Just this week a student in one of my online classes answered a test question with a real-world example of trying to manipulate people using numbers and graphs, which they had to debunk. The example they chose (from the course text, Levitin’s Field Guide to Lies) is solid gold; and they directed me to an actual video clip of the lie-in-use, “in the field” as it were. After looking at it more in that light, I realized there was even more going on here than Levitin was pointing out. It was bonkers in so many ways I had to do a complete write up of it here, so you can follow along and be well primed to spot these kinds of deceptive tactics yourself whenever they are used.
Because I think people just gullibly assume stats and graphs presented to them are at least somewhat honest. Maybe they are making a fallacious argument from the graph. But they aren’t even imagining they would be dishonest not just once or twice or a little bit, but outrageously and in nearly every aspect of their presentation. We don’t expect people to be so brazen in their attempt to lie and deceive. The liars in today’s example are anti-choicers. Which should not surprise. Lying for Jesus is probably the most common Christian practice in public discourse, outfrequenting even prayer (and certainly giving alms). It has been the number one Christian industry from even their earliest days. I’ve documented this too many times to count by now. But let’s tour one more example, for funzies.
That Time When Jason Chaffetz Lied to the American People
Back in 2015, U.S. Representative Jason Chaffetz was sitting a hearing on how evil Planned Parenthood was, interviewing their president, Cecile Richards, and making (as usual) a bunch of disingenuous and dishonest points, and trying to speak over his own witness and testify for her instead (and a lot else is going on there we could poke frustrated fun at, like that Chaffetz didn’t know—or pretended not to know—that a mammogram and a breast exam are not the same thing, or that Pap smears are not breast exams). But the centerpiece of this fiasco was a “graph” he presented Richards with, which caught her off guard, so she was too flustered to tear him to shreds over it. Her lawyer brought attention to the fact that the graph is Christian propaganda (it says right on it “SOURCE: Americans United for Life”; yes, the infamous AUL) and not from a real source anyone should trust, which is a fair enough point. But that’s not even the least of what went wrong here: the graph is dishonest in so many different ways it is actually a model teaching tool for critical thinking and how and why numeracy is crucial to not being a dupe.
Richards was numerate enough to have torn it down, but she was blindsided and didn’t have the time—which is the first dishonest tactic on display here: not even giving someone enough time to critically examine the information being presented, and instead just railroading them with what it “proves” without first having passed even rudimentary tests of whether it proves anything at all. But to get you centered, you should watch the original two-minute clip (archived on C-SPAN) showing the graph and the context of its presentation and use. You can then jump to the punchline if you want, and read this apt takedown by Columbia University statistics professor Andrew Gelman (shout out to my alma). But either way I’ll walk you through the essentials and expand.
This is the graph Chaffetz hurled unexpectedly at Richards:
If you want to play a game, before reading anything below, see how many distinct lies you can catch in this graph. I will give you one assist: the numbers are not wrong; every number on this graph is correct. And the source line doesn’t count, because though damning, it is nevertheless true. Now, how many lies is this graph using to deceive you? Write down the number you counted up.
-:-
Here we go.
- First: It only shows the end-data points for 2006 and 2013, yet draws lines as if through data points in every intervening year. But those data points don’t exist. The graph’s shape is therefore fake.
- Second: It “communicates” that between 2006 and 2013 Planned Parenthood gradually started providing more abortions than “cancer screening & prevention services,” that its purpose thus completely flipped upside down from screening to aborting. But pay closer attention. The y-axis has been invisibly flipped instead: on the left, the larger number is at the top; but on the right, the larger number is at the bottom. Yet the graph signals the top-right-side number is larger, when it’s not. In fact the lines should never cross: cancer screenings should remain several times more numerous than abortions all the way across the graph (as that is what its own printed numbers say).
- Third: The graph is anamorphic. Cancer screenings halved while abortions increased by barely twelve percent; yet the image shows a straight swap, as if abortions doubled while screenings halved, and as if there were almost as many abortions in 2013 as screenings in 2006. Neither is the case.
