Fake stories in purported nonfiction

I’ve been frustrated by the willingness of people to just make stuff up, or to pass along obvious errors and fabrications if they think it will help them make a point.

We’ve seen this with the Harvard law school professor who promotes the sort of stupid election denial conspiracy theories that would surely rate an F in his classes but which help his political allies. We’ve possibly seen this with the pizzagate guy and the dishonesty researcher, in that there are legitimate questions about whether their famous bottomless soup bowl and paper shredder were ever used in experiments as claimed. We’ve seen this with the computer programmer who shared an implausible and evidence-free claim of a smallish town with a supposed epidemic of IT-preventable deaths, a claim that then appeared in a data science textbook. We’ve seen this with a string of economists who elaborated nearly beyond recognition an already-dubious story about boat-pullers.

It’s some mixture of lies and the sort of aggressive credulity that allows someone to promote untrue stories with a straight face.

I thought about this again when listening to the controversial If Books Could Kill podcast’s episode on Rich Dad Poor Dad, a book that featured a ridiculous story where the author claims that, as a child, he and his friend melted down lead toothpaste tubes and poured them into a plaster mold to make . . . lead nickels! Apparently this was some sort of urban legend that the book’s author must have felt was effective at making whatever stupid point he was making.

So, yeah, the fabricating author of Rich Dad Poor Dad is pretty much the same as those economists and psychologists and computer scientists and all sorts of credentialed people who are willing to make stuff up or to promote fabrications in order to support their favored theories, providing active contrapositives to Dan Davies’s maxim, “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”

Anyway, this interests me, the general phenomenon of fake stories in purported nonfiction. I’m not talking about Mark Twain or David Sedaris telling tall tales, or George Orwell or A. J. Liebling moving around details or creating composite characters—not that I’d do that either! Rather, what concerns me is people making up events or details which they then present as evidence for whatever iffy claims they are pushing. The paradigmatic example might be fabricated atrocity stories in a war: the other side is the bad guys, so it’s ok to make stuff up, right? And then we see it in science (sometimes inadvertently, but recall Clarke’s Law) and then there’s that “smallish town” dude—I guess he justified his exaggeration on the grounds that, hey, information technology really is important—and the Rich Dad Poor Dad guy, who perhaps styles himself as the Marc Hauser of personal responsibility, not to be held back by the sort of schoolmarms who would insist on factual accuracy . . .

Really, it’s not about science at all. It’s about all those people out there for whom the concept of truth is dominated by the concept of justice. If a certain story should be true, and you’re in the right, then by golly you have every right to insist that it is true. Who are others to question you? The story is as good as true! Even if that smallish town and that paper shredder never existed, they could’ve existed, and why is everyone unfairly calling you a liar when they have no evidence of that, etc etc etc.

So, again, it was interesting to see pop social science and academic pontificating—two things I’ve thought a lot about in recent decades—mixed in with self-help, which is something I’m not so familiar with. It gives me more of a sense of the underlying unity of the problem.

“If Books Could Kill” could be better

That podcast has the problem that it consistently goes overboard. Freakonomics, while seriously flawed, has lots of good material too. Gladwell’s superpower is his credulity but at least he gets you thinking. The End of History is a period piece but it had some interesting ideas and, I think, deserved its wide circulation. Rich Dad Poor Dad . . . ok, I never read that one, but it reminds me of those 1970s bestsellers, Winning Through Intimidation and Looking out for #1, which, sure, they’re evil, but they make you think, just because they were sooooo different from the usual messages that we were getting in school or in what has since been called “the mainstream media.”

Similarly with Freakonomics and The Rules and Gladwell and all the rest: a key part of the appeal to readers is the feeling that you’re being let in on the secret, and the authors are breaking taboos, telling you things you’re not supposed to be hearing.

One thing that’s unfortunate about If Books Could Kill is that it has such a uniform political perspective. The hosts of the show are on the political left, and that’s their choice: They don’t need to to pretend to be something they’re not, and there are plenty of people on the other side making the conservative case. Indeed, one thing I’ve noticed in the science reform movement is that there are good reasons to support (or, I guess, to oppose) science reform from the left or the right.

Still, I wish they’d mock some bad left-wing books too. They came close when they devoted an episode to the book, The Identity Trap, which was written by center-left pundit Yascha Mounk—but they presented him as a “reactionary centrist,” focusing on the aspects of right-wing thought that led him to say silly things, rather than on the left-wing contributions to his silliness. They also did episodes on center-left pundit Cass Sunstein, but again without really probing the questionable leftist aspects of his ideology. I’m all-in on mocking Sunstein, but if you characterize him as a conservative, you’re really missing the point: his work illustrates lots of bad things about contemporary liberal politics. And they criticize Oprah Winfrey, who also is on the left side of the political spectrum, but again without connecting this to the ideological nature of her appeal.

Why would I like the hosts of If Books Could Kill to critique left-wing messages of bad pop-science and self-help books? Not for the purpose of “balance” or “false equivalence” or whatever. No, the reason is that these guys are funny and often insightful, and it would be interesting to see what they can do if they can’t just lean on their political stance. It’s the same reason I’d like to see Joe Rogan interview Alexey Guzey. If Rogan’s gonna be credulous, why not be credulous with someone who has genuinely interesting things to say?