criticize journalists for “both sidesing” every story. Which is it? Because it’s hard to see how it’s both."
That's fair, I would say that the two criticisms are basically in opposition to each other. I share a lot of the same complaints as the person you are responding to, but I would never complain about a journalist "both sidesing" an issue, I wish they would do more of that.
At a larger level, I see this sort of phenomenon online a lot, everyone has an opinion of either "more X" or "less X" and it is really hard to tell that the demands aren't usually incoherent or contradictory, they are issued by 2 separate and opposed groups with the demandees (in this case journalists) as the rope in a tug-of-war.
Ehhh, I feel like there are always 2 groups on both sides criticizing everything. Also I feel like in this case there are really 3 sides. There are plenty of people on both the left and right that love to "work the refs" by accusing media of being too much in favor of the other side, plus a third side that wants journalists to go back to just dry, factual reporting without trying to insert "context" into things.
Ha fair! I’ll just say that since I moved out of journalism and into business I see people misunderstanding, misusing or just plain not having data all time. I can’t even count the number of faulty models I’ve had to correct, or the businesses cases that rest on totally shoddy assumptions.
To be honest when I was in journalism and didn’t know much about business I kind of most assumed companies were well run - now I realize they’re basically in business in spite of themselves.
And are they also illiterate? Their reporting on *all* topics is bad , not just heavily number-y ones. It’s either loose ethics or stupidity (or both).
There are of course exceptions, but it seems to me most media doesn’t reward it.
That’s fair. In a more charitable mood I’d have acknowledged that. But what Dan Quail is describing goes beyond honest mistakes due to haste. It’s being tendentious is one’s approach to prioritize one’s agenda over attempting an honest understanding. I concede the business model of journalism is much to blame but the problem can also be seen in public media
One of my exes is a fairly successful journalist. In general, she was intelligent, intellectually curious, and committed to truth-seeking, but while we were going out, I noticed that she was often willing to make allowances for other journalists-- and especially for personal friends-- when they did things that violated normal common-sense morality. For example, she defended a friend who wrote a fairly cruel Gawker piece about her horror at finding out that her okCupid date, John Finkel, was a Magic the Gathering champion, even though even by the author's own account, he was pleasant, polite, and didn't do anything objectionable during the date. My ex argued that this sort of piece was fair game even though normal people would find publicly humiliating a date who hadn't done anything wrong pretty reprehensible.
One of the factors that probably informed my ex's response was that the piece's author experienced a pretty intense backlash, at least some of which was disproportionate and/or misogynistically flavored (death threats, people saying that the author should be raped). I get the sense that journalists in the current era have a strong siege/bunker mentality. Thanks to Meta/Google/etc, their industry's historical revenue model is broken and individual journalists' jobs are extremely precarious. And thanks to social media, any given piece of reporting on a remotely controversial topic will draw a big, hostile response, much of which will be in bad faith and come from obviously terrible people *even in cases where the reporting in question is actually bad*.
In this sort of context, it's pretty understandable/human normal that journalists are inclined to both circle the wagons and defend behavior that they wouldn't normally endorse. Unfortunately, this becomes a significant problem for the rest of us because we often have to rely on them for information. I don't see the problem getting better until journalism finds a more stable economic model again.
Your example reminds me of how irritating it is that journalists write about their bad dates instead of writing about Sudan, or really any actual news. In the last twenty years, language arts teachers have assigned a lot of essays about how the students feel about various things. Go back to assigning essays about John C. Fremont or the motif of yellow in Crime and Punishment! I don't care about your damn feelings unless I know you personally.
Unfortunately, your preferences are in the minority, writing about bad dates gets lots of clicks (especially if it's inflammatory or controversial), and its economics are much better than those of reporting on the civil war in Sudan. I get the sense that most journalists would themselves prefer to spend more time on substantive stories; but the market is not friendly to that desire. (Business journalism tends to be a bit more substantive precisely because it has an audience that's both eager and able to actually pay for substantive reporting.)
It is crazy that you mention that specific incident (I was a semi-professional MTG player at the time). It was so weird to me, because the existence of the piece, and the reaction to it, were obviously done for terribly short-sighted reasons. As you point out, humiliating a date because of their slightly weird hobby is not a nice thing to do, but it has layers of additional context which pick at people's identities (and thus make them defensive).
The thing is, this wasn't just any Magic the Gathering player, but the "GOAT," who is also a successful hedge fund manager, and everyone who talks to him acknowledges he is super-smart and kind. So, you had this perfect storm of "incel"-adjacent subcultures arguing this "proves" women only want to date "Chads," MTG players saying this just shows how stupid and shallow non-gamers are, and feminists saying just because you don't agree with this woman's preferences, doesn't mean they are invalid. (There was also a ton of abuse heaped on the journalist for her own appearance, by aggrieved MtG players who felt she wasn't "hot enough" to even be criticizing their champion).
I remember thinking at the time, while obviously this *particular journalist* is rejecting someone for shallow and stupid reasons, but people do things for shallow and stupid reasons all the time, so this particular couple would never have worked out anyway. The actual "problem," if you want to call it that, is the idea that journalists should use their specific personal feelings and interactions as emblematic of wider society, and that they need to give themselves social license for why this specific thing they don't like is a Problem. If you need to invent "red flags" to explain why you didn't click with someone, then you'll probably just setting yourself up to be lonely, but if you write an article about it trying to go viral, you're probably setting up lots of impressionable people to be lonely along with you!
These examples are specific deductions, in contrast to a carbon tax, which is a separate new tax. It required action to create the MID. The lack of a carbon tax is inaction.
"Federal income tax falls on income left over after certain expenses" is no different from "social security and medicare taxes fall on wage income" or "capital gains tax falls on investment income minus investment losses" or "property tax falls on the value of owned real estate."
All taxes have a defined scope that leaves certain potentially taxable stocks or flows on the table.
Hey wouldn't you know it. Just yesterday the Surgeon General spread a pile of misinformation about gun violence. Stuff like counting 19 year olds in shootings of children, switching back and forth between wildly different definitions of "mass shootings", implying "assault weapons" get used in a significant amount of crime, cherry picking the timing to avoid the new data that shows violent crime dropping, etc etc.
If there's any one set of people that need to recover some credibility after absolutely lighting it on fire during COVID it's the public health officials. Acting like the Surgeon General has anything whatever meaningful to say about gun policy as a "public health crisis" is simply pouring gasoline on the ashes.
I can’t litigate the veracity of the SG’s claims. But I’ll say this- even if everything he said was 100% correct it was still a bad idea. Guns are one of the most polarizing issues in the country, and it is really tendentious to lump them in under “public health”. With so many other actual public health issues that he could be addressing, this just burns credibility for no apparent gain.
Brings back memories of the early 80s when Physicians for Social Responsibility warned us that nuclear war was a public health issue on which they were experts.
Apparently, as I recall their saying, a nuclear war would be deleterious for people's health.
I guess they're still around peddling this stuff but the air went out of the balloon when the Berlin Wall fell, thankfully.
Yeah that made me want to scream. A good example of how the liberal staffer class is not acting like there is a contentious election coming up that depends on much more moderate swing voters.
"this just burns credibility for no apparent gain"
Yes, I'm barely kidding when I suggest someone should check the Surgeon General's financial records for large monetary transfers from anonymous Cypriot bank accounts because it's very hard to explain what the Hell he was thinking otherwise.
Guns and cars are the leading reasons that people who would otherwise live long healthy lives instead die young. And it’s not particularly close! Obviously they remain that way because they are popular, or they would have been fixed already.
Successful public health interventions usually intersect culture, and people are usually attached to culture. How we deal with human waste, how we cook food and manage kitchens, how we manage animals, how we send off the dead, how we welcome children into the world, etc. Possibly the biggest coup ever for public health was the introduction of a quasi-religious ritual, handwashing, into our daily lives - multiple times a day!
Congress. The Surgeon General doesn't have regulatory authority over guns and cars. In fact, you say they run the public health system, but what regulatory authority do they actually have?
Let me paste here a random NYT reader's response (not my own):
"This sounds like a great extension of the authority of doctors and public health scientists. I'd like to offer a few more areas for input from the Surgeon General.
1. Foreign policy - clearly large numbers of people die in wars, so why isn't the Surgeon General in charge of our foreign policy?
2. Vehicular accidents killed nearly 40,000 Americans last year. Why isn't the Surgeon General consulted on automobile design?
3. 13,000 people died in fires last year. When will the Surgeon General weigh in on Fire Codes for residential buildings
4. Almost 20,000 died from falls in 2022. The Surgeon General needs to speak up on the design of stairwells.
Really all of politics can be placed under the rubric of Public Health. There's no need for political parties or elections at all."
I am not very exercised about gun rights myself (don’t own any, seems like an obviously legitimate thing for a government to regulate, odd to me how hot other libertarian minded people get over it) but I AM exercised over mission creep in regulatory agencies. This was a crazy move. True believer? Misguided political calculation? Red meat for the base? I am not sure but another in a VERY long line of examples of Biden agency pick being completely off the rails. A lot of the stuff Biden personally does I think is reasonable but his administration is taking crazy pills from the SEC, DOJ, FTC etc etc. too bad he is running against Clown College Republicans so there is no sane alternative.
Definitely true believer. If you listen to his loneliness interviews, he believes he can use his position to put a spotlight on tough problems facing American society so that we can try to find solutions together. For loneliness, this was a thoughtful message. Unfortunately, for gun violence, putting things in the spotlight never seems to help us make progress.
I think it's very weird to act like car safety seat regulation and shaken baby videos make sense but talking about gun deaths in children is totally out of bounds, given the number of deaths associated annually with each modality.
By the way, the pendulum has swung on car seat stuff, too -- we now require car seats way out in places where there is little good data to suggest that we're averting any meaningful number of deaths.
Pretty sure there are not single issue car seat owners who will now disregard the opinions of the surgeon general out of (in this instance, justified) mistrust!
Also guns are deliberately made to kill people on purpose. You don’t need a medical expert to tell you they are dangerous to kids!
But I also think it doesn’t make sense to selectively issue warnings about some things that kill 30,000 people a year and not other things that kill 30,000 people a year, just because some of them have partisans and are supposed to be “obviously dangerous”. It makes sense to just classify them on the basis of the actual harms caused here and leave it to the economists and politicians to figure out the costs of mitigating these harms, and the cultural values involved.
The significant distinction is when the deaths are the item in question functioning as intended. Government issued guidance related to accidents, externalities, defects and malfunctions are one thing. Guns functioning as intended killing people when those killings are unlawful is a criminal justice issue, not a public health or consumer safety issue. Gun accident and malfunction deaths are on a tiny scale compared to car accidents or lung cancer from cigarettes. They're something like half that of swimming pools.
I literally don’t understand what you’re saying. How does being a criminal justice issue make something not a public health issue? Does violence cease being relevant to health once there’s a law against it? Should we be tracking legal pollution deaths separately from illegal pollution deaths?
Also, aren’t suicides the big public health concern from guns, even more than anything illegal or accidental?
Anyway, I agree that the surgeon general should have a series of warnings about automobiles and cigarettes. I don’t think anyone is denying that, other than maybe North Carolina politicians who still think its politically problematic to engage in culture war issues like talking about deaths caused by legal products.
I wouldn’t mind putting Smith & Wesson in a position where they had to say under oath that their products are intended to help people commit suicide, perform robberies, etc.
That’s true, but surely can also parse the difference between “hey you might not know this but activity X Y Z is actually quite dangerous to your health—like having a fireplace” and “we asserting regulatory authority under public health laws after failing to win the political fight with direct legislation to curb something that everyone knows is, and is in fact specifically designed to be, dangerous”.
That second thing burns trust that serves an important social role for the first fireplace thing. Now people will think you don’t like fireplaces because of some climate agenda or whatever, not because they are in fact a surprisingly large health hazard.
The surgeon general isn’t asserting regulatory authority, is he? Does the surgeon general actually have any regulatory authority? I thought the warnings on cigarettes were ordered by a lawsuit settlement or by Congress, even though they quote the surgeon general in order to get some respect for the claim.
I think it's definitely elite misinformation when they don't bring up that fact. But I think the public health agencies are actually quite good about always talking about guns both in the context of suicides and homicides, unlike other public actors talking about guns.
I think politics is inseparably part of any political appointee’s job. If the Surgeon General’s statements on guns will have bad effects, that’s all the reason he needs not to make them.
The "have large gatherings all you want if it's a BLM protest; the rest of you, no effing way" thing was (rightfully) probably the single biggest destroyer of trust & credibility in the public health establishment in many a year.
One key difference about them (in most cases) is that car safety seats and not shaking your baby are steps _you_ take to keep _your_ kids alive. And getting that information out to parents is useful (like SIDS information etc). This is consistent with "smoking kills (you)"
Gun regulation is different.
Exception: Maybe if you want to talk about gun safes or keeping ammo separate, or trigger locks. But does the SG talk about Smoke Detectors? (A quick google search isn't find anything - and I'd lump those together)
We definitely got smoke detector stuff in the home safety portion of our pre-discharge teaching. Also electrical outlet covers, locking away poisons, braces on bookcases to keep them from falling over...
We got handouts. We saw videos. Every product you buy has instructions with pictures and big warning labels. And that includes a lot of products not even meant for children! Seriously, look at the plastic packaging in your Amazon box sometime.
I'm not sure how much of that you can trace to the surgeon general, personally, but going through all the new parent classes at the hospital and starting to "see" all those labels and stuff really opened my eyes to just how weird we treat guns in comparison to everything else that might kill kids, proportionately speaking.
It's like you said: there are really basic innovations, like trigger locks, that are cheap, easy to use, and would take up thirty seconds of the videos I watched, right after outlet covers and before car seat installation. And we don't do that. It's empirically odd, even if you know it is driven by political realities.
My quick googling of trigger locks suggests they aren't so widely accepted as effective. They break easily, there are many other easy to implement alternatives, and many guns already come with conceptually similar safety measures that are more effective.
But in terms of what's weird I don't that guns are such an outlier. There must be 50 different poisonous chemicals in my house right now from household cleaners to paints to roach poisons. There are also several species of very poisonous berries growing in my yard, a couple of swimming pools, a pond and a stream that floods in walking distance, And in this age of harm reduction for overdoses, a million americans are walking around with lethal doses of fentanyl.
Unintentional gun deaths age 14 and under totaled 84 in 2022, compared to 202 accidental poison deaths and 500 drownings. There was 175 gun suicides in the 10-14 age group and 42 poison suicides. These numbers don't look very different, but there's few regs on what legal medicines or household cleaners I keep in my house
As an aside, didn't it turn out that "shaken baby syndrome" was mostly a moral panic sort of thing that got made up in a couple over-sensationalized trials of like babysitters?
Sort of. I think "shaken baby syndrome" in particular was kind of overblown as a specific thing, but the general category of "trauma" really is one of the major causes of infant death, and people really do abuse infants for infant-specific reasons that go beyond the abuse visited on children more generally (i.e. stuff like the pronounced lack of sleep in new parents and the way that a colicky baby crying really does make some people kind of crazy past a certain point). The videos we watched in the hospital specifically dealing with shaken baby were really more about managing anger or depression when around infants, so clearly someone got the message.
Eh, shaking a baby is in fact more dangerous to them than you might expect in a sleep deprived and angry moment with a screaming infant, and those moments come at you faster than you might expect too. I have not researched it but I suspect it has had some impact and its plausibly useful training for new parents. Don’t shake the baby ever no matter what! Don’t give the baby water (it’s bad for them)! Get the vitamin K shot! Be alert for post partum depressed on and psychosis!
I certainly don't doubt that you can do great harm shaking an infant. As I recall though the "shaken baby syndrome" thing was about a medical "expert witness" claiming they could, like, look at an autopsy and based on certain bruising or whatever claim someone had to have shaken this baby beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe there was also some thing about, "the babysitter could shake your kid and they'd seem fine when you get home then randomly collapse and die later." It was entirely prosecutorial pseudoscience nonsense.
We looked heavily into this and (this was 9 years ago so things may have been updated) but yeah:
Loose blankets - I think it caused C02 to pool up around the infant's mouth and nose and they don't have all the normal reflexes/ability to move/wakeup for better air.
We were told under no uncertain terms to keep those things out of our crib - and definitely used "sleep sacks" which couldn't get loose.
It's like the Secret Congress. People will listen to experts on the first two issues because they're not polarizing. The latter is, so "expertise" isn't an issue and your words will simply feed the culture war. So why do it?
Granted this is not a nuanced interpretation, there is definitely some value in trying to understand the gun violence problem through a public health framework, but making the question of gun possession a public health issue leads people to think you are claiming that owning a gun is akin to having a disease.
I mostly agree with this analysis, in the sense that I think "public health" as a concept gets way, way, way overstretched by people who want to use it for all kinds of stuff--climate change immediately comes to mind--and I genuinely think that is a bad thing that devalues the field. Something that is used to mean everything eventually comes to mean nothing, and I think "public health" is really in danger of falling into that space, if it hasn't already. And I say that having taught undergrad public health classes for years; I'm lamenting what is, in my mind, a very bad thing.
My sense is that going for "public health" arguments is, in the minds of people who do it, One Weird Trick for sneaking around certain elements of politics that they find frustratingly intractable and/or distasteful. I am squarely in the camp of people who think that One Weird Trick never, ever works and that usually One Weird Trick thinking actually makes your problems worse.
But.
Two things I also think are true:
1) This is part of why I have repeatedly gone with the car seat parallel throughout this discussion. No one thinks that driving cars is a disease, but we lecture parents about it literally at the hospital, and it is treated explicitly with a public health framing, and it's fine. There are actually other parallels that I think are useful, such as the fact that car deaths can be, like gun deaths, the result of all kinds of actors with all kinds of motivations, and we don't have to argue about "reckless driving deaths" versus "accident deaths" versus "malfunction deaths"--no one cares. We just (correctly, IMO) treat car seats as a single-point technological response to a set of things that used to kill kids on the regular and we don't sweat it, because that approach works. I think we should be that way about guns.
2) A point I have tried to stick to throughout this thread is that I think the discourse around this issue is genuinely odd in a way that is very revealing, not of bad faith, precisely, but of the way in which our discussion of guns is really about all kinds of other stuff--emotional stuff, like how cool people think guns are and how they figure into self-identity--that we are not willing to say or acknowledge or maybe don't even notice in the rush to rehash some specific set of talking points or pre-baked opinions that comport with our feelings.
It's the same reason why I replied to the original post about assault weapons and was like, "there is literally no mention of assault weapons in the ten tweets you linked." And I think this inability to even recognize that we are not having the discussion, much less have an actual discussion, is a huge blind spot and a huge problem for some big-ticket issues like guns. It is why I keep using words like "odd" and comparing gun discussion and harm reduction measures to other things (again: car seats, shaken babies) that cut a different way, emotionally and politically. People think--truly believe--that they are being hyper rationale and folks on the other side are irrational in a way that is just fundamentally untrue. I recognize that in part because I saw it so clearly (and maybe wrote about it less clearly) in my prior research. But that's my intervention: I have tried to avoid stating particular policy preferences because I think that reckoning with the incongruence is more likely to achieve something useful than for us to all rehash policy territory that has already been over-tilled.
To add to your point, Kaiser routinely asks us, as parents, if we have a gun in the house, along with questions about smoke detectors, gated pools, etc.
I had in mind antitrust enforcement where they have gone bananas, but they have been maximally aggressive in a couple of other areas I have happened to come across (like opioid litigation) as well. I know I know, cry me a river for the poor Sacklers but it leads me to suspect they are also being unreasonable and political in areas I don't have a view on too.
They also seem to be botching the case against Trump, which strikes me as a real "you come at the king best not miss" situation, but I have been deliberately avoiding details on the many legal actions against Trump so perhaps they are doing a better job that it seems like from down here buried in the sand.
Judge Aileen Cannon has gone rogue, is the problem there. She’s like some kind of … some sort of unsecured bit of armament, the right idiom isn’t coming to me.
After actually experiencing a actual, serious public health crisis just four years ago, you'd think that it would teach people to stop using that phrase for every thing out there they deem to be bad, but alas...
Meh. I read over the ten tweets published in your link, and I think you can quibble with some of the details--I really wish people would start disaggregating the degree to which suicide is more the real problem than murder with guns--but there isn't even a mention of mass shootings or assault weapons in those ten tweets, and I didn't hear him mention it in the little video.
If you acknowledge that bullets causing trauma by their passage through human tissue are a major cause of child death in this country, that seems like a public health problem, in the sense that those deaths are highly preventable. I guess you could argue about whether it constitutes a "crisis" or not, but nobody gets mad when you want to deal with, say, lead poisoning, and that doesn't even kill kids. I had to watch a movie about shaken baby syndrome to even leave the hospital. I had to watch a demonstration of how to correctly install a car seat.
I am a gun owner, licensed to hunt in the state of Texas, and no one said anything about it.
Harm prevention is this constant thing you are being messaged on when you are a parent, especially in the early years--here's how to do child seat safely, here's how to lay your kid to sleep, here's which products are safe or non-safe, etc. So honestly the brackets around doing policy on guns and kids in our society always seems really odd, by comparison. I understand the politics that lead to that outcome, but as "elite misinformation," I think this one is pretty weak sauce.
I'm not saying that you can't find some real elite misinformation whoppers about guns out there. But this particular tweet thread doesn't look like it to me.
But the "public health" message if often "we should pass legislation", not "be more safe with your guns". The latter seems like something the SG should talk about, but not the former
I'm pretty sure that the car seats have labels on them because someone passed a law. I know for a fact that the shaken baby video thing is done by law, because I'm a registered nurse and got that in my training (even though, to be clear, I'm critical care rather than L&D).
Whether you want to talk speed limits and licensure and street lights or alcohol and marijuana usage or air pollution, laws are how we do public safety and health in this country. If you aren't talking about legislating, you are kind of just blowing smoke.
It might not be politically smart for the SG to talk about legislation that will irritate people (like you, I guess), but it's pretty nonsensical on its face to say, "man, officials charged with public health matters shouldn't talk about legislation, since that is the main way we do public health in this country."
I don’t think that’s nonsensical. Legislation isn’t their department. I don’t want Trump’s SG talking about how we need to build the wall to prevent disease from spreading inside the US.
I think the SG should talk about the number of injuries and their causes, but not necessarily about what particular interventions are best. To know which interventions are best takes expertise beyond health and medicine, since interventions have implications outside of health or medicine.
Sure - fwiw, if the OP is representing the SG's communication accurately, it sounds like in this case a big part of the problem is not that they were staying in those bounds, but cherry-picking and using the data in misrepresentative ways. There's no reason (beyond I guess politics) to imply that assault weapons kill more people than pistols, or to say violent gun crime is increasing right at the moment (as opposed to higher than it was 5 years ago), etc...
Yeah, I've avoided clicking through to the statements myself, but those implications, if actually there in the statements and not just the reconstructions being tossed around to make the surgeon general sound bad, do sound bad.
Also, suicide is specifically the reason I do not myself own any firearms. I don’t think I am suicidal guy myself but the data shows being confident about that is pretty dangerous. I get sad! Sometimes I am drunk! Apparently people kill themselves impulsively! Not worth the risk.
The fall would be terrifying. If you shoot yourself in the head, you don’t even have time to hear the report. Your brain has been destroyed before it has time to process the sound
I guess I like interposing “willing to tolerate a scary fall” between myself and suicide in the absence of an informed consent paradigm. But you places your bet and takes you chances!
You can just shoot yourself in the head on the way down and save half of that terrifying-ness. And, if you change your mind half way, oh wait...never mind.
"If you acknowledge that bullets causing trauma by their passage through human tissue are a major cause of child death in this country, that seems like a public health problem, in the sense that those deaths are highly preventable."
"I am a gun owner, licensed to hunt in the state of Texas, and no one said anything about it."
This confuses me. Are you saying that we need the Surgeon General to encourage warning labels be added to ammunition saying that bullets cause trauma by their passage through human tissue because people who use guns might not know that?
It's an interesting question! But as your comment highlights, it's really odd that some of the commenters want to act as though discussing it was a strange choice for the SG's office in a world where I can't crack open my beer without seeing a message about drinking in pregnancy, and there are calorie counts plastered all over the menu boards of every junk food place I eat at.
