The facts we know we know aren’t all the facts there are to know. Sometimes they’re not even facts: Reality-based non-thinking, Part One.

On my last post, Silent Cal and That Old-time Republican Religion, I led off with:

Right Wingers are in the habit of believing whatever they need to believe to justify whatever it is they want to do.

The left is hardly immune from this.

Among the temptations besetting us members of the Reality-based Community is the temptation to believe that because we respect the facts we have got those facts.

And we do. Some of them, some of us, some of the time.  But we need to remember that along with the facts we have got other things.

Biases.

Preconceptions.

Prejudices.  Vanities. Bad memories.

Hopes. Dreams. Illusions. Passions and desires.

All these things get in the way of our seeing the world for what it really is and tend to lead us into believing it’s what we wish it to be.  They lead us into ignoring the facts we have or that there are there for us to obtain.  They lead us into selectively choosing facts to support our version of reality.  They lead us into misinterpreting and even misrepresenting facts.  They lead us into thinking that things that aren’t facts are. 

You remember how in the last few weeks before the election half the Village Press Corps went to war against the New York Times’ Nate Silver because he had the geeky arrogance to insist that the numbers---the facts on hand---tended to show that what was happening in the world at large was very different than what was going on in the world as journalists and pundits were describing it to themselves and each other at the backs of the campaign busses and around the lunch tables of their favorite DC watering holes.  Liberals and Democrats all along the left coast of Blogtopia [Editor’s note: credit as always to skippy] rallied around Silver.  But it didn’t require much cynicism to see that many of Silver’s stalwarts were only on his side because in his version of the world the President was on his way to winning re-election.  They trusted Silver’s math because it proved what they wanted it to prove not because they’d tested it themselves and found it worked.  Most of them couldn’t have begun to do the math themselves.

They didn’t have the facts.

They had faith.

I should say we, because I’m talking about myself as well.

We know math works, but that doesn’t mean we know how to do it ourselves.  We have faith, though, that people like Silver who do it for a living know what they’re doing.  When they show us their results, we trust that they didn’t forget to carry a 1 or misplace a decimal point and we trust that if they did goof up other people who can do the math will pipe right up to correct the error.

Something else we have. Trust.

We trust in the experts or at least trust that there is such a thing as expertise.  We trust the professionals. We trust the scientists, mathematicians, historians, doctors, and engineers.

We have favorites. Favorite writers, favorite teachers, favorite journalists, pundits, analysts, and bloggers.

We trust that they are smart and know what they’re talking about because we trust ourselves to recognize smart people to trust.

We assume that their opinions are based on facts and their interpretation of those faces is correct, and then we take a perilous leap.

We accept their interpretations and opinions as facts.

We have friends.  Smart friends. They wouldn’t be our friends if they weren’t smart, right? So we trust that when they tell us about something they know, it has a basis in fact. We have relatives and coworkers, and some of them are smart and we trust what they tell us and some of them are idiots and we know to distrust everything they try to tell us, even when all they’re telling us is the time of day.

Our intellectual relationship with reality is filtered and buffered.  Our knowledge of the facts is often, at best, second-hand, more often third, fourth, and fifth-hand.

Generally, people don’t argue the facts.  Or with the facts or to get at the facts.  We don’t even argue ideas.  We argue in favor or our opinions. We champion what we already believe, and it’s usually the case that we believe something because it confirms something else we need to believe, usually that “I’m right to think what I think and live as I live.”

Read a blogger or a pundit approvingly citing a “new study” and you’re probably reading a sentence that should have been written more honestly as “Here’s a study that proves everything I already know about how the world works, so there!”

Or to put it another way. We’re in the habit of believing what we need to believe in order to justify what we want to do.

But beyond that, an awful lot of what we know we know we don’t really know.  There isn’t even anything there to know.  It’s just something we think. It’s something we picked up somewhere and let stick in our heads, and we continue to think it only because we haven’t thought about it since we first thought it---we’ve never bothered to re-submit it to any tests against the facts---or because it’s convenient to think it.  It’s as I just said. It confirms something else we know we know.

I just finished reading Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter Bergen.  It’s a pretty good book, well-written, informative, factual, or at least I trust that it is factual.  Bergen has a good reputation as a journalist.  His previous books on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were well-received and, as far as I know, haven’t been shown up as bunk. And Manhunt tracks with other things I’ve read on the subject, including Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, which I read just before starting Manhunt.

