The morass of lies

It will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I really hate it when people make shit up and then misrepresent it as the truth.

Now making shit up, by itself, is just fine.  I'm a fiction writer, so making shit up is kind of my main gig.  It's when people then try to pass it off as fact that we start having problems.  The problem is, sometimes the false information sounds either plausible, or cool, or interesting -- it often has a "wow!" factor -- enough that it then gets spread around via social media, which is one of the most efficient conduits for nonsense ever invented.

Here are three examples of this phenomenon that I saw just within the past twenty-four hours.

The first is about a Miocene-age mammal called Orthrus tartaros, "a distant relative of modern weasels," that was a scary hypercarnivore.  Here's an artist's conception of what Orthrus tartaros looked like:

Problem is, there's no such animal.  In Greek mythology, Orthrus was Cerberus's two-headed brother, who had been given the task of guarding the giant Geryon's cattle, and was killed by Heracles as one of his "Ten Labors."  "Tartaros," of course, comes from Tartarus, the Greek version of hell.  While there are plenty of animals named after characters from Greek myth, this ain't one of them.  In fact, it's the creation of a Deviant Art artist who goes by the handle Puijila, and specializes in "speculative evolution" art that was never intended to represent actual animals.  But along the way, someone swiped Puijila's piece and started passing it around as if it were real.

What's frustrating about this is that there are plenty of prehistoric animals that were scary as fuck, such as the absolutely terrifying gorgonopsids.  You don't need to pretend that an (admittedly extremely talented) artist's fictional creations are part of the real menagerie.

The second one cautioned the tender-hearted amongst us against catching spiders and putting them outdoors.  "Spiders in your house," the post said, "are adapted to living indoors.  95% of the spiders captured and released outside die within 24 hours.  Just let them live inside -- most of them are completely harmless."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ciar, House spider side view 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

While I agree completely that spiders have gotten an undeserved bad rap, and the vast majority of them are harmless (and in fact, beneficial, considering the number of flies and mosquitoes they eat), the rest of this is flat wrong.  Given that here in the United States, conventional houses have only become common in the past two hundred years or so, how did the ancestors of today's North American spiders manage before that, if they were so utterly dependent on living indoors?  And second, how did anyone figure out that "95% of the spiders captured and released died within 24 hours?"  Did they fit them with little radio tracking tags, or something?  This claim fails the plausibility test on several levels -- so while the central message of "learn to coexist with our fellow creatures" is well meant, it'd be nice to see it couched in facts rather than made-up nonsense.

The last one is just flat-out weird.  I'd seen it before, but it's popping up again, probably because here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's vegetable-garden-harvest time:

If you "didn't know this" it's probably because it's completely false.  Pepper plants have flowers that botanists call "perfect" (they contain both male and female parts), so they can self-pollinate.  The wall of a pepper -- the part you eat -- comes from the flower's ovary, so honestly, the edible parts of peppers are more female than male (even that's inaccurate if you know much about sexual reproduction in plants, which is pretty peculiar).  The number of bumps has zero to do with either sex or flavor.

So: one hundred percent false.  When you grow or buy peppers, don't worry about the number of bumps, and afterward, use them for whatever you like.

What puzzles me about all this is why anyone would make this kind of stuff up in the first place.  Why would you spend your time crafting social media posts that are certifiable nonsense, especially when the natural world is full of information that's even more cool and weird and mind-blowing, and is actually real?  Once such a post is launched, I get why people pass it along; posts like this have that "One True Fact That Will Surprise You!" veneer, and the desire to share such stuff comes from a good place -- hoping that our friends will learn something cool.

But why would you create a lie and present it as a fact?  That, I don't get.

Now, don't get me wrong; there's no major harm done to the world by people making a mistake and believing in the sexuality of peppers, doomed house spiders, and a Miocene hypercarnivorous weasel.  But it still bothers me, because passing this nonsense along establishes a habit of credulity.  "I saw it on the internet" is the modern-day equivalent of "my uncle's best friend's sister-in-law's cousin swears this is true."  And once you've gotten lazy about checking to see if what you post about trivia is true and accurate, it's a scarily small step to uncritically accepting and reposting falsehoods about much, much more important matters.

