Getting the Facts Right

 

Mar 26, 2018

By Keith Sones

My mother was a school librarian for about 35 years prior to her retirement, and her love of books, knowledge and research was very much on display. She was also pretty passionate about ensuring that her kids were exposed to those same ideals, and our lifestyle reflected her purpose. We were free to watch as much TV as we wanted, as long as it wasn’t more than an hour per day. Kind of like Henry Ford’s early offering: you can buy any colour of Model T you want, as long as it’s black. Since we only had black and white CBC, that wasn’t a huge draw (no offense to our federal broadcaster), so we turned to the wide variety of books in the house for entertainment.

As a 10-year-old boy, one of my favourite collections was the World Book Encyclopedia set that my dad had purchased some years earlier. They were offered in alphabetical order, so upon cracking open the front cover of the “A” volume it didn’t take long to realize that they were impressively packed with a broad swath of really cool facts such as the speed of an antelope (about 55 mph as I recall), the volume of copper produced annually in Argentina (OK, long forgotten that one) and the oft cited quotes of Aristotle (“He who has overcome his fears will truly be free”). And then it was on the Bs, Cs, etc. But hang on. Before you think I was a complete geek, which is partially true, the competing offer in a cold and dark Dawson Creek winter was going door to door in a quest to make 50 cents shovelling a neighbourhood driveway, which I also did. So, when comparing the options of freezing to make a bit of extra money or staying warm while reading about the population density of Tokyo, at -40 degrees the choice was often easy.

Spending a significant amount of time learning all sorts of random facts about random things made me feel I had to do something with my newfound knowledge. Since Trivial Pursuit hadn’t been invented and the rabbit ears on our small Westinghouse television couldn’t reach far enough to pick up Jeopardy!, I’d rush into the kitchen and ask my mom and dad if they happened to know, say, the official language of Zaire. I’d burst with pride when they said “No, actually I don’t,” at which point I would blurt out the results of my latest dive into the pages of the World Book. I was taken aback when they did know the answer, which was frequent (darn them, had they just read the same book?), so I kept digging to find more obscure bits of data.

At times, we would disagree on the answers. While I had become a scholar of a select series of books, my parents were always listening to CBC radio news and scanning newspaper headlines, as global affairs morphed the world in ways that rendered the written encyclopaedic details out of date. When this occurred and they were inevitably right, my thought balloon quickly deflated and I’d walk away somewhat disillusioned by the idea that my beloved fountain of wisdom was less than perfect. However, I also began to learn a valuable lesson: specifically, that things I thought I knew (and truly did) can change. Currency mattered.

The next logical step was to enter into the world of debate. Not in any sort of official capacity, but by engaging with my parents and elder sister in some good old fashioned arguing. I had no idea that there were rules to a formal debate, or even that this kind of deliberate and somewhat confrontational discussion had a name in the big world that lay beyond my small one. I just knew that it was fun to use facts to make a point, even when I didn’t agree with the point itself. I sometimes tossed up egregious issues to let others think they were on their front foot by offering them what seemed to be the easy position to support. Hey mom, I’ll take the pro’s of nuclear war and you tell me why such a catastrophic event is a bad thing. Dad, let’s talk about whether or not it’s in our best interest to put kids in jail for life. And so on.

Now, it’s really important to realize a couple of things. To win a debate, you don’t need to agree with the position you take. I may vehemently disagree personally with one side or the other in a debate, and that’s okay. But to win, you need facts. Real, hard facts if you can get them. Inserting emotion into a debate will almost always cause you to lose. But it’s also really hard not to get worked up about things that you feel passionately about. So, what to do?

My answer came from two very unlikely sources. The first was in the “A” volume of the 1970 World Book, once again provided by my Greek buddy Aristotle, who said “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” The kitchen debates that I clearly lost to my wise parents usually came about when my process broke down. Instead of listening, I was merely letting their words bounce off my ears while I was thinking of my next point, failing to hear and understand what ended up being the winning part of their argument. Alternately my debate ship sunk when I had done some research but not enough, thinking I knew more than I did, allowing my parents to see the gaps in my arguments and close in for the kill. On occasion I simply conceded the debate when I realized I was fighting a losing battle. Good valid points are always good valid points, even if it’s your sworn enemy who identifies them.

