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My wife, Carole, just gave me a shirt emblazoned with, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” It reminded me of an important phenomenon that has been lately grabbing my attention.
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Oxford Dictionaries, publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has selected “post-truth” as 2016’s international word of the year. The dictionary defines post-truth as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” (And thrive on repetition, I suspect.) I’m reminded of the German propaganda machine preceding and during World War II.
“If you tell the same lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better...” said Joseph Goebbels, the Minster for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda during Nazi Germany. “Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.”
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The problem?
The figures don't lie, but liars figure!
You have to care, first.
I remember my first Deming Seminar. I had been ordered to go, and really couldn't understand why. How could some old dude talking about statistics and Japanese management, of all things, possibly have anything useful to say about leadership in the military?
My skepticism lasted until I saw the Red Bead and the Funnel. Those two demonstrations showed me that my view of the world was at best inaccurate, and at worst seriously flawed and harmful. There were answers to problems that other leaders and I had been struggling with for years. That revelation, that significant emotional event (SEE), was re-capped a couple of days later when Deming was describing the evils of performance evaluations. A sergeant from the Marine Corps led a question with, "Dr. Deming, I think your make some good points, but I live in the real world..." Deming stood, and waved to cut the sergeant off. "Young man, I live in the real world. You don't." Whether or not the sergeant got it, I did. I came home from that seminar and began enrolling in every statistics and SPC class I could find.
My point is, I had to be led to that SEE. I didn't go looking for it, and actively avoided it when the opportunity arose earlier.
My own belief is that the truth has been politicized. We used to have communications channels that cared more about truth than a point of view, where rigorous fact checking was the norm, and news itself was a loss leader for networks. The advent of cable news and polarized/polarizing channels, polarizing talk radio and other channels now means that you can tune out anyone who might present evidence that contradicts your world view.
Recently, someone reminded me of an article from Fast Company (http://www.fastcompany.com/52717/change-or-die) that had alarmed me when I originally saw it. Reviewing it, I saw some potential answers for why we have what we have now (post-fact reality). If we spend all our time only listening to viewpoints that reinforce our own, our brains actually begin to get hard-wired to only accept what we hear in those channels as fact, and reject others...we become literally brainwashed.
I wish I had some answers to the problem...I continue to show everyone I can the Red Bead and the Funnel, and some other exercises I've picked up over the years, to try to find chinks in the armor and get people to acknowledge that maybe they don't really know what they think they know.
On a humorous note, if you watch Steven Colbert, he had a funny take on the Oxford Dictionary revelation...he claimed that they stole his concept, "truthiness." It's worth a look on YouTube.
Every Theory is Correct
"Every theory is correct in its own world, but the problem is that the theory may not make contact with this world. " Dr. W. Edwards Deming
The concept of cyberbalkanization has amplified the possibility of not even being exposed to information that contradicts our mental models.
Dirk van Putten
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