Just how paranoid/skeptical/cynical should we be?
Yesterday I read about a poll that said 1/3 of all Americans do not plan on getting vaccinated for COVID-19 and as President Hillary Clinton once said, polls are never wrong.
So we might as well start our discussion (which I say like I’m actually going to let you talk) about paranoia, skepticism and cynicism by questioning whether or not polls like the one I read are accurate.
But polls really don’t have to be accurate because having spent a lifetime in the news business I know we need stuff to write about and the fact that pollster Nate Silver got the 2016 election wrong (he once predicted Donald Trump had a 2 percent chance of becoming the Republican nominee for president) won’t stop us from going right back to Nate Silver for more predictions about the next election.
In an article called Nate Silver is a Dart Throwing Chimp (face it, great headline that got me to read the article) the author pointed out that analytics are good at predicting the future as long as the future stays on the same arc as the present. But if something out of the ordinary happens, analytics tends to miss it which is kinda like saying I’m great at predicting the weather as long as the weather tomorrow is pretty much the same as the weather today.
And misses the point of predictions entirely.
You watch a weather forecast to find out if something out of the ordinary is going to happen, like an ice storm in August or heat wave in January or plague of toads in Kansas City and the only weather pattern Kansas City has missed lately is that plague of toads thing, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we had one because last week we had a day in the 60s and today it’s 1 degree, but feels like -15 and Sunday it’s supposed to be even colder.
(Where were we, because it feels like I’ve drifted out of my lane and just started complaining about the weather.)
Oh, yeah complaining about the inaccuracy of polls.
How to predict the future
Jeane Dixon was a famous psychic and astrologer mainly because newspapers ran her column which predicted all kinds of stuff like the assassination of JFK and the world coming to the end in 2020. (If Jeane had only said the “world as we know it” she would have been right on the money.)
But she also predicted the world would end in 1962, cancer would be cured in 1967, WWIII would start in 1958 and the Soviets would be the first people on the moon.
Apparently a mathematician named John Allen Paulos called it the “Jeane Dixon effect” which means you make a shitload of predictions about a shit-ton of topics (apparently shit comes in “loads” and “tons” and most commonly, “predictions”) and then remind everybody of the few ones you got right because most of us won’t remember all the ones you got wrong.
I got all this off a website called realtalktime.com which also reported Jeane wrote a book called Horoscopes for Dogs which you’ll want to look for on amazon.com and…wait…wait…something’s coming to me…I predict that if you buy a copy and give it to your dog, he or she will need you to turn the pages!!!
(Man, I could give Jeane a run for her money.)
According to the same article, Jeane’s last words were: “I knew this would happen” although they got that off Wikipedia so maybe somebody made that up and if so, hats off to whoever did it.
(My mom has told me what she wants on her gravestone: “See? I told you I was sick.” Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of this article, but I’ll throw it in for free.)
Before I read the vaccination story I read one about the source of the COVID-19 virus that said some people from the World Health Organization had decided it was “unlikely” it came from a Chinese laboratory which sounds something less than 100-percent certain and made me think it was more “likely” than I thought before I started reading the article about how “unlikely” it was.
Whenever people start using weasel words like “unlikely” it gets my attention because it sounds like something you say when you don’t really know for sure and want to have something to point to when it turns out you were wrong.
“Hey, we said it was ‘unlikely’ not certain.”
It also turns out the Chinese government limited research into the outbreak and ordered scientists not to speak to reporters which may or may not mean anything because I’m pretty sure the Chinese government would do the same thing if I ever try to find out what part of the chicken is being used to make the General Tso’s chicken I eat about once a week.
As I pointed out in the cartoon above, over the years people in charge have assured us of a number of things that turned out to be wrong.
Up until I read the article I believed the theory that it came from someone eating or having sex with a bat (although I just made up the “having sex with” thing, but even though you know it’s not real you’re still trying to picture how that would work, aren’t you? Seems like I’m starting to get the hang of this prediction business.)
Anyway…
We got the flu from birds and the common cold from horses and now when I watch one of those food shows where some dude travels to Angor Wat to dine on fricasseed iguana (and I say all that without being precisely sure where Angor Wat is or if there are iguanas in the neighborhood or what it means to fricassee something) I think: “Thanks a lot, dude…like we don’t have enough diseases to worry about already?”
Delta Airlines and facial recognition
(OK, totally threw this in because I wrote about it a couple days ago, didn’t use it and it now seems to fit in with today’s theme.)
If you’re paranoid – and if you’re not you’re probably under-informed – it might worry you that Delta Air Lines is rolling out facial recognition for travelers. So instead of using the old boarding pass/license/passport/birthmark/note-from-your-mother system, you’d roll up to the security gate, look into a camera and be allowed to board the aircraft, which sounds easy.
But if you’re an attractive young woman and your facial recognition is based on all those social media selfies you’ve been posting, you might need to make that “duck lips” face to be recognized. (BTW: First time I typed that I missed the ‘u’ and hit the ‘i’ and it read “dick lips” so I’m thinking maybe that’s a Freudian slip or God really does work in mysterious ways.)
OK, so you go up to a camera and make a face and – bang – you get to board an aircraft which sound really convenient until you think about it and wonder where this facial recognition stuff will stop.
Think of all the places you go and whether or not you want any security camera in the vicinity to know you’re there. I don’t plan on doing something stupid, but right now I’m not drunk so decisions I make in the sober present might not hold up in my inebriated future.
In conclusion and I’m really not sure I have one
So here’s what we have so far:
1. Take all predictions with a grain of salt which I predict will be a good choice.
2. People in charge will lie when it benefits them.
3. Don’t make those stupid dick lip faces in social media posts because you might be forced to make one in public while the airport security guard snickers.
So some paranoia/skepticism/cynicism is probably a good idea, but not too much and I’m not real sure where that line is so maybe we should take a poll.