unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [46]
And so these men of Indostan, disputed loud and long, each in his own opinion, exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!
So, oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween, tread on in utter ignorance of what each other mean, and prate about the elephant not one of them has seen!
Unless we want to “tread on in utter ignorance,” like the blind men debating about the elephant, we need to bear in mind that our personal experience seldom gives us a full picture. This is especially true when our experience is indirect, filtered by others.
Consider what happened during the Gulf War of 1991. During the forty-three-day air campaign, television viewers at home watched “smart bombs” homing in unerringly on their targets time after time. A nation that had lost more than 58,000 members of its armed forces in Vietnam a generation earlier now seemed able to fight a new kind of war, from the air, putting hardly any soldiers at risk.
Not surprisingly, military briefers were showing the public only their apparent successes, but no amount of skeptical questioning by reporters could undo the enormous impact of what viewers were seeing on their TV screens. Only long after the war did we learn that a lot of “smart” weapons missed their targets and that just 8 percent of the munitions dropped (measured by tonnage) were guided. Contrary to the picture presented on television, nine of ten bombs dropped were old-fashioned “dumb” ones. This was documented in a 1996 report by the General Accounting Office (which has since been renamed the Government Accountability Office). It wasn’t until a decade after the 1991 war that weapons precision actually improved enough to match the false impression created by the selective use of video during Desert Storm. The lesson here is that sometimes what you don’t know or haven’t been told is more important than what you have seen with your own eyes. We humans have a natural tendency to overgeneralize from vivid examples.
The reason we should trust the GAO’s report over the evidence offered by our own eyes is that the GAO had access to all the relevant data, including the Pentagon’s bomb-damage assessment reports, and it systematically weighed and studied that mass of information. Also, the GAO is an arm of Congress with a reputation for even-handed evaluation and for casting a skeptical eye on the claims of agencies (such as the Pentagon) that seek taxpayer money for their programs. The GAO study relied on evidence; what Pentagon briefers showed Americans during the war was a collection of anecdotes—and carefully selected anecdotes at that. The public saw few if any “smart” bombs miss, when in fact they missed much of the time. War was made to seem less messy, less morally objectionable, than it really is.
The Great Fertilizer Scare
Without real data and hard evidence, it’s easy to be led astray in all sorts of matters, especially when a dramatic story involving well-known figures captures our attention. The Great Fertilizer Scare of 1987 will illustrate. It began when a former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Bob Waters, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and it was reported that two other players from the 1964 team also had ALS. Soon newspapers were carrying a story saying a common lawn fertilizer, Milorganite, which a groundskeeper recalled using on the 49ers practice field, was suspected as a cause.
Milorganite is sewage sludge, recycled by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. It is dried for forty minutes at between 840 and 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, a process that kills bacteria and viruses, but it does contain tiny amounts of certain elements, including cadmium, which some researchers at the time suspected might be