Now, you might have missed the next three, because they require external knowledge, but…
- Fourth: The graph conflates correlation with causation. It was built and contextualized to signal that Planned Parenthood has gradually shifted policy toward abortions over screenings; but what is left out of this graph is the actual cause of the halved screening frequency: that after 2006, national standards changed regarding the recommended frequency of “cancer screening,” due to research showing that, for example, screening for cervical cancer annually (likewise breast cancer) causes more harm from false positives and so biannual or triannual screening came to be recommended instead. So in a very basic sense, the graph lies about the cause of the shifting frequency of those specific procedures. (Which is the lynchpin of the entire deception here; more on that in a moment.)
- Fifth: It does this twice. Not only does it falsely signal this halving of tests was a Planned Parenthood mission to abandon testing, but it falsely signals the 12% increase in abortions was also a Planned Parenthood mission to increase the national abortion rate. In fact in the period depicted the number of abortions in America declined, indeed by over 20%. So why were more abortions being performed by Planned Parenthood? Because anti-choice efforts were closing clinics and limiting access in exactly those years. The result was that Planned Parenthood increasingly became the only place women could seek abortion care. In other words, anti-choice activism caused this number to go up, not Planned Parenthood’s conniving.
- Sixth: More particularly, this graph lies (through deceptive wording) about what is being counted. Abortions register in our mind as single-patient events, so the graph misleads us psychologically to extend that same understanding to the admittedly vague category of “cancer screening & prevention services,” as if we are counting the same thing. We are not. The reason cancer screenings halved after the new recommendations is because the new recommendations called for screening half as often. In other words, their “cancer screening & prevention services” number here is counting tests, not patients. In fact the same number of patients (more or less) were receiving these cancer screenings. They were just gradually being tested every other year instead of every year. So the number of tests halved, but not the number of people being tested. This change in what is being counted thus creates an incongruity with a counting of abortions. These are not commensurate things to measure at all. If the graph had counted patients, both lines would be nearly parallel, and screened patients would show as always roughly ten times more numerous than Planned Parenthood abortion patients across the entire period, directly refuting the entire argument intended by the graph.
- Seventh: Putting those last three points together, the biggest lie being told here is by selection-and-omission: the choice itself to only graph abortions against cancer screening tests is a lie. Because Planned Parenthood provided near five million services in each of those years, so you should ask, why aren’t the other three million services on this graph? Or, if you didn’t know this external information and were just looking at the graph, you should still ask, “Are cancer screenings the only other non-abortion services Planned Parenthood provides? Why are no other services being shown?” We’ll get to that. But the short answer is: because then the entire graph’s argument would be refuted. There was no substantial change in the number of non-abortion services they provided between 2006 and 2013.
Maybe you caught more lies than those seven (if so, please detail any additionals in the comments). But seven is more than enough. The authors, endorsers, and users of this graph are liars. Not just mistaken. Not just goofs. Liars. They know they are lying. They know the graph is contrary to reality. The number of abortions never exceeded the number of cancer tests—it never even came close, in any year. The number of patients likewise remained the same—always ten times more women getting screened than seeking abortions. They know the national number of abortions went down in this period, not up; and the increased recourse to Planned Parenthood for abortions services was caused by antiabortion activism, not “Planned Parenthood.” And they know the actual non-abortion services they provided didn’t change meaningfully, and that there were ten times more non-abortion patients served in both years. All of this information is being kept from you with a manipulation of data and imagery.
We thus get to see what a real chart would look like thanks to the curtain being yanked away by Dr. Gelman:
Here we have a correct and real y-axis, and resulting visual honesty. Gelman is using their data points, so he still drew straight lines across all years, but he admits he had to with the information given—a better graph would draw lines through real data points for every year, so you could see the actual rate and shape of change in both numbers. Gelman also adds some otherwise-hidden causal information (for screenings, he notes the cause was changes in national standards, not in Planned Parenthood’s mission). He could have added more—like why there was a slight rise in abortions there when nationally abortion numbers went down, or that the “screenings” line is not commensurate with the “abortions” line because it is measuring tests and not patients, or that lines are missing for all the other services PlanP provides. Indeed, the best graph would simply count patients—and then both lines would be nearly flat, and the screening line about ten times above the abortion line all the way through (and above, if it included “all other patients served”).