Clearly, we seem to be very into discussing harm reduction stuff, and we have apparently as a society decided to slap warning labels on everything. Given that such is the case, it becomes really interesting to think about what we don't want to discuss or don't want to label or whatever. And I'm sure you think all that stuff is dumb, but it didn't bother you so much that you wanted to post about it; the gun thing did. That is interesting information--it tells you something.
To put it differently, does the Pennsylvania legislature really think that my child's lifetime risk of dying from being shaken is great than the risk of dying from a gunshot wound inflicted by a weapon that I own and store in my house? That is, statistically speaking, just a deeply weird claim.
FWIW, my own academic background in technology and public policy (see my comment elsewhere in these threads on radiation, or just check out the website in my bio link) plus my own libertarian-ish pragmatism tend to make me skeptical of labels versus technical solutions for harm reduction. But the fact that you, a guy living in 2024 America, are "confused" about warning labels as though labeling things isn't a thing we do everywhere on, near as I can tell, every conceivable product and flat surface in the United States basically captures the core strangeness of the debate and the way in which people--and I argued in my book on radiation therapy that all of us are prone to falling into this trap because it is core to how our minds work--don't see the contradictions that we don't want to see.
How much are the commenters here saying the SG shouldn't talk about gun deaths at all (particularly in terms of accurately providing accidental and suicide death/injury risk?)? I'm not reading much of that view, and what I am reading, or might sympathize with, is that we do have a lot of sometimes-too-obvious warning labels when it comes to some things. At a certain point when they are too ubiquitous and obvious people tend to tune them out, ie "known to cause cancer in the state of California" stickers are on literally everything.
Rather it seems that there's more griping about the SG misrepresenting and cherry-picking data to make political points, ie violent crime is rising or assault weapons kill more than pistols, playing fast and loose with the definition of mass shooting, etc.
You misunderstood my comment. I was asking for clarification in what you were saying, and not assigning a value judgement. Sorry if that was unclear.
As to your broader point, I think that we as a society and the SG and similar institutions in particular should do a much better job of examining the results of actions. If we do X and expect to accomplish Y, then we should really examine whether we actually accomplish Y.
My issue with the Surgeon General's statements are that he's doing X (warn about guns) to accomplish Y (decrease gun deaths), but it doesn't accomplish Y and instead accomplishes Z (decreases the credibility of the Surgeon General's office).
This applies as in a broader way with labeling generally. We've made it so ubiquitous that its mostly ignored. California wanted to warn people of things that cause cancer, but now everything causes cancer and most people don't pay any attention to the warning. The action of X to accomplish Y failed, but there hasn't been a change in approach, there's just a doubling down.
I had great hopes that there was finally political will to address this problem head on, discuss the real-world efficacy of different harm reduction strategies, and advocate with real donor money for more empirically defensible legislative approaches, but then the No Labels people explained that I had misunderstood their organization's political mission and invited me to leave the rally…
"it's really odd that some of the commenters want to act as though discussing it was a strange choice for the SG's office in a world where I can't crack open my beer without seeing a message about drinking in pregnancy, and there are calorie counts plastered all over the menu boards of every junk food place I eat at."
It would not be a strange choice for the SG's office to talk about gun violence. It was a strange choice to decide to (i) frame it as a "public health emergency," when violent crime rates in fact are still well-below historical highs and are dropping from their recent spikes, especially given that "public health emergency" is now well-known as a dog whistle for about 45% of the population, and (ii) do it just months before what is expected to be a close election when, AIUI, the clear weight of evidence is that discussion of gun control in general does far more to motivate anti-gun control voters than pro-gun control voters (this is explicitly why Matt discourages Democrats from talking about gun control).
Sure, but if the SG is implying that assault weapons and mass shooting cause most bullet wounds, or that violent crime is rising, or that he has useful information on how to avoid becoming a shooting victim then he's overstepping his role and being misleading.
Interestingly, one thing that has slightly influenced my opinion on guns is recently taking a break from academia to become a bedside critical care nurse and caring for people who got shot (in the parlance of the business, "GSWs"). I just recently had two GSWs at once, a middle-aged person and a young 20s person, so it has been at the forefront of my mind. Summer is kind of GSW season.
I haven't come to any major revelations or anything, in the sense that I had already given a lot of thought to my positions on the policy side, and I remain comfortable with those. But I underappreciated the mental pain and suffering these people experience, even apart from their injuries. Many patients have this deep sense of how the world has been upended--a kind of "why me" of "unsafeness + unfairness," I guess--that I don't really see as often in, for example, motor vehicle accident victims (which also spike in summer), even in cases like a small-caliber bullet going through the thigh that didn't, strictly speaking, do that much damage in a life-threatening-injuries sense.
Anecdata, obviously, but it has been on my mind this summer.
Gun violence is fully baked into the medical establishment as its own unique health concern. Whenever I read a public health paper or search for CDC data or homicide, suicide, injury from assault, the harms due to guns are usually the focus. Other causes are either split off or flat-out ignored. One would get the impression that jumping off a building or stabbing someone is completely out of their area of concern
As a medical professional very much involved in the issue of suicide, I can say that is simply not true. The primary question is why do people try to kill themselves, regardless of method. at the same time, it is a fair observation that access to a gun makes a suicide attempt more likely to be lethal and easier to act on impulse
Kind of hilariously one of the batshit nonsense stats in this SGs report says 4% of people have fired a gun in self defense. 4%! That's a wildly huge number even by irrationally pro-gun standards.
yep, this is not something an SG would be informed on.
That said - my read of the data is that that's probably relatively small, and just like many (but not all) gun suicides would likely be replaced with other methods w/o guns, a fair fraction of criminals just replace gun-carriers with softer targets.
Not to mention that young men whose rivals also have guns shooting each other instead of fist/knife fighting is the biggest driver of gun homicide by far.
Getting the actual number of crimes prevented is hard of course and estimates vary. But I'm pretty convinced the number is actually pretty large because most of the time when something DOESN'T happen nobody records it.
I've personally been in situations when once the other party realized that we were armed they just backed off. Nobody ever called the cops or anything like that.
What situation were you in? I’ve lived in the middle of a major city for 20 years amongst millions of people and I’ve never been anywhere close to such a situation.
I'm not who you were responding to, but I was with a friend, driving back to his house, when another driver was overcome with road rage and followed us home. He stepped out with a knife, and my friend stepped out with a pistol. The other guy got back in his car ASAP and peeled out, never to be seen again.
At the same time though, this is somewhere that international comparisons are useful. The US is a high crime country for our level of wealth compared to wealthy OECD countries. Even if guns in isolation prevent some crimes, they do seem to cause more crime overall (and cause certain crimes to become deadlier).
I don't think controlling for wealth is sufficient or even all that useful. The correlatation between poverty / wealth and violent crime is just not that strong, in international comparisons or domestically between states and localities. Fun fact: when I last looked it up the lowest homicide big city (over a million residents, I think was the filter) in the US is also the poorest: El Paso, Texas.
Violent crime in the US seems to be more about cultural factors. Homicide is super-concentrated in American descendants of slavery to the exclusion of almost every other ethnic group. Our violence statistics look totally different if you only look at Black immigrants + every other ethnic group.
“ just like many (but not all) gun suicides would likely be replaced with other methods w/o guns,”
I don’t believe that’s true. A large percentage of suicides are impulsive acts. I believe there are studies of putting pills in blister packets and the act of having to break out each pill and form a pile and then swallow them all deters a lot of people. With a gun it’s very easy to commit an impulsive act. If you have a gun in your bedroom you just have to get it and shoot yourself. If you want to jump off a bridge you have to drive to the bridge, find a place to park, walk out to the middle, etc.
I agree that large % might not happen, at least on that particularly attempt. But that's not incompatible with saying that many others are less impulsive.
If I recall correctly the blister pack law (in the UK maybe?) resulting in a significant reduction is suicides. So it’s not as if one method not being availed means people automatically find another. A method isn’t readily available the mental criss passes and they go on with their lives.
Usually? Sometime they are if the researcher is focusing on drug overdose deaths (which kills over twice as many people). But I see CDC papers and reports on gun suicides and gun homicides, leaving out other causes, more often than I see reports on all causes broken down by mechanism. Google and see for yourself if you're curious.
It breaks out suicides by firearm, suffocation, and poisoning. I’m a bit surprised to learn that firearms are a majority of suicides, suffocation is a quarter, and poisoning 1/8 - I would have thought poisoning was closer to firearms in number of suicides!
Isn't a large fraction of that just that the rate of success is much higher with a firearm? As I recall that's responsible for men having a higher suicide rate, despite women having a higher attempt rate.
Well, alright - I take your word for it. In the past I remember my experience being different! I remember a morning where I was very frustrated trying to find information on overall homicides or suicides because the entire first page of google was just on the gun variety.
Now that I'm doing a quick search it was probably homicide, because that one is currently about half "gun homicides" in the first page of google. It's possible this was different 2 or 3 years ago? (or my memory's wrong?, take it fwiw).
In either case, my subjective experience of digging around cdc data and associated reporting is they sometimes put an inordinate amount of emphasis on gun, given the mechanism is not necessarily the only or the key driver of suicide / homicide
I had to scroll down farther to see the breakout by method, but this one also showed the same three methods by gender, with all three being close for women, while men have a strong lean towards firearms.
Related to your comment and something you and I like to follow, SCOTUS just ruled that the entities suing the Surgeon General over pandemic messaging do not have standing: [https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-411_3dq3.pdf] Alito/Thomas/Gorsuch dissent.
I'm not conflicted on the merits: social media companies have agency and they could have told the White House to go pound sand. Standing always gives me a headache and I too will need to read over it, but I find it plausible to deny it on first blush.
I almost see it the other way around. I'm convinced the government has manipulated the incentives of these companies to get them to act as censors on their behalf in a manner the government can't themselves under the constitution. We shouldn't have to rely on the corporate entities to shield the public from the government's bad behavior.
I'm highly skeptical that any social media user can actually discern a cognizable injury causally connected to Fed influence on social media moderation decisions.
Facebook has been pretty openly begging for the chance to re-write section 230 or some executive order in a manner that entrenches their market share for like a decade. Colluding with the regulators to do censorious content moderation is how they get to be in the room when that stuff gets written. It's classic regulatory capture. It just happens to have greater 1A implications than usual in this case.
Beyond what Dave wrote, I'm shocked you would even need to ask that. The federal regulatory and prosecutorial apparatus is enormous and being considered a "good citizen" by the feds is often the difference in how they approach all kinds of things.
"That's a nice Section 230 protection you've got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it," followed by floating a proposal to "reinterpret" it's application.
The light impression I've started forming of her is - I disagree with her on some real issues but she doesn't seem to be a "hack". I don't follow SCOTUS that closely this is more of the sort of zeitgeist I'm picking up.
Comments like this are interesting because they demonstrate people talking out of their depth of expertise. Sometimes the experts actually just know more than you. Age breaks of 1-19 are extremely common in public health statistics and reporting because of the way underlying data is reported, which is the case with the mortality statistics cited in the Surgeon General's report.
I'm guessing most people would reasonably think public health officials should be somewhat concerned with life expectancy. Gun deaths are a key driver of lower life expectancy in the US. Because gun deaths disproportionately affect younger people, they have have a disproportionate effect on life expectancy overall compared to more common causes of death like heart disease or cancer. This is also true for other forms of accidental death that are leading causes of death among young individuals.
If Matt had a post focusing on why US life expectancy is lower than other countries and he mentioned guns, I'm guessing you wouldn't say he's spreading misinformation. It's still perfectly reasonable to have different values for society and say guns should be legal, widely accessible, etc., but that doesn't mean we should ignore some of the consequences of making guns widely accessible either and debate the various tradeoffs.
The reason including 19 year olds is misleading is that the 19 year olds shooting each other that make up a huge portion of the sample have nothing at all to do with whether your 13 year old is going to be the victim of random gun violence like its a car accident or some shit. "Children" don't randomly get killed by guns in any meaningful numbers. Certain subsets of 17, 18, 19 year olds shoot each other at a horrifying clip. It's a dramatically misleading way to state the problem.
It's a good thing the scientists who put the report together thought of this issue and use age-adjusted rates when discussing overall gun-related deaths or have comparison groups for similar age cohorts.
Yes, I'm quite sure they very carefully and intentionally considered the necessity that they conform their data to the weasel worded, misinfo talking point: "Firearm violence is now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents—more than car accidents or drug overdoses."
It's definitely not true among children, but it's written in the weaselly way where they can say "and" means children plus adolescents additively, then they have to use the expansive definition of adolescent that includes legal young adults to keep it from being an outright lie. It's willfully unclear in a classic misinfo manner.
Taking Dave Coffin's representations at face value, I don't think the problem is grouping ages 1-19 together; the problem is using the term "children" to refer to this 1-19 age group. This is a problem because the term "children" as most Americans use it excludes 18-19 year olds (and often 16-17 year olds).
Good thing the report describes individuals age 1-19 as "children and adolescents" then, which is consistent with standard definitions and convention in both public health and medicine.
Can you link to some resource on the standard definition of "children and adolescents"?
I'm reading the advisory* and the term is also used in reference to the 0-17 age range (p. 21) and 1-18 (p. 25).
It might sound as if I'm being pedantic, but I suspect that 18 and 19 year olds are doing a lot of work in the claim that firearm violence has become the number one cause of death among children and adolescents. I would be very curious whether this claim is still true if "children and adolescents" is instead defined using the 0-17 or 1-18 age ranges.
To me I'm wondering "why children and adolescents" in the first place?
Patterns of death for 5-14 year olds are very different from said patterns i 15+, 1-5 or especially 0 year olds (infants). Infants die frequently, relatively speaking, of all sorts of things. 1-5 year olds die much less and usually of a subset of the natural causes that kill infants. 5-14 year olds rarely die of non-natural causes of any kind but around 15 or 16 suicides, traffic accidents, homicide and overdoses all enter the picture.
So if we're specifically talking about gun deaths, we're talking about very different patterns in children vs adolescents, just as if we'd all intuitively understand that senior citizens, infants and 20 year olds are exposed to very different sorts of gun risks.
The actual report itself isn't overly focused on children; you're over-indexing on Mr. Coffin's perspective of the report and how it might be biased rather than the actual content of the report itself. The report does provide descriptive information on age-related patterns in gun violence, but it also discusses racial, geographic, and socioeconomic differences as well. Pretty standard stuff.
Sure, here you go. Most mortality statistics are reported in 5 year blocks (e.g., 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, 15-19...), although if want raw or crude-adjusted rates for single-year intervals, those also are available for mortality data. For example, cancer epidemiologists often study cancer incidence among "adolescents and young adults," which by their convention covers individuals from the ages 15-39 (note the 5 year blocks).
It is true that gun deaths increase through adolescence and young adulthood and then decline with aging, but the report isn't trying to hide this trend at all. This is a pattern that's also true for other forms of accidental death like drug overdose/automobile accidents.
I looked at the pages you referenced, and it looks like the differences in definition in the report are due to differences in how the cited papers described their study population. "Children" and "adolescents" aren't mutually exclusive categories, so there is some overlap and can mean researchers operationalize their studies in slightly different ways. Some of this is just the choice of individual researchers/teams, which can make summary reports like this a little confusing. I think a good faith approach would be to recognize this is an issue for all scientific reports summarizing a body of literature rather than anything unique to this specific report on gun violence.
"It is true that gun deaths increase through adolescence and young adulthood and then decline with aging, but the report isn't trying to hide this trend at all, and think a reason. This is a pattern that's also true for other forms of accidental death like drug overdose/automobile accidents."
This is a wild misrepresentation. 768 children under 15 killed by gun in 2022 vs 1138 who died in auto fatalities in 2021. This is a plausible comparison of "accidental" or random deaths. The situation flip flops dramatically when you add in young adults who are mostly actively involved in shooting at each other.
As I read this, I thought about a recent column in the NYT about wine titled In Defense of Wine. The author writes sanely about how important wine has been to humans over the centuries and links to an article--and I've seen others like this--that talks about the overstatement first the EU and now the US takes about moderate drinking. Whether it's about eating meat, drinking a glass of wine, or having a baby, we elites love nothing more than to cherry pick science to convince ourselves not to do things that, in general, for most, aren't that catastrophic. This seems to me to be a part and parcel of why we aren't having very much fun.
I also read that article and appreciated the take. It's not like we're going to unlock some super level of intelligence or health by avoiding moderate drinking.
Yeah--I was pretty blown away by how low the relative risk is for most. The headlines would make you think otherwise. I'm in my mid 60s and, for me, all those glasses of wine over the years with friends and family are totally worth giving up three months of life.
"Based on the research that formed the basis of Canada’s new guidelines, which he helped write, Stockwell walked me through the risks for a woman my age: If I indulged in, say, around six drinks a week, he said, I was increasing my lifetime risk of dying from an alcohol-related cause by a factor of 10, compared with those who drank about only one or two drinks a week. That jump sounded worrisome, until Stockwell put it in context. If I consumed six drinks a week, the risk I was facing of dying of some alcohol-related cause was still, by any measure, small on average — only about 1 percent. And if my risk of all-cause mortality was pretty low — Stockwell assured me that at 53, it was — then any incremental added risk on top of that was also clearly going to be very low.
Stockwell offered me another way of thinking about it, which is even more bottom-line oriented: How much time does a certain amount of drinking shave off your life? For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average, he said. Consume seven alcoholic beverages a week, and that amount goes up to about two and a half months. Those who push five drinks a day or more face the risk of losing, on average, upward of two years, said Stockwell. He emphasized that all those numbers were averages — and that it was impossible to predict the level of impact an individual person would experience."
I cannot help thinking, also, that there are so many confounding effects.
- the average is a weird number because the number of drinks a person can have has a lower bound of zero but an upper bound of, well, a shitton, and is skewed by alcoholism (i.e. the teetotalers do not skew the average as much as the alcoholics do).
- alcoholism will have a host of other life-shortening effects beyond the actual physical effects of drinking. The DUIs, the addictive behavior causing loss of jobs, relationships, etc.
I have not read the studies here but it is hard for me to imagine this is easily controlled for. And so this could make 7 drinks feel much more dangerous than 5 when, really, it's about the same, but the more you drink, the closer you get to the alcoholics, where all the real damage is done. And since you have to represent this as an "average", the curve looks more gradual than it is.
Respectfully, I would just point out that the vast majority of those who drink a few glasses of wine are not alcoholics. I think the conflagration of alcoholism with casual drinking is unfair to the vast majority of the world that can drink with moderation. In the same way that it makes no sense to deny opiates to those, and again these are the vast majority of users, who genuinely need them for short or long-term pain management, simply because there are addicts. And yes, I have personal experience with alcoholics and addicts . I know how devastating those afflictions can be. And I also don’t believe it is ideal to limit the majority simply because something is truly horrific for some. At least when it comes to wine!
I think you are misreading what I wrote. In no way was I implying that casual drinking is alcoholism.
Again, didn't read the study, so I don't know how they controlled for anything. But I think it would be VERY hard to separate people who drink a few glasses of wine, and who do so for their whole lives, and to track them over time as a group, and measure them against a different group, who drinks a few more glasses of wine, and so on.
How many of the people who drink 7 glasses a week turn into alcoholics over a 10/20/30 year period? And if you are measuring outcomes of the whole group, and averaging it, how much do the health outcomes of the alcoholics skew the average outcomes? And did the study control for that? And can we posit that people who drink 7 glasses a week are a few percentage points more likely to become alcoholics later than people who drink 1-3 (or zero)?
My gut tells me that alcohol consumption doesn't really matter... until you tip over into heavy drinking. And that, then, lots of second-order effects are more dangerous than the first order effects. Again, do the studies account for that? Does dying in a DUI crash alter the averages? What about dying from a health issue when you had no health insurance because you showed up to work drunk too often and couldn't keep a job?
My gut further tells me that the study conflates this. If I drink 7-10 a week, I am more likely to be in a group with some alcoholics, and the alcoholics' very bad outcomes are skewing the averages in my group.
Basically, does the study separate "alcohol" from "alcoholism"? Alcoholism is very bad for your health for the same reasons that any other addiction is, and that is different than the question of whether alcohol, on its own, is bad for your health.
If I understand you correctly, you aren't really talking about what I'm talking about which is I think it's fine for most people to drink wine. So, you are right, I did misunderstand you. Thanks for clarifying!
Once an organisation has a vested interest in making a problem out to be Very Bad Indeed, facts will be exaggerated to make the problem worse than it actually is.
Elite misinformation seems like a result of domain-specific experts pretending that they’re instead generalists with complete mastery of social psychology, data analysis, and moral philosophy.
This leads experts to attempt to mislead people just enough to achieve a desired outcome.
This is a related phenomenon to the "don't tell inconvenient truths because they could be weaponized" issue. Coverage, or lack of coverage, of crime increases in 2020-2022, is probably the most widespread example.
Really drives me crazy, because it's dishonest, ineffective, and self-defeating.
Great point. There are also plenty of COVID-related and Trump-related examples. I am a highly educated Democratic voter in a classic liberal elite profession, and I personally have a lot less faith in the mainstream media, public health organizations, etc, than I did in 2015. It’s really sad and isolating.
I think crime is a particularly bad thing to not talk about and hope people won't notice. There's a lot of data available and people are personally invested.
I think that you are doing a mild injustice to the vast majority of D voters who have no idea that pistols are the main problem and just see it as obvious (to them) that a scary looking military weapon with a massive clip which is intended to be used for mass killings, is really necessary for day to day life in civilized America. Clearly, pistols are more of a problem. On the other hand, possibly by accident, those same D voters are probably correct that legislation against assault rifles has more chance of success (although not under out current SCOTUS obviously).
I feel like the elite misinformation is more of a political liability for Democrats than Republicans. My sense is much of Republican elite misinformation is driven by political calculation—if we claim X this will help us win and we can do Y. Whereas the misinformation on the Dem side is driven by issue groups who want to make their issue more of a priority. If those priorities are politically unpopular, as they often are, then the Dems will shoot themselves in the foot trying to talk about or fix a problem that isn’t as pressing as the Groups claim.
I wrote a book adjacent to this topic, Radiation Evangelists, about the early development years of radiation therapy in medicine, and I have an add-on to this column: a lot of times people doing this kind of misinformation have functionally managed to talk themselves into believing what they are pitching.
Most of the early radiation innovators that I wrote about ended up dying of cancer or other radiation-induced maladies. I expected the story to be one where people who didn't know better died of something they didn't understand. But what I found in the research is that users recognized--and documented!--the risks more or less immediately. It's just that they then proceeded to talk themselves into alternate explanations. A lot of patients were harmed as a result, but the therapists bore the worst of it; more or less an entire generation of men and women who were enthusiastic early adopters ended up dead in a pretty painful and awful way.
All of which is simply to say that I think "elite misinformation" is an even harder problem than this column suggests, because motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug. Even well-meaning humans armed with reasonable information are highly prone to talk themselves into believing wrong stuff, and they will do that EVEN WITH the counter information right there in on the table. And someone who has lied to themself first is hard to disabuse of a notion, because 1) they do not "know" that they are lying, and 2) admitting that they are wrong now carries a component of shame and disappointment to go along with the embarrassment.
This is a _great_ example of the problem the Rationalist community coalesced around. Whether their proposed solutions are at all helpful to most humans, rather than just a few eccentrics whose personality traits are at least two SDs away from the median, may be questionable, but certainly it's a real problem, and finding good solutions would make a lot of people's lives much healthier and happier.
It's interesting that you bring up the Rationalist community, because this research is more or less why I find the Rats to be a bit silly: they believe that this problem is quasi-solveable AND that they have solved it, if only everyone else would listen. Whenever I read stuff coming out of that community, or listen to them on podcasts, it always feels hilariously similar to a lot of the discourse I read in old medical journals and conference proceedings and keynote speeches. It also squares with my experience of people I meet who think of themselves as "rationalists"; as you can imagine, such folks--including some good friends!--are well-represented in my work as first an academic and now a frontline medical professional working in a hospital.
And, to be clear, I don't think the Rationalist community is insane or anything. But in my experience, they tend to 1) fundamentally underrate the degree of difficulty and complexity of the human judgement problem, 2) systematically overrate their solutions to the problem, in part because of (1), leading them inevitably to 3) become overconfident in their own judgement in a way that takes them right back down the road they thought that they were avoiding. You can see specific instances of this in areas like malaria control policy, which I wrote about at (okay, absurd) length elsewhere on this forum. The Rationalist community has done a lot of great stuff in public health that I really appreciate, but the approach has really distinct limits that they just. don't. see.
