If you’re on twitter a lot(like I am) you might have heard of this recent trend of people praising Osama Bin Laden.
It’s one of the more popular topics at twitter in the week leading up to Thanksgiving. If you searched for Bin Laden on twitter during that time, you’d have seen pages and pages of people talking about the trend.
This seems to goes beyond just talking about blowback, which is the idea that foreign intervention often ends up making you enemies. Apparently some people are unironically saying that Bin-Laden was right, or even that he was justified in carrying out 9/11. It’s good to understand blow-back, but there’s no justifying what Bin Laden did.
To the casual twitter user, this might seem like a disturbing trend. A lot of people are seemingly defending Bin Laden. But something about this phenomenon is strange to me. If so many people are unironically defending Bin Laden, then why haven’t I encountered any of them in the wild? I have encountered people in the wild talking about blowback, but so far, every post I’ve seen where someone is actually defending Bin Laden was brought to me by someone else.
If encountering an ideologue “in the wild” means that you’re encountered them first hand, then encountering them second-hand is analogous to encountering them in a zoo. If you go to an actual zoo, you can be sure that you’ll see some lions, tigers, elephants, gorillas, and any number of exotic animals. However you’d be hard pressed to find those same animals out in the wild. Even if you go to their known habitats, actually seeing one isn’t always a frequent occurrence.
When people share the posts of their ideological opponents, they tend not to share the more reasonable posts. They’re motivated to share the most outrageous ones they can find so that they make their opposition look bad. They’re also trying to drive engagement, and outrageous posts are good at driving engagement.
The first twitter post I referenced in this entry was brought to you by Libs of TikTok. Libs of TikTok is a conservative social media personality that’s dedicated to sharing the most outrageous-looking posts and actions on behalf of liberals. Usually they focus on trans issues, but over the past few months they’ve been posting about Israel–Hamas war. Libs of TikTok is a sort of ideological zoo. Just like you can go to a real zoo to see the lions and elephants, you can go to one of Libs of TikTok’s social media accounts to see the people who praise Bin Laden.This is not to say that Bin-Laden-praisers don’t really exist. They clearly do exist. A lot of people have encountered them, and you can probably go track down some of those posts right now if you really wanted. But they might not be as frequent as they seem. Libs of TikTok, and other similar accounts signal-boost the ones that do exist. They present a distorted view of the ideological landscape, and make things like Bin-Laden praising seem more common then it really is.
This an application of Alyssa Vance’s Chinese robber fallacy: There are over 1 billion Chinese people. If one out of every ten thousand of them are robbers, that would result in more than a hundred thousand Chinese robbers. That’s a lot of robbers, and if someone wanted to make you think that Chinese people were robbers, they could easily share true examples of Chinese robbers until your attention span was depleted, even if only 0.01% of them actually were robbers.
No outright fake news is needed in order to have this effect. If given a large enough world, there are almost always enough examples of a rare ideology to cherry pick in order to make it seem like a common one.
There are many other examples of zoos on the internet. Reddit_Lies on Twitter is a zoo. /r/ChoosingBeggars on Reddit is a sort of zoo. The algorithms on the typical social media site, that feed you the most high-engagement content have the effect of a zoo. Even a normal news publication is a sort of natural zoo. The news doesn’t tell you about every day normal events. It tells you about rare, exceptional events. As John B. Bogart said, "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."
I will admit sense-making based entirely on your personal experience isn’t perfect. Perhaps the reason I don’t encounter Bin Laden supporters in the wild is because of my personal internet habits. A lot of the discourse seems to mention TikTok, which I don’t use. Everybody is in a bubble of some sort, so relying only on your personal experiences does have it’s flaws. But it’s still better than relying on a source that’s distorted in a particular direction.
It’s perfectly fine to do your sense-making based on second-hand information, but you have to be mindful of the forces that bring that information to you. You should understand how the information might be manipulated, intentionally or even unintentionally. You should be aware of the motivations your sources have, and the ways in which they’re likely to spin information. You should understand how they can cherry pick true information in order to distort the bigger picture. If you don’t, then you may find yourself an easy target for manipulation.
