On the Trail of the Woozle
May 24, 2022 9:27 AM Subscribe
The Woozle Effect, named after a Winnie-the-Pooh story, "occurs when frequent citation of publications lacking evidence misleads individuals, groups, and the public, and nonfacts become urban myths and factoids." [Wikipedia]
It appeared in a recent reddit post on /r/badhistory , "Woozling History: A Case Study", picking apart a recent tweet to the effect that "You have less free time than a medieval peasant", following the citations to the original source, which is less than convincing. In A.A. Milne's original story, Pooh and Piglet start following tracks which gradually increase in number, until Christopher Robin points out that they're wandering in circles and following their own tracks. Thus, the woozle, aka "evidence by citation", explores the phenomenon whereby something is taken as fact by virtue of the original assertion/paper/article being cited or quoted (sometimes, if not frequently, inaccurately or grossly out of context) until the number of citations is itself taken as some sort of proof.
A prominent example is "Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics", a brief letter to the editor from The New England Journal of Medicine published in 1980, which asserted that hospitalized patients treated with small doses of opioids generally didn't become addicted to them; it was cited frequently in the run-up to the current opioid epidemic, and one of its authors said later, "The letter wasn't of value to health and medicine in and of itself. So if I could take it back—if I knew then what I know now, I would never have published it. It wasn't worth it."
It appeared in a recent reddit post on /r/badhistory , "Woozling History: A Case Study", picking apart a recent tweet to the effect that "You have less free time than a medieval peasant", following the citations to the original source, which is less than convincing. In A.A. Milne's original story, Pooh and Piglet start following tracks which gradually increase in number, until Christopher Robin points out that they're wandering in circles and following their own tracks. Thus, the woozle, aka "evidence by citation", explores the phenomenon whereby something is taken as fact by virtue of the original assertion/paper/article being cited or quoted (sometimes, if not frequently, inaccurately or grossly out of context) until the number of citations is itself taken as some sort of proof.
A prominent example is "Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics", a brief letter to the editor from The New England Journal of Medicine published in 1980, which asserted that hospitalized patients treated with small doses of opioids generally didn't become addicted to them; it was cited frequently in the run-up to the current opioid epidemic, and one of its authors said later, "The letter wasn't of value to health and medicine in and of itself. So if I could take it back—if I knew then what I know now, I would never have published it. It wasn't worth it."
I've never encountered this term before, but the phenomenon is widespread in the scientific literature, and it's nice to have a name for it.
posted by biogeo at 9:58 AM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by biogeo at 9:58 AM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
A related neologism is anecdata.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:00 AM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:00 AM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
See also Tom Lum's history of the Sphex Wasp Citation, delivered with verve and enthusiasm.
It also hints at how to escape the cycle: when it sounds a little too good to be true, check the citation.
posted by Jeanne at 10:16 AM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
It also hints at how to escape the cycle: when it sounds a little too good to be true, check the citation.
posted by Jeanne at 10:16 AM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
For a fairly specific version of this in the humanities, see also the Chortlemuffin Effect.
posted by babelfish at 10:28 AM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by babelfish at 10:28 AM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
So, so far, we've got Woozle, Sphex Wasp, and Chortlemuffin; I'm liking how the lineup of this surprisingly deep children's cartoon is shaping up.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:42 AM on May 24, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:42 AM on May 24, 2022 [9 favorites]
Here's a particularly glorious example of the Woozle effect.
The movie reviewer Roger Ebert, writing a review about the subject of this Wikipedia entry, cites Wikipedia and mentions a particular detail from this article.
Someone then changes the source for the detail from the original report, to Ebert's movie review. Someone else then has to change it back.
posted by ocschwar at 10:44 AM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
The movie reviewer Roger Ebert, writing a review about the subject of this Wikipedia entry, cites Wikipedia and mentions a particular detail from this article.
Someone then changes the source for the detail from the original report, to Ebert's movie review. Someone else then has to change it back.
posted by ocschwar at 10:44 AM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
"And when you look up... They drop on you"
posted by Windopaene at 10:46 AM on May 24, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by Windopaene at 10:46 AM on May 24, 2022 [9 favorites]
The Reddit post doesn't so much "pick apart" the tweet as confirms it.
Late in the post, they state:
A comparison that included considerations for the relative time spent on tasks such as food preservation and preparation, making and mending clothing, field work and animal tending outside of a “workday,” or any other necessary tasks would be more difficult to fully estimate but also a far more valuable and fair comparison between the relative labor expectations of the periods
But in the second tweet of the thread:
Yes, winter happened. But work didn’t stop in the winter for people in agriculture.
Winter is when you rebuilt and mended buildings, and fences, redug ditches, wove the insane amount of rope needed everything, redug ditches, sewed sails, fixed machinery, etc.