Which I think is really just to say that I think this is probably a wicked problem baked into our biological system of cognition in pretty fundamental ways. It's really frustrating.
This is exactly why I -- while respecting what the Rationalists are trying to do and agreeing with their diagnosis of a major problem -- don't really identify as a member of the community. Our perceptual biases cannot be solved at an individual level, we really need to talk about moving up a level to try to figure out how to build _institutions_ that allow people to benefit from correcting each others' errors, so the output of the group is more accurate and rational than the choices of any one individual.
Though as described in The Unaccountability Machine, by building a lot of institutions that optimize for single variables -- like "next quarter's profits", for corporations -- we've built systems that actually make _worse_ choices than any individual would on their own. :-/
(Side note: I was an undergrad in Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins back in the '90s, then came out to Berkeley for grad school in '99, so I was around for the early days of Rationalism as a self-identified community. Used to see folks like Eliezer at parties.)
I think we need to adjust the degree to which we engaged or accept this behavior based on 1) the times we live in and 2) the nature of the institution.
Issue 1 - we are currently in a very divided, low faith in institutions period. It's crucial for the government, particularly liberal/democrat government, to prioritize restoring faith in government. This is a pressing issue for Democrats, who advocate for more government, and less so for Republicans, who generally aim to reduce government influence. So it is essential for left-leaning causes to avoid this, while for right-leaning ones, the issue is less important. This is unfair, but life works like that.
This would mean really limiting the use of these tactics. One problem I think the Dems currently face (or at least a problem I have) is that I have very little, or no, faith when they talk about something being catastrophic. Climate change, voter registration, Trump taking over, large infrastructure projects, child care cliffs, etc. There have been so many "crying wolf" type incidents that my default is to just ignore or not believe claims of catastrophic outcomes. This is dangerous because on one of these issues they could be correct.
The second issue has to do with the nature of the institution. Public Health, Academia, Law Enforcement, etc., absolutely have to act in good faith. Their ability to do their jobs is predicated on public trust. There is almost no issue (even COVID or, in the case of law enforcement, solving a horrific crime) that is more important than trust. We see this with the US claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or with the claim around masks early on in the pandemic. The damage these false claims caused came back later to impact other, even more important issues, negatively.
Very much agreed. I think recent attempts to discredit the Supreme Court also fall into this category. Instead of working within the political process, they attempt to discredit the whole thing and tear it down. This is VERY dangerous.
If we can't settle things through politics then people will turn to violence.
This of course is also why Trump's lies about the election are so damaging. And one of the many reasons why I won't support him. Though Dem lies about voter suppression are also pretty bad
Elite misinformation may be real and serious, but it seems like Matt’s using it to paper over the insidious role right-wing propaganda plays.
Fox News has convinced large chunks of the country that we’re in a recession, Biden is simultaneously senile and a criminal mastermind, and that crime is at record highs. Those may not be as outright false as some astroturfed meme saying the Pope endorsed Trump, or that Biden drinks the blood of children, but they’re still _goddamned_lies_.
So, yes, while we CAN walk and chew bubble gum here, it would have been nice for Matt to at least acknowledge the elephant in the room instead of giving the impression that elite misinformation was the majority of the country’s misinformation problem - sorry Matt, but if you actually DO think elite misinformation is worse than Fox News, you’re on more drugs than Joe Biden.
And just to speak directly to Matt, this kind of oversight is why so much of your audience are grouchy asshats who believe more than a zero amount of the right wing propagandists’ misinformation. I know there’s value in “preaching to the sinners, not the choir” like you do, but you also need to help convince these persuadable fans that they ARE buying into bad right wing lies, not JUST confirm their bias that liberals are as bad as they think they are.
The difference is that Fox News misinformation is espoused by TV personalities, other grifters, and some deeply mentally disturbed individuals. Where as elite misinformation comes from credentialed experts at prestigious institutions. Eg, NYT and Harvard. The Fox New equivalent on the left would be TikTok.
The concern is that elite misinformation misinforms political actors like politicians and activists into taking counterproductive actions; or simply wasting attention and political capital on overblown issues. Furthermore, these elites have earned the trust of political actors and the broad public over centuries by being a source a valuable information and professional judgement. Yet their occasional misinformation risks that reputation and could reduce them to just more noise along the lines of Fox News and TikTok.
To be clear, I'm not trying to exonerate the elites themselves. I'm just pointing out that Fox News and Tik Tok, _as_sources_of_noise_themselves_, are actors that *amplify* the costs of elite mistakes.
A century ago, if an elite makes a mistake, maybe it gets outed, maybe it doesn't. Let's say it's 50/50 just for the sake of conversation.
Today, if an elite makes a mistake, Fox's and Tik Tok's incentives point towards making sure that at least 95% of the time the elites will be blamed for it.
But again, I'm not trying to _exonerate_ the elites here: Fox is a fact of life right now, and I'm 100% on board with you elite misinformation's costs to our own side, ESPECIALLY your point about its significant on-side coordination/strategery costs.
I'm just saying that as we go about correcting our grand strategy, if the only thing we have in mind is "we must be 100% at the top of our game at all times", well, I'm sorry to say, my friend, but that's a losing battle. As JVL over at The Bulwark keeps pointing out, the authoritarians only have to win ONCE; whereas democracy has to KEEP winning.
Thus, we MUST properly assess the _entirety_ of the misinformation environment, and advance our cause in due proportion in each arena. I'm not arguing for "this side over that" or "both sides", but rather "all of the above"! So, yes, we deal with elite misinformation, but we also make war (figuratively) on Tik Tok and Fox News, because although we'll never fully extirpate misinformation, we simply can't tolerate having two massive megaphones spewing great gouts of misinformation at our populace from all directions.
What does making war on Tik Tok and Fox News actually look like?
As I understand it, there's no reliable methodology that can effectively fight misinformation. Censorship just amplifies the content, or worse drives it to siloed channels that concentrate the crazy. Labelling can help, but really just at the margins.
What do you suggest should be done in terms of policy changes or specific actions by specific people or organizations?
Well, I'm open to ideas, and I'm cognizant of the very valid challenges you highlight -- whether legal, moral, or practical.
The Bulwark and Crooked Media seem to me like "good starts": Openly ideological alternative media sources that discipline themselves and each other against sensationalism and propaganda, but whose daily mission is to directly oppose the toxic propaganda being spewed by both social media and the right-wing propaganda machine.
Beyond that -- and please bear in mind that I'm just proposing shit on the fly here -- I'd suggest that it needs to be an "all fronts" assault:
Legally, Fox is but the largest outlet and also mostly just a front for a larger 'griftersphere'; law enforcement and prosecutors should root it out where possible. The Tik Tok ban is another "good start", and I'd entertain further regulation of social media algorithms.
Culturally, we need new taboos within the right against ever erecting propaganda machines like Fox again. Likewise, beyond just regulating the algorithms, we need taboos against exploitative algorithms like those employed by Twitter, Facebook, and Tik Tok. And we need a reckoning with the deep societal wounds both sides have inflicted on us: the families broken by polarization, the parents and grandparents whose twilight years were stolen by brain worms and scams, the young people who've been cheated out of their hope and mental health by rampant viral doomerism and the perversion/context collapse of therapy culture.
And in the business sphere, we need to continue and build upon The Bulwark and Crooked Media's efforts, to build them into a general campaign to eat away at both Fox/right-wing-media's AND social media's market shares. Eat their lunches! Bankrupt them the good old fashioned capitalist way: by driving them out of business with superior products!
I'm open to suggestions and criticism here. The point is, we don't have to just sit here idly by and impotently watch misinformation ruin our democracy. And we don't even have to violate the fundamental principles of our democracy to do it!
I think its going to be incredibly hard to create any kind of approach to address this that doesn't do as much damage as good. The attempt to label things as misinformation was essentially co-opted by Trump and others to describe almost anything they don't like.
Any prosecutorial action is likely to rebound incredibly negatively and be generally considered to be an escalation of the culture war / politics unless the conduct is incredibly egregious. Creating taboos on the right against the current media ecosystem is really only feasible if there is a broader acceptance and admittance of right wing ideas and personalities within the mainstream media ecosystem. And getting people to prefer a "healthy product" over a "tasty product" is incredibly difficult across many different mediums.
I definitely agree, and most approaches thus far have been rather ham-handed and one-off.
But isn't that kind of the problem? Before Fox News, one could say the same thing about, say, Bircher newsletters or the Kissinger letter: they generated backlash, they were ham-handed and one-off, they "did more damage than good". I hate to have to resort to a "true communism has never been tried" argument here, but Fox kind of amply demonstrates that when you DO organize a comprehensive, well-coordinated approach, you CAN *do more good than damage* (for your own side).
RE prosecutorial action, let me be more specific: I don't think anyone is going to miss all the dick-pill scams, real estate "gurus", reverse mortgage predators, fly-by-night insurance operations, and various other fraudsters advertising on right-wing media.
Or rather, the people who ARE going to miss them are already so far gone, I'm perfectly happy writing them off. And you never know, the normies might actually THANK us for ridding them of the scourge of bullshit artists they're constantly bombarded with.
Fox news gets an audience because right-wing people correctly determine that elite institutions have left-wing biases. To counteract them, you need to get elite institutions to correct those biases. Trying to punish or deplatform Fox instead will be seen as further entrenching the elite biases. "Any truthful person is welcome here" could work as a message, tripling down on "professing a right-wing view is itself proof that you are stupid or a liar" will not.
Yeah, I definitely didn’t advocate for any of these things you’re pushing back against.
For instance, I specifically did NOT say to “punish” or “deplatform” Fox, I said to outcompete them.
Also, screw the right wing for putting shitty alternative institutions like Fox together. Conservatives RAN most elite institutions as recently as a generation or two ago. Building a propaganda machine is NOT an acceptable response to liberal bias. EVER. Period.
That’s deeply short sighted. We’ve just endured more than two straight decades of conservatives mis-wielding power — whether in the majority or not — and you’re telling me the problem is no one trusts *liberals* enough?
Yes? I think that eroding trust in liberal institutions is a huge problem, and that it's orthogonal to how conservatives have used or misused their power.
To be clear, I'm not *contradicting* you, I'm "yes-and-ing" you. Yes, eroding institutional trust is a huge problem.
And the chief eroder in institutional trust for the past 25 years has been... surprise, Fox News. Elite misinformation probably gets a close second (although I'm open to arguments it's actually third after some other thing I'm forgetting).
All I'm arguing for is a sense of proportionality and the scale of the problem. As I told Matt Hagy, if we clock elite misinformation as the ONLY or the BIGGEST problem, then we're not getting our grand strategy right.
Or to put it another way: If elites managed to pitch perfect, no-hitter ball for the next 10 years straight, we'd STILL have Fox News undermining them, and to me it's a 50/50 question whether all that perfect ball would have yielded any actual results (in terms of increased public trust) vs. gotten swamped by Fox News regardless.
If the task proves Sisyphean, you don't keep rolling the rock up the hill, you grab a hammer and chip away at the damned rock.
>> If elites managed to pitch perfect, no-hitter ball for the next 10 years straight, we'd STILL have Fox News undermining them, and to me it's a 50/50 question whether all that perfect ball would have yielded any actual results."
I respectfully disagree with this. Fox News and Tucker will lie no matter what the elite institutions do, but I'd contend that most of the erosion of public trust is not due to Fox News, it's due to the ability of the public to become better informed and see through elite attempts to mislead them,
The problem is less about elite institutions being wrong and more about them intentionally lying and misleading.
In this new information environment, the key thing is for elites to stop lying and misleading and to get better at communicating uncertainty. This can mainly be accomplished by communicating and setting policy with more humility and a less paternalistic mindset.
That's fair. I know it probably seems like I'm coming on pretty strong, but I genuinely do respect when someone is able to elucidate that they have a different assessment of the ground reality as you have done here. Cheers!
"We’ve just endured more than two straight decades of conservatives mis-wielding power"
While I certainly won't defend every conservative decision, this seems a bit much. Of course we probably have VERY different viewpoints on what the best policies are.
You never know. I'm not actually a hair-on-fire prog. I have a lot of conservative viewpoints. I'm just not afraid to characterize the actual exercise of power by people who actually called themselves conservatives as a dumpster fire since basically H.W.
For every broken-clock good policy Trump had, he had at least a dozen other actively deleterious ones, and even the "good" ones, he was incompetent, inconsistent, and thoroughly corrupt at executing.
Mitch McConnell stole a SCOTUS seat, and along with Paul Ryan sabotaged the economy for almost a decade.
W... I don't think I need to elaborate on that one.
Conservatives throughout both W and Obama's admins consistently tanked immigration deals, regardless of how many concessions they'd won. I can't think of any global political actor who's shot theirselves in the foot on a key issue so badly and so many times besides maybe the PLO.
Gingrich may have at least not been absurdly wrong about the need for fiscal discipline in the 90's, but he happily demagogued it for all the wrong reasons and torched countless norms in the process.
W did a couple things out of compassion that were ill-advised; but H.W. is the only Republican in the last 30 years who I can honestly say at least made SOME policies that were NOT completely selfish AND were well-advised.
Contrast with the Democrats... whatever the faults in the implementation, Obama sincerely believed in Obamacare and most of his other policy initiatives. Ditto Clinton's crime bill. Biden's CHIPS and IRA. Most of the arguments for cynicism about the sincerity of these Democratic accomplishments in the last 30 years heavily rely on some form of racist/classist trope/tripe: "[x] just wanted to hand goodies out to minorities/the poors for votes".
At this point, we get better conservative governance out of the liberal party than we do out of the so-called conservative one.
If all that sounds like "a bit much" to you, I mean, that's between you and your god. To me, it sounds like it just means that *conservatives* were "a bit much". Which is actually a bit of an understatement.
My partner was just telling me about some Reddit trend where people are running saved online grocery orders from two years ago to see how much they would cost now, in order to go viral with examples where the price has gone up 400% or whatever. (No one cares if it was a discount two years ago on a product that is now out of stock and therefore carries a big fee.)
IMO, I think there's a solid case that, at least in recent history, misinformation from Fox News is much less harmful that elite misinformation because it doesn't directly inform policy and action nearly as much.
For example, I'd guess that the number of deaths from Fox News and Tucker style misinformation pales in comparison to the number of people who died because of the Iraq WMD misinformation.
But that’s not the only relevant metric! What about all the policy that *doesn’t* happen because of them?
Also, even by your own metric, you have to account for a couple hundred thousand excess COVID deaths.
And wrt “WMD misinformation”… uhh, dude, Fox was the *standard bearer* for repeating that stuff! You have [ed: those Iraq deaths] on the wrong side of Fox’s ledger.
This misses a key distinction and I think the heart of Matt's point, which is about the originating source of misinformation, rather than about the distribution channel.
Fox News helping to further misinformation that originated through elite institutions and the power structure is a very different thing from Fox News pushing non-elite misinformation sourced by cranks.
Sorry, but the source of the misinformation was the Bush administration. Cheney was an important force pushing the WMD rumor both before the Bush administration and during it, along with many others (e.g., Wolfowitz).
But again, as I see it, the distinction isn't left versus right misinformation, it's misinfo originated inside institutions/power structure versus outside. Bush and the neocons were clearly inside.
IMO the inside-outside distinction only matters from within the frame of Matt's analysis.
My criticism was on two levels: (1) that Matt's intro basically characterizes all liberal complaints about misinformation as mistakenly exaggerating the impact of fringe stuff, which completely ignores the entire propaganda machine sitting smack dab in the middle of the GOP mediasphere, and (2) that this machine both exacerbates the elite misinfo that Matt dislikes AND is clearly a larger problem than it -- even granting him that it might only be a 55-45 or 60-40 split, it's still the bigger problem.
From within Matt's analysis, sure, okay, the WMD stuff originated in an elite circle.
But from within mine, it's pretty obvious that Fox did 90% of the work from there. So, sure, it's bad enough that some elites (Bush admin) got it wrong, but Bush would have been spitting into the wind if Fox hadn't ran with his mistake and manufactured consent for the war.
Depends on how you think about it. Bush and the neocons were out of power when they started pushing the WMD rumors. So they weren't part of the government institutions at the time. Fox News actually facilitated their spread of misinformation. Fox News is uniquely culpable for spreading misinformation and always has been. They are one of the worst sources if you want to understand reality.
Do you read the evening threads at all? It's all right there. I'm not sure how OK Ben would be if I went around cherrypicking individual comments; not to mention how impolitic that would be.
But suffice it to say, practically not one day goes by where I don't see someone grinding away at their personal grievance in indelicate terms that indicate Right Wing Brain Worms. One commenter harped on about "most favored victims" (he meant Blacks) before eventually getting theirself permabanned. Several others insist on Fox News caricatures such as Dems being "weak on crime" or even "pro-crime". I could go on, but I don't feel like wasting my entire morning summoning a magisterial review of infractions that people are going to want to endlessly litigate and turn this into a megathread.
The point is, even if we set aside the accuracy of any one claim, it's pretty clear that right-wing propaganda's ambient osmosis plays a significant role in the average SB commenter's information environment.
Sometimes I read them. Definitely not all the time. I was asking because I have certainly talked (although not here) about some of the general topics you brought up, but I wouldn't endorse the way you're framing them. And sometimes I've found I say a few words that someone pattern-matches to their right-wing bingo card or whatever when that's not actually what I said or believe.
Anyway, it would surprise me if a significant chunk of readers endorsed something like "crime is at record highs". But it would not surprise me if several readers referred to Democrats as being weak on crime, or said something like that. So if that's what "much of your audience are grouchy asshats who believe more than a zero amount of the right wing propagandists’ misinformation" then, sure, yes.
More or less. I must apologize for the shorthand; I recognize the nuance you're pointing out, but I already catch shit for being one of the wordier commenters around here, so it's simply a matter of practicality and brevity.
“Fox News caricatures such as Dems being ‘weak on crime’ or even ‘pro-crime’”
The thing about caricatures Is that they resemble the truth. If you heard about a local prosecutor who was all-but refusing to prosecute violent crime, and that’s all you knew about him, would you bet a day’s pay that prosecutor was a Republican?
Our friend Joao here at least manages to give cogent pushback instead of triggered bias all the time.
I'm not bothered by the mere holding of a grievance; I have PLENTY of my own. But if that's all you've got**, then I don't have any interest in seeing that around this forum all the time.
Really well reasoned and argued, and also depressing. Becauee man oh man, if you think it's hard to change the opinion of your average swing voter with actual facts, I suspect it's even harder to change the opinion of a Harvard Ph.D that they are citing misinformation as gospel.
Yeah when I hear some crazy right wing crank talk about the deep state and then hear an Ivy League phd talk about gender theory stuff I feel like these guys are closer together than further apart.
Have not forgiven public health individuals for casually pretending that no one "needed" and N95 at the start of the pandemic and also misleading folks into thinking using one "incorrectly" would increase their odds of getting sick relative to a cloth mask...
Elite Intellectuals and Academics on the Left all love to lament the Anti-Expertise trend, but they all think their proverbial 💩 does not stink on this topic...but the fact is they are quite responsible for that distrust because of all this self servicing intellectual pussyfooting.
I have elderly parents and one of them had a seriously ill sibling. It took me a good two months to convince them that protecting themselves and others requires an N95 and their cloth masks weren’t doing much. It took so long because NPR and the CDC were telling them otherwise. Fortunately none of them got COVID before vaccines were available but there were nights where I wa lying awake worrying. I’m at the point where there is no way I’d take NPR seriously as a source of accurate information
I an a T1 diabetic, and I just happened to have a stock of N95s for woodworking. It never made sense to me that a better mask would NOT be better, and it was criminal for experts to go on TV and sort of demure and act like we didn't already have all the knowledge we needed to know that....i get that as doctors they had front line people they worried about dying (my wife was a hygienist struggling to get respirators), but it was still confidence burning to see "experts" try and use their power to gaslight people just so their friends in professional settings stood slightly better odds of living....
Any time someone uses the word “need”, especially if they contrast it with “want”, I’m going to call bullshit. Do some people “need” to be vaccinated? Is there some level of housing affordability that is “needed”?
Not to mention that time seemingly all the public health officials in the world decided that the AstraZeneca vaccine was basically poison. I think an underrated part of anti-vax sentiment is that credentialed experts keeps insisting that vaccines are very dangerous. If you keep saying that, some people will believe you!
My memory is that everyone expected a gold mine from low-latency and other premium products plus leveraging their entertainment arms for streaming. But it just never materialized: few care that much about latency and no one wants your streaming service unless it’s the old Netflix omnistream.
So, was it over-exaggerated or just derailed by realities about customers?
It seems we've gotten some of what people who were really upset about Net Neutrality. Zero Rating and throttling certain types of traffic, especially bit torrent traffic. Which like in principle was the kind of things NN was for avoiding, but the advocates took it all the way to its maximal conclusion that they'd not just throttle bit torrent but throttle like Wapo or something.
But like in principle it seems to me that preferring Netflix traffic over some nerd's bit torrent traffic is basically the same thing as preferring one website over another.
Interesting quote from Stanford Law Professor, Barbara van Schewick, an advocate of net neutrality, who admitted "What ended up happening in the years after the rollback went into effect in 2018 was so discreet that most people unlikely noticed its effects."
Net neutrality rules are already back in place under Biden. So not even really clear to me that people were wrong. Also California had a state level net neutrality role holding back change after the first rollback under Trump.
I was legit worried about it. I was glad MAtt listed that one. I totally believed policy advocates who I think were taking me for a ride in retrospect.
Is it possible to win a Presidential election without exaggerating? The answer is pretty clearly “no.”. Think of the stock phrase, “when elected, I will X.” Forgive the speaker for using “I” as synecdoche for the federal government. Absolve him for treating his election as a certainty when it is, at best, likely and stochastic. This phrase is still a whopper. Will you have 60 votes in the Senate? A majority in the House? Will the senate parliamentarian let you proceed via reconciliation. Will Krysten Sinema march to the tune of her own drummer or to the blandishments of big pharma? Will the courts go along?
Admitting how weak and constrained the President is would be political malpractice. Better to sell the plebs on hope and change. Winning elections is important.
The difference is everyone knows that politicians BS. My profession (lawyers) is the same way-- nobody thinks that when we talk about our cases we are giving a fair account of both sides. We're advocates!
But there's a whole bunch of people who we desperately need to be truth tellers, NOT advocates. My favorite example was the COVID letter signed by the public health people, at a time when they had advised America that outdoor gatherings were improper. (That advice turned out to be wrong, but we didn't know that yet.) And they sent out a letter saying BLM protests were different because the Black lives they would save outweighed any COVID risk.
You put stuff like that out, you damage the public health system, because the public thinks it's a bunch of ideologues or at best clout chasers who will lie and say they have costed out the lives saved by BLM protests rather than apply their advice consistently.
Basically large numbers of people are in professions where you AREN'T supposed to be doing activism, or at the least you are supposed to be separating your activism from your substantive work. And it's really important that THEY not put out BS in a way that it probably isn't for politicians whose words are discounted by the public.
What's funny is that the health professionals were kinda right -- outdoor antiracism demonstrations didn't seem to end up being a big deal (but that was also true for other outside activities)
Yeah, the issue with the letter was less whether it was true or not, so much as that it was really obvious that the people writing it didn't care if it was true. The decision to write it had nothing to do with epidemiology.
Right, but like the Zahn quote, that isn't what they said. They SAID they had costed out the lives that would be saved by BLM protests and they outweighed any COVID risks. Which was just Frankfurtian BS in its purist form.
"Staying at home, social distancing, and public masking are effective at minimizing the spread of COVID-19. To the extent possible, we support the application of these public health best practices during demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy. However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives. Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported."
I would say that's the most relevant passage. I think it's a fair reading to say that the letter is arguing that black people's health is best supported by engaging in the protests, even though other forms of protest are clearly antithetical to public health.
I definitely don’t read that as making a cost/benefit statement. It seems to be saying that there are two things going on here - the immediate public health impact, and statements about respect for health. They claim that protests against stay-at-home orders are bad on both counts, while these are good on one count and bad on the other, but they say the good part is “vital” so we should “facilitate safest practices” on the bad part. But they very specifically don’t try to count or measure these things, they just declare some vital and others as “effective”.
