A planet with flowers

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
—Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Here are some photos I took this afternoon:

n-Fold

Truth or lies?

Since I've been focusing on lies lately, I couldn't resist the image on the left which I happened on today. Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter cartoon is quite entertaining.

Reflections on deception

As I discussed in my last post, the word "lie" is often used to refer to a broad class of deceptions. But there is much to be said for specificity. I like the following definition, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the "the most common definition of lying":

to make a believed-false statement to another person with the intention that that other person believe that statement to be true.

And as I argued a couple of years ago, definitions matter. Someone accused of lying will surely opt for the narrow definition above. The accusation may then actually strengthen their position. If a lie can't in fact be demonstrated, they may appear to be vindicated. It seems to me that politicians often play this game. Indeed the accusation of lying conveniently distracts attention from more important deceptions.

There's a kind of objectivity about lies. With appropriate evidence, only a minimal number of assumptions are required to identify a lie. Children learn this quickly, and graduate from outright lies to distortions. When asked "Did you eat the cookies?" a small child may declare "No, it wasn't me!", all the while wiping the cookie crumbs from their mouth. A slightly older child might evade the question (and thereby avoid lying) by saying "I saw my brother eating some!"

The more sophisticated deceptions that adults practice typically don't include actual lying. It's simply too risky: being caught in a lie leaves one very little room to maneuver, and the likelihood of damage to one's credibility and reputation. Other forms of deception offer far more avenues of escape. Compared to lying, more subtle forms of deception are not nearly so easy to nail down. They often hinge on ambiguous language, evasions, exaggerations, and selective use of evidence.

The stovepipe

Consider, for example, the practice of "stovepiping", in which intelligence operatives are ordered to directly pass raw information that supports a certain conclusion up to the highest political levels. In a 2003 New Yorker piece Seymour Hersh described the practice in the context of "the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered":

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership."

Hersh quotes a former aide to Dick Cheney:

There’s so much intelligence out there that it’s easy to pick and choose your case. It opens things up to cherry-picking.

Lies, damned lies, and deceptions

As everyone knows—thanks to Benjamin Disraeli—there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. I believe the point here is that there are things much worse than lies. Disraeli (a politician) pointed the finger of blame at statistics. And indeed statistics can be used in a misleading way. Even without altering the data (i.e. lying), there are numerous ways to misrepresent the evidence. But this applies much more generally—as Disraeli was no doubt aware. For example, in budgeting a common problem is what is euphemistically called strategic misrepresentation. In the realm of politics, there's the non-denial denial. And in the world of marketing and PR, there's the fake blog, or flog.

Honesty and dishonesty

In the face of so much dishonesty, it may be tempting to retreat into cynicism. I think that would be a mistake. There is far more honesty and integrity in the world than it may appear. But the cacophony of deceit sometimes seems to drown out the quiet decency that is all around us.

Finally, a warning from O. Henry (Rolling Stones, 1912):

There is no well-defined boundary between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other.

To be honest

People in public relations are sometimes accused of being "paid liars". This misses the point. According to communications consultant Peter O'Malley:

In all instances, on both practical and legal grounds, effective public relations means not lying or defaming. But when perceived or real culpability is high, damage control inherently requires that engaged PR practitioners not volunteer facts they may know which may be true and may even be important to getting at the "truth" of the matter, but the disclosure of which would be harmful to the client's interest.

So lying is out (at least in principle), but that doesn't mean we'll be getting the whole truth. O'Malley continues:

And it frequently requires being steadfast in characterizing a "nearly empty" bottle as being "almost full". We may like to call all this "focused messaging", but in plain language, it means being highly selective in the presentation of information. Ultimately, it may mean being disingenuously mule-headed, and even secretive. In many settings, this may serve the client's interests, but it does not serve to enlighten the public.

Stronger forms of public relations are sometimes termed "spin". As Wikipedia puts it:

In public relations, spin is a usually pejorative term signifying a heavily biased portrayal in one's own favor of an event or situation; it is a "polite" synonym for propaganda. While traditional public relations may also rely on creative presentation of the facts, "spin" often, though not always, implies disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics.

The Wikipedia entry on propaganda sheds still more light on this:

As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented.

So the trick isn't to tell lies, it's to carefully cherry-pick facts and use them to "encourage a particular synthesis". William Blake put it well:

A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
"Auguries of Innocence," Poems from the Pickering Manuscript

Note that the term "lying by omission" obscures this somewhat. The Wikipedia entry for lie provides this description:

One lies by omission by omitting an important fact, deliberately leaving another person with a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions. A husband may tell his wife he was out at a store, which is true, but lie by omitting the fact that he also visited his mistress.

But this raises all kinds of difficulties. To what extent is a person responsible for correcting other people's presumed misconceptions? In fact, "lying by omission" is generally not considered to be lying per se but rather part of the broader class of behaviour we call deception.

Follow the money

Selective presentation of facts may not necessarily be deceptive. In our adversarial legal system, lawyers are expected to argue for one side or the other. The hope is that the truth will come out in the wash. Similarly, we expect a company spokesperson to represent the company's interests. Knowing whose interests a person is representing allows us to decide how to weigh the arguments they present.

Experts are a special case. Whether they are scientists, economists, policy specialists, or what have you, we often believe (or hope) that they are relatively unbiased. The bad news is that bias is ubiquitous. The good news is that a great deal of work has been done to try to identify different sources of bias. (See, for example, Wikipedia's list of different types of cognitive bias.) One straightforward source is bias is financial. Experts (and the journalists who quote them) should reveal possible financial conflicts of interest.

