“Jonah Lehrer”:http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/wDAM/~3/n4lwQf_DNA4/political_dissonance.php puts together the _Boston Globe_ article on political knowledge with Philip Tetlock’s work on expertise.
bq. There is no cure for this ideological irrationality – it’s simply the way we’re built. Nevertheless, I think a few simple fixes could dramatically improve our political culture. We should begin by minimizing our exposure to political pundits. The problem with pundits is best illustrated by the classic work of Philip Tetlock … After Tetlock tallied up the data, the predictive failures of the pundits became obvious. Although they were paid for their keen insights into world affairs, they tended to perform worse than random chance. So those talking heads on television are full of shit. Probably not surprising. What’s much more troubling, however, is that they’ve become our model of political discourse. We now associate political interest with partisan blowhards on cable TV, these pundits and consultants and former politicians who trade facile talking points. Instead of engaging with contrary facts, the discourse has become one big study in cognitive dissonance.
On the one hand, this is slightly loose. Pundits-a-la-Tetlock are not _quite_ the same thing as pundits-a-la-Lehrer. The former are professional prognosticators, while the latter are professional arguers. Or – to put it another way – the former are the folks who CNN calls up when something happens that they need an insta-expert on, and the latter are the folks who CNN pays a monthly retainer to. But on the other hand (and the other hand weighs a lot more here imo), what evidence we have (thanks to our late, and sorely missed co-blogger, Lee Sigelman) suggests that the latter are “pretty terrible at prediction too”:http://hij.sagepub.com/content/1/1/33.abstract). Indeed, they are arguably _worse._ Prognosticators have at least a modest requirement to be consistent in their predictions. They also have some need to avoid Delphic ambiguity, and in the test under discussion, Tetlock’s questions were designed specifically to force them to make clear and emphatic claims.[1] Professional talking heads, as Lee’s article illustrates, face neither of these constraints. It’s an open question how much such media contributes to public ignorance (n.b. that the consumption of cable news among non-elites is relatively low). But there are some findings (viz. Bartels’ “graph”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/04/measuring_epistemic_closure.html on awareness of economic inequality) which suggests that selective consumption of partisan information does have negative consequences for actual awareness of political facts.
fn1. As a complete aside, I’ve always been fond of the price-schedule offered by the soothsayer in Jack Vance’s _The Dying Earth._ “I respond to three questions,’ stated the augur. ‘For the twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I will speak a parable, which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.”