Lessons
Basic principles of numeracy are essential to critical thinking. It’s not enough to just question a source. You need to be able to question even the source’s argument. The graph Chaffetz lied to Richards’ face with presents a visual argument. The argument’s conclusion is that Planned Parenthood is nefariously abandoning its meritorious work (like cancer screening) to deliberately scale up abortions instead. It reaches this conclusion through various visually-presented logical steps.
For example, Gelman quotes Zachary Roth pointing one of these out:
[The image] makes it seem like in 2006, Planned Parenthood performed far more cancer screening and prevention services than abortions, but that by around 2010 it performed an equal number of both, and by 2013 it performed far more abortion services than anti-cancer services.
The issue is important because as part of their effort to defund Planned Parenthood, Republicans have portrayed it as primarily an abortion provider, while the group’s defenders have said it mostly performs other women’s health services, like cancer screenings.
In other words, the argument is:
- Planned Parenthood claims it performs more cancer screenings than abortions, but in fact it now performs more abortions than cancer screenings, and so is really just an abortion provider.
- If Planned Parenthood is really just an abortion provider, it should not receive any public support, and shutting it down will do no harm to honest patients.
- Therefore, Planned Parenthood should not receive any public support, and shutting it down will do no harm to honest patients.
Obviously one can easily refute the major premise as well (that shuttering abortion care is good and not bad), but that’s not the premise this particular graph is arguing for. It’s arguing visually for the minor premise: that Planned Parenthood is really just an abortion provider (and is lying when it says it’s not). One gets this from its headline and its visual rhetoric, but also its context (as you can tell from the video, for example; and Chaffetz isn’t misusing it there: it is used the same way in the original document that produced it, as we’ll find in a moment). The premise is “defended” with an image of two arrows crossing each other, claiming what Roth points out. The claim is false, as Roth also noted. And ironically, it can be proved false by anyone who looks at the actual numbers on the graph (Richards struggled to see those in the hearing; you can see her squinting and not succeeding). The visual contradicts the numbers. The visual is lying. These liars presumably want to claim plausible deniability by insisting they had the right numbers, so that if you call them on the lie, they can try to pivot away from that into some other talking point. But a lie is a lie. And lying is lying.
Other lessons may be familiar, like the essential canard that correlation does not entail causation. Showing a correlation graphically to argue for a causal relationship is a logical non sequitur. You need more information than that. Conversely, omitting crucial yet positively known information that clearly signals the actual cause (and that cause isn’t what you are claiming it is) is lying. Why did abortions slightly increase at PlanP? Does that match or buck a national trend? And if it bucks it, why is that? “Is” it because PlanP is an evil abortion-for-profit enterprise? Or is it because antiabortionists destroyed its peer providers forcing it to take over more patient load? Why did screenings halve at PlanP? Does that match or buck a national trend? And if it matches it, why is that? “Is” it because providers don’t take their other services seriously and just use them to figleaf their real operation as abortion factories? Or is it because standards changed so that in in fact test frequency halved but not tested patients? Cause-correlation fallacies are ubiquitous. Don’t let that slide.
Other lessons of course relate to all the ways visuals can deceive, like invisibly flipping a y-axis, distorting proportions, and even using “red” for the “bad” abortion and “pink” for the “nice and fluffy” cancer screenings. Definitely be on your guard against that. Don’t be a dupe. But the most important lesson—because it may be one you think of less and are thus less on your guard against (as possibly Richards wasn’t)—is this: always ask when arithmetical arguments like this are being attempted at you, “What are you actually counting?” Of course, also, who counted, and how were they able to count this, and how reliable is that way of counting, or finding the things to count? And, ideally even, has anyone else independently counted this and come up with the same or similar result? Or, worse, come up with a concerningly different result? But the key factor here is how these liars used a change in test frequency to dupe you into thinking they were counting a decline in patients served by these tests.
