Facts Aren't Dead, But They Aren't Relevant Either

I came across this graphic the other day and thought I'd share it:

Now the fun thing about this little equation is looking at the thousands of comments it has on the web of people reporting their answers (The correct answer is 7, by the way). After quickly browsing, I saw the most popular answer to be 1, although 5, 3.5, and 7 were also prevalent.

But I'm not writing this to complain about the education level of the US; in fact, this situation seems much more similar to a headline in The Onion that reads: "Parents Don't Remember Enough Colors To Help With Kindergartener's Homework." Completely understandable. It would seem that there are a lot of people who don't use the order of operations in everyday life, myself included, so it wouldn't be surprising that people would forget.

Except that's not the entire problem. There were comments, written in combative, didactic, lecturing tones, explaining the order of operations and applying to this equation, conclusively asserting the answer to be something other than 7 (usually 5). One such commenter gave showed his work as:

6-1x0+2/2
6-0+2/2
6-0+1
6-1
5

Others, usually those who chose 1 as the answer, entirely ignored or forgot the order of operations, blurting out their left-to-right methodology, as in this example:

Anything x 0 = 0, and 0 + 2 = 2 and 2/2 = 1, so the answer is 1.

So the problem is only partly that many people either don't know or have forgotten how to do simple math equations. But there is another problem here, and I think it offers insight into a phenomenon that took place recently in Tampa Bay.

Paul Ryan earned the nickname "Lyin' Ryan" for his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, a speech with "another level" of dishonesty. A Romney aide once commented that the campaign will not be "dictated by fact checkers," a statement many have taken to mean that the Republican Party intends to say whatever it wants in order to win the election.

So are facts dead? Well, if you read the title of this post you'd know my opinion about that. There is an important NPR article that argues that facts are indeed dead, and in my last post I agreed with the article and discussed how politicians sticking to statements they know to be false and have been publicly exposed as false. I suppose they believe it's more humiliating to be wrong than to lie, that the most importantly quality in a political leader is uncompromising stubbornness, masculinity at its worst. The biggest casualty of this stubbornness is reality.

According to my history research at New York University, a big development towards the dying of facts occurred during the Reagan presidency with regards to state massacres conducted by El Salvador (my historical focus was Central America, after all). The US-supported government, supported essentially because it wasn't communist, had slaughtered entire villages and buried hundreds in rural mass graves, which were found by journalists along with at least one witness. Of course this would disgrace the Reagan presidency since they had supported the Salvadoran regime and intended to continue doing so to fight communism, so they took a strategy that hadn't been used before: they denied the facts. But it wasn't as simple as that. They discredited the journalist who originally brought the story to light, claiming he either had dubious motives for publishing the story or that he didn't understand what he found, and also claiming that the main witness was not reliable. This strategy worked well, and there wasn't a consensus about what really happened in El Salvador until long after Reagan left office, if there even is a consensus or if anyone still cares. And this method of doubting the source of evidence has justified a lot of misinformation.

This tactic is more effective now because of all the corroborating right wing "journalistic" sources eager to rush in and support a false claim that benefits their ideology. Now, this is where the math comes back in (you were wondering if I'd forgotten about it, weren't you?). Suppose you see this equation and have never worked with anything like it before:

6-1x0+2/2 = ?

Now there are three methods for solving this equation: the two I mentioned above and the correct one:

6-1x0+2/2
6-0+1
7

Supporters of each answer are giving reasons for their beliefs, and they all seem plausible Left-to-right makes sense because that's how we read, and so does solving using order of operations one at a time instead of in pairs. Some express disbelief at other plausible answers (one answer read, "How do you get 7 from that?!").

The fact is that if you use the order of operations correctly the answer is 7, but if you've never encountered the order of operations before how would you choose what to believe? You might think the correct answer is 1 simply because more people chose it - even though I know 7 to be the answer I still doubted myself for a moment when I saw the sheer number of 1s.

In the meantime, Bill O'Reilly is repeating again and again that the answer is 5 because only a pin-head wouldn't use pemdas in order one at a time, and Sean Hannity says that only mooching welfare queens would get an outlandish number such as 7 from that equation, and Rush Limbaugh insists that only someone with a woman's intelligence would get 1. Each bring on their guest "experts" who they claim to be mathematicians who diagram the answer to be 5 with holographic numbers floating in the air, and Glenn Beck cries at the beauty of the "correct" answer and Ann Coulter scoffs at the idea of sitting down with a believer of 7 and having a conversation about mathematics. Gerardo Rivera blames social problems on people who have a dangerous belief in 7 and Gretchen Carlson laments that if everyone would just see the correctness of the answer 5 then the country would be great again. Karl Rove moans that scaling back on public service and creating huge tax breaks for millionaires is the only way to stop the problems caused by 7-believers and Dick Cheney insists only a non-patriotic 7-believer wouldn't want to take military action in Iran. And now, what was once a fact (that the answer is 7) is now a dangerous political ideology.

And because believing in 7 is a political ideology, anyone supporting a belief in 7 is biased and not to be trusted. Fact-checking organizations, journalists, and Nobel Laureate mathematicians try to call attention to the factual inaccuracy, but since they are seen to be supporting a political agenda and not a fact they are either ignored or actively resisted. Here a fact has been politicized.

If a person is presented with two conflicting and plausible sets of information, how does he choose which to believe? I'll trust even Wikipedia to deliver the answer here: selective perception, the subject of much research showing that when people are offered many different media sources they will gravitate towards sources that correspond closely with their political views.

Now let's say the debate is not about this equation and the number 7 but instead about, say, the effectiveness of gay therapy programs such as Pray Away The Gay, or the existence of climate change, or the harmful results of deregulation and trickle-down economics, or the dangers of fraud in elections, or whether Trayvon Martin was a bad kid and he was mostly responsible for the events that led to his death, or that women can biologically shut down a pregnancy while being raped (Akin was not the first to make this claim, ladies and gentlemen), or that Obama is Muslim and wasn't born in America, and so on.

In each of the above instances, either facts or expert consensus is available, and in each instance the facts have been distorted, ignored, or viewed as opinion rather than fact. So it's not that the facts aren't there. It's that they're being facts isn't very important in determining what a person believes.

To close, we get an understanding of why the Republican Party can be so out of touch. In each of the above instances (and many more) the Republican Party takes the position that is not supported by facts or expert consensus but a hypothetical, even fringe interpretation more or less created out of thin air mixed with political perspective. So the GOP is out of touch because they're acting in a world that doesn't exist, a world where women's bodies' "juices don't flow" during rape, where election fraud is widespread and threatening, where homosexuality can be cured and climate change is a hoax, where cutting government services to almost nothing and granting huge tax breaks to the wealthiest in the country is actually better for all citizens, and so on. The country the GOP wants control over is hypothetical, based on ideologically and religiously based laws of nature that don't apply in reality. And to win power in reality, the party increasingly needs to convince voters of the falseness of the facts governing the real country and drag us all into its twisted fantasy rather than confront the accuracy of truth.

Here's a comic about hypothetical situations. Enjoy much of our government's operating as if we're all living in one.