I came across the following twitter thread the other day:
https://twitter.com/kitten_beloved/status/1519339931138609153
"I just can't understand how anyone could think [opinion shared by hundreds of millions]"
Congratulations, you have a common form of mind-blindness caused by ideological insularity
Don't worry, help is on the way, you can get better, let's get started
This thread is about understanding your ideological enemies. I agree with this thread. Understanding your enemies is incredibly important. It’s incredibly important if you want to be able to fight them effectively. It’s also incredibly important if you want to make sure that you’re on the right side in the first place. It’s a thread worth reading.There is, however, one issue with it. It’s not very well suited towards the audience who most needs to read it.
"But won't understanding my enemies make it harder to crush them, what if I start liking them"
On the contrary, understanding one's enemies is a vital first step on the path to getting their necks under your jackboots, forever
Developing feelings is rare!
What you're currently lacking is a theory of mind about your enemies, which means you are frequently surprised when their behavior contradicts your model of them
That's no fun, nobody likes being wrong constantly
So let's get better, progress through the stages with me
This kind of rhetoric won’t play very well with people who don’t already want to understand their enemies. Getting your enemies’ “necks under your jackboots” might be a figuratively correct description of what their motives are. However that’s not the way they think of it. It just sounds so oppressive when you put it that way. They almost never want to oppress people into agreeing with them. However, these enemies are an exception. They’re a special brand of evil. They’re so obviously selfish and/or hateful that it’s immoral to even try to rationalize their views. How can it possibly not be immoral to try to justify murder, slavery, bigotry, and exploitation of the poor?
At least that’s how they see it.
It’s a problem if your audience does not agree with your characterization their motives. They expect to know their own motives better than you, and a disagreement about their motives might lead them to assume that you’re not worth listening to. I also suspect that they don’t frequently feel surprised by their enemies. People who don’t want to understand their enemies often don’t behave like they frequently feel surprised by their enemies. In fact they seem to behave in the opposite way. This is probably due to confirmation bias, which makes what they do see feel like it reinforces their existing beliefs. This is another statement that doesn’t match their worldview, and it will further advance their distrust of you.
The audience of people who don’t want to understand their enemies, isn’t going to respond well to this thread, but there is an audience who will: People who do place value in understanding their enemies. I’m sure Kitten_beloved is aware of this fact. In fact, I suspect that the real target audience here is probably rationalists. There are multiple pieces of rationalist jargon in the thread. I’m sure that rationalists like it, but that’s kinda preaching to the choir.
I see this issue often when people comment about about censorship, cognitive empathy, or the marketplace of ideas. People criticize things like ending friendships over “disagreements”. However the word “disagreements” doesn’t rightly capture the emotion people feel when they end their friendships. To them, the people they “disagree with” actively want to cause harm. They roll their eyes when what they’re experiencing is described as mere “disagreement”. For a contemporary example of this, just look what people are saying about Pro-Palestine activists.
If you want a certain demographic to be your audience, and you want to appeal to them, then you need to recognize where their mindset currently is, and work from there. You will need to validate that they’ve likely experienced, and then explain how those experiences are consistent with your view of the world. Only then, can you effectively make the positive case for why your position is correct. Otherwise, they’re going to dismiss your point out of hand, because to them, what you're saying appears to defy their own reality. When appealing to a certain audience, you should do your best to make sure that you can make sense of their worldview. If it doesn’t make sense to you, then you’re at risk of misunderstanding it. Having a faulty understanding of your audience’s worldview will derail your connection with them almost as much as writing for a different audience will.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are different problems if you give them too much validation. They might just nod along with what you’re saying, and not realize that there’s anything about themselves that they have to change. You have to strike the best balance you can. Finding the right balance can be very difficult, after all, you’re trying to introduce them to a new way of thinking.
And I do apologize to kitten_beloved for picking on this particular thread. It’s far from the worst example of this. Most politicians are way worse. Making arguments that appeal to the audience that doesn’t need them might as well be the language that most politicians speak. This thread just happens to be thing that sparked my inspiration to write about the topic.
This is part 2 my series where I describe pet peeves of mine that make me distrust a piece of media. Part 1 can be found here. There are some patterns in media that I can’t help but see as red flags. These patterns trigger my instinct to distrust what I’m reading.
