Three Reality Filters To Detect Lies, Misinformation, and Deception
A book published thirty-five years ago reveals the tools
Information overload and media blitz are making it increasingly difficult for people to know truth from falsehood, and facts from fiction.
Social media helps spread fake news and incubates echo chambers of prejudice and hatred thanks to our innumerable cognitive biases and fallacies.
Experts confound us with their theories, and politicians seduce us with their grand promises and exaggerated claims.
Activists spin narratives based on questionable facts and capture the public imagination. They hijack public opinion and turn their agendas into the mainstream orthodoxy that becomes difficult to question.
Amid our helplessness to know the reality, it makes sense to revisit the ideas of eminent thinkers and writers who had the foresight and astuteness to stand apart, think, and call out the false prophets, demagogues, propagandists.
In1985, Garrett Hardin, an eminent ecologist, wrote a book, Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, And the Merely Eloquent.
Garrett Hardin wrote this book from an ecologist’s perspective. But the tools he offers in this book will help people to filter the information that bombards them incessantly and see the hidden reality. Hardin describes these intellectual tools as “filters for reducing reality to a manageable simplicity.”
The three filters are:
- The literate filer
- The numerate filter
- The ecolate filter
The literate filer deals with language, especially the words, used to communicate policies, theories, and ideas.
The numerate filter deals with numbers: quantities, ratios, and rates.
The ecolate filter with the consequences of our actions on the natural world, whose complexity is seldom taken into consideration when we choose a particular course of action.
Each filter operates through a specific question:-
Literacy: What are the words?
Numeracy: What are the numbers?
Ecolacy: And then what?
We must learn to use all the three filters to understand the world and to predict the consequences of our actions.
Literate filter
Language, especially English, lends itself to ambiguities, obfuscations, misconceptions, and misrepresentations.
Its very variety, subtlety, and utter irrationality, idiomatic complexity make it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language. (Robert A. Heinlein, American science-fiction writer)
Words are powerful and can inform, enlighten, confuse, distract, and seduce, depending on how people use them.
Beyond communication, language has two functions: to promote thought, and to prevent it. (Garrett Hardin)
Wordsmiths can camouflage the true significance of a statement by using words that can distract and mislead the audiences and readers.
People use certain words and expressions that Hardin calls “discussion-stoppers”, to avoid debates and questions like “infinity”, “non-negotiable”, ‘faith, “reason”, “bottom line”, “spirit”, etc.
Equivocation
Equivocation helps politicians to escape blame and public scrutiny. They use the strategy of the weather office’s pre-satellite forecasts (it may or may not rain). Instead of saying “things are bad”, they say “things are better than they were before.” When there is a riot or disaster, they do not say, “the situation is terrible”, instead they claim “things are under control” or “the situation is getting back to normalcy”.
Bureaucrats phrase public documents in opaque language to keep their discretionary powers.
Experts use jargon-heavy language to show their specialized knowledge.
Catchphrases and slogans
Catchphrases and slogans are helpful to rally public opinion around worthy causes. Unfortunately, these pithy one-words and one-liners solidify into immutable ‘truths’ preventing deeper analysis and wider debates about the underlying complexities.
Phrases and expressions like, “black lives matter”, “racial discrimination”, “white privilege”, “gender equality”, “cancel culture”, etc. are useful hooks to hang public awareness on. Over time, however, they gain meaning and intensity that traps them in cocoons of ideological dogmatism.
Social evils are embedded in historical, political, and cultural contexts that need an unbiased study to unravel multiple layers of nuance and meaning.
In politics, the clever use of language is the passport to entering the portals of power.
I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words. (President Donald Trump)
Trump won in 2016 because his rustic, conversational, ‘the guy-next-door’ style of speaking endeared him to millions of voters.
Trump speaks more like a salesman than as an intellectually well-endowed leader. His clever use of superlatives, repetitions, and binaries have an emotional appeal that clouds rational responses.