I don’t like their kind of reasoning, but I don’t think they’re even suggesting the claim you made.
Yes, it feels like every public facing profession and organization has adopted an advocacy framework, getting much worse in Trump era if not necessarily starting there.
I suppose I was pushing back against Matt’s “elite disinformation” framing. A large share of public facing elite communication is done by politicians. It’s certainly more odious when scientists get in on the act. The European conceit that disaster would ensue if global temperatures rose more than 1.5 degrees made me overreact for a long time. I inferred that either climate was an unsolvable problem or they were full of shit (I strongly leaned towards the latter), and refused to give any weight to reducing emissions. The Yglesian line that we can make things materially better through slowly transitioning to zero emission electricity has moderated my position, though Im still less interested in emissions reductions and more interested in seawalls and slow migration towards the poles than Matt
I hate it how many news agencies have a boilerplate line like “1.5 degrees C is the point that climate scientists have determined is the amount we need to stay below to avoid major disasters”. No, scientists didn’t determine that this number was *the* amount we need to stay below to avoid disasters - they determined that *every* number was *a* number to stay below to avoid *some* disasters, and 1.5 was some sort of consensus to focus on based on being a combination of manageable and a stretch.
>> "I inferred that either climate was an unsolvable problem or they were full of shit (I strongly leaned towards the latter), and refused to give any weight to reducing emissions."
Fair enough, but what about subsidizing innovation that could eventually reduce emissions?
In reality, technology advances are the only way to meaningfully reduce global emissions. IMO, things are looking very good on this front thanks to years and years of subsidies that at the time were a complete waste of money on a direct carbon reduction basis.
Wind, solar, storage, and electrification of heating and transportation are beginning to play a major role in reducing emissions. There's even a bipartisan consensus on funding research in nuclear, advanced geothermal, and other "non-wires" solutions like VPPs.
Maybe this is pollyannaish, but I've never been more bullish on our ability to meaningfully reduce worldwide emissions. Most of the heavy lifting on the innovation and breakthrough technology front is basically done and we're mostly in the implementation and incremental improvement phase.
The technological improvements we support will not keep global warming under 1.5 degrees. So if you take the Europeans at their word, and 1.6 degrees is disaster, those wouldn’t really be a solution. That bit of elite disinformation kept me from leaning in to wind and solar for years.
We probably agree that the big error was presenting the consequence as an all or nothing binary instead of as a continuous function with worse outcomes depending on how high temps increase. IMO, the whole existential crisis/disaster framing was huge mistake, both from a misinformation standpoint but also in terms of encouraging all or nothing thinking as you've described.
As I understand it, 1.5 is bad and probably a foregone conclusion unless a miracle innovation happens. OTOH, 2.0 and 2.5 would be much much worse and we're in reasonably good shape to avoid those outcomes as long as we keep at it.
I think of an extra 1 degree as something that can be fixed with air conditioning, and something that would actively help agriculture in the upper midwest, canada, siberia and much of china.
I'm a big fan of mitigation. The reality is we crossed a lot of thresholds back in the 1990's. There are, of course, always new thresholds, but the fact we crossed all those thresholds means that a lot of global warming is baked in and a lot of Bangladeshis and other poor populations living in low lying areas are likely to die.
So I think we need to mitigate, a lot. Indeed, I think we should be doing it right now. We should be bidding out for technological solutions, offering grants and prizes, etc. Because what I suspect is going to happen is while we chase our tail around trying to get to zero emissions a lot of people are going to die.
I knew that someone would beat me to this. The public health community's galling behavior during the pandemic was the best example Matt could have used for this article, and I was surprised that he didn't use it.
Counterpoint: I think the profound misinformation from the President of the United States was the best example Matt could have used for this article, and I was surprised that he didn't use it.
As someone who participated in the sky-is-falling rhetoric around net neutrality, I want to give a little more context. Basically the concern was that carriers would shift their business model to be a cartel of gatekeepers to online services, which really would be a much better economic model than the heavily regulated quasi-utility business they're currently in and really would be a long-term headache for the everyday consumer. But these things don't happen overnight, and by the time the Trump rollback happened, it was clear this was always going to be legally contentious and none of the carriers really wanted to push the envelope. The upshot is that there really was a bad thing that could have happened, and public political mobilization really did discourage it from happening, but the twists and turns were not quite as dramatic as media coverage suggested.
In fact, versions of this are true for most of the things you're describing. The question of accurately describing the impacts of climate change (which Matt wisely avoids addressing in this piece) are a similar issue. We don't always know what is going to happen, and the issue is competing for attention like everything else.
Agree with this. Net Neutrality advocacy and regulation falls into the same bucket as aggressive antitrust regulation -- it works to discipline the market even if it ultimately fails in court.
"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."
I'm glad Matt owns up to this because this is a perfect example of how dangerous this phenomenon is. The California voters were told they could have $50 high speed rail from LA to San Francisco in less than 3 hours for $9.95 billion (matched by federal funds to total $19.9 billion). The entire thing was a lie. The project is already up to $100 billion, the first segment (which almost nobody will ride and which will not cost $50 to ride) on flat land between Bakersfield and Merced is many years away from completion, and the project's designers have not demonstrated that it is even possible at reasonable cost to go from Bakersfield to Los Angeles (a long story that I tell on my own Substack).
The point is, this is more than a folly-- this was fraud and theft. Sponsors of a project that is likely impossible to actually complete convinced California voters to authorize billions of dollars of spending that could have been directed to solving other problems in our state. Heck, we could have subsidized clean air zero-carbon bus trips for everyone who wants to travel by land between Los Angeles and San Francisco with that money and THAT would have even been a better use of it.
And yes, it was fraud. The project organizers chose $9.95 billion for the same reason that your local supermarket marks apples at 99 cents instead of a dollar-- to make the price tag look as low as possible. They HAD to know that it would cost a lot more-- the arguments against the ballot initiative in the ballot pamphlet rationally predicted a $90 billion cost. Even the opponents estimated too low!
This is not the way to do liberalism or government. You tell the public the truth. If the public votes against you, it's OK. You told them the truth and that's democracy.
The plot in True Detective season 2 was about people trying to get a slice of the high speed rail boondoggle, which was spending a lot of money and not building much.
That season came out almost a decade ago.
I thought it was an underrated season, and Vince Vaughn deserved some praise for his performance, which of course is the opposite of what happened.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=taJ4MFCxiuo&t=155s&pp=ygURbW9ub3JhaWwgc2ltcHNvbnM%3D
Is there a chance the track could bend?
Not on your life my Hindu friend!
This is the correct answer, and I even get sniped on this due to continual experiencing of Westernness.
A big problem with that season is that Nick Pizzolatto had no idea at all how the politics of high speed rail works so the whole season is based on a bunch of absurd things happening.
My strong impression from reading even positive reviews of "True Detective" is that "the whole season is based on a bunch of absurd things happening" could be used to summarize each season of the show.
Season 1 is really good though in terms of characters and ideas and a the big story of Russ and Marty's relationship over 15 years. Season 2 doesn't really have that.
The most annoying thing is that they could have built the whole thing for $50 bn. But they'd have had to change California real estate law in some fundamental ways - include in the initiative the power for CAHSR to seize any non-federal land in the state at a price to be determined by CAHSR, with short notice period (one month would suffice), and that the only power that any former landowner would have would be the right to sue to dispute the valuation, in which case CAHSR would be liable to pay the difference in valuation (without any interest or penalty). Rely on Kelo as the constitutional justification
They'd also have had to get a competent organisation (ie not an American one) to do the construction - French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, any would do.
The absence of any penalty - let alone any *interest,* sounds like a bridge too far to me. Slight systematic overvaluation of eminent domain seems like a massively better problem to have than any kind of systematic undervaluation.
Totally agree. Allow for interest and reasonable attorneys fees (eg 33% of the undervaluation) and there is less incentive to shaft property owners. You might also limit valuations to 125% of assessed value to reign in run away finders of fact.
I'm mostly trying to avoid a situation where CAHSR has to hold an enormous contingency budget against the risk of losing legal actions and getting rinsed by former property owners who can convince a judge to approve an enormously inflated valuation.
If there is a reasonable limit to the losses, then they can take some land, pay $1million for it, stick $250K in a contingency fund and then the only part of the organisation that has to care is group legal. That's probably the practical version of what I propose. But Kelo should mean that blocking eminent domain rather than arguing over valuations is impossible, yet CAHSR was prepared to sit and argue over a valuation rather than just picking their own valuation, seizing the land, and then arguing about the valuation later in court. I don't know if that was lack of legal authority or lack of political will, but it was a massively expensive problem.
They'd also need some variances on various regulations (particularly environmental), but those would be mostly because the way that too many US regulations are enforced is that people sue and then get injunctions to stop construction - give CAHSR a variance that if they had a reasonable compliance plan then you can't get an injunction unless you can demonstrate that that compliance plan was not reasonable (ie, just because it doesn't comply, you can't stop them building, you have to show they weren't even trying to comply).
Dilan Esper's point (in the article he linked) that the *first* part of the line to build is the line through the Tehachapis is well-taken, though. I suspect that if you got a Japanese or a Taiwanese engineer to design your railroad, you'd get told exactly how to route it so it was earthquake-safe, but neither I nor Dilan are railroad tunnel engineering experts.
Also @Dilan, one of the nice things about high-speed rail is that it's, uh, fast. That means that if you do have to go a relatively long way around (e.g. going up the coast to Oxnard or Santa Barbara before crossing the mountains), then you can do that - you can add a lot of miles in diversions at 200mph before you really start affecting the travel time. AIUI, from talking to some of the engineers who worked on the UK's HS1 and HS2 routes, you work out where you can cross a mountain chain and then you work backwards from there to identify the routes to get to the crossing. This is why the Lyon-Turin line under construction takes such an odd route on approach to the Alps - because they picked the tunnel route first and then worked out how to connect it to the rest of the system.
So the problem with going up the coast is there are tons of curves. I am not saying it is totally impossible to do but you can't use the existing SP coast route- and in addition to increasing travel time slowing down for the curves there are all the practical problems of the coastal act, rich landowners who don't want the train, etc.
Neither of us knows enough about seismic protection and tunnelling to say where the mountain crossing should be. And neither do the "Lines on Map" people. And nor does CAHSR. Honestly, I doubt anyone in the USA (or the UK) does. You want a Japanese or a Taiwanese engineering firm to do a survey, and identify where to do the crossing, and then you start designing the rest of CAHSR from there: if you cross the mountains in X place, then you have to get the track from X to LA Union Station, so you design a route from X to LAUS. Then you have to go up the Central Valley from X, so that determines which Valley cities can be reached.
Similarly in the Bay Area, you start with the mountain crossing between the Caltrain line and the Central Valley, and then you work out how far the track comes up the Valley.
Although this actually is the type of project that imminent domain is supposed to be used for (roads, railways etc).
Kelo was about taking property so it could be redeveloped by private property owners.
Reanimate the corpse of Robert Moses, in other words.
That is not dead which can eternal lie;
And with strange eons even the Cross Manhattan Expressway may touch the sky.
"What is dead may never die" -- Theon Greyjoy.
GRRM knew what he was doing. The Iron Islanders are basically meant to be "Vikings who worship Cthulhu."
Maturity is recognizing Jacobs' philosophy does more harm than Moses.
They could not have built over the Tehachapis for $50 billion. The terrain challenges are far too massive.
I've always wondered if the southeastern US would have been a better choice for HSR.
Atlanta/Orlando is one of the busiest domestic flights in the US, there are no mountains on this route, and the distance is only a bit longer than LA/SF. My impression is that labor and land are both much cheaper in the southeast than in California.
I do wonder if swamps and crossing state lines would be huge hassles for getting HSR done though. And I suspect that a lot of the Atlanta/Orlando flights are tourists connecting via Atlanta on a theme park visit to Orlando, so connecting HSR to the airport in Atlanta would probably be a necessity.
It isn't clear that they can build the thing at all for any price. No one currently has a solution for building through the Tehachapis.
What is so hard in tunneling thorough mountains?
it's not just tunneling through mountains
Also tunneling through mountains isn't easy.
This is correct, but... historically, a lot of the large infrastructure projects in this country were built on fraud and misinformation. The financing structure for 19th century railroads certainly wasn't anywhere close to sound (and directly lead to repeated panics and recessions). But we still had the railroads, which people could use and provided a great deal of benefits.
I guess I struggle with where you draw the line between "outright lies to voters to build something useful and long lasting" (where California HSR mostly falls) to "boring technical discussions of how this will go which is over the public's head and will be subject to its own misinformation campaign" (e.g., Obamacare). At some point, people have to accept the fact that we want government to get shit done and it ain't gonna be perfect (and if my own experience with big business is any indication, it's not much different in the private sector). So we try to mitigate the bad as much as we can and push for the good.
There’s a big difference between a terrible, criminally irresponsible process that builds something useful and one that doesn’t, especially as time passes
You are right that it is a difficult line. But nonetheless lowballing government programs is incredibly risky. The Crédit Mobilier scandal could have easily killed the whole project. They were playing with fire and got very lucky.
This was a central part of the Robert Moses strategy, correct? Dupe the state legislature into a significantly smaller cost, and then once construction has already commenced, reveal the grand plan. Although, I guess the difference between that and the LA/San Fran line was that Moses actually built things.
"Dupe the state legislature into a significantly smaller cost, and then once construction has already commenced" this is more or less basically how every weapon system the Pentagon wants gets made as well. We call this system democracy.
The F-35 is a great example of this. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2022/09/01/lockheed-pentagon-claim-theyre-reining-in-f-35-sustainment-costs/
The HBO TV Movie The Pentagon Wars is great on this as well and pretty much sums up the process we see with transit and affordable housing as well (and anyone who's worked in software design would be familiar with this dynamic too) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA
Also why people don't much like this anymore! Moses built things without much regard for whether it was a good idea. The backlash has been with us for over 50 years now.
Yes, but they actually got built. Moreover, historically the cost overruns were not 10x
Interstate highways were pitched as vital to beating the Ruskies in World War III!
It's ironic that I'm listening to the "Big Dig" podcast right now* (I grew in MA when this project was ongoing so of particular personal interest to me) because it's clearly a companion piece to your post about CA HSR.
I'm only halfway through, but it lays out in pretty painstaking detail the delays in getting the project started, the cost overruns and yes what appears to be outright lying from Bechtel corporation about timelines to complete. Specifically, it seems like Bechtel corporation basically lied about the timeline it would take to complete a tunnel across the Fort Point Channel.
In other words, you're post has some interesting familiarity to it. And yet, I think the consensus now is that it was "worth it". From a quick google search, the following benefits are noted:
- Housing: The project led to the development of 7,700 new housing units, including 1,000 affordable units
- Office and retail space: The project added 10 million square feet of office and retail space
Hotel rooms: The project added 2,600 hotel rooms
- Traffic flow: The project improved traffic flow by 62% compared to pre-project levels
- Travel time and vehicle operating costs: The project saved travelers an estimated $167 million per year on travel time and vehicle operating costs
- Urban design: The project led to new residential development near parks and open spaces
Now this is a quick google search with AI driven response, so feel free to nitpick some of this. But I think the basic contours is correct. And I think this underplays the impact. That housing, hotel and office space is located in some of the valuable real estate in all of the country. Furthermore, the beautification effects of not having an elevated highway surely has led to knock on urban development of restaurants and shops that otherwise wouldn't have exited as proximity of the highway would have meant going to certain neighborhoods that are now trendy an uninviting proposition. Lastly, I wouldn't discount the impact of the Zakim Bridge. There's a reason it was heavily featured in the movie "The Departed" as it's become a pretty iconic (and beloved) part of the modern Boston skyline.
The point being, I think there is a very strong case to be made that the "Big Dig" was worth it despite the cost overruns, extreme amount of time it took to complete and what appears to be outright fraud involved.
Which comes back to kind of the tragedy of HSR. The concept I actually think is sound. If this project was built by the Spanish I'm guessing it would be done years ago. So in theory this is actually a good project that would probably have been "worth it" with Big Dig style cost overruns. But at this point, the complete lack of progress means it probably should be junked. Someone involved in this project needs to read up again on "Sunk Costs".
* Great podcast and worth your time. Feel like it's catnip for Matt and his audience. One thing the first few episodes did was make me more sympathetic to NIMBY or I should say sympathetic to the historical reasons why NIMBY became so strong starting in the 70s (which the podcast gets into). Because listening to the show, it really hit home to me how much of this impulse is about highway building. Matt bemoans (Rightly) how much the building of highways through the middle of cities was absolutely devestating. But I feel like listening to this podcast that people put highway building in the same mental bucket as building apartments; big government + rich people building stuff to enrich themselves without any care of how it impacts the little guy. And the fight in the 60s about a highway through East Boston really hits home to me that the impulse to stop construction just generally comes from a pretty understandable place.
It's fine to say that where you have already completed something, it is worth it.
But even in the best case scenario, which the Big Dig or the transcontinental railroad is, there's some massive negatives:
1. If you fail, you end up with a white elephant that reminds the public of the folly of big government. Those exist- there are unused subway tunnels around the country, bridges to nowhere, ghost ramps and highways to nowhere, etc. And each one tells a story of how government wasted taxpayer money.
2. Even if you succeed, developing the reputation (as people are arguing here) that all projects run over is not good for the cause of big government. Remember when the Pentagon had those $600 toilet seats? I bet supporters of increased defense spending loved hearing that one brought up over and over again over the next decade plus when they asked for appropriations!
3. The public will think we are a bunch of liars and that every spending program explodes. This is a big reason, by the way, that there's a lot of green eyeshade budgeting and honest scoring of Democratic initiatives in Congress. Obama did not want the story of Obamacare to be how he promised this program would pay for itself with some minor tweaks to the tax code and modest Medicare cuts and then it blew up the budget deficit! Had that happened, maybe the Republicans get that last vote they needed to repeal it! Plus the next time we propose something, we'd get "remember Obamacare? You can't trust them".
Plus, I realize there isn't a lot of morality in politics, but this really is immoral. You don't have to be an anti-tax crusader to say that when you ask the voters for pay for something you think will be good for them, you tell them up front and reasonably accurately what you think the price tag will be. You owe them that in a democracy.
I agree. The 99 tunnel project in Seattle was a good idea and worth it despite its cost overruns which is why I would have supported it with more accurate costs estimates up front but when when everything ends up costing twice what they say it will then when folks are honest people mentally double it and then vote down good ideas.
In my business, I am required by the court to charge by the hour rather than offer a flat rate for many cases. I usually will give clients a non-binding estimate of the total costs. I always make that about 50% more than I think it will likely cost. It gives me some buffer if things go wrong. Since clients are buying a thing that they have basically no idea what it "ought" to cost, 99% of the time they agree because I have good reviews and/or I came highly recommended by a friend. When the case almost always ends up costing less than they expected they are very happy about. I've even had a few of them feel bad and try to "tip" me the difference which I always decline. I've gotten flowers sent in response to my final bill or cookies dropped off at the office for the staff from happy customers.
But many attorneys do the opposite and give a low ball estimate and then run up bills that shock the clients. (They are frankly also sometime just generally shocking and reflect a lot of unnecessary work.) They have a hard time getting paid and generate negative goodwill from clients. In my experience they often low ball because they are pretty desperate for work and think it makes it more likely they will get the job. But since I have a 99% hire rate for my practice in terms of initial consultations signing up to be clients, I think the idea that those low ball estimates are getting more people to say yes aren't necessarily as true as micro economics would lead you to believe since attorney pricing is so lacking in transparency that client usually can't really compare prices effectively when making choices. In fact, their desperation for work in a space where many of the rest of us have months long wait lists for appointments is probably reflective of the fact that they don't have good reviews or get many referrals from prior clients.
My sense is that with most infrastructure projects the public wants something and they have no idea what that thing would cost and whatever that thing would cost is going to a large number well beyond people's day to day financial understanding and approaching the range where humans only abstractly understand. If policy makers gave a slightly inflated cost estimate, built it with inhouse management and limited subcontracting and mostly came in "under budget and ahead of schedule" with only a few projects that hit unexpected snags hitting or going over the estimates, I think people would view that as a great success even if they would have viewed that same cost as a bungogle if they had lowballed it and run over cost and time as almost all projects seem to do.
I think particularly in Blue areas where progressive ideas and projects have generally support we would be having more popular figures to put up for national elections if we were honest with a bit of padding for what things will cost, actually actively managed projects with competent people and delivered a bit more than expected.
Oh I'm actually not sure I disagree with you at all. I think my point is big infrastructure projects (often) carry huge long term benefits above and beyond initial projections.
I'm not finished with the podcast but the host has alluded to the "tragedy" of the Big Dig and I think for reasons you're getting at. The cost overruns and the giant extended timeline to finish has put a huge headwind against getting infrastructure projects proposed and funded. For the exact reasons you lay out in bullet point two.
I'm living it now. I now commute to work via the LIRR to Grand Central station. I can now walk to the office as opposed to needing to take a crosstown subway journey. Considering how many people had to make that same journey previously, the impact on shorter commute times should be enormous. But there was an apparently lack of forethought as to how new train schedules would effect service to Atlantic Terminal and whether new trains needed to be ordered. So schedules are messed up the primary effect has been to increase transfer times at Jamaica station from 2-3 minutes to upwards of 10-15 minutes. For all trains, which means not only are you not saving on travel time by going to Grand Central (it should be about a 10-15 minute reduction in travel time going right to Grand Central), you've now increased travel times to Penn Station! Like..ugh!
And yet! And yet. If Albany and the city can actually get their heads straight and get transfer times at Jamaica back down to where they were, the actual impact on commutes should huge give the number of LIRR commuters. And if Long Island can actually get it together and not be the worst NIMBYs in the country this side of San Francisco, the economic benefits of the new access could be absolutely enormous.
But because this screw up happened, a lot of long islanders and New Yorkers are understandably not in a mood to throw money to the MTA and commuter rail. Which by the way, if you don't think this is a factor in Kathy Hochul's terrible U-turn on congestion pricing I have a bridge to sell you two miles south of me.
Someone in my city is trying to start a Museum of Political Corruption. I'll let people know here if it comes to fruition.
If there's a good kickback in it, it will get built.
"And yet, I think the consensus now is that it was 'worth it'."
Andrew Odlyzko has a very interesting manuscript, entitled "Collective hallucinations and inefficient markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s", in which he argues that a lot of financial bubbles form from precisely this phenomenon: investments that absolutely are worth it *in the long term*, but is unclear if their benefits will arise soon enough for the project to be a worthwhile investment at current interest rates.
For a little relief on this topic, here's Genesis' criminally underrated song about the building of the British railroads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG9-7WmeSdc
highway construction should take a lot more precedence that residential or commercial construction.
Eminent domain is a thing exactly to make sure highways, railways etc can get built
Yes! But in the case of the Seattle Big Dig there actually hit a legit, unexpected problem. There were apparently some large iron structures that were included in the fill area where they dumped the dirt from the Denny regrade that were not in any city records and the drill hit on and broke. That obviously let to cost overruns and delays. I think Seattle took it well in part because everyone was expecting the Seattle Big Dig to turn in absolute money pit based on the experience in Boston so people's expectations were so low that it more led to an "I told you so" than a revolt. But the tunnel is lovely to use and the increased land for surface development, reconnection of the waterfront to the rest of the city and massive improvements in the views for much of the City made its actual cost totally worthwhile in a way I think few people deny. (Plus it won't come crashing down on large parts of the city in an earthquake like the old viaduct was set to do so that is a plus.) Ironically the toll they set on it to help cover the costs and cost overruns is actually one of the closest things to congestion pricing I have seen in the West. Granted it isn't a charge to go into town but a charge to be able to get through downtown from the north of the city to the south of the city actually probably cover more daily commutes in our weirdly shaped and decentralized city than a downtown congestion price would do.
The problem is the legislature didn't write exemptions to the various types of lawsuits NIMBY's would obviously throw in the way of rail construction.
That's a problem but it is not the problem. The problem is that it was impossible to do at the cost that was promised (and it indeed is impossible to do the most important segment, Bakersfield-LA at any reasonable cost) and they lied to voters by lowballing the cost to get it passed and now we've sunked a ton of money that could have helped deal with our state's many problems into a boondoggle.
