(2017-03-08) Harford Problem With Facts

Tim Harford on The problem with facts

1953: Scientists were publishing solid evidence of a link between smoking and cancer.

In 1995, Robert Proctor, a historian at Stanford University who has studied the tobacco case closely, coined the word “agnotology”. This is the study of how ignorance is deliberately produced

Mainstream journalists, too, are starting to embrace the idea that lies or errors should be prominently identified (Fact-Check).

And yet: will this sudden focus on facts actually lead to a more informed electorate, better decisions, a renewed respect for the truth? The history of tobacco suggests not.

One infamous internal memo from the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, typed up in the summer of 1969, sets out the thinking very clearly: “Doubt is our product.”

Tempting as it is to fight lies with facts, there are three problems with that strategy.

• The first is that a simple untruth can beat off a complicated set of facts simply by being easier to understand and remember
• There’s a second reason why facts don’t seem to have the traction that one might hope. Facts can be boring
• only 4 per cent of the sample read enough serious news to be worth including in such a study. (The hurdle was 10 articles and two opinion pieces over three months.)
• In the war of ideas, boredom and distraction are powerful weapons
• The endgame of these distractions is that matters of vital importance become too boring to bother reporting
• There’s a final problem with trying to persuade people by giving them facts: the truth can feel threatening, and threatening people tends to backfire

When we reach the conclusion that we want to reach, we’re engaging in “motivated reasoning”.

Is there an answer? Perhaps there is

We know that scientific literacy can actually widen the gap between different political tribes on issues such as climate change — that is, well-informed liberals and well-informed conservatives are further apart in their views than liberals and conservatives who know little about the science

a new research paper from Dan Kahan, Asheley Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft and Kathleen Hall Jamieson explores the role not of scientific literacy but of scientific Curiosity.

while politically motivated reasoning trumps scientific knowledge, “politically motivated reasoning . . . appears to be negated by science curiosity”.

We have to find a way to make people want to seek them out. Curiosity is the seed from which sensible democratic decisions can grow.