Fact avoidance

I've learned through the years that my feelings are an unreliable guide to evaluating reality.

Part of this, I suppose, comes from having fought depression for forty years.  I know that what I'm thinking is influenced by my neurotransmitters, and given the fact that they spend a lot of the time out of whack, my sense that five different mutually-exclusive worst-case scenarios can all happen simultaneously is probably not accurate.  It could be that this was in part what drove me to skepticism, and to my understanding that my best bet for making good decisions is to rely not on feelings, but on evidence.

It surprises me how many people don't get that.  I saw two really good examples of this in the news last week, both of them centered around embattled President Donald Trump.  In the first, he was questioned about why he was putting so much emphasis on securing the border with Mexico -- to the extent of sending in the National Guard -- when in fact, illegal border crossings are at a 46-year low.  (You could argue that current levels are still too high; but the fact is, attempted border crossings have steadily dropped from a high of 1.8 million all the way back in 2000; the level now is about a quarter of that.)

I'm not here to discuss immigration policy per se.  It's a complex issue and one on which I am hardly qualified to weigh in.  What strikes me about this is that the powers-that-be are saying, "I don't care about the data, facts, and figures, the number of illegal migrants is increasing because I feel like it is."

An even more blatant example of trust-your-feelings-not-the-facts came from presidential spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has the unenviable and overwhelming job of doing damage control every time Trump lies about something.  This time, it was at a roundtable discussion on taxes in West Virginia, where he veered off script and started railing about voter fraud.  "In many places, like California, the same person votes many times — you've probably heard about that," he said.  "They always like to say 'oh, that's a conspiracy theory' — not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people."

Of course, the states he likes to claim were sites of rampant voter fraud are always states in which he lost, because the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote still keeps him up at night.  But the fact is, he's simply wrong.  A fourteen-year study by Loyola law professor Justin Levitt found that a "specific, credible allegation existed that someone pretended to be someone else at the polls" accounted for 31 instances out of a billion votes analyzed.

To make it clear: 31 does not equal "millions and millions."  And a fraud rate of 0.0000031% does not constitute "many times."

So, Trump lied.  At this point, that's hardly news.  It'd be more surprising if you turned on the news and found out Trump had told the truth about something.  But when asked about this actual data, in juxtaposition to what Trump said, Sarah Sanders said, "The president still feels there was a large amount of voter fraud."

Wait, what?

What Trump or Sanders, or (for that matter) you or I, "feel" about something is completely irrelevant.  If there's hard data available -- which there is, both on the border crossings and on allegations of voter fraud -- that is what should be listened to.  And when you say something, and are confronted by someone who has facts demonstrating the opposite, the appropriate response is, "Whoa, okay.  I guess I was wrong."

But that's if you're not Donald Trump.  Trump never admits to being wrong.  He doesn't have to, because he's surrounded himself with a Greek chorus of people like Sanders (and his sounding boards over at Fox News) who, no matter what Trump says or does, respond, "Exactly right, sir.  You're amazing.  A genius.  Your brain is YUUUGE."

Hell, he said a couple of years ago that he could kill someone in full view on 5th Avenue and not lose a single supporter, and we had a rather alarming proof of that this week when a fire broke out at Trump Tower on, actually, 5th Avenue -- which, contrary to the law, had no fire alarms or sprinkler system installed -- killing one man and injuring six.

The response?  One Trump supporter said that the man who died had deliberately set the fire to make Trump look bad, and then didn't get out in time.

Facts don't matter.  "I feel like Trump is a great leader and a staunch Christian" wins over "take a look at the hard data" every time.

I'd like to say I have a solution to this, but this kind of fact-resistance is so self-insulating that there's no way in.  It's like living inside a circular argument.  "Trump is brilliant because I feel like he's brilliant, so anything to the contrary must be a lie."  And when you have Fox News pushing this attitude hard -- ignoring any information to the contrary -- you can't escape.

If you doubt that, take a look at what Tucker Carlson was talking about while every other news agency in the world was covering the raid on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's office: a piece on how "pandas are aggressive and sex-crazed."  (No, I'm not making this up.  An actual quote: "You know the official story about pandas — they’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they are almost extinct.  But like a lot of what we hear, that is a lie...  The real panda is a secret stud with a thirst for flesh and a fearsome bite.")

That's some cutting-edge reporting, right there.  No wonder Fox News viewers were found in a 2012 study to be the worst-informed of all thirty media sources studied, only exceeded by people who didn't watch the news at all.

