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What’s wrong with ‘alternative facts’?

by Kip Hansen at Climate Etc.

the original Wkipedia definition of the phrase “alternative facts”. If you Google the phrase now you will of course find this has been swamped by hits  for the alleged gaff made by  Trump counsellor KellyAnne Conway.

the original Wkipedia definition of the phrase “alternative facts”. If you Google the phrase now you will of course find this has been swamped by hits for the alleged gaff made by Trump counsellor KellyAnne Conway.

‘Alternative facts’ is a term in law to describe inconsistent sets of facts put forth in a court given that there is plausible evidence to support both alternatives. The term is also used to describe competing facts for the two sides of the case. – Wikipedia

So . . . what exactly is a ‘fact’? From the Wikipedia:

“…A fact is something that has occurred or is correct.
Facts may be checked by reason, experiment, personal experience, or may be argued from authority.
In the most basic sense, a scientific fact is an objective and verifiable observation, in contrast with a hypothesis or theory, which is intended to explain or interpret facts.

With this context, it is not surprising that there are competing ‘facts’ of which their proponents are equally certain. ‘Facts’ are being confused with hypotheses and theories, and too many ‘facts’ are being asserted by authority.
So . . . what’s wrong with ‘alternative facts?’
Nothing — absolutely nothing. Quite the opposite, really. Alternative facts are what we use to learn new things about the world around us. Science is the subject of using alternative facts to come to a better understanding. Discovering that there are alternative facts about something – even better, seemingly contradictory facts – is what points us to an area of study that promises the reward of new insights into the natural world.
Out in today’s world of U.S. Two-Party Politics – an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque landscape being repainted daily in the “news” and “social” media – a lot of ill-mannered, Queen-of-Hearts-style nonsense is being churned out by turning this perfectly good and useful idea – alternative facts – into a mockery of truth-finding — turning Truth into an one-word oxymoron.

Facts vs factoids

Much of what we know as facts, and much of what are presented to us as facts, are more correctly characterized as “factoids” – a word believed coined by Norman Mailer – which has two closely related meanings:
1) a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print.
a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually or strictly true, or an invented fact either deliberately created or created by sloppy thinking, poor logic skills, lack of critical thinking or poor journalism believed to be true because it appears in print, in a journal article, in mainstream or social media, on a web site or has ‘gone viral’ on the Internet.
2) a brief or trivial item of news or information.
Factoids are often presented to us as numbers – which influence us to find them somehow truer or more believable – or are presented as impossibly simplistic assertions about complex topics. Factoids most often are used rhetorically [as in argument, debate, or propaganda] in opposition to other facts in a fact-vs-fiction construction, explicitly stated or implied – “Here are the facts!” – implying that all else is fiction, all other ‘facts’ are false.
Tied to the use of factoids is the principle of “Only One Fact”. This is the rampantly popular idea that for each subject there exists only one fact (or set of related facts) and, from that, it follows that all other statements on the subject are falsehoods, lies, or errors. We hear this in common speech: “The fact is…” and we see on single issue websites “The Facts are…”. This “Only One Fact” version of reality is a serious cognitive malfunction – and a leads to serious critical thinking errors.
Climate science, and the never-ending debate about its implications, is particularly rife with Factoids and Alternative Factoids. Each side, mostly from the extreme edges of the field, sling factoids at one another in endless streams of numbers, graphs, trend-lines, echo-chamber talking-points (prepared by their own side’s experts) – spiced with a truly incredible number and variety of personal opinions presented as if they were facts.
Once we weed out the truly daft opinions, the obvious non-physical misunderstandings and the delicious-and-nutty fruit-cakery served up from the far edges of climate alarm and hard-core “its all a big hoax” skepticism alike, we are still left with a huge number of seemingly true statements, facts, that seem to contradict each other, sometimes apparently in direct opposition.

Competing ‘facts’ about the Amazon

How’s that, you ask? Let’s look at an example. It has long been considered a fact, and still is by almost all environmental movements, that:

[T]he Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans….the rain forests of the Amazon were untouched by human hands before the arrival of European explorers in the 15th century. [The Amazon is] an old-growth forest — primary forest, virgin forest, primeval forest — is a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance and thereby exhibits unique ecological features and might be classified as a climax community [a biological community of plants, animals, and fungi which, through the process of ecological succession the development of vegetation in an area over time, had reached a steady state].

Yet, reappearing again in the science press this week is the story of ancient earthworks deep in the Amazon forest:

Deep in the Amazon, the rain forest once covered ancient secrets. Spread across hundreds of thousands of acres are massive, geometric earthworks. The carvings stretch out in circles and squares that can be as big as a city block, with trenches up to 12 yards wide and 13 feet deep. They appear to have been built up to 2,000 years ago.” The study [ doi: 10.1073/pnas.1614359114 ] states “We reconstructed environmental evidence from the geoglyph region and found that earthworks were built within man-made forests that had been previously managed for millennia.