Especially given that there are a couple of media corporations I could name that survive by exploiting that exact tendency.

So I'll exhort you to check your sources.  Yes, on everything.  If you can't verify something, don't repost it.  To swipe a line from Smokey Bear, You Too Can Prevent Fake News.  All it takes is a little due diligence -- and a determination not to make the current morass of online lies any worse than it already is.

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The tapestry of lies

In my novel Sephirot, the main character, an ordinary guy named Duncan Kyle, finds himself lost in an interlocking maze of worlds, each of which seems to be doing its best to trap him permanently.  The first character he meets, the enigmatic Sphinx, gives him a warning about what he's about to face.  "The first thing you should learn here," she says, "is that everything you see and hear is a lie."

Duncan quickly comes to the obvious question, which is if everything here is a lie, is the Sphinx's own statement a lie as well?

The Sphinx cocks a sardonic eyebrow and says, "Oh, of course not.  I wouldn't lie about something that important."

When later, he meets the gruff rogue Jack Holland, he's once again confronted with whether anything he's seeing is the truth.  "Do you believe it?" Holland asks him.  "All this?"

Duncan responds with a question.  How can he not believe what's right in front of him?

"Then you're choosing to believe a lie," Holland responds.  "You're more'n half gone already."

Lie to people often enough, and they lose their ability to tell the difference.  Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, knew that principle well, and used it to astonishing success.  He put it succinctly: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.  The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

It's a lesson the Trump administration has also learned well.  Consider the following:

They said they'd never overturn Roe v. Wade; it's "established law."

They said they were all for a healthy environment, including clean water and air.

They said grocery prices would come down and the stock market would surge "on day one."

They said the war in Ukraine would be peacefully resolved within three days of Trump's inauguration.

They said there'd be no instigation of, or participation in, more military actions overseas; the focus would be on helping Americans.

They said they'd never make cuts to Medicaid and Medicare.

They said they'd never touch Social Security.

They said of course they were supportive of equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, that Trump is a "real friend of the gay community."

They said they aren't after legal immigrants, only illegal ones.

They said well, okay, they are after legal immigrants, too, but they'd never go after American citizens.

And... surprise!... just two days ago Trump said that his pal Nayib Bukele, dictator of El Salvador, had better build five more concentration camps, because the "homegrowns are next."

Trump supporters, look long and hard at this photograph.  This is not a terrorist or a criminal or a gang member.  This is  Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist, weeping as his head is shorn in the CECOT concentration camp.  He was in the United States seeking asylum from his native Venezuela.  He committed no crime, received no constitutionally-guaranteed due process.  Go ahead, try to defend this, I dare you.

Every single time, they're hoping that enough people will say, "Well, even if they lied, it doesn't affect me" that their supporters will not think to add the obvious word "... yet."  But each lie further erodes our freedoms -- and further dulls our ability to recognize it for what it is.

Part of the problem, of course, is the media.  That we even had to invent the word "sanewash" to describe Trump's handling by the media is telling.  But beyond that, they've downplayed the lies, calling them "evasions" or "partial truths" or "alternative views" or even "opinions."  Outlets like Fox News and OANN are the most egregious, but even supposedly centrist media like CNN and The New York Times routinely soft-pedal stories highlighting the barrage of falsehoods coming from this administration.  The result is that unless you put in a concerted effort to find the truth, you're being given watered-down half-truths at best, and at worst deliberate omissions and outright glaring lies.

I've found myself wondering how many of the Republican officials know these things are lies.  Some, like Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan, are clearly True Believers, and are every bit as culpable as Trump himself.  Some, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are probably too stupid to tell the difference.  But the others?

Doesn't matter in the end, of course.  Someone might want to remind Marco Rubio, for example, that "I was following orders from higher up" was not considered an acceptable defense at Nuremberg.