So sorry to end on a rather dismal note, but it seems like until people decide to start valuing facts above feelings, we're kind of stuck.  Honestly, the only answer I can come up with is educating children to be critical thinkers, but in the current environment of attacking teachers and public schools, I'm not sure that's feasible either.

In the interim, though, I'm gonna avoid pandas.  Because they sound a lot sketchier than I'd realized.

Sunk cost and treason

There's this thing called the sunk-cost fallacy -- that once a person has put a lot of time, money, effort, or emotional investment into something, they are unlikely admit that it didn't live up to its expectations.

This is the only thing I can come up with to explain why Republican leaders are still sticking with Donald Trump, even after credible allegations that not only did the Russians tamper with the election results, Trump encouraged them to do so.  Giving a foreign power access to our government for malign purposes is, I thought, the definition of treason.  Imagine, for example, if there were evidence that Barack Obama had allowed a foreign government to manipulate election results.  These same people who are giving Trump a pass on this, or ignoring it completely, would be calling for reinstating crucifixion.

To be fair, some Republicans are aghast at this.  Lindsey Graham has been outspoken in his call for an independent investigation of the allegations.  John McCain went even further, saying that if the claims are true, it could "destroy democracy" in the United States.  Even Mitch McConnell, who has been one of Trump's biggest supporters, has joined in the call.  Much as I hate to admit agreeing with Joe Walsh on anything, he hit the nail on the head a few days ago with this tweet:

Which is it exactly.  I would think that anyone, regardless of party affiliation, would be appalled at the idea that the Russians may have influenced a national election, and would want it investigated.

But astonishingly, that isn't what's happening.  Other than a few outspoken conservatives who want the issue looked at -- if for no other reason, to clear Trump's name and get rid of any taint of illegitimacy -- most Republicans are shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Meh.  No biggie."

Now wait just a moment.  These were the same people who were chanting "Lock her up!" because of allegations that Hillary Clinton mishandled some emails.  Instead, what has been the overall response?

An increase in the positive ratings of Vladimir Putin.

I'm not making this up.  In a poll conducted by The Economist, favorable ratings for Putin tripled in the past two years, most of the increase being in the last month.  In fact, Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California made the following astonishing statement: "There’s a lot of negative things about [Putin] that are accurate but there are a lot of negative things about him that have been said that are inaccurate.  At least the other other side of the coin is being heard now...  Finally there’s some refutation of some of the inaccurate criticisms finally being heard."

So instead of people being outraged that Putin and his cronies may have interfered in the election, they're saying, "Well, maybe Putin's not so bad after all."

I can't think of anything but sunk cost as an explanation for this.  These people have already overlooked so much in the way of Donald Trump's unethical behavior, evasions, and outright lies, not to mention his blatant lack of qualifications for the job, that to admit that this finally drives them over the edge would require a huge shift of perspective.  I've never seen a candidate that elicits such an enormous emotional response from ordinary citizens; huge investments of time and energy have been put into seeing him in the White House.  For the pro-Trump cadre to say "Okay, we were wrong about him" is apparently a bridge too far.  Easier to say, "Trump's got to be right, so we were wrong about Putin."

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, agrees.  He said, "The Republican base, particularly the Trump part of the Republican base, is going to regard anyone and anything that helped their great leader to win as a positive force, or at least a less negative force."

I hope that wise heads prevail and that the allegations are at least investigated.  And although I don't like Trump, I hope they turn out to be false, because the idea that the Russians (or any other country) are able to manipulate our government so boldly is profoundly terrifying.  But if they are true -- if the evidence supports the Russian hacks -- we have to act.  I'm no constitutional law scholar, but there has to be some provision for invalidating an election's results if the outcome was affected by a foreign power.

Especially if a cold, calculating villain like Vladimir Putin is responsible for it.

Rigged thinking

Skepticism often requires maneuvering your way through equal and opposite pitfalls.  As I frequently say to my classes, gullibility and cynicism are both signs of mental laziness -- it is as much of a cognitive error to disbelieve everything you hear as it is to believe everything.

The same is true of reliance on authority.  It certainly is inadvisable to believe without question anything an authority says (or believe it simply because (s)he is an authority); but dismissing everything is also pretty ridiculous.  Stephen Hawking, for example, is a world-renowned authority on physics.  If I refused to believe what he has to say on (for example) black holes I would be foolish -- and very likely wrong.

So categorical thinking tends to get us into trouble.  It's an excuse to avoid the hard work of research and analysis.  It is also, unfortunately, extremely common.

