How do we manage the information fire hose when critical public news breaks in an area with significant technical jargon, precedents and folk ways breaks through the barrier of interesting to vital. How do we, people who want to be reasonably well informed, differentiate between the spectrum between expertise to bullshit to active noisemaking to drown out the signal?
For health insurance and health finance, I have an advantage. At this point, I can filter information streams where some people say very little but are extremely information and value dense, to daily reads with something interesting to say where I can trust that I am not going to chase references to people with interesting things to say but have to be approached with care to active bullshit artists. Those categories are independent of political affiliation. I have liberal and conservative high density information providers, I have liberal and conservative bullshit artists that I just don’t read. This filtering was developed over years of participation in the conversation.
National security law, money laundering, counter-intelligence are all areas that I know exist and I know some people are worth tracking. David Ignatius at the Washington Post is a pipeline to the three letter agency world. Bradly Moss is an acknowledged expert on clearances. The Brookings Lawfare blog is a collection of experts who are trying very hard to write for both a professional audience and an informed lay audience. There are others, but I don’t know who they folks are.
As this issue increases in salience people emerge from the woodwork. Some of them know what they are talking about (much like some anonymous guy at an almost top-10,000 blog proved that he knew what he was talking about on health insurance) and some don’t. Yet they offer nuggets that could be very tempting to chase for confirmation bias reasons.
How do we manage the information fire hose to at least flag the actively negative contributors to net knowledge and hopefully filter out or at least minimize the noise from the occasionally interesting but often non-contributory voices.
We’re lucky here at Balloon Juice. We have two domain area experts, Adam and Cheryl, sharing with us. But as issues outside of our normal experiences dominate the political discussion, how do we find people who know what the hell they are talking about without wading through a river of nonsense?
schrodingers_cat
Greg Siskind is my go to on immigration, he is an immigration lawyer based in Memphis, TN. I have been following him on his blog and now Twitter since the Bush II immigration overhaul.
Ohio Mom
It isn’t fool proof but if someone has been proven right in the past, I tend to give them more credibility.
On the flip side, say if someone was a big Iraqi War booster, I’ll be very, very skeptical about their latest pronouncements.
But overall, i ageee that it is often hard to know who to believe. I have a personal list of issues I am agnostic about because I know I don’t have enough information (most have to do with disability and/or education).
Rasputin's Evil Twin
I’ve come to think this “administration” is a revival of “Macbeth” as directed by the Three Stooges, featuring the Keystone Kops, and with rewrites by Samuel Beckett. Feel free to add to the details. The Kissinger cameo throws me.
Marcopolo
Hi David,
I don’t think I’ve seen you comment on this ACA development (Aetna pulling out of all ACA exchanges):
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/aetna-latest-insurer-flee-aca-exchanges-47343081
Any thoughts?
Major Major Major Major
@Rasputin’s Evil Twin: Macbeth at least had a strong female character.
Big R
@schrodingers_cat: Ha! I have friends at Siskind Susser!
rikyrah
You are our lifeline, Mayhew. Good, bad, horrible, I do trust you to tell it like it is, in English we can understand.
Thank you.
Starfish
If you are talking about Twitter, find people you trust as subject matter experts and look through their lists and retweets. Through your medical tweets, I think I started following Andy Slavitt. A lot of the people you follow are far too technical for me to understand. Filter out known liars and charlatans. This is harder. I keep seeing people retweeting some of these idiots.
Louisa Mensch is a crazy who should not be trusted.
Seth Abramson despite his check mark keeps posting hyperbolic crap to get the hopes of lefties up but is repeatedly wrong or exaggerating.
Eric Garland is a marketer who started the “It’s time for some game theory” meme. It took a long time to read and fell apart for not making any real points or containing any factual information. I will never trust this dude, but I see people retweeting him all the time.
Charles Clymer is shrill and occasionally retweets something stupid not based in reality. I still follow Charles, but I do not use pronouns because what is gender?
burnspbesq
Just Security, which is run by the Brennan Center at NYU, is every bit as good as Lawfare, with a somewhat more left lean. They go together like chorizo and eggs. Both are essential reading every morning.
schrodingers_cat
@Big R: I don’t know anyone there personally but GS is well informed about the subject and he does a good job of getting the info out there. I am amazed at BJ’s reach. We are everywhere!
