It’s not an echo chamber, but it’s an echo chamber . . . How does that work, exactly?

Joseph Delaney points to a silly post on twitter by an economist (nobody famous this time, just someone on the internet) who writes:

If a vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to *not* take it would have no effect whatsoever on anybody else.

So if people refusing a vaccine bother you, it’s only because you admit it’s not completely safe and/or effective.

As Delaney points out, this is ridiculous for many reasons, first that nothing in life is 100% safe or 100% effective, second that if the vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to not take it would definitely have an effect. By not taking the vaccine, you can spread the disease to other people who don’t have the vaccine. This could kill them!

If you want to argue against vaccines using cost-benefit reasoning, go for it. I doubt I’d be convinced, but you can lay out the costs and benefits and make your case. Maybe the person who wrote the tweet feels the social costs are too high. But the direct benefits are clear—even more so if the vaccine is 100% safe and 100% effective. So I don’t think this twitter guy has thought this through at all.

I guess he was trying to be clever but just didn’t think it through. I wonder if part of this is a problem within the field of economics, where there’s a bit of a tradition of silly-clever arguments being celebrated (see here, for example).

Silly arguments occur in all fields of social science, as you can see if you scan through some psychology or sociology journals (not to mention the depths of decadent postmodernism etc.). Ummm, yeah, we have transparently silly arguments in political science too! I guess the point is that different fields have different forms of silly. In political science, the silly can come from measuring something and sticking a name on it, without thinking whether the name fits the measurement. In psychology, the silly comes from running an experiment on 30 people on Mechanical Turk and making general claims about human nature. In other fields, the silly comes from flat-out gobbledygook, as in the famous Sokal paper. In economics, a popular form of silly is the good-is-bad argument. Sometimes the good-is-bad argument has real oomph, as with Adam Smith’s famous paean to the self-interest of the butcher, the brewer, and the baker; other times, as with the quote above, it’s just silly counterintuitiveness for its own sake.

To put it another way: in life, elasticities are typically between 0 and 1, which means that policies typically don’t work quite as well as you might hope (that’s the elasticity less than 1), but they typically go in the intended direction (that’s the elasticity more than 0).

I know, #Notalleconomists. I’m not saying that most or even many economists don’t understand vaccines; I’m just saying that I can see how the error demonstrated in the above quote could appeal to some economists. Similarly, not many political scientists would say that North Carolina is less democratic than North Korea, but some prominent political scientists did attach their reputations to that claim, and it’s the kind of confusing-the-measurement-with-the-reality sort of mistake that political scientists sometimes make.

But I wasn’t really here to talk about economics.

The question that really interested me is how could someone be so wrong on such a simple thing? OK, we live in a world where people deny the existence of school shootings—but in that case the argument is so elaborate that I’d argue that the complexity of the story is part of its appeal. This vaccine thing seems simpler. So what’s going on?

Delaney picked up on a clueless tweet—but the world is full of clueless tweets. I followed the link and the person who wrote the above quote seems to be a bit of a political extremist, for example linking to an Alex Jones fan (which is what got me thinking about school shooting deniers). So the natural thought is that the person who wrote that twitter post is stuck in an echo chamber.

We hear a lot about media echo chambers—go on Facebook or Twitter or even TV news and you’ll hear just one side of the story. In this case, though, it’s more complicated. Following the link, you’ll see that many of the twitter commenters strongly disagreed with the above-quoted post, and many even went to the trouble of explaining what was wrong. But that didn’t seem to matter. The person who wrote the tweet just sarcastically brushed aside all the arguments in the other direction.

I see this a lot when I look things up on twitter. It’s not an echo chamber—in any thread, you’ll often get two strongly opposed perspectives, but typically:

(a) It’s only two perspectives, not three or more, and

(b) Nobody seems to be listening to the other perspective.

So it’s kinda weird. The outcome seems very much what you’d get from an echo chamber, but in the actual process, people are exposed to both sides of an issue. It’s a kind of non-debate debate.

I’m not sure how to think about this, but let me raise a complicating factor, which is that in many of these debates there really are clear right and wrong sides. For example, in the above debate, the claim “If a vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to *not* take it would have no effect whatsoever on anybody else” is some mixture of uninformed, foolish, illogical, and flat-out wrong. This happens a lot. Just as most forecast probabilities are close to 0 or to 1, with only a few events being highly uncertain, it’s my impression that in most debates, when looked at from the outside, have a clear right and wrong position. Other times things are more ambiguous, but that can arise from a debate having multiple dimensions, so that the two sides are each right about a different aspect of the disagreement.

I assume that some scholars of communication have looked at this “non-debate debate” phenomenon, where people are exposed to both sides of an issue but don’t even register the opposing arguments. I’ve seen some pretty extreme cases recently where most of the participants in a dispute refuse to even consider the arguments on the other side. But they’re still being exposed to them!

OK, that’s about it for me on this one. I don’t know how to think about this, but I think that my naive earlier view that people were in echo chambers . . . that story ain’t quite right.