My one (small) consolation is Stephen King's observation that "The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short."  The flipside of this, though, is that even in a short time, the victims of regimes like this one will suffer horrible harm.  Some will die.  Our standing as a world leader, as a light for freedom and equality under the law, has already been irrevocably damaged.  I don't know how likely it is that the legal system will save us; Trump already received one 9-0 (even freakin' Clarence Thomas!) Supreme Court vote demanding he bring back Kilmar Ábrego García, another innocent man sent to a concentration camp without due process, and Trump's response basically was "I don't hafta, who's gonna make me?"

And so far, no one has.  If the president defies the Supreme Court, we have no checks and balances.

I wish I had something more positive to say.  Like Duncan's predicament in Sephirot, simply realizing you can't believe anything you're seeing or hearing only gets you so far.  Disbelieving what they're saying is just the first step.

The second -- the one we've yet to take as a nation -- is to demand truth, fairness, and justice in a voice loud enough that it cannot be ignored.

Keep in mind that the one advantage we've got is numbers.  Once the tapestry of lies is torn to shreds, once the men and women who created it have been deposed, we've got the power to rebuild what we once had.  But that means getting enough people to recognize what's happening that they're willing to act.

Otherwise, as Jack Holland put it, we're "more'n half gone already."

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Well, actually...

American economist Thomas Sowell famously said, "Endless repetition does not make something true."

I used to run into examples of this principle all the time when I was a teacher -- widely-accepted, and rarely-questioned, incorrect statements that still somehow classified as "stuff everyone knows."  One that immediately pops to mind, and that I had to debunk just about every year, was that daddy-longlegs (also called "harvestmen"), those familiar arachnids in just about everyone's cellars and attics, are "actually deadly poisonous but their fangs are too small to pierce human skin."  There's no truth to this whatsoever; they don't even have poison glands, and their chelicerae ("fangs") aren't hollow like a spider's.  They are, in fact, entirely harmless.

In the interest of making at least a minuscule inroad into ridding the public consciousness of some of the most egregious of these, today I present to you an extremely incomplete list of commonly-accepted falsehoods that have spread by word-of-mouth and now become ubiquitous.

The Latest Gossip by François Brunery (ca. 1900) [Image is in the Public Domain]

How many of these have you heard -- and how many did you believe?

