Time for Tracking the Election Manifesto Promises?

A young journalist from The Hindu performed an interesting analysis of official election manifestos. After analyzing individual items, he assigned them to one of the following categories - fulfilled, under progress, yet to start, stalled etc. According to the results, the Central Government of India had fulfilled 18% of the promises in 2.3 years. Though it seems low, I was actually surprised and happy to be wrong about my skepticism towards the government. The same journalist did another analysis of Delhi government and concluded 23% of the manifesto promises were fulfilled by the end of 1st year. Another pleasant surprise! I think it's time we start seriously evaluating the election manifestos by political parties and ask questions about unfulfilled promises. Let it not be a mere box of carrots.

There are two simple problems with this particular analysis,

1. Cross-sectional analysis: This analysis was performed at a specific point of time (almost a year ago) and it is outdated now. So having these numbers continuously updated can help us compare apples to apples in real-time.
2. Only two governments: Hypothetically if a BJP state government is performing poorly it should not get bragging rights for the good work done by BJP's Central Government. So it would be extremely valuable to have these statistics for central government & all state governments.

Biostatistics: Possible Remedy in the Era of Fake News?

Well before the debate of "Fake News" started trending, researchers at Stanford University started working on a project aimed at studying how well we evaluate the information, especially from online sources. Starting in early 2015 researchers studied the behaviour of students from schools and universities like Stanford for 18 months. In the summary of the report researchers summed up their disappointment by stating "in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation." The participant did a pretty poor job in assessing the credibility of information and sources. Though it is unfortunate it might not be entirely shocking as it confirms the pattern we are observing around us.

In the era of social media journalism, the reliability of information appears to have taken the back seat. Facebook announced it's intention to crack down on fake news. Recently Twitter has also joined the call. Maybe few other companies will follow the suit. Though commendable initiative, it doesn't seem enough for the enormous scale of the problem. There are 85+ virtual communities worldwide with atleast a million registered users each (like Facebook and Twitter). Additionally, there are few dozen instant messaging services like Whatsapp. Making all these platforms accountable seems like practically an impossible task. And even if a lot of them implement some measure of regulation, can we trust these platforms with their self-moderation policies?

Wordplay in Information Manipulation

There is a very interesting scene in the movie Dark Knight. The Joker (bad guy) is holding Rachel (lead actress) hostage at the edge of a rooftop and then the Batman arrives. The short conversation goes something like,

Batman: Let her go!
Joker: Ohh, very poor choice of words

Indeed, maybe the Batman was under a lot of stress. If this poor^ information representation example serves as one end of the spectrum, then researchers might be on the other end.

The way (good) researchers chose their words, seem remarkably careful^^. They would love to say something like, "X is associated with increased risk of Y with the p-value of blah-blah" (possibly with extra stress on the word associated).

^Poor = unintentional or careless
^^Careful = intentional and thoughtful