Confusing fact and opinion
Once the dust has settled on the St John’s museum fiasco, we’ll be able to see things more clearly. I rather suspect that the first thing that’s going to occur to us – if we have any sense – is that there is a marked and significant difference between fact and opinion. That, and how it’s invariably wise not to sign petitions when you don’t know what nutter’s name is going to turn up on the list next to your eminent one, or what nutty comment is going to be put down next to your sensible one.
The idea has grown of popular suffrage in as many areas of our lives as possible, even on matters of fact. Many people have come to believe, or have had the idea planted in them somehow, that because they have a vote, this gives them the right to interfere directly in the running of the country, vetoing or approving things from the largest project to the most insignificant piece of legislation. It is pointless, at this juncture, to explain that one has a vote precisely to allow one to elect a representative to make decisions on one’s behalf. We do that every five years. In between, we leave it up to them. We make our opinion known, of course. We shout and we scream. Sometimes, we might even applaud. But when it comes to the crunch, they decide.
In some cases, they don’t decide, and that’s when there are legally-constituted public bodies which take the decision out of the hands of parliamentarians. But the situation remains the same: the man with the ballot paper does not take the decisions. The man with the ballot paper voices an opinion, and that opinion may or may not be taken on board.
Once in a lifetime, we might get to use our vote between elections, when a referendum is called on a matter of tremendous importance, like whether or not Malta should join the European Union. But it stands to reason that we are not going to have a referendum on everything or anything else: whether to put Christ on our euro coin; whether to have an opera house or parliament; whether to have a museum under St John’s Square; whether pigs will fly or have their ears clipped. Yet a referendum is precisely what some people think they are entitled to. Reading between the lines of much of the nonsense that has been written over the last few days, this is what they seem to be demanding. Only they’re not – what they are in fact demanding is that the powers-that-be – and the identity of those powers is not quite certain given what happened last week – bow down to public opinion.
Their definition of public opinion is ‘who shouts loudest’. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that public opinion, as in the infamous incidents of the last few days, is not represented by what used to be called pillars of society, mixed in with a particularly loud crowd from Sliema or thereabouts. For the government – and the opposition, for that matter, if it has changed its policy on referendums – to go with public opinion, it would have to conduct a referendum. Otherwise, the silent majority find themselves railroaded over by a tiny minority with a good publicity machine and an effective misinformation campaign. I might add something else, too: referendums are held after intensive campaigns by both sides of the divide. They are not held after solely a misinformation campaign by the No camp.
There is another point, and it is an important one. Votes are taken on matters of opinion, and not on matters of fact. You can’t vote a fact out of existence, nor can you blot it out by claiming it is an opinion. Last Saturday, The Financial Times carried an excellent leading article on this matter. It so perfectly summed up what happened in Malta over the last few weeks that I found myself hoping that Astrid Vella and lots of her friends and associates take that newspaper. The article was called ‘Wisdom of nerds’. “Any attempt to turn mob opinion into the test for truth is pernicious,” it went. “That a thought might be popularly believed does not make it true. The earth did not stand still because Galileo fell out of favour, and evolution has not been disproved by the faith of believers. The wisdom of crowds can only be conventional.”
This growing inability to distinguish between fact and opinion, and to believe that opinions can be turned into facts if enough people share them (Astrid Vella and the FAA being a case in point on the matter of the museum), has been blamed on what is being called the Wikipedia phenomenon. There is no better place to find trivia than on Wikipedia, and it is a useful first stop in the search for the basics. But it is at once a cause and a symptom of a dangerous new pandemic: the belief that we can create facts out of opinions, or dismiss facts as opinions, and that the two are interchangeable. Notice how quickly the opinion that the cathedral will fall down or crack if a hole is dug before it became a ‘fact’. And to compound the confusion, the original opinion was not based on fact. Rather the opposite – those who manifested this opinion also manifested another: that they wished to stop the process by which the facts are drawn out through scientific investigation.
The article in The Financial Times referred to this problem, too. Wiki-enthusiasts, it said, cite the “wisdom of crowds” in claiming that just as a market finds prices for goods based on differing opinions of what they are worth, so a crowd can establish what truth is. Doesn’t that describe what we saw happen with Astrid Vella and her followers? They believed that they created the truth out of their opinion with the help of a lot of noise and a seriously flawed petition – and some rather noisome behaviour from a couple of government backbenchers and a geologist who found him drawn into an imbroglio. The Financial Times made a comment which I have made myself several times over the last few days, but because I am not taken seriously by certain people, and The Financial Times is, I will quote it for their benefit: “Whereas prices are reliant on opinions and values, facts are either true or false.”
