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Chapter 12 The Facts Are True, the News Is Fake

I never said that I said—No news is mostly news—Information flows in both directions

HOW TO DISAGREE WITH YOURSELF

In the summer of 2009, I partook of an hour-long public discussion with David Cameron, who was in the running for, and later became, the U.K. prime minister. The discussion was about how to make society robust, even immune to Black Swans, what structure was needed for both decentralization and accountability, and how the system should be built, ce genre de trucs. It was an interesting fifty-nine minutes around the topics of the Incerto, and I felt great communicating all the points in bulk for the first time. The room in the elegant Royal Society for the Arts was full of journalists. I subsequently went to a Chinese restaurant in (London’s) Soho to celebrate with a few people when I received a phone call from a horrified friend. All London newspapers were calling me a “climate denier,” portraying me as part of a dark anti-environment conspiracy.

The entire fifty-nine minutes were summarized by the press and reported from a tangential comment that lasted twenty seconds taken in reverse of the intended meaning. Someone who didn’t attend the conference would have been under the impression that that was the whole conversation.

It turned out that I presented my version of the precautionary principle during the conversation, worth restating here. It asserts that one does not need complex models as a justification to avoid a certain action. If we don’t understand something and it has a systemic effect, just avoid it. Models are error-prone, something I knew well with finance; most risks only appear in analyses after harm is done. As far as I know, we only have one planet. So the burden is on those who pollute—or who introduce new substances in larger than usual quantities—to show a lack of tail risk. In fact, the more uncertainty about the models, the more conservative one should be. The same newspapers had lauded The Black Swan in which this very point was fleshed out clearly—so visibly the attack had nothing to do with the point I was making, rather they wanted to weaken Cameron by demonizing me. I realized that they would have found another reason to tarnish me no matter what I said.

I managed to defend myself by making a lot of noise, and, with explicit legal threats, forced every newspaper to publish my correction. Even then someone at The Guardian tried (unsuccessfully) to tone down my letter by showing that it was some type of disagreement with what I said, not a correction of their misrepresentation. In other words, they wanted me to say that I was disagreeing with myself.

The London newspapers were actively misrepresenting something to their own public. Someone who read the paper was mistaking the journalist for an intermediary between him- or herself and the product, the piece of news. But if I eventually set the record straight, thanks to my bully pulpit, many can’t do the same.

So clearly there is an agency problem. There is no difference between a journalist at The Guardian and the restaurant owner in Milan, who, when you ask for a taxi, calls his cousin who does a tour of the city to inflate the meter before showing up. Or the doctor who willfully misdiagnoses you to sell you a drug in which he has a vested interest.

INFORMATION DOESN’T LIKE TO BE OWNED

Journalism isn’t Lindy compatible. Information transmits organically by word of mouth, which circulates in a two-way manner. In Ancient Rome, people got information without a centralized filter. In the ancient Mediterranean marketplaces, people talked; they were the receivers and the purveyors of news. Barbers offered comprehensive services; they doubled as surgeons, dispute-resolution experts, and news reporters. If people were left to filter their own rumors, they were also part of the transmission. Same with pubs and London coffee houses. In the Eastern Mediterranean (currently Greece and the Levant), condolences were the source of gathering and transmission—and represented the bulk of social life. Dissemination of the news took place at these gatherings. My social grandmother would have her “rounds” of visits of condolences some days in Beirut’s then-significant Greek Orthodox community, and knew practically everything down to the most insignificant details. If the child of someone prominent flunked an exam, she knew it. Practically every affair in town was detected.

Unreliable people carried less weight than reliable ones. You can’t fool people more than twice.

There were some occasional episodes of collective frenzy, with the spread of false rumors, but, owing to the low level of connectivity between communities, these did not travel as fast as they do today.

The period of time that corresponds to reliance on one-sided accounts such as television and newspapers, which can be controlled by the mandarins, lasted from the middle of the twentieth century until the U.S. election of 2016. At that point, social networks, allowing a two-way flow of information, returned the mechanism of tidings to its natural format—Lindy had to strike. As with participants in markets and souks, there is a long-term advantage to being dependable.

