I was prepared to enjoy Susan Jacoby‘s Op-Ed in the New York Times, “Best Is the New Worst” (30 May 2008). Yes, the title “Best Is The New Worst” is a snowclone, the sort of trite phrasal template with plug-and-play slots which is the refuge of lazy writing. In fact, “X is the new Y” is a classic of the genre. (Is this headline choice an example of such, or a clever meta-reference intended to mock declining standards? Discuss.) However, this bit was more troubling, and made me look askance:

Another peculiar new use of “elitist” (often coupled with “Luddite”) is its application to any caveats about the Internet as a source of knowledge. After listening to one of my lectures, a college student told me that it was elitist to express alarm that one in four Americans, according to the National Constitution Center, cannot name any First Amendment rights or that 62 percent cannot name the three branches of government. “You don’t need to have that in your head,” the student said, “because you can just look it up on the Web.”

Ahem. Laziness in a student may well be a cause for alarm, but uncritically accepting the spin which innumerate and agenda-driven reportage has placed upon a survey is, I dare to suggest, even worse. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that these numbers, intimidating though they may be, are in fact completely worthless. They don’t measure what they’re claimed to measure. The reason goes back to the First Amendment itself:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

This breaks down to six different rights. The first half of the religion bit — the Establishment Clause — covers a different territory than the second half, the Free Exercise Clause. It’s possible to have the right to follow your personal religion even in a country which has an established church (hint, hint: the United Kingdom has Muslims). Speech and the press get one “freedom” each, but the people have a “right” to assemble and another “right” to petition.

The National Constitution Center website features a 1997 survey which speaks of “four rights” in the First Amendment, and lists them as “speech,” “religion,” “press” and “assembly.” Now, I’d argue that this obscures the constitutional status of religion, reflecting or enforcing an oversimplified view of the matter, but more importantly, the right to petition vanished down a memory hole.

If it were universally acknowledged that, say, petitioning and assembly were two faces of the same freedom, then I wouldn’t mind so much. However, a 2006 survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum asked respondents to name their First Amendment rights, and their “correct” answers were the freedoms of religion, speech, press, petition and assembly. When two different love-the-Constitution groups can’t even be consistent on how many freedoms exist, can the results be considered reliable? What, exactly, are we citizens supposed to know, and will we lose credit for knowing the wrong “right” answer? Suppose that the NCC called you one September morning in 1997, and you said that the First Amendment covered speech, religion, press and peaceable assembly. You would be a sterling citizen in 1997, but nine years later, the Freedom Museum would stamp you defective.

Both surveys share another flaw. As was pointed out back in 2006,
several “freedoms” which are likely to be uppermost in an American’s mind are found in other, later amendments: bearing arms, avoiding self-incrimination, avoiding unreasonable search and seizure, not being enslaved (took a while for that one) and so forth. What happens if you remember a whole list of these rights, but can’t recall which amendment they go under?
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Megan Garber writes the following in the Columbia Journalism Review‘s daily blog:

We currently find ourselves in, to put it mildly, a lull in the 2008 campaign’s primary season. The delegate tallies are in limbo. Parsing them seems to require a postgraduate degree in calculus.

I call mathification! The analogue of linguification, this term refers to statements which, as Isabel Lugo puts it, “clearly intend to get across a true point about the real world by making a false point about mathematics.”
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This one comes from Ellen Wulfhorst on the Reuters wire:

Unlike traditional, mainstream media, blogs often adopt a specific point of view. Critics complain they can contain unchecked facts, are poorly edited and use unreliable sources.

I sense a great disturbance in the Schwartz, as if a million monitors were just sprayed with soda. (Well, no, I don’t have that many readers, but Dave Neiwert, Athenae and Coturnix have already picked up on it.) And here’s another puzzling statement from the same piece, describing the poll which found that “a majority of Americans do not read political blogs.”

The poll was conducted online from January 15 to January 22 among 2,302 adults. Harris said it does not calculate or provide a margin of error because it finds such figures can be misleading.

Is anyone else concerned by the sampling bias which this procedure could entail? If you ask people online what websites they read, you’re going to get (at best) a measure of what people who spend time online read, not what Americans in general are reading. Sure, that’ll probably increase the percentage of blog readers, skewing the poll towards “new media,” but it’s still bias. (They claim to have used “propensity score weighting” to “adjust” for this.)

On their website, Harris Interactive lays out their rationale for not reporting margins of error. Basically, they assert that people are too poorly educated to know what “margin of error” means: people don’t know that the phrase refers only to sampling error, not to other possible sources of obfuscation (which are harder to get a quantitative handle on). Therefore, people will assume that polls are more accurate than they really are; to avoid this problem, and to save the wear-and-tear on a newscaster’s mouth which the tediously long phrase “margin of sampling error” would produce, Harris will not admit fallibility at all.

Gee, how nice of them to make that decision for us, so that even the people who know statistics can’t get the figures. I just loooove suffering for the sins of innumerate America.

UPDATE: I also get a kick out of this:

Just one in ten (19%) Echo Boomers (those aged 18-31) regularly read a political blog

One in ten. Nineteen percent. Oops.

There are only 1.27 times as many straight people as gay people in the world, and most people aren’t either.

How do I know? Google says so. Just count the hits.

porn: 227,000,000
lesbian porn: 9,930,000
straight porn: 610,000
heterosexual porn: 360,000
homosexual porn: 284,000

Now that I’ve gotten Science After Sunclipse banned from every school room in America (oh, like it wasn’t already, me being an ill-tempered, illiterate evilutionist and all), you can just go about your business. Or you can hang around while Windy and I resolve the group selection controversy.