At Liberal Patriot John Halpin asks whether Americans can “escape their overly emotional politics”?
Lost in the emotional propaganda of contemporary politics is any rational discussion of the pros and cons of various policy choices, neutral evaluations of legislative language and motives, and measured examination of actual outcomes and necessary adjustments to help improve complex legislation or executive actions. Partisan path dependency requires Democrats to uniformly hate and despise everything that Trump is doing and it also requires Republicans to uniformly love and praise his every action. Dissidents, meaning Democrats who might be okay with some of Trump’s policies or Republicans who might disagree with others, are not allowed in the arena and will be subjected to the partisan star chamber online and in the media.
Agonistic expression is characteristic our post-literate culture just as it was characteristic of pre-literate culture. Reason and temperate, logical modes of expression were typical of a very short period of our past, when many of us relied on the written word for information.
Now we’re relying on increasingly visual forms. Charts, graphs, videos. The post-literate period has just begun and it will get much, much worse.
We have always used charts and graphs in science. What is wrong with them? You use them frequently. I think it’s always good to go back and look at the raw numbers, make sure the graphs are done properly and I think log graphs are underutilized but that’s another issue. I think the visual form that has been most harmful has been social media and Youtubes where people watch someone who looks and sounds authoritative or reinforces what the watcher wants to believe and they accept what they are saying without question.
It would mostly be a plus if those people had to present some real data but even when they occasionally do it’s usually cherry picked, outright wrong and made up or deceiving. Pretty clear that these people dont read original research, dont know the difference between mean and median (forget mode) and are largely innumerate.
Recent example, a guy at Cowen’s place claimed Medicare spending had gone up by 60% since 2019 due to out of control spending, WFA and providers rocketing up their prices. Instead, Medicare spending has increased about 27% in that time period ($800 billion to $1.03 billion, or $1.1 billion if you want to use the estimates for 2024.) During that time the number of Medicare enrollees increased from 63 million to 67 million. Inflation over that time was about 25%. Clearly, in real dollars prices didnt rocket up due to what providers were charging and it wasn’t 60%, but he heard it from some guy on a Youtube.
Steve
That’s false. Unless by “always” you mean the last 50 years. I use charts and graphs because that’s what my audience expects.
I gather from that comment you have never read Euclid’s Elements, Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Newton’s Principia, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, any of Robert Koch’s works (there are a few diagrams but are 90%+ non-pictorial), Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. All are remarkably free of pictures, charts, and graphs (other than those introduced later by others).
You should read up on the topic. They largely weren’t used until the field of statistics developed and governments started collecting data that merited statistical analysis but they became common in the late 1800s and even more so in the 1900s. So let me change always into last 150 years. (There is a somewhat interesting article on their use in the NYT which started using them in 1933 at link. They note, like every other piece on the topic that they were common in science articles well before 1933.)
https://7wdata.be/data-science/when-did-charts-become-popular/
Steve