So, I was reading along with interest, trusting I was getting the facts, enjoying the book as history, journalism, and an adventure story, when I ran headlong into this, Bergen’s explanation for why a Democratic President seemed as aggressive and determined about the use of force as only Republican Presidents are supposed to be:

Perhaps [President Obama’s] views on national security had to do with when he came of age. Obama was the first major American politician in decades whose views about national security weren’t deeply informed by what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam.  Too young to have served in Vietnam as the senators John McCain and John Kerry did, he was also too young to have avoided service in Vietnam as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had.  For Obama, Vietnam was a nonissue, and it is possible this fact contributed to his greater use to his willingness to use military power in comparison to an older generation of Democrats.  It took Clinton two years to intervene in Bosnia, which was on the verge of genocide, whereas it took Obama only a week or so to intervene in Libya in the spring of 2011, when dictator Moammar Gadhafi threatening large-scale massacres of his own population.

Two things pulled me up short here.

A flash of memory and a longstanding prejudice.

End of Part One. Part Two is here.

Comments

[Ralph H.]

This is a bit generalized, reductionist, pessimistic, in my opinion. Let's set aside the question of whether Republicans exclusively drink their own Kool-Aid & talk about us liberals, progressives, what have you. We in the RBC as often as not are hardly coming into these issues out of the blue. Re. Silver, I made a point of reading up on his methodology -- which he shared widely -- & also happened to know something about Bayesian analysis, so his predictions made intuitive sense. On other issues, particularly involving national security, I try to read what the much-despised "mainstream media" reports -- just the facts, ma'am, as Joe F. used to say -- & amplify that with selective use of the blogosphere (which can be much better than many people believe), & further draw on my long background in military & intelligence issues, which I admit is a blessing for guys like me & the lack thereof a handicap for others of our broad political persuasion. But the point is that my opinions nearly always evolve, and are not reflexive. I'd like to think there are others in the RBC like me.

[Ken Houghton]

My faith in Mark Bowden is significantly lower than yours.

And the reason many of us trusted Silver (or, even more, Sam Wang at Princeton who had the courage of his data, unlike Silver who flipped VA [iirc] in his final EC prediction) was that you could see most of the inputs--the polls. And they stayed stable or went more for BarryO as time went by.

Which meant that it was more difficult to come up with a reasonable narrative as the election neared. You had to assume that a Presidential election would be relegated to an off-year or midterm mix of voters. You had to assume the "low-information" voters would all break the same way (which has, to be nice about it, never happened on a national scale over multiple states)--when the "undecideds" themselves were trending Obama with each poll.

What fit the data: that Obama was likely to be re-elected and that the chances were getting better as the election came closer.

Does that mean certitude about Silver's prediction of a 75% or 78% or 80% (let alone another decimal place) prediction? No. The faith is in the story, because it fits the data. Given the same chance I got in 1992, would I have taken Obama at even odds? Absolutely. (You owe me a sandwich, I believe.) Would I have given 2:1 to a Romney supporter? Probably; almost certainly by the last week of October. 3:1 or 4:1? Maybe, but I wouldn't swear to it even the day before, even though Nate Silver said that range was Fair Value.

And, as Ralph H. notes above, Silver didn't make a secret of his methodology, unlike the Unskewed Polls gaggle. So you really had to make several assumptions that didn't fit with 2004, let alone 2008, to decide Silver was wrong, as opposed to "right in the abstract."

Because the story fits the data--not that the story exists and the data has to be culled to fit it.

[Mark]

The thing about Silver, as I understand it, is that he set up his methods and simply followed them. He made no judgement about what the data said, but simply reported it. And remember, he stated his results in terms of probabilities. Saying someone has an 80 percent probability of winning an election is not predicting that he will win the election. Predictions may be made on the basis of the probabilities, but the probabilities themselves are not a prediction.

[Norma Cartwright]

My head aches and will probably explode. My ego is bruised; I infer that you are saying that I'm NOT infallible...and that is just unacceptable.

Dammit, I'm a Democrat. A liberal! Even a Dirty-Fukkin-Hippie, fer gawd's sake! How can I be wrong? Or, is it that I've taken for granted that my worldview, superior as it is to RightLandia's, has morphed into a superiority-complex. Oh, the Hubris! It burns!

Actually, I think the headache comes from two sources: one, my mind's door opened so fast, I can only compare it to a "home invasion", complete with miscreants wielding assault rifles and Super-sized Magazines loaded with RealityBites.

Second (and the lesser of the events), the flashback of Rummie's performance-art/artful-dodge...