I’ve had this blog post on my mind for weeks now, and so here we go.
The title of this post is not the only place this has occurred in my life, the “inspiration” for this was that exactly that was the was a math teacher in high school back in Illinois in the 1980s started out telling us the new material we would be working on that week. The words he shared have stuck with me for well over 30 years. “People will try to lie to you in various ways in your life, and many times they will do so because they think it is good for you. Lying is never good. It never serves a noble purpose. Many times people will try to get a reaction from you with “data”, or get you to value their opinion on a topic as the “right answer”, but the most important lesson you can learn in your life is how not to fall for the lie. Newspapers, teachers, doctors, and other “authorities” in your life will try to lie to you with statistics, making you think that something is what it is not. Learning how to interpret data, how to verify it, how to truly understand what they claim to be telling you is the only way to counter this evil force in the world. Whenever you are presented with “facts” with “data”, especially with numbers that tell a story, which is the purpose of statistics, make sure you know what they are really telling you or you may be led astray and when enough of us are led astray, when we let people lie with statistics, there is no limit to the danger that can but us in. This is what I will spend the next few weeks trying to equip you to handle.” Those few weeks in 1985 were the most important in my life.
I constantly use what I was taught by that brilliant educator. I’m not sure I totally understood the magnitude of what he was saying that fall day as I started on my sophomore year math class. I likely did not. I do know that it obviously struck me as out of the ordinary in some way for me to have never forgotten the lessons or how they made me feel. As a 15 year old trying to make sense of everything it gave me a sense of agency about my life I have never experienced until that time. Here were the keys that would let me look at and challenge everything that someone presented to me and to work objectively to verify that what I was being prompted to believe was actually worthy of my trust. A few years before Ronald Reagan would make the phrase, “Trust, but verify”, actually originating with a Russian proverb, part of the American lexicon, I was being taught the tools to do exactly that with the most undisputable “facts” we are taught as children to believe. After all numbers have exact meaning. Four is as distinct from five as anything can be. But add additional symbols or measures around those numbers and they become less so. I began to learn that percent signs and scales on graphs of numbers we red flags, klaxon horns, warning bells to immediately raise skepticism and to begin to think, “what motives caused the author of this to present it this way?” I believe those few weeks in the fall of 1985 were the more important things I have ever learned in my life. Nothing else stands out as unique about that teacher. The remainder of the class that year was as normal as could be, and I do not even recall his name with certainty, but the tools and techniques are burned into my brain like nothing else I’ve ever learned.
It could be because I was already on the path, which had really started for me in earnest at about eleven or twelve, of knowing that I was going to work with these computer things that were being talked about. For Christmas in the early 80s, I think it was 1982, but it could have been 1981. I had asked for and received a TI-99 4/A computer. It was the only thing I got that year because all my relatives had to pool their money together to afford the machine. Over the years I had immersed myself in learning to program it and how it worked and everything I could discern. So I think a big part of why this resonated with me so much was I had a deeper understanding that a typical teen of that day would have on how crucial data was to everything.
Fast forwarding to today, and the years we have all lived through, especially in the United States, this lesson keeps coming back into focus for me due to how central I feel it is for anyone to not be fooled into conspiracy theories and other nonsense that has been tossed around by people no less “authoritative” than a former president of the United States and all the “experts” he drew into his orbit and who have lied with statistics as the American public for years. Are they the first politicians to do this? Of course not, not will they be the last, which is why to be an informed citizen, a key to a democracy as cited by so many of the Founding Fathers, you need to know how you are being lied to with statistics.
Let’s start with COVD. And let’s remember what I said, about two of the easiest ways to lie with statistics; percent signs and graph scales. These two things are all over when we are being told about COVID. “New cases are up 350%!!!” “This graph shows a four fold increase!!!!!” These types of statements are everywhere but they key to getting through the noise is to ask for or find yourself base numbers that you can do your own research on. If I get to those and can rationally think about motives of the authors presenting me the other statistics I can see past the lie, assuming one is being told. Not every statistic is a lie, but you should begin with the assumption that it is. If it is a source you value, Доверяй, но проверяй. Trust. But verify.
I am going to be making a lot of assumptions in the examples, so I am being totally transparent about that. Just as you likely have been taught “any statement with ‘always’ or ‘never’ is always false” I am not claiming that the leanings I speak towards are 100% true. Because they are not.
