Henry Kim
Henry Kim
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

PS.

David, you might get a kick out of this, the review of the book, rather than the book itself. In a way, the book is more typical of the way many people think in political science— we have one set of data about what people say they believe, another set of data that show “what they really think,” via revealed preference. They are different. Ergo, people lie all the time. And gosh, how much data and techy tools we have.

The reviewer, however, takes this kind of thinking as both simple-minded and really overstating the case. The linkage between what Google searches reveal (and the same is true for what people respond to polls, how they vote, or even how congresspeople vote — after all the side deals, which are unobserved, after all, are made) and “what people really think” is rather tenuous. The process is three layered, as I mentioned before: there are presumed “real beliefs,” which are not only unobserved, but necessarily wrapped in uncertainty (the people who believe these thing themselves aren’t necessarily committed to what they believe, if they lack “skin in the game.”); there are actions, which are observed; and there are various “side actions” (side deals over agricultural subsidies, appeals to community, shared past experiences, curiosity caused by current events, etc.) that combine with “true beliefs” to form the choices that are observed. So there is no neat one-to-one correspondence between the observed choices and “true beliefs,” as the sources of the potential noises are innumerable. As the reviewer puts it:

Part of the reason I think this way is because I don’t believe that a person’s Google search is as reflective of their innermost desires as the book seems to think, so what a person truly believes may go way beyond their online behavior. Consider the studies revealing people’s sexual preferences for instance; how many of them point to trivial idiosyncrasies and how many are indicative of some deeper truth about human brains? The tools alone cannot draw this distinction.

The secondary and tertiary objections he raises are really outgrowths of these. All these “side actions,” arising from innumerably different causes as they are, some of which are correlated with sociocultural background, media habits, idiosyncratic interests of all kinds, give rise to all manner of confounding variables that generate not-so-random noise, subsets of which reveal something interesting about the “side actions,” if examined in proper context, rather than about whatever deep truths there is to be found. Precisely because of these many confounds, nothing is really believable unless we have studies that uncover the same findings in all manner of different contexts, with diverse peoples. Way too much noise. A lot of interesting noise. But they do interfere with the big argument that the author of the book is selling. As it were, internet based studies especially, but all sorts of polls, unless done extremely carefully, always suffer from highly biased samples (and technology has significantly worsened the extent of biases, which polling people have been becoming painfully aware, albeit without (really) good solutions just yet.) The conclusion that the reviewer reaches could easily be my own proposal:

I thus find tools like those described in this volume to be the starting points for understanding human behavior, rather than direct determinants of human behavior.

So, we should be finding better ways to weigh the noise, wander through somewhat aimlessly looking to understand, and build a framework for starting to make sense of things, not try too hard to find “right answers.” But “right answers” generate reputations, get papers published, and grant people tenure, among other things, even if they are not quite so right as their proponents claim. Thus my burnout: I was and still am convinced that this is how we could easily go down the wrong path, but I’m increasingly forced to take the “simple” path myself for career reasons, for both research and teaching paths. I got too busy having to peddle “right answers” that I didn’t believe myself so that I didn’t have time to think for the purpose of understanding. So that was that.

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    Henry Kim

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    Henry Kim