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October 10th, 2024 (Permalink)

Grisly or Grizzly?

Since it's the month ending with Halloween, here's a pair of easily confused words appropriate to the season. Let's start with a headline from several years ago:

Trial Weeks Away For Man Accused In Girlfriend's Grizzly Murder1

Unless the boyfriend sicced a bear on his girlfriend―in which case he should at least get credit for an imaginative murder weapon―the crime was "grisly" rather than "grizzly"2. You can't blame this mistake just on the editor―though that editor should have caught it―since the first sentence of the article makes the same mistake: "The trial of a man who is accused of killing his girlfriend in a grizzly way during sex is two weeks away."

Grizzly bears are not bears that are especially grisly, though the results of a grizzly bear attack would probably be grisly enough. Rather, the grizzly bear is so called because it has grizzled fur, that is, fur the hairs of which are tipped with gray. The word "grizzly" has no connection, other than sounding the same, with "grisly", since they come from different roots. "Grizzly" is related to the word "grizzled"3, which means "streaked with gray". Both words descend from the French word for "gray"4, namely "gris"5. "Gris" looks like it ought to also be the source of "grisly", which means "gruesome" or "frightening"6 but descends from an Old English word7.

I've never seen "grizzly" misspelled as "grisly", so this is one of those errors that goes only one direction, namely, "grisly" to "grizzly". It's a common error, too; for instance, an article in Forbes magazine a few years ago twice referred to a "grizzly murder"8, and it remains uncorrected.

Since "grisly" and "grizzly" are both English adjectives, neither a spell-checking program nor one that checks grammar is likely to correct it. To do so, they would probably have to be specifically programmed for it. I tried the sentence from the CBS News article in several online spelling and grammar checkers and none flagged the mistake. So, this is exactly the sort of homophonic duo that you should add to your mental checker.

Notes:

  1. "Trial Weeks Away For Man Accused In Girlfriend's Grizzly Murder", CBS News, 2/1/2017.
  2. Snopes Staff, "Grizzly vs. Grisly", Snopes, 7/3/2016.
  3. "Grizzled", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 10/7/2024.
  4. John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins (1991).
  5. "Gris", Larousse, accessed: 10/7/2024.
  6. "Grisly", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 10/7/2024.
  7. Ross & Kathryn Petras, That Doesn't Mean What You Think it Means: The 150 Most Commonly Misused Words and Their Tangled Histories (2018).
  8. Risa Sarachan, "True Crime Podcast 'Sacred Scandal' Explores Murder Mystery Involving Miami Church", Forbes, 12/2/2021.
Puzzle
October 6th, 2024 (Permalink)

The Puzzle of the Hyena's Password

The Agency for Counter-Terrorism (ACT) has recovered a computer belonging to the infamous international terrorist known only as "the Hyena". There is reason to think a terrorist attack is imminent, and it's possible there is evidence on the computer that would help thwart the attack. Unfortunately, the computer is password protected.

There is one clue to the password: it is known to the ACT that the Hyena has a poor memory and uses puzzles to help him remember passwords. Taped to the computer was the torn piece of paper shown.

A computer program may not crack the password in time to prevent the attack. The ACT believes that the password is somehow concealed in the puzzle on the piece of paper.

Can you help the ACT? What is the Hyena's password?

Debate Watch Debate Watch
October 4th, 2024 (Permalink)

The Veep Debate

Here are some provisional thoughts on the vice presidential "debate" earlier this week.

