She Blinded Me With Bias

Every once in a while, I check in with Andrew Sullivan, even though he annoys the hell out of me. He has one of the most popular blogs on the Intar-Web, and even though he's a conservative scumbag, he nonetheless agrees with me on most of the major issues of the day - Bush is an idiot, torture is wrong. You know, traitorous cut-and-running, that sort of thing. This is the result of having a crazed radical like Bush in the White House. People who never agree on anything can unite in the spirit that the President is a complete asshole.

Anyway, Sullivan is in kind of a tough spot these days. He's basically admitted that a small minority of Democrats and a vast majority of left-wing bloggers, typically his sworn enemies, were right all along about the Iraq War being a huge miserable fucking mistake. See, Sullivan was for the war at first, and went so far as to imply that those who opposed the war were un-American appeasers. Now he's on our side, that is the side of Americans with any lingering morsel of common sense, but still can't really admit that he's on our side, so he regularly invents new and increasingly ludicrous reasons why liberals are wrong even when they are clearly right.

Thus, he gets to have it both ways...Conservative who mocks fluffy, hippie-inspired lib'rul thinking, but also rational thinking man of the political center. It's lame.

I've seen him make all manner of twisty, convoluted arguments for why liberals don't get to be right about Iraq even though they were totally right. (Check out this post, where I discuss one of his more retarded assertions - that Dick Cheney was more right about WMD's in Iraq than Al Gore is right about global warming, even though we already know Dick Cheney was completely wrong and the verdict is still out on Gore's conclusions.)

Today's patently ridiculous paragraph may just take the prize for Stupidest Andrew Sullivan Post. Of the month thus far. (No, there's no actual prize. There wasn't any such thing as a Braffy either. Deal with it.) His punditry has come loose from even a semblance of rationality. It's utter nonsense. He might as well have typed a blog post suggesting that President Bush take a bite of the Caterpillar's mushroom before challenging the Queen to a game of croquet.

The weirdest part is, Andrew didn't even write the bulk of the post. It's a quote from a Washington Post story about a researcher looking into "hindsight bias." Yeah, "hindsight bias." Can you tell where this is going?

"Liberals' assertion that they 'knew all along' that the war in Iraq would go badly are guilty of the hindsight bias. This is not to say that they didn't always think that the war was a bad idea. It is to say that after it was apparent that the war was going badly, they assert that they would have assigned a higher probability to that outcome than they really would have assigned beforehand," - Hal Arkes, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who has studied "hindsight bias" and how to overcome it.

So, liberals such as myself, who said that the Iraq War was a huge mistake from the very beginning didn't really think it was likely to be a huge mistake. We only think that we did now because of "hindsight bias." Ah, I see. Perhaps this is why the albums that I think are my favorites at the end of the actual year never wind up being the ones I continue to like the best well into the future.

"You may have thought that Fiona Apple album was the recording of the year," I think to myself, "but be honest...You haven't put 'Extraordinary Machine' on in months and you still listen to Wolf Parade and The National all the time."

Now, finally, I can udnerstand this phenomenon! Thanks, Dr. Arkes.

What I'm saying is, this idiocy is not 100% Andrew Sullivan's fault. But please do note the fact that he finds it blog-worthy. He will grasp at any argument, no matter how lame, to try and equate the sins of liberals with the sins of conservatives (and more specifically, neo-conservatives.)

Of course, this mission is, at its very core, irrational. Not only because no influential members of the Left are as insane as the cabal currently in power (although that's true.) But because no one in the Left has been able to do anything that significant in our government for 6 years now. They are shut out of every decision and every policy. Sure, they can occasionally raise a stink and get some mention in a newspaper, but obviously the crimes of Republicans as of late will be worse than the crimes of Democrats. Republicans are the only ones in charge!

Okay, I'm done with Andrew. He's kind of an idiot, but he's an amusing idiot. Let's take a closer look at this Washington Post article to which he favorably linked.

Antiwar liberals last week got to savor the four most satisfying words in the English language: "I told you so."

I hate this article already. No one I know who was against the war in 2003 is "savoring" anything now. We don't feel "satisfied." We're all fucking miserable. This past six years has resembled a car accident (and I've been in a car accident). You can see the center divider coming, you're spinning out of control, you know impact is imminant, and time kind of slow sdown for a second. It's a horrible, horrible feeling to know you're about to crash into something, hard, and that's how I've felt for a long time.

I'm not savoring being right. Of course, I wish I had been wrong. I wish the war took three days and Bush got to feel better about himself and he coasted through the rest of his term and then everyone got sick of him, because he's an idiot, and voted for the next criminal Republican goober asshole with enough money to run a national campaign. Seriously. I'm right about stuff all the time, it's not that big of a deal to me. I'd much rather thousands of Americans and even more Iraqis were still untortured and fucking alive, asshole.