Kenneth Fair
If it involves the Supreme Court, you can’t go wrong with Nina Totenberg, Dahlia Lithwick, and the folks at SCOTUSBlog.
David Anderson
@Marcopolo: not surprising but Aetna is staying in Nevada
Kenneth Fair
On cybercrime and Internet security, Brian Krebs is a go-to source.
Gin & Tonic
@Starfish:
Louise (not Louisa) Mensch may sometimes be crazy, but sometimes she also has good information.
hovercraft
@Rasputin’s Evil Twin:
You are just too wedded to the DC swamp and their old thinking, visionaries knows that firing the FBI Director for investigating you and then lying about it, inviting the nation and person who are the cause of the investigation in the first place to come and meet with you in the Oval Office the very next day, and then topping it off with a Kissinger photo op, just as no one in their right mind is making any comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre, is a brilliant new way of doing things. This is how you drain the swamp. #WINNING!!
Cheryl Rofer
I follow a bunch of academic area experts for reliable interpretation of international news. There are also lesser-known reporters, often freelancers, who are pretty good, like Casey Michel on terrorism and Central Asia. This is pretty time- and Twitter timeline-consuming. But most are better than run-of-the-mill media. If you look at my Twitter follows, though, be aware that I follow some people to keep an eye on them, rather than because I value their input. I don’t follow hard-right people, though, because I already have too much to do.
And I greatly appreciate David’s analyses, because insurance is not my expertise.
Gin & Tonic
@Kenneth Fair: Taylor Swift is great on that, too (@SwiftOnSecurity)
Rathskeller
I use twitter as a network of trust/people, so when, e.g., Rick Wilson retweets something that Max Boot says, then I look into Boot then follow them shortly afterwards.
Louise Mensch is undoubtedly bonkers, but she’s also being fed valid information by other people. So I still follow her, for that and also for it’s for her cheery little “haha you’re going to jail” tweets. I wouldn’t retweet anything by her since she’s certainly going to be played for a fool by others.
Earlier this week, I was going through a list of public speakers (female computer scientists), and nearly all of their twitter feeds were interesting. So people who are trying to have a public face can also maintain interesting streams.
Marcopolo
Hmm, all the articles I saw said Aetna was pulling out from all the remaining ACA exchanges in which it was participating. Haven’t seen Nevada mentioned. Here’s another article:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/aetna-completely-exits-obamacare-exchanges-cites-massive-losses/article/2622734
Is there any possibility that someone else might come into these markets like Centene?
jhtrotter
April 13, 1970 is maybe a better date for comparison to recent events than October 20, 1973. John Aaron is wandering through a room full of baffled and overwhelmed controllers, who are trying to make sense of a lot of scary data that seemed intrinsically nonsensical, trying to find a simple save for a situation that they couldn’t yet know wasn’t going to respond to a simple save, 30 minutes post fuel cell explosion on Apollo 13. Except they don’t know that it’s a fuel cell explosion in that moment, wouldn’t know it with reasonable certainty for days. They can make no sense of what is happening, can’t believe they could be seeing something this bad and have it be real, are leaning towards it being an instrumentation problem, and have devised no course of action because of all that. And John Aaron, having been off duty but summoned in to help, sees it for what it is and says ‘…you guys are wasting your time, convincing yourselves this is some kind of funny instrumentation problem, when you really need to understand that the command module is dying…’.
If we focus on trying to make sense of Comeynacht, or Russiagate, or whatever, will we miss the bigger picture, maybe that democracy could be dying? At this point, can we even count on there being legitimate elections in 2018 to try to start fixing this with?
Whatever. I’d look to John Aaron for help. Have him bring Gene Kranz along too. You’re wasting your time if you think you have to understand it all to understand that it’s all very very bad.
schrodingers_cat
@jhtrotter:
An example of someone, not to be taken seriously.
Starfish
@Rathskeller: I know a number of the female computer scientists and focus on a very specific niche. I did not mention them at all. Which ones do you enjoy?
eldorado
why don’t both of them have a column in at least one big city newspaper?
