Here, within six minutes of one another, are two tweets on the subject of Amazon's fourth quarter results, one from CNN and one from the WSJ:
The New York Times explained the apparent contradiction: Sales were up 22% but profit fell behind investor expectations and investors freaked out. Disproportionately.
The Times notes:
Over a day, some $24B was wiped from Amazon's value. Not because there was anything fundamentally wrong with the company, but because of a
. I came across the idea of these feedback loops on a Linked In blog entry written by Tim Price, a Director at an investment firm, Price Value Partners. Tim's piece was on the price of oil, and the effect on markets of post-hoc speculation and rationalization. His piece led me to a brilliant article written by Thomas Schuster, a professor of communications at Leipzig University. Schuster writes that investors don't make rational decisions based on an unemotional interpretation of available data. Instead, they react, as a herd,
. This mass movement of opinion destabilizes markets.
The mass media's selective processing and amplification of information is the main problem.
Schuster suggests that the reason this is done is clear: the mass media is less a public interest than a business that must be sustained by generating readership.
This explains the Amazon story, which at the end of the day is a non-story.
Here, as context, is Amazon's share price over 5 years: The 14% "calamity" is on the far right side of the graph.
Of course, feedback loops fueling themselves are seen in
. The media currently seems saturated with hysterical articles about Zika virus, this year's epidemic de jour.
In 2008, Larisa J. Bomlitz and Mayer Brezis published a piece in the Journal of Public Health describing the relationship between the intensity of media coverage of health events and their actual importance (as measured by the number of deaths).
Here was a graph describing the relationship. Today it's easy to imagine that the concerns of 2008- SARS and bioterrorism- have been replaced by breathless articles on Zika and Ebola.
Here's my take:
that has been reduced to producing clickbait to survive.
that accepts and amplifies the nonsense news they're fed.
If information density and legitimacy are indeed the problems, the blame- I'd argue- lies largely not with the media or the public, but with the medical establishment. What a miserable job we've done pruning, prioritizing and explaining ideas and making them relevant to the average human being.
Last week I spent a few hours reading both the NEJM and JAMA, and was struck by a couple of intelligent ant important articles on healthcare policy- particularly two important articles on the subjects of long term opiates and physician malpractice. They are two stories that should be shared with patients. They aren't because 1) they are dry and written in leaded, outdated academic jargon and 2) are, like most of the medical literature, hidden behind a paywall. In order to get the malpractice article in the NEJM, for example, I'd either need to pay $20 to access the article or $35 to access the journal archives for 24 hours.
for responding to nonsense when the real, meaningful healthcare information is obscured and restricted to a guild of insiders? Instead (and with no disrespect for my colleagues in Ohio intended.. they are at least trying to engage...) this is what often passes for healthcare communication between healthcare providers and patients.
Here's my takeaway: if we want to have a meaningful dialog around big healthcare, we need to get a lot better about
with the lay public. The alternative is watching as media outlets create self-perpetuating information loops based, very very loosely, on some kernel of medical data.
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