This post was originally published at Malark-O-Meter, which statistically analyzes fact checker rulings to make comparative judgments about the factuality of politicians, and measures our uncertainty in those judgments.
There's a lot of talk this week about Marco Rubio, who is already being vetted as a possible front runner in the 2016 presidential campaign...in 2012...right after the 2012 presidential campaign. In answer to the conservatives' giddiness about the Senator from Florida, liberals have been looking for ways to steal Rubio's...er...storm clouds on the horizon that could lead to potential thunder maybe in a few years? I dunno. Anyway, one example of this odd little skirmish involves a comment that Senator Rubio made in answer to a GQ interviewers' question about the age of the Earth:
GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?
Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries. [emphasis added]
Gotcha!" say my fellow liberals (
and I). Ross Douthat, conservative blogger at the
New York Times (among other places),
argues convincingly that it was a "politician's answer" to a politically contentious question, but rightly asks why Rubio answered in a way that fuels the "conservatives vs. science" trope that Douthat admits has basis in reality. Douthat writes that Rubio could have said instead:
I’m not a scientist, but I respect the scientific consensus that says that the earth is — what, something like a few billions of years old, right? I don’t have any trouble reconciling that consensus with my faith. I don’t think the 7 days in Genesis have to be literal 24-hour days. I don’t have strong opinions about the specifics of how to teach these issues — that’s for school boards to decide, and I’m not running for school board — but I think religion and science can be conversation partners, and I think kids can benefit from that conversation.
So why didn't Rubio say that instead of suggesting wrongly, and at odds with overwhelming scientific consensus, that the age of the Earth is one of the greatest mysteries?
An issue more relevant to the fact checking industry that Malark-O-Meter studies and draws on to measure politicians' factuality is this: Why aren't statements like this featured in fact checking reports? The answer probably has something to do with one issue Rubio raised in his answer to GQ, and something that pops up in Douthat's wishful revision.
- "I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow." (Rubio)
- "...I'm not running for school board..." (Douthat)
You can easily associate these statements with a key constraint of the fact checking industry. As Glenn Kessler stated in a recent panel discussion about the fact checking industry, fact checkers are biased toward newsworthy claims that have broad appeal (PolitiFact's growing state-level fact checking effort notwithstanding). Most Americans care about the economy right now, and few Americans have ever thought scientific literacy was the most important political issue. Fact checkers play to the audience on what most people think are the most important issues of the day. I could not find one fact checked statement that a politician made about evolution or climate change that wasn't either a track record of Obama's campaign promises, or an assessment of how well a politicians' statements and actions adhere to their previous positions on these issues.
What does the fact checker bias toward newsworthiness mean for Malark-O-Meter's statistical analyses of politicians' factuality? Because fact checkers aren't that interested in politicians' statements about things like biology and cosmology, the malarkey score isn't going to tell you much about how well politicians adhere to the facts on those issues. Does that mean biology, cosmology, and other sciences aren't important? Does that mean that a politicians' scientific literacy doesn't impact the soundness of their legislation?
No.
The scientific literacy of politicians is salient to whether they support particular policies on greenhouse gas reduction, or stem cell research, or education, or, yes, the economy. After all, although economics is a soft science, it's still a science. And if you watched the recent extended debate between Rubio and Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, and you also read the Congressional Research Report that debunks the trickle down hypothesis, and you've read the evidence that we'd need a lot of economic growth to solve the debt problem, you'd recognize that some of Rubio's positions on how to solve our country's economic problems do not align well with the empirical evidence.
But does that mean that Rubio is full of malarkey? According to his Truth-O-Meter report card alone, no. The mean of his simulated malarkey score distribution is 45, and we can be 95% certain that, if we sampled another incomplete report card with the same number of Marco Rubio's statements, his measured malarkey score would be between 35 and 56. Not bad. By comparison, Obama, the least full of malarkey among the 2012 presidential candidates, has a simulated malarkey score based on his Truth-O-Meter report card of 44 and is 95% likely to fall between 41 and 47. The odds that Rubio's malarkey score is greater than Obama's are only 3 to 2, and the difference between their malarkey score distributions averages only one percentage point.
How would a more exhaustive fact checking of Rubio's scientifically relevant statements influence his malarkey score? I don't know. Is this an indictment of truthfulness metrics like the ones that Malark-O-Meter calculates? Not necessarily. It does suggest, however, that Malark-O-Meter should look for ways to modify its methods to account for the newsworthiness bias of fact checkers.
If my dreams for Malark-O-Meter ever come to fruition, I'd like it to be at the forefront of the following changes to the fact checker industry:
- Measure the size and direction of association between the topics that fact checkers cover, the issues that Americans currently think are most important, and the stuff that politicians say.
- Develop a factuality metric for each topic (this would require us to identify the topic(s) relevant to a particular statement).
- Incorporate (and create) more fact checker sites that provide information about a politicians' positions on topics that are underrepresented by the fact checker industry. For example, one could use a Truth-O-Meter-like scale to rate the positions that individuals have on scientific topics, which are often available at sites like OnTheIssues.org.
So it isn't that problems like these bring the whole idea of factuality metrics into question. It's just that the limitations of the fact checker data instruct us about how we might correct for them with statistical methods, and with new fact checking methods. Follow Malark-O-Meter and tell all your friends about it so that maybe we can one day aid that process.