Medawar’s Test

There is a test for `smarts’ that Sir Peter Medawar was fond of. I often think of it when teaching equilibrium.

If you have ever seen an El Greco, you will notice that the figures and faces are excessively elongated. Here is an example.The eye surgeon Patrick Trevor-Roper, brother to the historian Hugh offered an explanation. Readers of  certain vintage will recall the long running feud between Hugh Trevor-Roper and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh said that the best thing Hugh Trevor-Roper could do would be to change his name and leave Oxford for Cambridge. Hugh Trevor-Roper eventually  became Lord Dacre and left Oxford for Cambridge. But, I digress.

Returning to Patrick, he suggested that El Greco had a form of astigmatism, which distorted his vision and led to elongated images forming on his retina. Medawar’s question was simple: was Patrick Trevor-Roper correct?

Russian Meddling, Fake News & Lemons

The various US intelligence agencies have identified three ways in which the Russian state meddled with the recent US elections:

1. Intrusions into voter registration systems.
2. Cyberattack on then DNC and subsequent release of hacked material.
3. Deployment of `fake’ news and internet trolls.

The first two items on this list are illegal. If a PAC or US (or green card holder) Plutocrat had deployed their respective resources on the third item on this list, it would be perfectly legal. While one should expect the Russian’s to continue with item 3 for the next election, so will each of the main political parties.

Why is `fake’ news influential? Shouldn’t information from a source with unknown and uncertain quality be treated like a lemon? For example, it is impossible for a user to distinguish between a twitter account associated with a real human from a bot. Nor can a user tell whether individual twitter yawps are independent or correlated.

Perhaps it depends on the distinction between information used to make a decision like which restaurant to go to and that which is for consumpiton value only (gossip). There appears to be no fake news crisis in restaurant reviews. There could be a number of reasons for this. The presence of non-crowd sourced reviews, the relatively low cost of experimentation coupled with frequent repetition and the fact that my decision to go to a restaurant does not compel you to do so comes to mind.

Political communication seems to be different, closer to entertainment than informing decision making.  If I consume political news that coincide with my partisan leanings because these enteratin me the most, it means that the news did not persuade me to lean that way (it follows that surpressing fake news should not change the distribution of political preferences). So, such news must serve another purpose, perhaps it increases turnout. If so, we should expect the DNC to be much more active in the deployment of `fake’ news and an increase in turnout.