Only a goddamn warmongering right-wing fucktard would even be thinking about the Iraq War in these kinds of terms. Focusing on who has fucking bragging rights? Writer Shankar Vidantam, are you serious? This is the Washington Post! How about a little decorum? How about you just tell the news without making it into some kind of fucking role playing game!

This was after a declassified National Intelligence Estimate asserted that the war in Iraq was creating more terrorists than it was eliminating. For millions of people who opposed President Bush's mission in Iraq from the start, this was proof positive that they had been right all along. Yes, they told themselves, we saw this disaster coming.

Only . . . that isn't quite true.

Um...yes, it is.

Trust me. I mean, Shankar didn't interview me for this article. I can't imagine why. I could have told him that, as a regular but casual newspaper reader with no actual international relations or foreign policy experience, I knew in early 2003 that this entire war would be a huge disaster. A lot of people knew that. A LOT. Mainly, I was just hearing it from them, and the arguments made sense so I listened attentively.

The thing was, everyone ignored these people. Newspapers, cable television, talk radio, Congress. For those sources, it was The Bush Line ALL THE TIME, so I could see how an intellectually lazy and fundamentally disinterested person might think that everyone agreed that the conflict would go swimmingly. But we all didn't. Take my word for it.

Shankar does put himself in kind of a tight spot, rhetorically speaking. How can you prove that no liberals had a clear and accurate sense of how the war would go before it started? (A better question might be...what is the point of such a discussion, but since Shankar has brought it up in one of the nation's leading newspapers, I'll ignore this point for now.)

Accordingly, he doesn't even try to back up this assertion, but moves right into discussing a tangentially-related psychological phenomenon. Yeah, that's more in the spirit of true journalism...Just drop an inflammatory suggestion in there with no evidence, then move on. William Randolph Hearst would be very proud. Remember the Maine!

One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics to the vagaries of the stock market, experiments show that once people know something, they readily believe they knew it all along.

It's not unlike deja vu, that strange feeling we sometimes get...that we've lived through something before.

Accordingly, he doesn't even try to back up this assertion, but moves right into discussing a tangentially-related psychological phenomenon. Yeah, that's more in the spirit of true journalism...Just drop an inflammatory suggestion in there with no evidence, then move on. William Randolph Hearst would be very proud. Remember the Maine!

One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics to the vagaries of the stock market, experiments show that once people know something, they readily believe they knew it all along.

It's not unlike deja vu, that strange feeling we sometimes get...that we've lived through something before.

Accordingly, he doesn't even try to back up this assertion, but moves right into discussing a tangentially-related psychological phenomenon. Yeah, that's more in the spirit of true journalism...Just drop an inflammatory suggestion in there with no evidence, then move on. William Randolph Hearst would be very proud. Remember the Maine!

One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics to the vagaries of the stock market, experiments show that once people know something, they readily believe they knew it all along.

It's not unlike deja vu, that strange feeling we sometimes get...that we've lived through something before.

Now, what was I going to say? Oh, I'm sorry...I've just had the strangest feeling of hindsight bias. But it seems to have passed for now.

This is not to say that no one predicted the war in Iraq would go badly, or that the insurgency would last so long. Many did.

Exactly. Wait, but ...Shankar...didn't you just say that liberals didn't really see the Iraq disaster coming? Or am I just experiencing some more of that hindsight bias stuff?

But where people might once have called such scenarios possible, or even likely, many will now be certain that they had known for sure that this was the only possible outcome.

Hindsight bias clearly exists. When really good or really bad things happen, we all get a sensation of inevitability. As if this were the only way things could have turned out, even though it was more likely just a random confluence of events.

For example, about a year ago, I had been having some sporadic car trouble, but I decided to make a late night trip to the video store anyway, just because I was bored and wanted to grab some new rentals. As I'm leaving the store, driving down Pico Boulevard, the car just stalled out. Just stopped dead in its tracks. And as I'm pushing it to the side of the road and getting out my phone to call AAA, I'm just furious with myself. "Why would I take the car out at night? I knew this was going to happen!"

Of course, I had no idea the car would choose that moment to break down. But still, my immediate regret caused me to have the fantasy that this had been a forseeable, and therefore preventable, occurance rather than just unfortunate timing.

Clearly, this would apply to some people's feelings about the Iraq War. People who had no real opinion about it at the time, or who felt that it was probably a mistake but weren't sure what would actually happen, might very well feel now that our failure was predictable. This is not the sort of thing that could be analyzed statistically, but I'm sure it occurs.

However, it's not only unfair but nonsensical to apply this standard to everyone in the anti-war camp. Yes, hindsight bias exists. What's your point?

Here's Shankar's essential argument:

Even though many liberals were right about the Iraq War, they didn't have 100% absolute certainty all along that they were right, thus decreasingly their overall level of correctness. Go Bush.

Sound reasonable to you?

