Over at the Janesville Gazette, they’ve an editorial stance occasionally focused on telling common people in that city to sit down, stop questioning, and just shut up.
Where once one heard that the proper use of the press was about speaking truth to power, what’s left of the Janesville press is about speaking half-truths to the powerless.
Still, I’m a free speech advocate, and that paper’s free to take whatever position it wants.
It’s odd, though, that a paper whose Saturday editorial decries poor quality (“Our Views: City’s critics should get informed, do better”) can’t seem to write an editorial on the subject without committing a garden-variety error of reasoning.
Consider this erroneous defense of Janesville’s new, multi-million-dollar municipal bus garage:
Simply stated, many of the critics are ill informed.
Some labeled the new bus garage a “Taj Mahal” as they saw it going up, but the majority of people who took the time to tour the facility and learn about it during an open house came away convinced it was a wise investment.
That’s a joke, right?
Does the Gazette‘s editorialist not understand that relying on the opinions of those who voluntarily attended an open house for a bus terminal is a reliance on a self-selected sample, and so commits the error of self-selection bias?
It’s a self-chosen pool of those who attended, for goodness’ sake.
Those who show up at an opera house are not an unbiased sample of an entire community’s views of Don Giovanni, after all.
Candidly, self-selection – because it produces a sample formed by its own members’ intentions – is an even more obvious statistical error than selection bias by researchers’ sloppy sampling (which might involve accident and so be harder to spot).
It’s fair to call for being better informed.
It’s even the paper’s right to call for being better informed while the editorial board carries water for government, businesses, and insiders against ordinary people.
But it’s simply laughable for the Gazette‘s editorialist to a call for ordinary people to be better informed while committing basic errors of reasoning.