Why Truth Is Not Enough

The 2016 Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year was “post-truth”. Few would doubt that it was a deserved winner. In the Brexit referendum, the Leave campaign plastered buses with the message that the UK sends £350 million a week to the EU, ignoring Britain’s rebate of £100 million plus the substantial sums that the EU spends on the UK. The US election campaign was similarly filled with falsehoods and candidates contradicting their own previous statements.

But, for every cloud, there’s a potential silver lining. Psychologists refer to the importance of “hitting bottom” before recovery from an addiction. While 2016 might seem a low point, with falsehoods potentially swinging critical votes, the bright side is that the public now realises that it shouldn’t accept everything at face value. Facebook and Twitter are taking seriously the concern that they may be a platform for “fake news”, and policymakers, journalists and bloggers are increasingly trying to back up their assertions with facts. Surely, this is the perfect response to the post-truth 2016?

Not necessarily. In a recent TEDx talk, entitled “From Post-Truth to Pro-Truth”, I explain why truth is not enough. Even if a fact is true, it may still be meaningless. This is because a fact, even if true, may describe only a single isolated case, and is not representative of what normally happens: an anecdote is not data. You can almost always find an anecdote to support a view that you want to support. An anti-immigration newspaper could find one example of an immigrant family who committed a crime, and turn that into a headline. A pro-immigration newspaper could find an example of an immigrant family who set up a business and created jobs, and turn that into a headline. Both headlines may be true, but they are equally meaningless, as they say nothing about immigrants in general.