We'd also like to believe that media reports are relatively unbiased. Sadly it's not always so. In January of this year, the Toronto Star published an article titled Top Ten Health Scares, "condensed from the American Council on Science and Health's list of medical stories that made us worry unnecessarily in 2007". As I noted in a previous post, the ACSH is an industry front group. Getting their don't-worry-be-happy message into the pages of a major newspaper—not as advertising, but as content—is PR gold. Imagine the article was instead a full-page advertisement, titled "The Chemical Industry Presents the Top Ten Health Scares".

As an article in the PR Watch Newsletter put it:

In examining organizations like ACSH, therefore, the key question is not, "Are they paid liars?" It is more meaningful to simply ask, "Who funds them, and whose interests do they serve?"

By the Way

I just got back from a wonderful couple of weeks on the Camino de Santiago in Spain (and a little bit in France). Here are some photos from the journey. I'm not sure how to summarize the experience and all its dimensions, but I can say that I have some great memories!

Stop worrying and learn to love the chemicals

Well Margaret Wente is at it again. In a column last week titled Yellow duckies and other killers, she claims that "Mothers across Canada have been prostrated by the plastics scare."

It's hard to be a good mother these days. Deadly perils lurk everywhere. Take that yellow bathtub ducky, contaminated with a dangerous substance known as BPA.

But why stop there? Wente proceeds to list other putative hazards: toxic mould, pesticides, perfumes, "death-rays from the sun", walking barefoot in the grass. The message is clear: stop worrying already!

We forget how negligent our own parents were. They gave us naked sunbaths and let us suck on plastic duckies and roll around on pesticide-drenched lawns. It's astonishing how ignorant they were, and how many of us managed to grow up.

Now Margaret Wente is no scientist (what was your first clue?), so she needs an outside authority:

Dr. Elizabeth Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health [ACSH], an independent group devoted to accuracy in health reporting. She points out that both BPA and phthalates have been studied intensively for decades. There are no studies - none - that show any link between these substances and harm to people. The basis for the claims of danger are all from studies done on rats, and they don't predict human risk.

According to Media Transparency, ACSH haven't disclosed their corporate donors since the early 1990's, but their 1991 annual report listed each of the following as contributing at least $15,000:

American Cyanamid Company * Anheuser-Busch Foundation * General Electric Foundation * Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation * ICI Agricultural Products, Inc. * ISK Biotech Corporation * Kraft, Inc. * Monsanto Fund * The NutraSweet Company * John M. Olin Foundation, Inc. * Pfizer, Inc. * Sarah Scaife Foundation Incorporated * The Starr Foundation * Archer Daniels Midland Company * Carnation Company * Ciba-Geigy Corporation * Ethyl Corporation * Exxon Corporation * General Mills, Inc. * Heublein Inc. * Hiram Walker-Allied Vintners * Johnson & Johnson * Kellogg Company * The Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, Inc. * Malaysian Palm Oil Promotion Council * National Starch and Chemical Foundation, Inc. * PepsiCo Foundation Inc. * Union Carbide Corporation

The under-$15,000 list continues on, listing all kinds of industrial, pharmaceutical, and food corporations.

Figures don't lie ...

In her April 19th column, Wente quoted an organizations called the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) who similarly dismiss concerns about BPA. While they don't accept industry money, STATS is funded by a number of the same conservative organizations as ACSH. I think I see a pattern here.

But so what if these organizations get "conservative" funding? An anonymous commenter on my previous post wrote:

Why should the funding source matter? Isn't it the quality of the evidence and the arguments made? Your smear is the equivalent of an ad hominem attack.

My response:

I don't think it's ad hominem. If a medical study was funded by a pharmaceutical company, I'd like to know that. Not that it invalidates the study: as you say, the quality of the evidence and the arguments (analyses) made is centrally important.

So let's have a closer look at the quality of the evidence and arguments in one particular case.

I looked at a recent post on the STATS blog concerning formula- versus breast-feeding. While the author allows that "Yes, there is robust evidence that nursing reduces ear infections [otitis media] and diarrhea", he sets out to discredit claims of a link between formula feeding and diabetes, leukemia, and serious respiratory infections. In the latter case, he writes "The most recent research does not support the contention that formula carries a higher risk," citing a 1995 paper from the Journal of Pediatrics.

Interestingly enough, that study was supported in part by the Mead-Johnson Nutritional Group. Leaving that aside, however, here are some results from the abstract:

In the first year of life the incidence of diarrheal illness among BF [breast fed] infants was half that of FF [formula fed] infants; the percentage with any otitis media was 19% lower and with prolonged episodes (>10 days) was 80% lower in BF compared with FF infants. There were no significant differences in rates of respiratory illness; nearly all cases were mild upper respiratory infections. ... These results indicate that the reduction in morbidity associated with breast-feeding is of sufficient magnitude to be of public health significance.

Sure enough, they didn't find statistically significant differences in rates of respiratory illness. Now an important consideration in statistics is the power to detect differences, which is determined by a number of factors including sample size. So what was the sample size in this study?

... morbidity data were collected by weekly monitoring during the first 2 years of life from matched cohorts of infants who were either breast fed (N = 46) or formula fed (N = 41) until at least 12 months of age.

So there were a total of 87 infants. In their discussion, the authors write:

We did not observe any significant differences in the incidence or prevalence of respiratory illnesses between BF and FF infants. However, the vast majority of episodes were mild upper respiratory illnesses. Previous studies have indicated that the protective effect of breast-feeding is greatest for lower respiratory illnesses. The sample size in our study was not large enough to detect differences in more severe respiratory illnesses.

Blind trust?

Ultimately, we all have to rely on some surrogate measures to judge the quality and trustworthiness of the information we encounter. Our own expertise can only be so broad and we rely on others to help us interpret the world. Oldly enough the words of Ronald Reagan come to mind: "Trust, but verify."