Actually, Sometimes Facts Don’t Matter

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” This saying has become one of the most overused phrases of the Trump era. It has a seductive appeal in a partisan era. It’s reassuring—your opponents must simply be misinformed—and suggests an easy solution—make sure people have the right information, and disagreement magically dissolves.

There’s just one problem: it’s not how democracy or knowledge work. When it comes to political facts, disagreement is inevitably—and happily—part of our civic fabric. The facts we fight over and how we fight over them are value laden and fraught with questions of interpretation. Meaningful knowledge is inextricably embedded in society. Saying that facts are constructed through social processes is not the same as saying facts are unimportant or made up. Nor does it mean that facts don’t matter. They do. But no policy question starts out with complete and correct facts that point to an unambiguous conclusion. Instead, policy begins with values and goals—in other words, with politics: this is what a democracy looks like. Vigorous disagreement is to be expected. If the discussion is grounded in respectful disagreement, resolution is possible.

Even the most rigorous data does not speak for itself. Data requires interpretation and storytelling. “More data” does not inherently mean “more knowledge,” any more than a personal library with more books necessarily makes its owner smarter or well read. The accumulation of facts is not the same as wisdom.

Why are elites so seduced by the idea that data can foreclose politics? Technocratic paternalism, a genuine belief that facts settle policy, could be one reason. Because they are highly credentialed, elites have immense faith in their own command of those facts. Therefore, the best way for them to avoid cognitive dissonance when debates continue is to assume their opponents are factually misguided. To accept otherwise would be to admit that the real conflict is one of values or strongly held opinions, which cuts against the technocratic grain.

Owning up to the ambiguity of research frightens elites. If your mindset revolves around a singular, oracular science that can dispassionately decide complex policy issues, it becomes easy to exclude those who have a contrary opinion on the basis that they are ignorant and unable to handle complexity. And it is easy to fear that any questions about science will undermine your basis for governing. An instrumental view of research—as a way of producing public policy—leads inevitably to a protectionist, defensive stance toward research. The foundational premises of this worldview are faulty. Problems usually rely on multiple domains, some of which are more about values and less about expertise.

Moreover, not all problems are solvable—especially not in a world of scarce resources and competing priorities. Seen from a different perspective, the mistakes in expertise are, in fact, part of the system at work. Through testing, retesting, debating, and engaging with novel and strange ideas, we have a better hope of arriving at answers.

We are said to be awash in misinformation and disinformation. The belief is pervasive that we live in a unique, post-truth age dominated by fake news. This is the foundational myth that sustains a tendency towards intellectual tyranny. For many elites, our dangerous epistemic environment justifies a wholesale campaign against doubt and dissent—even in science, where it is foundational to the entire endeavor—and a climate of censorship and cancellation in the institutions that are supposed to foster public discourse. Populists question elites’ epistemic culture, which requires deference to experts. In response, elites double down, weaponizing the claim of misinformation to legitimate the stifling of debate.

Read More: How Autocrats Weaponize Chaos

“The Death of Truth: How We Gave Up on Facts and Ended Up with Trump” reads a characteristic headline in The Guardian. Americans largely seem to have bought into this narrative: according to the Pew Research Center, 85% of Americans think that our failure to agree on the facts is a moderately or very big problem. A CBS poll indicates that 60% of Americans say people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories today compared to 25 years ago.

But here’s the problem. All the best social science research converges on the same finding: there is no evidence that we live in an age uniquely defined by misinformation or conspiratorial belief. This is not to say misinformation doesn’t exist but that it does not carry the kind of exceptional explanatory weight it is given.

Nor does there seem to be some kind of one-sided problem, as commonly charged, where Republican voters have become a “political party unhinged from truth.” To the extent all of us exist in a “post-truth” age, it is a bipartisan problem, and the problem is not limited to the “ignorant” masses whom elites despise. Studies have repeatedly found that more educated people are often less accurate and more polarized in their opinions, possibly because they are better at cherry-picking data to protect their firmly-held priors, and liberals are not immune.

 Indeed, a central finding of those who study conspiracy theories is that they are a bipartisan phenomenon, and most of us believe at least one conspiracy theory.

But the key problem with the misinformation story is that “facts” don’t matter in the ways we think they do. This nuance rarely makes it into coverage of our post-truth environment but is fundamental. Much of the panic about misinformation assumes a naive model for how we form our opinions: that facts come first, then opinions. Someone reads an untrue fact, believes and internalizes it, and then adopts a political conclusion that is “wrong” based on it—“wrong” in the sense that they would not hold that opinion but for their misperception. But our mental models are more complicated than that and largely work in the reverse direction. This is precisely why we have harped on how difficult it is to identify “pure facts” and why we believe values play an inescapable role in political decision-making.

Hysteria over misinformation is leading us to some dark places where calls are made for the kind of censorship and conformity that breed resentment and prevent open inquiry. Consider the rush during COVID-19 to label certain ideas as off-limits—including the possibility that COVID-19 emanated from a lab in China, a view now deemed by both the FBI and CIA as the most likely possibility. The rush by big tech, encouraged by government, to censor dissenting views that turned out to be plausible and likely correct, is just one example of what inevitably goes wrong in attempting to shut down misinformation.

Misinformation is actually strikingly hard to identify. One person’s obvious misinformation may be another’s strongly held opinion. We do not mean facts can never be identified. We do not hold that there is much value if someone wants to claim that the earth is flat. But such examples are rare and of little practical import. The examples that matter are almost always more complicated than that. As such, censoring misinformation carries the strong risk of censoring a good-faith idea. This risk is hardly worth it, considering the thin evidence for misinformation’s role in our contemporary maladies. But even if such a case could be made, would-be censors would have to show that their solution is worth other significant costs to the free flow of ideas and the silencing of important, good-faith ideas.

Read More: Misinformation Is Exhausting. Listening Helps

In one study, two political scientists, Joseph Uscinski and Ryden Butler, looked at the dubious epistemology behind “fact-checking.” After examining hundreds of examples of fact-checking from prominent news sources, the authors note, “if facts were as self-evident as the fact checkers take them to be, they [the fact-checkers] would not have to engage in methodologically questionable practices.” Instead, fact-checkers are highly selective in which “facts” and politicians they check.

Of course, misinformation exists, and we do not mean to give it a free pass. But it probably does not play as much of a role in forming views as feared because of how people process information.

If facts are the result of preexisting divides, our energies really should be applied elsewhere. We should recognize that fundamental tensions over deeply held values are inevitably at the center of our politics. Although recognizing this does not get us closer to resolving our disputes, we should at least be honest about playing on the right field.