The Harm of Irresponsible Writing

I consider publishing numbers, graphs, or grand conclusions that are not backed by science to be vastly irresponsible, because of the staggeringly high chance that they are bullshit. Therefore, I consider writing that presents unscientific conclusions to be also irresponsible. Well, unless it includes giant caveat stating that there is an enormous probability that this is not correct, and readers are encouraged to do independent science research in order to validate the points (which not only never happens, but most people don’t know how to do).

But why is it irresponsible? Freedom of speech, people can say whatever they want, right? You can always ignore it, right?

Not exactly. When people read something coming from a source that seems authoritative, most of the time, they simply believe it. Numerous studies have shown that people blindly trust authority, most notably the famous Milgram experiment. So if you write something up that seems credible, don’t back it with any science, and publish it, people will probably read it and believe it despite the caveat of it having a staggeringly high chance of being bullshit.

Then, if they take that knowledge, and apply it to their lives, they are now basing a part of their lives on a fact that has a very high chance of being incorrect. How many people do you know that say MSG is bad for you, in fact? Have you asked if they ever tried googling it?

Back to the Start

So let’s return to Ev Williams’ article. This article is a perfect example of publishing pseudoscience results in an authoritative way, and such that it directly affects the lives of many people, in what I see to be a negative manner.

Here it is again, in case you didn’t get a chance to read or skim it before:

https://medium.com/working-parents-in-america/growing-kids-and-growing-companies-8657049a057c

The topic we are discussing here is work-life balance for parents. In other words, how much time you spend with your children vs on your work. This is not a light topic at all. This is a very heavy topic, and small changes in this balance can produce large changes in both the parents’ and children’ lives. It must be approached very carefully.

But Ev jumps right in with no shame. He says that he took an informal survey of highly successful people with children to ask a few questions about their work life balance, in order to figure out what’s normal. Now we layer up this sensitive topic with a couple more very dangerous lines of thinking.

First, successful is presented without any additional qualification. What is “highly successful” for Ev? Is it someone who has a lot of money? Holds a high position in a big company? The truth is that everyone has different definitions of success. Some people think it would be great success if they were a CEO of a big business making millions of dollars and driving expensive cars. Others are disgusted by this idea and see success in owning a small farm and being surrounded by family and friends, having enough to live comfortably but not much more. And there’s a whole range in between. By presenting “highly successful” without any qualifications, Ev implies that success for the reader is the same as what it is to him. And being a well known and obviously very smart person, he is looked up to by many, and that assumption subtly sinks in to the back of their minds.

Second, he is trying to figure out what’s normal for parents who are also “successful” in their careers. However, I’d like to present the counter argument of who cares what’s normal? You should not be deciding how much time you spend with your own children based on “what’s normal”. You should especially not be deciding how much time to spend with your children based on what is normal for people that Ev Williams considers to be successful. But yet, Ev published this information for a reason, and it wasn’t for people to read it and say “eh, who cares”. It was for them to read and base their own values around it. The direct implication is “Successful people spend an average of this amount of time on work and this amount on kids. Therefore, you should have around the same split if you want to be successful.” While this is already a cause and effect fallacy (or cum hoc ergo propter hoc if you want to be a rationality hipster), it’s a very direct statement to working parents, and will doubtlessly make an impact on the lifestyle choices of readers. And the “normal” recommendation from the article is working ~60 hours each week, which, if you work 5 days a week, is about 12 hours a day. This is a very high number, especially when you have children to care for.

Now on top of all that, he presents data that is entirely unscientific. There are been an enormous number of surveys taken and published under scientific standards, and it’s not hard to figure out how to select a group for your survey and run the numbers to show how accurate it might be. We all probably learned this in basic science and/or statistics classes. And the consequences of not doing so are vast. As discussed above, they increase the chance of the results being bullshit by an enormous amount. And yet Ev dives directly into this very touchy subject, knowing that he is an influential person and the purpose of the article is to influence people, and presents data that is very likely to be inaccurate.

Responsibility & Speed

I have slowed down significantly with my writing here on Pragmatic Life, and this is part of the reason. I write a lot about big lifestyle changes and values, and I want to make sure that what I’m saying is as close to the truth as I am able to get. But it’s a lot more work being responsible. Doing scientific research is not a quick or easy task, and on top of that, after doing research it’s not infrequent that I find that my ideas or thoughts were actually wrong, and have to go back to the drawing board.

I hope that my adherence to these principles improves the quality of the pieces here, and that any readers who got this far will start to be a little more skeptical of reading things with no citations or backing, no matter where they are found, or who wrote them.