Bad Searches and Cultivating Healthy Ambivalence

Jeremy Smyczek — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 19:54:34 +0000

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Jeremy Smyczek

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Students seem to arrive in my rhetoric classes (RHE 306 and 309K so far) with a polarized understanding of how to use the internet's two most common research tools: Google and Wikipedia. They've either not been clued in (or at least pretend) that both resources are problematic in terms of reliability, or they've been told that both are the devil, to be avoided by any serious scholar.

As is so often the case, my main concern as an instructor is to get students to realize that the whole story is complex: the internet provides tools, and like traditional tools such as saws and hammers, they provide tremendous saved labor if used with caution and training, and, in much the same regard, have elevating sequences of consequences (e.g. inaccuracy, plagiarism, libel) when used carelessly or naively.

An exercise that points this out—I call it the “bad search” exercise—is to have students perform a Google search for Martin Luther King, Jr. (This specific example isn’t hugely important, as search results change and there are many instances of the kind of problem illustrated.) Depending on the day and the level of personalization software on each student’s computer, somewhere in the top ten (after the MLK Wikipedia page, of course) will appear “Martin Luther King: A True Historical Examination.” It appears at www.martinlutherking.org.

Many students have been taught that .org, which often reflects nonprofit status, reflexively grants reliability. So imagine their consternation to realize that they have, in this case, stumbled upon a libelous hate site hosted by Stormfront, a white supremacist group. This fact isn’t apparent without some poking around on the page itself, so in all likelihood, some student somewhere has used this site as an informational source. Errors of this general category doubtless occur daily.

The takeaway point is that search engines are unmediated by human editors: they can save labor on the front end by amalgamating awesome sums of information, but can then restore it by causing users to misevaluate any given source, since it has typically not been vetted for accuracy.

The same applies to Wikipedia. We want students to consider that group editing, while reasonably reliable, lends itself to all manner of exceptions ranging from deliberate spoofs and hoaxes to idiosyncratic fan pages. A “bad search” exercise that provides working examples of the latter are searches for pages devoted to pro wrestlers: while they’ve gotten better since I started performing this exercise, they still weave “in-universe” narratives into attempts at legitimate biography, making it near-impossible for students to figure out which events occurred historically and which as part of the scripted wrestling narrative.

And yet, virtually every major Wikipedia article features a long list of references representing a great deal of embedded labor to pool information on a given topic in one place. Many of these references themselves link to reliable articles, and so Wikipedia is actually ideal as a place to get started. Even if the articles themselves are not academically viable resources, we need not reinvent the wheel by beginning searches from scratch.

This loops us back, recursively, to the problem outlined at the outset: how do we get students themselves to evaluate individual sources, like those found using Google, such as might be found in the Wikipedia article reference list? It’s a much harder task than saying “Wikipedia and Google bad” or that of unconditional endorsement of the internet as a labor-saving tool. Use of academic databases is one way of screening in advance, of course, but is still a kind of argument from external authority that merely repackages the problem of evaluation for credibility.

The simplest answer is to teach students to evaluate all sources both internally and contextually, and to view quick internet seraches with healthy ambivalence. Teaching that, however, takes longer than a day.

Over the Hedge with Nate Silver and Jacques Derrida

Eric Detweiler — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:00:51 +0000

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Eric Detweiler

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In October 2012, statistician and New York Times blogger Nate Silver was predicting up a storm. He was aggregating, calculating, and tabulating poll results in order to determine the probable outcomes of the upcoming presidential election. By the end of the month, he had President Obama’s reelection chances at 79%. MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough was not amused:

“[A]nybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes.”

In his own blog for the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates aggregated some of the Silver backlash that occurred in the final days before the election. From Politico’s Dylan Byers:

“For all the confidence Silver puts in his predictions, he often gives the impression of hedging. Which, given all the variables involved in a presidential election, isn't surprising. For this reason and others—and this may shock the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis.—more than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated.”

And from Dean Chambers: “Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice.”

Coates sums up:

“I don't really know. Anyway, Byers goes on to quote David Brooks and Joe Scarborough, manly-men who can't find San Francisco on a map and are so macho that they chew coffee beans whole, leaving the French press for you ... Terry Gross-listening, Steve Urkel-looking m—”

Actually, I’d recommend reading his post for yourself.

I found Coates’ gloss of the Silver’s critics compelling and astute: The critique often boiled down to the fact that the critic didn’t think Silver was “manly” enough. But there’s also a flip side to this critique: He was also too bold, too bombastic, too reckless in his prognostications. So to the (I would argue significant) extent that such adjectives are linked with masculinity in American culture—political culture included—Nate Silver was branded as both too macho and not macho enough. He’s too confident; he “gives the impression”—but only the impression—of “hedging.” In a way, his hedges were taken as a superficial way for this “man of very small stature” to make incredibly arrogant (at least for Scarborough et al.) claims without proving it on the gridiron like a real man.

At the same time I was following the 2012 election and Silver’s blog, I was also reading a lot of Jacques Derrida’s work, as well as criticism of that work. I found myself struck by similarities between Silver critics and Derrida critics. Slavoj Zizek (whose name, I suppose, arouses as much ire in some academic corners as Derrida’s does in others), for example, states “that in his writing he's seeking ‘simply to make completely sure that the idea comes through,’ in contrast to the exasperating rhetorical adornments he finds—or rather skips over—in a thinker like Derrida” (Nealon). Urban Dictionary’s entry on “postmodernism” is less nuanced and scholarly, but raises a point that’s hard to miss: “pseudo-intellectual Trojan Horse of tyrants everywhere in the western world. Began in Arts faculties in various universities under ‘thinkers’ like Derrida.... Works insidiously by ... dressing up bulls*** in flowery language.” There are those “adornments” again, and this time they’re floral.

Lest I be taken for a “pseudo-intellectual,” maybe I should get to the point. (Or maybe being readily taken for a pseudo-intellectual isn’t such a bad thing?) Though the work of Silver and Derrida travels in relatively different professional and cultural circles, I think readers of both authors miss something important in dismissing vast sections of that work as purely stylistic or only apparent. Brushing off Silver’s hedges as mere “impression[s]” or Derrida’s “rhetorical” use of obscurity—“exasperating” as it might occasionally be—elides something significant. The hedges of both serve important rhetorical purposes, even if those purposes aren’t “to make completely sure that the idea comes through” clearly and immediately. The last two chapters of Silver’s 2012 book are, after all, entitled “A Climate of Healthy Skepticism” and “What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You.”

But let’s get to the part where I actually say what I mean (pundits, you can start reading here): The various controversies and critiques surrounding Silver and Derrida have made me wonder whether I need to spend more time teaching students to read and write hedges. As a teacher of rhetoric, I am bound up in the tradition of teaching students to “make the weaker argument the stronger.” But perhaps I need to spend more time teaching students to make the stronger argument the weaker: That is, to understand the importance of the prolonged performance of self-doubt as it manifests itself in both the thinking and writing processes of rhetors. To understand that practicing and manifesting such doubts is not just a way of annoying or toying with yourself or your audience, but a way of trying (even if Zizek takes the shortcut straight from the conservatory to the lounge) to get them to dwell with problems, catches, and weaknesses for the sake of fashioning a more incredulously wrought and thus more credible argument in the end. Or perhaps the point is not an end at all, but rather—

Ooh, I’ve gotta go. Fresh Air comes on in five minutes.

Blogging Pedagogy - uncertainty

Bad Searches and Cultivating Healthy Ambivalence

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Over the Hedge with Nate Silver and Jacques Derrida

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