1. Turkey meat is not high in the amino acid tryptophan -- or at least, no higher than any other protein source.  Tryptophan isn't why you're sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner; it's much more likely to be overeating, consumption of wine, and the general energetic letdown we all experience after a big event.
2. The pronunciation of words with an s, c, or z in Castilian Spanish, where the usual sibilant is sometimes replaced by a coronal fricative /θ/ (usually written in English as "th"), did not occur because there was a king who lisped and all of his fawning courtiers wanted to make him feel better by imitating him.  In fact, the phonetic shift seems to have been gradual, spreading across the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and may have been driven by the need to differentiate words (like siento "I feel" and ciento "one hundred") that otherwise would have been pronounced identically.
3. The seasons are not caused by the Earth being closer to the Sun in summer; in fact, during the Northern Hemisphere's summer the Earth is actually farther away from the Sun than it is in winter.  The seasonal changes in temperature are almost all due to the twenty-three degree axial tilt of the Earth.  Nor is it true, as I've seen claimed in some hyper-religious posts, that "if the Earth was only a few feet closer or farther away from the Sun than it is, it would be boiled or frozen" -- so, goes the claim, God placed the Earth in exactly the right spot, and can I get a hallelujah?  In fact, the Earth's orbit is elliptical enough that it's about five million kilometers closer to the Sun at perihelion than it is at aphelion, and we neither roast at one nor are flash-frozen at the other.  So you may well think that God directs the universe, but if that's your proof, you might want to reconsider.
4. Despite what you may have learned from such historical documents as Hagar the Horrible, Vikings did not go into battle wearing horned helmets.  Horns (or antlers) on headgear would have been a serious hindrance to fighting, and the Vikings were way smarter than to do anything that slowed down the highly lucrative plunder and pillage.  Extant horned or antlered headgear seems to have been mostly ceremonial in use, probably by shamans to invoke animal spirits.
5. Lemmings don't engage in mass suicide by diving off cliffs or swimming out into lakes and drowning when they get overcrowded.  This complete fabrication became a popular belief because of a 1958 Disney movie called White Wilderness which depicted it happening; it turns out that the scene was filmed using lemmings that had been purchased from Inuit children for a quarter a piece, and the unfortunate rodents were shoved off a cliff repeatedly to get enough footage for the film.
6. Albert Einstein did not fail high school mathematics; in fact, by fifteen he had mastered both differential and integral calculus.  He did fail his first entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, but this was probably because he was two years younger than most of the rest of the students who attempted it.  (He did really well on the science and math portions.)  He did, however, as an adult say to a frustrated physics student, "Do not worry about your difficulties with mathematics; I can assure you that mine are far worse," but this was more overly modest of the great man than it was accurate.
7. Apologies to Pink Floyd, but there is no permanently dark side of the Moon.  Because the Moon is tidally locked, the same side faces the Earth all the time; put another way, its periods of rotation and revolution are the same.  Any given spot on the Moon is (like the Earth) in sunlight at some times and in darkness at others, and what length of time it spends in each depends on latitude and where the Moon is in its orbit.
8. There is absolutely no mention that Mary Magdalene in the Bible was a prostitute (reformed or otherwise), nor that she was the same person as the unnamed woman who anointed Jesus's feet in Luke chapter 7, or the adulterer whom Jesus saved from being stoned in John chapter 8.
9. People don't "use only ten percent of their brain."  There's no way evolution would have favored the production of a huge, complex organ like the brain, and then we only ever get to use ten percent of it.  In fact, over the course of your life you use pretty much the whole thing, even if at any given time only a fraction of the neurons are firing.  If you could get your whole brain to fire at once, the result wouldn't be superpowers, it'd be a body-wide and probably fatal seizure.
10. Sharks can, in fact, get cancer.  The mistaken belief that they never do was popularized in a book by William Lane and Linda Comac with the creative title Sharks Don't Get Cancer, and was used as part of a campaign to sell shark cartilage capsules as a cure-all.
11. Speaking of fish, three South American fish with scary reputations are pretty close to harmless.  Piranhas rarely attack humans, and while they'll bite, there are no recorded incidents of people (or other large animals) being "skeletonized" by them, Vashta Nerada-style.  The strong-jawed pacu fish do not wait for male skinnydippers and bite off their testicles; that claim started as a joke when a biologist commented that the pacu has grinding teeth capable of chewing (tree) nuts.  Last, the infamous candiru catfish of the Amazon does not swim up people's urethras and get lodged there.  They parasitize other fish, hooking onto the gills, but (like most parasites) are very host-specific.  The likelihood of having a candiru go up your urethra, even if you were urinating while submerged in a stream where candiru live, is (according to American marine biologist Stephen Spotte) "about the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously being eaten by a shark."
12. Catherine the Great, empress of Russia in the eighteenth century, did not die while attempting to have sex with a horse.  Admittedly, she was apparently very fond of sex, but with people.  She died at age 67 of what was clearly a stroke.  The rumor started because of some attempts to discredit her (and Russians in general) published in Germany, and there's no truth to it whatsoever.
13. Cracking your knuckles doesn't cause arthritis.  Like any repetitive motion, it can cause inflammation if you do it compulsively, but done occasionally, it's completely harmless.
14. The word crap did not originate as back-formation from the name of nineteenth-century businessman Thomas Crapper, who improved the design of (but did not invent) the flush toilet.  Crap traces its origins to medieval Latin; and Crapper's name is actually an altered version of cropper, meaning farmer.
15. Somewhat along the same lines: fuck is not an acronym for either "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" or "Fornication Under Consent of the King."  The former is supposedly what was written above the heads of adulterers confined to the stocks; the latter, what was allegedly stamped on marriage documents, giving a couple the right to lawfully do the deed.  Neither is even close to true.  Nor does "fuck you" originate as a corruption of "pluck yew," supposedly an expression meaning to draw a longbow made of yew-wood.  And while we're at it, the middle finger as a sign of contempt has nothing to do with archery, either, despite the story that Welsh bowmen captured by the English supposedly had their index fingers cut off so they couldn't draw, but showed those Silly English Types-uh by drawing their bows using only their middle fingers.  In fact, "fuck" is a good old Indo-European root with a very long history (from the reconstructed word *peuk, meaning "to prick" or "to jab", and therefore a cognate to words like "poke," "point," "punch," and "pugnacious").  The middle finger has been used as a rude gesture at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, where it meant -- as it still does today -- "fuck you" or "stick it up your ass."