The existence of these earthworks, and their antiquity are facts – actualities, they really exist and strong, replicable evidence exists for the dates of creation.
The facts reported by Watling et al. (2017) in regards to the earthworks are not only alternative to our accepted facts [above] about the Amazon; they directly contradict long-standing, almost universally-accepted, facts. It is because they are contradictory that we can begin to develop a new and better understanding of the ecology of the Amazon rainforests, their history, their evolution and the South American nations within whose boundaries these forests exist, can create national policies based on this better understanding.
By combining the two sets of seemingly contradictory facts– alternative facts, we can see that while the Amazonian forests are certainly old-growth forests, having existed in their current states for hundreds, up to thousands, of years, they are not “virgin forest, primeval forest” at all but have actually been created by long-term interactions with the human civilizations that lived within them.
This is not a trivial example of “new discoveries lead to better understanding”, though it could be viewed that way. There has been a long constant stream of alternative facts to the background fact of a pristine, primeval Amazon. The investigation of a soil type named “Terra Preta” (Portuguese for “black soil”) began producing alternative facts in the 1960s and they have rolled out regularly since. Yet it was fact not long ago, despite these alternative facts, that the land of the Amazon was relatively useless for agriculture.
Now we see that there is very strong evidence that the Amazon is not being newly deforested but is apparently being re-cleared, re-claimed as arable land. It is land that in the past was cleared and used for agriculture, speculatively thought to be a sort of ancient perma-culture, and for the building of extensive towns and cities.

Example: climate science ‘alternative facts’

Consider the following statement:

“Earth’s average surface temperature has risen by about 0.8° Celsius since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.”

Well, we have a fact – “Earth’s average surface temperature has risen”; a number related to the magnitude of the temperature increase (which must be considered subject to some degree of factual uncertainty); and a time period. The statement can be considered, factual (subject to some caveats) or true. However, the statement implies causation — that the warming was caused by the Industrial Revolution–which makes it a factoid because the cause of the warming is a hypothesis.
Consider the following alternative statement:

“Earth’s average surface temperature has risen for the last several hundred years, since the depths of the Little Ice Age*, and by about 0.8° since the mid-19th century, which is the beginning of the instrumental temperature record.”

[* = “three particularly cold intervals: one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, all separated by intervals of slight warming.”]
This statement is equally true but again implies causation – “since the depths of the LIA”.
It is possible to construct a clear Fact about changes in global mean surface temperature changes and the associated uncertainties. However the IPCC’s mandate to focus on man-made climate change resulted in a conclusion dictated by their mandate that is arguably a factoid.

Conclusion

Not all alternative facts lead to a better understanding. Some just stand in opposition to one another until such time as new and better facts or evidence emerge from the confusion to help clarify the situation. Those new facts or evidence will be, at first, Alternative Facts – they should not necessarily be expected to match either of the preferred climate science factoids above.
As these new alternative facts emerge, they should be embraced and seriously considered by all sides and positions in the climate debate. Those new, alternative facts –those few that survive the fire of massive open public review– will lead to better understandings of the physical actualities of Earth’s climate which in turn will allow policy makers to make better climate policy.

This article is published in our “questions of free speech” section. We are interested in taking all shades of opinion on the climate change debate. If you would like to submit an article please send it to [email protected] with the subject line “climate debate”.

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Vaska
Vaska
Mar 9, 2017 4:21 AM

What the example of the Amazon actually shows is the displacement of previously held beliefs — not facts — about the region by newly discovered facts which contradict those previous beliefs.
There are, in other words, no alternative facts about the Amazon — or anything else for that matter.

binra
binra
Mar 7, 2017 1:43 PM

I prefer perspectives to ‘facts’ – because what are called facts are perspectives whether they are empirically verifiable,, whether they fit the collective consensual reality or are attempts to leverage such ‘reality’ to a narrative identity assertion.
Existence is FACT – but in order to experience any relation – I must give definition to receive perspective.
That isn’t where your article was focussed – but I felt to get my facts straight first!
The either/or mentality is a binary I associate with the fight/flight of the sympathetic (threat) suppression of all else to its agenda. This can also be seen as demand of a fearful and jealous god – and its modelling persists as a pattern regardless the fashions of professed belief.
To the scientist – there is the model or theory that best fits the measurable in terms of definition, prediction and control. Yet without the meaning of wholeness of being – such approach operates the extension of the intent to command and control life – and is used by such agenda to engineer outcomes of plunder and destruction – while presenting the guise of official fact™ – or the regulatory protection by mandate.
Data may be factual – if arrived at with integrity – but its interpretation is a story. The wish to believe stories – or the insistence stories are true – is in the ‘what’s in it for me’ of (competing) private self interests.
While competition is a motivating innovation through the desire to overcome challenge or persist despite adversity – its very nature grows a shifting but essentially uncompetitive cartel of established interests – within a given set of parameters. And operates to keep those parameters as the condition of their capture of their revenue stream, food and energy supply, or host.
So fact takes on legal basis in corporately captured society rather than an honesty of relation in which what fits and works best is acknowledged as a ‘working’ fact or truth – and becomes part of the culture.
The subversion of what works best, so as to lock out rivals, is ‘what works best for the private agenda’ of the willingness to sacrifice all else to serve such agenda.

