This week I've been urging my students to be more like Stan Marsh and not take "facts" for granted.
In episode #1009 (air date, Oct. 11, 2006), Stan Marsh is drawn into the world of conspiracy nut-jobbery by a man who claims that George Bush was behind the 911 attacks. Initially skeptical, Stan is presented with increasing evidence right up to a confession by George Bush himself. Throughout it all, Stan keeps tilting his head to one side and saying, "Really?" "Really?"
That's the attitude we need when doing any kind of investigative work, whether it's for a research essay or a news story.
We may not be statisticians, physicists, or social scientists, but we all have a critical faculty, if we're willing to use it. All too often, however, we check our brains at the door when confronted by "experts."
One of the stories I use to illustrate this is taken from Joel Best's book Damned Lies and Statistics (2001). In 1995 a graduate student published a paper on guns and violence in which he cited a Children's Defense Fund study showing that the number of children killed by guns had doubled each year since 1950. Now whenever we hear that something has "doubled each year" we should ask ourselves, WWSMD? What would Stanley Marsh do?
Stanley, of course, would tilt his head to one side and say, "Really? Really?"
Unfortunately, nobody bothered doing this with the graduate students paper. After all, he was a graduate student, and he was quoting figures from -- well, from some kind of authority. It had "Children" in the title, and even more compelling, it had "Defense Fund" in the title.
Who can argue with an organization so obviously honest?
The newspapers picked it up and the doomsdayers had a field day until finally, some Stanley somewhere finally asked, "Really?"
All it takes is a couple of minutes with the "two times table."
See, if two children were killed by guns in 1950, then four were killed in 1951. Following along with this very simple mathematical operation we find that 2,048 children were killed by guns in 1960. That's a lot. But it's a mere shadow in comparison to the 1,049,000 killed in 1970, and it pales to absolutely nothing in comparison to the 1.1 billion children killed in 1980. By 1983 there were 8.6 billion children killed, and in 1994, the year of the Children's Defense Fund study, 17.6 trillion children were killed by gunfire.
And that's just in the United States.
"Really? Really?"
Well, of course not.
the graduate student misread the report which actually stated that the number of children killed by gunfire had doubled since 1950. In other words, if two children were killed in 1950, then at the time of the report, four children were killed. Furthermore, the size of the population had increased by 73%, so per capita, it's not even double.
In another incident, the gay newspaper The Washington Blade reported that about 3,000 gay youth kill themselves every year -- a sad, but interesting trick, considering that the total number of youth suicides is around 2,000.
We're not statisticians, scientists, or sociologists, but we do have a critical faculty -- one which we're all too often ready to check at the door when confronted by "experts." But these experts are often misquoted, misinterpreted, or even out and out wrong. In many instances, the experts, and their information, is little more than the opinion of someone with a vested interest in the issue.
Whether we're writing a research essay, or reporting the news, we could all stand to be a bit more like Stanley Marsh and bring a healthy skepticism to everything we're told.
