None of us can independently verify everything we read or hear, so we must take on trust nearly all the information we receive. This makes us vulnerable to factoids, the dross of the information age and the stock-in-trade of activists and lobbyists.
Factoids are statements that are either misleading, or about matters that are essentially unknowable. But through frequent repetition these pseudo-facts become accepted as true, distorting our view of the world and its problems.
Examples of factoids are claims that between 50 and 100 plant and animal species are becoming extinct every day; or that over a third of the pregnancies that occur across the world are unwanted; or that 10 per cent of the population are homosexual.
Take the figures for extinctions, for instance. There is great scientific disagreement about the number of species of animals, plants, and other organisms on earth. Around 1.8 million species have been catalogued so far, and estimates of the total number vary from 4 million to 100 million.
No-one has any idea about how many of this unknown number of species are really becoming extinct. But as sceptics have pointed out, if extinctions really were taking place at anything approaching the rate that environmentalists claim, we could expect to see far more documented extinctions than have actually been observed.
The situation is not much better with the figures often cited for domestic violence. In the past, government and professional organisations have endorsed the claim that one in three women have been beaten by their male partners, despite a warning from the Australian Law Reform Commission that "it is probably impossible to obtain a reliable picture of domestic violence".
So what is the origin of this factoid? It comes from American research carried out in the mid-1970s by sociologists who interviewed over 2,000 people who were married, or in a de facto union. 28 per cent said they had experienced an act of violence from their partner at some stage in their relationship. But the researchers defined violence expansively, so that it covered anything from throwing something without hitting anyone, to using a knife or a gun.
The sociologists, good victim-makers as most of them are, clearly wanted to show that domestic violence was even more prevalent than their research indicated. They suggested their figures were too low, because many people would be unwilling to admit they were aggressors or victims. Perhaps; although it is equally likely that people falsely claimed to be victims, or even aggressors.
But even if this research was faultless, American findings do not necessarily apply to Australia. There are a number of relevant differences between the two societies, and the study showed considerable racial and ethnic variations in the incidence of domestic violence.
The study also found that the level of violence by wives against husbands was not much less than the level of violence by husbands against wives. The figure of 28 per cent covered both types. And when it came to severe violence, "husband beating" was slightly more frequent than "wife beating". But such facts could not be accommodated in the one-in-three-beaten-women factoid, and so they remain virtually unknown.
Sometimes the creator of a factoid admits it is a fabrication. In the mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan was the US President, the claim that 3 million Americans were homeless was widely quoted as a sign of his administration's meanness.
But then Mitch Snyder, an advocate for the homeless who had supposedly calculated the 3 million figure on the basis of a national survey, confessed he had invented the number. He thought that at least one per cent of Americans had to be homeless -- after all, what kind of problem is it, if not even one per cent of the population are afflicted?
This gave him 2-and-a-bit million, which he rounded up to 3 million because he felt sure that homelessness was getting worse under Reagan. Snyder cheerfully justified his action, claiming that no-one took an issue seriously unless numbers were provided. But even Snyder's confession did not demolish the factoid, and "3 million homeless" still gets trotted out as part of Reagan's legacy.
Some activists' enthusiasm for their factoids prevents them from seeing that dodgy figures could actually be harming their own cause. A number of informed observers believe that highly inflated statistics for landmines have made many people feel the situation is so hopeless that there is little point in making donations to charities engaged in landmine clearance.
In the early 1990s, when international organisations first began focusing on the landmines issue, there was no way of making a reliable estimate of the number of these weapons. So the figures were just plucked from the air.
The United Nations and some other lobbying agencies still use an estimate of 110 million uncleared mines in around seventy countries. They add that at current rates it will take more than 1,100 years and US$33 billion to remove the ones already planted. For good measure, they often round out this dispiriting picture by claiming an additional twenty landmines are laid for each one cleared.
But after many years of practical experience, a number of organisations actually involved in removing mines say that these figures are wildly exaggerated, and that the total number of uncleared landmines in the world is probably less than 2 million.
The Halo Trust, a British charity, states that its surveys show a maximum of 165,000 landmines in Mozambique, as against the UN figure of 3 million. For Angola, where official figures vary between 9 and 15 million, a mine clearer recently pointed out that the lower number would still require four jumbo jets full of landmines to have arrived every day for the past twenty years.
The moral arguments for many of the causes that arouse contemporary concern can usually be made without resorting to factoids. It is a measure of the contempt that lobbyists often have for the general public that they are willing to be so cavalier with the truth.
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