unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [67]
Perfect knowledge is seldom if ever available to humans. For one thing, new information is constantly arriving, and human learning is constantly expanding. How certain are we of that? Quite certain—which leads us to:
RULE #2: You Can Be Certain Enough
IN THE WORLD OF PRACTICAL REALITY, WEIGHING THE FACTS IS A matter of choosing the right standard of proof to give us the degree of certainty we need under the circumstances. We can’t be absolutely certain, but we can be certain enough to make a reasonable decision. A civil jury in Santa Monica was certain enough in 1997, for example, that O. J. Simpson will never find “the real killer” of his wife, Nicole Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman because he’s the real killer. But sixteen months earlier, a criminal jury in Los Angeles found him not guilty of the same crimes in one of the most celebrated trials of the twentieth century. Both votes were unanimous.
How can that be? A big reason is that our laws require proof of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a criminal case. That is—quite appropriately—a very high standard, and it applies because that’s how “certain enough” we need to be before depriving anyone of his or her liberty or very life. But in a civil trial, a lower standard applies because only property is at stake. The twelve-person jury in the civil trial unanimously found that a “preponderance” of the evidence showed Simpson killed Goldman and committed battery upon Nicole, whose throat was slashed.
In our everyday lives, we have to pick an appropriate standard. Imagine trying to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” whether one brand of cornflakes is better than another. You would never get breakfast! But the more important the decision, and the more difficult it is to reverse the consequences of that decision, the more careful we have to be.
Carpenters and seamstresses have a saying: “Measure twice, cut once.” It’s one thing to guess or use trial and error with respect to trivial matters or decisions that can easily be reversed, but you should try for a higher degree of certainty before buying a car or a house, and a higher degree still when choosing a spouse or a president. The research on this point is reassuring: when confronted with decisions that are significant and irreversible, people do tend to be more analytical, and to take more time thinking about the decision. Be as certain as you need to be.
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Johnson’s Rock
A note to our academic friends: We don’t hold with the philosophical notion that maintains there are no facts, only subjective interpretations. That’s a fine subject for debate in the classroom or an all-night bull session in the dorm, but it isn’t much use in the everyday world.
We stand with the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson. His biographer James Boswell said he told Johnson it wasn’t possible to refute Bishop Berkeley’s “ingenious sophistry” that matter didn’t exist. Boswell recalled:
“I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it,—‘I refute it thus.’”
That’s our position. If you can kick a rock, you have verified the rock’s existence as a practical fact. You have proof enough. We can’t prove the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, because nobody can foretell the future. We do have evidence that it’s come up in the east every day for perhaps 4 billion years, so we operate on the theory that it will rise there again tomorrow. We’re certain enough we’re right, and we haven’t been proved wrong yet.
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RULE #3: Look for General Agreement Among Experts
SOME STATISTICS ARE SETTLED AND ACCEPTED BY ALL SIDES: DEMOCRATS, Republicans, and even vegetarian anarchists. The circumference of the earth is 24,901.55 miles at the equator, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We won’t quibble with that. The national average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline was just over $3