Adam L Silverman
. And if I ever get my hands on those two they’re in big trouble for making me look bad…
Aleta
If a writer or blogger makes statements without explaining how they got there, or doesn’t credit the people and articles they drew ideas from, it may be a sign they’re less reliable.
If they spend words claiming to be an expert, pretending they were first, or if they don’t like giving credit to others, to me it seems like they have less understanding of how knowledge works. So may be careless about putting out information that isn’t true.
ETA That is, thinking of career moves and making a name ahead of caring about accuracy.
jhtrotter
@schrodingers_cat:
I’m sure you’re right. I remember that same fug mothersmucker dismissive response from last fall given to those who dared say ‘…you know, this guy has a real chance…’.
But I’m sure you’re right. I’ll look for a puppy picture to post.
schrodingers_cat
@jhtrotter: I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2018 and neither do you.
schrodingers_cat
Speaking of experts what do people think of Sarah Kendzior.
justawriter
There is also a question of how fresh the knowledge is. There was a time when I could have been regarded as an informed writer if not an expert on agriculture, rural development, alternative fuels and related issues. But thanks to the collapse of print journalism, I am now and will likely be for the rest of my career a small town community journalist (where I have accumulated expertise on the importance of sewage systems). I am increasingly aware that my hard won knowledge on technical topics dating from the first Shrub term are woefully out of date. It is, to coin a phrase I just came up with last week, Sad.
jhtrotter
@schrodingers_cat: Kitten pictures for everyone whilst we await the rise of the great ‘splainer to save us all.
gbbalto
@schrodingers_cat: Not an expert myself, but she seems very knowledgeable and is a regular read for me on Twitter and her frequent articles. She has studied the rise of authoritarianism, particularly in Central Asia. Her PhD dissertation was on Uzbekistan. She is pessimistic about the progress of the US but has suggestions for enduring and fighting back. An excellent writer as well.
schrodingers_cat
@gbbalto: I have seen people link to her but there is something about her certainty of how things are going to be, that I find unnerving. She expresses zero doubt. That bothers me.
Starfish
@schrodingers_cat: I like her. I think her points are valid but depressing. Her face does not convey the normal range of human emotion, and I find that really weird.
onthepublicrecord
The source writes well and clearly, since writing reflects the clarity of thought. The source delineates the situation she is applying her knowledge and reasoning to. She gives links. She doesn’t use unnecessary jargon. She doesn’t overstate any individual case. She doesn’t mind being corrected when wrong. She talks about the issue, not herself.
Those are all good signs that someone knows what the hell she’s talking about.
Miss Bianca
Has anyone here gotten a Twitter account just to follow news/blog sources outside BJ? Asking for a friend…
gbbalto
@Miss Bianca: I have never had a Twitter account, but have been able to follow others’ tweets so far – just not able to respond or forward. I don’t know whether some accounts would require you to get an account of your own in order to read them.
gbbalto
@schrodingers_cat: It bothers me, too, but because there is always some chance (hopefully not a high one) that her predictions will prove all too accurate. I think that she does show a resemblance in tactics between the current admin and emerging authoritarian ones. ETA: I think that we can still fight it off (something I need to put some energy into)
No One You Know
Regarding hate crimes matters, I trust the SPLC and Morris Dees (and I just realized that I haven’t heard about Dees for some time, do I need to check that).
Sometimes I look at who’s writing at Known Bad Sources, just to see who’s running the meme machine.
Nice Polite Republicans has done panels recently that help
. The national news director did a pretty good job at shooting down some ridiculous claims by the GOP participant: “No one could know what Wyden meant by ‘follow the bodies'” was rebutted sharply.
No One You Know
AND…while I was breathlessly following the FBI story, I found this…maybe we already had a report on Republicans deleting their health care promises?
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-start-literally-deleting-their-health-care-promises/ar-BBAWciO?ocid=spartanntp
BCHS Class of 1980
Dude, it’s OK to count yourself among the domain experts. I know we all do.
Also I think Cole himself counts as one in the areas of pet adoption and truly inventive uses of profanity.
Oh, and Doug! for obscure song lyrics.