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So, ignoring a word tweak here/or there, they basically replaced
with
I'm not sure how any of y'all are reading the new word as being notably more pro-gun-control. It seems like an accurate summary of a research area where estimates cover a 50x range.
The sheet was providing anti-gun-control advocates with proverbial ammunition. They could point to it as an objective demonstration of the benefits of gun proliferation.
With this, the CDC is now, as you note, probably necessarily wrong (60k - 2.5M is a huge range to work with), but now the sheet doesn't provide a plausible amount that anti-gun-control advocates can use. So it moved away from the anti-gun-control position on that spectrum.
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Because they're going to do more "research" and not make the mistake of including the studies that make gun control look bad. This is an iterated game and we're far from the first iteration. 2A advocates have been watching government officials lie about lacking grade level reading comprehension for decades on this subject and things that looks like underhanded tricks are underhanded tricks 100% of the time on this subject.
Do you have evidence the CDC will not include such studies in future literature reviews? If not, this seems like entirely circular reasoning: they're bad because they're going to ignore these studies in the future; I know they're going to ignore these studies in the future, because they're bad.
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I think that going from "wide variability" without mentioning the range does matter on its own, even as someone that wishes Kleck was a bit more fastidious on his research. Not just that it's hiding or papering over data, though that's not great, but that a lot of mainstream activism relies on and communicates that these numbers are far, far lower than downsides like unlawful homicide or assault. GVA objects to even the lower-end estimate (60k) from the previous report for that reason.
And there a bunch of more complex issues, where to many people it seems like the desire to wipe the board and start again with new research coincides a) with the places with the greatest political disagreement, rather than disagreement with the merits, and b) where changes in political affiliation with likely researchers and with publications make it unlikely to see the same reads present, even if they were true.
On the other hand, I didn't write this up in June, even though I'd been keeping an eye on MorosKostas well before that. Nor did the Reload, even as its lead writer did.
Having a couple major gun control advocacy group specifically say that they want the number taken down because it undermines their policy goals, and then the CDC doing it because the gun control advocacy group asked, makes it a far bigger deal. This one is small, and not that aggressive, and ... it's the one they got caught on.
I don't object to the claim the evidence illustrates GVA is biased. I object to the claim that it provides convincing evidence the CDC is biased. In order to demonstrate that, I don't think what you showed is sufficient.
For instance, the fact the advocates were ignored by the CDC prior to getting support from the White House suggests that the CDC is not prioritizing leftwing advocates. Likewise, the fact this exchange took place over months suggests this isn't simple activism.
Moreover, the basic argument that this conversation caused the website to change doesn't indicate bias unless we take it as granted that the decision-making was bias. The more charitable explanation is that the advocates drew attention to a problem and the CDC eventually agreed in a neutral manner, at which point the only reasonable option was to change the website.
As I see it, the only way to demonstrate your preferred theory over the more charitable one is to demonstrate that the website change was, in fact, biased/unreasonable. IMO, you haven't done so.
What slate is being wiped clean? The CDC original reports are still publicly available. No research has been rescinded. I'd be shocked if future literature reviews just flat out ignored research from before year X.
I don't think I made that claim; my objections remain if the CDC 'merely' revises their outreached based on poor arguments backed by Senators and the White House.
In a report that could not be recorded or presented to FOIA requests? Where none of these compelling arguments be summarized by any member? Where no 'expert' except the handful of the most bombastic gun control advocates were questioned, including the people the site had previously cited, about the matter?
Would you prefer I use the term 'buried' (or compare)? MorosKostas noticed this specific matter because The Trace used the removal here to argue as evidence that the study should be and was in the process of being re-evaluated.
I think you're vastly underestimating the available degrees of freedom for meta-study or literature review authors. Starting from whether such a broad literature review to note natively exclude data from before a start date is done.
It seems to me that if you believe the CDC revised its outreach due to poor arguments by liberals, there are a couple hypothesis
The CDC is leftward biased.
The CDC just bends to the administration in power.
The CDC just acts mostly randomly out of both scientific and political incompetence.
The fact you are accusing the CDC of "papering over" data suggests you don't believe #3. So, it seems to me you either believe #1 (despite apparently denying it here) or you believe #2. That is my perspective, but I apologize for putting words in your mouth and am open to being wrong here.
Is it normal to archive arguments for a change to a single sentence on one of the CDC's many websites? Honest question.
Why would you expect the specific string "Armed resistance to crime" to appear on the CDC website? Or "defensive gun uses". There are myriad ways to discuss either topic that don't use those specific strings. The topic itself is discussed quite a bit by the CDC, and there must be something wrong with Google because even the literal phrase "defensive gun use" is used on the CDC website.
