“If you want to get people to believe something
really, really stupid, just stick a number on it.”
Reading PROOFINESS is an exercise in and a proof of patience. At least, that is how I felt. Funny enough, there was no dull moment. A book with the title, PROOFINESS: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, has an inherent pushback effect for many people, for sure. The author, Charles Selfie, a professor of journalism in New York University, is aware of such potential dispiriting factor that the seemingly odd and illusive title might excite and embolden. He quickly explains “Proofiness” as the “art of using bogus mathematical arguments to prove something that you know in your heart is true – even when it’s not.” He advances arguments that tend to not only dilute the potency of ‘facts and figures’ (read mathematics) but strains to paint the ordinarily dreaded subject of “numbers” in the darkest and damning of colours.
Perhaps his approach will attract and retain the attention of many with a strong bias against mathematics to have their moment of Pyrrhic victory to ‘punch’ the one subject that might have unduly tasked their intellect and frustrate their dream of an alternate academic and career glory. Whatever your mathematical preference, you will find comfort and accommodation in Selfie’s masterful presentation style and logic to offer a delightful, remarkable and revealing account of the creepy deployment of “numbers” to tell the intriguing stories of life-changing tangos in the society. The keywords in the authors subject of interest – proofiness – include journalism, politics, elections, and democracy (using America as a case study). The capstone of his argument is to demonstrate how the practitioners of these professions (if they may be so referred) exhibit a choreographed display of fake patterns of alternative facts (read falsehood) to titillate their audiences and exploit the seemingly default setting of humans to believe a lie. Why? You may ask. Selfie’s response is that it’s human nature to resist change, to cling to our old, familiar ideas instead of abandoning them in the face of new information. We shrink away from data that challenge our prejudices; we tend to seek out – and to believe – data that reinforce them, even when they are evidently flawed.
At this point, my interest was divided on whether to continue reading the book. The notion being dished out, I thought, was crabby and not worth the investment of my time, particularly during the festive season of Christmas. On the other hand, there was a strong incentive to read on to the very end. The urge to continue was compelling on account of the author’s mastery of words. Perhaps I should say, his use of words, his choice and craft in the deployment of words. He displays the expertise of an effective communicator that is deserving of his high rating as a professor of communication. The author ensures a generous infusion of the fundamental objectives of communication including informing, educating and entertaining his audience, the reader. He sure has his endearing ways with words. My resistance dissolved in the face of his audacity to tread the dreaded path and expose the trending new normal and universal culture of tending to believe and live a lie.
His style of presentation makes esoteric and mundane subjects come alive! You still want to keep faith with Charles Selfie to know more – a quest for novelty, a search for a new set of data or a new idea that forces a rethink and reappraisal of the issues of life and the world at large. He encourages this quest with his bold assertion that “Knowledge-gathering is systematic demolition and reconstruction of our view of the world.”
The author declares that “numbers have peculiar powers – they can disarm skeptics, befuddle journalists, and hoodwink the public into believing almost anything.” Numbers are that potent because in its purest form, a number is truth. The cold and crystalline world of numbers gives us the rarest of all things: absolute certainty. Numbers on their own are abstracts. When tied to a measurement of some kind, numbers acquire real-world meaning but lose its purity; it becomes tainted with the uncertainties and imperfections of the real world. Proofiness, as Selfie explains, is the art of using pure mathematics for impure ends, and he reminds that bad mathematics has a dark side. He provides a penetrating look at the intersection of math and society and in this book, that graph is skewed to the disadvantage of math, because of its wanton misapplication in political, economic and social circles.
The author employs some familiar and less popular jargon to erect pillars to build his case; Potemkin numbers, disestimate, fruit-packing, cherry-picking, apple-polishing, casuistry, statistical margin of error, regression of the moon, and electile dysfunction (distinct from the other ‘ED’ many would relate to). He describes ‘Potemkin numbers’ as fabricated and meaningless statistics where the creators care little about facts and reality. They seem convincing but are the most overt form of proofiness. ‘Disestimate’ (coined by the author) “is the act of taking a number too literally, understating or ignoring the uncertainties that surround it.” In ‘fruit-packing’, it is the false presentation of data that creates the proofiness. ‘Cherry-picking’ is lying by exclusion to make an argument seem compelling.‘Apple-polishing’ is putting the finishing touches on data, manipulating them so they appear more favourable than they actually are. He defines ‘Casuistry’ as the art of making a misleading argument through seemingly sound principle. On ‘Electile Dysfunction’ (a coinage created by the author); Selfie presents an elaborate argument to clarify his hypothesis that elections are inherently unfair. He uses the classic examples of the 2000 presidential elections in America (Bush v. Gore) and the 2008 Minnesota Senate election (Coleman v. Franken) to argue his case. It’s a given that determining the winner in an election is as simple as the act of counting; it’s as easy as counting one, two, three…and tallying the valid votes to know who has the ultimate advantage as per predetermined electoral rules. “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting,” as emphasized by Sir Tom Stoppard, a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. Experience has shown that this apparently simple procedure of counting can become complex, contentious and perplexing and fall victim of proofiness. This has led to the drab yet popular view that as long as humans are entrusted to count things, more so electoral votes, they will be subject to certain infallibility. Based on such existential evidence, the author affirms his electile dysfunctional theory that “No matter what method a government uses to run an election, it can’t be an equal contest, at least in a mathematical sense. It’s an inescapable truth: all elections are flawed, and there’s nothing we can do to fix them.”
All of these techniques encapsulated in the jargons highlighted above, according to Selfie, are forms of proofiness; all of them allow an unscrupulous person to make falsehoods look like numerical fact. He avers that “Proofiness is the raw material that arms partisans to fight off the assault of knowledge, to clothe irrationality in the garb of the rational and the scientific. This is what makes it a powerful tool for propaganda.” Politicians deploy it to ends that are often detrimental to the good health and well-being of the society. It is toxic to a democracy, to the extent that democracy is a system of government based on numbers, “and rotten numbers are eroding the entire edifice from within,” if we are to believe Selfie.
Perhaps there is an element of truth to his view because numbers have a powerful and near-mystical hold on humans. Because we think that numbers represent truth; no matter how idiotic, how unbelievable an idea is, numbers can give it credibility. And we seem to be wired to think that a number cannot be made to lie. There lies our vulnerability as humans.
The lessons from this book becomes important and critical in a world that is increasingly enmeshed with and driven by data. We ought to be attentive to the implications and consequences of proofiness as espoused by Prof Charles Selfie. He submits that our degree of knowledge will determine whether we succumb to proofiness or fight against it. It’s more than mere rhetoric; humanity may well rise or fall by the numbers, in a world being reconfigured and reshaped at tsunamic speed by powerful surging data (another word for information).
Welcome to the 21st year of the 21st century!