The second source was my Grade 11 physics teacher, who preached to all of us “You only need to know two things to pass this course. F=MA and you can’t push on a rope”. Okay, there were a few more equations needed, but the rope reference just meant that when things didn’t make sense, investigate because something is probably wrong. He wanted us to think, not just scribble numbers.

With all of this history in my back pocket, I noticed this statement the other day on social media and was reminded of how important facts and critical thinking really are:
“Anyway, our health services are all paid for by our provincial health plan so if the resource companies aren’t helping us, why should we just let them take our resources?”
For context, I live in BC and we have for years paid a modest amount per month to the Medical Services Plan, a government fund. For a family with two adults (and as many kids as you want), the cost is $150 per month, so the per-person cost for the highest incomes (defined as greater than $42,000/year) is less than $1000 per year.

At first glance I chalked it up to a person’s political perspective, pitching an argument against the resource sector. However, after a minute of thought it felt a lot like someone was pushing on a rope — the statement didn’t seem to make sense. So I dropped back into my curious child mindset and did a bit of fact checking. It turns out that against a provincial 2018/19 health budget of about $19 billion and a population of roughly 4.8 million, every man, woman and child in the province would have had to pay just under $4000 per year to make the books balance. Not only was this personal proclamation wrong, it was really wrong. Not even close to being accurate. Resource royalties and taxes contribute a massive amount to our social infrastructure. And yet, here is a person who has framed their political view based on information that is at best misleading and at worst damaging. Fake news!

Now, I’m not naïve enough to believe everyone runs their lives by the gospel truth and somehow this person slipped through the cracks. We are subjected to rhetoric, spin and information gaps every day. But it’s also a matter of degree, and sometimes the impacts of not having or using the facts are substantial. Here are two more current day examples.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year or more, you have heard about the #metoo and #timesup social movements. Irrespective of how you view the various movie stars, musicians, politicians and moguls who have found themselves in the spotlight for alleged bad behaviour, there is some clarity that can be found through a bit of research. In 2010 an RCMP study indicated that of the sexual assault and harassment claims filed each year, slightly less than 1% were considered to be false or misleading upon investigation. To put that another way, when a complaint is made you will have a 99% chance of being right if you believe the accuser. Just as when buying lottery tickets, I can’t say for certain which of the individual cases makes up the 1%, but to assume the alleged perpetrator is Mr. Clean is just bad math.

Putting one’s belief where it’s statistically appropriate also makes sense. It’s a tough thing for a woman (or man) to come forward and publicly call out their aggressor. Money is very rarely the motivator, so what’s in it for them? Apart from getting the truth out and taking back control of their self-worth, not much. Why are we so quick to disbelieve? It’s uncomfortable, it challenges our social order, we don’t want to believe we’ve been blind (or participating), and we don’t know how to fix it, so we jam our heads right back in the sand.

There are also many myths about renewable energy that seem to go unchallenged. The biggest I see on a daily basis is that we need to “replace” fossil fuel generated power with wind and solar facilities. In Alberta, with a reasonably sized (and growing, which is awesome!) wind presence, these are the stats for around noon on the day I wrote this article:

95.13% of power from fossil fuel, wind makes up 3.67% of capacity and 0.53% of generation, solar at 100% capacity and generating 0.149% of the load.

Wind and solar are fantastic sources of electricity and work compatibly with other firm power such as gas turbines and large hydro, allowing the gas and water to be stored and used later when the wind isn’t blowing and the clouds roll in. Will batteries and other technology allow a full substitution to occur? Perhaps and even likely, but not today, next week or next year. So swapping one for the other is not yet an option, a fact a person can easily discover if they take the time. Yet the crowd continues to yell and swing their pitchforks, demanding a full change today.

We find ourselves in a deceptive and dangerous place when we take the easy path, accepting social perception as a stand-in for current, accurate information. Significant negative impacts can occur when we fail to educate ourselves and understand the way the world is, not merely the way we want it to be. Ignorance may be bliss and Disney movies are fun, but they are not a surrogate for the real world that we live in and need to improve.

Alex, I’ll take Global Improvement for $800…

Keith Sones is Vice President, National Business Development, The Valard Group of Companies.