Are you saying that it was never achievable from a materials cost perspective? Engineering challenges? Labor? I admit it's not clear to me why it would be difficult to build that segment.
Fundamentally engineering, geology, and terrain challenges. I tell the whole sorry story here. https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/people-who-draw-lines-on-maps-are
The right way to build it is, as you said, build LA-Bakersfield first, or at least the first step should have been launching the TBMs.
I'm not as convinced as you are that it's impossible to cross the mountains anywhere that is earthquake-proof (note that modern TBMs mean you're not restricted to the passes; you can tunnel right under the peaks as well, see Mont d'Ambin in the Alps), but the right approach would be to pick a tunnel route and then work out how to connect it to LA and what the right route up the Central Valley should be, rather than picking a route first and then working out how to cross the mountains, as CAHSR actually did.
Either way, neither of us are tunnelling engineers or seismologists, so I don't think there's any serious prospect of us debating the question - neither of us has the knowledge to make a serious assessment of the risks.
But, yes, CAHSR, the project as conceived, is a deceitful money-sink; I expect the eventual "solution" to be that they build a slow route (probably Grapevine) from LA to Bakersfield and then run actually fast from Bakersfield to SF, and claim that it's high-speed because the average train speed between LA and SF is still going to be 100mph or more.
You can't go up the Grapevine without massive tunneling which gets you the earthquake issue. Grapevine Canyon is a series of switchbacks with 6 percent grade.
Don’t they already have the ROW land acquired and through CEQA, and it does that weird loop above the grapevine and avoids that pathway so that politician in north LA county can be happy?
That is a problem. But it is a small, small part of the problem with California's HSR debacle.
A major cause of cost overruns in infrastructure projects in the US is the start stop start stop nature of construction caused by litigation and permitting. There are huge fixed costs to infrastructure construction and it seems that we pay those costs for every project because of the time gaps between completed and new projects.
Curious to know about some of the govt boondoggles you’ve seen in Florida - we hear so much about this in California, and somewhat Texas, but I feel there must be a lot in Florida too
Boy, I so want liberal government to succeed. And then I see the California HSR and the Kathy Hochul pratfall in New York and it pushes me toward despair. Do better, our team!
You are only allowed to wallow in liberal despair for 10 minutes a day maximum. Hope is a moral obligation. Despair is the enemy of justice because the struggle for justice requires courage, persistence, and faith and all of these spring from a reservoir of hope. But, I also would really fucking like to see our team doing better.
As a licensed professional engineer I'll tell you that very large and complicated infrastructure projects almost ALWAYS go over budget and over schedule. Humans have trouble estimating ands sensing the unknown unknowns.
true, But those cost overruns shouldn't be 10x
If they had actually built the thing for say 2x we wouldn't be complaining about it now
Whenever I had a research project due in a year, I was always confident I could meet the deadline fairly easily. The source of my confidence was that, while my schedule was currently packed which made immediate progress very difficult, that schedule would surely ease up in a few months and then I'd have plenty of time to finish the work. You won't be surprised to learn that this kind of future discounting typically led to tears down the road when said schedule was just as packed as it was at the earlier moment.
I don't know if this kind of budgeting is cynical or a form of blackmailing or just part of human cussedness to be hopelessly optimistic about future states.
Why not overestimate the budget then?
I mean, I understand- they want the bid- but there's a point behind my admittedly rhetorical question. If it was just an ordinary process of "guess the costs in good faith", shouldn't, with all the experience people have, some of the guesses come in too high instead of too low?
So what does that say about what is really going on-- good faith estimates that just missed the mark, or deliberately lowballing the costs for contracting and/or political reasons to hook the public in so they are forced to pay the real price?
So, the bid is the thing, right? There is a related phenomenon in government work (work done by government organizations on a reimbursable basis for other government organizations) constrained by budgets but without a real bidding process. It turns out that it is common to significantly overestimate the initial costs of a project and then as more information becomes available and the schedule firms up the initial estimate usually (not always) comes down. Some of the pressure to reduce the estimate admittedly comes from the "customer" who does have an appropriated budget limit. The high initial estimate is how the service providers hedge against the risk of the "unknown unknowns."
I imagine at this point it would be counterproductive to accurately estimate the time and cost involved; people are by now used to undershoots so they'd assume your project would be more costly than it is if you correctly announced its cost.
i'm sure you're right that the price presented was unrealistic, but i think it is always important to point out that a great deal of the increase in estimated total project cost is just a function of the increase in real estate values. if they are to ever build the socal portions of the project they'll need to aquire a lot of privately owned real estate and the price they'd pay is much higher now than it was 15 years ago.
The opponents predicted $90 billion in costs. And much of the land is in the middle of nowhere and not part of the boom. So no that isn't it.
most of the land "in the middle of nowhere" has already been purchased, so those costs aren't going up. but the southern california segments have not been purchased, and the value of that real estate has sky rocketed.
Right but the main reason for that non-purchase is terrain/engineering/geology issues known for over 100 years.
The plan was always build in central California and then blackmail the state for money so that it wouldn't be a white elephant!
i think the main reason they haven't been purchased is because no one has given them money to start work in those areas.
The initiative put a $9.95 billion price tag on the whole thing!
In fact they NEEDED to start there first because LA-Bakersfield was the most important need. We have plenty of passenger rail in central California but none between LA and Bakersfield. So you start there first.
Again, the plan was always to lowball the cost and then try to blackmail the public to put up whatever obscene sum would actually be needed to get over the Tehachapis.
sorry, so cal = southern california, not social.
Sorry no it's not "fraud" to spin things in your direction when engaged in a political campaign, for better or worse it's just how the game is played.
It's not fraud when a politician says "elect me and there will never be a cloudy day" because we all know he is lying.
But it is fraud when advocates- including many subject matter experts- say "approve this taxpayer funded program because it will only cost $9.95 billion and will yield $50 a trip less than 3 hour train trips between LA and San Francisco" knowing that isn't close to true.
But this just shows why California's system of "government by referenda" is pretty bad in my view. It's not "rule of the people" it's rule of the interest groups and campaign professionals who specialize in running ballot initiative campaigns. Personally I'd just change the system rather than trying to enforce rules that the Don Drapers of the political world have to be honest about everything all the time because of course they aren't going to do that, no more than Don Draper is going to admit that buying lipstick isn't going to make you happy.
California's system of government by referenda is how we got marijuana legalization. The politicians were NEVER going to touch this because they are so afraid of looking soft on drugs. It was only because there was an option to bring this to voters that we got the ball rolling.
It's a good system. If it requires that sponsors of projects be more honest about them, that's a good thing too.
In any event, even in a purely representative democracy, this sort of activity can still discredit advocates of government. Eventually, the voters may get sick of being lied to, and some projects will turn into white elephants such as freeway stubs that constantly remind voters that the folks who promised progress just stole their money instead.
It also got you three strikes and Prop 13 which are big parts of mass incarceration and why middle class families increasingly can't afford to live there anymore. Let's just say we disagree on this (full argument here https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-07/california-is-cradle-of-reckless-referendums?embedded-checkout=true)
It did. But parts of three strikes were later repealed. We also reformed our auto insurance system by initiative.
I am highly protective of our system. It's great. We allow our voters to make choices. Some of those choices are bad, but we also are able to do things to circumvent politicians when politicians are acting anti-democratically. This is how things should work.
You can argue we need a higher signature requirement. That is true. But the general notion that the voters should be able to overrule politicians is sound. It's more democratic than the alternative. And if you don't like it, don't live here.
Nah it has made the state completely unaffordable for anyone who isn't upper class. My city has a 1% homelessness rate to propositions.
And if you're going to have government by proposition you're going to have dishonest referenda. Policy advocates are much more dishonest than parties.
And if that means weed never got legalized so be it. The harm of Prop 13 far, far outweighs anything positive that has come out of it.
We need a new business model for public works projects. Contractors must agree to a fixed price and not get paid until the job is completed, with penalties for delays.
Yes, the bids will be much higher in order to cover all the risks, but at least we'll know the cost up front and can make a decision if that new bridge or rail line is really worth it.
"Contractors must agree to a fixed price"
No. That contracting model is only acceptable for turnkey projects, wherein the contractor both designs and builds the new infrastructure. Otherwise, either the contract sets the minute details of the project in such stone that neither the contractor nor public officials can adapt unforeseen technical challenges; or the public officials will have the freedom to insert scope creep to the project until the contractor is guaranteed a loss. The only solution is to take the majority of the work in-house.
How will bringing the work in-house improve performance? Who will have skin in the game and suffer the consequences for cost and schedule overruns? Perhaps large, complex projects can be broken into baby steps, with a fixed price for each step, and a chance to negotiate adjustments (as well as consider new bidders) for subsequent steps.
I think you believe that public works officials are not penalized for cost overruns. I disagree with that premise; I think they lack the tools to appropriately prevent contractors from developing cost overruns through incompetence. Consequently I don't think the problem is a lack of "skin in the game"; the problem is insufficient in-house technical knowledge to break down the "large complex projects…into baby steps".
If public officials were effectively held accountable, we wouldn’t be having this discussion about why we can’t build anything.
Was it definitely a lie? Construction projects are notorious for being massively more expensive and slower to build than expected.
The conflation of externalities with direct subsidies is egregious and one of those things that exemplifies how journalists often are unconcerned with truth or knowing. They just want to sell a salient story. I lost of lot of respect when speaking with journalists on research I did, because of the questions they asked and the responses they were apparently seeking to elicit.
There is a reason why the public has lost trust in experts and journalists over the years and that is because actors in these positions of authority often abuse the trust of the public.
Don’t ascribe malice rather than incompetence - most journalists are just incredibly innumerate.
Hopefully AI makes all journalists more scientifically and economically literate. I know I’ve certainly used it to explain some things!
I think this is true, but also beside the point. I don’t think most journalists care if what they write is literally correct. They start with a “vibe,” do enough research to “confirm” the vibe, and then view their job as writing an interesting, possibly inflammatory story that persuades people of the vibe. Their failures come primarily from indifference for objective facts rather than mere negligence. In the legal world, we’d say they have “scienter,” something worse than negligence, though not always “intent.”
As a former journalist I’d say this is not only untrue but unfair.
You’re criticizing journalists for being one-sided and promoting an agenda, while many others criticize journalists for “both sidesing” every story. Which is it? Because it’s hard to see how it’s both.
I also think journalists get held to an impossibly high standard. Most people in most companies aren’t particularly good at their jobs, don’t know how to interpret data or think critically, and propose solutions to problems that benefit them personally. Should we really be surprised that the same applies sometimes to some journalists?
In general - almost all of my colleagues tried to treat their stories and their subjects fairly and tried to relay the facts accurately. Did they always succeed? No. But as I compare it to other industries, the failure rate was pretty low.
As someone who is held to standards of accuracy in writing, I can tell you that it is in fact not difficult to avoid the pitfalls that most journalists fall into. It is, however, hard to do that while also generating clicks. Objective facts rarely are interesting to a wide audience.
The failure rate is exceedingly high. I’d say 60-70% of articles I read on a subject of which I am an expert contain significant false premises on which the article relies and any objective researcher could identify. But these errors are not random-they invariably point towards making a story more interesting or compelling. That is the fundamental bias of the press.
The people criticizing both sidesing typically just want a propaganda piece that confirms their priors. 90+% of the time they shouldn't be taken seriously
My general critique of both-sides journalism is that it’s lazy and uninformative. Often it’s just summarizing the opposing press releases. But that isn’t the issue I’m referring to here. What I find funny is that multiple posters here have chosen to view the issue purely from a political/partisan lens. My problem, and I think Matt’s, runs much deeper.
Haha the good old fallacy of trust:
https://aarongertler.net/nameless-fallacy/
The Fallacy of Trust
The Fallacy of Trust occurs when a person who is an expert on foreign policy picks up a newspaper, flips to the foreign policy section, and cries out “balderdash!”
This isn’t the problem. The problem is that the same person will often read the rest of the newspaper without complaint, quietly updating their opinions bit by bit.
Meanwhile, the expert on local politics will cry out “balderdash!” in the local-politics section, but read about foreign policy without complaint.
If we assume that the newspaper is mostly wrong on both topics, then neither expert is gathering information very effectively.
"Gell-Mann Amnesia" is absolutely a thing, and for good reason.
"You’re criticizing journalists for being one-sided and promoting an agenda, while many others criticize journalists for “both sidesing” every story. Which is it? Because it’s hard to see how it’s both."
That's fair, I would say that the two criticisms are basically in opposition to each other. I share a lot of the same complaints as the person you are responding to, but I would never complain about a journalist "both sidesing" an issue, I wish they would do more of that.
At a larger level, I see this sort of phenomenon online a lot, everyone has an opinion of either "more X" or "less X" and it is really hard to tell that the demands aren't usually incoherent or contradictory, they are issued by 2 separate and opposed groups with the demandees (in this case journalists) as the rope in a tug-of-war.
I totally agree - but my sense is also that if two opposing groups are both criticizing you, then you’re actually doing things the right way.
Ehhh, I feel like there are always 2 groups on both sides criticizing everything. Also I feel like in this case there are really 3 sides. There are plenty of people on both the left and right that love to "work the refs" by accusing media of being too much in favor of the other side, plus a third side that wants journalists to go back to just dry, factual reporting without trying to insert "context" into things.
Ha fair! I’ll just say that since I moved out of journalism and into business I see people misunderstanding, misusing or just plain not having data all time. I can’t even count the number of faulty models I’ve had to correct, or the businesses cases that rest on totally shoddy assumptions.
To be honest when I was in journalism and didn’t know much about business I kind of most assumed companies were well run - now I realize they’re basically in business in spite of themselves.
And are they also illiterate? Their reporting on *all* topics is bad , not just heavily number-y ones. It’s either loose ethics or stupidity (or both).
There are of course exceptions, but it seems to me most media doesn’t reward it.
Well, also deadlines (both official and unofficial).
That’s fair. In a more charitable mood I’d have acknowledged that. But what Dan Quail is describing goes beyond honest mistakes due to haste. It’s being tendentious is one’s approach to prioritize one’s agenda over attempting an honest understanding. I concede the business model of journalism is much to blame but the problem can also be seen in public media
One of my exes is a fairly successful journalist. In general, she was intelligent, intellectually curious, and committed to truth-seeking, but while we were going out, I noticed that she was often willing to make allowances for other journalists-- and especially for personal friends-- when they did things that violated normal common-sense morality. For example, she defended a friend who wrote a fairly cruel Gawker piece about her horror at finding out that her okCupid date, John Finkel, was a Magic the Gathering champion, even though even by the author's own account, he was pleasant, polite, and didn't do anything objectionable during the date. My ex argued that this sort of piece was fair game even though normal people would find publicly humiliating a date who hadn't done anything wrong pretty reprehensible.
One of the factors that probably informed my ex's response was that the piece's author experienced a pretty intense backlash, at least some of which was disproportionate and/or misogynistically flavored (death threats, people saying that the author should be raped). I get the sense that journalists in the current era have a strong siege/bunker mentality. Thanks to Meta/Google/etc, their industry's historical revenue model is broken and individual journalists' jobs are extremely precarious. And thanks to social media, any given piece of reporting on a remotely controversial topic will draw a big, hostile response, much of which will be in bad faith and come from obviously terrible people *even in cases where the reporting in question is actually bad*.
In this sort of context, it's pretty understandable/human normal that journalists are inclined to both circle the wagons and defend behavior that they wouldn't normally endorse. Unfortunately, this becomes a significant problem for the rest of us because we often have to rely on them for information. I don't see the problem getting better until journalism finds a more stable economic model again.
Your example reminds me of how irritating it is that journalists write about their bad dates instead of writing about Sudan, or really any actual news. In the last twenty years, language arts teachers have assigned a lot of essays about how the students feel about various things. Go back to assigning essays about John C. Fremont or the motif of yellow in Crime and Punishment! I don't care about your damn feelings unless I know you personally.
Unfortunately, your preferences are in the minority, writing about bad dates gets lots of clicks (especially if it's inflammatory or controversial), and its economics are much better than those of reporting on the civil war in Sudan. I get the sense that most journalists would themselves prefer to spend more time on substantive stories; but the market is not friendly to that desire. (Business journalism tends to be a bit more substantive precisely because it has an audience that's both eager and able to actually pay for substantive reporting.)
Most journalists would prefer to focus on whatever is easiest to write.
(that's not because their journalists, but because they're people)
I too am lazy. Just like the dog.
It is crazy that you mention that specific incident (I was a semi-professional MTG player at the time). It was so weird to me, because the existence of the piece, and the reaction to it, were obviously done for terribly short-sighted reasons. As you point out, humiliating a date because of their slightly weird hobby is not a nice thing to do, but it has layers of additional context which pick at people's identities (and thus make them defensive).
The thing is, this wasn't just any Magic the Gathering player, but the "GOAT," who is also a successful hedge fund manager, and everyone who talks to him acknowledges he is super-smart and kind. So, you had this perfect storm of "incel"-adjacent subcultures arguing this "proves" women only want to date "Chads," MTG players saying this just shows how stupid and shallow non-gamers are, and feminists saying just because you don't agree with this woman's preferences, doesn't mean they are invalid. (There was also a ton of abuse heaped on the journalist for her own appearance, by aggrieved MtG players who felt she wasn't "hot enough" to even be criticizing their champion).
I remember thinking at the time, while obviously this *particular journalist* is rejecting someone for shallow and stupid reasons, but people do things for shallow and stupid reasons all the time, so this particular couple would never have worked out anyway. The actual "problem," if you want to call it that, is the idea that journalists should use their specific personal feelings and interactions as emblematic of wider society, and that they need to give themselves social license for why this specific thing they don't like is a Problem. If you need to invent "red flags" to explain why you didn't click with someone, then you'll probably just setting yourself up to be lonely, but if you write an article about it trying to go viral, you're probably setting up lots of impressionable people to be lonely along with you!
This comment section clearly has conviction that failure to tax what could be taxed is a subsidy: see SALT, MID, etc.
I assume Dan Quail used the phrase "*direct* subsidies" to establish precisely that distinction.
These examples are specific deductions, in contrast to a carbon tax, which is a separate new tax. It required action to create the MID. The lack of a carbon tax is inaction.
"Federal income tax falls on income left over after certain expenses" is no different from "social security and medicare taxes fall on wage income" or "capital gains tax falls on investment income minus investment losses" or "property tax falls on the value of owned real estate."
All taxes have a defined scope that leaves certain potentially taxable stocks or flows on the table.
Hey wouldn't you know it. Just yesterday the Surgeon General spread a pile of misinformation about gun violence. Stuff like counting 19 year olds in shootings of children, switching back and forth between wildly different definitions of "mass shootings", implying "assault weapons" get used in a significant amount of crime, cherry picking the timing to avoid the new data that shows violent crime dropping, etc etc.
If there's any one set of people that need to recover some credibility after absolutely lighting it on fire during COVID it's the public health officials. Acting like the Surgeon General has anything whatever meaningful to say about gun policy as a "public health crisis" is simply pouring gasoline on the ashes.
I can’t litigate the veracity of the SG’s claims. But I’ll say this- even if everything he said was 100% correct it was still a bad idea. Guns are one of the most polarizing issues in the country, and it is really tendentious to lump them in under “public health”. With so many other actual public health issues that he could be addressing, this just burns credibility for no apparent gain.
Brings back memories of the early 80s when Physicians for Social Responsibility warned us that nuclear war was a public health issue on which they were experts.
Apparently, as I recall their saying, a nuclear war would be deleterious for people's health.
I guess they're still around peddling this stuff but the air went out of the balloon when the Berlin Wall fell, thankfully.
Yeah that made me want to scream. A good example of how the liberal staffer class is not acting like there is a contentious election coming up that depends on much more moderate swing voters.
"this just burns credibility for no apparent gain"
Yes, I'm barely kidding when I suggest someone should check the Surgeon General's financial records for large monetary transfers from anonymous Cypriot bank accounts because it's very hard to explain what the Hell he was thinking otherwise.
Because he's not actually trying to move public policy, but just get kudo's from liked minded people at the cocktail parties
Guns and cars are the leading reasons that people who would otherwise live long healthy lives instead die young. And it’s not particularly close! Obviously they remain that way because they are popular, or they would have been fixed already.
Successful public health interventions usually intersect culture, and people are usually attached to culture. How we deal with human waste, how we cook food and manage kitchens, how we manage animals, how we send off the dead, how we welcome children into the world, etc. Possibly the biggest coup ever for public health was the introduction of a quasi-religious ritual, handwashing, into our daily lives - multiple times a day!
I think it’s fine to say that guns and cars are public health concerns, but why is a doctor the right person to diagnose that or prescribe a solution?
The surgeon general runs the public health system. Who else would do it?
Congress. The Surgeon General doesn't have regulatory authority over guns and cars. In fact, you say they run the public health system, but what regulatory authority do they actually have?
Agreed. I could care less about litigating the veracity; it's still political malpractice.
Let me paste here a random NYT reader's response (not my own):
"This sounds like a great extension of the authority of doctors and public health scientists. I'd like to offer a few more areas for input from the Surgeon General.
1. Foreign policy - clearly large numbers of people die in wars, so why isn't the Surgeon General in charge of our foreign policy?
2. Vehicular accidents killed nearly 40,000 Americans last year. Why isn't the Surgeon General consulted on automobile design?
3. 13,000 people died in fires last year. When will the Surgeon General weigh in on Fire Codes for residential buildings
4. Almost 20,000 died from falls in 2022. The Surgeon General needs to speak up on the design of stairwells.
Really all of politics can be placed under the rubric of Public Health. There's no need for political parties or elections at all."
I am not very exercised about gun rights myself (don’t own any, seems like an obviously legitimate thing for a government to regulate, odd to me how hot other libertarian minded people get over it) but I AM exercised over mission creep in regulatory agencies. This was a crazy move. True believer? Misguided political calculation? Red meat for the base? I am not sure but another in a VERY long line of examples of Biden agency pick being completely off the rails. A lot of the stuff Biden personally does I think is reasonable but his administration is taking crazy pills from the SEC, DOJ, FTC etc etc. too bad he is running against Clown College Republicans so there is no sane alternative.
Definitely true believer. If you listen to his loneliness interviews, he believes he can use his position to put a spotlight on tough problems facing American society so that we can try to find solutions together. For loneliness, this was a thoughtful message. Unfortunately, for gun violence, putting things in the spotlight never seems to help us make progress.
I think it's very weird to act like car safety seat regulation and shaken baby videos make sense but talking about gun deaths in children is totally out of bounds, given the number of deaths associated annually with each modality.
By the way, the pendulum has swung on car seat stuff, too -- we now require car seats way out in places where there is little good data to suggest that we're averting any meaningful number of deaths.
Pretty sure there are not single issue car seat owners who will now disregard the opinions of the surgeon general out of (in this instance, justified) mistrust!
Also guns are deliberately made to kill people on purpose. You don’t need a medical expert to tell you they are dangerous to kids!
But I also think it doesn’t make sense to selectively issue warnings about some things that kill 30,000 people a year and not other things that kill 30,000 people a year, just because some of them have partisans and are supposed to be “obviously dangerous”. It makes sense to just classify them on the basis of the actual harms caused here and leave it to the economists and politicians to figure out the costs of mitigating these harms, and the cultural values involved.
The significant distinction is when the deaths are the item in question functioning as intended. Government issued guidance related to accidents, externalities, defects and malfunctions are one thing. Guns functioning as intended killing people when those killings are unlawful is a criminal justice issue, not a public health or consumer safety issue. Gun accident and malfunction deaths are on a tiny scale compared to car accidents or lung cancer from cigarettes. They're something like half that of swimming pools.
I literally don’t understand what you’re saying. How does being a criminal justice issue make something not a public health issue? Does violence cease being relevant to health once there’s a law against it? Should we be tracking legal pollution deaths separately from illegal pollution deaths?
Also, aren’t suicides the big public health concern from guns, even more than anything illegal or accidental?
Anyway, I agree that the surgeon general should have a series of warnings about automobiles and cigarettes. I don’t think anyone is denying that, other than maybe North Carolina politicians who still think its politically problematic to engage in culture war issues like talking about deaths caused by legal products.
