There was a sad funeral recently in Chicago, commemorating
the tragic demise on April 18 of a long time friend of us all. The event was first reported by the Chicago
Tribune; National Public Radio then brought
the news to a wider public last Sunday, so many of you may have already learned
the tragic news.[1]
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| Funeral for Facts |
The funeral ceremony
was to commemorate the death of Facts.
The deceased was ill for a very long time and on life
support in recent years. Death
mercifully came about a week ago. The funeral was attended by reporters,
bloggers, and news media of all kinds.
The final blow was when Florida Congressman Allen West
declared that 78 to 81 members of the Democratic party were card carrying
members of the Communist Party. This was
quickly established by fact checkers to be a total fabrication, but Congressman
West continued to stand by his declaration.
West is the same congressman who claims that student loans are a socialist
plot to educate voters.
Facts are survived by its brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and
their sister Emphatic Assertion, according to the Chicago Tribune.[2]
Authorities say that facts, when they were alive, were “observable,
concrete particulars in the real world,” things you can see, measure, and
count; they first came into our modern consciousness at the time of Francis
Bacon in the 17th century.[3]
Bill Adair of Politifact.com spends all his time performing
autopsies on the dead body of Facts. He has been unable to determine who the killer
was. It appears from his initial findings that almost everyone in American
politics has had a hand in the crime.
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| Photo from "You Are Not So Smart" |
Adding to the carnage, political scientists, Brendan Nyhan
and Jason Reiflert, discovered the “backfire” effect, which is a name for the
odd phenomenon now being studied by cognitive scientists. This is the
phenomenon where a person who believes a false story is presented with incontrovertible
facts contrary to his erroneous belief. The result is that the person will
believe the false belief even more strongly! In other words, facts have no effect
whatsoever on false beliefs.
Nyhan lists a number of these instances on his
website[4]
and in his fascinating book, “You Are
Not So Smart.”
One classic case of the backfire effect is the rise of the
“Birthers.”
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| Born in ? |
This is a fast-growing group who believe that President
Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia.
The President played along with this for a while, but finally revealed
an authenticated birth certificate issued in Hawaii. As soon as he presented
that factual evidence, the group exploded in size and became more convinced of
his foreign birth.
Go figure.
This is a certified organic free-range blog.
To comment on this blog, click
on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “Post a Comment.”
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| The Author on His Sailboat |
[1] The
Death of Facts in an Age of Truthiness, All Things Considered April 29, 2012.
[2]
Rex W. Huppke, Chicago Tribune reporter. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04-19/news/ct-talk-huppke-obit-facts-20120419_1_facts-philosopher-opinion.
[3] Mary
Poovey of NYU, A History of the Modern Fact. http://english.fas.nyu.edu/object/MaryPoovey.html.
The author blames the demise of facts on
economists who started using mathematical modeling to create a kind of “truth”
that cannot be observed, and on the internet which allows anyone to make
outrageous claims and gain at least a few believers. This blog is an excellent example.
The reason I use endnotes in this blog is to give the illusion that facts, or
at least some authority, underlies the outrageous claims made in the text. Of
course, this is only a trick, used by virtually everyone these days.
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