The third tweet drives it home:
My point is that we give a lot more labor to increase someone else’s wealth than in times past. We generally work much longer hours. We have far fewer holidays and times of community festivity.
It's obviously self-evident that housework was more difficult back then. The point is that we now work more for others' enrichment than we might have back then.
Even when there's a bunch of things to do around the house, there's a big difference between being obligated to do it for a boss, versus doing it for yourself, at your own pace, in your own way. The tweet was speaking of "free" in the terms of "unobligated" rather than "leisure."
posted by explosion at 11:22 AM on May 24, 2022 [7 favorites]
Late in the post, they state:
A comparison that included considerations for the relative time spent on tasks such as food preservation and preparation, making and mending clothing, field work and animal tending outside of a “workday,” or any other necessary tasks would be more difficult to fully estimate but also a far more valuable and fair comparison between the relative labor expectations of the periods
But in the second tweet of the thread:
Yes, winter happened. But work didn’t stop in the winter for people in agriculture.
Winter is when you rebuilt and mended buildings, and fences, redug ditches, wove the insane amount of rope needed everything, redug ditches, sewed sails, fixed machinery, etc.
The third tweet drives it home:
My point is that we give a lot more labor to increase someone else’s wealth than in times past. We generally work much longer hours. We have far fewer holidays and times of community festivity.
It's obviously self-evident that housework was more difficult back then. The point is that we now work more for others' enrichment than we might have back then.
Even when there's a bunch of things to do around the house, there's a big difference between being obligated to do it for a boss, versus doing it for yourself, at your own pace, in your own way. The tweet was speaking of "free" in the terms of "unobligated" rather than "leisure."
posted by explosion at 11:22 AM on May 24, 2022 [7 favorites]
"And when you look up... They drop on you"
cite: https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/ (archive.org mirror retrieved 2022-05-13)
posted by flabdablet at 11:27 AM on May 24, 2022
cite: https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/ (archive.org mirror retrieved 2022-05-13)
posted by flabdablet at 11:27 AM on May 24, 2022
We've got one of these in traffic safety, namely that 94% of crashes are caused by human error. The actual statistic comes form an older NHTSA study that examined the causal chains in crashes and found that 94% of those in the study had a human error as the final link in the chain. However, the statistic has been trumpeted to mean that all we have to do is fix human error (were that so simple) to end crashes. Here's an Atlantic Article on the topic; side note, two of my colleagues are quoted in this piece, one with whom I agree, and one with whom I do not.
This statistic has recently come under greater scrutiny, but even just a couple years ago it was nearly ubiquitous in the literature. The last time I attended the Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in person, I heard former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao parrot it as a truthism.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 11:36 AM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
This statistic has recently come under greater scrutiny, but even just a couple years ago it was nearly ubiquitous in the literature. The last time I attended the Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in person, I heard former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao parrot it as a truthism.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 11:36 AM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
when it sounds a little too good to be true, check the citation.
hbomberguy agrees
The only woozle I've personally bagged was the one about the length of the longest word. If you do a web search for "longest word titin", all the top results tell you it's got 189,819 letters. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't and if you ever get dinged for missing this well-known answer in a pub quiz you can cite me.
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 AM on May 24, 2022
hbomberguy agrees
The only woozle I've personally bagged was the one about the length of the longest word. If you do a web search for "longest word titin", all the top results tell you it's got 189,819 letters. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't and if you ever get dinged for missing this well-known answer in a pub quiz you can cite me.
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 AM on May 24, 2022
This week's "Maintenance Phase" podcast examines the notion of "the calorie," and finds that many of its most science-y notions have the least scientific basis -- but are used unquestioningly to this day: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1411126
posted by wenestvedt at 11:50 AM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by wenestvedt at 11:50 AM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
If the phenomenon is widespread in the scientific literature, as biogeo asserts, it is far worse in science commentary and the science-adjacent blogosphere, where you'll see whole sentences both rechurned and wrong. The same stories based on a press release are copied and copied without any critical evaluation, let alone any proper crap-detecting. sigh!
Jeanne: when it sounds a little too good to be true, check the citation.
Fair enough, but that can be hard - being coincident with our own bias and prejudice and all. Let's first flag the ficts that are obviously, must be, wrong. Like Rachel Carson's brother being born 4 years after the death of their father; or Bavljenac island [famous for its similarity to a monster mitochondrion] being both 500m max length and 1.4 sq.km in extent.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:53 AM on May 24, 2022 [3 favorites]
Jeanne: when it sounds a little too good to be true, check the citation.
Fair enough, but that can be hard - being coincident with our own bias and prejudice and all. Let's first flag the ficts that are obviously, must be, wrong. Like Rachel Carson's brother being born 4 years after the death of their father; or Bavljenac island [famous for its similarity to a monster mitochondrion] being both 500m max length and 1.4 sq.km in extent.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:53 AM on May 24, 2022 [3 favorites]
The Reddit post doesn't so much "pick apart" the tweet as confirms it.
