• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 905 0

suicide, any more than abortions are causing people to get murdered or have accidents. Women who are in a high-risk category for suicide, homicide, and accidents are almost certainly more likely to get into a situation where they need an abortion than those in the general population. Mentally ill people, risk-takers, women who run with a wild crowd—they are more likely to get into trouble of all sorts, including having an unwanted pregnancy. Conversely, women who have a child are more likely to be more stable and responsible, and less likely to take needless risks. Yet antiabortion lawmakers turn that correlation into causation, forcing doctors to scare their patients with the idea that going through with the abortion might cause them to commit suicide later on. The “right to know” laws have nothing to do with knowledge. They are vehicles for whatever bits of proofiness can be deployed to support the lawmakers’ opinions.

The left is guilty too. Liberals get every bit as lathered up about guns as conservatives do about abortions, so they manufacture proofiness to try to get their way. In 1996, a young historian at Emory University, Michael Bellesiles, burst onto the academic scene. His claim to fame was an article in the Journal of American History that argued that guns were rare in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, and that the populace resisted the government’s attempts to arm its citizens. If true, it would change the tenor of the debate about gun control and the right to bear arms; it would re-frame the idea of a gun-toting public, making it a relatively modern invention rather than an organic part of American culture. The paper won Bellesiles a great deal of praise and attention—as well as a book contract. Bellesiles’s magnum opus, Arming America, was lauded by the Economist and even won the prestigious Bancroft Prize. It was quickly becoming a very influential piece of research, and was embraced by antigun activists, even though the research turned out to be mathematical tripe.

Bellesiles claimed to base his conclusions upon numbers of guns found in archival documents—particularly wills and other probate records from around the country. But it soon became apparent that the data were questionable at best. He had clearly misinterpreted some data and cherry-picked others. There were also dark intimations that Bellesiles was making up some numbers out of whole cloth. One critic pointed out that one set of Bellesiles’s numbers was mathematically impossible, implying that Bellesiles was artificially deflating the number of guns in the region he was studying. When Emory University investigated Bellesiles’s work, they declared that the professor was guilty of either “extremely sloppy documentation” or fraud—and seemed to lean toward the latter, finding “evidence of falsification” of some of his data. In other words, Bellesiles had probably committed the ultimate academic sin.86 His desire to change the debate on gun control had led him to manufacture Potemkin numbers. His book was withdrawn by its original publishers and he was forced to resign.

Both the left and the right have embraced proofiness, as it has proven its power. No matter how moronic a number might be, no matter how transparently false a statistic is, it can still justify a piece of legislation or a public policy . . . or a false belief.

Proofiness gives fantasy the appearance of fact, reinforcing it, strengthening it so that it can resist assault from without. In some sense, proofiness is the antithesis of knowledge.

In the first half of the twentieth century, scientists at Bell Labs and elsewhere created a new branch of science known as information theory. Originally conceived as a way to answer some very mundane telecommunications problems (such as how many telephone calls can be crammed onto a single copper wire), information theory soon grew far beyond its roots and became one of the most profound scientific theories of the century. It explained how information gets transmitted, stored, and manipulated by information processing devices: