Discovering What is True

three examples

The internet makes available to us an enormous amount of information of variable quality. It is an unfiltered medium; anyone can put information up, true or false. It follows that the ability to find information and filter it, to tell, largely on internal evidence, whether to trust something found online, is an important skill and one little taught. Several of my past posts dealt with the problem.¹

This one demonstrates my approach — three times.

The Report

"Before Putin invaded, I read what appeared to be a respectable French estimate that Ukraine was shelling Russian civilians worse than Russia was shelling Ukrainian civilians. 20% worse? Can't remember" (commenter on a recent post)

Another commenter identified the source, a Postil article by Jacques Baud published April 1, 2022. I read it.

Moreover, OSCE observers have never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass. "

The article provided a link in support of its claim. The relevant passage:

AH: If the question is what we have seen on the ground … we have seen convoys leaving and entering Ukraine on dirt roads in the middle of the night, in areas where there is no official crossing. In one border area, we’ve also made this public, including some footage we have put out. We have seen specific types of weapons that we have described in detail, including electronic warfare equipment. We have spoken to prisoners taken by the Ukrainian forces who claim to be members of the Russian armed forces fighting on rotation in Ukraine. ---

That is consistent with there being no Russian units on the Donbass — the convoys might have been Russian supporters of the Donbass Republics acting without official military support, the prisoners might have been lying under threat from their captors. But it is not consistent with “never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass.”

That is evidence, although not very strong evidence, that the author is biased in favor of the Russian account. My next example is a little clearer:

On 11th February, President Joe Biden announced that Russia would attack the Ukraine in the next few days. How did he know this? It is a mystery. But since the 16th, the artillery shelling of the population of Donbass increased dramatically, as the daily reports of the OSCE observers show. Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacts or intervenes. It will be said later that this is Russian disinformation. In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries have deliberately kept silent about the massacre of the Donbass population, knowing that this would provoke a Russian intervention.

What the text linked to actually says is:

National security adviser JAKE SULLIVAN said a full Russian invasion of Ukraine could come before the end of the Beijing Olympics on Feb. 20, even as President JOE BIDEN today told his counterparts about Moscow’s forces possibly launching an incursion in five days.

“Any American in Ukraine should leave as soon as possible, and in any event in the next 24 to 48 hours,” he said from the White House podium. “We don’t know what’s going to happen, but the risk is now high enough, and the threat is now immediate enough, that this is what prudence demands.”

Converting "possibly launching an incursion" hence Americans should get out into "announced that Russia would attack the Ukraine in the next few days. How did he know this?" struck me as clear evidence of slanted writing.

The next tell:

In his speech of February 24, Vladimir Putin stated the two objectives of his operation: “demilitarize” and “denazify” the Ukraine. So, it is not a question of taking over the Ukraine, nor even, presumably, of occupying it; and certainly not of destroying it.

Baud takes it for granted that Putin is telling the truth.

The final and clearest evidence is Baud’s description of the situation when the piece was written, about April 1, 2022.

The bulk of the Ukrainian army was deployed in the south of the country in preparation for a major operation against the Donbass. This is why Russian forces were able to encircle it from the beginning of March in the “cauldron” between Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, with a thrust from the East through Kharkov and another from the South from Crimea. Troops from the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR) Republics are complementing the Russian forces with a push from the East.

At this stage, Russian forces are slowly tightening the noose, but are no longer under time pressure. Their demilitarization goal is all but achieved and the remaining Ukrainian forces no longer have an operational and strategic command structure.

The “slowdown” that our “experts” attribute to poor logistics is only the consequence of having achieved their objectives. Russia does not seem to want to engage in an occupation of the entire Ukrainian territory. In fact, it seems that Russia is trying to limit its advance to the linguistic border of the country.

That is the beginning of the war as seen by someone who believed the Russian sources — Russia having achieved its objectives, the Ukrainian military all but destroyed.

None of this is evidence that Baud is dishonest — he may have believed everything he wrote. But it adds up to clear evidence that his account cannot be trusted.

I am relying mostly on internal evidence, text in the article and text it links to in support of its claims. But the final and decisive evidence depended on something I knew and the author did not — the next three years of the war, which demonstrated that the Ukrainian army was still functioning, Russia had not achieved its objectives and was not trying to limit its advance to the linguistic border of the country.