mohandeer
mohandeer
Mar 6, 2017 8:19 PM

Never let us forget either, that as with other fields of study, there are all too often, no definable “absolutes”. Todays statement of fact can easily and all too often, become tomorrow’s “Amazing new discovery” as the authour of this article demonstrates. New discoveries and the means and wherewithal to master the hidden truths of such finds then entitles the finder to make pronounced statements and assigned assurances of their irrefutable factual correctness….. until the next discovery comes along or the latest measuring/analysis device, does indeed refute the original “fact”.
In truth, most of what we think we know, is at some point, debatable or even refutable, so a salt pot to hand, is often a useful condiment to have on one’s person, when confronted with “facts”.
This article is a legitimate avenue of search and development and a lot more reliable than many “Research And Development Institutions.

mohandeer
mohandeer
Mar 6, 2017 7:57 PM

Reblogged this on Worldtruth and commented:
Facts are sacred, but they are not always…. well ….Fact, as this article demonstrates.

rtj1211
rtj1211
Mar 6, 2017 7:14 AM

The most dangerous scenario is an uncritical media allowing a genocidal murderer to keep schtumm about their own crimes whilst hollering for the death sentence for a bunch of armed robbers.
The narrow facts may condemn the robbers, but allowing the genocidalist to go free is the true crime.
The American war machine is what I am referring to, along with the sycophantic NATO ally media who are too cowardly to put USA Inc in court for capital imperial war crimes.
But of course wind farms are a far greater crime (not that I support the AGW scam in any whatever….)

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Mar 5, 2017 11:00 PM

Of facts and theories, Stephen Jay Gould writes:

In the American vernacular, “theory” often means “imperfect fact”—part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus creationists can (and do) argue: evolution is “only” a theory, and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is less than a fact, and scientists can’t even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): “Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science—that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was.”
Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.
Moreover, “fact” does not mean “absolute certainty.” The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Ray Ross, Jr.
Ray Ross, Jr.
Mar 5, 2017 8:31 PM

Keep in mind that the earth at one time was flat.

tutisicecream
tutisicecream
Mar 5, 2017 7:12 AM

“Tied to the use of factoids is the principle of “Only One Fact”. This is the rampantly popular idea that for each subject there exists only one fact (or set of related facts) and, from that, it follows that all other statements on the subject are falsehoods, lies, or errors.”
This is exactly what perception management aims to achieve in an attempt to undermine how we see the world. It is dangerous because it can manipulate people into conflicts and war and has often been used to do so. And is certainly being used now regarding Russia.
We see this 21st Century Factoid Man approach being used with increased intensity in the media, news, films, even documentaries. Wherever ideas need to be changed or facts hidden.
What is accepted as a fact may be a myth and facts can be undermined or corrupted to create a desired effect or outcome. So when this construct is used to deceive people in organisational terms it’s called astroturfing a good example being the White Helmets as a propaganda weapon in the Syrian conflict.
See the comprehensive debunking here http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/03/02/forget-oscar-give-the-white-helmets-the-leni-riefenstahl-award-for-best-war-propaganda-film/

Willem
Willem
Mar 4, 2017 9:44 PM

‘So . . . what’s wrong with ‘alternative facts?’’
Nothing. They are called ‘hypotheses’ in science or ‘differential diagnoses’ in medicine.
Popper (paraphrased): a fact is a dangerous proposition, dangerous as in that it can easily be falsified or proven wrong. For as long as it cannot be proven wrong, we will call the proposition a fact. And facts that cannot be proven wrong are ,by definition, not facts but BS.

Willem
Willem
Mar 4, 2017 9:48 PM
Reply to  Willem

Written a bit too fast, I meant, facts that cannot be falsified by definition are BS

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Mar 5, 2017 10:39 PM
Reply to  Willem

“… facts (but really, hypothesis or theories which are the explanatory frameworks of “facts”) that cannot “in principal” be falsified, are bullshit . . .”
Glad I could help.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Mar 5, 2017 10:42 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

And that’s “hypotheses” and not “hypothesis.” (Fat fingers, small keyboard — those are facts and together explain the typos.)

Marc Krizack
Marc Krizack
Mar 4, 2017 7:49 PM

This is a good article. Keep in mind that in the context in which it was raised by Trump’s spokeswoman, it was used to deny actual facts.

MoriartysLeftSock
MoriartysLeftSock
Mar 5, 2017 9:38 PM
Reply to  Marc Krizack

What facts were they?

vierotchka
vierotchka
Mar 4, 2017 7:30 PM