Monday, March 05, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
Continuing from last
week’s discussion of how to tell if we are winning or losing the fight
against BDS, you might think the best way to answer that question would be to
draw from numerical information. Numbers
don’t lie, after all. But do they always
tell the truth?
I thought about this several years ago when I read the exciting subhead
to this
story which explained we don’t need to worry so much about campus
anti-Semitism since BDS is absent from 97% of colleges and universities in
America.
Great news! one would first think in knowing that your cause is aligned
with a big number (97%) vs. a small one (3%) until you realize that this entire
analysis is an inadvertent, but still misleading, example of Proofiness.
That word comes from a 2010
book of the same name which is subtitled "The Dark Arts of
Mathematical Deception." The term
derives from Stephen Colbert's "truthiness," a word the comic
invented to describe "facts" that sound so good, they must be true
(especially if they confirm what you already want to believe).
Proofiness plays with the human tendency to treat quantitative data
more respectfully than we treat other types of information, which is why we
(for example) lap up the latest poll results, regardless of how wildly
divergent they are from one another, and despite the fact that their predictive
power has been shown to be minimal.
(Exhibit A-Z: Polls associated with the last US election.)
Because most people's desire to believe numerical data is coupled with
a lack of understanding of mathematical concepts (for instance, does that
"margin of error" reported in the last set of polls you read about
include potential systemic error – such as poorly worded survey questions – or
just statistical variance?), people can easily be deceived by different types of
mathematical deception.
My favorite of these is the unit
fallacy which you'll see frequently in discussions involving rates or
percentages. This is the one where a CEO
of a company whose profits have risen from 10% to 12% will express this growth
as "our profits have grown 20%," which is technically accurate (if
that 20% is applied to the original percentage, rather than the whole), but
misleading since most people think of "growing 20%" as implying
addition (which would make such a description more suitable for profits growing
from 10% to 30%).
Proofiness is a staple of election politics where candidates play all
kinds of fruity tactics, from cherry
picking data to comparing apples to
oranges. But in the case of the Times
of Israel headline, we are faced with inadvertent Proofiness based on the
seemingly remarkable statistic of only 3% of colleges dealing with anti-Israel
incidents.
On the surface, this certainly seems like a wonderfully positive
trend. After all, 97% is much, much
bigger than 3%, and if I wanted to think of myself as being on the winning
side, I'd far prefer to ally myself with that very large number vs. the very
small one (which explains the Occupy Movement’s "We are the 99%" slogan
– another "proofy" assertion).
But remember that there are over 4000 colleges in the US, which means
that 3% comes out to over 100 schools.
And if you heard a headline that said anti-Israel activity was prevalent
in more than 100 US college campuses, you'd probably react differently than you
would to that 97% vs. 3% figure. Further,
if you looked at a list of those colleges (which would go on for 2-4 pages,
depending on font size), you might not feel victorious at all, especially since
such a list would include some of the biggest and best known schools in the
country (including most of the Ivy League and the vast University of California
system).
But before panicking at a different packaging of the same data, a look
at the original
report the Times story was covering provides a more reasonable description
of the situation, one that will be familiar to most Divest This readers.
For, as that report analyzes (and the Times headline does actually
confirm correctly), US campuses are not aflame.
Anti-Israel activity is not constant, even on the 100+ campuses where it
is regular. BDS, while not a complete
wash out, is hardly on the march (and has yet to trigger even a dollar of
actual divestment from the Jewish state).
Most schools where loud protests, ongoing anti-Israel lectures and film
series, or hectoring professors are a problem, these anti-Israel partisans have
to compete with increasing numbers of pro-Israel students who long ago decided
they had every right to use their own free speech rights to counter Israel's
defamers.
Still, anti-Israel hate campaigns at 100+ schools is a problem
(especially if who is in that 100 changes each year, meaning we could be seeing
seeds planted at 200, 300 or more schools over the course of the decade). But figuring out what to do at a hundred
high-profile campuses is a much smaller (or at least a different) challenge
than having to deal with thousands of flaming campuses, which is why a dose of
reality can actually help our side make more effective decisions on where to
put time and resources.
So rather than panic that the campuses are turning against us, or take the
equally fallacious path of deciding the problem is solved (since it
"only" impacts 3% of schools), we should focus our attention on
ensuring that students on each of the campuses where anti-Israel activity
predominates have the knowledge, the tools and the arguments they need to ensure
the BDSers and other Israel haters continue to be defeated and ignored.
We must also realize that since the war against Israel is not something
we started, that we have no control over when it ends. And so we need to brace for campus (and
other) fights that will go on year after year after year, showing the same
level of persistence and resolve as Israel's foes, but bolstered by better
tactics and the fact that we are in the right.
