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I Believed These Four Lies

2024-03-08 · list · Hank · 10:13 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube · mode: Explainer · tags: self correction, civic or action cta

Hank walks through four things he believed and later found false or misleading (a rent-versus-income graph, a quote attributed to Jane Goodall, Jon Stewart's 8% tax figure, and a reading of NOAA's billion-dollar-disaster data), then argues everyone is less skeptical of what fits their worldview and that he must keep a strong alliance to the truth despite the incentives of recommendation systems.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Tracking his own false beliefs; lie one: the viral rent-versus-income graph; rent share of income and homelessness

  • ★★ A couple of months ago Hank began keeping track of every time he believed something outright and later found it not quite right or totally wrong; he shares four because it is useful. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank saw a TikTok animation showing rent and household income diverging dramatically since the 1990s; it matched his understanding, so he did not question it. — 00:00:20 · TikTok
  • ★★★ Hank says the graph's note is wrong: income was adjusted for inflation but rent was not, which is most of the reason the lines diverge. — 00:00:20
  • ★★ Hank guesses the graph began as a mistake that went viral for its dramatic divergence, then kept going viral because people saw that posting it worked. (speculative) — 00:00:48
  • ★★ Hank says rent as a share of income has risen considerably since 2000 and skyrocketed in 2022 and 2023, varying a lot by region. — 00:01:17
  • ★★ Hank says the places where rent has risen most are the places with the largest homeless populations. — 00:01:17

  • ★★★ Hank argues homelessness is a problem of a lack of homes: when people outnumber homes, housing costs rise and those with the least end up without one. — 00:01:17

    “Homelessness is a problem of a lack of homes.”

00:01:47 — Lie two: the made-up Jane Goodall population-reduction quote and what she actually said

  • ★★ Hank asks viewers to advocate for the construction of new homes in their community. — 00:01:47
  • ★★ During a Twitter storm Hank accepted that Jane Goodall had advocated reducing the global population to 500 million, since he knows old-school environmentalists who push population reduction, and he disliked it. — 00:01:47 · Twitter
  • ★★★ Hank agrees the Earth cannot handle infinite humans but says population growth falls in more equitable, better-resourced societies, so that is where to focus. — 00:01:47
  • ★★ Hank calls actively reducing populations a red flag: people should be granted their own destinies, not paternalistically controlled by well-meaning outsiders. — 00:02:16
  • ★★★ Hank says the tweet claimed Goodall said reducing world population to its level of 500 years ago would solve all the world's problems, but she never said this. — 00:02:16
  • ★★ A couple of months later, after repeating the claim to someone who praised Goodall, Hank felt uneasy about putting it in another head, checked it, and found Goodall never said it. — 00:02:46
  • ★★ Jane Goodall (quoted): In the clip Goodall says we cannot hide from population growth because it underlies many problems, which would not be problems at the population of 500 years ago. — 00:02:46
  • ★★ Jane Goodall (quoted): Just before, Goodall says that without improving the lives of local people there is no hope of saving the chimpanzees, describing a program that asked villagers what would help them. — 00:03:15
  • ★★★ Hank says someone heard true things, took an implication and attributed it to Goodall; whether she meant it is subjective, and by his read she did not. — 00:03:44

00:04:14 — Lie three: Jon Stewart's 8% average tax burden and its fine print

  • ★★ Jon Stewart (quoted): In a clip, Jon Stewart, discussing whether Americans are the most taxed people, reads 8% as the average tax burden. — 00:04:14
  • ★★ Hank, who trusts Jon Stewart a lot, accepted the low figure because it fit his views, until a TikTok showed it was wrong. — 00:04:14 · TikTok
  • ★★ Hank says he should have known, having read many times that the average US tax burden is 25%. — 00:04:14 · United States
  • ★★★ Hank says Stewart had just talked about sales, property and gas taxes, but the 8% excludes them: it is only federal income tax for a married one-earner couple with two children, not most families. — 00:04:59
  • ★★ Hank says the figure was also for that household during the pandemic, when government payments counted as tax coming back, lowering the effective rate. — 00:04:59 · COVID-19 pandemic

00:05:28 — Lie four: NOAA billion-dollar disaster data, the Twitter reading and the misattributed rebuttal