After all, what does “cancer screening & prevention services” mean exactly? Services—how? Patients, or medical visits? Because those aren’t the same thing (the same patient can spread care over multiple visits, or get a lot done in one visit). Procedures performed, or procedures coded? Because those aren’t the same thing (the same procedure can be cross-coded multiple times or grouped under a single service code). For example, if they had said “pap smear tests performed,” that would clue you in to what is actually being counted, and that would make it possible for you to investigate questions like, “Did pap smear tests decline in frequency everywhere, or only at Planned Parenthood? And in either case, why?” Of course you should already have done this for the abortion data. Immediately you should have been skeptical of the narrative that abortions rose 12% between 2006 and 2013, and thus have checked if they actually did—at which you would find they didn’t, but went down 20%, requiring inquiry into why Planned Parenthood was picking up more of the load, which would explode the entire argument being foisted on you.
But I’ll bet you were hoodwinked entirely by the conflation of cancer tests and tested patients, because no information was provided that would alert you to question that. Which is the most important lesson here: when you get duped (and you will get duped), it will be by tactics like this, where they don’t clue you in at all to what information is being concealed from you, so you won’t be able to defend yourself against any resulting disinformation. The only way to arm yourself against this attack is to always remind yourself the attack exists as a strategy, and you should be alert to how you can catch it. And this is way more important a point than I am even making out here: because almost all apologetics, for any false claim or view, consists of omitting information that, when reintroduced, refutes it—so you must always go look for what information is being left out. In my case, once my student drew my attention to the video clip (which I hadn’t looked at before), I immediately ran some keyphrase searches to find out if anyone else had already debunked it and thus already checked this stuff—hence I found Gelman, and the rest of the thread from there. I then could research the history of changing test standards, the history of Planned Parenthood’s isolation as increasingly, in many places, the only available abortion provider left, and everything else.
Ultimately, after all that, I still wanted to know where even these liars’ numbers came from. So then I tracked down the original committee presentation, where this “slide” is on page 6. Which led to a dead URL I could recover on archive.org, which led to the original Christian lobbyist package, which originated the graph, but still does not cite a source for its numbers. It mentions relying on PPFA’s “annual reports,” though not specifically for these numbers. But I figured, why not check there? So I hunted down their online report archive, but it only goes back a few years. A little more digging and I found the report for 2006, and indeed the numbers are there that we find on the dishonest graph: page 6 says over a million Pap tests, almost a million breast exams, over forty thousand colposcopies, and a few thousand tissue removal procedures, for a total of “2,007,371” instances of “cancer screening and prevention.”
Then, of course, I found the report for 2013. Indeed it shows that number fell to 935,573 (page 18), by adding up 378k Pap tests and 487k breast exams (about half of the numbers from 2006), and now tens of thousands of HPV vaccinations (because that had just been introduced in 2006), over thirty thousand colposcopies, and a few thousand tissue removals. They also, of course, add up millions of other services, as I mentioned before: pregnancy tests, prenatal services, STD testing, contraception, and a smattering of other things like adoption counseling. Which of course showed no major change in quantity over time (and in fact still show roughly the same numbers today). There is a reason our liars chose only to count cancer screening tests. Indeed, the number of those that Planned Parenthood performs has since gone down even more–though for a different reason now: the Affordable Care Act. Cancer screenings are now more widely available to the population, because uninsured people are at an all time low, thus abrogating the need of independent clinics like Planned Parenthood for those specific services, because they’re now routine components of most people’s Health Management plan. So we can note that after 2013, the uninsured rate dropped by about 30% due to the ACA, which roughly matches the drop seen in cancer screenings at PlanP.
