by Daniel Yim
8
Is It a Fact that Facts Don’t Matter?
DAVID RAMSAY STEELE
Facts don’t matter, or so Scott Adams keeps telling us.
This looks like an outrageous claim. He sometimes qualifies it by saying that “Facts matter for outcomes but not for persuasion” and sometimes seems to back away from it by saying that “Facts are over-rated” (implying they do matter at least a little bit).
And despite his flat assertion that facts don’t matter, Scott spends much of his time on his blog and on Periscope disputing matters of fact. He tells us that he was one of the few to predict Trump’s victory—he assures us that this is a fact, and that it matters a lot. More generally, he tells us that Persuasion is “a good filter because it predicts well”—he tells us that this is a fact, and that it matters a lot. And of course he repeatedly informs us that “facts don’t matter,” which if true must be a fact that matters a lot (and that would be a performative contradiction, but hey, Scott’s impatient with technicalities so we’ll steer clear of them).
In fact, Scott can’t talk for five minutes or write for two pages without making his argument depend on matters of fact which really do matter for his argument. So how can it possibly be that facts don’t matter?
Well, maybe he thinks that facts don’t matter for most people, though they quite obviously do matter to him? Or maybe we can make some sense of his strange claim that “facts matter for outcomes but not for persuasion”? Or perhaps he means only that politicians sometimes win elections despite making a lot of factually inaccurate claims? Or perhaps he’s practicing what he sees as Donald Trump’s “anchor” strategy—making a seemingly outlandish claim to attract attention and situate the negotiation, a claim which he will later dial back to a more moderate statement?
The Two Meanings of “Facts”
What are facts? Dictionaries give several alternative (and sometimes incompatible) definitions of the word “fact.” However, these alternative definitions can be grouped into two basic ideas:
1.“Facts” are the way things really are (or were), independent of what anyone thinks.
2.“Facts” are statements which have been certified as true, either by common consent or by some authority, such as a consensus of experts.
It can be confusing that there are these two common uses of the word “fact,” as they are often contrary in meaning. In sense #1, it’s possible for everyone to be wrong about a fact, or just to be totally unaware of it, whereas in sense #2, nothing can be a fact until someone has become aware of it and considered it to be a fact.
A little thought shows, in fact, that the vast majority of facts in sense #1 can never be known by anyone—for example, think about such facts as the precise configuration of molecules inside a distant star, or how many beans were in that can I opened a year ago. The universe contains an infinity of facts in sense #1, and very nearly all of them are forever unknowable.
Furthermore a fact in sense #2 may not be a fact in sense #1, because common consent or the judgments of experts may be mistaken. Facts in sense #2 sometimes change. It used to be a “fact” in sense #2 that continents do not move, that homosexuality is a mental illness, and that it’s hazardous to your health to go swimming immediately after a meal. None of these are “facts” in sense #2 any longer.
Assuming that we’ve now got these facts right, then the sense #2 facts we now possess always were sense #1 facts, and the older sense #2 facts were never sense #1 facts, though people thought they were. Sense #1 facts never change, as long as we stipulate the date—a sense #1 fact may stop being a fact at a point in time, but then it’s still a fact that this fact was a fact before that point in time.
Although the two senses are sometimes opposed to each other, there is an intimate connection between them. We’re concerned about sense #2 facts because we think that they’re generally likely to give us sense #1 facts, at least a lot of the time. If we thought that a sense #2 fact had only a fifty-fifty chance of being a sense #1 fact, we would lose interest in sense #2 facts.
Confusion may arise if we don’t keep the distinction clear between sense #1 and sense #2. When Kellyanne Conway said that she would look for some “alternative facts,” this became viral and was taken by many to imply that she thought we could pick and choose our reality, like O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But close attention to that actual exchange between Kellyanne and Chuck Todd, and the other comments by President Trump and Sean Spicer, reveals that Kellyanne, Sean, and the president were very definitely talking about sense #2 facts. They weren’t disputing for a moment that sense #1 facts are objective and independent of what anyone believes, though in this particular disputed case, whether Trump’s Inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s, it looks to me that the Trump people were probably sincerely mistaken.
The attribution to Trump and his supporters of the view that facts in sense #1 can be chosen at will is not only wrong (not a fact); it’s extremely weird, because there are indeed a lot of people who deny the objectivity or absoluteness of truth (post-modernists, social constructivists, anti-realists, and truth-relativists) and these people are all on the left. This is a characteristic belief of leftist intellectuals, and is never found on today’s right.
Cognitive Dissonance
Scott talks a lot about “Cognitive Dissonance,” a concept which plays a big role in his theory of how people form their ideas. In Win Bigly (p. 48), he introduces Cognitive Dissonance by citing the Wikipedia definition. The basic idea is that Cognitive Dissonance is the discomfort or mental stress people have when they find a conflict between one thing they believe and something else they have come to believe.