So there you have it.  Only a drop in the bucket, I'm quite sure -- as James Randi put it, the reason we need debunkers is because there's so much bunk out there.  But perhaps this cleared up a few things?

One can only hope.

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What's in a name?

In the way that viral nonsense always goes, every few months I see a resurgence of a post (actually a collection of similar posts) which takes your first name and purports to tell you what its "deep meaning" is.  And of course, you're always told that your particular name means something like "Joyful Soul" or "Beautiful Dreamer" or "Fierce Warrior."

It shouldn't require my pointing out that almost all of these alleged meanings are wrong.  The Deep Meaning Generator doesn't give a flying rat's ass what your actual name is; it simply takes it and randomly assigns one of a list of pre-programmed positive-sounding results that are intended to make you think, "Yes... that's me!  Courageous Friend!  I knew it!"

Most western European first names are considerably more prosaic than that.  A few do have origins that sound like they could come from the Deep Meaning Generator; Reginald, for example, means "powerful ruler," which is kind of funny because these days Reginald is not generally thought of as being the most manly name in the world.  (My apologies to any Reginalds in the studio audience.)

A few of the oldest names in the European tradition go back to Hebrew.  A lot of names containing el or elle come from the Hebrew El, meaning "god."  Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Elijah, Elias, and Elizabeth (and the various names derivative from those) mean, respectively, "God's gift," "God's strength," "God's healing," "Yahweh is God," "God is Lord," and "God's promise."  Other names originating in Hebrew are John/Jonathan ("God's grace"), Joseph ("Yahweh shall add"), and Mary/Maria//Mara/Miriam ("bitterness").

A lot of the harsh-sounding old Germanic names have gone out of vogue, and some of those did have meanings that come across as wishful thinking on the part of the parents.  For example, the bert part in Albert, Herbert, Bertram, Gilbert, Bertrand, Bertha, and Robert comes from a Proto-Germanic root meaning "bright" or "brilliant."  But there are plenty of first names that have meanings that are simply weird.

Cecil/Cecile/Cecilia means "blind."  Emile/Emily/Emilia means "rival."  "Courtney" means "short nose."  Leah means "weary."  Calvin means "bald."  Tristan means "outcry."  Rebecca means "bound" or "tied."  Bailey means "manager."  Deborah and Melissa both mean "bee" -- in Hebrew and Greek, respectively.  Cameron means "crooked nose." 

And my own name, Gordon?  Gaelic for "hill dweller."  Oddly appropriate, since just about all of my ancestors were Scottish and French peasants.

But the reason I chose to write about this goes beyond looking at some strange linguistic origins, as fun as that is.  What I'm more curious about is why those Deep Meaning Generators are so damn popular.  Do people actually believe that what they're saying is true, despite the fact that you can find the (actual) linguistic origin of your own name with a fifteen-second Google search?

Or do they know it's not real, and don't care?

I honestly suspect it's the latter, because the one time I went against my better judgment and did the "Well, actually..." thing -- I hardly ever do that, because (1) arguing online is the very pinnacle of pointlessness, and (2) it's fucking obnoxious at the best of times -- I got a response of, "I don't care if it's true, it's fun to believe it."