I wouldn’t mind putting Smith & Wesson in a position where they had to say under oath that their products are intended to help people commit suicide, perform robberies, etc.
That’s true, but surely can also parse the difference between “hey you might not know this but activity X Y Z is actually quite dangerous to your health—like having a fireplace” and “we asserting regulatory authority under public health laws after failing to win the political fight with direct legislation to curb something that everyone knows is, and is in fact specifically designed to be, dangerous”.
That second thing burns trust that serves an important social role for the first fireplace thing. Now people will think you don’t like fireplaces because of some climate agenda or whatever, not because they are in fact a surprisingly large health hazard.
The surgeon general isn’t asserting regulatory authority, is he? Does the surgeon general actually have any regulatory authority? I thought the warnings on cigarettes were ordered by a lawsuit settlement or by Congress, even though they quote the surgeon general in order to get some respect for the claim.
Most of those gun deaths are actually suicides not murders. And it's a great example of elite misinformation.
The ratio is about 3:2 suicide to homicide, with accidental coming in at 1% (and another 1-2% undetermined)
I think it's definitely elite misinformation when they don't bring up that fact. But I think the public health agencies are actually quite good about always talking about guns both in the context of suicides and homicides, unlike other public actors talking about guns.
I think politics is inseparably part of any political appointee’s job. If the Surgeon General’s statements on guns will have bad effects, that’s all the reason he needs not to make them.
The "have large gatherings all you want if it's a BLM protest; the rest of you, no effing way" thing was (rightfully) probably the single biggest destroyer of trust & credibility in the public health establishment in many a year.
One key difference about them (in most cases) is that car safety seats and not shaking your baby are steps _you_ take to keep _your_ kids alive. And getting that information out to parents is useful (like SIDS information etc). This is consistent with "smoking kills (you)"
Gun regulation is different.
Exception: Maybe if you want to talk about gun safes or keeping ammo separate, or trigger locks. But does the SG talk about Smoke Detectors? (A quick google search isn't find anything - and I'd lump those together)
We definitely got smoke detector stuff in the home safety portion of our pre-discharge teaching. Also electrical outlet covers, locking away poisons, braces on bookcases to keep them from falling over...
We got handouts. We saw videos. Every product you buy has instructions with pictures and big warning labels. And that includes a lot of products not even meant for children! Seriously, look at the plastic packaging in your Amazon box sometime.
I'm not sure how much of that you can trace to the surgeon general, personally, but going through all the new parent classes at the hospital and starting to "see" all those labels and stuff really opened my eyes to just how weird we treat guns in comparison to everything else that might kill kids, proportionately speaking.
It's like you said: there are really basic innovations, like trigger locks, that are cheap, easy to use, and would take up thirty seconds of the videos I watched, right after outlet covers and before car seat installation. And we don't do that. It's empirically odd, even if you know it is driven by political realities.
My quick googling of trigger locks suggests they aren't so widely accepted as effective. They break easily, there are many other easy to implement alternatives, and many guns already come with conceptually similar safety measures that are more effective.
But in terms of what's weird I don't that guns are such an outlier. There must be 50 different poisonous chemicals in my house right now from household cleaners to paints to roach poisons. There are also several species of very poisonous berries growing in my yard, a couple of swimming pools, a pond and a stream that floods in walking distance, And in this age of harm reduction for overdoses, a million americans are walking around with lethal doses of fentanyl.
Unintentional gun deaths age 14 and under totaled 84 in 2022, compared to 202 accidental poison deaths and 500 drownings. There was 175 gun suicides in the 10-14 age group and 42 poison suicides. These numbers don't look very different, but there's few regs on what legal medicines or household cleaners I keep in my house
My PCP asked me if I had smoke detectors in my home just a couple of months ago during a physical.
As an aside, didn't it turn out that "shaken baby syndrome" was mostly a moral panic sort of thing that got made up in a couple over-sensationalized trials of like babysitters?
Sort of. I think "shaken baby syndrome" in particular was kind of overblown as a specific thing, but the general category of "trauma" really is one of the major causes of infant death, and people really do abuse infants for infant-specific reasons that go beyond the abuse visited on children more generally (i.e. stuff like the pronounced lack of sleep in new parents and the way that a colicky baby crying really does make some people kind of crazy past a certain point). The videos we watched in the hospital specifically dealing with shaken baby were really more about managing anger or depression when around infants, so clearly someone got the message.
That sounds right, but the "shaken baby" framing does seem awfully of a kind with other instances of elite public health misinformation to me.
I don't think it's a good idea to shake your baby.
Eh, shaking a baby is in fact more dangerous to them than you might expect in a sleep deprived and angry moment with a screaming infant, and those moments come at you faster than you might expect too. I have not researched it but I suspect it has had some impact and its plausibly useful training for new parents. Don’t shake the baby ever no matter what! Don’t give the baby water (it’s bad for them)! Get the vitamin K shot! Be alert for post partum depressed on and psychosis!
I certainly don't doubt that you can do great harm shaking an infant. As I recall though the "shaken baby syndrome" thing was about a medical "expert witness" claiming they could, like, look at an autopsy and based on certain bruising or whatever claim someone had to have shaken this baby beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe there was also some thing about, "the babysitter could shake your kid and they'd seem fine when you get home then randomly collapse and die later." It was entirely prosecutorial pseudoscience nonsense.
I've been told they figured out SIDS mostly has to do with blankets and that's why they recommend these zip up sack things instead now.
We looked heavily into this and (this was 9 years ago so things may have been updated) but yeah:
Loose blankets - I think it caused C02 to pool up around the infant's mouth and nose and they don't have all the normal reflexes/ability to move/wakeup for better air.
We were told under no uncertain terms to keep those things out of our crib - and definitely used "sleep sacks" which couldn't get loose.
How would you know that?
It's like the Secret Congress. People will listen to experts on the first two issues because they're not polarizing. The latter is, so "expertise" isn't an issue and your words will simply feed the culture war. So why do it?
Granted this is not a nuanced interpretation, there is definitely some value in trying to understand the gun violence problem through a public health framework, but making the question of gun possession a public health issue leads people to think you are claiming that owning a gun is akin to having a disease.
I mostly agree with this analysis, in the sense that I think "public health" as a concept gets way, way, way overstretched by people who want to use it for all kinds of stuff--climate change immediately comes to mind--and I genuinely think that is a bad thing that devalues the field. Something that is used to mean everything eventually comes to mean nothing, and I think "public health" is really in danger of falling into that space, if it hasn't already. And I say that having taught undergrad public health classes for years; I'm lamenting what is, in my mind, a very bad thing.
My sense is that going for "public health" arguments is, in the minds of people who do it, One Weird Trick for sneaking around certain elements of politics that they find frustratingly intractable and/or distasteful. I am squarely in the camp of people who think that One Weird Trick never, ever works and that usually One Weird Trick thinking actually makes your problems worse.
But.
Two things I also think are true:
1) This is part of why I have repeatedly gone with the car seat parallel throughout this discussion. No one thinks that driving cars is a disease, but we lecture parents about it literally at the hospital, and it is treated explicitly with a public health framing, and it's fine. There are actually other parallels that I think are useful, such as the fact that car deaths can be, like gun deaths, the result of all kinds of actors with all kinds of motivations, and we don't have to argue about "reckless driving deaths" versus "accident deaths" versus "malfunction deaths"--no one cares. We just (correctly, IMO) treat car seats as a single-point technological response to a set of things that used to kill kids on the regular and we don't sweat it, because that approach works. I think we should be that way about guns.
2) A point I have tried to stick to throughout this thread is that I think the discourse around this issue is genuinely odd in a way that is very revealing, not of bad faith, precisely, but of the way in which our discussion of guns is really about all kinds of other stuff--emotional stuff, like how cool people think guns are and how they figure into self-identity--that we are not willing to say or acknowledge or maybe don't even notice in the rush to rehash some specific set of talking points or pre-baked opinions that comport with our feelings.
It's the same reason why I replied to the original post about assault weapons and was like, "there is literally no mention of assault weapons in the ten tweets you linked." And I think this inability to even recognize that we are not having the discussion, much less have an actual discussion, is a huge blind spot and a huge problem for some big-ticket issues like guns. It is why I keep using words like "odd" and comparing gun discussion and harm reduction measures to other things (again: car seats, shaken babies) that cut a different way, emotionally and politically. People think--truly believe--that they are being hyper rationale and folks on the other side are irrational in a way that is just fundamentally untrue. I recognize that in part because I saw it so clearly (and maybe wrote about it less clearly) in my prior research. But that's my intervention: I have tried to avoid stating particular policy preferences because I think that reckoning with the incongruence is more likely to achieve something useful than for us to all rehash policy territory that has already been over-tilled.
To add to your point, Kaiser routinely asks us, as parents, if we have a gun in the house, along with questions about smoke detectors, gated pools, etc.
What do you think the DOJ has done wrong?
I had in mind antitrust enforcement where they have gone bananas, but they have been maximally aggressive in a couple of other areas I have happened to come across (like opioid litigation) as well. I know I know, cry me a river for the poor Sacklers but it leads me to suspect they are also being unreasonable and political in areas I don't have a view on too.
They also seem to be botching the case against Trump, which strikes me as a real "you come at the king best not miss" situation, but I have been deliberately avoiding details on the many legal actions against Trump so perhaps they are doing a better job that it seems like from down here buried in the sand.
Judge Aileen Cannon has gone rogue, is the problem there. She’s like some kind of … some sort of unsecured bit of armament, the right idiom isn’t coming to me.
An armament that slides freely across the deck as the waves rock the boat?
Yeah like a unmoored howitzer, kind of.
Omar Little springs to mind *every* single time I read about Trump's legal troubles.
It's funny because that line isn't original to him! Emerson or somebody said it first.
Can you lay out a list of your favorite examples?
After actually experiencing a actual, serious public health crisis just four years ago, you'd think that it would teach people to stop using that phrase for every thing out there they deem to be bad, but alas...
Meh. I read over the ten tweets published in your link, and I think you can quibble with some of the details--I really wish people would start disaggregating the degree to which suicide is more the real problem than murder with guns--but there isn't even a mention of mass shootings or assault weapons in those ten tweets, and I didn't hear him mention it in the little video.
If you acknowledge that bullets causing trauma by their passage through human tissue are a major cause of child death in this country, that seems like a public health problem, in the sense that those deaths are highly preventable. I guess you could argue about whether it constitutes a "crisis" or not, but nobody gets mad when you want to deal with, say, lead poisoning, and that doesn't even kill kids. I had to watch a movie about shaken baby syndrome to even leave the hospital. I had to watch a demonstration of how to correctly install a car seat.
I am a gun owner, licensed to hunt in the state of Texas, and no one said anything about it.
Harm prevention is this constant thing you are being messaged on when you are a parent, especially in the early years--here's how to do child seat safely, here's how to lay your kid to sleep, here's which products are safe or non-safe, etc. So honestly the brackets around doing policy on guns and kids in our society always seems really odd, by comparison. I understand the politics that lead to that outcome, but as "elite misinformation," I think this one is pretty weak sauce.
I'm not saying that you can't find some real elite misinformation whoppers about guns out there. But this particular tweet thread doesn't look like it to me.
But the "public health" message if often "we should pass legislation", not "be more safe with your guns". The latter seems like something the SG should talk about, but not the former
I'm pretty sure that the car seats have labels on them because someone passed a law. I know for a fact that the shaken baby video thing is done by law, because I'm a registered nurse and got that in my training (even though, to be clear, I'm critical care rather than L&D).
Whether you want to talk speed limits and licensure and street lights or alcohol and marijuana usage or air pollution, laws are how we do public safety and health in this country. If you aren't talking about legislating, you are kind of just blowing smoke.
It might not be politically smart for the SG to talk about legislation that will irritate people (like you, I guess), but it's pretty nonsensical on its face to say, "man, officials charged with public health matters shouldn't talk about legislation, since that is the main way we do public health in this country."
I don’t think that’s nonsensical. Legislation isn’t their department. I don’t want Trump’s SG talking about how we need to build the wall to prevent disease from spreading inside the US.
What if the wall was made of mosquito netting?
I think the SG should talk about the number of injuries and their causes, but not necessarily about what particular interventions are best. To know which interventions are best takes expertise beyond health and medicine, since interventions have implications outside of health or medicine.
Sure - fwiw, if the OP is representing the SG's communication accurately, it sounds like in this case a big part of the problem is not that they were staying in those bounds, but cherry-picking and using the data in misrepresentative ways. There's no reason (beyond I guess politics) to imply that assault weapons kill more people than pistols, or to say violent gun crime is increasing right at the moment (as opposed to higher than it was 5 years ago), etc...
Yeah, I've avoided clicking through to the statements myself, but those implications, if actually there in the statements and not just the reconstructions being tossed around to make the surgeon general sound bad, do sound bad.
Also, suicide is specifically the reason I do not myself own any firearms. I don’t think I am suicidal guy myself but the data shows being confident about that is pretty dangerous. I get sad! Sometimes I am drunk! Apparently people kill themselves impulsively! Not worth the risk.
Having the option to kill myself without the connivance of the medical establishment is why I own a pistol.
No tall buildings where you live? I guess hard to climb if you get really sick.
I think that risks hurting other people physically, and almost certainly making some people see something horrific.
The fall would be terrifying. If you shoot yourself in the head, you don’t even have time to hear the report. Your brain has been destroyed before it has time to process the sound
I guess I like interposing “willing to tolerate a scary fall” between myself and suicide in the absence of an informed consent paradigm. But you places your bet and takes you chances!
If you do it right. You there are a fair number of people who attempt it and remain alive with serve brain damage.
You can just shoot yourself in the head on the way down and save half of that terrifying-ness. And, if you change your mind half way, oh wait...never mind.
Evil Camus agrees - you never know what a man with a gun might do.
"If you acknowledge that bullets causing trauma by their passage through human tissue are a major cause of child death in this country, that seems like a public health problem, in the sense that those deaths are highly preventable."
"I am a gun owner, licensed to hunt in the state of Texas, and no one said anything about it."
This confuses me. Are you saying that we need the Surgeon General to encourage warning labels be added to ammunition saying that bullets cause trauma by their passage through human tissue because people who use guns might not know that?
It's an interesting question! But as your comment highlights, it's really odd that some of the commenters want to act as though discussing it was a strange choice for the SG's office in a world where I can't crack open my beer without seeing a message about drinking in pregnancy, and there are calorie counts plastered all over the menu boards of every junk food place I eat at.
Clearly, we seem to be very into discussing harm reduction stuff, and we have apparently as a society decided to slap warning labels on everything. Given that such is the case, it becomes really interesting to think about what we don't want to discuss or don't want to label or whatever. And I'm sure you think all that stuff is dumb, but it didn't bother you so much that you wanted to post about it; the gun thing did. That is interesting information--it tells you something.
To put it differently, does the Pennsylvania legislature really think that my child's lifetime risk of dying from being shaken is great than the risk of dying from a gunshot wound inflicted by a weapon that I own and store in my house? That is, statistically speaking, just a deeply weird claim.
FWIW, my own academic background in technology and public policy (see my comment elsewhere in these threads on radiation, or just check out the website in my bio link) plus my own libertarian-ish pragmatism tend to make me skeptical of labels versus technical solutions for harm reduction. But the fact that you, a guy living in 2024 America, are "confused" about warning labels as though labeling things isn't a thing we do everywhere on, near as I can tell, every conceivable product and flat surface in the United States basically captures the core strangeness of the debate and the way in which people--and I argued in my book on radiation therapy that all of us are prone to falling into this trap because it is core to how our minds work--don't see the contradictions that we don't want to see.
How much are the commenters here saying the SG shouldn't talk about gun deaths at all (particularly in terms of accurately providing accidental and suicide death/injury risk?)? I'm not reading much of that view, and what I am reading, or might sympathize with, is that we do have a lot of sometimes-too-obvious warning labels when it comes to some things. At a certain point when they are too ubiquitous and obvious people tend to tune them out, ie "known to cause cancer in the state of California" stickers are on literally everything.
Rather it seems that there's more griping about the SG misrepresenting and cherry-picking data to make political points, ie violent crime is rising or assault weapons kill more than pistols, playing fast and loose with the definition of mass shooting, etc.
It would be interesting to have a forum format where instead of replying to irrational individuals, you could reply to the aggregate opinion.
You misunderstood my comment. I was asking for clarification in what you were saying, and not assigning a value judgement. Sorry if that was unclear.
As to your broader point, I think that we as a society and the SG and similar institutions in particular should do a much better job of examining the results of actions. If we do X and expect to accomplish Y, then we should really examine whether we actually accomplish Y.
My issue with the Surgeon General's statements are that he's doing X (warn about guns) to accomplish Y (decrease gun deaths), but it doesn't accomplish Y and instead accomplishes Z (decreases the credibility of the Surgeon General's office).
This applies as in a broader way with labeling generally. We've made it so ubiquitous that its mostly ignored. California wanted to warn people of things that cause cancer, but now everything causes cancer and most people don't pay any attention to the warning. The action of X to accomplish Y failed, but there hasn't been a change in approach, there's just a doubling down.
I had great hopes that there was finally political will to address this problem head on, discuss the real-world efficacy of different harm reduction strategies, and advocate with real donor money for more empirically defensible legislative approaches, but then the No Labels people explained that I had misunderstood their organization's political mission and invited me to leave the rally…
"it's really odd that some of the commenters want to act as though discussing it was a strange choice for the SG's office in a world where I can't crack open my beer without seeing a message about drinking in pregnancy, and there are calorie counts plastered all over the menu boards of every junk food place I eat at."
It would not be a strange choice for the SG's office to talk about gun violence. It was a strange choice to decide to (i) frame it as a "public health emergency," when violent crime rates in fact are still well-below historical highs and are dropping from their recent spikes, especially given that "public health emergency" is now well-known as a dog whistle for about 45% of the population, and (ii) do it just months before what is expected to be a close election when, AIUI, the clear weight of evidence is that discussion of gun control in general does far more to motivate anti-gun control voters than pro-gun control voters (this is explicitly why Matt discourages Democrats from talking about gun control).
There's a whole report beyond the press release.
Plus, people who get shot or shoot themselves end up in the hospital or the morgue, which seems like it would involve doctors.
Sure, but if the SG is implying that assault weapons and mass shooting cause most bullet wounds, or that violent crime is rising, or that he has useful information on how to avoid becoming a shooting victim then he's overstepping his role and being misleading.
Interestingly, one thing that has slightly influenced my opinion on guns is recently taking a break from academia to become a bedside critical care nurse and caring for people who got shot (in the parlance of the business, "GSWs"). I just recently had two GSWs at once, a middle-aged person and a young 20s person, so it has been at the forefront of my mind. Summer is kind of GSW season.
I haven't come to any major revelations or anything, in the sense that I had already given a lot of thought to my positions on the policy side, and I remain comfortable with those. But I underappreciated the mental pain and suffering these people experience, even apart from their injuries. Many patients have this deep sense of how the world has been upended--a kind of "why me" of "unsafeness + unfairness," I guess--that I don't really see as often in, for example, motor vehicle accident victims (which also spike in summer), even in cases like a small-caliber bullet going through the thigh that didn't, strictly speaking, do that much damage in a life-threatening-injuries sense.
Anecdata, obviously, but it has been on my mind this summer.
https://x.com/Surgeon_General/status/1805555386247954664?t=zOCcnSd1fhFztOvvX7it2Q&s=19
Unbelievable amounts of "elite misinformation" in there.
Gun violence is fully baked into the medical establishment as its own unique health concern. Whenever I read a public health paper or search for CDC data or homicide, suicide, injury from assault, the harms due to guns are usually the focus. Other causes are either split off or flat-out ignored. One would get the impression that jumping off a building or stabbing someone is completely out of their area of concern
As a medical professional very much involved in the issue of suicide, I can say that is simply not true. The primary question is why do people try to kill themselves, regardless of method. at the same time, it is a fair observation that access to a gun makes a suicide attempt more likely to be lethal and easier to act on impulse
https://youtu.be/Sh7QWBb2U2A?si=NTlKQdF3hGEsKu6_
The problem is the people always ignore the other half of the equation. The amount of crimes prevented or stopped because of possession of a gun.
Kind of hilariously one of the batshit nonsense stats in this SGs report says 4% of people have fired a gun in self defense. 4%! That's a wildly huge number even by irrationally pro-gun standards.
Perhaps it includes self defense against animals? Or hallucinations?
yep, this is not something an SG would be informed on.
That said - my read of the data is that that's probably relatively small, and just like many (but not all) gun suicides would likely be replaced with other methods w/o guns, a fair fraction of criminals just replace gun-carriers with softer targets.
Not to mention that young men whose rivals also have guns shooting each other instead of fist/knife fighting is the biggest driver of gun homicide by far.
Getting the actual number of crimes prevented is hard of course and estimates vary. But I'm pretty convinced the number is actually pretty large because most of the time when something DOESN'T happen nobody records it.
I've personally been in situations when once the other party realized that we were armed they just backed off. Nobody ever called the cops or anything like that.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jun/06/andy-biggs/no-government-data-does-not-say-defensive-gun-use-/
What situation were you in? I’ve lived in the middle of a major city for 20 years amongst millions of people and I’ve never been anywhere close to such a situation.
I'm not who you were responding to, but I was with a friend, driving back to his house, when another driver was overcome with road rage and followed us home. He stepped out with a knife, and my friend stepped out with a pistol. The other guy got back in his car ASAP and peeled out, never to be seen again.
FWIW.
You clearly need to attend more imaginary situations. I've been in several just in the last few minutes. \S
At the same time though, this is somewhere that international comparisons are useful. The US is a high crime country for our level of wealth compared to wealthy OECD countries. Even if guns in isolation prevent some crimes, they do seem to cause more crime overall (and cause certain crimes to become deadlier).
I don't think controlling for wealth is sufficient or even all that useful. The correlatation between poverty / wealth and violent crime is just not that strong, in international comparisons or domestically between states and localities. Fun fact: when I last looked it up the lowest homicide big city (over a million residents, I think was the filter) in the US is also the poorest: El Paso, Texas.
Violent crime in the US seems to be more about cultural factors. Homicide is super-concentrated in American descendants of slavery to the exclusion of almost every other ethnic group. Our violence statistics look totally different if you only look at Black immigrants + every other ethnic group.
“ just like many (but not all) gun suicides would likely be replaced with other methods w/o guns,”
I don’t believe that’s true. A large percentage of suicides are impulsive acts. I believe there are studies of putting pills in blister packets and the act of having to break out each pill and form a pile and then swallow them all deters a lot of people. With a gun it’s very easy to commit an impulsive act. If you have a gun in your bedroom you just have to get it and shoot yourself. If you want to jump off a bridge you have to drive to the bridge, find a place to park, walk out to the middle, etc.
I agree that large % might not happen, at least on that particularly attempt. But that's not incompatible with saying that many others are less impulsive.
If I recall correctly the blister pack law (in the UK maybe?) resulting in a significant reduction is suicides. So it’s not as if one method not being availed means people automatically find another. A method isn’t readily available the mental criss passes and they go on with their lives.
Self-poisonings are usually broken out as well in suicide data. It makes sense that they break out the big causes and not all the random little ones.
Usually? Sometime they are if the researcher is focusing on drug overdose deaths (which kills over twice as many people). But I see CDC papers and reports on gun suicides and gun homicides, leaving out other causes, more often than I see reports on all causes broken down by mechanism. Google and see for yourself if you're curious.
Here’s the first thing that comes up when I search for a cdc report on suicide: https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
It breaks out suicides by firearm, suffocation, and poisoning. I’m a bit surprised to learn that firearms are a majority of suicides, suffocation is a quarter, and poisoning 1/8 - I would have thought poisoning was closer to firearms in number of suicides!
Isn't a large fraction of that just that the rate of success is much higher with a firearm? As I recall that's responsible for men having a higher suicide rate, despite women having a higher attempt rate.
Well, alright - I take your word for it. In the past I remember my experience being different! I remember a morning where I was very frustrated trying to find information on overall homicides or suicides because the entire first page of google was just on the gun variety.
Now that I'm doing a quick search it was probably homicide, because that one is currently about half "gun homicides" in the first page of google. It's possible this was different 2 or 3 years ago? (or my memory's wrong?, take it fwiw).