The first thing to notice here is that this phenomenon of Cognitive Dissonance does not arise in most everyday cases where we find we have been mistaken. I was sure I had left my keys on the coffee table, but when I look, they’re not there. I start to search in the other likely places, and soon find them in my coat pocket. I had made a mistake; my memory was slightly faulty; no big deal. I’m not distressed. People revise their beliefs and acknowledge their mistakes all the time. Scott is demonstrably wrong when he says that Cognitive Dissonance “often” happens in “daily experience.” It almost never happens in daily experience.
But there certainly are cases (a small minority of cases) where a major assumption is challenged by events, leading to emotional distress and sometimes to the production of what Scott calls “hallucinations,” highly fanciful stories which reconcile the person’s prior assumption with what has unexpectedly happened. Scott, in fact, soon forgets the Wikipedia definition and then begins to use his own definition of Cognitive Dissonance, in which “your brain automatically generates an illusion to solve the discomfort” (pp. 48–49).
So, for Scott, the crux of Cognitive Dissonance is an illusion. This presupposes a distinction between illusion and reality, and therefore presupposes that facts matter a whole darn freaking lot. Exhibit A for Scott’s argument is, of course, the election of Donald Trump on November 8th 2016. Many people had thought the election of Trump, though an appalling hypothetical, was practically impossible, but it happened, and so these people experienced mental discomfort, and some of them began to believe very fanciful stories.
As Scott reminds us, these “hallucinations” (a term he extends to include any belief in tall tales) are more common among the party out of power. In the time of Obama, some Republican voters believed that Obama was a Muslim, while in the time of Trump some Democratic voters believed that Trump had “colluded with the Russians.”
When we look at these exceptional cases of what Scott calls “Cognitive Dissonance,” what do we see?
The first thing we notice is that this Cognitive Dissonance is brought about by the realization that something is seriously wrong: we find ourselves inclined to believe in two things which can’t both be true, and we know that this can’t be right. Sometimes, as with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the contradiction arises beca
use we have to accept that something has happened which our prior beliefs implied could not happen.
A standard example would be a religious sect which preaches that the world is going to end on a particular day. That day comes and goes without any obvious disruption, and the sect has to decide what to make of this—they may begin to preach that the world did end on that date, despite superficial appearances, or they may conclude they got their calculations wrong, and fix on a new, future date when the world will end.
The awareness that something is seriously wrong arises because of our acceptance of facts. What it shows is that facts are tremendously important. Facts matter more than almost anything else could possibly matter! There is (as a matter of fact) just one thing—only one!—that matters more than facts, and I’ll tell you what it is in a moment.
Without our acceptance of facts, this Cognitive Dissonance could not arise. It’s only because we accept that Trump did in fact become president-elect that we perceive a clash between this acceptance and our prior theory which told us it could not happen. This Cognitive Dissonance also requires that we recognize the law of logic which states that we can’t simultaneously accept a statement and its negation. So, we can’t accept that “Trump was elected president” and “Trump was not elected president.” The understanding that elementary logic is supreme is innate in all competent humans, in all cultures and social classes, at all historical times.
When we come up with what Scott calls an “illusion” to reconcile the new facts with our prevailing assumptions, what we’re doing is to accept the newly discovered facts while trying to preserve as much of our prevailing assumptions as we can, without self-contradiction, especially those assumptions we see as most fundamental. This is a rational response.
Coming to Terms with the Reality of Trump
After Trump had been elected but before the Inauguration, Scott predicted that Trump’s opponents in the first year of the Trump presidency would go through the following stages:
1.They would at first say that “Trump is Hitler.”
2.About halfway through the year, they would concede that Trump is not Hitler, but would say he was incompetent, perhaps even crazy.
3.By the end of the year, they would concede he was highly competent and therefore effective, but would assert that they didn’t like his policies.
Scott is justly very proud of this series of predictions, which have broadly come true (though he didn’t foresee the eruption of the “Russian collusion” story, nor did he foresee the brief revival of the “Trump is crazy” theory following the release of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury in January 2018). Scott’s latest prediction is that people will soon start talking about America’s new “Golden Age.”
However, as Scott’s account makes clear (but Scott himself apparently doesn’t notice), the fulfillment of these predictions depended on the over-arching importance of brute facts. According to Scott’s account:
1.The disappearance of the claim that Trump is Hitler results from unavoidable awareness of the fact that Trump has not done any Hitler-like things.
2.The disappearance of the claim that Trump is incompetent results from unavoidable awareness of the fact that he accomplished more than most presidents in his first year.
By Scott’s own account, then, in these two cases, the facts are absolutely decisive. He just takes for granted, without any hesitation, that people had no alternative but to acknowledge these facts.
When Trump was elected, we can imagine the anti-Trump believers “hallucinating” that Hillary had been declared winner, that Trump had conceded, that Hillary gave the Inaugural Address on 20th January 2017, and that Hillary was now in the Oval Office, carrying out the duties of president, no doubt superbly. But not one of the millions of Hillary supporters reacted in this way. Quite the opposite, they wept and wailed, bemoaning the undeniable fact that Hillary had lost the election. Clearly, facts are sometimes decisive, according to Scott’s own account.
