TED Talk: On Being Wrong

Most of us will do anything to avoid being wrong. But what if we’re wrong about that? “Wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz makes a compelling case for not just admitting but embracing our fallibility.

.. 04:50

I’ll give you an analogy. Do you remember that Loony Tunes cartoon where there’s this pathetic coyotewho’s always chasing and never catching a roadrunner? In pretty much every episode of this cartoon,there’s a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine — he’s a bird, he can fly. But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him. And what’s funny — at least if you’re six years old — is that the coyote’s totally fine too. He just keeps running — right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he’s in mid-air. That’s when he falls. When we’re wrong about something — not when we realize it, but before that — we’re like that coyote after he’s gone off the cliff and before he looks down. You know, we’re already wrong, we’re already in trouble, but we feel like we’re on solid ground. So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.

Fighting Fake News Is Not the Solution

One is a large study of the reach and impact of fake news; the other is opinion-poll data on the tax-reform bill that Congress passed and President Trump signed into law in December. Together, they burst the two-bubble theory by showing that most Americans are better informed and less gullible than you might think. That, in turn, suggests that fighting “fake news” is not the solution, or perhaps even a solution, to our current political problems.

.. The economists’ study suggested that every American adult had been exposed to at least one fake news story in the leadup to the 2016 election, but relatively few people—roughly eight per cent—actually believed them.

.. About ten per cent of news consumers sought out more fake news, and they read an average of 33.16 fake stories, according to the political scientists.

.. rather than two bubbles, there was one, positioned far to the right of the political spectrum. A majority of Americans, the study showed, get their news from a variety of different media. They are routinely exposed to opinions they don’t share; they do not live in an echo chamber.

.. “Not only was consumption of fact-checks concentrated among non-fake news consumers,” the authors wrote, “but we almost never observe respondents reading a fact-check of a specific claim in a fake news article that they read.”

.. language had a way of migrating from Breitbart into the mainstream media.

.. The authors identified the two topics that dominated false conspiratorial narratives—Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the threat posed by immigration—and traced the mainstream media’s disproportionate focus on these topics to the fake-news sites’ obsession with them.

.. ineffectual fact-checking pieces might have been a primary vehicle of that migration—such as, for example, when the Post fact-checked Trump’s claim, made in an interview with the conspiracy-theory purveyor Sean Hannity, that Clinton’s e-mails caused the death of an Iranian defector.

.. Opinion data on Trumpian tax reform is real-life proof that most Americans share a fact-based view of reality.

Mark Levin: Mooch’s ’Absolutely Disgusting’ Remarks to ‘Liberal Rag’ Make WH Look ‘Moronic, Pathetic’

Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin blasted new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci on Thursday for going to a “liberal rag” and making “absolutely disgusting” comments about White House Chief Strategist Steve K. Bannon.

.. Levin marveled at the fact that Scaramucci called a “liberal reporter at a liberal rag” and spoke in that way about his colleagues.

 “What the hell has Steve Bannon done to this guy?” Levin asked. “Nothing!”
Levin, who is the author of the current best-selling book Rediscovering Americanism, said that “if you support Donald Trump, then you don’t sit back and excuse all this.”
.. Levin, a Reagan administration alum who has written some of the most seminal books of the modern conservative movement like Liberty and Tyranny, which became a runaway bestseller despite scant to no coverage in the legacy media, asked, “Do you think this kind of internecine warfare makes America great again?”“It makes these guys look stupid, moronic, pathetic! That’s not how you serve your president, in my view,” he said.

.. “The president is under brutal attack, and he really needs some pros around him,” he continued.

.. On Fox News, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham slammed Scaramucci for “trashing Steve Bannon, who has been carrying the conservative populist banner for years, loyal to this president,” and said Scaramucci’s comments were “humiliating to the president.”

Levin had a reminder for Scaramucci about the position he holds.

“You’re communications director to the president of the United States,” Levin said. “You hold a public trust.”