Every scientist knows this, which is why it was so odd to see people with a scientific background drawn into the mess. You don’t even have to be a scientist. You just have to be one step up from the intellectual level of gossips round the greengrocer’s van.
This article is published in The Malta Independent today.
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I’m afraid it is not only the crowd who are unscientific, eschew facts and believe that because a large number people believe something to be true then therefore it must be so. Scientists too are astonishingly unscientific – global warming, bird ‘flu and AIDs are just three issues where scientists predict doom and gloom and ‘prove it’ with ‘facts’ – but sad to say scientists are just as prone to the whims of fashion, the media and the herd instinct – no more rational in fact than an angry mob of Springfield residents baying for blood and setting out to burn down someone’s house.
Old people in the rural area where I grew up used to say:
‘Millions of flies are attracted by excrement. So does that mean excrement is good?’
I suppose that the learning lesson from all of this is that the marketing dictum that ‘perception is stronger than fact’ helds sway also in the political arena.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090219/letters/the-majority-are-not-necessarily-right-1
@Steve M,
I beg to differ on that. I have seen many, many scientists use facts to back up their theories and then have other people interpret these theories as fact.
The Bird flu was one of them – yes, it was very virulent and *could* have been really bad but scientists always pointed out that it would get bad *if* it mutates into a worse strain of virus. The media blew the whole thing out of proportion by covering it as if the world was about to end but when you looked at the facts, more people die of malaria (a preventable disease) every day than died of the bird flu. I remember having heated discussions at work with people who claimed that we should take precautions “just in case the bird flu arrives in Malta” as they took whatever the media reported as sacrosant.
The same applies to global warming – at the most recent IPCC, scientists put their name down to state that they feel that “there is a 98% probability that global warming is caused by human endeavours”. Many people laughed at them (including in the local press) as for them “isn’t it obvious? Isn’t that why we have freak weather?” when in actual fact, there are other theories.
The problem, I believe, is that the media never makes a distinction between fact and theory and then ignores the fact that the great hairy unwashed accept something as fact “because it was on the news/radio/newspaper” and thus further propagate an opinion as fact.
There’s one little problem. What is a fact? In Galileo’s time it was a “fact” that the Earth was the centre of the universe. Now, of course, we know better. MALTA is the centre of the universe. The point being that facts and truth can change with time. Science and history abound with examples.
@Steve M.
“but sad to say scientists are just as prone to the whims of fashion, the media and the herd instinct – no more rational in fact than an angry mob of Springfield residents baying for blood and setting out to burn down someone’s house.”
The real scientist is the one who is in the basement researching, writing down notes, thinking about new concepts, testing them in a lab and then publishing the proven (and unproven) concept in scientific journals.
Those “scientists” which you speak of, are not scientists at all. They’re only a bunch of hired lackeys, saying things which their goverment tells them to do. Ever heard of psych engineering? For years and years, we’ve had an onslaught of global warming news, telling us not to use “pif-paf” or deodorants because their gaseous residues make a hole in the ozone layer. For all I know, the earth has been warming up for the last couple of thousand years since the last ice age.
Scientists should be concentrating more on how to get us out of here if something really nasty happens.
@ Andrea: “Old people in the rural area where I grew up”
Where was the rural area, if I might ask?
@ John: That wasn’t a fact. It was a scientific model. Scientific models can change (indeed they must change when there’s room for improvement) to fit the data.
@ John Meilak: Really now.
Leo Said
Germany/’Deepest Bavaria’, extremely rustic.
I think there is a difference between the Wikipedia effect, whereby an individual can edit or add information as opposed to the ‘ Wisdom of Crowds ‘ phenomenon (actually a book title by James Surowiecki). The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ phenomenon suggests that if you ask a large enough, diverse enough group of people a question then the mean of their answer will , almost always , be more accurate than any individual’s answer, even if that individual may have specialist knowledge of the subject.
How can the mean of the crowd’s answer, most of whom are non-specialists, and some of whom are complete morons, be more accurate than a specialist’s?
@H.P.Baxxter
Is that so? But you haven’t answered my question “What is a fact?”
