BY PHILLIP MANNING
Proofiness is the art of deceiving with mathematics. According to author Charles Seife, proofiness is widespread. Lawyers use it in court, hucksters use it in advertising, and politicians use it in almost everything. In this smoothly written book, he gives numerous examples of how people “turn numbers into falsehoods.”
Seife is not a mathematician. He is a journalism professor at New York University and the author of four previous books of popular science. The mathematics he employs are limited and simple. But the stories behind the math are detailed and hard hitting.
A classic example of proofiness took place in 1995 during the trial of football star O.J. Simpson, who was accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. Simpson was represented by (among others) the famous defense attorney Alan Dershowitz. “Despite an extraordinary amount of forensic evidence that seemed to prove Simpson guilty,” Seife writes, “Dershowitz and his colleagues threw up a cloud of obfuscation ... And proofiness was a key element of that cloud.”
Dershowitz claimed that only 1 in 1,000 wife beaters murders his spouse. This is true, but misleading. In fact, Simpson had been arrested years before for battering the dead woman. And if an abused woman is murdered, statisticians calculate that the chances of the abuser being the murderer are about 50 percent. So, Dershowitz hid the truth with bad math, which, Seife writes, “helped put a likely murderer back on the streets.”
Of all the ways people misuse numbers to manipulate us, the most obvious way is to simply make them up. Numbers can make an outrageously false assertion seem solid. A blatant example of this came in a 1950 speech by Senator Joe McCarthy. Brandishing a sheaf of papers, McCarthy made a bold claim: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 ... members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
McCarthy’s declaration was fiction. He had no names. But the publicity
generated by the made-up number propelled him to he forefront of American politics
and destroyed the careers of several loyal government employees. McCarthy was
eventually censured by the Senate, after which he faded into obscurity. But
his legacy lives on in “McCarthyism,” a word that describes reckless,
and unsubstantiated attacks on the patriotism of others. He also left behind
an example of the power of made-up numbers. “In skillful hands,”
Seife warns, “phony data, bogus statistics, and bad mathematics can make
the most fanciful idea, the most outrageous falsehood seem true.”
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