The title of this post, Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, has been attribute to Mark Twain when he was commenting on the role of politicians in our lives, whose job it seems is now to cover up, white wash, or simple mislead people as they go around doing their daily tasks of governing. What is amazing is that during the election process, most of us know that we are being fed hollow promises by candidates. I think that initially most political candidates are honest enough people with noble, but naïve, ambitions to help the people that elect them, but once elected get caught in the insidious nature of politics in which lies and manipulation for some reason seem the norm. Yet, despite knowing this, we still elect them and get upset when they do not, or barely, fulfil their campaign promises to make our lives better. What is going on in our minds? That title line implies that there are lies that told to gloss over realities, lies that are blatantly and brazenly told to mislead, and then lies that are told to push agenda’s using statistics, which few but experts can usually fathom and for some reason most people seem to readily accept because some technocrat said so and is reported as such by the mass media. When I was a researcher publishing my work in peer reviewed journals, I had to show my statistics clearly and justify the results that validated my conclusions. The statistics I see flying out of the news reports by corporate funded technocrats often make no sense and rarely justify any rational conclusions they proport to make. I can only conclude they are there merely to impress and mislead people who do not bother to look up the work being quoted by the press. And there is a reason people generally trust what they read (or view) from sources they accept as OK even when they know bias exists.
At heart, most people are kind and honest and care about the people around them. Note how people act in emergencies when the social masks are dropped temporarily to reveal the inner bright angels of our nature’s. We are born highly social animals that need love and interaction, and that is our primal drive before we are socialized into all manner of separateness from each other. Look at a diverse batch of two-year old’s playing with each other. They will notice differences between each other but then just go about playing. These young children no more care about the differences than the myriad species of creatures on Earth do where within the species the physical characteristics do not matter (except perhaps during the breeding season). I watch cats and dogs and I notice that each animal seems to know what is happening from another of its species based on body language, pheromones’, or other unique aspect of that species. From what I have read, deception in the greater animal world does occur between individuals (e.g., higher apes and dolphins), but is rare. I think that in humans, while our brains allow us greater expansion of expression through our ego’s, our general focus, unless excess negative enforcement is experienced, is to trust. I think that this is why we feel betrayal so acutely.
Social psychologist, Tim Levine, has studied truth and deception and found that, even in high suspicion situations, truth-bias still occurs. (Truth-bias refers to people’s inclination towards believing that the communication of another person, regardless of whether or not that person is actually lying or being untruthful. It is human nature to believe communication is honest, which in turn makes humans highly vulnerable to deception. APA.) An extension of truth-bias is truth-default which is when misleading a person during communicating is considered deception. There are many different kinds of deception, lies, equivocations, concealments, exaggerations, and deliberate understatements that people use to avoid punishment, maintain relationships, and preserve self- image. There is a smaller group that deliberately use deception or lies to drive personal agenda’s that can be nefarious in nature. On the whole most people will primarily be honest to achieve any specific goal unless such a goal requires some form of deception to be achieved. Lies are a conscious decision but can become unconsciously habitual in any with extreme egoic personalities (e.g., narcissists, sociopaths, or psychopaths).
To sum up, as long as a person is truth-biased while they retain the perception that everything that they are being told is true. Levine has found that people are not good at recognizing lies even when their intuition tells them something is amiss. It seems to be an inherent cognitive mechanism to not actively consider the possibility of deceit or to dismiss that possibility of deceit in the absence of obvious evidence to the contrary. When we listen to people that we more likely trust (e.g., authorities) we listen through the filtering of our belief structures (derived from our conditioning). Hence the sources we accept as OK because they conform to our views.
I have talked about lies and damn lies, and now a little on statistics. It is incredibly easy to tell the truth about some data and yet still lie with statistics. The mass media do it all the time to alarm us or to mislead us. For example, when you see a headline that crime in a small village has risen 100% since a new mayor was elected, we assume truth and make false conjectures about the mayor and crime. First, what has the crime to do with the new mayor, and what exactly were the numbers of this crime wave – there was one more theft this month than last month – hopefully you see what I’m getting at. Most people take things at face value as the truth instead of questioning the assumptions and underlying data used for this sensational headline meant to mislead and generate a point of view. Add something fearful into the mix (such as a 100% rise in murders instead of just a rise in crime) and you get a nice compliance public ready to believe what they want to believe to resolve a problem possibly generated by a nefarious mind.
“He Who Controls the Narrative Controls the People…Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” George Orwell, 1984. This past century (e.g., The century of Spin, Dinan & Miller) especially has been one of manipulation of the public opinion everywhere (e.g., Public Opinion, Walter Lippman), also called propaganda. This last year has been especially notable in the wealth and depth of lies perpetrated in the global population by leaders and technocrats to drive our compliance with C-19 rules. Add to that all the censorship in the name of protecting us from bad information and you get something wicked being perpetrated on us all by the hierarchy. Truth can usually stand on its own merits. If censorship and misleading statistics are needed to remove alternate views, then nefarious propaganda is occurring. For example, Big Pharma telling us that an experimental and largely untested vaccine has 94% efficacy should be seen at beast as dubious, especially when they have no liability on any adverse effects. Looking at the large numbers of test subjects (35,000) and the low numbers of those tested (167) in control and test groups with symptoms then subjected to ‘statistics’ brings the real efficacy down to more like 10%. I know so many desperately want to see a vaccine work so they can get back to ‘normal’ but was the old normal really that good?
We have been getting Lies, Damn lies, and Statistical lies to keep us quiet, complacent, and all too willing to go along with draconian lockdowns, dubious solutions, propaganda and mindless censorship. Our rights have been eroded away and all we get is, that it is for the public best. “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” Benjamin Franklin. I get frustrated at the mindless memes driving our current opinions. Don’t get me wrong, I like memes, but I don’t base my decisions on them. I try to find our facts and truth when I can and then make my mind up based on my Pyrrho of Elis approach (see earlier post Skepticism {Jan 2018}).
“If one day there comes a time to choose sides, it’s better to have worked at becoming informed than to later make excuses for having buried our heads in the sand.” Ed Newman.
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