[Dean's World] Dave Price: GIGO

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
GIGO
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1146516861.shtml


   Remember how it was patiently explained, by James Risen among others,
   that of course religious zealot terrorist Osama bin Laden would never
   work with secular tyrant Saddam? [1]Wellâ¦

     Whoever leaked the debriefing to Risen apparently gave him only
     part of it. Zubaydah did tell interrogators of bin Laden's
     reservations about being beholden to Saddam. (Newly released Iraqi
     documents demonstrate that despite these reservations, which date
     to at least 1992, bin Laden requested operational support from
     Saddam.) But the report also included this line, which contradicted
     the whole thrust of Risen's article: "Abu Zubaydah explained that
     [bin Laden's] personal goal of destroying the U.S. is so strong
     that to achieve this end he would work with whomever could help
     him, so long as al Qaeda's independence was not threatened." One
     other nugget from Zubaydah's March 2002 debriefing was omitted. He
     named a senior al Qaeda associate who did have good relations with
     the Iraqi regime: Abu Musab al Zarqawi, with whom Zubaydah had
     plotted attacks in Jordan.

   Iâd swear Iâve heard that Zarqawi name before. Isnât he currently
   famous for his role in some capacity or other? Itâll come to me, Iâm
   sure.
   This episode is exemplary of a larger trend Iâve noticed: the tendency
   of the antiwar crowd to adduce only heavily biased or very incomplete
   datasets in their reasoning. This goes beyond merely making
   tendentious arguments; I spend a lot of time reading/posting on such
   sites and they often seem either genuinely unaware of the
   preponderance of relevant data or so unable to process the
   implications of the data's existence that they simply edit it out of
   their consciousness. Whether the former or the latter is the case here
   (i.e., whether Risen was not given the relevant portions or
   deliberately ignored them), it's difficult to achieve perspicacity
   when [2]relying on misleading or incomplete data: garbage in, garbage
   out, as we say in IT.
   There are many other examples of this same sort of thing. For
   instance, as much as they might want to pretend Abu Ghraib or
   Guantanamo Bay are exceptional, a few minutes with Google will
   [3]demonstrate (note the 10,000,000 results) inmate abuse is an
   unfortunate but nearly unavoidable effect of imprisoning people, and
   hardly requires any kind of conspiracy or tacit consent to occur as
   [4]some maintain; psychological experiments have [5]confirmed this, if
   the vast empirical evidence were not enough. In fact, the rate of
   abuses in military prisons is generally lower than that of civilian
   prisons; surely this is a more relevant datum than whether instances
   of abuse have occurred at all? Yet the ipso facto conclusion from the
   Left, and implicitly argued by the mediaâs coverage, is that if any
   such incidents occurred, then âBush tortured!â One might just as well
   similarly indict the governor of every state in the Union, and the
   leader of every country in the world, for the similar abuses that
   occur almost universally in civilian prisons.
   This style of "argument by misleading examples" is somewhat dangerous,
   because the media can use it to argue nearly anything, no matter how
   obviously wrong. Suppose the media were to publish lurid photos of all
   the examples of Allied atrocities in WW II (such as the [6]Dachau
   massacre, the firebombings of [7]Dresden and [8]Tokyo,
   [9]Hiroshima/Nagaski) to the exclusion of all other information about
   the war. If such examples were touted in the media day after day, week
   after week, month after month, with no countervailing arguments that
   such actions were either militarily necessary or tragic exceptions to
   otherwise generally decent behavior (esp. as compared to Axis
   atrocities like the [10]Holocaust and the [11]Rape of Nanking), this
   would eventually succeed in stigmatizing the Allied war effort, just
   as the Iraq war effort was stigmatized by excessive coverage of Abu
   Ghraib.
   Similar problems exist with the egregiously counterfactual âBush lied
   us into war!â arguments. They require that Bush or his civilian
   leadership somehow not only convinced the director of the CIA that
   Iraq's possession of WMD was a âslam-dunk caseâ and created consensus
   to that effect among the rest of the worldâs intel agencies but also
   persuaded the Clinton administration to make such claims as well, all
   of which is impossible in any scenario that does not involve Rovian
   mind control rays and/or time travel. Yet they still make the
   arguments, ignoring these gaping chasms in favor of this tidbit about
   aluminum tubes or that picayune discrepancy about suspicious trailer
   labs. And again, the media plays along, hyping the datums that fit
   their preconceptions and assiduously avoiding those that do not.
   [12]Scott Adams, the cynical absurdist author of the Dilbert cartoons,
   argues pretty effectively that the vast majority of people rarely make
   rational decisions, but rather tend to emote and then rationalize
   their emotive choices ex post facto, cherrypicking data that fits
   within their emotional worldview. Examining how people adduce their
   evidence can often expose such a reversal of logical thought
   processes.

References

   1. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/012/165kjveg.asp
   2. http://ace.mu.nu/archives/174632.php
   3. http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=prison+abuse+-abu+-ghraib+-guantanamo+-military+-cheney+-bush+-rumsfeld
   4. http://www.balloon-juice.com/
   5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Prison_Experiment
   6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_massacre
   7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebombing_of_dresden
   8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebombing_of_Tokyo
   9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
  10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust
  11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_nanking
  12. http://www.dilbertblog.typepad.com/