Child Mortality

Child mortality is like a thermometer for the general health of a society. It is just one number, but in order for it to go down, a lot of things have to be going well. In most industrialised countries, less than 5 children per 1,000 don't reach their 5th birthday. As the world has become richer, and more people have shifted from absolute poverty to middle income, this incredibly harsh trauma has visited fewer and fewer of us. It is easy to get caught in the negativity of daily news. This is slow (rather than breaking) news that has taken 200 years and fundamentally changed almost all of our lives. It is worth celebrating. The country with the worst child mortality in 2013 (Angola) has half the child mortality of the country with the best in 1800 (Belgium). More than 30% of children in Belgium in 1800 did not live till their 5th birthday. The global average has reduced from 43.3% to less than 3.4%. It is worth celebrating.

mRaf Lamina

The opposite of thought control may be just as scary. Without being careful, Animal Farm in reverse may mean we focus so heavily on the bad, we miss the good. With a world connected so that information flows, you don't have to use bullets to tear things down. You just have to feed the hatred. Truth lies in relationships. A post-truth world would be one that tears down those connections by focusing on the divisions. Good news builds slowly. Good news is the decrease in child mortality, war, disease, and poverty we have witnessed over long time scales. I am a free speech fundamentalist. I don't think law should control words, but I do think relationships should. Words matter. We must choose them carefully.

see Animal Farm in Reverse

by Bryan Caplan

Free Speech (Tim)

The Debatable Right to Free Speech

(Human Rights Series Part 1) 

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to… receive and impart information and ideas through any media.” Sounds completely reasonable, until you realise that the first item returned on a Google search ‘Did the holocaust happen?’ is ‘Top 10 reasons why the holocaust didn’t happen’ published on the anti-Semitic, hate speech website Stormfront.org. Is that an opinion which has a right to dissemination through any media and regardless of frontiers?

I find holocaust denial a very compelling case because it’s not just an aberrant opinion; it’s an opinion that makes very specific claims about historical reality. That the Nazis killed six million Jews is an undeniable fact, and to deny it is to make specific claims about reality. If even the most basic research shows that holocaust denial is demonstrably false, why bother to proscribe it? My argument is that even easily falsifiable facts may be more harmful that mere opinions. If you post an article about why you personally hate Jews, it’s obvious to any reader that it’s just your opinion. However, opinions become something a lot more dangerous when they distort facts to try and win converts. It’s facts rather than opinions that need protection sometimes.

Donald Trump told a great many lies in his presidential campaign. Not strongly worded opinions, or political doublespeak, but out and out lies. The most notorious of these lies was the promise to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. If he merely expresses the opinion that the US government should make more effort to seal the border with Mexico, that’s his right. The problem is that he made appeal to actual real-world facts. He made a promise to do something which cannot actually be done. You can’t actually force another country to pay for your public works. But the lie is told, the seed is planted in people’s heads and the harm is done. The same might be said about the claims which were pushed by the Leave campaign in Britain.

Fact-Checking the Donald

I don’t really mean to get political, but these events do highlight the fact that increasing numbers of people are being duped by claims that could easily have been falsified.  Fake news is the hot topic of the day, but it’s really just the extreme version of various forms of counterfactual and spurious claims which float freely around the internet. See the anti-vaccination movement for another example. My question is; what should be done about it?  Should these sorts of falsehoods be allowed to survive?

I don’t have an answer. I just want to start the discussion. Maybe governments should start by banning fake news. Maybe politicians should be censured for making claims that are demonstrably false. Does the internet need some kind of watchdog? Or is it simply up to us to educate future generations so that they are less susceptible to BS? Let’s just hope it’s not too late by then.  

--- Other posts by Tim Casteling ---

History and Perspective

We can no longer blame mainstream media for their news selectivity. Like most markets, they are largely a mirror to what people want. Not what we say we want. Social Media does the same thing. If people want to get heard, the best way to do it is to say something divisive in an emotional way. People who agree already will bounce that idea around in their echo chamber as it provides their view extra strength. People who disagree may feel obliged to respond in equal but opposite tones. The message will spread. We hear lots of bad stuff because bad stuff spreads.

I am not a 'the world is only improving' guy, but there is a lot of good news. A fantastic book to read is 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' by Steven Pinker. History and perspective have a habit of being very different from our narrow world views. History and perspective are great teachers. Max Roser also does a great job on Our World in Data providing 'visual news' but over a much longer time frame. He focuses on the things we should care about like poverty, violence, health, education and pollution. 

It may not make the news, but there is a lot of good work being done in the world. Sometimes that is worth celebrating.

Up To Us

Liberal Constitutional Democracies and their Citizens are similar to the News and Social Media. The Government can only really do a limited amount of stuff because they aren't dictators. We made it that way. Many of us disappeared off to the New World and set up new ways of doing things. We made a hash of it initially and those of us who were there already often got the short end of the stick. But we got, and we are getting better. 

In many countries in the world, if we want to do something, we don't have to wait for the Government to do it. A Liberal Constitution gives you the right to do something unless it obstructs someone elses liberty. It doesn't stop you from helping people. If there are poor people in a rich country, I don't think you can blame it on the government. You don't need to get consensus, raise taxes, and redistribute. If there are poor people in a rich country, it is because not enough of us are doing something about it. 

When it comes to the News, if we want to hear about stories that really matter, we don't have to wait for the News to cover it. Social Media means we are in charge of the content that gets put out. There is no one stopping you from participating in the conversation. If the quality of discussion is poor, we can't blame any Media companies.

News stories tend to focus on 'News worthy' items. They talk about deaths due to shark attacks and murders, not deaths due to diarrhoea or malaria. Something is newsworthy if it is out of the ordinary. It is not the job of the media to tell us stories that resonate more closely to our lives. The description of ordinary peoples lives. We don't tend to talk about the stuff that matters to us in the open. So we only hear from celebrities and writers. We don't hear from each other.

source: NEWS!!! Florida led the world in Shark Attacks in 2013

One thing I like about the blogging medium is that when I speak to friends who read my blog, we get straight to something that matters to both of us. Most of us only have a few areas of interest that overlap and we are very busy. We don't get to see each other that often. Often a catch up ends up being small talk for a while before perhaps by chance you stumble on something that matters. With blogs, the friend may have skimmed stuff that doesn't interest them and read the ones that did. The trigger of seeing you may bring back that post and you can chat about it. Even better, I have found the trigger of seeing the blog post actually leads to more face to face time. With so much going on, sometimes we need triggers to remind us what is important to us. 

In my ideal world, we would all write blogs. Clearly public comments descend quickly, but if one persons post triggers you to write something etc. the world will be more full of things that matter to us.

At some point, if things aren't the way we want them, but we have the power to change that - it is up to us and we need to get on with it.

News or Noise

What news do you follow? How much of it is really news, and how much is noise?

I don't know what the answer is but I do know that the next really important battle now that information is closing in on free is how do you filter it? How do you get the really important stuff, and how do you distinguish it from the rubbish?

I think things like sharing quality items you find, and making it easy to give things ratings will help a lot. If you build a network of people whose opinions you value, and you read the things they have helped filter and filter yourself... you combine the millions of new writers out there with a million new editors.

But how many people use things like Google Reader, and share the items they find interesting?

If you do, please let me know. If you don't please do. Here is a site with my shared items.