In either case, my subjective experience of digging around cdc data and associated reporting is they sometimes put an inordinate amount of emphasis on gun, given the mechanism is not necessarily the only or the key driver of suicide / homicide
Fancy that, a paper on gun suicides (or gun homicides) leaving out other causes. That's like a paper on schizophrenia leaving out lung cancer. /S
Sure there's nothing in the slightest wrong with those papers individually. People are free to study rarer forms of death, too, and that's useful.
But if the numbers on gun deaths are easier to find than overall deaths, that's worth commenting on.
The first hit that was a paper was focusing on a single method of suicide, and it was a poisoning method: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022437524000434
Third hit: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide
I had to scroll down farther to see the breakout by method, but this one also showed the same three methods by gender, with all three being close for women, while men have a strong lean towards firearms.
Second hit on the same search: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm
Also breaks out those same three causes.
Related to your comment and something you and I like to follow, SCOTUS just ruled that the entities suing the Surgeon General over pandemic messaging do not have standing: [https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-411_3dq3.pdf] Alito/Thomas/Gorsuch dissent.
I'm gonna have to actually read all of this one. There's probably no case on the docket I'm more internally conflicted over.
I'm not conflicted on the merits: social media companies have agency and they could have told the White House to go pound sand. Standing always gives me a headache and I too will need to read over it, but I find it plausible to deny it on first blush.
I almost see it the other way around. I'm convinced the government has manipulated the incentives of these companies to get them to act as censors on their behalf in a manner the government can't themselves under the constitution. We shouldn't have to rely on the corporate entities to shield the public from the government's bad behavior.
I'm highly skeptical that any social media user can actually discern a cognizable injury causally connected to Fed influence on social media moderation decisions.
What power does the executive branch have to manipulate the incentives?
Facebook has been pretty openly begging for the chance to re-write section 230 or some executive order in a manner that entrenches their market share for like a decade. Colluding with the regulators to do censorious content moderation is how they get to be in the room when that stuff gets written. It's classic regulatory capture. It just happens to have greater 1A implications than usual in this case.
Beyond what Dave wrote, I'm shocked you would even need to ask that. The federal regulatory and prosecutorial apparatus is enormous and being considered a "good citizen" by the feds is often the difference in how they approach all kinds of things.
"That's a nice Section 230 protection you've got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it," followed by floating a proposal to "reinterpret" it's application.
They control the DOJ and all the regulatory agencies.
Is Amy Coney Barrett . . . not bad?
The light impression I've started forming of her is - I disagree with her on some real issues but she doesn't seem to be a "hack". I don't follow SCOTUS that closely this is more of the sort of zeitgeist I'm picking up.
All Gaul, er the Supreme Court, is divided into three parts:
-- 3 liberal justices who of course are wonderful people, salt of the earth, veritable saints and all that
-- the lost souls: Thomas, Alito and (sadly) Gorsuch
-- reasonable people who often drive me crazy: Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett
Gorsuch is reliably good on criminal justice though.
And some western issues as well.
Comments like this are interesting because they demonstrate people talking out of their depth of expertise. Sometimes the experts actually just know more than you. Age breaks of 1-19 are extremely common in public health statistics and reporting because of the way underlying data is reported, which is the case with the mortality statistics cited in the Surgeon General's report.
I'm guessing most people would reasonably think public health officials should be somewhat concerned with life expectancy. Gun deaths are a key driver of lower life expectancy in the US. Because gun deaths disproportionately affect younger people, they have have a disproportionate effect on life expectancy overall compared to more common causes of death like heart disease or cancer. This is also true for other forms of accidental death that are leading causes of death among young individuals.
If Matt had a post focusing on why US life expectancy is lower than other countries and he mentioned guns, I'm guessing you wouldn't say he's spreading misinformation. It's still perfectly reasonable to have different values for society and say guns should be legal, widely accessible, etc., but that doesn't mean we should ignore some of the consequences of making guns widely accessible either and debate the various tradeoffs.
The reason including 19 year olds is misleading is that the 19 year olds shooting each other that make up a huge portion of the sample have nothing at all to do with whether your 13 year old is going to be the victim of random gun violence like its a car accident or some shit. "Children" don't randomly get killed by guns in any meaningful numbers. Certain subsets of 17, 18, 19 year olds shoot each other at a horrifying clip. It's a dramatically misleading way to state the problem.
It's a good thing the scientists who put the report together thought of this issue and use age-adjusted rates when discussing overall gun-related deaths or have comparison groups for similar age cohorts.
Yes, I'm quite sure they very carefully and intentionally considered the necessity that they conform their data to the weasel worded, misinfo talking point: "Firearm violence is now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents—more than car accidents or drug overdoses."
“ Firearm violence is now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents”
That’s a true statement though, right?
It's definitely not true among children, but it's written in the weaselly way where they can say "and" means children plus adolescents additively, then they have to use the expansive definition of adolescent that includes legal young adults to keep it from being an outright lie. It's willfully unclear in a classic misinfo manner.
Taking Dave Coffin's representations at face value, I don't think the problem is grouping ages 1-19 together; the problem is using the term "children" to refer to this 1-19 age group. This is a problem because the term "children" as most Americans use it excludes 18-19 year olds (and often 16-17 year olds).
Good thing the report describes individuals age 1-19 as "children and adolescents" then, which is consistent with standard definitions and convention in both public health and medicine.
Can you link to some resource on the standard definition of "children and adolescents"?
I'm reading the advisory* and the term is also used in reference to the 0-17 age range (p. 21) and 1-18 (p. 25).
It might sound as if I'm being pedantic, but I suspect that 18 and 19 year olds are doing a lot of work in the claim that firearm violence has become the number one cause of death among children and adolescents. I would be very curious whether this claim is still true if "children and adolescents" is instead defined using the 0-17 or 1-18 age ranges.
*https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/firearm-violence-advisory.pdf
To me I'm wondering "why children and adolescents" in the first place?
Patterns of death for 5-14 year olds are very different from said patterns i 15+, 1-5 or especially 0 year olds (infants). Infants die frequently, relatively speaking, of all sorts of things. 1-5 year olds die much less and usually of a subset of the natural causes that kill infants. 5-14 year olds rarely die of non-natural causes of any kind but around 15 or 16 suicides, traffic accidents, homicide and overdoses all enter the picture.
So if we're specifically talking about gun deaths, we're talking about very different patterns in children vs adolescents, just as if we'd all intuitively understand that senior citizens, infants and 20 year olds are exposed to very different sorts of gun risks.
The actual report itself isn't overly focused on children; you're over-indexing on Mr. Coffin's perspective of the report and how it might be biased rather than the actual content of the report itself. The report does provide descriptive information on age-related patterns in gun violence, but it also discusses racial, geographic, and socioeconomic differences as well. Pretty standard stuff.
Sure, here you go. Most mortality statistics are reported in 5 year blocks (e.g., 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, 15-19...), although if want raw or crude-adjusted rates for single-year intervals, those also are available for mortality data. For example, cancer epidemiologists often study cancer incidence among "adolescents and young adults," which by their convention covers individuals from the ages 15-39 (note the 5 year blocks).
It is true that gun deaths increase through adolescence and young adulthood and then decline with aging, but the report isn't trying to hide this trend at all. This is a pattern that's also true for other forms of accidental death like drug overdose/automobile accidents.
I looked at the pages you referenced, and it looks like the differences in definition in the report are due to differences in how the cited papers described their study population. "Children" and "adolescents" aren't mutually exclusive categories, so there is some overlap and can mean researchers operationalize their studies in slightly different ways. Some of this is just the choice of individual researchers/teams, which can make summary reports like this a little confusing. I think a good faith approach would be to recognize this is an issue for all scientific reports summarizing a body of literature rather than anything unique to this specific report on gun violence.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/adolescent-health#tab=tab_1
"It is true that gun deaths increase through adolescence and young adulthood and then decline with aging, but the report isn't trying to hide this trend at all, and think a reason. This is a pattern that's also true for other forms of accidental death like drug overdose/automobile accidents."
This is a wild misrepresentation. 768 children under 15 killed by gun in 2022 vs 1138 who died in auto fatalities in 2021. This is a plausible comparison of "accidental" or random deaths. The situation flip flops dramatically when you add in young adults who are mostly actively involved in shooting at each other.
As I read this, I thought about a recent column in the NYT about wine titled In Defense of Wine. The author writes sanely about how important wine has been to humans over the centuries and links to an article--and I've seen others like this--that talks about the overstatement first the EU and now the US takes about moderate drinking. Whether it's about eating meat, drinking a glass of wine, or having a baby, we elites love nothing more than to cherry pick science to convince ourselves not to do things that, in general, for most, aren't that catastrophic. This seems to me to be a part and parcel of why we aren't having very much fun.
I also read that article and appreciated the take. It's not like we're going to unlock some super level of intelligence or health by avoiding moderate drinking.
Yeah--I was pretty blown away by how low the relative risk is for most. The headlines would make you think otherwise. I'm in my mid 60s and, for me, all those glasses of wine over the years with friends and family are totally worth giving up three months of life.
"Based on the research that formed the basis of Canada’s new guidelines, which he helped write, Stockwell walked me through the risks for a woman my age: If I indulged in, say, around six drinks a week, he said, I was increasing my lifetime risk of dying from an alcohol-related cause by a factor of 10, compared with those who drank about only one or two drinks a week. That jump sounded worrisome, until Stockwell put it in context. If I consumed six drinks a week, the risk I was facing of dying of some alcohol-related cause was still, by any measure, small on average — only about 1 percent. And if my risk of all-cause mortality was pretty low — Stockwell assured me that at 53, it was — then any incremental added risk on top of that was also clearly going to be very low.
Stockwell offered me another way of thinking about it, which is even more bottom-line oriented: How much time does a certain amount of drinking shave off your life? For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average, he said. Consume seven alcoholic beverages a week, and that amount goes up to about two and a half months. Those who push five drinks a day or more face the risk of losing, on average, upward of two years, said Stockwell. He emphasized that all those numbers were averages — and that it was impossible to predict the level of impact an individual person would experience."
I cannot help thinking, also, that there are so many confounding effects.
- the average is a weird number because the number of drinks a person can have has a lower bound of zero but an upper bound of, well, a shitton, and is skewed by alcoholism (i.e. the teetotalers do not skew the average as much as the alcoholics do).
- alcoholism will have a host of other life-shortening effects beyond the actual physical effects of drinking. The DUIs, the addictive behavior causing loss of jobs, relationships, etc.
I have not read the studies here but it is hard for me to imagine this is easily controlled for. And so this could make 7 drinks feel much more dangerous than 5 when, really, it's about the same, but the more you drink, the closer you get to the alcoholics, where all the real damage is done. And since you have to represent this as an "average", the curve looks more gradual than it is.
Respectfully, I would just point out that the vast majority of those who drink a few glasses of wine are not alcoholics. I think the conflagration of alcoholism with casual drinking is unfair to the vast majority of the world that can drink with moderation. In the same way that it makes no sense to deny opiates to those, and again these are the vast majority of users, who genuinely need them for short or long-term pain management, simply because there are addicts. And yes, I have personal experience with alcoholics and addicts . I know how devastating those afflictions can be. And I also don’t believe it is ideal to limit the majority simply because something is truly horrific for some. At least when it comes to wine!
I think you are misreading what I wrote. In no way was I implying that casual drinking is alcoholism.
Again, didn't read the study, so I don't know how they controlled for anything. But I think it would be VERY hard to separate people who drink a few glasses of wine, and who do so for their whole lives, and to track them over time as a group, and measure them against a different group, who drinks a few more glasses of wine, and so on.
How many of the people who drink 7 glasses a week turn into alcoholics over a 10/20/30 year period? And if you are measuring outcomes of the whole group, and averaging it, how much do the health outcomes of the alcoholics skew the average outcomes? And did the study control for that? And can we posit that people who drink 7 glasses a week are a few percentage points more likely to become alcoholics later than people who drink 1-3 (or zero)?
My gut tells me that alcohol consumption doesn't really matter... until you tip over into heavy drinking. And that, then, lots of second-order effects are more dangerous than the first order effects. Again, do the studies account for that? Does dying in a DUI crash alter the averages? What about dying from a health issue when you had no health insurance because you showed up to work drunk too often and couldn't keep a job?
My gut further tells me that the study conflates this. If I drink 7-10 a week, I am more likely to be in a group with some alcoholics, and the alcoholics' very bad outcomes are skewing the averages in my group.
Basically, does the study separate "alcohol" from "alcoholism"? Alcoholism is very bad for your health for the same reasons that any other addiction is, and that is different than the question of whether alcohol, on its own, is bad for your health.
If I understand you correctly, you aren't really talking about what I'm talking about which is I think it's fine for most people to drink wine. So, you are right, I did misunderstand you. Thanks for clarifying!
More importantly, those effect sizes are highly uncertain and often based upon correlations that assume causality
Once an organisation has a vested interest in making a problem out to be Very Bad Indeed, facts will be exaggerated to make the problem worse than it actually is.
Elite misinformation seems like a result of domain-specific experts pretending that they’re instead generalists with complete mastery of social psychology, data analysis, and moral philosophy.
This leads experts to attempt to mislead people just enough to achieve a desired outcome.
Abolish gen eds!
*ducks*
This is a related phenomenon to the "don't tell inconvenient truths because they could be weaponized" issue. Coverage, or lack of coverage, of crime increases in 2020-2022, is probably the most widespread example.
Really drives me crazy, because it's dishonest, ineffective, and self-defeating.
Great point. There are also plenty of COVID-related and Trump-related examples. I am a highly educated Democratic voter in a classic liberal elite profession, and I personally have a lot less faith in the mainstream media, public health organizations, etc, than I did in 2015. It’s really sad and isolating.
Yes. The payoff is immediate and personal, the cost is long term and spread out - a classic externality
I think crime is a particularly bad thing to not talk about and hope people won't notice. There's a lot of data available and people are personally invested.
Those deaths are mostly a function of ZIP code.
I think that you are doing a mild injustice to the vast majority of D voters who have no idea that pistols are the main problem and just see it as obvious (to them) that a scary looking military weapon with a massive clip which is intended to be used for mass killings, is really necessary for day to day life in civilized America. Clearly, pistols are more of a problem. On the other hand, possibly by accident, those same D voters are probably correct that legislation against assault rifles has more chance of success (although not under out current SCOTUS obviously).
I feel like the elite misinformation is more of a political liability for Democrats than Republicans. My sense is much of Republican elite misinformation is driven by political calculation—if we claim X this will help us win and we can do Y. Whereas the misinformation on the Dem side is driven by issue groups who want to make their issue more of a priority. If those priorities are politically unpopular, as they often are, then the Dems will shoot themselves in the foot trying to talk about or fix a problem that isn’t as pressing as the Groups claim.
Education polarization could also make this a more common liability on the Democratic side, too.
Great point. Democrats fight amongst themselves, Republicans fight against Democrats.
I wrote a book adjacent to this topic, Radiation Evangelists, about the early development years of radiation therapy in medicine, and I have an add-on to this column: a lot of times people doing this kind of misinformation have functionally managed to talk themselves into believing what they are pitching.
Most of the early radiation innovators that I wrote about ended up dying of cancer or other radiation-induced maladies. I expected the story to be one where people who didn't know better died of something they didn't understand. But what I found in the research is that users recognized--and documented!--the risks more or less immediately. It's just that they then proceeded to talk themselves into alternate explanations. A lot of patients were harmed as a result, but the therapists bore the worst of it; more or less an entire generation of men and women who were enthusiastic early adopters ended up dead in a pretty painful and awful way.
All of which is simply to say that I think "elite misinformation" is an even harder problem than this column suggests, because motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug. Even well-meaning humans armed with reasonable information are highly prone to talk themselves into believing wrong stuff, and they will do that EVEN WITH the counter information right there in on the table. And someone who has lied to themself first is hard to disabuse of a notion, because 1) they do not "know" that they are lying, and 2) admitting that they are wrong now carries a component of shame and disappointment to go along with the embarrassment.
It's just a really hard problem.
Very interesting. It seems to me that one of the downsides of being intelligent is that you're able to find smart reasons for doing dumb shit
This is a _great_ example of the problem the Rationalist community coalesced around. Whether their proposed solutions are at all helpful to most humans, rather than just a few eccentrics whose personality traits are at least two SDs away from the median, may be questionable, but certainly it's a real problem, and finding good solutions would make a lot of people's lives much healthier and happier.
It's interesting that you bring up the Rationalist community, because this research is more or less why I find the Rats to be a bit silly: they believe that this problem is quasi-solveable AND that they have solved it, if only everyone else would listen. Whenever I read stuff coming out of that community, or listen to them on podcasts, it always feels hilariously similar to a lot of the discourse I read in old medical journals and conference proceedings and keynote speeches. It also squares with my experience of people I meet who think of themselves as "rationalists"; as you can imagine, such folks--including some good friends!--are well-represented in my work as first an academic and now a frontline medical professional working in a hospital.
And, to be clear, I don't think the Rationalist community is insane or anything. But in my experience, they tend to 1) fundamentally underrate the degree of difficulty and complexity of the human judgement problem, 2) systematically overrate their solutions to the problem, in part because of (1), leading them inevitably to 3) become overconfident in their own judgement in a way that takes them right back down the road they thought that they were avoiding. You can see specific instances of this in areas like malaria control policy, which I wrote about at (okay, absurd) length elsewhere on this forum. The Rationalist community has done a lot of great stuff in public health that I really appreciate, but the approach has really distinct limits that they just. don't. see.
Which I think is really just to say that I think this is probably a wicked problem baked into our biological system of cognition in pretty fundamental ways. It's really frustrating.
This is exactly why I -- while respecting what the Rationalists are trying to do and agreeing with their diagnosis of a major problem -- don't really identify as a member of the community. Our perceptual biases cannot be solved at an individual level, we really need to talk about moving up a level to try to figure out how to build _institutions_ that allow people to benefit from correcting each others' errors, so the output of the group is more accurate and rational than the choices of any one individual.
Though as described in The Unaccountability Machine, by building a lot of institutions that optimize for single variables -- like "next quarter's profits", for corporations -- we've built systems that actually make _worse_ choices than any individual would on their own. :-/
(Side note: I was an undergrad in Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins back in the '90s, then came out to Berkeley for grad school in '99, so I was around for the early days of Rationalism as a self-identified community. Used to see folks like Eliezer at parties.)
I think we need to adjust the degree to which we engaged or accept this behavior based on 1) the times we live in and 2) the nature of the institution.
Issue 1 - we are currently in a very divided, low faith in institutions period. It's crucial for the government, particularly liberal/democrat government, to prioritize restoring faith in government. This is a pressing issue for Democrats, who advocate for more government, and less so for Republicans, who generally aim to reduce government influence. So it is essential for left-leaning causes to avoid this, while for right-leaning ones, the issue is less important. This is unfair, but life works like that.
This would mean really limiting the use of these tactics. One problem I think the Dems currently face (or at least a problem I have) is that I have very little, or no, faith when they talk about something being catastrophic. Climate change, voter registration, Trump taking over, large infrastructure projects, child care cliffs, etc. There have been so many "crying wolf" type incidents that my default is to just ignore or not believe claims of catastrophic outcomes. This is dangerous because on one of these issues they could be correct.
The second issue has to do with the nature of the institution. Public Health, Academia, Law Enforcement, etc., absolutely have to act in good faith. Their ability to do their jobs is predicated on public trust. There is almost no issue (even COVID or, in the case of law enforcement, solving a horrific crime) that is more important than trust. We see this with the US claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or with the claim around masks early on in the pandemic. The damage these false claims caused came back later to impact other, even more important issues, negatively.
Very much agreed. I think recent attempts to discredit the Supreme Court also fall into this category. Instead of working within the political process, they attempt to discredit the whole thing and tear it down. This is VERY dangerous.
If we can't settle things through politics then people will turn to violence.
This of course is also why Trump's lies about the election are so damaging. And one of the many reasons why I won't support him. Though Dem lies about voter suppression are also pretty bad
I sometimes think that Trump's real super-power is to get people to sink to his level...and then point that out to justify his own misdeeds.
Elite misinformation may be real and serious, but it seems like Matt’s using it to paper over the insidious role right-wing propaganda plays.
Fox News has convinced large chunks of the country that we’re in a recession, Biden is simultaneously senile and a criminal mastermind, and that crime is at record highs. Those may not be as outright false as some astroturfed meme saying the Pope endorsed Trump, or that Biden drinks the blood of children, but they’re still _goddamned_lies_.
So, yes, while we CAN walk and chew bubble gum here, it would have been nice for Matt to at least acknowledge the elephant in the room instead of giving the impression that elite misinformation was the majority of the country’s misinformation problem - sorry Matt, but if you actually DO think elite misinformation is worse than Fox News, you’re on more drugs than Joe Biden.
And just to speak directly to Matt, this kind of oversight is why so much of your audience are grouchy asshats who believe more than a zero amount of the right wing propagandists’ misinformation. I know there’s value in “preaching to the sinners, not the choir” like you do, but you also need to help convince these persuadable fans that they ARE buying into bad right wing lies, not JUST confirm their bias that liberals are as bad as they think they are.
The difference is that Fox News misinformation is espoused by TV personalities, other grifters, and some deeply mentally disturbed individuals. Where as elite misinformation comes from credentialed experts at prestigious institutions. Eg, NYT and Harvard. The Fox New equivalent on the left would be TikTok.
The concern is that elite misinformation misinforms political actors like politicians and activists into taking counterproductive actions; or simply wasting attention and political capital on overblown issues. Furthermore, these elites have earned the trust of political actors and the broad public over centuries by being a source a valuable information and professional judgement. Yet their occasional misinformation risks that reputation and could reduce them to just more noise along the lines of Fox News and TikTok.
To be clear, I'm not trying to exonerate the elites themselves. I'm just pointing out that Fox News and Tik Tok, _as_sources_of_noise_themselves_, are actors that *amplify* the costs of elite mistakes.
A century ago, if an elite makes a mistake, maybe it gets outed, maybe it doesn't. Let's say it's 50/50 just for the sake of conversation.
Today, if an elite makes a mistake, Fox's and Tik Tok's incentives point towards making sure that at least 95% of the time the elites will be blamed for it.
But again, I'm not trying to _exonerate_ the elites here: Fox is a fact of life right now, and I'm 100% on board with you elite misinformation's costs to our own side, ESPECIALLY your point about its significant on-side coordination/strategery costs.
I'm just saying that as we go about correcting our grand strategy, if the only thing we have in mind is "we must be 100% at the top of our game at all times", well, I'm sorry to say, my friend, but that's a losing battle. As JVL over at The Bulwark keeps pointing out, the authoritarians only have to win ONCE; whereas democracy has to KEEP winning.
Thus, we MUST properly assess the _entirety_ of the misinformation environment, and advance our cause in due proportion in each arena. I'm not arguing for "this side over that" or "both sides", but rather "all of the above"! So, yes, we deal with elite misinformation, but we also make war (figuratively) on Tik Tok and Fox News, because although we'll never fully extirpate misinformation, we simply can't tolerate having two massive megaphones spewing great gouts of misinformation at our populace from all directions.
What does making war on Tik Tok and Fox News actually look like?
As I understand it, there's no reliable methodology that can effectively fight misinformation. Censorship just amplifies the content, or worse drives it to siloed channels that concentrate the crazy. Labelling can help, but really just at the margins.
What do you suggest should be done in terms of policy changes or specific actions by specific people or organizations?
Well, I'm open to ideas, and I'm cognizant of the very valid challenges you highlight -- whether legal, moral, or practical.
The Bulwark and Crooked Media seem to me like "good starts": Openly ideological alternative media sources that discipline themselves and each other against sensationalism and propaganda, but whose daily mission is to directly oppose the toxic propaganda being spewed by both social media and the right-wing propaganda machine.
Beyond that -- and please bear in mind that I'm just proposing shit on the fly here -- I'd suggest that it needs to be an "all fronts" assault:
Legally, Fox is but the largest outlet and also mostly just a front for a larger 'griftersphere'; law enforcement and prosecutors should root it out where possible. The Tik Tok ban is another "good start", and I'd entertain further regulation of social media algorithms.