But more generally, the idea that it's buried, imo, rests on the assumption that the new wording specifically "buries" the unfavorable study (2.5 million) and not the favorable one (60,000). This seems not true to me, or at least not obvious.
I'm completely get how literature reviews can be biased, but when you use phrases like "wipe the board and start again" - that, to me, literally implies ignoring all studies before year XXXX - including favorable studies. If all you mean was that this specific study would be dropped or all right-leaning studies would be dropped.... then say that? Why use totalizing rhetoric? And then provide evidence this will actually happen when the CDC reviews the evidence.
Again, I don't particularly care whether it was #1 or #2 from your hypothesis, or that it's some excluded option (eg, the CDC bends to the first Senator to ask, and red tribers know not to ask because them doing this would be far greater a scandal).
At least in theory, it's a good deal of the point behind FOIA, although it can sometimes be excluded from FOIA under the b(5) exception (this is probably legitimate for the redacted 'drafts' of the new webpage). That's why there's 100+ pages that the CDC found responsive.
It's just that none of them contain a better argument than Hughes' insistence that his system was complete, somehow; most don't even contain a worse one. Instead, they're almost all about harm or visibility, or about The Trace asking on the topic.
That's the name of the underlying Kleck study.
That's the term of art used in the 2013 NASEM piece.
From the top of my search list:
the fast fact page which just had this information stripped from it,
firearms as a violence prevention topic without any mention of defense,
funding for new research that doesn't mention defense but does have a link to the 2013 NASEM report in case you wanted to dig a lot of pages in
a transcript of a press briefing where someone asked "I was wondering if this report addresses defensive gun use or justifiable shootings, which is a highly contested figure and is often used by outside groups as a political talking plan." (the answer was no).
a NVDRS preview pointing to 210 lawful self-defense cases.
a gun possession among youth paper
an Addressing Key Gaps paper that mentions defense only in the sentence that "In the self-protection model, adolescents are theorized to carry firearms as a means of self-defense because they reside in high crime neighborhoods..." [internal citations removed]
and a whole bunch more NVDRS previews.
There are no direct mentions of even the low-end estimates from the previous "Fast Facts" page, and there are no serious engagement with the concept. Does your search look different?
Because I think this is more serious a problem, from a perspective of social trust.
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So when was the last time that right-wing advocates pointed an issue out to the CDC and they made a change over it? If they’re unbiased, there ought to be some such instances.
I didn’t claim they’re unbiased. I claimed this incident isn’t good evidence that they are biased.
But even if I had claimed that, this retort is not convincing when the entire evidence in favor is N=1 and had to be leaked.
So do you think they’re unbiased? Or are they biased and you’re just defending them on this point anyway?
Every individual piece of evidence is N=1, you can dismiss anything you want as long as you go one piece at a time. If you don’t see this as part of a broader trend then I question how much attention you’ve been paying.
And what on earth does its being leaked have to do with its evidential probity? If anything that makes it more reliable because people weren’t speaking guardedly.
I truly don't have an opinion on whether they're biased. But, I thought decoupling was considered a virtue on this site, so I think its appropriate for me to push back on what I see as pure confirmation bias here: the CDC can be biased and this can be terrible evidence for that hypothesis.
I mean, all the evidence I've seen against the CDC has come from opponents. Any distribution can be skewed with a biased filter, and whatever I think about the CDC, I definitely do think the people this website is biased against the CDC in the sense that anti-CDC content gets attention, while pro-CDC content does not.
So, no, I don't think me noticing a bunch of anecdotes that are anti-CDC is good evidence the CDC is biased. I think the much stronger evidence is simply the prior based on their demographics (i.e. very educated).
Likewise, I think the fact this took months to resolve and only happened after boosting from the White House is evidence contrary to the "bias" interpretation being pushed here. That's not what I'd expect from an institution suffering extreme bias, and is, imo, stronger evidence than the HTML change itself.
No, I'm saying that we don't get many leaked emails from the CDC. If we had 10 and 2 of them show left-leaning bias and 0 show right-leaning bias, this is, in fact, not great evidence for bias or for right-leaning bias to not exist. It being leaked matters insofar as it means our sample size is tiny and even that sample is biased (someone had to be motivated to leak it).
Pro-CDC content like what? What is there lately worth praising the CDC for? What is its proportion to the blameworthy stuff? You can't just assert that it doesn't get posted as evidence the forum is biased if there's simply none of it to be posted.
Also, for someone complaining about bad evidence of bias, you haven't given any evidence of bias on the part of this site, you've merely asserted your own opinion as if that should suffice. By your standards, what we really need is a double-blind statistical analysis of a representative sample of every post on the site and the subreddit containing the word "CDC" in the past 5 years, compared to some privileged benchmark. Good luck with that.
