A couple of weeks ago, I had a funny (in retrospect...) conversation with a couple of kibitzing 1Ls. I had (in a separate conversation with a somewhat brighter 2L) sweepingly generalized this year's presidential election as a choice between "stupid hope" and "stupid fear." The 2L asked me whether it was "really" stupid fear, suggesting that we may not know how many terrorist attacks have been prevented since the Towers went down. I responded that, no, I could hardly claim epistemic certainty about the absence of theoretical events--

Chapter One: The Great Debate

--and then I was interrupted by an imperious blonde. "If you don't know it with 'epistemic certainty,' then you don't know it, so why don't you say that?"

I was a bit surprised to discover someone in the Law School lunchroom jonesing for an epistemological debate, but hey, great! "So," I responded, turning to her, "Do you know anything?"

A gentleman sitting to her left--husband, maybe?--responded, something like contempt or disgust contorting his face. "That was... so... condescending."

It took me a full second to figure out what the heck he was talking about. "No, no... do you know anything? As in, do you have anything that is actual... is it possible for you to... know anything at all? I mean, if you're going to demand epistemic certainty, that's an incredibly high standard for labeling something as 'knowledge.'"

Apparently I had completely lost them both. She had parroted my phrase without grasping its meaning. She did not want to debate epistemology. She wanted to tell me that anyone who didn't vote Republican was evil to the core; by characterizing the election as two stupid choices, I had clearly cast my lot with Obama... somehow? She proceeded to offer most of the empty clichés you might expect from any zealous and moderately brain-damaged supporter of pretty much anything. To these I responded with a handful of carefully-chosen facts--facts which, I hasten to add, I do not know with anything approaching epistemic certainty. Just facts I've read in enough reliable places to consider them worth bringing to her attention. "Facts" I believe, facts that strike me as plausible.

"I don't believe that," her male friend chimed in when it became uncomfortably clear that his associate was making a complete fool of herself. "You're just inventing stuff to strengthen your position! You can't prove any of that stuff."

I was flabbergasted. "Look," I said, "I'm not writing a law review article here. I'm having an impromptu political debate over leftover soup. If you want to sit down with me for a few hours, I could probably show you credible sources for everything I've said in the last ten minutes. But I don't wander around the law school carrying hard evidence of every assertion I might make over the course of a given day."

"But since you brought it up," I continued, "How many voters go to the polls with a head full of facts? My original point was that the driving force behind most voters this year is either irrational hope, or irrational fear--and the one they feel correlates strongly with the candidate they pick."

"Well, voters shouldn't do that," he said, defeated. "I always vote on the issues."

I laughed. "So you always vote third-party, then?"

All he managed was a lame, "Sometimes." At this point the couple was getting up to leave. The woman, halfway out the door, shot off a quick, derisive, "Oh sure, throw your vote away!" before the door clacked shut behind her, one final hollow, insulting, and frankly meaningless cliché bringing our debate to a close.

Chapter Two: The Life of a Fact

I was reminded of this debate today when I read an article on copyright infringement entitled "750,000 Lost Jobs? The Dodgy Digits Behind the War on Piracy." In a frankly brilliant piece of investigative journalism, Ars Technica's Julian Sanchez slit to ribbons several heavily-recycled statistics regarding the United States' estimated economic loss to copyright infringement. I encourage you to read the whole article, but here's a great excerpt anyway:

Try to follow the thread of citations to their source, and you encounter a fractal tangle of recursive reference that resembles nothing so much as the children's game known, in less-PC times, as "Chinese whispers," and these days more often called "Telephone." Usually, the most respectable-sounding authority to cite for the numbers (the FBI for the dollar amount, Customs for the jobs figure) is also the most prevalent--but in each case, that authoritative "source" proves to be a mere waystation on a long and tortuous journey.

Basically, when the RIAA or the MPAA or any of a million so-called "economic authorities" tell you that peer-to-peer software or whatever is hurting the economy by X amount of jobs or dollars, they're operating a hair's-breadth from outright lies. But that's not the point of this entry--rather, it was fascinating to read how an estimate of "anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000" lost jobs was transformed, over the course of decades into a hard-and-fast "750,000 lost jobs."

Because I have experienced this very thing in source checking for the law review! The horrific, misguided, and technologically irresponsible "CP80 Bill" was the subject of a symposium at BYU Law School, so the presenters all get their material in our Law Review. One of the articles I edited contained this statement from Elizabeth M. Shea's article, The Children's Internet Protection Act of 1999:

[A]dolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 are one of the largest consumers of "adult oriented" material on the Internet.

In checking that source, I found Elizabeth to be quoting something U.S. Representative Ernest Istook said in 1998 at certain congressional hearings. But he certainly hadn't cited the material, so I went digging elsewhere, and found an old Newsday article that pinpointed the statistic as coming from the "U.S. Commission on Pornography"--a study undertaken in 1989, long before the Internet had escaped the bounds of academia and military experimentation.

In other words, in 1989, adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 were "one of" the largest consumers of "adult oriented" material, period. (IIRC, that demographic was in fact the third-largest "adult material" consumer of several fairly arbitrary demographics, so it looks like even in 1989 the Commission was playing fast-and-loose with language--but don't hold me to that, I may be misremembering! d^_^b)

Anyhow, that finding in itself is probably much more alarming to most of you than it is to me, but regardless, it was eye-opening to really "follow the information" back to a source and see how one "fact" had been taken up by a particular cause and dragged through the streets for all to see--a veritable death-march that would, within ten years, erode all context from its battered frame.

Is it any wonder voters don't feel especially compelled to "vote the issues?" Whose issues? Whose facts? How many studies can you account for in a given decision? How many eventualities can you anticipate?

Chapter Three: Now What?

We are a society that loves to demand proof--but only from those whose positions we find distasteful. We do not demand proof from people who are telling us what we want to hear, what we already believe, what we desperately hope to be true. And yet we demand an impossible burden of proof from those whose attitudes differ, whose pessimism we find distasteful, whose conclusions make us feel vulnerable or foolish or wrong.

But, while one could waste a lifetime seeking epistemic certainty in every case, my experience is that the law of diminishing returns makes it possible to approach certainty, at least with regard to one's life choices. But most people do not read enough or think enough--and most people are simply not humble enough to recognize their mistakes and learn therefrom.

Here's another uncited statistic for you: most drivers think of themselves as "above average." And while some undoubtedly are, most (from a purely mathematical perspective) are not. We are all egotists. We are all ready to be optimistic about our own chances, and doubtful of others. That, I hasten to add, doesn't make us wrong! But hopefully it inspires in our choices some measure of caution.

Because most of the time, you can't know "the facts." They often look shiny, so it may help to think of facts like money. Use them to enrich your life, but don't expect them to buy you happiness. If they look fake, they probably are. They're only worth as much as everyone thinks they're worth. And if you can help it, don't put them in your mouth--you don't know where they've been.