New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32751993 [1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/election-20... [2] https://www.centreonconstitutionalchange.ac.uk/opinions/brex...

You're right about that and it scares me, especially so since the advent of the internet as everything is already there and in place to make it much easer to program them on a massive scale. My first experience of the wide scale nature of this phenomenon was in the early 1970s when almost overnight television stations changed from televising mostly game shows and old movies to pushing news full on. As news became the new 'paradigm' for judging ratings it meant that hyping up the news became commonplace—the more sensational news stories became the higher up the ratings went. This continued to escalate to the situation we now have, that is where TV stations regularly interrupt programs with news headlines and news grabs. As these interruptions have to be short, making them sensational and thus more memorable became quite an art form. (Of course, as sleazy tabloids also played out similar themes it became increasingly difficult to escape such practices.)

At the same time, good news reporters and news anchors became thin on the ground (because of stations' new policies, through their dilution in the new news cycle, and the new breed having different ethics to the previous generation). Excellent reporters such as Ed Murrow (and his 'Murrow Boys') and anchors like Walter Cronkite who knew how to balance the news eventually disappeared, so by the time the internet came along that priming to which you refer was ready grow exponentially.

[For those not acquainted to news as it once was (and as a reality check), here are several of Ed Murrow's broadcasts (there are many more on the web and I'd urge you to listen to a sample of them). I apologize in advance if the second one offends or upsets anyone as the subject matter is horrible but I've included it to illustrate how dramatically news reporting has changed over the past 70 or so years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3qpgfH5imA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ffpIHnuaw ]

"people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way."

Right, that's why those in charge of media organizations have the important responsibility to present news objectively and not sensationally (unfortunately, in the competition for resources the dollar has won out big-time over ethics).

When I was at school, we were taught how to debate, and along with this training, we learned the critical difference between rhetoric and fact and how to tell them apart. From our class the teacher would select two teams at random and they would debate a proposition provided by the teacher. The proposition could be factual, fiction or hearsay, or some theoretical possibility: 'There is no such thing as a black swan' and 'Life exists both on earth and elsewhere in the universe' being two such examples. The teacher then assigned one team to argue in the affirmative and the other in the negative (the teams had no say or choice in which way they had to argue).

At the end of the debate the remainder of the class voted on which team won the debate and that was then followed by an analysis of what had taken place—both the remaining class and debaters had to separate rhetoric from supported fact, figure out subject from predicate, and so on. At later debates, the teacher would allow teams to debate topics that they actually believed or disbelieved but the same analytical process would follow afterwards.

I reckon my early debating experience at high school is the reason why I found my later encounter with the formal debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus at university so interesting, as I quickly realized that the debating techniques that we'd been taught at school were essentially the same as those that Socrates had used against his opponent.

What's very important to realize here is that we don't need university-level logic to teach kids how to develop decent 'bullshit' filtering techniques—techniques that they can then apply throughout life. Moreover, the subject can be made interesting for kids: casting Thrasymachus as a selfish villain who believes 'that justice is everyman for himself' and watching how Socrates not only systematically demolishes that premise but also counters it with the notion that 'justice is much more than just one's self-interest' , as it's not only interesting and can be used to teach kids about logic, rhetoric and false premises but also the narrative has a built-in moral dimension/argument that's essentially universal.

I believe it's of fundamental importance that we provide kids with a solid grounding in these matters early on in their education so they can think logically and reason things out for themselves. Because, as we've seen from horrific events in the 1930s in Germany (and others), great swathes of even intelligent people can succumb to false argument and determined propaganda (and as we now know, good and concerted propaganda is extremely hard to resist).

For the first two decades after WWII, it seems we attempted to get things right (witness the training kids at my school had (and my high school was nothing special, it was stock-standard ordinary and typical of many others)). Unfortunately, in recent decades, and at a time when it's needed more than ever, such training seems to have fallen by the wayside. I'm not sure how we should now tackle the problem either—given that most kids will have experienced and grown used to the internet long before they'll ever get any training in logic, rhetoric, etc. (that is if they ever manage do so at all).

In short, the polls are normally a bit wrong, and sometimes more than a bit. And occasionally that changes the expected result (as in 2015) rather than just the magnitude of an expected victory. And over the last 30 years or so those misses have on average been larger against the Conservatives than against Labour. But the conclusion, on analysis, is that the misses have generally been caused by structural problems with the polling, not respondents lying because they're shy. This shouldn't surprise us too much: trying to produce a valid poll with less than 100% response rates requires assumptions, and increasingly more heroic ones as the numbers fall and distributions of those still answering change. I'm mildly in awe of my colleagues for getting as close as they do, given how difficult the problems are. And (with the exception of a few partisan hacks) the polling industry and polling academia in Britain is remarkably straightforward about exposing their errors in public and issuing 'mea culpa's where appropriate.

The last part was intended to relate because the notion of a 'shy Tory' is that a voter has deeply-held but perceived socially embarrassing views that they are shy about revealing to a pollster. Persistent dishonesty is disliked, by voters of all parties, and seen to be socially unacceptable - so we would expect social desirability bias to apply to polling for Johnson. But, in fact, voters are happy to rate him as both dishonest and their preferred choice for Prime Minister. Which suggests in a straightforward (though admittedly non-rigorous) way that they're unlikely to be hiding voting for his party.

[0]: http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/3789/1/Report_final_revised.pdf