Pet Peeve #2: The Number Zero
You might have see the following infographic a few years ago, or something like it:
This infographic lists the annual deaths associated with multiple drugs. Tobacco is at the very top with about 400,000 deaths annually, and Marijuana is at the bottom with 0 annual deaths. It even lists deaths from what we consider to be safe drugs, including 2000 deaths from caffeine, and 500 deaths from aspirin. At the very bottom of the list is Marijuana, which is listed at 0 deaths.
You might have heard that you can't die from an overdose on THC, which the active ingredient in marijuana. This is essentially true. There have been some rare reports of death from apparent THC overdose, but whether or not THC is to blame is almost always contested. One such example occurred when a coroner couldn't find any explanation other than THC for a woman's death.
St. John the Baptist Parish Coroner Christy Montegut said last week that toxicology results for a 39-year-old LaPlace woman who died in February showed that she was killed by an excess amount of THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana.
“It looked like it was all THC because her autopsy showed no physical disease or afflictions that were the cause of death. There was nothing else identified in the toxicology — no other drugs, no alcohol,” Montegut said. “There was nothing else.”
The woman's name was not released.
Montegut, who has served as the St. John coroner since 1988, believes this could be an index case in medicine, perhaps the first death on record solely as a result of THC exposure.
Some drug researchers and experts are skeptical.
Keith Humphreys, a former senior policy adviser at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said that with the vast amounts of marijuana consumed in the U.S. every year, it's hard to imagine that more overdose deaths wouldn't be occurring if THC was toxic at consumable levels.
“We know from really good survey data that Americans use cannabis products billions of times a year, collectively. Not millions of times, but billions of times a year,” said Humphreys. “So, that means that if the risk of death was one in a million, we would have a couple thousand cannabis overdose deaths a year.”
Humphreys also said it's not uncommon for coroners to see a drug in the system, with no other sign for what might have caused an event leading to death, and so conclude that the drug was the cause.
So while it’s a bit contested, it is at least fair to say that there are 0 deaths from marijuana overdose. However, this infographic is about more than just overdose deaths. Most of the 400,000 deaths from tobacco aren’t from literal nicotine overdose. Most deaths from tobacco come from breathing in tar and other chemicals, which lead to long-term health problems, which reduce lifespan. Marijuana smoke has many of the same chemicals as cigarette smoke, and it also has more tar. Most of the 100,000 alcohol deaths also are not overdose. Only about 2200 of those deaths are from overdose. The rest are from long-term health effects and from accidents. I’m not sure where the 2000 caffeine deaths come from. As far as I can tell, there are only 92 deaths from Caffeine, ever. If anyone knows where that 2000 figure might come from, leave a comment down below. I’d love to see it.
When I see this infographic, I get a strong sense that the creator took the fact that you can’t die from marijuana overdose, and assumed that the annual deaths from marijuana can't possibly be anything except 0. It makes me think that they didn’t bother to check, especially not for deaths related to the tar and chemicals in marijuana smoke.
This is what I usually think when I see the number zero where a zero is not obvious. I assume by default that the creator of the work didn’t actually check the figure, and just assumed that it must be zero. It’s especially suspicious when there’s a reason to expect a non-zero figure to be there. In this case you might expect at least a few deaths due to the lung problems that marijuana causes.
It’s even more suspicious when the creator is clearly biased in favor of listing a low number like 0. We can tell that the creator of this infographic is biased because there’s a marijuana plant in the background, and because the line for marijuana is listed, in a bigger, differently colored font. It is explicitly a pro-marijuana piece.
Now I’ve been in favor of marijuana legalization for a long time. I’ve believed in legalization ever since I was 14. However, I’m not a fan of this infographic. The figures it contains make me question whether the author did their homework. It doesn’t pass the sniff test, and because of that I can’t rely on it.
I figured I might as well check to see if my intuition was right. I was unable to find an organization that actually tracks annual deaths due to marijuana, but I did find some literature about it. To the infographic’s credit, there is some literature that says that studies usually fail to find an impact from marijuana on all-cause mortality. However, even that literature doesn’t conclude that marijuana can’t cause death. Instead, they say that there is a lack of research on the topic.
