I was just listening to this This American Life show on Alex Jones. I knew he was a bad guy but I hadn’t realized how horrible he was—a kind of supercharged Al Sharpton with a much higher level of hatred and lying. But that won’t be news to many of you. The stunning part to me was near the end, when interviewer Jon Ronson talks to some people who personally knew Jones in high school, knew that Jones told lie after lie after lie, and yet they say things like, “who’s to say. . . . some of the stuff he says could be true. It could be. I mean, Obama, he could be a Muslim. He could back them up, the radical Muslims. And he could have been giving them money behind—I mean, who knows? We don’t know. I mean, we hear what they want us to hear. We see what they want us to see. I mean, anything could be anything.” As Ronson puts it, “All these people who knew for sure that Alex had been a liar back in Rockwall. A lot of them believed that what he says on Infowars might be true.”
It struck me that this is an example of the fallacy of the one-sided bet, which is, in this case, to hear argument X and think that X might be true or maybe X isn’t true, but not to consider the possibility that the opposite of X might be true. So, yeah, Alex Jones could be a pathological liar and still tell the truth sometimes on his show. Maybe Obama is a Muslim, despite there being no evidence for this. Maybe that school shooting never happened. The probability is about 1 in a zillion of that, but no probability is exactly zero. But, once you open the door to these things, why not consider other equally unlikely possibilities. Pick a random celebrity and say that he did the school shootings. Pick another random Christian celebrity and say that she’s a Muslim. Etc.
Being open-minded is fine, but no reason to take as your default belief the statements of a person who’s known to have lied repeatedly.
The purpose of this post is not to convince any Alex Jones fans that they’re wrong. This blog has 10,000 readers so maybe there some Alex Jones fans in the audience, and maybe there are some others who aren’t Alex Jones fans, exactly, but see him has a fighter for their side, who knows. It’s easier to talk about ovulation and voting or beauty and sex ratio rather than Holocaust deniers and school shooting deniers because . . . these latter topics are just more upsetting to think about, as they involve actual people being murdered and then disrespected. Election denial is somewhere in the middle: no dead bodies involved (except on January 6th) but it threatens democracy so there’s that. Anyway, if you’re an Alex Jones fan, you might still be able to compartmentalize your views and so you can still read this blog for the statistics advice.
No, the point of this post is just to reflect on the persistence of the fallacy of the one-way bet. Or, to put it another way, the power of defaults. My plea to you: Whenever you hear the claim X, don’t immediately frame this as “Maybe X is true and maybe it’s not,” leading to a some sort of belief that’s a weighted average of X and what you thought before. That’s not a generally appropriate mode of Bayesian analysis.
Obligatory Carl Sagan quote “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”
I am surprised often how many will engage in this fallacy, regardless of their educational background. On the other hand, I am even more surprised that attempts to define ‘lies’ are so flawed to begin with. I began to think about the common definitions of ‘lies’ when I heard the characterization “truthiness”.
“a truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true”.
Now this Webster dictionary definition isn’t all that helpful to me either. But engaging in ‘truthiness’ seems to be more pervasive in our social interactions than ‘lying’.
What is more helpful is to identify the cognitive biases that lurk in our social and work life. And even more fundamentally, I think that many of us are a lot lazier in our thinking than we admit. I believe that David Perkins, Founder of Project Zero as well Daniel Kahnemann elaborate on our laziness in their seminal research. I’m though less sure that it is easy to think better consistently and contextually if we are taught to think logically and critically b/c the quality of knowledge is so variable to begin with.
Andrew has wisely framed this discussion of Alex Jones within the context of the one-sided bet rather than pounding on Alex Jones assertions in particular. To my wife’s annoyance, I am a long-time dedicated viewer of Alex Jones and am bothered by otherwise educated people who are unaware of Jones’s influence and existence. Many an NPR program–a favorite whipping boy in this blog–will discuss vaccination hesitancy/resistance without ever noting that Jones pushes the notion that the vaccine was created expressly to enslave and depopulate the planet. The usual suspects are Soros, Fauchi, Gates, Rothschild and the Illuminati.
The secret handshake is “Big Mike”, which is the reference to Michelle Obama actually being a male.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ngrH2zQm5U
If you find that farfetched, you probably do not know much about the expanding lunatic fringe in the United States.
And it expands one more ring every time someone sends an “interesting link” along — *just* *like* *that*
probably a lot of readers like myself think of him as just one more *** in the pantheon of the media, which has *** of all sorts.
It’s hard to tell what type of media lying will have the largest impact over the long run: one *** dude telling big lies who has a small following or a whole bunch of people – say the nudge lords or others generating misleading information for policy purposes – telling many less severe untruths over years and even decades, but with the full backing of the establishment in their field, generating thousands of misleading reports in the mainstream media, often hyped with the full cooperation of the media.
Alex Jones rants and raves his misinformation while NPR calmly and articulately teaches you the wrong thing.
Different methods work for different audiences.
“…articulately teaches you the wrong thing.”
What, the both are teaching the *same* wrong thing; the difference lying merely in “technique”?
If that’s what you really mean to say, mark your territory unambiguously, like a pissing dog, and get it over with!
the nudgelords’ impact on social beliefs has much different social consequences than “the big lie.”
‘himmicanes’ are not leading to anyone actually dying, as opposed to what led to 1/6.
It seems to me that the fallacy of the one-way bet is essentially the same as the fallacy of binary thinking. The issue is almost always not whether something is possible, yes or no, but how likely it is. One way to gage likelihood is the track record of the source. Another is to consider the corresponding likelihood of alternative possibilities, both plausible and implausible. And of course a third is to engage directly with the evidence for and against the hypothesis in question.