  • The "Debate"1: On the first of this month, a so-called debate was held between the vice presidential candidates of the two major parties, Republican Senator J. D. Vance and Democratic Governor Tim Walz. Though the format was a joint news conference―see below―there was more actual debating this time than during the previous debates this year2.
  • The Debaters: Vance was a much better prepared and more effective debater than former president Donald Trump in either of his two debates this year. Trump lost his debate against Harris and he did not win the one against Biden, rather Biden lost it. In contrast, Governor Tim Walz was ill at ease and appeared poorly prepared for the debate, unlike Kamala Harris in her only debate appearance. In particular, Walz did not have an adequate answer prepared for a question about his past misstatements that he should have anticipated―but more about that in the next section.
  • The Format: The debate continued this year's unfortunate return to the dual-moderator, joint news conference format, with two reporters from the host network asking the candidates questions that they frequently ignored. This began with the first question of the debate, in which both candidates were asked whether they would support or oppose a strike by Israel on Iran's nuclear facilities. Walz did not directly answer the question, using it instead as an excuse to attack Trump. Vance retaliated in kind, defending his running mate and attacking Kamala Harris, though at the end of his time he did indicate support for Israel's right to self-defense.

    The most glaring failure to answer a question was Walz' reply when asked by moderator Margaret Brennan to explain why he falsely claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre. Initially, he dodged the question with a rambling biography but, to her credit, Brennan pressed him for an answer. Walz then claimed that he "misspoke": if so, he "misspoke" several times, once as recently as February of this year3. Walz should have expected the question and prepared a quick confession and apology since there was no way he could get away with denying or excusing what he had said.

    If, perish the thought, our political debates continue in this format, we need moderators such as this who will press the candidates to answer the questions asked, and then point out any persistent failures to do so.

  • The Moderators: The aforementioned Brennan and Norah O'Donnell, both of CBS News, co-moderated the debate. Their moderation was decidedly mixed: as mentioned above, Brennan did a good job of insisting that Walz directly address her question about his past misstatements, but she also tried to act as an instant fact-checker, which led to one of the most memorable moments of the debate.

    When Brennan tried to fact check Vance's claims about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance immediately pointed out that this violated an agreement that the moderators would not try to fact check the candidates during the debate4. This is exactly what Mitt Romney should have done when Candy Crowley broke the rules by trying to fact check him during his debate with Barack Obama5. If the moderators don't abide by the rules they agreed to, why should the debaters?

  • Fallacies: There are too many to catalog, and not just by the debaters, so I'll pick one committed by a moderator as an example. In asking a question about how to reduce violence committed with guns, O'Donnell claimed that "the leading cause of death for children and teens in America is by firearms.6" This is only true if "children and teens" is redefined to exclude children under the age of one year old7. Moreover, "teens" includes those eighteen and nineteen years old, who are usually and, for many purposes―such as voting―legally considered adults.

    Since you have to define a concept before you can count its instances, one of the most common statistical tricks to inflate or deflate a number is to redefine it8. Politicians and activists often want to inflate or deflate a number, either to scare or reassure us as the case may be. In this case, activists want to alarm us about violence committed with guns, and one way to do so is to make us think that such violence is the leading cause of death for "children". However, it is clearly a redefinition of "children" to exclude those under the age of one, and while those eighteen or nineteen years old are definitely "teens", they are usually considered adults. Finally, most of the deaths by firearms of those in this artificial age group of 2-19 occur in the teen years. Without all of this definitional legerdemain, the leading cause of death for children is vehicle accidents.

    It should be needless to say that pointing this out is not to downplay the problem of violence with guns, and it shouldn't be necessary to play statistical tricks like this to get people concerned. The problem is worrisome enough without exaggeration.

  • Who won?: The consensus seems to be that Vance won handily9, but reading the transcript―as I usually do instead of watching the debate―I had the impression that the outcome was much closer than the consensus suggests. I would still judge that Vance won, but that the result was relatively close. I've since watched some of the debate, and think one reason why Vance overwhelmingly won the general verdict is a matter of style rather than substance: he appeared poised and well-prepared, whereas Walz was nervous and occasionally flustered.