From The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids:
There is an overall dearth of cohort studies empirically assessing general population cannabis use and all-cause mortality. Although the available evidence suggests that cannabis use is not associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality, the limited nature of that evidence makes it impossible to have confidence in these findings. These conclusions are not informed by the results of existing large-scale modeling studies that synthesized data from a variety of sources to estimate the burden of disease attributable to cannabis use (Degenhardt et al., 2013; Imtiaz et al., 2016). Although these studies were methodologically rigorous, their direct applicability to actual cannabis-related mortality rates in the United States is uncertain. Consequently, the committee chose not to include them in this review. Also excluded from review were studies of mortality among persons with known cannabis addiction or dependence, those who have been under medical treatment for these disorders, or those who were identified through a country's criminal justice system, due to presence in these populations of important and often inadequately controlled confounders such as concurrent mental illness and poly-substance abuse.
CONCLUSION 9-1 There is insufficient evidence to support or refute a statistical association between self-reported cannabis use and all-cause mortality.
So while they have something to point to in order to kinda sorta justify their “0” figure, it’s very weak, and the 0 figure still seems super suspect to me. I would bet that if they ever do track marijuana-related deaths like they do for tobacco, then they will find more deaths from marijuana smoke than was listed on the infographic for either caffeine or aspirin.
With this sort of media, when I see a low number other than 0, I’m usually less suspicious. Seeing a low non-zero number gives me a sense something was actually checked. If the figure actually is zero, then they might need to do a bit extra to convince me. Simply saying “yes, we checked” helps a little bit. At least it lets me know that they knew they were supposed to check. It’s even better when I can see what they checked, and where I can find it. At least that would let me know that they’re trying to be accurate.
One of the ways I pass my free time is to scroll through Twitter or Reddit looking for interesting or controversial articles to read. Occasionally, I only make it a paragraph or 2 in before I decide that I don’t trust the author, and that I can’t take anything they write seriously. This can happen even if the article is taking a position I already agree with. Sometimes there’s just something about the article’s style that seems like it can’t be trusted. I was originally going to write a post that contained all the pet peeves that would cause that to happen. However, after I got part-way through, I decided that if I included everything, then this entry would be too long. So instead, I’m writing about each one separately. Pet peeve #1: Portraying your opponent as a caricature.
The thing that inspired me to write about this topic was an article I saw on twitter. It’s an article about a proposed regulation that would force companies to make cancelling subscriptions easier. More specifically, it was about those companies’ reaction to it.
Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy
It begins:
The Federal Trade Commission’s recent proposal to require that companies offer customers easy one-click options to cancel subscriptions might seem like a no-brainier, something unequivocally good for consumers. Not according to the companies it would affect, though. In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.
Those were some of the points shared by groups representing major publishers and advertisers during the FTC’s recent public comment period ending in June. Consumers, according to the Wall Street Journal, generally appeared eager for the new proposals which supporters say could make a dent in tricky, bordering-on deceptive anti-cancellation tactics deployed by cable companies, entertainment sites, gyms, and other businesses who game out ways to make it as difficult as possible to quickly quit a subscription. The News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing publishers, tried to refute those customers in its own comments to the FTC. The Alliance claimed its members actually receive “very few complaints” about cancellations. Consumers, according to the Association of National Advertisers, may actually benefit from annoying cancellation friction.
To be clear, I absolutely hate difficult to cancel subscriptions. I also hate so-called “free trials” that bill you if you forget to cancel. Some cancellation processes I’ve encountered were so difficult that they certainly seemed criminal. When I first heard about this proposal, I thought to myself “Finally, someone is going to do something about these predatory practices!”
I agree with the with the article’s apparent position on the proposal. The new rule is a good idea, and it’s needed. Even so, something about the article still managed to rub me the wrong way. Even before I started reading the article, I already disliked it just from the headline alone. By the time I had finished it, I was already trying to find out how the article was deceiving me.
The first sign of trouble was the headline:
Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy
This reads like a headline from the onion. You can tell just from reading it that it’s caricature of what they actually said. Companies don’t call literally their customers “idiots” like this. At least, certainly not out in the open.
The article continues:
In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.
