Comments on: Charm Beats Accuracy

By: michael webster

michael webster — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:08:42 +0000

Robin writes: “Can we really expect people to track the accuracy of advice from their doctors, lawyers, or interior decorators, relative to their looks, charm, and general impressiveness?”

Did you ever wonder why law firms, whose main product is catalogued and cross referenced documents, have to have 5 star locations – or geographical charm?

There are few repeat consumers of legal services – so charm and general impressiveness substitutes for reputation.

By: Newton

Newton — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:23:11 +0000

Didn’t Philip Tetlock write a book recently claiming that media experts have no greater accuracy than chance?

Ah, wait, it was “political” experts

http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715

By: Jamie Forrest

Jamie Forrest — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:25:27 +0000

But how would you assess the accuracy of a weather forecast? If the prediction is a 60% chance of rain tomorrow, and it turns out to be sunny, does that mean the forecast was wrong? After all, there was still a 40% chance of no rain.

By: Wendy Collings

Wendy Collings — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:41:39 +0000

The study Robin references only covers television stations.

Television’s primary purpose is entertainment. Content will always be secondary to presentation in this medium.

Those who care about accuracy in news and weather reporting know:

- The Internet is best. You can choose your sources, pick from a wide selection of headlines/angles, and get the latest updates. Dubious accuracy can be cross-checked.

- Newspapers come second best. The selection is space-restricted, and updates are restricted to publishing frequency. However, you can read it in your own time and skip what you don’t want.

- Television is content-poor. It takes much longer to watch someone tell you about the news than to read it for yourself. You can’t escape the presenter’s time frame except by taping the program and replaying it later, but fast-forwarding is not like skim-reading. You either watch something or miss it. Keeping viewers engaged relies on having entertaining footage, whether this serves the content well or not.

“Why should we expect this to be any better for other kinds of news?” – The majority of people expect TV to entertain them, and doctors and lawyers to inform them. The expectation of accuracy in each case is quite different.

As for the weather; for most people, most days of the year, it really, really doesn’t matter what happens. As Scott Clark said, news and weather is just for day-to-day small talk.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:41:32 +0000

True, most of us don’t put enough thought into how accurate our news coverage is. But there are a few reasons why news outlets see it as in their interest to keep a basic level of factual accuracy:

1. Libel lawsuits.
2. One news source can score an advantage over another by revealing that the other published false information (i.e. Memogate 2004 and its effects on CBS Evening News)

Of course, neither of these preclude laziness if the news source can claim good faith.

By: Alan Gunn

Alan Gunn — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:10:27 +0000

Just a small addition to what Andy just said: For people who need a decent forecast, there are better sources than TV. I get my weather (when I need it) from an internet site that has proved reliable; commodities traders get theirs from people who get paid the big bucks. All the radio and TV are really good for is telling us when the feds have declared a watch or a warning; anybody can do that.

My sense of things is that the TV people err heavily on the side of predicting bad weather. This seems to align with their incentives: if they miss bad weather, the people who get caught in it will be unhappy; if they call for bad weather and it turns out OK, people will be pleasantly surprised. And their goal is to have people like them.

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:05:45 +0000

I bet that investors in the Thai financial markets are more than happy to fly someone to Thailand to verify official reports. The television watchers are just revealing that they don’t really care about the weather forecast, they just want to watch someone charming and good looking.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:31:18 +0000

Why such high expectations for the accuracy tracking ability or inclinations of “people”? It’s not like our species makes “people” with the same quality control that we use for scientific computers or instruments.

By: Fabio Franco

Fabio Franco — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:12:13 +0000

It is not a question of “accuracy”. I think you’re all missing the point. The news is not there to inform, but to form, to mold your opinion. And public opinion moves the world. So we are all spoon-fed lies and dishonest commentary in order to further someone’s hidden agenda (see, for example, a Dan Klein paper on the intellectual dishonesty of Paul Krugman in econjournalwatch.org).

“The first and foremost of all the forces which move the world is the lie”. That is the first line of Jean-François Revel’s classic “La connaissance inutile” (“Useless Knowlege”), out of print everywhere (I wonder why…).

The vast majority walk around completely blind as to the forces at work in politics; a few can still discern in the penumbra weird phenomena and may pose questions about “accuracy”; but only a handful have the ability to throw light upon the darkest lies governing the world.

By: LB

LB — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:57:01 +0000

Interesting. As a frequent bicyclist, I care a lot about the weather, but realized that in the short term, I’m better off pulling up a Doppler, than I am using anyone’e prediction of whether it is going to rain tonight. I once scoured the web looking for any studies of different weather predictions and came up completely empty. Hope I am wrong about that.