    While this debate was much better than the previous presidential one, I hope that one of the losers is the joint news conference format. The Democrats have benefitted at the Republicans' expense from the transition from debates arranged by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) to these network-sponsored ones. The CPD is, of course, imperfect but it handled past debates much better than the television networks have done this year. Perhaps the Republicans will have enough sense to go back to the CPD four years from now; either that or insist on a more balanced selection of outlets, such as including Fox News, though the Democrats will, of course, try to refuse it as Harris did earlier this year10. In any case, while Vance may have won this debate despite the odds against him, the GOP lost the debate negotiations this year.

Notes:

  1. From this point on I will drop the quote marks on "debate", though this event did not have a genuine debate format.
  2. See:
  3. Danny Hakim & Amy Qin, "Tim Walz Said He Was in Hong Kong in 1989 During Tiananmen. Not True.", The New York Times, 10/1/2024.
  4. David Bauder, "CBS News says it will be up to Vance and Walz to fact-check each other in veep debate", Associated Press, 10/1/2024.
  5. See: Second Presidential Debate Logic Check, Part 2, 10/20/2022.
  6. Stefan Becket, "Read the full VP debate transcript from the Walz-Vance showdown", CBS News, 10/2/2024.
  7. Nur Ibrahim, "Are Guns the Leading Cause of Death for Children in the US?", Snopes, 4/3/2023.
  8. See: Redefinition.
  9. See, for instance: Alan Rappeport, "Who Won the Debate? A Crisp Vance Fends Off Walz", The New York Times, 10/2/2024. Also see the online poll reported in: Hugh Cameron, "Who Won the VP Debate, Vance or Walz? Newsweek Readers' Verdicts", Newsweek, 10/2/2024. Newsweek doesn't explain how the survey was conducted, except to say that it was done online, so it's possible that it could have been gamed by partisans.
  10. Nur Ibrahim, "No, Harris Didn't 'Back Out' of Sept. 4 Fox News Debate with Trump", Snopes, 10/2/2024. A silly "fact check" apparently justified because some anonymous individuals I've never heard of claimed on social media that Harris "backed out" of the debate. No, she didn't "back out" because she refused from the beginning. For a similarly silly "fact check" from earlier this year, see: Soviet Anti-Semitic Propaganda & the Death of the Debates, 2/1/2024, footnote 2.

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Recommended Reading
September 30th, 2024 (Permalink)

The Gray Lady's Sins & "Without Evidence"

  • J. Peder Zane, "The Sins of the Gray Lady", Real Clear Politics, 9/18/2024
    Readers of the New York Times know the news may change, but the message is always the same in their paper of record. It will play up every Republican kerfuffle and downplay Democratic scandals while presenting the choice between the two parties as a Manichean struggle between good and evil. … The transformation of the Times, and much of American journalism, during the last decade from a traditional newspaper that largely reports the news into the daily call sheet for the "woke" revolution that seeks to undermine the traditional pillars of American society is now so complete that it may seem unremarkable. Both its defenders and critics know exactly what to expect when they open its pages. Such acceptance, or resignation, is dangerous because it normalizes the great sin of the New York Times: the betrayal of hitherto bedrock journalistic principles of fairness, objectivity and pluralism that made the Fourth Estate a pillar of American democracy during the 20th century.

    The paper's radical reinvention of itself into a results-oriented tool serving leftwing social change has happened quickly―the Times of 2010 bears little resemblance to the paper published today. But enough time has passed so that we can identify both the key incidents and the dynamic political, cultural and economic forces that have transformed America's most influential newspaper, and thus the nation itself.

    That story began to come into focus on August 7, 2016―the day American journalism crossed the Rubicon. That's when the New York Times published a front-page article arguing that Donald Trump was such an "abnormal" candidate that "normal standards" of reporting on him were henceforth "untenable." From now on, the paper made clear, the news columns of the Times would be taking sides. "If you view a Trump presidency as something that's potentially dangerous," Jim Rutenberg wrote, "then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you've ever been to being oppositional."