Another way the Hillary supporters could have failed to accept the demonstrated fact of Trump’s election victory would have been to “hallucinate” that on November 8th 2016 the world was occupied by space aliens who abolished the United States of America along with its constitution and election procedures. These space aliens now directly governed what had been the US and we all became subject to their edicts. Not one of the millions of Hillary supporters opted for that theory!
Why did all the millions of Hillary supporters, without exception, fail to adopt one of these theories, or any of numerous other fanciful yarns we could dream up? According to Scott’s own account, there was just one explanation for this: all these millions of people had to accept the facts. The facts were irresistible.
Having accepted the unwelcome fact that Trump was now president, the Hillary supporters responded to this unwelcome fact by claiming that Trump was Hitler. Although inaccurate, this was not entirely arbitrary. It was essentially a continuation of what many of them had been saying before the election. They had been saying that if you elected Trump you would be electing Hitler. No doubt to some of them this was hyperbole, but they didn’t mind taking the risk that many others would interpret it literally, and now they found themselves hoist by their own hyperbole.
As the months went by, Trump failed to do anything remotely like Hitler. He did not set up concentration camps, outlaw all political parties except his own, murder his critics or rivals, or act in any way outside the previously existing law. He criticized Obama for having usurped the legislative role of Congress, complied with the decisions of courts, and did not propose that judicial review should be abolished. Nor did he grow a mustache.
The involuntary acceptance of facts caused changes in ideas. We can easily imagine that the Hillary supporters might have “hallucinated” that concentration camps were under construction, that all political parties except the Republicans had been outlawed, that Hillary, Bill, Barack, Michelle, Elizabeth Warren, John McCain, and Michael Moore had been assassinated in a “June Purge.” But not one of the Hillary supporters reacted like this. Instead, they all accepted that Trump was not Hitler after all, and moved on to the theory that he was “incompetent” or even “crazy” and that the White House was “in chaos.”
This was also factually inaccurate, but again, it was not entirely arbitrary. It returned to charges made against Trump during the election campaign. Trump’s decisive management style, his plebeian bluntness of speech, and his readiness to let people go who hadn’t worked out could easily be represented as someone just flailing around. His tweets could be described as impulsive, ill-considered responses to immediate provocations. It took a while before perceptive people, with the help of Scott Adams, came to understand that the Trump tweets were essentially strategic and adroitly crafted: Trump was counterbalancing the hostile propaganda pouring out from CNN and MSNBC; he was reaching a hundred million followers several times a day, and he was doing so (as he occasionally pointed out) for free.
The “incompetent or crazy” theory was killed by the demonstrable fact that Trump was effective; more than most presidents he was getting things done. Of course, we may not like some of the things he was getting done (and when it comes to the Wall, protective tariffs, and the wars in Syria and Afghanistan, I don’t), but, as Scott rightly insists, that’s a separate matter. More than half the country does like them.
Notice that, once again, acceptance of the fact that Trump was fully competent was involuntary. It was thrust upon the reluctant Hillary supporters by factual evidence that could hardly be contested, culminating in the successful passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Bill in December 2017, which all experienced observers attributed in large part to Trump’s management skills and capacity for hard work. By the time Trump achieved a rare perfect score on a standard test of cognitive ability, most people had already abandoned the theory that he was incompetent.
What Kind of a Genius?
Scott tells us that Trump is a Master Persuader. He goes so fa
r as to claim that Trump could have taken a different policy agenda and won with it, because of his persuasive skills (Win Bigly, pp. 92–93). He even says Trump could have won by persuasion if his and Hillary’s policies were simply switched.
While Trump’s persuasive skills are certainly extraordinary, and Scott has helped me and thousands of others to appreciate that, I believe we can explain Trump’s political success differently, and I very much doubt that Trump could have won with a substantially different agenda. I believe his choice of agenda was part of a shrewdly calculated political strategy. A linchpin of this strategy is the traditional working class in the Rust Belt states. These people had seen their real wages reduced, they had seen mining and manufacturing decimated as companies moved offshore, and they had seen that the Democratic Party would do nothing for them, not even to the extent of paying lip-service to their interests or having candidates visit their neighborhoods.
Trump, Hillary, and the Issues
In the 2016 election campaign, Trump constantly hammered away at the issues, while Hillary ran away from the issues. This was obvious to all those who followed the speeches and the TV ads on both sides, but if anyone had any doubts, there was a scholarly study of precisely this point, conducted in March 2017 by the Wesleyan Media Project. This study corroborated what was evident to anyone who followed both sides of the campaign.
All of Trump’s many rally speeches were densely focused on the policies he advocated. Only briefly would he make a nasty remark about Hillary’s personality or past misdeeds, then he would swiftly return to his advocacy of very specific policies. The same was even more true of the TV ads for Trump. On Hillary’s side, both speeches and TV ads gave very little attention to policy issues—far less than any other presidential candidate in living memory—and put all the emphasis on Trump’s horrible and frightening personality. As the Wesleyan study cautiously put it, “Clinton’s message was devoid of policy discussions in a way not seen in the previous four presidential contests.”