It is not so crazy to say that Obama is a Muslim. His father was step-father were from Muslim families. His statements were so confusing and unconvincing that even most Obama supporters are not able to tell pollsters what his religion is. Some also say he is an atheist.
It is also hard to tell what Alex Jones truly believes. Sometimes Obama and Jones both seem to be just saying what their target audiences want to hear.
Roger:
It would not be so crazy to say that Obama is a Muslim, except that Obama’s not a Muslim. In some abstract sense it’s not so crazy, but conditional on the fact that Obama is not actually a Muslim, it’s indeed crazy. In any case, yes, politicians often tell audiences what they want to hear, but, no, attacking families of school shootings is not normal. It’s pathological behavior. I don’t really care what Alex Jones believes. What he says is bad enough.
There is exactly 0 evidence that Barack Obama is, himself, Muslim. While his stepfather and birth father were (although, by most accounts, neither were particularly religious), his mother was a non-religious Christian. He grew up non-religious, though became more religious in Chicago later in life. The fact that Obama was simultaneously attacked as being Muslim (which itself isn’t something to attack someone for) and that he was a member of Revered Wright’s church hints at the absurdity of the claim.
Finally, why polls matter regarding someone’s religion is beyond me. Some people also don’t believe Francis is Catholic, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is the current leader of the Catholic Church.
Polls do matter in this case. Normally a man is considered a Muslim if his father was Muslim, unless he actively repudiates it. Obama has said that he is Christian, but he has also said other things that leave plenty of doubt.
Whether he is a Muslim depends on your definition.
When there is a big story, like a school shooting, Alex Jones often looks for holes in the official narrative. If you don’t like his conspiracy theories, then don’t listen to him. I think he is off the air, anyway.
Roger:
Ahhh, an internet rabbit hole! I wonder if there’s a place where the flat earthers and the Obama-is-a-Muslim people and the believers in himmicanes and embodied cognition could all get together and debate each other. But I think Jones is worse because he doesn’t just spread ridiculous theories; he also spreads hateful lies such as with the school shootings.
Putting ’embodied cognition’ next to ‘himmicanes’ here is misleading and confused.
The implication seems to be that, like himmicanes, ’embodied cognition’ refers to a single, theoretically unjustified hypothesis which we should all now recognise as laughable. It doesn’t. Instead it refers to a long tradition of diverse approaches in the cognitive sciences which are unified by their foregrounding of how possession of a physical body contributes to the cognitive capabilities and peculiarities of humans, other animals, and robots. Like any broad and multifaceted framework, many different experiments have been done under the banner of ’embodied cognition’. Some of that work is good, and some of that work is poor. I assume when you use the term you are referring to a particular experiment which used poor methodology and came to an erroneous conclusion.
As a single fan of your blog, I’d love it if you would stop misleadingly using the term ’embodied cognition’ as a punchline in this way. It reads to me the way it might read to you if a non-statistician joked about ‘himmicanes and Bayesianism’. The existence of poor work that presents itself as Bayesian isn’t justification for writing off the whole family of approaches. Likewise for embodied cognition. If you really like the example (I don’t actually know which bad study you are talking about), then please try and find a way to refer to it that doesn’t conflate it with an entire research tradition.
Barney:
I’m thinking about the claims of Bargh et al. and many other similar experiments. We’ve discussed several of them on this blog over the years.
A good friend lives down the block from the Sandy Hook school shooting. Don’t really care exactly what Alex Jones’ motivations for his comments on that are, but the comments themselves were pure evil. I hope the people in Sandy Hook find a way in court to totally bankrupt him. “love” to hear any defense of his actions
Pure evil? A kid killed 28 people, including himself. I can see calling that pure evil. Maybe some of the influences on him were evil, I don’t know. But all Alex Jones did was to tell some stories. You are free to believe or not believe him.
Roger –
> But all Alex Jones did was to tell some stories. You are free to believe or not believe him.
C’mon. He deliberately exploited the pain of people whose young children were murdered. I’m not sure about pure evil, but why on earth would you euphemistically sugar-coat what he did?
Roger:
You write, “all Alex Jones did was to tell some stories.” No. All that Stephen King does is tell some stories. Jones is not “telling some stories”; he’s telling lies about real people who has suffered horribly. And the issue is not whether “you” are free to believe him; it’s that gullible people do believe him, and in his efforts Jones is aided by various people who support him out of some mixture of $ and perceived agreement for whatever political views he’s advancing. I think it’s horrible with Sharpton, and I think it’s horrible with Jones.
It is hard to know many things.
For example, it is hard to know how to prepare, in the event I must to plan for Martian Christmas as it is celebrated beneath the surface of Europa, at the summer solstice of Jupiter, and have to make arrangements in a great hurry, I’m sorely lacking in prior experience and do not know what gifts will be appreciated, and which will be insulting to my hosts.
So it may be a matter of terrible urgency that I know what gifts I should bring, in the event! What shall I do, if such an invitation arrives by tomorrow’s post?
If I am stubborn enough, perhaps I’ll decline the invitation outright [3]. Perhaps I’ll say, well I cannot go wrong if I bring them a Haggis from Bannockburn [2]. Or I’ll just consult a fortune-teller, who doesn’t claim to know any Martians on Europa, but perhaps knows more about me than I know myself [4].
just take an applebee’s gift card or something
Actually, we have a pretty good idea what Jones truly believes; he believes he can make money selling stuff like health supplements.
John:
+1. But, based on that radio segment I heard, I don’t think Jones is motivated entirely by $. He seems to really like getting into fights with people.
This comic feels quite appropriate for the topic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4127
Essentially Jones’s followers are engaging in the same behavior as the professor in the comic – absorb enough crazy theories and eventually the idea that Obama isn’t a muslim starts to look pretty crazy.