Facts. The word is so appealing. Who doesn’t love facts? Well, actually lots of people these days, notably including the president of the United States, plenty of politicians, and conspiracy theorists.
I’d add religious believers, but I’m not sure how much we should expect from a religion when it comes to facts. After all, faith in things unseen is a hallmark of religiosity. It’s impossible to fact check what can’t be observed in any fashion. The check, though, can reveal an absence of a fact, not its wrongness.
Still, I do my best to keep my blog posts as accurate as possible, even though when we get into the areas of philosophy, meditation, and spirituality, there’s bound to be considerable debate about what’s true or false, along with whether truth and falsehood even pertain to ineffable personal experience.
I got thinking about facts after reading an article in the September 1 and 8 issue of The New Yorker, “Vaunted” in the print edition, “The History of the New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department” in the online edition.
Download The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department | The New Yorker
The magazine definitely is way more committed to fact-checking than I am, or would want to be. Their fact-checkers sound equally obsessive and fascinating. This passage points to obsessiveness.
Perhaps the most revered of all checkers was Martin Baron, who put in thirty-six years. Baron was gentle, fatherly, and prim. Alex Ross once wrote a piece mentioning a minor Mozart canon titled “Leck mich im Arsch.” Baron stayed up late combing through Mozart biographies so he wouldn’t have to call a Mozart scholar and repeat the phrase “lick me in the ass.”
He was almost pathologically punctilious. The checkers loved Baron. He’d bestow upon them honorifics, as in Professor Seligman or Dr. Kelley. He felt that, as a checker, he should avoid errors at all times. John McPhee said, “Somebody told me, ‘The thing you’ve got to know about Martin Baron, he is always right. And take that literally.’ If a Shakespeare play was mentioned in a piece, he would have to go and check the author’s name.”
By the end, he’d spent so much time checking that he had difficulty making any assertions at all. He would phrase statements as questions: Wouldn’t you say it’s a nice day? After Baron’s death, Ian Frazier recalled, “Gesturing to the water below the window, he once said to me, ‘I think that’s the Hudson River.’ ”
But there’s a practical side to fact-checking that fits with a central theme of this blog since I started it in 2004. The article states it simply.
How do you confirm a fact? You ask, over and over, “How do we know?”
That’s a question I’ve asked over and over of religious believers (of whom I used to be one, when I asked these questions of myself). How do we know that God exists? How do we know there is life after death? How do we know a guru has supernatural powers? The questions are endless. The answers are unsatisfying.
The best most religious believers can do is refer to a supposed personal experience of themselves or someone they trust. Along this line, the article says:
The nuclear option is to invoke “on author,” which signifies something impossible to verify but witnessed or experienced by the author, and therefore grudgingly allowed by the checker, who renounces all culpability.
Julian Barnes once explained, “If, for example, the fact checkers are trying to confirm that dream about hamsters which your grandfather had on the night Hitler invaded Poland—a dream never written down but conveyed personally to you on the old boy’s knee, a dream of which, since your grandfather’s death, you are the sole repository—and if the fact checkers, having had all your grandfather’s living associates up against a wall and having scoured dictionaries of the unconscious without success, finally admit they are stumped, then you murmur soothingly down the transatlantic phone, ‘I think you can put that on author.’ ”
Over the years I’ve noticed how irritated religious believers who comment on my blog posts become when they’re confronted with demands to explain why their purported facts about God or the supernatural actually are true.
Again, I’ve been in the same irritated boat back in my believing days. When someone challenged my beliefs, I’d get defensive, feeling that they were trying to drill holes in my comfortable vessel of faith that could cause it to sink. Which, eventually, it did. Not solely because of the challenges, though in retrospect I think being exposed to that skepticism did play a role in my de-conversion from religious faith.
Fact-checking at The New Yorker also involves challenges, in this case of writers by fact-checkers.
Checkers talk to virtually all sources in a piece, named and unnamed. They also contact people who are mentioned, even glancingly, whom the writer didn’t already speak to, and many people not mentioned in the piece at all. Checkers don’t read out quotes or seek approval. Sources can’t make changes. They can flag errors, provide context and evidence.
The checker then discusses the points of contention with the writer and the editor. It’s an intentionally adversarial process, like a court proceeding. You want to see every side’s best case. The editor makes the final call. In a sense, the checker is re-reporting a piece, probing for weak spots, reaching a hand across the gulf of misunderstanding.
The checker also asks questions that, in any other situation, might prompt the respondent to wonder if she was experiencing a brain aneurysm. “Does the Swedish Chef have a unibrow?” “He actually has two separate eyebrows that come close together above his nose.” Could a peccary chase a human up a tree? Certainly if it’s a white-lipped peccary, which is the size of a small bear and prone to stampede. Zadie Smith once received a call regarding whether, years earlier, at Ian McEwan’s birthday party, a butterfly landed on her knee. When a Talk piece by Tad Friend described the singer Art Garfunkel waving his arms around, the checker asked Garfunkel to confirm that he had two arms.
Fact-checkers can go overboard at times, nitpicking where the nit really isn’t worth all that picking (I admit that I don’t know what a nit is, and I don’t feel like taking the time to find out right now). However, they’re a valuable counterweight to the disdain for facts the pervades society these days.