So the takeaways here are: never simply trust a conservative Christian source (lying and misrepresentation are their normal mode of discourse); visual arguments are still arguments (and as such can still represent fallacies or lies); numeracy is crucial to critical thought (and to just being a savvy person generally, rather than a dupe); and when presented with any numbers argument, we must understand how to ask (and investigate) what is being counted, who is counting it, how are they counting it, and how does that affect what we make of the count. And, of course, we must never fall for causation-correlation fallacies, but always ask, “Why does the data present this way? What bigger phenomena might explain this? What other data or sources could I check to get a sense of whether this is normal or weird or what is causing it?”
But the most important lesson of all is: never trust proven liars again. Once they have demonstrated their utter disrespect for the truth (and thus for you), you should condemn them as useless bloviators whose opinions and assertions no longer matter to any useful discourse. The Americans United for Life are simply liars. And liars deserve no place at the table. Much less at a congressional committee hearing.
Excellent piece.
Another thing going on here is that rebutting is much more work than telling a lie. If you are teaching how to find lies, finding all the lies is good. If you are deciding what to do in a realistic context, it is essential to identify one lie, determine that the source is a liar, and move on without doing more work. Otherwise the liar controls how your time is used.
Tim, that is such an important point.
Your first point falls under the general point I made that trying to flash past something quickly without allowing time to examine it is itself a dishonest tactic. If someone is using clock time to win an argument, rather than submitting their case to genuine review, they are probably already lying about something.
Your second point I concluded with here but didn’t expand on as you did (though I have elsewhere, e.g. in my Primer on Media Literacy). We also have limited resources (time, money, access), and so cannot fact-check everything. So heuristics are needed. One of them is, as you note, stop caring what proven liars say. Block them. Never read them. Don’t let them sit at the table. They are not relevant to any genuine discourse. You are no longer obligated to hear them out or rebut them. They lost that right.
Another, I would note, is to proportion resources to the cost of being wrong. If being wrong about something doesn’t cost anything (being wrong about who won the last Superbowl won’t harm anyone, and is easy to correct), you needn’t assign many resources to fact-checking it (it can get checked eventually when it comes up). But if being wrong about something costs a lot (being wrong about global warming is exceedingly expensive and harmful), you should assign some significant resources to fact-checking it adequately enough for fair confidence.
But to go full circle, this brings up another important critical thinking tool: liars know this. So they will frequently use what are generally legitimate heuristics dishonestly.
For example, ad hominem is a real fallacy; so liars will accuse someone of ad hominem because they know it is a respected accusation, but will misapply the term (what they claim is ad hominem actually isn’t, e.g. calling someone an amateur who doesn’t know what they are talking about is not an ad hominem if their competence is relevant to whether what they are saying is true).
Likewise, the efficiency strategy of no longer reading sources that are proven liars will be used by liars to disconnect you from reliable sources, by falsely accusing them of lying. This is a point I cover in Media Literacy. Liars can (and often do) lie about who is lying. Motivated reasoners can likewise resort to fallacies of reasoning to likewise immunize themselves against exposure to reliable sources (such as by rounding “is occasionally wrong” up to “routinely lies”).
The same can happen with the cost heuristic, by claiming something is truly dire, in an attempt to manipulate you into spending resources investigating it, when in fact the claim of its direness was false, and you should not have been suckered in to wasting so much time.
The lesson being here: critical thinking is hard, because liars are clever—and, as you note, it is far more resource-consuming to debunk a lie than to tell one.
While there are many arguments against climate change and the greenhouse effect like The Australian Great Barrier Reef recovering from turning white a few years ago which many blamed on climate change and CO2 emissions May I ask where such arguments are shown to be scientifically incorrect as you indicate if a subject such as climate change isn’t appropriately fact checked it will become very costly. Thanks.
Follow the link I provided.
I cover the whole issue of global warming there.