Next up in the article comes the Arkes quote that Sullivan excerpts. Is an OSU psychology professor really qualified to make blanket declarations about a group as massive and diverse as "liberals"? I mean, "liberals are guilty of a hindsight bias"? How does he know? To make an accurate scientific survey of liberals and their attitudes on the Iraq War, you'd need one hell of a large, random sampling of left-wing Americans. Somehow, I doubt Prof. Arkes has gone to this much trouble.

The hindsight bias plays an important role in public debate, because it gives people a false sense of certainty. When people convince themselves that they knew something would happen, what they effectively ignore is how much that outcome may have been unpredictable.

In place of accuracy, what the hindsight bias seems to offer is a form of comfort. It is easy to be confident about the past, because one cannot be proved wrong.

Welcome to Fantasyland, where even when you are 100% right, YOU'RE STILL WRONG! Shankar's stating that liberals, who were right about the Iraq War, are taking solace in a hindsight bias, because it means that they cannot be proved wrong! Awesome!

Maybe it's me, but shouldn't psychologists be focusing their attention on the large number of delusional Americans who can't bring themselves to admit that this entire Iraq debacle has been and will continue to be a monumental disaster for both of our nations? If you had a choice between psychoanalyzing a group of people who may be acting a bit smug after their attitudes had been proved repeatedly correct or a group of people who sadistically continue to send waves of their own troops into battle ill-equipped and with no clear-cut mission because of abstract concepts like "Spreading Freedom"...oh, never mind...It's not even worth it.

I'd also like to pause to note that this is supposed to be a news article, not an editorial. The top of the page announces that it's a DISPATCH FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR, like I'm going to read about ACTUAL BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE and not some weasels attempt to blame me for actually having some sense of what the fuck I'm talking about some of the time.

Look, I'm not saying I'm some Middle-East expert who predicted everything that has happened since 2003. That's my whole point! If I knew better all this time, why didn't anyone actually running the country? How was it that our President thought the mission was accomplished 3 years ago? And how is it that, in a country with leadership that fucked up, the Washignton Post is reporting about how all the anti-war people weren't correct enough in their pre-war disaster assessments?

The article goes on for a while describing hindsight bias and giving non-Iraq examples, as if proving that the phenomenon exists will magically make it applicable to this situation. It's not even remotely convincing.

But check out this part (on the second page, of course, after you click through and wait for a pop-up ad to load):

In yet another experiment, Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University and a pioneer in the field of hindsight bias, found that Americans who made estimates about their danger after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks recalled having made much lower estimates of risk a year later, after their fears failed to materialize.

Fischhoff testified about psychological factors in judgment at a meeting of the House intelligence committee last week.

While hindsight bias in the context of the Iraq war was real, the psychologist cautioned in an interview against misuse of the idea -- the argument by many supporters of the Bush administration that it was impossible to know ahead of time how the war would turn out.

I mean...wow...wow...That is bullshit on an almost admirable level.

First off, this study does not discuss hindsight bias in the context of the Iraq War. That's proof that hindisight bias existed in the context of the 9/11 attacks! Which, as the past several years of grinding and pointless conflict have continually affirmed, had nothing at all to do with the fucking war in Iraq, idiot!

Secondly, he's forced...in the article...to admit that his thesis is fundamentally flawed. "THE PSYCHOLOGIST CAUTIONED IN AN INTERVIEW AGAINST MISUSE OF THE IDEA!" That means, "bringing this topic up in the context of the Iraq War will most likely be misleading and should be avoided." Oh, Shankar...He's telling you it's not news, and then you write a news article including his quote that it's not news.

Folks, this is straight-up propaganda. No doubt about it. This is a plant. A story designed to make people distrustful of anyone speaking out against the war. "Sure, if may seem like they were right all along, but they just got lucky. No one knows anything about the future, it's all a murky unknowable mystery. Even people who know some things about what might happen are retroactively ignorant because of this here hindsight bias. So why not continue to support the President and his cruel war machine?"

And, of course, it wouldn't be authoritarian right-wing propaganda without a dig at bloggers:

Indeed, research by both Fischhoff and Arkes show that people can fight the hindsight bias only when they honestly and systematically try to explain how different outcomes are possible. Such self-doubt is the exact opposite of how modern politics works: In the age of the blogosphere, certitude is king.

PROJECTION ALERT! Blogs are an interactive medium. If you get something wrong, and you have comments open (and most anti-war bloggers do), people will come and tell you when you're wrong. Blogs can also be edited easily, at any time, and are often written in a casual, conversational, stream-of-consciousness manner. They are absolutely not about certainty. Maybe half of the blog posts I read begin with, "I might be crazy but..." or "This looks to me like..." You know who always sounds 100% certain about every ridiculous assertion they make...Writers for the Washington Post!

There's more to the article, but I'm actually so angry I can't continue to blog about this right now. Just go read it for yourself and maybe drop Shankar an e-mail and let him know that you think he's a soulless shill. That's what I did.