Correcting Hollywood Science: The Microexpressions of Mike Daisey Edition

By: | March 29, 2012

This past weekend I spent too many hours on Netflix watching Lie to Me, the Fox television drama that ran from 2009 to 2011. It’s a crime procedural (my favorite genre) about Dr. Cal Lightman, a psychologist who can spot liars by analyzing their body language and super-fast facial ticks, called microexpressions.

On the show, Lightman’s obsession with faces stems from a decades-old film of his mother recorded by her therapist. She had been institutionalized for depression, but on the film, she tells the therapist how good she feels after treatment, and how she longs to see her children. The therapist is convinced, allows her to go home, and she promptly commits suicide. After years of analyzing the footage, Lightman discovers that his mother’s face had shown flashes of agony while she lied about her happiness. He goes on to create a system for coding subtle facial expressions and launches a consulting firm, The Lightman Group, that helps police (and all sorts of other clients) detect when individuals are lying, and why.

It’s one of those shows that sticks with you, or with me, anyway. For the past few days I’ve been surreptitiously scrutinizing the faces of everyone I see—people exchanging small talk at a birthday party, people telling outrageous true stories on stage, my longtime friends, even my fiancé. Could I discover their hidden feelings just by paying closer attention? It’s tricky, of course, when you don’t know if someone is lying. But what about when you do know, like in the sad case of Mike Daisey?

Yesterday I hatched a plan: Learn the basics of the real science behind Lie and Me, then watch a bunch of old Daisey clips on YouTube and root out the signs of his deception.
Continue reading →

Look Me in the Eye and Lie

By: | March 28, 2012

I know Erika already covered the Mike Daisey/TAL/Apple story and so did a lot of other people as smart as she is.  But I’m a slow thinker, so I’m coming in to this a little late and out of left field.  The left field in this case is epistemology, which is “the study of knowledge and justified belief.”   Justified belief — knowing that what you know is reliable and worthy of trust — is why I like science.

Science – or physical science anyway – accomplishes all this epistemological goodness by having theorists and observers/ experimentalists stage a running death duel.  Theorists take the facts that observers observe or experimentalists find, and arrange them into a theory, a model, a picture, a story – their terms vary.  Observers and/or experimentalists narrow their eyes, spit on their hands, and design observations and experiments that blow the theorists’ theories to smithereens.  Theorists counter by refining their theories to accommodate the newly-found facts, and the duel continues on and on, years, decades even, centuries sometimes, until theory and fact converge and everybody agrees:  for right now, anyway, this is as close to the truth as we can get.  Without theory, facts are incoherent; without fact, theory is airy nonsense.  Without both, nothing close to the truth.

I’m tempted to say the same duality — coherence vs. complicated reality, story vs. facts — operates in fiction vs nonfiction, but it doesn’t, not really.  Continue reading →

The Compulsion to Count

By: | March 27, 2012

 

For as long as I can remember, I have counted. If I’m on a train I might count the electric lines we pass or the rows in my car or the number of windows on each side of the aisle. When I’m bicycling, I count pedal strokes. It’s not something I do deliberately; I’ll just suddenly catch myself doing it. It feels like my mind doodling.

I’d never really thought about it, until once, years ago, my aunt Sandy, my mother and I were driving by a string of power lines on the Kansas prairie and somehow Sandy mentioned that she’d been counting the power lines. Big deal, I thought. Doesn’t everybody do that? Mom didn’t know what the hell we were talking about.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 24, 2012

March 19 – 23     This week:

Sally has profound doubts about technology, choice, freedom, and those things on her lawn.

Heather grieves her lost stories and admires a young writer who reclaims one of them.

Erika says that nonfiction writers who lie hurt the causes for which they lie.

Virginia argues with her charming family about the value of meeting 5th cousins.

Erika, on a hot roll, argues that yes, dammit, the world is ready to pay for long-form science writing.  From her mouth to God’s ears.

Does the world really need more science journalism? Matter says yes, and thousands agree

By: | March 23, 2012

Last month, two journalists launched a new science and technology journalism project called Matter. Using the crowd-funding Web site Kickstarter, Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson asked donors to help them raise $50,000 to start a venture that, every week, will publish “a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science.” Giles and Johnson met their initial goal in less than two days and have now overshot it by a mile. By the time Matter’s Kickstarter campaign closes tonight, its total haul will have exceeded $128,00 in pledges from more than 2,400 backers – a phenomenal sum.

Now what?

Continue reading →

Family Ties

By: | March 22, 2012
My family.
Not my family.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about my genetic testing results from 23andMe. That’s because, despite paying $5 a month for the site’s mandatory Personal Genome Service®, I rarely look at it.

It’s not that I’m scared of the data (been there), and not because I forgot — every six or eight weeks I get an email from the company saying things like, You have 8 new results from 23andMe! New discoveries have been made about your DNA! I hadn’t visited the site because, frankly, I was bored of it. How many times is one expected to look sort-of-interesting, sort-of-meaningless risk calculations and ponder healthier ways to live?

Then at a conference last week, while trying to make small talk with a scientist, I mentioned my 23andMe subscription. Turns out he has one, too. “Isn’t it funny when you get those messages from your distant relatives?” he said. I told him I didn’t know what he meant. “I get them all the time,” he said, shaking his head.
Continue reading →

Internal monologue: Mike Daisey and the predictability of lies

By: | March 21, 2012

A lie told for good purposes is not inherently wrong. And besides, Mike Daisey didn’t lie.

That’s been Daisey’s defense in the fallout of revelations that he fabricated key details of a now-retracted radio piece on working conditions at a Chinese Apple supplier.

Can a person really lie and still believe that he’s telling the truth?

Absolutely, says Daniel Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and author of the book Predictably Irrational.

Continue reading →

The Lost Story of Madre de Dios

By: | March 20, 2012

One of the hardest things about being a freelance writer is seeing a great story— the kind of story you’ve always dreamed about writing—slip through your fingers. Your editors fail to see the beauty or the tragedy. No one shares your obsession; no one wants to put you on a plane to Miami or Lima or Mobasa, say, and pay for expenses while you throw yourself into the reporting. The pitch falls flat, eyes look away in embarrassment, and a half beat later, a kindly question. What else have you got?

Thirty years of freelancing and I can pretty much remember each and every one of these failures, these lost stories. They continue to dog me, and I sometimes think that this will be the last thing on my mind when I die. It won’t be my life flashing in front of me; it will be stories, particularly these stories, the ones that never saw light of day. Continue reading →