Green Light: Gas Light

I haven’t been doing any writing on here in a while because I was uncertain what exactly was happening around me. So I’ve ended up with a lot to say about exactly that: uncertainty.

The events of the last few months have left us all in a confused and vulnerable place. I know I’m not the only person that feels endlessly deceived and manipulated by the government and the media. And with good reason. Living in a time when people are strongly encouraged to stay at home has done an efficient job of gaslighting us. There are several things at play here. Let’s dissect.

In the era of fake news, people were already used to being suspicious of “facts” even before the pandemic hit. The only thing keeping people grounded was some remaining relative trust in statistical evidence as well as the ability to verify things with our own eyes. Now both of those stabilizing forces have been stripped away from the public. We’ve been left with nothing but what we hear and see on our screens to paint a picture of what’s going on.

Every day, I hear statistics that appall me from one source and then I hear a contradictory stat from another source. And I don’t mean just slightly contradictory. I mean things like Coronavirus cases are “down 20%” and “up 20%” for the same region. I mean things like violent hate crimes are “up 50%” and “down 50%” in the same time frame. Complete opposites. This can be very overwhelming for the average Joe who is just trying to make sense of current events that he can’t even go outside and see with his own eyes. If it wasn’t hard enough that the Coronavirus is invisible, the enduring problem of racism in this country can be just as hard to see for someone who doesn’t witness it happening on their front lawn. It’s really no wonder so many people in the suburbs have trouble fathoming injustices like police brutality that mostly happen in urban areas. We’re simple animals that need to see things with our own eyes.

So naturally people have been picking and choosing which information they want to believe. But that’s not good enough— not even close. The sad reality is that most people don’t think hard enough about the stats they read before jumping on board. This is because most people don’t understand that statistics aren’t meant to be accepted at face value. They are meant to be scrutinized and questioned. One of the first things you learn as an Economics student is that stats are highly flawed ALL THE TIME. They are so easily misleading because they’re subject to selection bias, omitted variable bias, endogeneity, reverse-causality, etc. Most of what economists do in Academia is just picking apart studies done by someone else for any problems that could disqualify the conclusions they present.

Here’s why this is so important to understand. The idea that statistics don’t lie is very dangerous. They lie all the time. And a healthy skepticism towards the numbers we see online is the best way to make sure we don’t grossly overreact. Of course it’s not like you can sit down and conduct a full-scale econometric evaluation every time you read a headline. But there’s a few healthy questions we can all ask ourselves before believing one.

1. Who is publishing this?

2. Are they for profit or not?

3. What is their goal?

4. How does you believing them help achieve that goal?

5. Who might disagree and why?

Asking these questions can’t make us fully certain in believing something. But at least it can make us fully certain in what we should distrust.

Trump often refers to COVID-19 as the “invisible enemy.” But the real invisible enemy is confusion. The real invisible enemy is uncertainty. It leaves us helpless to manipulation from voices that are pursuing their own greedy objectives.

Know when someone wants something from you. Don’t fall victim to it.

Filip, again.