Which I find utterly baffling.  I don't get any satisfaction at all out of telling everyone that Gordon means "Blissful Spirit" when I know it doesn't.  Plus, the bigger concern here is one that I've addressed before, in the context of the "What's the harm?" objection to believing in stuff like astrology and Tarot divination; putting aside your critical thinking facilities in one setting makes it that much easier to put them aside in more important settings, like your health.

I get that rational thinking is hard, and that the harsh reality of evidence-based understanding can be problematic when it comes into conflict with our dearly-held beliefs or desires.  But unfortunately, credulity is a habit, and one we have to work hard against, even when it seems harmless.

So those are my thoughts for this morning.  Sorry if it makes me seem like a humorless curmudgeon.  Hopefully regular readers of Skeptophilia will know I'm not humorless; as far as the "curmudgeon" part, my wife would be happy to discuss that with you at length.  But anyhow, as a linguist and someone who is dedicated to pursuing the truth, I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop reposting the fake Deep Meaning Generator things.  Because I'm tired of seeing stuff like people claiming that Wanda means "Heart of Gold" when it actually means "sheep herder."

Thank you.

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Truth by repetition

You probably have heard the quote attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: "If you tell a lie big enough and continue to repeat it, eventually people will come to believe it."  This has become a staple tactic in political rhetoric -- an obvious recent example being Donald Trump's oft-repeated declaration that he won the 2020 presidential election, despite bipartisan analysis across the United States demonstrating unequivocally that this is false.  (The tactic works; a huge number of Trump supporters still think the election was stolen.)

It turns out that the "illusory truth effect" or "truth-by-repetition effect," as the phenomenon is called, still works even if the claim is entirely implausible.  A study by psychologist Doris Lacassagne at the Université Catholique de Louvain (in Belgium) recently presented 232 test subjects with a variety of ridiculous statements, including "the Earth is a perfect cube," "smoking is good for the lungs," "elephants weigh less than ants," and "rugby is the sport associated with Wimbledon."  In the first phase of the experiment, they were asked to rate the statements not for plausibility, but for how "interesting" they were.  After this, the volunteers were given lists of statements to evaluate for plausibility, and were told ahead of time that some of the statements would be repeated, and that there would be statements from the first list included on the second along with completely new claims.

The results were a little alarming, and support Goebbels's approach to lying.  The false statements -- even some of the entirely ridiculous ones -- gained plausibility from repetition.  (To be fair, the ratings still had average scores on the "false" side of the rating spectrum; but they did shift toward increasing veracity.)

The ones that showed the greatest shift were the ones that required at least a vague familiarity with science or technical matters, such as "monsoons are caused by earthquakes."  It only took a few repetitions to generate movement toward the "true" end of the rating scale, which is scary.  Not all the news was bad, though; although 53% of the participants showed a positive illusory truth effect, 28% showed a negative effect -- repeating false statements triggered their plausibility assessments to decrease.  (I wonder if this was because people who actually know what they're talking about become increasingly pissed off by seeing the same idiotic statement over and over.  I suspect that's how I would react.)

Of course, recognizing that statements are false requires some background knowledge.  I'd be much more likely to fall for believing a false statement about (for example) economics, because I don't know much about the subject; presumably I'd be much harder to fool about biology.  It's very easy for us to see some claim about a subject we're not that familiar with and say, "Huh!  I didn't know that!" rather than checking its veracity -- especially if we see the same claim made over and over.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Zabou, Politics, CC BY 3.0]

I honestly have no idea what we could do about this.  The downside of the Freedom of Speech amendment in the Constitution of the United States means that with a limited number of exceptions -- slander, threats of violence, vulgarity, and hate speech come to mind -- people can pretty much say what they want on television.  The revocation of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine in 1987 meant that news media no longer were required to give a balanced presentation of all sides of the issues, and set us up for the morass of partisan editorializing that the nightly news has become in the last few years.  (And, as I've pointed out more than once, it's not just outright lying that is the problem; partisan media does as much damage by what they don't tell you as what they do.  If a particular news channel's favorite political figure does something godawful, and the powers-that-be at the channel simply decide not to mention it, the listeners will never find out about  it -- especially given that another very successful media tactic has been convincing the consumers that "everyone is lying to you except us.")