Again, this message is nothing like what you’d expect a large company to put out. Large companies don’t openly insult customers like this. Large companies also don’t refer to themselves as “Big Business”. This passage even has a little of embedded argument in it. It tells you that it’s a torment to stop your service. Nobody embeds counterarguments in their statements just so you can use it against them. This is supposedly based on what the companies said, but it’s been warped in obvious ways, and it’s hard to tell what the actual statement probably was.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The article is full of this kind of thing.
Caricature itself isn’t bad if your audience already knows the subject matter, but it’s not a good way to introduce your audience to an opposing position. A caricature, by definition, distorts it’s subject by exaggerating it’s most ridiculous attributes. A caricature of someone’s argument is an exaggerated version of the most ridiculous parts of that argument. In their real statements, there may or may not be nuance and context that make the argument work, but if there is, I can’t expect to find that nuance and context in a caricature. Including it would undermine the idea of caricature itself.
A caricature of a statement is more than just a Straw Man, it gives a sense that the author doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to even check for context. Perhaps they don’t even think context can matter.
Some authors try to weasel their way out of such straw-man accusations by telling you “it’s just a joke”, even though they’re clearly trying to persuade you. A humorous poorly-reasoned argument is still a poorly-reasoned argument. If you have to fall back on “it’s just a joke” in order to defend it, then your point might not be on solid ground to begin with. Saying “It’s just joke” might as well be outright admitting that your argument is without merit.
If you want to actually be convincing, then you should instead, steel man your opponent. Essentially, you provide the best version of their position that you can. Include the nuance and context that makes it work. Then, you can explain why it is wrong.
This way might not feel very good. After all, why help out your opposition by presenting the best version of their argument? But doing so is actually helpful for you. It shows confidence in your own position. If it looks like an argument a real person would believe, then it doesn’t trigger as much skepticism. Perhaps more importantly, it protects you in case your reader learns the real argument from somewhere else. Learning your opponent’s real position won’t sway them as much because you’ve already told them about it. It gives your argument more sticking power.
You can still joke around about the opposing position. Just make sure that I know what that position actually is first. I don’t want to have to guess what their real position probably is.
About Half-way down the article, the author finally included an actual quote,
“If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click,” the Association said in a statement.
But at this point, it was too late, the distrust had already started to creep in. The author had already shown that he didn’t care very much how the companies’ actual statements worked.
I looked a bit further into it to figure out what the companies’ real statement was. The quote above, comes from a statement made by the Association of National Advertisers Their full statement can be found here.
This is the part where they talk about “click to cancel”
Requiring “simple” cancellation is a difficult standard for businesses to implement, as there is little detail provided to guide them to understand its meaning and how to comply with this ambiguous requirement. If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click. Such accidental cancellations could cause consumers to miss out on essential deliveries of food, water, or medical products, and could create the inconvenience of requiring the consumer to register again for a service they did not intend to cancel in the first place. The possibility of accidental cancellations could be greater in the mobile environment, which may be less optimized to manage complex processes such as account administration. Consequently, in many instances, it may be reasonable for sellers to require some form of customer authentication, or redirection of the consumer to a medium that best facilitates account administration, before processing a cancellation. As a matter of public policy, permitting reasonable customer authentication prior to cancellation helps to minimize mistaken or fraudulent cancellation actions, which lead to customer frustration and undesired lapses in the provision of needed goods or services. Several state-level negative option laws permit reasonable authentication procedures prior to cancellation,17 and the proposed amendments to the Current Rule should similarly allow companies to verify consumer identities prior to effectuating a cancellation choice.
This statement does make some reasonable points about why you might not want a literal 1-click cancel button. If I click a “Cancel” button in the navigation, at minimum, I would expect to see a confirmation page first. One that says “Do you want to cancel your subscription?” and a button that says “Confirm Cancellation”. That’s at least 2 clicks, one to get to the cancel confirmation page, and one to cancel. If my account was cancelled out of the navigation bar, that would be very surprising to me. Something like that really would lead to unintended cancellations. It also makes total sense to force users to log in, in order to cancel. I don’t want some random unauthenticated person messing with my account settings!