Culturally, we need new taboos within the right against ever erecting propaganda machines like Fox again. Likewise, beyond just regulating the algorithms, we need taboos against exploitative algorithms like those employed by Twitter, Facebook, and Tik Tok. And we need a reckoning with the deep societal wounds both sides have inflicted on us: the families broken by polarization, the parents and grandparents whose twilight years were stolen by brain worms and scams, the young people who've been cheated out of their hope and mental health by rampant viral doomerism and the perversion/context collapse of therapy culture.
And in the business sphere, we need to continue and build upon The Bulwark and Crooked Media's efforts, to build them into a general campaign to eat away at both Fox/right-wing-media's AND social media's market shares. Eat their lunches! Bankrupt them the good old fashioned capitalist way: by driving them out of business with superior products!
I'm open to suggestions and criticism here. The point is, we don't have to just sit here idly by and impotently watch misinformation ruin our democracy. And we don't even have to violate the fundamental principles of our democracy to do it!
I think its going to be incredibly hard to create any kind of approach to address this that doesn't do as much damage as good. The attempt to label things as misinformation was essentially co-opted by Trump and others to describe almost anything they don't like.
Any prosecutorial action is likely to rebound incredibly negatively and be generally considered to be an escalation of the culture war / politics unless the conduct is incredibly egregious. Creating taboos on the right against the current media ecosystem is really only feasible if there is a broader acceptance and admittance of right wing ideas and personalities within the mainstream media ecosystem. And getting people to prefer a "healthy product" over a "tasty product" is incredibly difficult across many different mediums.
I definitely agree, and most approaches thus far have been rather ham-handed and one-off.
But isn't that kind of the problem? Before Fox News, one could say the same thing about, say, Bircher newsletters or the Kissinger letter: they generated backlash, they were ham-handed and one-off, they "did more damage than good". I hate to have to resort to a "true communism has never been tried" argument here, but Fox kind of amply demonstrates that when you DO organize a comprehensive, well-coordinated approach, you CAN *do more good than damage* (for your own side).
RE prosecutorial action, let me be more specific: I don't think anyone is going to miss all the dick-pill scams, real estate "gurus", reverse mortgage predators, fly-by-night insurance operations, and various other fraudsters advertising on right-wing media.
Or rather, the people who ARE going to miss them are already so far gone, I'm perfectly happy writing them off. And you never know, the normies might actually THANK us for ridding them of the scourge of bullshit artists they're constantly bombarded with.
Fox news gets an audience because right-wing people correctly determine that elite institutions have left-wing biases. To counteract them, you need to get elite institutions to correct those biases. Trying to punish or deplatform Fox instead will be seen as further entrenching the elite biases. "Any truthful person is welcome here" could work as a message, tripling down on "professing a right-wing view is itself proof that you are stupid or a liar" will not.
Yeah, I definitely didn’t advocate for any of these things you’re pushing back against.
For instance, I specifically did NOT say to “punish” or “deplatform” Fox, I said to outcompete them.
Also, screw the right wing for putting shitty alternative institutions like Fox together. Conservatives RAN most elite institutions as recently as a generation or two ago. Building a propaganda machine is NOT an acceptable response to liberal bias. EVER. Period.
Let me put it this way: trust in one of these two groups matters more to the future of our country than the other:
- Conservative experts and institutions
- Mainstream liberal experts and institutions
That’s deeply short sighted. We’ve just endured more than two straight decades of conservatives mis-wielding power — whether in the majority or not — and you’re telling me the problem is no one trusts *liberals* enough?
Yes? I think that eroding trust in liberal institutions is a huge problem, and that it's orthogonal to how conservatives have used or misused their power.
See my response to Matt Hagy.
To be clear, I'm not *contradicting* you, I'm "yes-and-ing" you. Yes, eroding institutional trust is a huge problem.
And the chief eroder in institutional trust for the past 25 years has been... surprise, Fox News. Elite misinformation probably gets a close second (although I'm open to arguments it's actually third after some other thing I'm forgetting).
All I'm arguing for is a sense of proportionality and the scale of the problem. As I told Matt Hagy, if we clock elite misinformation as the ONLY or the BIGGEST problem, then we're not getting our grand strategy right.
Or to put it another way: If elites managed to pitch perfect, no-hitter ball for the next 10 years straight, we'd STILL have Fox News undermining them, and to me it's a 50/50 question whether all that perfect ball would have yielded any actual results (in terms of increased public trust) vs. gotten swamped by Fox News regardless.
If the task proves Sisyphean, you don't keep rolling the rock up the hill, you grab a hammer and chip away at the damned rock.
>> If elites managed to pitch perfect, no-hitter ball for the next 10 years straight, we'd STILL have Fox News undermining them, and to me it's a 50/50 question whether all that perfect ball would have yielded any actual results."
I respectfully disagree with this. Fox News and Tucker will lie no matter what the elite institutions do, but I'd contend that most of the erosion of public trust is not due to Fox News, it's due to the ability of the public to become better informed and see through elite attempts to mislead them,
The problem is less about elite institutions being wrong and more about them intentionally lying and misleading.
In this new information environment, the key thing is for elites to stop lying and misleading and to get better at communicating uncertainty. This can mainly be accomplished by communicating and setting policy with more humility and a less paternalistic mindset.
I'll add additional evidence that trust in institutions among people on the left who never watch Fox has plummeted as well.
That's fair. I know it probably seems like I'm coming on pretty strong, but I genuinely do respect when someone is able to elucidate that they have a different assessment of the ground reality as you have done here. Cheers!
"We’ve just endured more than two straight decades of conservatives mis-wielding power"
While I certainly won't defend every conservative decision, this seems a bit much. Of course we probably have VERY different viewpoints on what the best policies are.
You never know. I'm not actually a hair-on-fire prog. I have a lot of conservative viewpoints. I'm just not afraid to characterize the actual exercise of power by people who actually called themselves conservatives as a dumpster fire since basically H.W.
For every broken-clock good policy Trump had, he had at least a dozen other actively deleterious ones, and even the "good" ones, he was incompetent, inconsistent, and thoroughly corrupt at executing.
Mitch McConnell stole a SCOTUS seat, and along with Paul Ryan sabotaged the economy for almost a decade.
W... I don't think I need to elaborate on that one.
Conservatives throughout both W and Obama's admins consistently tanked immigration deals, regardless of how many concessions they'd won. I can't think of any global political actor who's shot theirselves in the foot on a key issue so badly and so many times besides maybe the PLO.
Gingrich may have at least not been absurdly wrong about the need for fiscal discipline in the 90's, but he happily demagogued it for all the wrong reasons and torched countless norms in the process.
W did a couple things out of compassion that were ill-advised; but H.W. is the only Republican in the last 30 years who I can honestly say at least made SOME policies that were NOT completely selfish AND were well-advised.
Contrast with the Democrats... whatever the faults in the implementation, Obama sincerely believed in Obamacare and most of his other policy initiatives. Ditto Clinton's crime bill. Biden's CHIPS and IRA. Most of the arguments for cynicism about the sincerity of these Democratic accomplishments in the last 30 years heavily rely on some form of racist/classist trope/tripe: "[x] just wanted to hand goodies out to minorities/the poors for votes".
At this point, we get better conservative governance out of the liberal party than we do out of the so-called conservative one.
If all that sounds like "a bit much" to you, I mean, that's between you and your god. To me, it sounds like it just means that *conservatives* were "a bit much". Which is actually a bit of an understatement.
Not to both sides…but both sides seem pretty dedicated to convincing everyone we are in a recession for some reason.
My partner was just telling me about some Reddit trend where people are running saved online grocery orders from two years ago to see how much they would cost now, in order to go viral with examples where the price has gone up 400% or whatever. (No one cares if it was a discount two years ago on a product that is now out of stock and therefore carries a big fee.)
Not to mention the fact that the end of ZIRP drove the Uberverse's prices up to realistic market levels.
There’s also likely a lot of selection/publication bias. If you get a negative or ho-hum result, you’re less inclined to report it.
BOTH SIDES BOTH SIDES YOU'RE JUST LIKE THE NYT YOU MUST BE BANISHED AND CANCELED!
;-P
ed: Just kidding, if anyone couldn't tell. I promise I don't actually bite and I hate cancelling people.
IMO, I think there's a solid case that, at least in recent history, misinformation from Fox News is much less harmful that elite misinformation because it doesn't directly inform policy and action nearly as much.
For example, I'd guess that the number of deaths from Fox News and Tucker style misinformation pales in comparison to the number of people who died because of the Iraq WMD misinformation.
But that’s not the only relevant metric! What about all the policy that *doesn’t* happen because of them?
Also, even by your own metric, you have to account for a couple hundred thousand excess COVID deaths.
And wrt “WMD misinformation”… uhh, dude, Fox was the *standard bearer* for repeating that stuff! You have [ed: those Iraq deaths] on the wrong side of Fox’s ledger.
This is special-pleading for Fox News and not convincing, particularly because Fox News pushed WMD misinformation to the hilt.
This misses a key distinction and I think the heart of Matt's point, which is about the originating source of misinformation, rather than about the distribution channel.
Fox News helping to further misinformation that originated through elite institutions and the power structure is a very different thing from Fox News pushing non-elite misinformation sourced by cranks.
Sorry, but the source of the misinformation was the Bush administration. Cheney was an important force pushing the WMD rumor both before the Bush administration and during it, along with many others (e.g., Wolfowitz).
But again, as I see it, the distinction isn't left versus right misinformation, it's misinfo originated inside institutions/power structure versus outside. Bush and the neocons were clearly inside.
IMO the inside-outside distinction only matters from within the frame of Matt's analysis.
My criticism was on two levels: (1) that Matt's intro basically characterizes all liberal complaints about misinformation as mistakenly exaggerating the impact of fringe stuff, which completely ignores the entire propaganda machine sitting smack dab in the middle of the GOP mediasphere, and (2) that this machine both exacerbates the elite misinfo that Matt dislikes AND is clearly a larger problem than it -- even granting him that it might only be a 55-45 or 60-40 split, it's still the bigger problem.
From within Matt's analysis, sure, okay, the WMD stuff originated in an elite circle.
But from within mine, it's pretty obvious that Fox did 90% of the work from there. So, sure, it's bad enough that some elites (Bush admin) got it wrong, but Bush would have been spitting into the wind if Fox hadn't ran with his mistake and manufactured consent for the war.
Depends on how you think about it. Bush and the neocons were out of power when they started pushing the WMD rumors. So they weren't part of the government institutions at the time. Fox News actually facilitated their spread of misinformation. Fox News is uniquely culpable for spreading misinformation and always has been. They are one of the worst sources if you want to understand reality.
What do you think so much of Matt's audience believes?
Do you read the evening threads at all? It's all right there. I'm not sure how OK Ben would be if I went around cherrypicking individual comments; not to mention how impolitic that would be.
But suffice it to say, practically not one day goes by where I don't see someone grinding away at their personal grievance in indelicate terms that indicate Right Wing Brain Worms. One commenter harped on about "most favored victims" (he meant Blacks) before eventually getting theirself permabanned. Several others insist on Fox News caricatures such as Dems being "weak on crime" or even "pro-crime". I could go on, but I don't feel like wasting my entire morning summoning a magisterial review of infractions that people are going to want to endlessly litigate and turn this into a megathread.
The point is, even if we set aside the accuracy of any one claim, it's pretty clear that right-wing propaganda's ambient osmosis plays a significant role in the average SB commenter's information environment.
Sometimes I read them. Definitely not all the time. I was asking because I have certainly talked (although not here) about some of the general topics you brought up, but I wouldn't endorse the way you're framing them. And sometimes I've found I say a few words that someone pattern-matches to their right-wing bingo card or whatever when that's not actually what I said or believe.
Anyway, it would surprise me if a significant chunk of readers endorsed something like "crime is at record highs". But it would not surprise me if several readers referred to Democrats as being weak on crime, or said something like that. So if that's what "much of your audience are grouchy asshats who believe more than a zero amount of the right wing propagandists’ misinformation" then, sure, yes.
More or less. I must apologize for the shorthand; I recognize the nuance you're pointing out, but I already catch shit for being one of the wordier commenters around here, so it's simply a matter of practicality and brevity.
Cheers!
“Fox News caricatures such as Dems being ‘weak on crime’ or even ‘pro-crime’”
The thing about caricatures Is that they resemble the truth. If you heard about a local prosecutor who was all-but refusing to prosecute violent crime, and that’s all you knew about him, would you bet a day’s pay that prosecutor was a Republican?
He isn't? I thought he got banned after re-offending one too many times.
No, he was on his last strike and just decided not to comment here anymore.
Either way, I don't miss the grievance-mongering.
Our friend Joao here at least manages to give cogent pushback instead of triggered bias all the time.
I'm not bothered by the mere holding of a grievance; I have PLENTY of my own. But if that's all you've got**, then I don't have any interest in seeing that around this forum all the time.
** Not YOU directly, the abstract "you".
Fox news primetime ratings are around 2 million viewers. With a country of 330 million that doesn't seem like a large chunk of the country.
This is a rookie analytical mistake. Fox News’s talking points diffuse WELL beyond their audience proper.
When elite is a euphemism for government bureaucracy then yes that misinformation is worse than Fox News.
Really well reasoned and argued, and also depressing. Becauee man oh man, if you think it's hard to change the opinion of your average swing voter with actual facts, I suspect it's even harder to change the opinion of a Harvard Ph.D that they are citing misinformation as gospel.
Yeah when I hear some crazy right wing crank talk about the deep state and then hear an Ivy League phd talk about gender theory stuff I feel like these guys are closer together than further apart.
Have not forgiven public health individuals for casually pretending that no one "needed" and N95 at the start of the pandemic and also misleading folks into thinking using one "incorrectly" would increase their odds of getting sick relative to a cloth mask...
Elite Intellectuals and Academics on the Left all love to lament the Anti-Expertise trend, but they all think their proverbial 💩 does not stink on this topic...but the fact is they are quite responsible for that distrust because of all this self servicing intellectual pussyfooting.
I have elderly parents and one of them had a seriously ill sibling. It took me a good two months to convince them that protecting themselves and others requires an N95 and their cloth masks weren’t doing much. It took so long because NPR and the CDC were telling them otherwise. Fortunately none of them got COVID before vaccines were available but there were nights where I wa lying awake worrying. I’m at the point where there is no way I’d take NPR seriously as a source of accurate information
I an a T1 diabetic, and I just happened to have a stock of N95s for woodworking. It never made sense to me that a better mask would NOT be better, and it was criminal for experts to go on TV and sort of demure and act like we didn't already have all the knowledge we needed to know that....i get that as doctors they had front line people they worried about dying (my wife was a hygienist struggling to get respirators), but it was still confidence burning to see "experts" try and use their power to gaslight people just so their friends in professional settings stood slightly better odds of living....
Any time someone uses the word “need”, especially if they contrast it with “want”, I’m going to call bullshit. Do some people “need” to be vaccinated? Is there some level of housing affordability that is “needed”?
Not to mention that time seemingly all the public health officials in the world decided that the AstraZeneca vaccine was basically poison. I think an underrated part of anti-vax sentiment is that credentialed experts keeps insisting that vaccines are very dangerous. If you keep saying that, some people will believe you!
Very glad I never bothered to learn anything about Net Neutrality.
It's actually a very interesting topic! But even some it's biggest advocates have since admitted it was all a bit of an over exaggeration.
My memory is that everyone expected a gold mine from low-latency and other premium products plus leveraging their entertainment arms for streaming. But it just never materialized: few care that much about latency and no one wants your streaming service unless it’s the old Netflix omnistream.
So, was it over-exaggerated or just derailed by realities about customers?
Where did you see that if you don't mind?
It seems we've gotten some of what people who were really upset about Net Neutrality. Zero Rating and throttling certain types of traffic, especially bit torrent traffic. Which like in principle was the kind of things NN was for avoiding, but the advocates took it all the way to its maximal conclusion that they'd not just throttle bit torrent but throttle like Wapo or something.
But like in principle it seems to me that preferring Netflix traffic over some nerd's bit torrent traffic is basically the same thing as preferring one website over another.
Interesting quote from Stanford Law Professor, Barbara van Schewick, an advocate of net neutrality, who admitted "What ended up happening in the years after the rollback went into effect in 2018 was so discreet that most people unlikely noticed its effects."
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/26/1247393656/net-neutrality-explained-fcc
So I guess, in response to your q, some stuff has happened on the margins. But for the average internet user, there was no real difference.
Net neutrality rules are already back in place under Biden. So not even really clear to me that people were wrong. Also California had a state level net neutrality role holding back change after the first rollback under Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/technology/fcc-net-neutrality-open-internet.html
Think we might need a post on this. It seems no one is current on what's happening with net neutrality.
I was legit worried about it. I was glad MAtt listed that one. I totally believed policy advocates who I think were taking me for a ride in retrospect.
Is it possible to win a Presidential election without exaggerating? The answer is pretty clearly “no.”. Think of the stock phrase, “when elected, I will X.” Forgive the speaker for using “I” as synecdoche for the federal government. Absolve him for treating his election as a certainty when it is, at best, likely and stochastic. This phrase is still a whopper. Will you have 60 votes in the Senate? A majority in the House? Will the senate parliamentarian let you proceed via reconciliation. Will Krysten Sinema march to the tune of her own drummer or to the blandishments of big pharma? Will the courts go along?
Admitting how weak and constrained the President is would be political malpractice. Better to sell the plebs on hope and change. Winning elections is important.
The difference is everyone knows that politicians BS. My profession (lawyers) is the same way-- nobody thinks that when we talk about our cases we are giving a fair account of both sides. We're advocates!
But there's a whole bunch of people who we desperately need to be truth tellers, NOT advocates. My favorite example was the COVID letter signed by the public health people, at a time when they had advised America that outdoor gatherings were improper. (That advice turned out to be wrong, but we didn't know that yet.) And they sent out a letter saying BLM protests were different because the Black lives they would save outweighed any COVID risk.
You put stuff like that out, you damage the public health system, because the public thinks it's a bunch of ideologues or at best clout chasers who will lie and say they have costed out the lives saved by BLM protests rather than apply their advice consistently.
Basically large numbers of people are in professions where you AREN'T supposed to be doing activism, or at the least you are supposed to be separating your activism from your substantive work. And it's really important that THEY not put out BS in a way that it probably isn't for politicians whose words are discounted by the public.
What's funny is that the health professionals were kinda right -- outdoor antiracism demonstrations didn't seem to end up being a big deal (but that was also true for other outside activities)
Yeah, the issue with the letter was less whether it was true or not, so much as that it was really obvious that the people writing it didn't care if it was true. The decision to write it had nothing to do with epidemiology.
Right, but like the Zahn quote, that isn't what they said. They SAID they had costed out the lives that would be saved by BLM protests and they outweighed any COVID risks. Which was just Frankfurtian BS in its purist form.
Do you have that letter? I didn’t think they had claimed anything so specific about numbers.
"Staying at home, social distancing, and public masking are effective at minimizing the spread of COVID-19. To the extent possible, we support the application of these public health best practices during demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy. However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives. Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported."
I would say that's the most relevant passage. I think it's a fair reading to say that the letter is arguing that black people's health is best supported by engaging in the protests, even though other forms of protest are clearly antithetical to public health.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
I definitely don’t read that as making a cost/benefit statement. It seems to be saying that there are two things going on here - the immediate public health impact, and statements about respect for health. They claim that protests against stay-at-home orders are bad on both counts, while these are good on one count and bad on the other, but they say the good part is “vital” so we should “facilitate safest practices” on the bad part. But they very specifically don’t try to count or measure these things, they just declare some vital and others as “effective”.
I don’t like their kind of reasoning, but I don’t think they’re even suggesting the claim you made.
Yes, it feels like every public facing profession and organization has adopted an advocacy framework, getting much worse in Trump era if not necessarily starting there.
I suppose I was pushing back against Matt’s “elite disinformation” framing. A large share of public facing elite communication is done by politicians. It’s certainly more odious when scientists get in on the act. The European conceit that disaster would ensue if global temperatures rose more than 1.5 degrees made me overreact for a long time. I inferred that either climate was an unsolvable problem or they were full of shit (I strongly leaned towards the latter), and refused to give any weight to reducing emissions. The Yglesian line that we can make things materially better through slowly transitioning to zero emission electricity has moderated my position, though Im still less interested in emissions reductions and more interested in seawalls and slow migration towards the poles than Matt
I hate it how many news agencies have a boilerplate line like “1.5 degrees C is the point that climate scientists have determined is the amount we need to stay below to avoid major disasters”. No, scientists didn’t determine that this number was *the* amount we need to stay below to avoid disasters - they determined that *every* number was *a* number to stay below to avoid *some* disasters, and 1.5 was some sort of consensus to focus on based on being a combination of manageable and a stretch.
>> "I inferred that either climate was an unsolvable problem or they were full of shit (I strongly leaned towards the latter), and refused to give any weight to reducing emissions."
Fair enough, but what about subsidizing innovation that could eventually reduce emissions?
In reality, technology advances are the only way to meaningfully reduce global emissions. IMO, things are looking very good on this front thanks to years and years of subsidies that at the time were a complete waste of money on a direct carbon reduction basis.
Wind, solar, storage, and electrification of heating and transportation are beginning to play a major role in reducing emissions. There's even a bipartisan consensus on funding research in nuclear, advanced geothermal, and other "non-wires" solutions like VPPs.
Maybe this is pollyannaish, but I've never been more bullish on our ability to meaningfully reduce worldwide emissions. Most of the heavy lifting on the innovation and breakthrough technology front is basically done and we're mostly in the implementation and incremental improvement phase.
The technological improvements we support will not keep global warming under 1.5 degrees. So if you take the Europeans at their word, and 1.6 degrees is disaster, those wouldn’t really be a solution. That bit of elite disinformation kept me from leaning in to wind and solar for years.
Yeah. That makes sense.
We probably agree that the big error was presenting the consequence as an all or nothing binary instead of as a continuous function with worse outcomes depending on how high temps increase. IMO, the whole existential crisis/disaster framing was huge mistake, both from a misinformation standpoint but also in terms of encouraging all or nothing thinking as you've described.
As I understand it, 1.5 is bad and probably a foregone conclusion unless a miracle innovation happens. OTOH, 2.0 and 2.5 would be much much worse and we're in reasonably good shape to avoid those outcomes as long as we keep at it.
I think of an extra 1 degree as something that can be fixed with air conditioning, and something that would actively help agriculture in the upper midwest, canada, siberia and much of china.
I'm a big fan of mitigation. The reality is we crossed a lot of thresholds back in the 1990's. There are, of course, always new thresholds, but the fact we crossed all those thresholds means that a lot of global warming is baked in and a lot of Bangladeshis and other poor populations living in low lying areas are likely to die.
So I think we need to mitigate, a lot. Indeed, I think we should be doing it right now. We should be bidding out for technological solutions, offering grants and prizes, etc. Because what I suspect is going to happen is while we chase our tail around trying to get to zero emissions a lot of people are going to die.
I knew that someone would beat me to this. The public health community's galling behavior during the pandemic was the best example Matt could have used for this article, and I was surprised that he didn't use it.
Counterpoint: I think the profound misinformation from the President of the United States was the best example Matt could have used for this article, and I was surprised that he didn't use it.
Sure, but I don't want the rules of engagement for campaign rhetoric to apply to all human endeavors.
Wouldn’t that bolster the “you can’t trust politicians” trope and intensify cynicism about politics?
The price is too high.
The plebs want a king. They already believe the president is one anyway.
As someone who participated in the sky-is-falling rhetoric around net neutrality, I want to give a little more context. Basically the concern was that carriers would shift their business model to be a cartel of gatekeepers to online services, which really would be a much better economic model than the heavily regulated quasi-utility business they're currently in and really would be a long-term headache for the everyday consumer. But these things don't happen overnight, and by the time the Trump rollback happened, it was clear this was always going to be legally contentious and none of the carriers really wanted to push the envelope. The upshot is that there really was a bad thing that could have happened, and public political mobilization really did discourage it from happening, but the twists and turns were not quite as dramatic as media coverage suggested.
In fact, versions of this are true for most of the things you're describing. The question of accurately describing the impacts of climate change (which Matt wisely avoids addressing in this piece) are a similar issue. We don't always know what is going to happen, and the issue is competing for attention like everything else.
Agree with this. Net Neutrality advocacy and regulation falls into the same bucket as aggressive antitrust regulation -- it works to discipline the market even if it ultimately fails in court.