From d88af2320373d3143720def5b311a6f989a3ba45 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Zack M. Davis" Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:16:26 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] finish draft of "Accidentally Misleading People Should Be Embarrassing" --- ...isleading_people_should_be_embarrassing.md | 24 +++++++++++-------- 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/accidentally_misleading_people_should_be_embarrassing.md b/content/drafts/accidentally_misleading_people_should_be_embarrassing.md index c1e7f07..93e742f 100644 --- a/content/drafts/accidentally_misleading_people_should_be_embarrassing.md +++ b/content/drafts/accidentally_misleading_people_should_be_embarrassing.md @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@ Title: Accidentally Misleading People Should Be Embarrassing -Date: 2027-01-01 +Date: 2026-07-28 Status: draft Category: philosophy Tags: honesty @@ -8,7 +8,9 @@ Sometimes we say things that we think are true—perhaps even things that _are_ The temptation reflects a confusion as to the nature of the judgment. Mostly, people don't care about judging the innocence of your soul; they care about whether they'll be led into falsehood the next time they take the risk of believing what you say—if there is a next time. If you want there to be a next time and you're going to have social emotions about it, the most productive emotion is _embarrassment_ rather than defensiveness. Visibly embarrassed people can be counted on to work hard to make sure that people won't regret believing them next time. Defensive people won't, because, well, why would they? They didn't do anything wrong. -Once, I suspected an ideological rival of misrepresenting a citation: the text of their claim linked to a webpage featuring an embedded PDF of an essay, but when I used my web browser's "Ctrl-F" search functionality with appropriate search terms to see what in the paper justified the claim, I came up empty. When considering whether to escalate to complaining more loudly about my rival over this (after the rival didn't respond to a blog comment and DM), I mentioned the matter to a third party—who pointed out that the essay _did_ contain my search term! On further testing, it appeared that my web browser's Ctrl-F behavior depended on which page element had focus: if the user had last clicked inside the embedded PDF viewer, the search returned results inside the PDF, but not if the user had last clicked elsewhere on the page. +----- + +Once, I suspected an ideological rival of misrepresenting a citation: they had linked to a webpage featuring an embedded PDF of an essay, but when I used my web browser's "Ctrl-F" search functionality with appropriate search terms to see what in the essay justified their claim, I came up empty. When considering whether to escalate to complaining more loudly about my rival over this (after the rival didn't respond to a blog comment and DM), I mentioned the matter to a third party—who pointed out that the essay _did_ contain my search term! On further testing, it appeared that my web browser's Ctrl-F behavior depended on which page element had focus: if the user had last clicked inside the embedded PDF viewer, the search returned results inside the PDF, but not if the user had last clicked elsewhere on the page. I was _so embarrassed_. @@ -18,16 +20,18 @@ But the innocence of my soul didn't matter. I knew that raising a suspicion that (Recounting this seven years later, I went back and downloaded the PDF. Excluding the title page and the endnotes, it was six pages.) -Another time, a journalist wrote an article paraphrasing a source as saying that journalists "discussing both critics and supporters" of some controversial public figure "could be unfair" and should instead "somehow prove statistically which side was right." I was familiar with the source's work, and the paraphrase didn't sound like something she would say, so I asked her about it. She said she had told the journalist that she "wasn't a huge fan of 'both sides' journalism, where you just find someone with one opinion and someone with the other opinion" rather than trying to figure out the truth and had given suggestions for data sources that might bear on claims about the public figure. +----- + +Another time, a journalist wrote an article paraphrasing a source as saying that it "could be unfair" for journalists to "discuss[ ] both critics and supporters" of some controversial public figure and that they should instead "somehow prove statistically which side was right." I was familiar with the source's work, and the paraphrase didn't sound like something she would say. When I had occasion to talk to the same journalist three years later, I remembered that line from the article and asked the source about it. She told me that she recalled telling the journalist that she "wasn't a huge fan of 'both sides' journalism, where you just find someone with one opinion and someone with the other opinion" rather than trying to "figure out the truth" and had given suggestions for data sources that might bear on claims about the public figure. + +In light of that statement, I thought the paraphrase in the article was misleading. ("[S]omehow prove statistically which side was right" leads readers who aren't familiar with the source's work to imagine that she has an unreasonable faith in the power of statistics to resolve all questions, whereas voicing skepticism of [false balance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance) is eminently reasonable. "Somehow" implies vagueness, but pointing out data sources that bear on some question is supplying a specific "how.") -[TODO— +When I brought this up to the journalist, he didn't seem embarrassed. "I had to boil down what she said to plain English," he said. When I continued to insist that it seemed like a bad paraphrase when compared to what the source had told me later, he said, "Is that necessarily what she said to me?" -I thought the paraphrase in the article was misleading. ("Somehow prove statistically which side was right" leads readers who aren't familiar with the source's work to imagine that she has an unreasonable faith) +And in absolute fairness, maybe it wasn't, _necessarily_. I of course was not present for the conversation between the journalist and the source; I don't have the recording, if there was one. Even if the source can assumed to be an authority about what she _meant_ to say, I cannot with absolute certainty rule out the scenario where the "somehow prove statistically which side was right" line was a reasonable paraphrase of the words she had literally said at the time and that her reconstruction three years later of what she remembered saying was unintentionally injecting more nuance after the fact. If the journalist had reasonably paraphrased the words that were said to him at the time and the source didn't object during the fact check call, then he was innocent in his soul. Even if his readers walked away with a distorted impression of what the source believed, the miscommunication wasn't his fault. -"Is that necessarily what she said to me?" he said. +I still think this episode _looks bad for him_ and that he should have been _embarrassed_. Sources deciding whether they should talk to him are mostly worried about the risk that their views will end up being miscommunicated, not whose fault a miscommunication would be if it happened. Unlucky accidents do not impinge upon the innocence of one's soul under the moral law, but the moral law is unmercifully permissive about everyone else's right to _avoid unlucky people_. - * "Yeah, well, what I meant was that I ctrl-F'd for it" would not be a good excuse - * If the person hadn't been my enemy, would I have been more likely to find it +----- - * journalist who mis-paraphrases someone's actual views and then says, "But I wasn't there; is that what she said to me?" Even if we can't prove that he's mis-paraphrasing what she actually said, the journalist should be embarrassed that the paraphrase doesn't match actual views -] \ No newline at end of file +And that's why accidentally misleading people should be embarrassing: because the desire to avoid such embarrassment motivates a counterfactual reduction in such incidents of people being misled, notwithstanding that it was an accident. -- 2.53.0