Proofiness - Charles Seife [1]
It really didn’t matter whether the list had 205 or 57 or 81 names. The very fact that McCarthy had attached a number to his accusations imbued them with an aura of truth. Would McCarthy make such specific claims if he didn’t have evidence to back them up? Even though White House officials suspected that he was bluffing, the numbers made them doubt themselves.1 The numbers gave McCarthy’s accusations heft; they were too substantial, too specific to ignore. Congress was forced to hold hearings to attempt to salvage the reputation of the State Department—and the Truman administration.
McCarthy was, in fact, lying. He had no clue whether the State Department was harboring 205 communists or 57 or none at all; he was making wild guesses based upon information that he knew was worthless. Yet once he made the claim public and the Senate declared that it was going to hold hearings on the matter, he suddenly needed some names. So he approached newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, an ardent anticommunist, to help him compile a list. As Hearst recalled, “Joe never had any names. He came to us. ‘What am I gonna do? You gotta help me.’ So we gave him a few good reporters.”
Even the assistance of half a dozen Hearst reporters and columnists couldn’t give much substance to McCarthy’s list. When the hearings began in March 1950, he couldn’t produce the name of a single communist working for the State Department. It didn’t make any difference. McCarthy’s enumerated accusations had come at just the right time. China had just gone communist, and as the hearings finished, North Korea invaded the South. The United States was terrified of the rising tide of world communism, and McCarthy’s bluff turned him, virtually overnight, into a symbol of resistance. An obscure back-bench junior senator had become one of the most famous and most divisive figures in politics. His line about 205 communists was one of the most effective political lies in American history.
The power of McCarthy’s speech came from a number. Even though it was a fiction, that number lent credibility to the lies he was telling. It implied that the sheaf of papers he held in his hand was full of damning facts about specific State Department employees. The number 205 seemed to be powerful “proof” that McCarthy’s accusations had to be taken seriously.
As McCarthy knew, numbers can be a powerful weapon. In skillful hands, phony data, bogus statistics, and bad mathematics can make the most fanciful idea, the most outrageous falsehood seem true. They can be used to bludgeon enemies, to destroy critics, and to squelch debate. Indeed, some people have become incredibly adept at using fake numbers to prove falsehoods. They have become masters of proofiness: the art of using bogus mathematical arguments to prove something that you know in your heart is true—even when it’s not.
Our society is now awash in proofiness. Using a few powerful techniques, thousands of people are crafting mathematical falsehoods to get you to swallow untruths. Advertisers forge numbers to get you to buy their products. Politicians fiddle with data to try to get you to reelect them. Pundits and prophets use phony math to get you to believe predictions that never seem to pan out. Businessmen use bogus numerical arguments to steal your money. Pollsters, pretending to listen to what you have to say, use proofiness to tell you what they want you to believe.
Sometimes people use these techniques to try to convince you of frivolous and absurd things. Scientists and others have used proofiness to show that Olympic sprinters will one day break the sound barrier and that there’s a mathematical