    The article never explained why the normal standards of objectivity were insufficient. If Trump were truly a danger to the Republic, wouldn't an honest accounting of his behavior be enough to expose him? As would become clear in the years that followed, the true danger to the nation would come from the license Rutenberg's piece gave to reporters at the Times and the many news outlets that followed its lead to betray the core tenets of modern journalism not just in covering Trump, but regarding a wide array of issues. "All the news that's fit to print" became redefined as all the news that advances the left's narrative on race and crime, climate change and gender, capitalism, and even the history of the United States. …

    The Times did not just radically change what it covered, but also how it covered it. Views on race and other issues that conflicted with the progressive narrative were increasingly seen through the Trumpian lens as "abnormal" and "potentially dangerous." As Rutenberg suggested, journalism's time-honored commitment to "objectivity" fell before the argument that respectfully airing a range of views on consequential issues was to fall prey to the sin of "both-siderism," "whataboutism," or "moral equivalence"―i.e., giving people deemed as liars (conservatives) the same space as truth-tellers (progressives).

    Echoing language once restricted to discussion of the Holocaust, the Times brands anyone who questions global warming orthodoxy or the results of the 2020 presidential race as "climate-change deniers" and "election-deniers." …

    Yes, the Times has always had a liberal bias, and its history is filled with egregious examples of distorted coverage. As Ashley Rindsberg documented in his 2021 book, The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History, these include the downplaying of Stalin's crimes during the 1930s, largely ignoring the Holocaust during World War II, romanticizing Fidel Castro during the 1950s, and retailing a long history of anti-Israel coverage1.

    But its recent turn is different thanks to its aggressive ambition and scope. Rather than serving as an honest broker whose mission is to provide readers with the information needed to make decisions about important issues, it insistently puts its thumb on the scale, both in terms of the stories covered and those ignored. By replacing skepticism with ideology, the Times seeks not to inform, but to persuade. Its aim is not to reflect society but to transform it, and views to the contrary are verboten, beyond the pale of acceptable discourse.

    Because the Times is, by far, the most influential news outlet in the United States, its embrace of progressive ideology has had a cascade effect, transforming the coverage and sensibility of thousands of newspapers and websites, TV and radio stations, entertainment companies, and corporations that follow its lead. Deliberately, it has legitimized and mainstreamed far-left views. …

    The remainder of this lengthy article is an account of the NYT's recent sins, including its misreporting of the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with Russia, its capitulation to the backlash against Senator Tom Cotton's opinion piece ending with the forced resignation of editor James Bennet2, and its foray into pseudohistory, the 1619 project3. If you already know about these cases, you might save time by skipping over the details; however, if you're not familiar with them, or could use a quick refresher, read the whole thing.

  • Matt Bai, "I say, without evidence, that the media's Trump qualifiers are backfiring", The Washington Post, 9/18/2024
    [Usual throat-clearing omitted.]

    …[I]t seems tragically obvious to me that, by constantly holding Trump to a different standard of proof than we do anyone else, we in the news media are actually making him less accountable for his mendacity, rather than more so.

    The most recent example of what I'm talking about appeared in this very newspaper. I refer you to this Post headline from Tuesday: "Trump, without evidence, blames 'rhetoric' of Biden, Harris for possible assassination attempt."

    I'm in no way picking on my own news site here, which I hold to be among the very best; these kinds of phrases―"without evidence," "baselessly claimed," etc.―have over the years become ubiquitous in stories about Trump in the national media. …

    There are good reasons that this came to be. Trump is, to put it bluntly, a shameless public liar, which is something we haven't really seen before.

    "We haven't?" Speak for yourself. If you haven't seen it, either you haven't been looking or you just got your wisdom teeth.

    … Here's the dilemma. The news media can't credulously publish things we know to be untrue…

    How do they do it, then?

    …and yet, if the president says them, we can't exactly not publish them, either. At the same time, we find ourselves pressured by critics on social media for whom no level of scrutiny, when it comes to Trump, will ever be enough.

    Why not just ignore such people?