There is, however, one major problem with this statement. The proposed rule doesn’t actually require you to make a 1-click cancel button. “Click to cancel” is just a nickname. The actual requirement is a cancellation process that is at least as simple as the sign-up process, and through the same medium:
The proposal also requires sellers to provide a simple cancellation mechanism through the same medium used to initiate the agreement, whether, for instance, through the internet, telephone, mail, or in-person. On the internet, this “Click to Cancel” provision requires sellers, at a minimum, to provide an accessible cancellation mechanism on the same website or web-based application used for sign-up. If the seller allows users to sign up using a phone, it must provide, at a minimum, a telephone number and ensure all calls to that number are answered during normal business hours. Further, to meet the requirement that the mechanism be at least as simple as the one used to initiate the recurring charge, any telephone call used for cancellation cannot be more expensive than the call used to enroll ( e.g., if the sign-up call is toll free, the cancellation call must also be toll free). For a recurring charge initiated through an in-person transaction, the seller must offer the simple cancellation mechanism through the internet or by telephone in addition to, where practical, the in-person method used to initiate the transaction.
This rule requires a 1-click cancel only if you had a 1-click sign up in the first place. If a company requires authentication in order to sign up, then they can require authentication in order to cancel. If it takes you more than one click to sign up, then it can take more than 1 click to cancel. I sure hope these companies don’t have literal 1-click confirmation-less signup buttons, and I certainly hope they aren’t signing you with no authentication either!
But then again, maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the The Association of National Advertisers for this oversight. The author of the Gizmodo article apparently didn’t catch it either. That would have been quite a good opportunity to make fun of the original statement, and it would have addressed the real statement too.
I’m not very forgiving when it comes to deceptive tactics. Once I get the sense that you’re trying to deceive me, I become suspicious about the whole thing. After all, if the author has already revealed that they don’t care about informing me accurately, how can I trust anything they say? Even if I already agree with their position, I can’t use it as a source. It’s just too unreliable; the people I’m citing it to would, rightly, mock me for it. It’s just not very useful, and mostly makes me dislike the author and maybe even their publication.
I’ve been wanting to write down my thoughts on the subject of belief and truth for some while now. The distinction between the two is one of the cornerstones of how I see the world. A good theory of what the truth is, and what it means to have a belief has a profound impact on how we think about the world. It also has a profound impact on how we understand other peoples’ perception of the world.
The Truth:
The objective truth. The true truth. The truth is true even if you don’t believe it is true. It is true even if you don’t know it is true. It is true even if you can’t prove that it’s true.
Belief:
A person’s perception of the truth. We form our beliefs based on a combination of several things, including our personal obversations, our reasoning, and our prior beliefs. A belief might not be the objective truth, and it’s foolish to treat it as if it were. However, belief is how we experience the truth, so it’s the closest thing we have.
The role of evidence:
Many people equate evidence with truth. If you ask people to define objective truth, they will likely say something about evidence. Some people even treat an idea with no evidence in the same way they that they would treat an outright false idea, such as in the anectote described in this post by David J. Balan.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has put out his own theory of “Objective Truth”. And his theory is all about evidence.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CxUWD6LRR20
According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, an idea becomes the Objective Truth only after it has been established by a substancial amount of evidence. This is a fine way to define objective truth, since if we want to be extremely sure that an idea is true, then we almost certainly need a strong body of evidence to prove it. However, I think it’s worthwhile to acknowledge that an idea can be true even if there is no evidence for it. If there’s no evidence, it can still be true, we just wouldn’t know it.
Newton produced the proof for how gravity worked in the 1600s However, the equations that Newton came up with would have still worked at any prior period in history. They would even have worked if nobody had proven them. The evidence for Newton’s equations isn’t the thing that made them true. What the evidence did was allow us to be certain that they were true. Essentially, evidence is just a tool that we use to make sure that our beliefs are close to the truth.
Likewise, a thing can be untrue, even if there actually is evidence. What looks like good evidence can often be flawed. There are many examples of this in the criminal justice system.
One good example of this is the case of Ronald Cotton where eyewitness Jennifer Thompson famously misidentified the perpetrator.
She had never been so sure of anything.