Which brings us to "everything the government tells you is a lie."

Distrust of the government is in vogue these days.  "The government says..." is a fine way to start a sentence that you're expecting everyone to scoff at, especially if the piece of the government in question belongs to a different political party than you do.  That spokespeople for the government have lied on occasion -- that they have, sometimes, engaged in disinformation campaigns -- is hardly at issue.  But to decide that everything a government agency does or says is deliberately dishonest is sloppy thinking, not to mention simply untrue.

It also has another nasty side effect, though, which is to convince people that they are powerless.  If the Big Evil Government is going to do whatever they damn well please regardless of what voters want, it leads people to believe that they're being bamboozled every time they vote.  And powerless, angry, frustrated people tend to do stupid, violent things.

Which is why the whole "the election is rigged" bullshit that Donald Trump is trumpeting every chance he gets is so dangerous.  For fuck's sake, the election hasn't even happened yet; one very much gets the impression that this reaction is much like a toddler's temper tantrum when he doesn't get the piece of candy he wants.  Trump can't conceive of the fact that he could compete for something he wants and lose fair and square; so if he loses (and it very much looks like he's going to), the election must be rife with fraud.

Scariest of all was his suggestion in last night's presidential debate that he might not concede the election if Clinton wins.  As CNN senior political analyst David Gergen put it:

More importantly, many in the press, as well as others (I am among them) were horrified that Trump refused to say he would accept the verdict of voters on November 8.  No other candidate has ever taken the outrageous position that "if I win, that's legitimate but if I lose, the system must be rigged."  It is bad enough that Trump puts himself before party; now he is putting self before country.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In fact, actual voter fraud in the United States is so rare as to be insignificant with respect to the outcome of elections.  A comprehensive study by Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and professor of law at Loyola University, found 31 cases of credible voter fraud out of one billion ballots cast in the past sixteen years.  A separate study by Lorraine Minnite, professor of political science at Rutgers, came to the same conclusion.  Further, she found that irregularities in elections were almost always due to innocent human error rather than a deliberate attempt to throw the election.  Here are four examples Minnite cites:

• In the contested 2004 Washington state gubernatorial election, a Superior Court judge ruled invalid just 25 ballots, constituting 0.0009 percent of the 2,812,675 cast. Many were absentee ballots mailed as double votes or in the names of deceased people, but the judge did not find all were fraudulently cast. When King County prosecutors charged seven defendants, the lawyer for one 83-year old woman said his client “simply did not know what to do with the absentee ballot after her husband of 63 years, Earl, passed away” just before the election, so she signed his name and mailed the ballot. 
• A leaked report from the Milwaukee Police Department found that data entry errors, typographical errors, procedural missteps, misapplication of the rules, and the like accounted for almost all reported problems during the 2004 presidential election. 
• When the South Carolina State Election Commission investigated a list of 207 allegedly fraudulent votes in the 2010 election, it found simple human errors in 95 percent of the cases the state’s highest law enforcement official had reported as fraud. 
• A study by the Northeast Ohio Media Group of 625 reported voting irregularities in Ohio during the 2012 election found that nearly all cases forwarded to county prosecutors were caused by voter confusion or errors by poll workers.

It's easy to say "the system is designed to screw voters!" or "the election is rigged!"  It's not so easy to answer the questions, "What evidence do you have that this happens?" and "How would you actually go about rigging a national election if you wanted to?"  (If you want an excellent summary of the argument that the risk of hackers or other miscreants affecting the outcome of an election in the United States is extremely small, check out the CNN article on the subject that just came out yesterday.)

So what we have here is one more example of baseless partisan rhetoric, which has as the unsettling side effect making people on the losing side feel like they've been cheated.  Which, I think, is why we're seeing a serious uptick in threats of violence by people who don't like the way the election seems to be going -- from the woman at a Trump rally who cited "rampant voter fraud" and said, "For me personally, if Hillary Clinton gets in, I myself am ready for a revolution" to Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke who tweeted, "our institutions of gov, WH, Congress, DOJ, and big media are corrupt & all we do is bitch. Pitchforks and torches time."

To reiterate what I said at the beginning; it's not that I condone, agree with, or like everything government has done.  Nor do I think that government officials (or whole agencies) are above doing some pretty screwed up stuff.  But to say "government sucks" and forthwith stop thinking -- or, worse still, threaten violence because of that simplistic view of the world -- is not just wrong, it's dangerous.