Typically Democratic, liberal, or left leaning sources have wanted to elevate the fear in COVID. As a surge begins we see the headlines everywhere. “Cases up 4,000% from last week!” Is this a case to bolt your doors and put plastic on the windows to the point of risking suffocation because the virus is everywhere? There’s only one way to find out. If last week there was 1 case and this week there are 40, that is in fact 4,000% but in a town of 100,000 it is certainly not cause for panic. It is something to keep an eye on and objectively understand but reacting to a percentage is akin to jumping off a bridge into a raging river because you heard a twig snap and thing therefore the bridge is collapsing. Overreacting will likely cause more problems. Think the toilet paper shortages and such when folks were totally irrational when we had no supply chain problems with toilet paper, but their reaction caused what they falsely believed was happening. It was a self fulfilling prophecy. What then happens is next week when the cases go from 40 to 37, you hear nothing from these same sources. Their motive is not to help you feel things are under control, it is to freak you out.
On the other hand Republican, conservative, or right leaning sources want to go far too much to the virus is overblown side of the equation. “Deaths are only at 0.1%, so there is nothing to fear.” Problem is in a country the size of the US that translates into 350,000 dead people. That’s nothing to ignore, especially when vaccines exist for this virus now just as the ones that have made polio not be something to be concerned about.
In class, even back in the 80s, the best source of lying with statistics was the USA Today front page graph. It is always presented at a scale that makes whatever is being shown as massively important, but when you look at the graph that moves from the top to the bottom at an incredible slope (or falls at a similarly precipitous rate), you see a lie. When you look at it you see that the graph does not go from 0 to 1,000, it goes from 952 to 954. Many times scale is used when you cannot be impacted by massive or miniscule percentages as above, so instead they lie to you with a scale zoomed it at the level of an electron microscope.
We’ve been bombarded with all kinds of things in the last few years. “Immigrants are streaming across the border at the highest rate in 100 years!” or “Border crossings are up 250%!” “Inflation is at the highest rate since 1984!” “Gas is up 25% since 60 minutes ago!” All of this in the media (yes even the media you trust), and yes in this case I do mean ALL and believe exceptions, if they exist are a likely as a unicorn, is to get you to have an emotional reaction on one extreme or the other, though sadly typically is it fear, anger, despair etc. If you understand that, you know that to determine if you care about what is being said is to get the raw data and overlay that against your risk tolerance for whatever the danger is that is being reported. All of those hockey stick shaped graphs are not likely calls to action that you need to react to, but if you do that they’ve done their job. I am in no way suggesting there is nothing to be concerned about and take action on, but I am saying that perhaps 10% of what is out there is worthy of any of your mental energy beyond exploring it enough to understand the lie that is being told and what the truth is that is highly likely less dire than the headline.
I’ve grown so weary of friends, family and the broader world being driven to their respective corners and just ready to fight as never before. I want intelligent debate about topics again, not polarized freak outs or refusals to even examine opposite information. I’d like the US to remain a functional democracy, and the only way that happens is for a large majority of the citizens to be capable of this. I look at stories from both sides on topics important to me and realize the truth is somewhere in between “cases are rising at a rate higher than ever seen in the history of the universe” and “all the deaths are from breathing in toxic fumes from foreign waste secretly stored in underground tanks and not COVID”. Yes, it takes work to do your own research and not just sit in front of whatever channel or website you look at and reading the two second headline designed to get you to dig in at your campsite. As someone who does not just take what is presented to be as “the truth” I do not understand how others live any other way other than just laziness or apathy. Sometimes I find that my opinion was wrong (yes shocking I know in a world where everyone things they are the sole people on the planet who know the truth) and have to admit I made a mistake. I’ll keep trying to help others see the base facts that data shows, including the fact that many times the data is just interesting but not really leading us anywhere concrete, but fabricated around the narrative someone wants you to believe.
So in short, where the data leads me to is, COVID is real, and people are dying from it at a rate higher than I feel is necessary given what we have available to us. Immigrants are not overrunning the country any more than before so learn to love people different than yourself and take is as an opportunity to grow. Inflation happens and after a massive world wide impact of shut downs needed to keep people from dying and even higher rates than the high numbers we have seen, lets stop blaming people and instead work together to help get supply in line with demand, and remember that with Carter and Reagan we had double digit inflation and found a way through, so it’s not as bad as people may want you to believe with numbers. There is a reason inflation is higher than anytime since 1984. Because before 1984 it was worse. Much worse. Ask your parents or grandparents when they considered themselves lucky to lock in an 18% mortgage. Breathe and do what you can and stop fighting being driven by the statistics designed to make you mad. Happy people or people determined to reach out and work with their neighbor are a lot more fun than bitchy people who have no ideas for effective solutions who find grumbling as their most effective contribution to the world. More of us in the first camp give us all support for each other to get through these tough times. Have hope. Things will get better as we work together. Finally, help people learn how not to be sheep manipulated by statistics and to exercise control over their life.
blendeddad 