But who's saying they're extremely biased, in particular? Plus they still caved - compare to all the times e.g. bureaucrats under the Trump admin just straight-up ignored instructions, leaked them to the media, then suffered no repercussions. I don't see how it's supposed to be evidence against bias that they didn't immediately do whatever, given that they did do it after a bit of cajoling.
Evidence is evidence is evidence. A small sample size is not as good as a large sample, but that doesn't make it worthless. Plus, the mere fact that leaking requires a motive doesn't mean it's necessarily biased. Any action requires a motive, but that doesn't make every action biased.
Well, for instance, 85% of the CDC's budget is in grant-making, which you can view here. Much of it funds medical research. But, instead of focusing on that, this sub focuses on a one sentence change on one webpage in their enormous website. That is as pure an example of picking the bias needle out of the haystack as I can think of.
Yes, if you wanted to demonstrate bias, use the Internet Archive, and write a scraper to compare all the webpages archived for the CDC. Check in, say, 2019 and now. Look at the changes and compute the percent that demonstrate leftward biased - you could use a differ and a sentiment NPL model. This is quite do-able for a software engineer and, if open-sourced, would be strong evidence of leftward bias in the CDC. I don't expect anyone in this forum to do it, because it's funner to complain about terrible "evidence" than collect strong evidence against your outgroup. I won't do it, because I don't actually care if the CDC is biased - I just unhealthily care about how everyone here is using this silly innocuous event as evidence of deep instituitonal bias, because that is just poor reasoning hygiene that I thought we were all supposed to be working to above.
No, they didn't. The CDC pushed back in those emails and refused to include a study the advocate suggested. Again, not anything anyone in this forum apparently cared enough to notice or signal boost.
You see, this is my point. Either
Y'all are using this as evidence of bias. In which case, I think you're wrong, as I've been arguing.
Y'all pre-supposing bias and then saying, "since we know the CDC is biased, this isn't surprising." But if that's the case, this entire thread is nothing more than an elaborate "Boo outgroup" and should be nuked by the mods.
True, but the fact that I personally don't have an example of right-wing advocacy going is then easily explaiend.
Well, biased towards the extremes at the very least. Otherwise, why leak it?
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They literally say that they’re making the change because otherwise it’d be too difficult to pass new gun control.
Can you point to where in the email chain a CDC representative say that was the reason they removed it?
This exact point in time is where I've lost all respect for the opinions of people on here as a group - individual users vary.
The guy above literally claims the CDC literally said they made a change to help pass gun control. I ask where they said this. They end up at +18 and I'm at -6, and, as far as I can tell, literally no one in this thread has offered any evidence for their bold claim. I seem to remember a specific rule... what was it again?
So much for evidence and truth-seeking. I remember when I learned new things about the world on this site rather than a simple link aggregation of boo outgroup links with some heavy doses of evidence-free speculation. The standards here are even lower than the mainstream journalists y'all deride. And the bulk of the people here support these shitty discussion norms.
It was fun while it lasted.
You seem to be correct here. I was one of those upvotes; I think I was probably just not thinking too critically about it. After all, this thread chain consisted of a reasonable summation of a probably bad-action, in a community that largely understand the decades of history here, and then you, being relentlessly tedious and nit-picky about it while making isolated demands for charity. I mean, can you empirically prove that no one in the CDC was motivated by the effects on the difficulty of passing gun control, and that no one in the CDC has ever said that? And if not, can you empirically prove that the "they" refers to the CDC, and not the activists who swayed the CDC? Have you tried coming up with more charitable explanations?
I personally believe one of the most fundamental issues with political discourse today is that standards for evidence are far too low. So low that you will always find evidence that meets your bar, making it so your beliefs are determined more by your biases, social bubbles, and promotion algorithms - rather than the actual state of the evidence.
X is evidence for theory A or theory B if and only if
P(X | A) > P(X | B)
The CDC is tweaked the wording after a neutral review of the evidence - a review prompted by activists.
The CDC is biased and therefore gave in to activism, neglecting their duty to be neutral guardians of the truth.
Most of the "evidence" provided in this thread by other people, in my opinion, does not provide any actual evidence for (2) over (1). Conversely, the facts I've brought up are:
The CDC ignored the activists until they were signal-boosted by the White House.
The CDC dragged its feet for months.
The CDC pushed back, arguing the activists' preferred studies were bad.
The CDC's new wording doesn't even seem to be more liberal than the old wording.
This is all evidence in favor of (1) over (2) and is all being ignored in this thread.