As mentioned in one of your earlier posts, the problem with this case was that while the decisions taken by the actual players – the applicants and the deciding body (MEPA) – are based on fact, the whole argument was given an emotional pitch. This is a ploy frequently resorted to when arguments are weak or difficult (vide other public debates on moral, ethical, lifestyle issues etc). Also a further problem faced by the applicants and the deciding body, not only on this application but on all major applications, is that you are in fact selling the future, therefore an unknown. Take the case of the former Ulysses Lodge, what was the upshot? Better the ugliness you know than the proposed project, whatever it may be. In this case, in a couple of years’ time I have no doubt that the FAAs and the Astrids of this world will be mounting a campaign against the foundation for allowing the artefacts to disintegrate.
But, as one wise man told me…so sorry but you only get EUR14 million once in a lifetime. Can the FAA collect EUR14m? Let me think….
You never asked the question in the first place. But I’ll answer you:
A fact is a statement which can be verified. I am typing at my keyboard. That is a fact. The sky is cloudy. Fact.
In Galileo’s time, no one could check whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Or to put it in a nerdier way, there was no experiment which could disprove the observations. The epicylic theory was unwieldy perhaps, but it fitted the data very well. Telescopes had just been invented, for heaven’s sake (a pun! I scintillate today!), and accurate timekeeping too.
But why am I discussing this with you? You’ve gone off at a tangent. If you can’t distinguish between “probably” and “certainly” and if you take The Sun to be the Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, then this discussion could get very confusing.
However, I’ll give you a recent example of twisted fact and crowd “mean answer”. Look up news reports on the collision between HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant. Crowd wisdom: We have narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster of epic proportions (CND spokesman – who else?)*
*Footnote: I expect Graffitti/AD/MLP to call for a nuclear-free Mediterranean bla bla bla
Fact: Complete bollocks.
John, I have not read ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’, but I can point out a few things:
1) The word wisdom in the title is unqualified. The book is not called ‘The Great Wisdom of Crowds’.
2) The wisdom of a crowd varies according to its context and its constituents. A question on farming is better put to a crowd of agricultural scientists, whereas an answer to a mechanical problem would be easier to obtain from a crowd of engineers.
3) The word ‘crowd’ is used to give a sense of novelty to an idea that is really very old. A crowd is a group of people, and groups of people, rather than individuals, have long been trusted for their wisdom. Cities had guilds, and governments have committees of experts.
The point is, a question about civil engineering should be put to a crowd of civil engineers. By adding everyone else to the crowd, you are diluting its wisdom.
@H.P.Baxxter
Of course I asked the question. How do you think this started in the first place. Check your facts.
Exactly. Before Galileo there was no experiment to disprove the fact. But a fact it was, nevertheless. Verification was to be found in the Bible. There was absolute certainty about this – no “probably”. No one doubted it till our friend came along with his weird new theory. And even then it was by no means readily accepted as a fact. I believe there are still some nutters who deny it.
It was a fact, for ages,(backed up by documentary proof) that G.M.de Redin erected 14 coastal watch towers around Malta and Gozo. The fact is (as we know today) he built 13. It was a fact for two millenia that microbes and maggots and the like spontaneously generated out of filth and dung and other unmentionable deposits, and not from previously existing microbes etc. And then Pasteur and that lot came along.
Today’s fact is only as good as today’s methods of verification. A “verifiable” statement of fact may not always be what it seems.
@ John: What are you driving at? Are you trying to get my dander up?
And what do you mean, “Exactly”? You disagree with everything I wrote. And for pete’s sake, don’t go an about verification in the Bible. Did the Ancient Greeks (as in B.C., before you reply) read the Bible?
Which other “facts” are you having doubts about? Perhaps I could clear them up for you.
@H.P.Baxxter
“Confused? Tune in next week to . . .”
Far be it from me to be raising your dander. I think we’d best leave it at that.
@ Andrea
“Germany/’Deepest Bavaria’, extremely rustic”. Ich habe verstanden, I have understood. One of my ex-trainees was from Kelheim and is now a leading consultant in the Schwabinger Hospital in Munich. His wife is from Ansbach and both have their roots in Bauernfamilien. I personally am strongly geprägt through the region around Stuttgart and now educate myself on this blog and on other fora dealing with Malta.
John – Sliema: There’s another book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
The crowds of the title are undifferentiated and non-specialist.
Leo Said
Dealing with Malta connotes dealing with an enigma!
“Confused? Tune in next week to . . .”
Huh? Am I supposed to recognise this quote?
To all those interested in the ‘ Wisdom of Crowds ‘ phenomenon, I suggest you read the book. An excellent example of this is the stock market, which regularly predicts downturns, upturns in economies and problems at a particular company long before any ‘ expert ‘ is aware of what is going on.