Proofiness - Charles Seife [2]
At the same time, proofiness has extraordinarily serious consequences. It nullifies elections, crowning victors who are undeserving—both Republican and Democratic. Worse yet, it is used to fix the outcome of future elections; politicians and judges use wrongheaded mathematics to manipulate voting districts and undermine the census that dictates which Americans are represented in Congress. Proofiness is largely responsible for the near destruction of our economy—and for the great sucking sound of more than a trillion dollars vanishing from the treasury. Prosecutors and justices use proofiness to acquit the guilty and convict the innocent—and even to put people to death. In short, bad math is undermining our democracy.
The threat is coming from both the left and the right. Indeed, proofiness sometimes seems to be the only thing that Republicans and Democrats have in common. Yet it’s possible to counteract it. Those who have learned to recognize proofiness can find it almost everywhere, ensnaring the public in a web of transparent falsehoods. To the wary, proofiness becomes a daily source of great amusement—and of blackest outrage.
Once you know the methods people use to turn numbers into falsehoods, they are powerless against you. When you learn to shovel proofiness out of the way, some of the most controversial topics become simple and straightforward. For example, the question of who actually won the 2000 presidential election becomes crystal clear. (The surprising answer is one that almost nobody would have been willing to accept: not Bush, not Gore, and almost none of the people who voted for either candidate.) Understand proofiness and you can uncover many truths that had been obscured by a haze of lies.
1
Phony Facts, Phony Figures
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
—John Adams
Facts are stupid things.
—Ronald Reagan
If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it. Even the silliest absurdities seem plausible the moment that they’re expressed in numerical terms.
Are blonds an endangered species? A few years ago, the media were all abuzz about a World Health Organization study proving that natural blonds would soon be a thing of the past. The BBC declared that people with blond hair “will become extinct by 2202.” Good Morning America told its viewers that natural blonds will “vanish from the face of the earth within two hundred years” because the blond gene is “not as strong a gene as brunettes’.” The story was winging its way around the globe until the WHO issued an unusual statement:
WHO wishes to clarify that it has never conducted research on this subject. Nor, to the best of its knowledge, has WHO issued a report predicting that natural blondes are likely to be extinct by 2202. WHO has no knowledge of how these news reports originated but would like to stress that we have no opinion on the future existence of blondes.
It should have been obvious that the story was bogus, even before the WHO denial. One geneticist had even told the BBC as much. “Genes don’t die out unless there is a disadvantage to having that gene,” he said. “They don’t disappear.” But the BBC had suspended its faculties of disbelief. The reason, in part, was because of a phony number. The specificity, the seeming mathematical certainty of the prediction of when the last blond would be born, gave the story an aura of plausibility. It suckered journalists who should have known better.
No matter how idiotic, how unbelievable an idea is, numbers can give it credibility. “Fifty-eight percent of all the exercise done in America is broadcast on television,” MSNBC host Deborah Norville declared in 2004, with a completely straight face. “For instance, of the 3.5 billion sit-ups done during 2003, two million, three hundred thousand [sic] of them