No it doesn't. Why would you read that and think it does?
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:04 PM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
No it doesn't. Why would you read that and think it does?
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:04 PM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
Some years back a friend recommended a book called The Leprechauns of Software Engineering by Laurent Bossavit, which explored some of the things 'everyone knows' about programming. I was quite surprised at how flimsy some of the things I kept hearing were when tracked back to the original citations.
posted by orbific at 12:07 PM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by orbific at 12:07 PM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
BobtheScientist: Was "ficts" for fictional facts intentional?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:43 PM on May 24, 2022
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:43 PM on May 24, 2022
I've seen that medieval Woozle rumbling about Tumblr for years now, and have wanted to wail aloud every time.
I've managed to capture a couple of Woozles. One was the misattribution of a quotation (now running for nearly two centuries!) that I dated back to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1838. Short version: they quoted something from somebody else and were mistaken about the author and the book; later writers stole that quotation from BEM and kept the misattribution; yet later authors, right up until now, have been recycling that quotation from each other and, yes, the misattribution. And a couple of years ago, I published an article pointing out that we have now had over eight decades of scholars misinterpreting one 19th-c. religious novel as a nonfiction memoir, going back to an error in a major (still used) bibliography published in 1930.
posted by thomas j wise at 12:57 PM on May 24, 2022 [7 favorites]
I've managed to capture a couple of Woozles. One was the misattribution of a quotation (now running for nearly two centuries!) that I dated back to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1838. Short version: they quoted something from somebody else and were mistaken about the author and the book; later writers stole that quotation from BEM and kept the misattribution; yet later authors, right up until now, have been recycling that quotation from each other and, yes, the misattribution. And a couple of years ago, I published an article pointing out that we have now had over eight decades of scholars misinterpreting one 19th-c. religious novel as a nonfiction memoir, going back to an error in a major (still used) bibliography published in 1930.
posted by thomas j wise at 12:57 PM on May 24, 2022 [7 favorites]
I’m pretty sure I caught a Woozle of tyromancy misspelled as typomancy in a 19th c book, probably because that’s when they transliterated it from Greek — accidentally turning a ρ into a p.
But this was for the Project Gutenberg version of Extraordinary Popular Delusions… and I can’t remember if they decided to go with the correct spelling of "divination through cheese" or the actual 19th c text.
posted by clew at 1:17 PM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
But this was for the Project Gutenberg version of Extraordinary Popular Delusions… and I can’t remember if they decided to go with the correct spelling of "divination through cheese" or the actual 19th c text.
posted by clew at 1:17 PM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
The myth of the 5μm aerosol/droplet cut-off must now be the most notorious example of the Woozle Effect — it contributed to a huge number of preventable covid deaths.
A very common example that's near and dear to my heart is the "glass is a liquid and flows over time" myth which is, or was, widely promulgated by high school and college textbooks and instructors.
There are a huge number of false popsci factoids in circulation, but Woozles are especially pernicious because they appear in authoritative sources and it's very, very difficult to remove them once they're established.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:20 PM on May 24, 2022 [15 favorites]
A very common example that's near and dear to my heart is the "glass is a liquid and flows over time" myth which is, or was, widely promulgated by high school and college textbooks and instructors.
There are a huge number of false popsci factoids in circulation, but Woozles are especially pernicious because they appear in authoritative sources and it's very, very difficult to remove them once they're established.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:20 PM on May 24, 2022 [15 favorites]
I don't think this quite qualifies if im understanding correctly but the one that drives me batty is the assertion that all mammals take 21 seconds to pee. But the original paper documented just a handful of zoo animals, all over 3kg, and the plus minus is 13 seconds.
posted by Mitheral at 2:22 PM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Mitheral at 2:22 PM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
See also Tom Lum's history of the Sphex Wasp Citation, delivered with verve and enthusiasm.
Amusingly I think there’s a minor failure to check sources carefully here - the textbook referenced seems to be by H.G. Wells and Julian Huxley, “that Huxley’s” brother, not his father. Which confusion may result from the fact that both Aldous and Julian are grandsons of that other Huxley, T.H., who was Wells’ professor and a significant influence.
posted by atoxyl at 2:24 PM on May 24, 2022
Amusingly I think there’s a minor failure to check sources carefully here - the textbook referenced seems to be by H.G. Wells and Julian Huxley, “that Huxley’s” brother, not his father. Which confusion may result from the fact that both Aldous and Julian are grandsons of that other Huxley, T.H., who was Wells’ professor and a significant influence.
posted by atoxyl at 2:24 PM on May 24, 2022
My Pooh reference was wrong…
Those are Jagulars.
