Army re-enlistment ahead of schedule, was: Re: [extropy-chat] give a small window into the military mind

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, Mike Lorrey wrote:

>--- Alfio Puglisi <puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:
>
>> Hmm, it's sometimes difficult to follow this kind of news from 6,000
>> miles
>> away. Given that the media picture about this is uniformly negative,
>> while
>> the Army picture is instead quite positive, one cannot avoid the
>> impression that everything is spinned this way or the other. Thanks
>> for all the data.
>
>See, this is the sort of bias I'm talking about. I've pretty much
>proven my prior assertion, and the best you are willing to do is say
>"everything is spinned this way or the other", as if that is somehow a
>neutral appraisal that both sides are guilty. How does a soldier on the
>street in Bagdad or the hills of Afghanistan spin his own opinion away
>from the reality of his or her own experiences? That is just nonsensical.

My previous message was poor wording (sorry, English is still a second
language). The "spin you don't know if it can believed or not" refers to
when you don't have numbers and other data. You did a pretty good research
and now there are some numbers. A negative media influence at home is a
possible and reasonable cause. Different thinkers can anyway arrive at
different conclusions, because it's different to prove things like this
without doubts.

If one was to make a Wikipedia-style NPOV statement, the result would be
something like this:

== Begin wikipedia article fragment ==

While new recruitment for the Army have been lower than expected,
re-enlisting numbers are higher than Army goals (lots of numbers and
examples follow. References to actual Army releases are even better...).

A possible explanation is that potential soldiers are negatively impressed
by an overly-negative media coverage of the war, while instead soldiers
who have seen the war first-hand have a more positive view of the subject,
in a significant enough way to substantially change their opinion. This
would point to a bias in the media coverage of the war (see [[Media
coverage of the Iraq war]] for a detailed analysis of this topic).

Opponents of this view say instead that the reporting of the war is
accurate, and that the numbers can be justified by ....

== End wikipedia article fragment ==

Of course one can stop short of the last paragraph, that would instead be
written by someone who doesn't share the same interpretation of the data.
Or by the same author, regardless of his opinion, if he knows what people
holding the opposite view say. Of course, pointing out any errors in the
reasoning is fair game.

See, it's quite boring :-)

Alfio