Further, such an agency problem as that of the current press is systemic, as its interests will keep diverging from that of its public until the eventual systemic blowup as we saw with the Bob Rubin trade. As an illustration: I was less frustrated by the misinterpretation of my ideas than by the fact that no reader would have realized that 99 percent of my discussion with Cameron was about things other than climate change. If the former could have been a misunderstanding, the latter is a structural defect. And you never cure structural defects; the system corrects itself by collapsing.

One way journalism will self-destruct from its growing divergence from the public is illustrated by the Gawker story. Gawker was a voyeurism outfit that specialized in publicizing people’s private lives in industrial proportions. Eventually Gawker, which bullied its financially weaker victims (often twenty-one-year-olds in revenge porn scenes), got bullied by someone richer and went bankrupt. It was revealing that journalists overwhelmingly sided with Gawker on grounds of “freedom of information,” the most misplaced exploitation of that concept, rather than with the public, who sided, naturally, with the victim. This is to remind the reader that journalism has the mother of all agency problems.

The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants. As we saw in Chapter 8, restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests. Further, skin in the game creates diversity, not monoculture. Economic insecurity worsens the condition. Journalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority live hand to mouth, and ostracism by their friends would be terminal. Thus they become easily prone to manipulation by lobbyists, as we saw with GMOs, the Syrian wars, etc. You say something unpopular in that profession about Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, and you become history. This is the opposite of business where me-tooism is penalized.

THE ETHICS OF DISAGREEMENT

Now let us get deeper into the application of the Silver Rule in intellectual debates. You can criticize either what a person said or what a person meant. The former is more sensational, hence lends itself more readily to dissemination. The mark of a charlatan—say the writer and pseudo-rationalist Sam Harris—is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on some specific statement (“look at what he said”) rather than blasting his exact position (“look at what he means” or, more broadly, “look at what he stands for”)—for the latter requires an extensive grasp of the proposed idea. Note that the same applies to the interpretation of religious texts, often extracted from their broader circumstances.

It is impossible for anyone to write a perfectly rationally argued document without a segment that, out of context, can be transformed by some dishonest copywriter to appear totally absurd and lend itself to sensationalization, so politicians, charlatans, and, more disturbingly, journalists hunt for these segments. “Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung” goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand (a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terror), and a few others. As Donald Trump said, “The facts are true, the news is fake”—ironically at a press conference in which he subsequently suffered the same selective reporting as my RSA event.

The great Karl Popper often started a discussion with an unerring representation of his opponent’s positions, often exhaustive, as if he were marketing them as his own ideas, before proceeding to systematically dismantle them. Also, take Hayek’s diatribes Contra Keynes and Cambridge: it was a “contra,” but not a single line misrepresents Keynes or makes an overt attempt at sensationalizing. (It helped that people were too intimidated by Keynes’s intellect and aggressive personality to risk triggering his ire.) Read Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, written eight centuries ago; you will notice sections titled “Questio,” then “Praeteria,” “Objectiones,” “Sed Contra,” etc., describing with a legalistic precision the positions being challenged and looking for a flaw in them before submitting a compromise. If you notice a similarity with the Talmud, it is no accident: it appears that both methods originate with Roman legal reasoning.

Note the associated straw man arguments by which one not only extracts a comment but also provides an interpretation or promotes misinterpretation. As an author, I consider straw man no different from theft.

Some types of lies in an open market cause others to treat the perpetrator as if he were invisible. It is not about the lie; it is about the system that requires some modicum of trust. For purveyors of calumnies did not survive in ancient environments.

The principle of charity stipulates that you try to understand a message as if you were yourself its author. It, and revulsion at its violations, are Lindy compatible. For instance, Isaiah 29:21 states: That make a man an offender for a word, and lay a snare for him that reproveth in the gate, and turn aside the just for a thing of nought. The wicked ensnare you. Calumny was already a very severe crime in Babylon, where the person who made a false accusation was punished as if he committed the exact crime.

However, in philosophy, the principle of charity—as principle—is only sixty years old. As with other things, if the principle of charity had to become a principle, it must be because some old ethical practices were abandoned.

NEXT

The next chapter will take us to virtue as skin in the game.