posted by Windopaene at 3:02 PM on May 24, 2022 [3 favorites]
Those are Jagulars.
posted by Windopaene at 3:02 PM on May 24, 2022 [3 favorites]
I came to post the Wired article about the aerosol/droplet cut off, but Ivan Fyodorovich already did. It's a great edge-of-your-seat science mystery story. It also is a great example how difficult unwoozling is. It also is shows how scientific turf wars can encourage woozlers.
posted by cron at 4:02 PM on May 24, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by cron at 4:02 PM on May 24, 2022 [3 favorites]
isn't this also a primary mechanism of political bullshit propagation
posted by glonous keming at 4:31 PM on May 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by glonous keming at 4:31 PM on May 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
This is pretty similar to the mechanism by which the guy on the Pringles can got the name "Julius"
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:55 PM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:55 PM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think I may have mentioned this before but a while back I had a PhD student looking at anaerobic digestion of cow waste. He tried to trace the source for an assumption of how frequently waste should be stirred for max efficiency of energy required to stir Vs maximising output from moving bacteria around. Turns out it started as an assumption plucked out of the air and then the assumption kept getting reused. Still is as far as I know.
posted by biffa at 6:39 AM on May 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by biffa at 6:39 AM on May 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
I caught a Woozle of tyromancy misspelled as typomancy in a 19th c book, probably because that’s when they transliterated it from Greek — accidentally turning a ρ into a p.
Drawing that kind of conclusion by staring at the texts concerned probably counts as typomancy.
posted by flabdablet at 6:47 AM on May 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
Drawing that kind of conclusion by staring at the texts concerned probably counts as typomancy.
posted by flabdablet at 6:47 AM on May 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
This is pretty similar to the mechanism by which the guy on the Pringles can got the name "Julius"
Which is wrong because the Pringles guy is obviously Milburn Moneybags, which is where he got his money before his Monopoly.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:28 AM on May 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
Which is wrong because the Pringles guy is obviously Milburn Moneybags, which is where he got his money before his Monopoly.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:28 AM on May 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
Exactly. "Pringles" is, after all, a slang term for "money" (or, in some cultures, "drugs" which comes to the same thing).
posted by flabdablet at 7:37 AM on May 25, 2022
posted by flabdablet at 7:37 AM on May 25, 2022
Drawing that kind of conclusion by staring at the texts concerned
N-grams or something like for the word in Greek and the two in English, and a big shift after the cheap edition of a popular book, but yeah.
posted by clew at 12:08 PM on May 25, 2022
N-grams or something like for the word in Greek and the two in English, and a big shift after the cheap edition of a popular book, but yeah.
posted by clew at 12:08 PM on May 25, 2022
Ooooh, I chased down a woozle in a thread in January because I see people (in environmental circles and gardening circles) cite the same stats about residential pesticide use on lawns all the time, and knowing just a tiny bit about pesticides sold for residential use, and pesticides sold for agricultural use, they seemed INSANE. So I tracked them back, and there WAS no underlying statistic at all -- it was a pure hypothetical to make a point about golf courses and groundwater pollution.
I felt this weird surge of triumph that I had tracked back this rhetorically appealing but logically unrealistic claim and found its origin as a throwaway hypothetical in a government report about golf courses! It also felt really good to be like, "My intuition is that this cannot possibly be true, because it seems to contradict my admittedly hazy and incomplete knowledge of pesticide regulation in the US, I guess I should try to find out since I don't actually know," and to be able to track the quarry down from the comfort of my couch.
I'm also pretty sure that I myself have quoted those incorrect stats, because they're definitely rhetorically appealing to me, since I am anti-pesticides-on-lawns and frankly anti-suburban-lawns-at-all. I feel kind-of like, hey, I have a sturdier foundation to argue against lawn pesticides, because I'm no longer quoting imaginary made-up statistics and I can focus on what actually IS true about their badness!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:01 PM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
I felt this weird surge of triumph that I had tracked back this rhetorically appealing but logically unrealistic claim and found its origin as a throwaway hypothetical in a government report about golf courses! It also felt really good to be like, "My intuition is that this cannot possibly be true, because it seems to contradict my admittedly hazy and incomplete knowledge of pesticide regulation in the US, I guess I should try to find out since I don't actually know," and to be able to track the quarry down from the comfort of my couch.
I'm also pretty sure that I myself have quoted those incorrect stats, because they're definitely rhetorically appealing to me, since I am anti-pesticides-on-lawns and frankly anti-suburban-lawns-at-all. I feel kind-of like, hey, I have a sturdier foundation to argue against lawn pesticides, because I'm no longer quoting imaginary made-up statistics and I can focus on what actually IS true about their badness!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:01 PM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
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Now, I just need to know how to escape the cycle.
posted by coolxcool=rad at 9:37 AM on May 24, 2022 [6 favorites]