One thing that can work is to make the liar burn clock time explaining their methodology by just making some guesses yourself, not to seriously argue them but to say that they aren’t controlling for explanations. This can let you counter the Gish gallop (since JAQing off to them has the same effect it does when they do to you and you can bring up any theory they didn’t counter as an alternative explanation, and when some more honest conservative says you were being dishonest you can dunk on them by pointing out not only their hypocrisy but the fact that it was the liars’ duty to actually prove their case and they failed , and it literally doesn’t matter if you point something out that you even knew wasn’t true because they didn’t know that and so they failed their homework).
For example: One reason why abortion services might have needed to go up between 2006 and 2013 is the recession. A lot of people in fully committed families may have needed to make changes to their family planning. Bringing this up isolates a key point that conservatives hate being thrown at them because it makes their demonization not work, which is that a huge swath of abortions are from people who already have kids .
Or what if the cancer rate itself went down? Which it did! https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-cancer-rates-changed-over-time/#:~:text=Between%202000%20and%202021%2C%20the%20incidence%20rate%20%E2%80%94%20or%20the%20rate,mortality%20rate%20fell%20by%2027.5%25. . Anyone who thought for even a fraction of a second would realize that cancer screening and prevention is not something that’s going to be fixed (i.e. everything from health education to changing nutritional quality to getting the poisons that conservatives keep letting corporations put into our bodies out of the water, air and food ) but abortions are going to be a much more perennial, constant thing (like their own data actually shows when the lie is corrected) because some relatively-fixed portion of the population will be getting pregnant.
Also, the graph implies that Planned Parenthood is insidiously making these choices. But the two data points don’t make these conclusions. What if more people just needed abortions? The right uses the shock and overtuned, dishonest moral sentiment they cultivate on this topic to just demonize anyone involved in the entire process, but Planned Parenthood was doing perfectly legal things. But it is critical for the right to be able to blame insidious outsiders and not women directly because, until they can massively change the background acceptance of misogyny in society, it just looks bad to be yelling at raped 12 year old girls. There’s absolutely no evidence given that Planned Parenthood had any desire to increase the rate of abortion, just that they filled their clients’ needs. The same applies to the cancer screenings. What if people had gone elsewhere for cancer screenings during that time (as in fact happened thanks to the ACA)? Why should Planned fucking Parenthood , the place whose core remit is family services, be micromanaging their patients’ decisions? Hell, why should they be held to task for that in any case ?
And at this point, one could point out that if we were to hold conservative organizations to this same standard, criticizing any of them who had started deemphasizing a good task in isolation because of mission creep or changing donor desires or anything else, no conservative organization would survive. This isn’t just an argument from hypocrisy. It’s a threat. “Hey, assholes, want to open some closets? We can do that too. How many kids got molested while taxpayers footed the bill because of tax-exempt churches?”
And that gets to the biggest lie of the graph:
They’re fucking talking to Planned Parenthood .
Why not actually fucking ask ? Don’t put your liar graph up. Ask if there’s some kind of reason. Let the other person explain, with time. If you’ve found something insidious, you should still be right, right ?
So the very way the graph is used proves that some bullshit is up. Because no legitimate investigator needs the element of surprise (at least not when they both have subpoena power and are dealing with data that actually can’t be easily falsified or cleaned up).
Oh, another issue:
One thing the anti-PP crowd always did was dishonestly imply PP was just this Abortions R’ Us place where you got BOGO abortions. But the whole point of PP is to provide comprehensive services.
So even if abortion rates increased at PP, what’s the context? Is that because they were just providing more family services in general (again, quite likely in a fucking recession)? Maybe they got an infusion of donor money and opened some new facilities, and those facilities maybe specialized in, again, their core remit? One of the lies of the chart is to look at both of these service types in isolation without considering the proportion of each as a share of cost, or a share of services per facility, or a share of services per patient.
That ties in with the reality, where abortion services got regulated to shit and so got super expensive to provide (all sorts of bullshit requirements for door sizes and people on staff and so on). Yeah, dude, when you make a procedure core to our general mission (which is, again, a continuum of family planning ) way more expensive to provide, of course we may have to prioritize that over other things. Does that mean we don’t want to provide preventative services? No! This whole fucking conversation is about defunding them ! But conservatives dishonestly slash services and make it hard for public services they don’t like to do their job, then blame them for it . The only thing PP maybe could have done is just provide fewer services. The fact that the person looking at the graph didn’t immediately have an explanation indicates that they certainly did not intend to just provide fewer preventive services..
