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By Root 825 0

is feeling.3 In lieu of devices that can measure these experiences directly, researchers are forced to use crude and unreliable methods to try to get a handle on the degree of pain or happiness that a subject is feeling. They use questionnaires to gauge how much pain someone is in (circle the frowny face that corresponds with your level of pain) or how good someone feels (circle the number that represents how happy you are). Making matters even more difficult, pain and joy are subjective experiences. People feel them differently—some people are extremely tolerant to pain and some are very sensitive; some are emotional and regularly climb up towering peaks of bliss while others are more even-keeled. This means that even if a scientist could somehow devise an experiment where people would experience exactly the same amount of pain or joy, they would almost certainly give different answers on the questionnaire because their perceptions are different. A swift kick to the shins will elicit a super-duper frowny face from someone who has a low pain tolerance, while a more stoic person would barely deviate from a mild grimace. When rational people will come up with different answers to a question—how painful a blow to the head is, how beautiful a person in a photo is, how easy a book is to read, how good a movie is—the measurement can have some value, but the number is certainly far from the realm of absolute truth.

But it’s not the farthest away. That honor goes to numbers that are tied to phony measurements—measurements that are fake or meaningless or even nonexistent. Numbers like these are everywhere, but product labels seem to be their favorite habitat. Just try to imagine what kind of measurement L’Oreal made to determine that its Extra Volume Collagen Mascara gives lashes “twelve times more impact.” (Perhaps they had someone blink and listened to how much noise her eyelashes made when they clunked together.) How much diligence do you think Vaseline put into its research that allowed it to conclude its new moisturizer “delivers 70 percent more moisture in every drop.” (Presumably it would deliver less moisture than water, which is 100 percent moisture, after all.) No matter how ridiculous an idea, putting it into numerical form makes it sound respectable, even if the implied measurement is transparently absurd. This is why paranormal researchers feel compelled to claim, without giggling, that 29 percent of Christian saints had exhibited psychic powers.

Making up scientific-sounding measurements is a grand old tradition; cigarette companies used to excel at the practice, the better to fill their ads with a thick haze of nonsense. “From first puff to last, Chesterfield gives you a smoke measurably smoother . . . cooler . . . best for you!” read one advertisement from 1955. You can’t measure the smoothness and coolness of a cigarette any more than you can measure the impact of an eyelash. Even if people tried to quantify impact or smoothness or coolness, the results would be worthless. These are phony measurements. They’re like actors dressed up in lab coats—they appear to be scientific, but they’re fake through and through. As a result, the numbers associated with these measurements are utterly devoid of meaning. They are fabricated statistics: Potemkin numbers.

According to legend, Prince Grigory Potemkin didn’t want the empress of Russia to know that a region in the Crimea was a barren wasteland. Potemkin felt he had to convince the empress that the area was thriving and full of life, so he constructed elaborate façades along her route—crudely painted wooden frameworks meant to look like villages and towns from afar. Even though these “Potemkin villages” were completely empty—a closer inspection would reveal them to be mere imitations of villages rather than real ones—they were good enough to fool the empress, who breezed by them without alighting from her carriage.

Potemkin numbers are the mathematical equivalent of Potemkin villages. They’re numerical façades that look like real data. Meaningful real-world numbers are