We are a storytelling species, and a social species, easily swayed by the opinions of others. We have three ways to acquire information: We can discover it ourselves, we can absorb it implicitly, or we can be told it explicitly. Much of what we know about the world falls in this last category—somewhere along the line, someone told us a fact or we read about it, and so we know it only secondhand. We rely on people with expertise to tell us.
I’ve never seen an atom of oxygen or a molecule of water, but there is a body of literature describing meticulously conducted experiments that lead me to believe these exist. Similarly, I haven’t verified firsthand that Americans landed on the moon, that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, that pasteurization really kills bacteria, or that humans normally have twenty-three chromosomes. I don’t know firsthand that the elevator in my building has been properly designed and maintained, or that my doctor actually went to medical school. We rely on experts, certifications, licenses, encyclopedias, and textbooks.
But we also need to rely on ourselves, on our own wits and powers of reasoning. Lying weasels who want to separate us from our money, or get us to vote against our own best interests, will try to snow us with pseudo-facts, confuse us with numbers that have no basis, or distract us with information that, upon closer examination, is not actually relevant. They will masquerade as experts.
The antidote to this is to analyze claims we encounter the way we analyze statistics and graphs. The skills necessary should not be beyond the ability of most fourteen-year-olds. They are taught in law schools and schools of journalism, sometimes in business schools and graduate science programs, but rarely to the rest of us, to those who need it most.
If you like watching crime dramas, or reading investigative journalism pieces, many of the skills will be familiar—they resemble the kinds of evaluations that are made during court cases. Judges and juries evaluate competing claims and try to discover the truth within. There are codified rules about what constitutes real evidence; in the United States, documents that haven’t been authenticated are generally not allowed, nor is “hearsay” testimony, although there are exceptions.
Suppose someone points you to a website that claims that listening to Mozart music for twenty minutes a day will make us smarter. Another website says it’s not true. A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine. It would be nice to believe that all you have to do is listen to beautiful music for twenty minutes to suddenly take your place at the head of the IQ line. It takes effort to evaluate claims like this, probably more time than it would take to listen to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, but it is necessary to avoid drawing incorrect conclusions. Even the smartest of us can be fooled. Steve Jobs delayed treatment for his pancreatic cancer while he followed the advice (given in books and websites) that a change in diet could provide a cure. By the time he realized the diet wasn’t working, the cancer had progressed too far to be treated.
Determining the truthfulness or accuracy of a source is not always possible. Consider the epigram opening Part One:
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
I saw this at the opening of the feature film The Big Short, which attributed it to Mark Twain, and I felt I had seen it somewhere before; Al Gore also used it in his film An Inconvenient Truth nine years earlier with the same attribution. But in fact-checking the Field Guide, I could not find any evidence that Twain ever said this. The attribution and quote itself are prime examples of what the quote is trying to warn us against. The directors, writers, and producers of both films didn’t do their homework—what they thought they knew for sure turned out not to be true at all.
A little web research pulled up an article in Forbes that claims it is a misattribution. The author, Nigel Rees, cites Respectfully Quoted, a dictionary of quotations compiled by the U.S. Library of Congress. That book reports various formulations of the remark in Everybody’s Friend, or Josh Billing’s Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (1874). “There you are, you see,” writes Rees. “Mark Twain is a better-known humorist than ‘Josh Billings’ and so the quote drifts towards him.”
Rees continues:
And not only him. In a 1984 presidential debate, Walter Mondale came up with this: “I’m reminded a little bit of what Will Rogers once said of Hoover. He said ‘It’s not what he doesn’t know that bothers me, it’s what he knows for sure just ain’t so.’”
Who’s right? With difficult matters such as this, it is often helpful to consult an expert. I asked Gretchen Lieb, a research librarian at Vassar who works as the liaison to the English Department, and who provided this insightful analysis:
Quotations are tricky things. They’re the literary equivalent of statistics, really, in terms of lies, damn lies, etc. Older quotations are almost like translations from another language, too, in terms of being interpretations rather than verbatim, especially in the case of this circle, since these authors wrote in a sort of fantasy dialect, à la Huckleberry Finn, that is difficult to read and downright disturbing to us now in some cases.
I could go check numerous other books of quotations, such as Oxford, etc., but that would be so twentieth century.
Have you come across HathiTrust? It’s the corpus of books from research libraries that is behind Google Books, and it’s a gold mine, especially for pre-1928 printed materials.
Here’s the Josh Billings attribution in “Respectfully Quoted” (we have it as an e-book; I didn’t need to walk away from my desk!), and it cites the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which I tend to use more than Bartlett’s:
“The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so.” Attributed to Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) by The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3d ed., p. 491 (1979). Not verified in his writings, although some similar ideas are found in Everybody’s Friend, or Josh Billing’s Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (1874). Original spelling is corrected: “What little I do know I hope I am certain of.” (p. 502) “Wisdom don’t consist in knowing more that is new, but in knowing less that is false.” (p. 430) “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” (p. 286)
By the way, regarding the Walter Mondale attribution to Will Rogers, Respectfully Quoted notes that this has not been found in Rogers’s work.
Here is a link to Billings’s book, where you can search for the phrase “ain’t so” and get the idea of what lies therein: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101067175438.
Not verifiable. Plus, if you search for Mark Twain, you find that this compendium/encyclopedia writer cites fellow humorist and smartypants Mark Twain as his most trusted correspondent, so they’re having a conversation and bouncing clever aphorisms, or as Billings would say, “affurisms,” off of each other. Who knows who said what?
I usually roll my eyes when people, especially politicians, quote Mark Twain or Will Rogers, and think to myself, H. L. Mencken, we hardly know you. Critical minds like his are in short supply these days. Poor Josh Billings. Being the second most famous humorist puts you on precarious ground a hundred years later.
So here’s an odd case of a quote that appears to have been utterly fabricated, both in its content and its attribution. The basic idea was contained in Billings, although it’s not clear if that idea came from him, Twain, or perhaps their buddy Bret Harte. Will Rogers gets put in the mix because, well, it just sort of sounds like something he would say.
The quote that opens Part Two was given to me by an acquaintance who misremembered it as:
The blackest lie is a partial truth that leads you to the wrong conclusion.
It sounded plausible. It would be just like Tennyson to give color to an abstract noun, and to mix the metaphysical with the practical. I only found out the actual quote (“A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies”) when fact-checking for this book. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.
In the presence of new or conflicting claims, we can make an informed and evidence-based choice about what is true. We examine the claims for ourselves, and make a decision, acting as our own judge and jury. And as part of the process we usually do well to seek expert opinions. How do we identify them?