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By Root 885 0

the nice round 37-degree Celsius number into Fahrenheit yields 98.6 degrees F, automatically making the number seem more precise than it actually is. Furthermore, Wunderlich took the body temperatures in his subjects’ armpits, so even if his measurements were valid and precise, his definition of “normal” wouldn’t apply to measurements of body temperature taken from the mouth or other orifices, as these have slightly different temperatures. Body temperature isn’t uniform—the answer you get depends on where you make the measurement. This is a huge source of error that most people don’t take into account. Neither do they seem to compensate for the fact that body temperatures can change dramatically throughout the day, and that “normal” is very different from person to person. There is no hard-and-fast definition of “normal,” much less one that’s precise to within a tenth of a degree as the 98.6°F number seems to be. Yet it’s a fiction that we still cling to—even medical dictionaries sometimes define a fever as a body temperature above 98.6°F. We all imbue the highly precise number with tremendous importance, even though in truth the definition of “normal” temperature is imprecise, fuzzy, and somewhat arbitrary. It’s a disestimation, yet one that’s persisted for a century and a half.

Because of disestimation’s subtlety and longevity, it can be a particularly nasty form of proofiness. Even though disestimates aren’t complete nonsense in the way that Potemkin numbers are, they mix a whole lot of fiction in with their fact. Failure to recognize the inherent limitations of a measurement can be extremely dangerous, because it can potentially create an authentic-sounding number that is in fact far removed from the realm of truth.

There are many roads that lead to proofiness. Potemkin numbers create meaningless statistics. Disestimation distorts numbers, turning them into falsehoods by ignoring their inherent limitations. A third method, fruit-packing, is slightly different. In fruit-packing, it’s not the individual numbers that are false; it’s the presentation of the data that creates the proofiness.

Supermarkets select their fruit and arrange it just so and package it so that even mediocre produce looks delectable. Similarly, numerical fruit packers select data and arrange them and dress them up so that they look unassailable, even when they’re questionable. The most skilled fruit packers can make numbers, even solid ones, lie by placing them in the wrong context. It’s a surprisingly effective technique.

A particularly powerful weapon in the fruit packer’s arsenal is what’s known as cherry-picking. Cherry-picking is the careful selection of data, choosing those that support the argument you wish to make while underplaying or ignoring data that undermine it.

Since real-world numbers are fuzzy, answers to numerical questions aren’t always clear-cut. Measuring the same thing in different ways can give different answers; some of the numbers will be too high, some will be too low, and, with luck, others will be reasonably close to the right answer. The best way to figure out where the truth lies is to look at all of the data together, figuring out the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of measurement so that you get as close to the truth as possible. A cherry picker, on the other hand, selects the data that support his argument and presents only them, willfully excluding numbers that are less supportive, even if those numbers may be closer to the truth. Cherry-picking is lying by exclusion to make an argument seem more compelling. And it’s extremely common, especially in the political world.10 Every politician is guilty of it, at least to some extent.

Al Gore is guilty of cherry-picking in his film An Inconvenient Truth. At the heart of the 2006 movie is a breathtaking and disturbing sequence where he shows computer simulations of what global warming will do to the surface of the earth. In a series of maps, he shows the world’s coastlines disappearing under the rising oceans. Much of Florida and Louisiana will be submerged,