New Orleans        Maybe this is out of my lane, but unfortunately reckless drivers keep pushing me onto the shoulder.  Houston, we have a problem, when subjective views bring us conclusions regardless of the facts and sometimes based on the same data and situations on the ground.  We may want to believe, but everything seems to tell us that we have to be skeptical, first, last, and always.

Of course, we know that from the daily papers and constant political gaslighting.  Musk and his fellow ideologues, masking as efficiency experts in their slash and burn, still depend on the White House and department press officers embedded by the Trump administration to claim that we are getting better service and government.  We know better, but as P.T. Barnum said long ago in so many words, you can fool some of the people all of the time, so it still increases division and mistrust.

It’s not just politics.  Something called a “many analysts” study was reported recently in Science among ecologists, similar to what has been done in psychology and other fields.  246 of them in teams were all give the same data set in one case on a bird and in another on an agricultural issue.  Looking at the same set of facts, in the cheap seats we would assume that all of these folks would come to something close to the same conclusions.  No way, the study found.  They were all across the map with huge divisions.  Subjectivity filled the gap, especially when the ecologists were not subject matter experts in these areas.  In these tests, there was good faith, so no attempt to mislead the rest of us, as is common in politics, but neither can we gulp everything down with mindless trust.

I’m listening to an audiobook called Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the brilliant reporter Steve Coll that covers deeply the intersection of the wars involving Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and more.  There’s a lot in the book to think about. I’m not halfway through. Looking at the point I’m making though, it is shocking how much the presidential reviews of the war status by political, military, and outside experts looking at the same facts on the ground make conclusions based on supposition, opinion, and commitments to various military and other theories, regardless of what they were seeing.  The consequences were written in blood and the futures of all of the countries involved and their populations.

And, just to throw another log on this fire, the lead piece on the Washington Post’s website is a classic case of what happens when “confirmation bias” confronts reality featuring Elon Musk and his latest Waterloo, courtesy of the Social Security Administration.  SSA is handling north of a trillion in payments, so for Musk’s DOGE to succeed he has to find evidence for his claims of massive fraud and overpayments, and it’s not happening for him.  First, he fumbled over the number of payments to dead people, which was quickly refuted by one after another.  As the Post reports his problem, this is not Social Security’s first rodeo at trying to make sure bad things don’t happen.  The agency’s inspector general recently found only 1% of bad payments and most were either accidental or based on catching up with rule changes.  It “works out to about $9 billion a year, and more than two-thirds of the mistaken payments were eventually clawed back. Another agency audit, which looked only at payments to retired workers, survivors and people with disabilities, found fraud was listed as the cause behind just 3 percent of improper benefit payments.”

The moral of this story is not keeping your opinions to yourself, but it certainly is to not swallow everything shoved at us, especially these days.  Question, evaluate, and conclude.  Wash, rinse, and repeat.