One of my approaches to judging a source of information is by finding some overlap between what I already know and what it says and judge it by that. That is how this example ends and the next one starts

Smiths: Noah vs Adam

One of the courses I have taught repeatedly in the past is History of Economic Thought. My objective was not to provide the students with factoids about past economists useful for cocktail party conversation but to get them to actually understand the ideas, so I usually devoted the whole semester or quarter to three important thinkers: Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Alfred Marshal.

Noah Smith writes a Substack that sometimes talks about subjects of interest to me, so it is useful to me to know if he can be trusted. One of his Substack posts was in part about Adam Smith, so gave me an opportunity to evaluate his competence and honesty. He offers five quotes from The Wealth of Nations in order to show that Adam Smith was not really a wicked conservative (true) but a modern progressive (false), opposed to property and inequality and supporting progressive taxation. To support the latter claim, Noah offers:

It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

If Noah had read the book he is quoting he would know that Smith starts his discussion of taxation with a series of maxims, of which the first is:

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

Tax burden in proportion to revenue is a flat tax. The context of Noah's quote is a discussion of a tax on the rent of houses, where the fact that it falls more than proportionally on the rich is a disadvantage but not a decisive one. Saying something is “not very unreasonable” does not imply it is desirable.

Another quote Noah offers to show that Adam shares the views of a modern progressive is:

Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.

Noah interprets this as “Adam Smith decries the existence of inequality and poverty, blames property rights for this inequality …”

In fact, the passage continues:

The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security.

...Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days' labour, civil government is not so necessary.

Smith isn’t decrying the existence of inequality, he is arguing that the existence of inequality makes government necessary to protect property.

A third quote that Noah offers:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Noah does not quote the next two sentences:

It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.

Smith isn’t arguing for antitrust law, he is arguing against government doing things that encourage cartel formation, the 18^th century equivalent of the 20^th century cartelization of the airlines by the CAB.

Noah’s conclusion:

Adam Smith decries the existence of inequality and poverty, blames property rights for this inequality, advocates progressive taxation as a remedy, and is innately suspicious of profit. He sounds more like Thomas Piketty than Milton Friedman.

It is true that Smith, like most people, decries poverty. All of the rest of the sentence is false. Adam Smith was an 18^th century radical who supported laissez-faire in large part because he thought it resulted in less poverty than the alternative, not the 21^st century progressive of Noah Smith’s imagination.

The important lesson for Noah Smith is the danger of believing things you want to believe on the basis of quotations selected by people who share your views. To have written what he did after actually reading The Wealth of Nations Noah would have to be deliberately dishonest, which, so far as I could tell from the post, he is not; the quotes are ones he could easily have gotten from the Internet, posted by other progressives making the same arguments. He is, however, saying things in public which he has no good reason to believe are true — and are not.

I pointed out the errors in a comment on his post, including the quotes from The Wealth of Nations that showed that what he had written was not true. He responded to another comment and reacted to a different comment of mine so almost certainly read that one, but he neither retracted his false statements about Adam Smith nor defended them.

From which I conclude that he does not very much care whether what he writes is true as long as it supports his political views, hence is probably not worth reading.

Fact or Fiction: A Revenge Fantasy

Browsing the web, I can across an entertaining story of revenge. The narrator, Kira, described being fired after 15 years from a company whose success was largely due to her work — by a boss who wanted to replace her with someone younger and cheaper. She, however, had advance warning due to a misdirected email thread and had made her preparations, with the result that her firing was a disaster for the firm that fired her, a triumph for the competitor that hired her and with her acquired an algorithm, crucial for the business both firms were in, that she had created on her own time and patented, an improvement on one she had invented for her first firm and they had never patented.

It was a very satisfactory story, especially for anyone who had lost a job but it was too perfect, ending with the boss who fired her losing his job as a result. I didn’t believe it.

How, with the tools available, could I tell? Kira named both companies. Searching for the company that fired her, TechVantage , I found a real company with that name — based in Dubai and doing nothing that fit very well with her story. The accounting software based on her initial algorithm, AccountSphere, existed too — in India. Precisions Systems, the company that hired her, was a real company based in the US but doing nothing that fit her story. One of their pages showed their leadership team. There was nobody there with either Kira’s job title or her name.

Whether the story is fact or fiction is of very little importance but it struck me as a nice example of how it is sometimes possible, even easy, to use the Internet to check something you find there.

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1. In particular When You Cannot Trust the Experts and How to Learn What is True. More posts on the subject.