False Precision, or… High Caliber Journalism
Published on 1 Sep 2005 at 12:22 am |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Thanks for Playing, Brain Trust, Technopolitical, Design, Interface, and Usability, Main Stream Media.
I should state at the outset that I have never seen media coverage during my career in that business, nor since, which was accurate in its depiction of events or matters of which I had personal knowledge. Why this is so is a multi-faceted subject and I only intend to take on one facet here.
Years ago I was witness to an incident in which a reporter mentioned offhandedly in a story that he had purchased a .22 rifle at a garage sale. A producer with a narrow background and education was given the task of re-working the story for the international market. Lacking any knowledge of firearms or the metric system the caliber was translated to metric by the simple expedient of replacing “caliber” with “mm.” “.22 rifle” became “22 mm rifle.” This particular producer wouldn’t hear of any objections – especially not from the engineering staff — and the story was duly broadcast worldwide.
False precision is a term used to describe a number of similar phenomena, some intentional, some accidental. A very typical version is when measurements are made to one degree of precision, and results after calculations are given at a higher one, or perhaps multiple measurements of differing precision are combined, but the highest precision, rather than the lowest, is carried forward into the results. For example, let us take a situation in which you have measured your own weight on a bathroom scale graduated to a half a pound, and your car on an industrial scale reading in increments of 10 pounds. Your weight is 152.5 pounds, the car weighs 3250. From this you can determine that you and your car total 3400 pounds plus or – 10 pounds. The 2.5 pounds has become meaningless. This becomes particularly absurd if you then decide to divide by two in order to discover what half of that is, exactly 1701.25 lbs. — even though there’s nothing in the situation capable of measuring a quarter of a pound…
I’ve often wondered about how the false precision in that story sounded to the different people who heard it. I’d imagine that people who are familiar with the US and the metric system and/or guns, probably wouldn’t pay it much attention since it’s obvious that we don’t actually have anti-aircraft cannon, grenade launchers, or something similar, frequently available at garage sales. Those unfamiliar with guns entirely would probably notice little amiss, whether metric savvy or not.
But something interesting happens if we stipulate a chain of references such that the next recipient of this bit of data does understand the metric system but not guns or the US. This person could easily interpret the data correctly, and inadvertently wash out the clues that indicate that it was all a mistake in the first place. A third or fourth party in the chain can then be entirely, and plausibly, misled. These parties, bringing completely accurate knowledge to the table, but using it to interpret a statement which was false, or which at the very least, lacked precision, might introduce a kind of false precision. The listener is lacking the vital precision specification which in this case should have read something like “22mm plus or minus 400%.”
By way of comparison, the very common tendency to translate meters to yards or vice versa as if they were equivalent would be about plus or minus 10%. In that case, the conversion seems justified, first because of the much lower deviation, and second because most people do understand that meters and yards are usually measured pretty casually. “About” almost seems to be a default modifier for most things measured in yards or meters. “They were about 100 yards away.” Essentially, the “about” stands in for the precision specification.
It’s also worth noting, lest I get hundreds of email on the topic, that firearm calibers are not strict diameter measurements. They do track more or less but are a formalized system of naming rather than an actual measurement. This particular incident involved confusion on a number of axes. This doesn’t weaken my point, but rather the contrary. If we treat “22 mm” as a measurement it’s off by 400%. If we treat it as a formalized name it’s just plain wrong.
Fortunately in this case, the remark was a throw-away line which could have been, and probably should have been, removed from the story altogether without any problem. Lines like that tend, one hopes, to be ignored, especially if there’s anything anomalous about them. But, I think that if we focus on a chain of events like this within the news organization, where the parties in question are reporters, stringers, producers, etc. all of whom have a high degree of trust in one another and a certain tendency toward “group-think,” we can begin to see one of the many causes for my initial observation that media output is almost never accurate.
Interestingly, this is also a classic case of cargo cult activity; call this one cargo cult journalism. The producer in question knew nothing of firearms, or the metric system, but had probably seen references to “9mm” in both contexts. It was a quick step then to make the current case look familiar without actually understanding how the thing really works.
[Note: I obviously didn’t invent the idea of false precision. I’ve constructed the examples above from memories of explanations given in lectures, text books, and elsewhere. Should one of my examples closely resemble something published elsewhere I’ll be happy to give credit where it’s due. I don’t think they do, but memory can be a tricky thing.]
Here are some links on the topic:
-- John
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