It’s Time to Give Up on Facts
Or at least to temporarily lay them down in favor of a more useful weapon: emotions.
By Jess Zimmerman
Feb 08, 20175:56 AM
https://slate.com/technology/2017/02/cou...-not-facts.html




Several years ago, when my last name was different and my politics were less entrenched, I worked for a nonpartisan fact-checking site. We analyzed falsehoods in political speeches and ads and email forwards: No, there won’t be death panels. No, Sarah Palin didn’t cut funding for special education. Yes, Obama was born in America. No, he wasn’t in the video for “(Whoomp!) There It Is.” We called many of these “zombie rumors”—we would try to smack them down, but a few months later, there they would be again. Over the three years I worked there, more and more zombie rumors massed at our door. We just kept plugging away, calmly stating the facts, because that was our job, but inside our well-insulated office we were screaming. What was the point of working so tirelessly to uncover the truth when the falsehoods never died?

In fact, by trying to stem the tide of untruths, we were probably making everything worse. Repeating a falsehood, even as part of a meticulously researched article that debunks it, actually reinforces the falsehood; the human brain seems to experience fact-checking as a statement followed by a bunch of Charlie Brown teacher noises. We knew this even then: I can probably designate a Washington Post article about the lie-repetition phenomenon as my first “lol nothing matters” moment, six years before the phrase became a meme. My most memorable illustration of this concept was the time that someone emailed to ask about a rumor on Snopes.com, forwarding along the page. It said “FALSE” boldly at the top. The person had forgotten that part but remembered the claim.

In the years since that Post article, which discussed research stretching back to 1945, psychologists, linguists, and philosophers have continued to explore why and how our brains cling to lies. And all the while, those lie-loving brains have kept at it, allowing the stream of email rumors I dealt with a decade ago to metastasize into an entire fake news industry and eventually a White House that traffics in “alternative facts.” Now all of us, not just the fact-checkers, are faced with the challenge of trying to reckon with a dubious alternate reality filled with fraudulent voters, pizza-joint sex rings, and massacres in Bowling Green. As linguist George Lakoff was still trying to tell us even as of last month, the more we correct them, the more ingrained they get. And yet we’re still trying to fact-check our way out. It’s an impulse we just can’t seem to kick.

But it’s never going to work. Facts are not the opposite of lies. Indeed, to defeat lies, we may have to—temporarily, in a targeted way—give up on facts.

The thing is that trying to counter a lie with a fact is like trying to get a catchy tune out of your head by reading out loud from the dictionary. It doesn’t matter which edition you use, or how many definitions you read, or how loudly you say them; when you stop, you’ll still be thinking about Rick Astley. In fact, it’s entirely possible you’ll find yourself singing “now I’m gonna LOOK it UP, ‘infrastructure’ IS a NOUN, this is what it means: a ba-a-asic framework.” The fact does not unseat the lie, and the lie often just ends up deforming the facts.

You have that song stuck in your head now, and I’m sorry. But we can fix it. There are two surefire ways to get a tune out of your head, besides death: Replace it with a stickier tune, or replace it with a tune that is just catchy enough to knock it out but not catchy enough to stay with you for all time. (The song that works best for the latter is “Everybody to the Limit” by Strong Bad, just so you know.) By the same token, even though you can’t dislodge a lie with a correction, might it be possible to dislodge a lie by replacing it with another lie (not ideal) or something similar enough to a lie that it occupies the same brain space (perhaps better)?-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Oldie but goodie.