Truth Is Complicated

We live in a world where the common belief, at least amongst smart people, is that truth lies in facts and data. The reality, of course is that facts and data alone lack any inherent knowledge or explanatory power. When facts and data get questioned, or an interpretation is challenged, often the response is to produce more data and more facts. This is why different truths always emerge from the same set of facts and data.

Data and facts rarely contain solutions. Data and facts alone have no vision. Knowledge is not wisdom. It's also true that too many facts and too much data humiliates people and makes them angry and deaf.

If you read The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, or watch CNN or Fox, you quickly determine that they cover fundamentally the same stories, using the same facts and data. So, why are there constant difference of opinion? Because a different set of emotions are used to interpret the data presented and those emotions are largely based on a person’s point of reference, their politics, their economic circumstances, their religion, and a host of unquantifiable though identifiable emotional factors.

The reason for truth’s elusiveness is because literally 85% of truth is based on the emotion of the party receiving the data and their points of reference with respect to their situation and the data regardless of the volume or credibility of the facts and data.

Are you still with me?

Simple example: An early morning car crash is witnessed by individual citizens each standing on one of the four corners of an intersection when the accident occurred. A traffic officer arrives shortly thereafter and begins to interview the witnesses. As the officer sits in her car and begins to sort out what she has learned from the witnesses, she sees and expects disagreements in witness accounts:

·        Some agree, some disagree about the traffic signals;

·        Some agree, some disagree about whether the vehicle’s headlights, turn signals were operating;

·        Some agree, some disagree on weather conditions at the time of the crash;

·        Some agree, some disagree on what was happening inside the vehicles at the time.

Ultimately it winds up being the traffic officer’s experienced interpretation of these disagreements that determines what the truth is likely to be, which will probably be disputed by attorneys who never were present at the accident.

Seven lessons:

1.      Eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable even though accurate from an individual observer’s perspective.

2.      Observations are always colored by the emotional states of the witnesses and victims.

3.      To think that every incident arises from one single truth and set of facts is na?ve and always erroneous in some respects.

4.      Facts and data matter, but though flawed, emotions and points of reference of observers or victims will always dominate what the truth turns out to be.

5.      Too many facts and too much data more often than not, offends and humiliates people, makes them angry, resistant and intellectually deaf.

6.      To be persuasive, a lot more attention needs to be payed to emotions and point of reference of observers rather than just knocking down on disputing data points.

7.      Real solutions and resolutions of questions and issues require wisdom and interpretation, something that all data and facts lack.