Ambiguous Facts

Have you ever walked away from a heated debate and realized that you could have spent an eternity in that interchange and never found common ground? Me too! There’s a reason and it’s not immediately apparent.

To illustrate, let’s take a simple thing like a fact. It’s a fact that the coastline of Britain is a certain length. Right? Wrong! It depends on the unit of measure. Yes, that’s right,

Benoît Mandelbrot is known for his invention of the word “fractal” as applied to the first new form of geometry since Euclid. He felt we needed a new version because Euclid’s could not accurately describe the shapes found in the natural world.

"How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension" is a paper he first published in Science in 1967. The paper examines the coastline paradox: the property that “if one were to measure a stretch of coastline with a yardstick, one would get a shorter result than if the same stretch were measured with a one foot ruler. This is because one would be laying the ruler along a more curvilinear route than that followed by the yardstick. This suggests a rule which, if extrapolated, shows that the measured length increases without limit as the measurement scale decreases towards zero.” In other words, given the smallest increment of measurement, the coast of Britain is infinite.

So let’s apply fractal thinking to our socio-political discourse with particular attention to the facts that we argue so much about.

Here’s what I mean: Take any issue like for instance, the new Health Care law that causes so much agita for many Republicans. When measured with a yard stick, i.e. political rhetoric, it presents itself as a simple problem of government intervention in private lives. So one could say, that’s the short and the long of it. But if we change the scale of our measurement we begin to see there is more to the issue.

Let’s measure it with a ruler. Now we see that certain people are beneficiaries of health care services that could reduce the costs of health care in this country. In other words, when we change the unit of measure it becomes more complex – i.e. bigger.  

 The key to this finding is a term I will call granularity. It means, “consisting of small grains or particles.” I propose that words are the granular pieces we use to measure our human  world. When we speak in bumper sticker slogans we are using a very large scale measuring device to explain complex issues. The results are almost always wrong.  

This is probably a long way of saying that the more we talk details the more we find that our country is dealing with some very complex problems. And when politicians speak of them in broad generalities they are pandering to our visceral responses – not our intellect.

And I can’t think of a time when more effort is put into pandering to our most basic instincts than campaign time.

Add this to the global Internet, and we have the current state of confusion, all based on “facts”.

Put this all together and we have an Internet of granular level discourse being freely distributed globally without validation, grounding, editing, or any other censoring. This should be a good thing. But from my vantage point, it isn’t necessarily. In fact, I might argue that the problem is exacerbated because the Internet has become a platform for anyone’s ideas or comments no matter how idiotic they are.  

If one can’t be certain about the length of a measurable coast line, how can we be certain about the variety of political positions based on so-called facts to win a debate. We can’t.

St. Augustine said, “Let us, on both sides, lay aside all arrogance. Let us not, on either side, claim that we have already discovered the truth.”

Robert DeFilippis