Four out of five doctors think the fifth doctor's an idiot!

By Joseph Walther

Here’s a quote. I don’t know who said it, but I think it was Bertrand Russell. Anyway, here it is. “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.”

Assuming that he said it, you have to understand something about old Bert. He was born in 1822, died in 1970, and—this is the critical thing—he was a British author. The Brits, in general, are long-winded to begin with. Add to this the fact that he was a product of the late 19^th century, and we have long-windedness taken to an unprecedented level.

Here’s what Bert meant. If dudes or dudettes want to believe something, they’re going to believe it and they’ll be in no mood to let facts interfere with it. The opposite is also true. Add in some statistics, most often of mythological creation, and we end up with an entirely new category of quasi-facts, called factoids.

Factoids look, and feel, like facts. But, they’re NOT facts. People who use them always include numbers to add credibility, most often consisting of creative, on-the-spot statistics.

The problem, though, is that factoids contain a significant number of half-truths. A single, half-truth, no matter how you state it, ALWAYS equals one WHOLE lie.

Years ago, someone sent me a statistics joke involving pickles. The premise was that eating pickles could kill you. The statistics were self-evident. Ninety-seven people out of every one-hundred, who died during WWII, had eaten pickles.

I had forgotten about that joke until last Wednesday when I overheard a 9-year-old boy talking about how bad pickles are for you. He had found something about the WWII “statistics” on the Internet, and he was NOT joking.

His equally young friends weren’t too sure, either. His aunt, seemingly as concerned, stated; “It may have been bad pickles.” She told them that she’d look it up on the Internet. I’m not making this up. It’s impossible to do so.

On a more serious note, however, a good friend and neighbor was telling me about his 3^rd grader daughter. A school administrator had congratulated him and his wife on the fact that the child scored at the seventh grade-level on a third grade standardized test.

He was convinced that his little girl could do seventh-grade work… ALREADY! I could see the concerned look on his face. He had that puzzled look on his face, such as, “How am I ever going to be able to afford Harvard tuition?”

That his delightful 8-year-old third-grader could do seventh-grade work was not true, of course. However, he had been convinced that she could by a school administrator who, either didn’t understand the nature of grade-equivalent scores or chose not to explain them to a proud daddy.

The amount of educational mumbo-jumbo going on at the K-12 level of public education increases exponentially with each Ed.D. degree annually awarded to various public school administrators. (Ed.D. stands for Doctor of Education, mostly in “Educational Leadership.”)

I’m not a professional educator. I have no academic credentials in Education. Even if I did have them, I’d never have the guts to admit it.

However, I do have credentials in Science and Engineering. I cut my eyeteeth on Inferential Statistics. And, I’m not the only one, either.

MANY of us skeptics possess more than a casual understanding of terms like Effect size, Differential sample attrition, Sample Precision, Confidence Interval Differentiation, Norm-referenced scores, Normal Curve Equivalent scores, Percentile rank, and the all-time favorite of the educational leadership set: Grade equivalents.

Grade equivalent score is one of the phoniest metrics going when it comes to reporting student performance. Administrators use it to make their own performances look better than they are.

The measurement does nothing more than report test performance in terms of the months since the beginning of a school year. A GE of 5.6, for example, means that a student’s performance is at the 6^th month of the 5^th grade.

This is ALL that it means. AND, it ALWAYS assumes that we’re talking about standardized tests!

My neighbor’s 3^rd grade daughter’s scoring at a 7^th grade-level on a standardized test does NOT mean that she can do 7^th grade work. It means that she did as well as a 7^th grade student having taken the same standardized, 3^rd grade test.

This youngster is a delightful, sunny, intelligent little girl. She’ll do just fine in school as long as her teachers are competent and her parents continue to take an active, positive role in her adolescent life.

Besides, everyone knows that good grades are not the only story to getting into Harvard. In fact, if a prospective student’s daddy or mommy can afford a new medical wing or the aspiring entrant’s daddy was a former CIA director, future Vice President, and future President of the United States, a kid could, easily…

What? He went where? Oh, damn! I’m so sorry about that. Forget what I said about Harvard. It was Yale.

We’ve got to learn the difference between a factoid and a fact. “There were 87% fewer cases of reported blindness among those who claimed to have stopped steadily masturbating,” is probably a factoid.

“The Earth seems to be at the beginning of a warming cycle, climatologically speaking, and the human race may have contributed to its acceleration to some degree, large or small,” is probably a fact.

Oh, and before I forget, Denzel Washington did NOT sign a blank check, hand it to a Veterans Administration official and say, “Build a hospital,” even though I’ve received hundreds of emails absolutely confirming that he did so, and telling me to “pass it on!”

Finally, I must voice my continued skepticism regarding a few other matters of socially professed truths.

Moses talking to God via a burning bush on a mountain that we no longer seem able to locate has always bothered me. Joe Smith and his alleged meeting with God—like that of Moses, alone and no means of independent verification—is also highly suspicious.

The Mohammed/Allah thing, the Noah thing, and Jonah’s experience with that whale do not pass the “smell” test, either. Of course, this is merely my opinion.

In fact, I think buying into these things, all of them, requires the ingestion of massive amounts of Kickapoo Joy Juice. Personally, I tried the stuff and the hangover is not worth it.

Last, I’d like to convey one other observation, just to all of my Roman Catholic friends, though.

Ever since medical science found a way, you guys have absolutely repelled against surrogate motherhood. I’ve witnessed some of you so aghast over the matter, that you were positively speechless… in a state of stunned disbelief, so to speak.

I’ll bet you’re all ecstatic that you didn’t have this rule back when Jesus was born, huh?! How differently things may have turned out. I’ll be back next week. Have a good one. Um, watch out for those pickles, though, you know… just in case.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.