It's a quandary.  There's currently no way to compel news commentators to tell the truth, or to force them to tell their listeners parts of the news that won't sit well with them.  Unless what the commentator says causes demonstrable harm, the FCC pretty much has its hands tied.

So the Lacassagne study seems to suggest that as bad as partisan lies have gotten, we haven't nearly reached the bottom of the barrel yet.

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The illusion of truth

Because we apparently need one more cognitive bias to challenge our confidence in what we hear on the news on a daily basis, today I'm going to tell you about the illusory truth effect.

The idea here is that if you hear a falsehood repeated often enough, in your mind, it becomes a fact.  This is the "big lie" approach that Hitler recommends in Mein Kampf:

All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. 

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.  Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.  For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

But the most referenced quote framing this idea comes from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

Which is more than a little ironic, because there's no evidence Goebbels ever said (or wrote) that -- although he certainly did embody the spirit of it.

The topic comes up because of a study that appeared in Cognition this week, called, "An Initial Accuracy Focus Prevents Illusory Truth," by psychologists Nadia M. Brashier (of Harvard University) and Emmaline Drew Eliseev and Elizabeth J. Marsh (of Duke University).  And what they found was simultaneously dismaying and heartening; that it is very easy to get people to fall for illusory truth through repetition, and they can be inoculated against it by having them read the source material with a critical eye the first time, striking out erroneous information.  Doing that, apparently, inoculates them against falling for the lie later, even after repeated exposure.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons RyanMinkoff, Academic dishonesty, CC BY-SA 4.0]

What's especially frightening about the dismaying part of this study is that being taken in by repeated falsehoods even works for purely factual, easily checkable information.  One of the statements they used was "The fastest land mammal is the leopard," which most people recognize as false (the fastest land mammal is the cheetah).  The surmise is that if you keep seeing the same incorrect statement, you begin to doubt your own understanding or your own memory.

I know this happens to me.  There are few topics I'm so completely confident about that I could hear someone make a contradicting statement and think, "No, that's definitely wrong."  I'm much more likely to think, "Wait... am I remembering incorrectly?"  Part of the problem is that I'm a raging generalist; I know a little bit about a great many things, so if an expert comes along and says I've got it wrong, I'm putting my money on the expert.  (I've also been called a "dilettante" or a "dabbler" or "a light year across and an inch deep," but on the whole I like "generalist" better.)

The problem is, it's easy to mistake someone who simply speaks with a lot of confidence as being an expert.  Take, for example, Donald Trump.  (Please.  No, really, please.  Take him.)  He's lied so many times there's a whole Wikipedia page devoted to "Veracity of Statements by Donald Trump."  As only one example of the illusory truth effect, take his many-times-repeated statement that he would have won the popular vote if it hadn't been for millions of votes cast fraudulently for Hillary Clinton, and also that his electoral college win was "the biggest landslide in history" (it wasn't even close; of the 58 presidential elections the United States has had, Donald Trump's electoral college win comes in at #46).

The problem is, Trump makes these statements with so much confidence, and with such frequency, that it's brought up the question of whether he actually believes them to be true.  Even if he's lying, the technique is remarkably effective -- a sort of Gish gallop of falsehood (the latter term named after creationist Duane Gish, who was known for swamping his debate opponents with rapid-fire arguments of dubious veracity, wearing them down simply by the overall volume).  A lot of his supporters believe that he won by a landslide, that Clinton only did as well as she did because of rampant fraud, and a host of other demonstrably false beliefs (such as the size of Trump's inauguration crowd, attendance at his rallies, how well the economy is doing, and that the air and water in the United States are the highest quality in the world).

So to put the research by Brashier et al. to work, somehow people would have to be willing and able to fact check these statements as they're happening, the first time they hear them -- not very likely, especially given the role of confirmation bias in affecting how much people believe these statements at the outset (someone who supports Trump already would be more likely to believe him, for example when he's stated that the number of illegal immigrants is the highest it's ever been, when in fact it peaked in 2007 and has been falling steadily ever since).