    So, at some point, we decided that the best way to handle Trump's more dubious assertions was to take the unprecedented step of prominently labeling them as baseless or unproven. Problem solved. Except it hasn't solved anything, other than to make a bunch of preening media critics feel good. If anything, in the contest between Trump's credibility and ours, this policy of hyper-skepticism has only made things worse.

    First, it's an unreasonable standard. It's one thing to say that Trump's stories of a stolen election or pet-eating migrants are false―this we know from reporting.

    He says, without evidence. Both claims are unsubstantiated, but we don't know that they're false. How would you prove that the election wasn't stolen? The best that you can do is show there's no strong evidence for it. Similarly, for the "pet-eating migrants": How could you prove that no migrant ever ate a pet? So, pointing out that Trump has not supplied strong evidence for either claim is about the best one could do.

    But when it comes to something like this claim about Democratic rhetoric leading to violence, what kind of evidence is Trump supposed to cite? Must a candidate walk around all day with an armful of data to back up every assertion? Is there really no room to advance a controversial and speculative argument without producing slides to support it?

    In fact, while Trump's latest allegation might be incendiary, there's no reason we ought to dismiss it out of hand. Haven't Democrats repeatedly said he poses an existential threat to the democracy and is a tool of the Russians? (I, for one, believe both of these things.) It's not crazy to think that these kinds of statements could incite violence….

    Gee, thanks for reiterating them, then.

    Second, it's a double standard. Why is Trump the only politician for whom this burden exists? In this month's debate, Vice President Kamala Harris gleefully repeated this [sic] assertion that Trump had promised a "bloodbath" if he weren't elected in November, even though his quote pretty clearly referred to the economics of car manufacturing. Wasn't she speaking baselessly and without evidence?

    No, it was worse than that: she should have known it was false, and if she did then she was lying4. Moreover, this was only one such claim she made during the debate.

    It's worth pointing out that the single greatest legislative achievement of the Biden administration was a law audaciously called the Inflation Reduction Act, despite the fact that it was designed to pour billions of dollars of new social spending into the economy and the fight against climate change―and had pretty much nothing to do with lowering inflation5. Thousands of news stories have referenced that bill by name, and I've not seen one that cast doubt on its principal claim.

    The larger problem with all this selective labeling is that it's almost certainly having the opposite effect of what we intend. Rather than highlight Trump's falsehoods for readers who might be inclined to believe him, our need to append qualifiers to everything he says is making us look like we're out to discredit him.

    Yes, but aren't you?

    In other words, we appear to be proving Trump's entire point not just about the news media but about the nation's elite institutions as a whole. Rather than reinforcing trust in news coverage, I fear we're further eroding it.

    All of which really matters, because in seven weeks Trump could well win a second term. And if that happens, we will have spent almost a decade covering him without figuring out how to hold him accountable for lying without making ourselves seem petty and self-interested. Yes, rebut the things Trump says that are demonstrably untrue, but don't go out of your way to discredit everything he says just because you fear that readers might believe him, or because you don't want the backlash from some sanctimonious journalism professor.

    Surely we can manage to call out blatant mistruths without abandoning all pretense of fairness and objectivity, which is essential to what we do. Although, I admit, I have very little evidence to back that up.

    Ha. I'd be glad if they just abandoned the "pretense" of fairness and objectivity in favor of the real thing. I'm all for pointing out Trump's untruths, but I'm also for pointing out those of his opponents, such as the false claims made during the debate. If you do that, perhaps you'll earn back the trust you've lost, but you better hurry if you need it before the election.

Notes:

  1. See:
  2. Remembering the Sokal Hoax & Another Sign of The Times, 10/29/2021
  3. Fact-Checking Pseudo-History, News Media Self-Censorship & Where's the Harm?, 10/29/2020
  4. The Last "Debate", 9/12/2024.
  5. Doublespeak Inflation, 8/29/2022.

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in these articles, but I think they're worth reading as a whole. In abridging the excerpts, I may have changed the paragraphing.

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