So, what you characterize as "relentlessly tedious and nit-picky", I view as requiring people to actually justify their beliefs with evidence. I don't view myself as requiring isolated demands for charity/rigour - I see myself as requiring a universally reasonably high bar for evidence - a bar required if you actually want accurate beliefs. I don't see this as a vice.
You claim there is "decades of history here" that this community understands. What I've seen is decades of cherry-picked anecdotes that people have allowed themselves is believe counts as convincing evidence. This is not what a trustworthy understanding of the world should be based on. The fact this community upvotes groundless claims they like to +18 and downvote requests for a single citation to -6 reinforces my lack of trust in this community's "understanding" of issues.
Could I prove something? Maybe. I could write a scraper and scrape the current CDC website and compare that to the Internet Archive and code up some kind of sentiment NLP model to check for political bias in the diffs. But, seriously, I really don't care enough to do all that work. Everyone here apparently has a lot of emotions invested in the CDC being biased, but they aren't willing to do that either. This is where I suppose we talk about how all this is signaling and no one here actually cares about proving anything - it's all just intellectual masturbation - but I guess I'm autistic enough to want the masturbation to be done properly.
And, honestly, I think most of the people are doing Motte-and-Bailey shenanigans here. What they claim they are doing is providing evidence the CDC is biased. What they are actually doing is enjoying the bonding behavior of booing the out-group. Otherwise these self-proclaimed "high-decouplers" could distinguish "the CDC is biased" from "this is evidence the CDC is biased". But then my real sin was interrupting the equivalent of a pep rally.
[ I apologize for my exasperation. ]
Sorry, but that "they" is an unspecified referent, so your whole chain here is just being uncharitable. Someone definitely did exactly what was alleged.
Are you familiar with the CDC's history regarding gun violence research, going back to the 90's? That was the "decades of history", and you don't seem to be aware of it at all.
The evidence provided is suggestive, and it appears efforts were taken to specifically dodge the FOIA requests that might prove it. Can you provide a cite of anyone here explicitly acknowledging that they're just enjoying a pep rally and booing the outgroup? Have you tried coming up with a more charitable interpretation?
Are you suggesting that the CDC has a history of political bias on this topic? It is my understanding that, between 1996 and 2018, the CDC was effectively banned from doing any gun violence research at all.
If you had read you own entertainingly biased link, you would note that it answers this objection. The CDC was banned from promoting gun control, not conducting research. If we want to be excessively charitable to the poor, easily bullied researchers, we can note that there was uncertainty about what might cross the line. OTOH, if we want to be reasonably cynical, we can note that this outcome is indistinguishable from one driven by a CDC that cannot even imagine value judgement-free research on this topic, and that was only ever interest in waging culture war against human rights.
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I’d be be more inclined to agree if they hadn’t had such research and then removed it. Pretending that data doesn’t exist is worse than mentioning it but concluding the error bars are too wide.
Suppose someone had contacted them pointing out methodological flaws with the 60,000 number, and the CDC then made the change. Would you say the change was right-leaning?
If so, then you aren't evaluating the change - just the context.
If not, then it seems like you're assuming making a statement more abstract causes it to be more left-leaning? That, or that the original statement was right-leaning and the new statement is neutral?
[ Edit: where do they "pretend... that data doesn't exist"? They reference widely varied estimates and they host other reports that explicitly cite this research ]
There used to be 2 stats (60k-25M) and a comment (statistics vary). Now there are just two comments: statistics vary, and we want more of them. Combining a request for “additional research” with the silent removal of existing research is dishonest and suspicious.
So...sure, I’m judging the context. It would have been more acceptable if the current summary was used from the start.
The email exchange lasted months. You see clear parts where the CDC pushes back. The CDC ignored the advocates until the White House signal-boosted them. All evidence the CDC isn't biased, and all evidence that literally everyone in this thread besides me is ignoring. It supports the obvious and charitable counter-hypothesis: that the CDC is neutral and, after long and careful deliberation, they believed the new wording is better at communicating the current state of the literature.
So, in order for this to be evidence of leftward bias, someone in this thread is going to need to explain why the change was unreasonable for a neutral CDC and reasonable for a left-biased CDC. I still don't see why this would be the case, so I still maintain this isn't evidence the CDC is left-leaning.
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It is? It certainly could be, but it's also pretty easily justifiable if you have a wide range of results and have good reason to think the extrema are low quality or otherwise unreliable. Notably, they didn't just jettison the 2.5M study for being low quality (despite that being fairly defensible on its merits) and report a narrower range that included the lowest estimate but not the highest. All in all, this smacks more of ducking controversy by removing an offending phrase than trying to hide the truth or sabotage gun rights activism.
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