The exaltation of stupidity as a marker of greatness points to the coarsening of the public mind and its susceptibility to manipulative demagoguery.
How to use the literate filter
Using the literate filter does not require exceptional language skills. People should demand bureaucrats, experts, activists, and political leaders to use plain simple language so that public scrutiny can perform its role as a check on authority.
Beware of catchphrases and rhetoric, the weapons that propagandists used to hijack public opinion.
Let the emotional and thinking brains work in synergy.
Pose uncomfortable questions in case of doubt. Ask “what are the words?”
Lies and misinformation seep through the crevices of public gullibility and emotional vulnerability.
Numerate filter
Through and through the world is infected with quantity. To talk sense, is to talk in quantities. ( Robert North Whitehead, British philosopher and mathematician)
Humans have a fascination with numbers because mathematical propositions enjoy higher credibility than general arguments.
Quantification - the breaking down of theories, facts, and hypotheses into numbers, helps win arguments and establish theories as principles.
Data can selectively mislead people. Numbers do not lie, we strongly believe. Numbers are relative, they have no absolute value.
The Intelligence Quotient (IQ) that tries to capture the complex and multi-faceted human intelligence as an absolute number is the greatest numerical fallacy of the modern age.
Data hides more than it reveals
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” (Attributed to Mark Twain)
Always treat official data with skepticism. Governments always like to present a rosy picture of the economy, like for example the employment numbers.
The media highlights negative data, scaring people about non-existent threats, and ignore real threats. Crime rates can mislead because of statistical fallacies. A high crime rate does not mean violent crimes are on the rise. A corrupt country will show a low crime rate merely because crimes are not reported or legally pursued.
How to use the numerate filter
In his book, “Factfulness”, author Hans Rosling advises us not to be fooled by standalone numbers. He says we should:-
Compare. Big numbers always look big. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make you suspicious. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divide by something.
80/20. Have you been given a long list? Look for the few largest items and deal with those first. They are quite likely more important than all the others put together.
Divide. Amounts and rates can tell very different stories. Rates are more meaningful, especially when comparing between different-sized groups. In particular, look for rates per person when comparing between countries or regions.
Numbers are not self-evident. They speak the language of relativity. Averages hide spectrums of range. Never take data at their face value. Ask questions and probe deeper to understand where the numbers stand in relation to relevant contexts.
Ecolate filter
Pandemics, rise in temperatures, forest fires, recurring floods, and droughts, melting Arctic ice caps all point to indiscriminate human interference with Nature’s self-balancing systems and cycles of birth, death, and regeneration. According to Garrett Hardin, the ecolate filter is the most important tool we can use to ensure that we leave behind an inhabitable planet for future generations. He says that ‘ecology’ is the biological equivalent of the “systems thinking” of the technological world.
The interconnectedness of the natural and the biological worlds
When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. (John Muir, American naturalist)
This is the First Law of Ecology: “Everything is connected to everything else.”
Garrett Hardin modified the first law of ecology as, “we can never do merely one thing.”
This profound statement has dawned on us in 2020 like a slap on the face. Tamper with wildlife and its unknown unknowns at the cost of releasing hidden and deadly viruses into humans.
How to use the Ecolate filter?
We have to use the ecolate filter in tandem with the literate and the numerate filters. Since we can never merely do one thing, we should never tire of asking “And then what?” fearlessly to those who intervene in the natural world in the name of development and progress, whether it is a dam, a nuclear reactor, a factory, a mine, destruction of forests, chemical-intensive farming, or animal farming that inflicts cruelty on animals.
We must demand that governments, entrepreneurs, farmers, and companies examine the first order and second-order consequences on biodiversity before they embark on any project.
Conclusion
Instead of depending on experts and the media to communicate and explain the facts transparently and lucidly, which they never do honestly, we must use the three filters of literacy, numeracy, and ecology to detect fake news, misinformation, and motivated propaganda.
Thanks for reading!
