Two Kinds of Error

Over the past decade I’ve devoted a lot of time in this space to complaining about – and occasionally making fun of – the vast oceans of misinformation that can be found almost everywhere online. Although, to be fair, I mostly complain about people who blindly accept everything they read online, and make fun of the often nonsensical actions they take in consequence. For example, some years ago I wrote about a bit of clickbait claiming that Don Knotts had just revealed the “real” reason for his departure from the Andy Griffith Show, despite the fact that this iconic American actor had been dead for eleven years at the time. I also strongly implied that anyone who blindly clicked on the link, let alone believed the absurd misinformation they would find there was a complete sucker…

Recently, though, I’ve become concerned with the opposite phenomenon appearing with increasing frequency – that is, people finding perfectly reasonable, carefully documented information online and refusing to believe it anyway. One could argue, as I have on occasion, that this error is the other side of the same coin. For example, members of the “anti-vax” movement heard about a single, laughably unprofessional, long since discredited theory about vaccines being tied to autism, and have re-introduced potentially fatal diseases into the United States while they cling to that theory, while as many as one-third of Americans have seen repeated information explaining how the use of facial coverings could end the pandemic in a matter of weeks, but are still refusing to wear them…

The point was brought home to me personally this week when I ran across a Buzzfeed list article about outrageous things college professors said their students had done. It would be easy to dismiss the entire list as being fictional, or at best highly exaggerated, except for the fact that I have seen several of these behaviors first-hand over the last decade at work, some of them repeatedly. It isn’t at all unusual for students to cite things their mother told them as proof of their thesis, demand an explanation for receiving zero credit for work they copied and pasted directly out of Wikipedia or failed to turn in at all, or demanding a different presentation date despite having had four months to prepare…

Any readers familiar with statistics (assuming I have readers) will recognize this basic problem as the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 errors, but if you are unfamiliar with the terms, the upshot is that accepting incorrect information is just as problematic as failing to accept correct information. That is, accepting universally-acknowledged quackery is going to be just as harmful as rejecting elementary best practices, even in cases less serious than the spread of potentially fatal pathogens. And in the current age of information, both types of error are far more dangerous than they have ever been before…

This post was originally going to be a humorous and sarcastic set of comments on things I saw in the classroom as a college instructor, including a few things even more absurd than the people at Buzzfeed put on their list. I could tell you stories about the kid who not only plagiarized a paper, but tried to turn in a paper that had been submitted to me, in the same class, during the previous semester, or the unfortunate individual who missed a term paper deadline because he was in jail that morning. But half-way through that post I realized that there was an actual point to be made here…

In today’s interconnected world, every one of us has access, at least in theory, to every bit of information, reliable or not, that has ever existed. Verifying any particular fact you come across is easier than it was at any previous time in history, but figuring out which data points you should accept, and which ones must be rejected is arguably the hardest it has ever been. Regrettably, though, the consequences of making either error are also orders of magnitude worse than they have ever been – and the fact that we are now being inundated by people deliberately spreading misinformation, disinformation, or outright lies is not helping. Going forward, all of us have got to try harder to get this right, before we lose another half-million (and counting) people for no reason at all…