  • ★★ Hank finds it odd to slip such a stat past people, since anyone above the poverty line sees far more than 8% leave their paychecks. — 00:05:28
  • ★★ Hank says the US tax burden as a share of GDP is low globally, so there is no need to make anything up about it. — 00:05:28 · United States
  • ★ Hank says he is a huge fan of NOAA, a great use of his tax dollars. (playful) — 00:05:28
  • ★★ NOAA provides data on the number of natural disasters causing over a billion dollars in damage per year, which Scientific American graphed. — 00:05:58 · United States
  • ★★ Hank's brain read the graph as showing climate change damage, as Twitter did, though neither NOAA nor the article, which was about disaster preparedness, said so. — 00:05:58 · climate change, Twitter
  • ★★ Voicing Twitter critics he found convincing, Hank says the US population grew from 230 million to 340 million since 1980, all requiring building. — 00:06:27 · United States, Twitter
  • ★★★ Hank says NOAA's numbers adjust for inflation but not for more than half of US buildings being built after 1980, so the graph better reflects total building value than climate disasters. — 00:06:56
  • ★★★ Hank says NOAA and Scientific American did not misrepresent the data: Twitter users did, and others then attributed that misrepresentation to the two institutions. — 00:06:56 · Twitter, United States
  • ★ Hank only realized this while making the video, so he reshot the part, having had a haircut in the meantime. (playful) — 00:07:25
  • ★★ Hank says climate change is part but not all of the reason the graph rises, and disasters are increasing, especially heavy rainfall events and heat waves. — 00:07:25 · climate change

00:07:54 — Sampling bias toward progressive misinformation, kinds of fakeness, an alliance to the truth; sign-off

  • ★★★ Hank notes all four examples are progressive-side misinformation, a sampling bias: they are things he believed, and he is less skeptical of what fits his worldview. — 00:07:54
  • ★★ Hank says data clearly show misinformation is a bigger problem on the right than on the left. — 00:08:24
  • ★★ Hank says the cases show varying kinds of fakeness: a wrong graph, cherry-picked data, a misattributed quote and a fact that does not say what it sounds like. — 00:08:24
  • ★★★ Hank thinks he is pretty good at this yet fails all the time: he fact-checks what he disagrees with but not what fits his view, a bias everyone must work through. — 00:08:53
  • ★★ Hank admits he sometimes wonders what it matters if a misleading graph energizes the change he wants, and says many people, including many who disagree with him, think that way. — 00:08:53

  • ★★★ Hank says that for who he is and what he does he must attempt a very strong alliance to the truth. — 00:09:26

    “I have to attempt to have a very strong alliance to the truth.”

  • ★★★ Hank says the incentives of the social internet's content recommendation systems make that hard for everyone, and he does not know what to do except try very hard. — 00:09:26 · recommender system

  • ★ Hank resolves, in a year that is going to be bad, to touch as much grass as he possibly can. (playful) — 00:09:55

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says Hank is nervous about the video: admitting being duped is weird, but nothing scares him more than people who think it never happens to them. — video description
  • ★★ The description says, depending on start date and data set, rent and income can diverge substantially or stay close, though all data sets show divergence in 2022 and 2023. — video description
  • ★★ The description calls the NOAA case a classic cycle: an authority's statement is misinterpreted online, then the misinterpretation is assigned to the authority to degrade it. — video description
  • ★★ In a channel comment Hank says vacant homes are a distraction: housing workers he talked to see a clear link between limited housing stock and homelessness; he points to 'vacancies are a red herring'. — creator comment
  • ★★ In a channel comment Hank separates Goodall's true sentence (no such problems with half a billion people) from the monstrous made-up one about reducing population to that. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Jane Goodall · misinformation · National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Also: People: Jon Stewart

Organizations: Amazon · Scientific American · TikTok · Twitter

Concepts: cherry picking · climate change · confirmation bias · demographic transition · effective tax rate · fact-checking · gross domestic product · homelessness · housing crisis · human overpopulation · inflation · misquotation · recommender system · selection bias · tax

Places: United States

Events: COVID-19 pandemic

Also centred on Jane Goodall: You are Probably Underestimating Jane Goodall’s Impact

Also centred on misinformation: The Top 10 Greatest Hoaxes of All Time · Truth or Fail: HOAXES! · Is Obama a Muslim? Examine the Evidence! · Somebody once told me… · My Greatest Tool Against Vaccine Misinformation · Are You Eating a Credit Card Every Week?

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