What to believe

The internet and other modern media certainly give us a lot of information. Google and Wikipedia are wonderful. We now have a massively enhanced choice of outlet for our news and knowledge churning out material at phenomenal speed.

When all this started we could be forgiven for thinking that confusion could be a thing of the past. But the reality has been the opposite. More hasn’t just meant better, it has also meant ambiguity, bias, misinformation, contradiction.

What can we do?

First, look for bias, and understand that it comes in all shapes and sizes. Don’t believe a word you read in the Daily Mail (though why you would want to read a word in the Daily Mail anyway rather escapes me). Even a quality newspaper usually has an axe to grind, even if it as small as wanting a story to be interesting. The same goes for TV news, though every time I visit the USA I see how blessed relatively we are with the BBC. An interview will always express what the interviewee wants us to conclude. A history book is written by an author, with a viewpoint. Companies always have a point of view. A good starting point is always to ask yourself a sceptical question: what bias might this source bring?

Less obvious, remember that bias begins at home, with ourselves. We tend to believe what we want to believe and to disregard what doesn’t fit our world view. We trust some sources implicitly. We always have assumptions in our heads, and we look for data to support those assumptions and tend to miss data which would challenge them. Challenge those assumptions, again and again. Actively look out for surprises, for data which does not fit or comes from a new angle.

Next, wherever you have interest, see for yourself, dig more deeply, ask some others. Maybe the Dom Joly approach of visiting North Korea is a bit extreme, but one clear advantage of the age of communication is that finding out more has never been easier. Google comes into its own here. How wonderful to be able to read up to date reviews of restaurants or films, for example, each one biased but made more reliable by their quantity. I gave up trusting book or movie reviews in newspapers long ago. In digging, it is important to seek out contrary views, otherwise there is a risk of simply multiplying your own bias. As with so many things in life, diversity is a wonderful thing.

Next, value numbers and charts over sound bites and value trends over individual data points. In this regard, The Economist has no peer, at least in my (biased?) opinion. The charts in there are generally imaginative, clear and objective. There may still be some bias in there, but the chart itself usually helps. Other strengths of The Economist are its willingness to go back and admit where it was wrong and its tendencies to express pros and cons of an argument. Of course, it has its overriding philosophy and may be a little blind to things which don’t fit that.

Finally, chill. We could go mad with this, and many of us get stridently upset about misinformation. It is a fact of the modern world, and we just need to understand it and take the plusses of the communication age rather than get more and more angry. We don’t need to read the Daily Mail ourselves, and presumably those that choose to read it get something from it. If they care to express arguments from The Daily Mail to me, I can choose to ignore them, at least after giving them some consideration.

An example which illustrates many of these points is the continuing debate about the congestion charge in London. There is bias everywhere in the debate, with most contributors plugging an agenda. Personally I find the motorist lobby one of the worst persistent sinners in the dark art of misinformation, but others are biased the other way. I accept my own bias in favour of road pricing, based on logic over emotion and some anti-car feelings. I may even like the policy because I like Ken Livingstone (and others may have the opposite bias). That is a common and dangerous bias, to judge the source rather than their argument.

I can dig further by asking people who have lived in London before and after the charge, not just taxi drivers or shop keepers. I can be more imaginative, for example using my own experience as a driver in Oslo some years back, and less happy recent driving experiences in provincial Britain or Rome. But best of all I can look for statistics. Some years back I read the headline “Congestion charge fails to reverse traffic chaos” or similar. Deep in the article you could see that traffic had grown by say 10% per year in the years before the charge, then had been stable or declining slightly for a couple of years before resuming growth. It is entirely reasonable to conclude that congestion would be worse without the charge, even if the headline was factually correct. That is another common bias – a correct but incomplete or misleading conclusion.

We are blessed to live in the age of communication. It comes at a cost that we can be confused, overwhelmed or bamboozled, deliberately or otherwise. If we are smart and keep our brains active, we can take the plus and minimise the minus.