Facts matter. Reality is too valuable to be sacrificed on the altar of whatever, dude. None of us can be correct in what we communicate to others all of the time. We all make mistakes. We all get things wrong.
Still, fact-checkers hold out to us a goal to strive for: truth-telling. We may never achieve a 100% score on this, but we can do our best, even when we’re uncomfortable with having our failures pointed out to us.
So far, Anna has found errors of counting, errors of framing (“One quibble with the framing, if you’ll allow me, is that you never mention how checkers quibble with the framing”), and errors of the too-good-to-check variety. For example, it turns out that Zadie Smith was asked not about a butterfly on her knee but about a slug on a wineglass.
However, it’s one thing to know the facts, and another to persuade the author. Most writers appreciate having been checked but resent being checked. Checking makes evident how badly you’ve misinterpreted the world. It upsets your confidence in your own eyes and ears.
Checking is invasive. In the eighties, Janet Malcolm was sued for defamation in a drawn-out case that involved the parsing of her reporting notes. She’d been accused of fabricating quotes; she maintained that she merely stitched quotes together, a journalistic transgression but, ultimately, not a legal one. (A court ruled in Malcolm’s favor.) From then on, the checking department required authors to turn over notes, recordings, and transcripts.
“It’s like someone going through your underwear drawer,” Lawrence Wright told me. Checkers can see your shortcuts, your reportorial wheedling, your blind spots. Ben McGrath, another checker turned writer, said, “It’s really interesting to realize that, these people you’ve been reading and admiring, there’s six errors on every page. And it’s not that they’re full of shit. It’s that this is what every person is like.”
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I’m copying in comments from Typepad posts that were written after this blog’s files were downloaded for migration into WordPress. That’s why the dates are the same.
Enjoyed this post, and the linked article. And the over-the-top examples of nitpicking!
Without a shadow of a doubt fact-checking is a vital function. Not just in publishing, and nor even just when blogging: but even in our everyday thinking and understanding and opinion-making. Us being shown where we’re wrong is actually a service to us, and something we should be thankful for, if that is we wish to see things as they really are, and further if we have no desire to misrepresent ourselves to others.
Of course, it’s equally important to know what’s important and what’s not. Being a stickler for accuracy and precision is never in itself nitpicking: going overboard and wasting time on irrelevancies is. While it is actually admirable that NYT’s professional factchecker checks out the unibrow thing (!), but in normal folks, most times, that would be compulsive and, while harmless enough, but hardly a virtue, and indeed taken to extremes actually a distraction.
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This is important to think about, actually, because here’s the thing. There’s all sorts of things delusionals will do to keep alive their delusions; but pseudo-fact-check is actually one of the weapons in their arsenal. In two ways, that I’ve experienced myself.
Point out to someone the absurdity of believing in religions halfwittery, and the more alert among them will sometimes latch on to some incidental error you’ve made, and via that error try to discredit your larger argument. …That’s essentially the reverse of what is reasonable to do. It is reasonable to be careful about factchecking important things, and not wasting time and effort over minor things. But these folks will tend to not worry about gaping holes in the important bits of an argument, while deliberating fixating on small errors they’ve found. Deliberately nitpicking, that is to say, in order to deflect the actual argument.
And another trick that woo flingers and other sundry purveyors of nonsense get up to, is to create a false equivalence between legitimate factchecking (which is important, vital even) and nitpicking: and via that false equivalence try to discredit their interlocutor via ridicule.
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So yeah, the TLDR takeaway from this discussion is probably this: that while factchecking is a vital function, but knowing what is important/critical to what’s actually being discussed and what’s merely incidental to the discussion/issue, is also an important part of critical thinking. …And also: remain alert to gaslighting attempts by purveyors of nonsense, who find ways to misuse this tool (in at least two ways, that I’ve described above).
What’s fascinating about the story of fact checkers is how parallel their research activities and obsession for gathering and verifying detais is with theological scholars.
All facts, at best, support a human interpretation of reality, never reality itself.
And as for “on author”, or ‘on the author’s say’ , what about on the say of 100 scholars, authors, priests, scientists or Pharisees?
It is more evidence. But for what? Someone’s version of reality, not among independent versions, but copied versions and competing versions. It’s still very vulnerable to human social behavior.
Right from the Jewish commentaries scrutinizing the New Testament, scholars coined the term pericopes to describe specific passages that were similar from one place to another.
In the 1800’s Johann Salomo Semler suggested that the similar stories of Jesus repeated across the four books of the New Testament were not independent witnesses, but merely the product of copying.
In this he introduced a validity standard rarely met today: independent witness, independent but similar conclusions.
Apply this to modern science and you can see how different ideas from science are not often the product of independent thinking, even experimentation, but of copying one idea over and over again, and modifying it only slightly, even replicating the same experiments over and over with the same validity flaws, because they shared the same blind spots in thinking.
Scientists do try to institutionalize critique and revision in an effort to get to the truth, independent of human bias in a way that imitates and hence pays homoge to their predecessors in Theology.