I came across this:

At first I thought this a parody but maybe it’s real? Here’s the home page, which again looks like a joke but I think it really is coming from the U.S. government:

Again, I’m not sure but for the purposes of this post, let’s assume that this is actually an official government statement:

EVERY TIME WE HIT A NARCO-TRAFFICKING VESSEL, WE SAVE TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND LIVES.

This is innumerate crazy talk.

Paul Campos discusses this in the context of the president’s cognitive degeneration, but I think there’s more to it than that.

Standard-issue innumeracy

Bill James once wrote that his innovation as a sports analyst was to think of baseball statistics as numbers that could be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided, in contrast to the usual attitude in which statistics are treated like words (so-and-so hit .300 or led the league in stolen bases or whatever).

We often see this meaningless-numbers-as-words attitude coming from credentialed academic social scientists. Some examples we’ve discussed over the years include: – The claim that beautiful parents are 36% more likely to have girl babies (thanks, Freakonomics!), – The claim that single women were 20% more likely to support Barack Obama and three times more likely to wear red or pink clothing during certain times of the month (thanks, Psychological Science!), – The claim that every execution prevents 18 murders (thanks, Harvard!).

These are examples of what one might call standard-issue innumeracy, which is how we might characterize claims that could in theory be correct but whose plausibility disintegrates after any serious engagement with reality. These are numbers that don’t make a lot of sense but they kinda sound good. A moment’s reflection would cause immediate skepticism, but who has time for a moment’s reflection? Not Steven Levitt, Cass Sunstein, or various authors, reviewers, and editors for Psychological Science. The numbers don’t mean anything, they’re just a way to tell a story.

Standard-issue innumeracy can come by fishing in small samples of noisy data, yielding what can be massive overestimates of effect size.

Hard-core innumeracy

But then there are what we might call hardcore innumeracy, those quantitative statements that don’t even require a moment’s reflection to recognize as absolutely ridiculous. For example: – The claim that the probability of a decisive vote is 10^-90 (thanks, British Journal of Politics and International Relations!), – The claim that scientific citations are worth $100,000 each (thanks, Ted talks!).

These are the equivalent of saying that a baseball player is hitting 3.000 or that somebody is on track to hit 272 home runs in April.

But credentialed social scientists say these things! What’s the point? 10^-90 is a really tiny number and $100,000 is a really big number, that’s the point.

When the President of the United States says, “every time we knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives,” is kinda like when the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and University Distinguished Professor writes, “We can, in other words calculate exactly how much a single citation is worth. . . . in the United States each citation is worth a whopping $100,000.”

Two things are going on here: (a) They’re being hard-core innumerate, providing numbers that are orders of magnitude away from anything reasonable. (b) They are exercising political or social authority, the power to say things that don’t make sense without getting called on it. Just like in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes: the more power you have, the more outlandish things you can get away with.

Also as with the emperor in the story, I suspect that the President and the Distinguished Professor believe the numbers they’re stating. I don’t think they’re bullshitting, exactly; it’s more that they treat numbers as words, not as things that can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided.

And their interlocutors don’t care either, maybe because they too think of numbers as words or maybe because it’s better for their careers to agree with the emperors, maybe question them on some specifics while showing a careful deference to their core ability to make outrageous claims and not be questioned.

A through line?

We live in a world in which certain quarters of academia and the prestige news media give strong support to outrageously innumerate claims. So I guess no surprise to see it coming from the government too–especially given the government’s recent proclivity to cite nonexistent or fraudulent research. Scary times all around.