In any case, it's hard to see how all this helps us.  The traction of "alternative facts" has simply become too great, as has the vested interest of partisan and sensationalized media.  Not for nothing do Brashier et al. call our current situation "the post-truth world."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: science historian James Burke's Circles: Fifty Round Trips Through History, Technology, Science, and Culture.  Burke made a name for himself with his brilliant show Connections, where he showed how one thing leads to another in discoveries, and sometimes two seemingly unconnected events can have a causal link (my favorite one is his episode about how the invention of the loom led to the invention of the computer).

In Circles, he takes us through fifty examples of connections that run in a loop -- jumping from one person or event to the next in his signature whimsical fashion, and somehow ending up in the end right back where he started.  His writing (and his films) always have an air of magic to me.  They're like watching a master conjuror create an illusion, and seeing what he's done with only the vaguest sense of how he pulled it off.

So if you're an aficionado of curiosities of the history of science, get Circles.  You won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Fast forward

Can I plead with you on bended knee about something?

Will you all promise that if you forward something, or post it on Facebook or Twitter, you'll do three minutes of research and figure out if what you're sending along is correct?

Because I'm sick unto death of seeing stuff like this over and over:

Look, we get it, okay?  You hate President Obama.  If President Obama simultaneously figured out how to erase the national debt, end all war, and cure cancer, you'd complain that he had only done it to distract you from the fact that he failed to stop the Benghazi attack in 2012 that killed four Americans.

But you are not helping your case any by lying.  Let's start with the fact that there is no "Kenyan language"; there are 68 languages spoken in Kenya, of which Swahili, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, and Kamba are the most common.  "Denali" comes from the Koyukon Athabaskan language of (Guess where?  You'll never guess) Alaska, from a word that means "high" or "tall."  The Swahili words for "black" and "power" are "nyeusi" and "nguvu;" in Kikuyu it's "iru" and "thitma;" in Kalenjin, "oosek" and "lugumek;" and so on.

Do you see anything that looks the least bit like "Denali" in there?

No, me neither.

Then there's this thing, that has been circulated so much that it makes me want to scream:

I started out responding every time I saw this with, "Oh, you mean like we still do in damn near every school in America?", but I've seen it so many times that I've kind of given up.  It would take you less than the aforementioned three minutes -- something like fifteen seconds, even with a slow connection -- to verify that the Pledge is still recited in every public school in the United States, and a great many private ones, every single morning.  But the people who this one appeals to seem to be unhappy if they're not embattled, so it's much easier to thump their chests and say, "Let me pass along something that conforms to my preconceived notions of how the world is!  That's how staunchly 'Murikan I am!" than it is to find out if what they're angry about is actually true.

But it's not only the conservatives that do this.  How about this one?

This one circulated around the channels of "Everything the US Does Sucks" for ages.  You'd think that it'd be easy enough to check -- after all, whoever created this image kindly listed all of the countries we allegedly invaded -- but again, it's easier just to get outraged and say, "hell yes!" and post it to your Facebook than it is to see if it's true.

Turns out, some political scientists fact-checked the list, and by the generally accepted definition of "invasion," only three qualify (Grenada, Panama, and Iraq).  Another seven are possibilities, if you stretch the definition to include sending troops to help fighters already battling with the government (Libya, Kuwait, Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Bosnia).  But this list includes Liberia -- where US troops acted as peacekeepers to stop the citizens from slaughtering each other -- and Congo, where they were sent in for humanitarian aid after refugees from the Rwandan genocide started pouring across the border!

Outrage is easy.  The trouble is, making sure you're not passing along a falsehood is easy, too, in these days where information is available at the touch of a keyboard.  There is no excuse for the fast-forward-finger.

The bottom line is: truth matters.  As Daniel Patrick Moynihan so eloquently put it, you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.  If you want to argue your position, that's fine and dandy, whether or not I agree with you.  But supporting your cause with lies helps nothing and no one.

All it does is make it look like you don't know how to do a Google search.