Lies, damned lies, and statistics

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” is a phrase describing the persuasive power of statistics to bolster weak arguments, “one of the best, and best-known” critiques of applied statistics. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent’s point. The phrase was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain, who attributed it to the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli.

—Wikipedia

I’ve been thinking about lies and opinions lately. People have lied to me, of course. My parents lied about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and I figured that out when I was five and bore them no grudge. People admire and nod in response because they think that is polite of them. I might not even want to hear the truth, but I am grown up now and almost never want the lie.

Just yesterday a workman lied to me about transgressing onto our property. And I understood his reasons. He is not well-paid and needs the work and has been told to make nice because my husband is furious about something that had they asked he probably would not have minded.

The crew didn’t ask, they nailed boards to our house and backfilled a wall (not a retaining wall) by pumping soil on our property. And then the men lied to me about what they’d done. I’m sure they were told to do whatever it took to calm Gary down. Making nice includes not only doing what he’s told but spreading blame away from his employer and himself. By the time I came out to talk to them, these men did their best, but provided a mishmash of: I didn’t do that, we should have asked, we will repair what we can. Sorry.

I am grateful for the apology. I did not call out the poor guy about the lies. The experience disturbed me more than it should have.

Thirty years ago fellow teacher said to me: “Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. Tell me what you really think.” I had been telling her the truth about what I thought. To this day I resent that I failed to convey was how deeply she offended me by assuming I lied to her.

I can honestly say I admire someone’s act and also never choose to do it myself. I can think the haircut looks nice but prefer the way it was before—it grows. It’s only opinion.

I have told a few lies, maybe many lies over time, but I have rules for myself about truth. I tell the truth unless that truth would cause hurt or reveal a surprise gift. I will lie about a present: “I didn’t find anything for you for Christmas” when in fact I have two gifts stashed in a drawer. Haircuts always look nice, you did a good job, it’s my fault.

Opinions are different. My opinion is personal and subject to change but generally not about hedging, and sometimes not even about truth. While I was teaching, perhaps my students would be amazed to know how often I held back my opinion. I insisted that their papers be accurate to the facts, but it was never my job to change the opinions of my students. They guessed what I thought sometimes, of course. They were young, not stupid.

Opinion is not fact or the same thing as truth however much we believe it. Some truths can never be entirely factual because we are not sure, we only believe. Belief can be critically significant and valued, but facts are something else. My students struggled to determine fact from opinion. I gave them examples of legitimate opinions, lies, and facts. The greatest book ever written can only ever be an opinion, that the Earth is round is a fact—the Flat Earth Society made them laugh.

Lies are simpler. We did an activity and year after year a “lie” was defined as “an untruth told to deceive.” I am telling you something that is incorrect, which I know is inaccurate, and which I am trying to convince you is truth. Parents know Santa Claus is not real, but lying to a young child is done with the best of intentions. Kimmel’s parade of parents lying to children about eating their Halloween candy in order to make them angry or tearful is pure exploitation—lying for the liar’s entertainment. [How is that cute or funny, upsetting a child simply because you can?] If I joke that my husband’s spirit animal is a squirrel I am not lying because it is a joke between us. If I tell you the wrong time because my watch has stopped, I am not lying but mistaken. If I tell you about a recent book I loved and you didn’t like it, I am not lying or even wrong but telling the truth about an opinion.

I never expressed an opinion about faith in class. Privately, I have been “politely agnostic” since I was a teenager. I am not an “atheist” because experience tells me that I do not know. I read the Bible. I respect spirituality. If God is there, I expect God is capable of being better and wiser and stronger than I am. Forgiveness is very hard. That’s one reason I expect God would forgive me for my sins and failure, and for my doubt. A wise historian once told his class that true faith and virtue is living on the razor edge of uncertainty and doing the right thing anyway. That’s what I try to do.

When my boys were little, a local pastor—the father of our older son’s friend—told me how he delivered the truth to a member of his congregation. A woman in her 70s had recently lost her husband and appealed to this man for comfort about seeing her husband again in the afterlife. However her husband had not been baptized. The pastor told the widow that her husband would burn in hell for all eternity. He said he felt very sorry for her as she sobbed.

I thought: How can anyone make God so small, human, and petty? How can anyone choose such a belief system, and tell an elderly woman who absolutely believes in a heavenly afterlife that her husband will never share it? How is that even possible to break down eternity into reward or punishment based on a ritual.

But, of course, many people do see the issue of eternal damnation as a simple equation.

[These same people apparently have no problem supporting for President a serial liar with a long history of bigotry and tax evasion, a twice divorced, indicted man who has already been found guilty of fraud and sexual abuse in our courts.]

In my heart I cannot understand this. I cannot always forgive though I believe it is only right to forgive. I try to maintain an open mind and a forgiving heart. I do try. But I am weak.

I read a series of reviews about Poor Things. I haven’t enjoyed any of the director’s previous films and might never watch this one. To believe his stated intention and the more fawning reviews, the film concerns freedom from societal constraints. That sounds well-intentioned. But the only restraint that character seems to explore is sexual.

I know sex is pleasurable. I know it’s important. I recognize that gender identity and orientation and sexual experience are all important in human lives. Constraints and defined borders involving sex are onerous and often cruel. Sure, I get all that. Any thirteen year old boy anywhere in the world could tell you that.

Tell me something I don’t know.

During the years I worked on my novel All the Daughters Sing, it changed the title a half dozen times; the story began as an 8k novelette and became a 20k novella and an 80k novel and then was excerpted as a 4k short story. I added characters and wrote tens of thousands of words that I later cut from the story. I began with a question: How might we start over as better people without war and self harm? Then I had to think about how much we could we change and still be human? What is necessary? [Sexual pleasure has a function, sure, but what else makes us human?]

I explored the science of asexual reproduction and the biological functions of coitus and aging. I thought long and hard about what we must be and do and how we could be our better angels. I created a paradise, my version of paradise. I did not lie. But it is my opinion.