Month: April 2010
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Obama tax increase misperception grows
Earlier this year, I noted a CBSNews.com post showing that 24% of Americans thought President Obama had raised taxes for most Americans and 53% believed taxes had been kept the same. The numbers, which were drawn from a CBS/New York Times poll conducted February 5-10, were even worse among Tea Party supporters — 44% thought
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed: -CJR’s Greg Marx nails the New York Times for lazy “he said, she said” coverage of the financial reform debate –David Gregory and Perry Bacon should form a blame-the-voters club for journalists who don’t fact-check –The unbearable hypocrisy of former Washington Times editor Wes Pruden accusing President Obama of “play[ing] the
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New article on health care misinformation
I have a new article on health care misinformation in The Forum that may be of interest (link requires free registration; ungated copy here): Why the “Death Panel” Myth Wouldn’t Die: Misinformation in the Health Care Reform Debate Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama struggled to overcome widespread and persistent myths about their proposals to
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Measuring “epistemic closure”
While I obviously support more polling on misinformation, I don’t agree with Ezra Klein’s suggestion that it’s the best way to determine whether there is “epistemic closure” among ideological or partisan groups: The question is how do you measure epistemic closure? The easy answer is you test for its product: Misinformation. What you’d want to
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Charles Krauthammer: Hack psychiatrist
It infuriates me when pundits pretend to diagnose mental illness in their political opponents, but at least it’s obvious in most cases that the speaker has no psychiatric expertise. That’s not true, however, with the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, an actual psychiatrist. Via P. O’Neill, the latest example comes from a Krauthammer column earlier this
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Bad CBS/NYT poll question on tax burden
If you want to see what the public believes about the size of the federal income burden, this CBS/New York Times poll question is not the way to do it: On average, about what percentage of their household incomes would you guess most Americans pay in federal income taxes each year — less than 10
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed: -TPM’s “House Crazy Caucus” (based on rhetoric) only overlaps slightly with my Congresional Myth Caucus (based on bill sponsorship/cosponsorship) -Quote of the day — Barbara Boxer on “death panels”: “Now why would I ever pull the plug on granny? I am granny” -Health care misinformation takes a turn toward the absurd
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Resistance to corrections in health
Christie Aschwanden has written an excellent article on how resistance to corrective information hinders progress in health and medicine for Miller-McCune. Here’s a sample: A surprising number of medical practices have never been rigorously tested to find out if they really work. Even where evidence points to the most effective treatment for a particular condition,
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Bayesian model averaging paper
Statistically-minded readers may be interested in a paper that Jacob Montgomery and I just had published in Political Analysis (normal people can stop reading here): Bayesian Model Averaging: Theoretical Developments and Practical Applications Jacob M. Montgomery and Brendan Nyhan Political science researchers typically conduct an idiosyncratic search of possible model configurations and then present a
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Obama birther myth not going away
CBSNews.com’s Stephanie Condon reports that the myth of Barack Obama being born in another country is not going away. The new CBS/New York Times poll shows that only 58% of Americans, and 41% of self-identified Tea Party supporters, think he was born in the United States: Although the Constitution requires American presidents to be natural