Back when I taught economic history to grad students at the University of Washington, I devoted the first meeting of the class to the evaluation of data and other factual evidence. After all, if the analyst takes every alleged piece of evidence at face value, hell fall constantly into error. I made up a list of eight or ten questions that I urged them to ask when they encountered seemingly factual statements. First, is (or was) the stated fact possible (e.g., forty million illegal aliens entered the USA in 2013)? Second, was anyone in a position to know this fact (e.g. illegal aliens engaged in more than a million instances of domestic abuse in 2012)? These two questions alone, without asking any others on my list, would be sufficient to permit a large proportion of the claims one encounters on social media to be dismissed out of hand. Preposterous and unknowable allegations do not qualify as facts.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 03:00:56 +0000
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