Proofiness - Charles Seife [92]
One of the dicta of information theory is that information resides in the unexpected. We gain knowledge when we encounter what we don’t anticipate. A stream of data that we can predict with perfect accuracy contains no information; it can’t tell us anything that we don’t already know. The quest for knowledge is a quest for novelty, a search for a new set of data or a new idea that forces us to look at the world in a slightly different way than we did before. Knowledge-gathering is systematic demolition and reconstruction of our view of the world.
It can be an unsettling and uncomfortable process. It’s never easy to destroy a cherished myth, to abandon a deeply held belief, or to inject shades of gray into a debate that once seemed black and white. It’s human nature to resist change, to cling to our old, familiar ideas instead of abandoning them in the face of new information. We shrink away from data that challenge our prejudices; we tend to seek out—and to believe—data that reinforce them.
This is nowhere more apparent than in the news media. A few decades ago, we had only a small handful of sources from which we could get our news. Over breakfast, we would read a newspaper or two. On our drive to and from work, we could choose to listen to two or three news radio stations. After dinner, we could watch the television news on three or four channels. In bed, we might relax with a magazine. With the advent of cable television and then the Internet, the number of news outlets proliferated enormously. The audience fragmented and then atomized. Gone were the days when Americans were forced to pick one of three nightly news broadcasts. Now there are so many outlets that we suddenly have the ability to find the source of news that makes us the least uncomfortable.
More and more, people seem to be seeking out news outlets that reinforce their beliefs without challenging them. Conservatives can now get their facts from Fox News; liberals can go to the Huffington Post for theirs. We no longer have to confront ideas that force us to reevaluate our positions. Instead, we can only listen to the ones we already agree with. We can wallow in our myths, undisturbed by the inconvenience of doubt. Gaining knowledge need no longer be the uncomfortable by-product of listening to the news.
Proofiness is at the center of this problem. Phony numbers have the appearance of absolute truth, of pure objective fact, so we can use them as a justification to cling to our prejudices. Fruit-packing can give an aura of respectability to the most wrongheaded notion, while a cleverly deployed Potemkin number or a disestimate can stave off even overwhelming evidence that an idea is incorrect. Proofiness is the raw material that arms partisans to fight off the assault of knowledge, to clothe irrationality in the garb of the rational and the scientific. This is what makes it such a powerful tool for propaganda.
In the United States, propaganda is a way of undermining democracy. It lets demagogues whip up a storm of irrational emotion, a thoughtless frenzy that leads people to vote against their interests and to support policies that they would otherwise reject. It is a subtle form of mind control, a mechanism for tricking people into agreeing with their leaders. Just as proofiness undermines democracy in other ways—diluting our votes, disenfranchising our citizens, prejudicing our justice system—through propaganda, it can rob us of our democratic right to think for ourselves.
Not all propaganda need make use of proofiness. Indeed, arguably the most effective modern use of propaganda didn’t have much of a proofiness component to it. In the months leading up to the Iraq war, neoconservative government officials such as Richard Perle enlisted the aid of a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, to spread stories about fictional Iraqi projects to build weapons of mass destruction. The administration used nonexistent weapons as the justification for invading Iraq, and by the time the lies were uncovered it was far