Politi-Score

Why waste perfectly good space at Sublime Bloviations dealing with the comments of crackpots?

Great question, if I do say so myself.

That problem accounted in part for the creation Bad Blogs' Blood.

As noted at Sublime Bloviations, one Karen Street created a political blog with a significant emphasis on PolitiFact and my criticisms thereof.  Street disabled commentary on her blog (eliminating a handful of comments I had posted), or else I would not bother posting about this at all; I'd simply leave a comment at Street's Politi-Psychics (sp).

Today's bee-in-the-bonnet tale concern's Street's "Politi-Score" project.  She uses an Excel spreadsheet to collect data on individuals whose statements are rated by PolitiFact.

Street read a post I created in response to a PolitiFact story by Bill Adair.  Adair posted some data in his story similar to Street's, so I made the connection:

Folks like Karen Street are thinking "So, what's the problem?  Glenn Beck tends to fudge the truth."

Bee, meet bonnet:

Bryan White objected yesterday in his blog that my calculations are not scientific….where did I ever say they were? The fact is even trying to do it scientifically would be wrought with the quandaries of the same selection bias of which he speaks. Not just selecting samples, but judging those samples.

I wrote nothing at all about Street's calculations.  I identified the selection of stories as unscientific because of the obvious selection bias.  Street is doing the math, not the selection.  But it would be as true of Street as it is true of Adair that her writing suggests an unscientific conclusion.  Minus the explanation that the results of something like "Politi-Score" do not serve as a useful measure of the truthfulness of the individuals, readers will tend to understand it that way.  And, as a corollary, it isn't unreasonable to think that Street herself draws that type of conclusion until she gets around to a categorical denial.  Street almost delivers that denial by acknowledging the reality of selection bias in the PolitiFact data she uses.

A lesson in charitable interpretation

On the issue of Glenn Beck's ratings, Street wrote:

So Glenn Beck doesn’t skew toward false, he’s actually right spot on Barely True.

 Adair had written that Beck's ratings skew toward "False."  Street tried to put a finer point on it by noting that Beck's ratings form something like a bell curve.  Basic charity of interpretation, however, ought to suggest that Adair viewed the range of the "Truth-O-Meter" as a type of continuum, with the left end representing greater falsehood and the right end representing greater veracity.  Thus, for Adair to say that Beck "skews toward the False end of the PolitiFact spectrum" simply means that Beck's average is left of the center.  He's not trying to associate a rating with Beck's average.

Errors of this type, in sufficient numbers, could qualify a blog for induction to the Bad Blogs' Blood Bad Blogs Blogroll.  But it's early.  I don't take Karen Street as an idiot overall.  On the contrary  She just acts like a idiot on occasion.  Unfortunately, those occasions have occurred frequently during the early stages of her blogging career.