His name was Ronald Cotton and he was the same age as she. Local man, headed down the wrong road, had already been in trouble with the law. He had been arrested on first-degree burglary charges and had served 18 months in prison for attempted sexual assault. Cotton had insisted that the relationship resulting in the assault charge was consensual and that he was being unfairly targeted by police because he liked to date white women.
When Thompson picked him out of the lineup, everyone was sure they had the right man.
Cotton is tall and handsome, with baby-smooth chocolate skin and a warm, engaging smile. Confronted by Thompson, his normal calm failed him. He was petrified. But he said nothing, betrayed no emotion.
Cotton’s actions and past hadn’t helped his case. He was nervous. He got his dates mixed up. His alibis didn’t check out. A piece of foam was missing from his shoe, similar to a piece found at the crime scene.
Not only was Cotton identified by the primary eyewitness, but there was other evidence too. There was physical evidence regarding the foam on his shoe. He couldn’t keep his story straight. He had past convictions for sexual assault. There was a lot of evidence that suggested he did it, and it was pretty compelling.
However, DNA Evidence showed that Cotton couldn’t possibly have been the rapist.
Cotton was unsuccessful overturning his conviction in several appeals. But in the spring of 1995, his case was given a major break: the Burlington Police Department turned over all evidence, which included the assailant’s semen for DNA testing, to the defense.
The samples from one victim were tested and showed no match to Cotton. At the defense’s request, the results were sent to the State Bureau of Investigation’s DNA database and the database showed a match with the convict who had earlier confessed to the crime to a fellow inmate in prison.
Evidence is not synonymous with truth, and even if you have evidence for something, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true. There could be a mistake in the evidence, or there could even be a nuance that you haven’t thought of.
My Truth? Your Truth? His Truth? Her Truth?
One concept that occasionally comes up in online discourse is the idea of a person having their own truth. Most of the time when you see it, someone “telling their truth” is portrayed as a positive thing. But when a post is specifically about what a person’s truth actually means, it usually ends up saying somethint to the effect of “there is no her truth or his truth. There is only the truth”
Take the following comic for example:
https://imgur.com/gallery/pleGM
This is a widly circulated comic online, and it contains 2 people expressing different beliefs about what number is drawn on the ground. They state these beliefs as though they are the truth, and there is a caption below in black font that implies that both of their beliefs are valid.
Then apparently, someone altered the comic, crossed out the black text, and added their own text in red. This red text assumes that both of the characters are “uninformed” and that at least one of them is definitly wrong. It goes on to say that they should have checked the facts, that they don’t want to do any research, and that what they’re doing is ruining the world.
I think that the person who wrote the black text, knows best what that symbol is supposed to be. That person is presumably the original author of the comic, and the person who created the symbol in the first place. I can’t think of a way any other person can possibly know better what the symbol is supposed to be. Apparently, according to that person, both 6 and 9 are right, and if that’s true, then the red text seems very silly.
Furthermore, this the symbol in this comic is a metaphor for much more complicated questions in real life. With real-life versions of this dilemma you don’t always have an obvious alternative explanation for what the truth might be. You just see a 6 and already know about ‘9’. In real life, both sides might be incredibly informed, and the reason they disagree might be because the problem is so complex that each party doesn’t have all the information the other party has, or they might have made a mistake in their reasoning.
They may even have seen what appears to them to be 100% conclusive evidence. However, one or both of them might have misinterpreted something along the way. They can’t reasonably be expected to know about the mistake. If they did, then they would have already gone back and fixed their reasoning. To them, their side is the Objective Truth.
It could also be the case that all their facts are both totally true, and the reason they disagree is because they’re not seeing the bigger picture. They might not even know about a bigger picture. It’s not always obvious where one exists.
I prefer this other widly-circulated image. It covers some important nuance that the above comic (the original version) doesn’t.
The core problem is that belief is how a person experiences truth. You can’t tell the difference between a strongly-held, but false belief and the truth. If you could, then you wouldn’t have the false belief in the first place. You can’t expect other people to tell the difference either. To them, it is the truth! This is what “their truth” actually is. Humans don’t have some sort of mystical “truth-sence” that lets us know for sure what the truth is. It’s not so easy to just choose objective truth over your truth, when “your truth” is the very way that you experience truth.