And, of course, in what fucking universe do organizations plan two wholly arbitrary metrics ahead of time? This could have been totally shocking to PP too. So the inference to insidiousness is crap.
The entire chart depends on someone never having worked in any organization
And general health context is also critical. If people’s health in general was going up, we’d expect a marked decline in preventive services but also an increase in abortion rates because people would be having more sex and considering families . The sleight of hand here is fractal but the big point I’d make is that anti-abortion advocates try to make people implicitly think (without usually saying it because it’s so obviously misogynistic) that young slutty girls are just out there getting abortions, but again, in actuality people make complex and contextual family planning decisions. So we would actually expect abortion usage to go up slightly as general health (and wealth though that doesn’t apply here due to the recession timing, though again it’s hard to tell because they cherry-picked two arbitrary data points which is an immediate giveaway of a liar) went up. These metrics actually are probably inversely correlated . Conservatives are usually so reductive that they don’t consider how an unintuitive (or not intuitive to them ) relation between two variables can yuck their yum. Why is increasing police funding not proof of police failure and inefficiency, for example? That’s how conservatives treat almost every other government agency: If they need more money, it’s because they’re squanderers! Are cops not bureaucrats?
All good points, Fred.
Of course, abortion went down during the recession, but your point is that one should first have considered that rather than assuming otherwise. For example, that actually did happen in the recent recession: abortion was falling considerably, but ticked slightly up again during and after the pandemic, for the same reason you hypothesized.
And if readers watch the clip, they’ll see your last point on display: Chaffetz kept confusing mammograms with breast exams and blowing past Richards’ understandably confused attempt to realize that’s what he was doing and correct him, and that’s when he threw the graph at her, on a screen so distant she couldn’t read it, and that (despite this being supposedly a factfinding hearing) he had not supplied her beforehand so as to honestly ask her about it.
Exactly. That was just me briefly spitballing. And while someone there to deliver actual answers shouldn’t be spitballing in a way that most of us can, they also shouldn’t be getting ambushed by disingenuous graphs. In a rational system of discourse, “Come back when you’ve got more than four data points, and how dare you even try to claim anything from something that weak, what is wrong with you?” would be the only response to that, and the only response in turn would be “Ooops, you’re totally right, I fucked up”.
In other words, perhaps the most fundamental lie of the graph here is that the graph is saying something unambiguously meaningful, rather than something riddled with assumptions, at least not all of which are true, that you have to buy first.
That’s why sensible people don’t determine even the existence of a trend, let alone its cause, from four data points.
Hence the extreme difference of the two data points’ slope. Even a deeply innumerate person can infer that a graph that has one very negative slope and one mildly positive slope can’t be explaining each other that strongly
One thing this post made me consider is that the lies from statistics almost always hinge on someone filling in construct validity invalidly. “Here’s four specific data points, liberals! You can’t refute that!” The (apparent) specificity of the numbers (even when they are actually complex constructs – as you noted, “cancer screening and prevention services” is a massive bucket that isn’t remotely comparable to the single category of abortions) is used as shorthand for their validity. But numbers need not just be precise, and gathered well enough: They also need to be deployed validly.
So any argument from a graph risks misleading lay people who don’t understand the complexity around construct validity. Which is why honest people are careful to use ones that make as few assumptions as possible.
Many years ago I was fortunate to have Jonathan Glover as a philosophy tutor. He wrote a famous book Causing Death and Saving Lives: The Moral Problems of Abortion, Infanticide, Suicide, Euthanasia, Capital Punishment, War and Other Life-or-death Choices. He was good at pointing, out the inconsistencies in moral positions. Those who believed in capital punishment tended to be against abortion. And those who were in favour of abortion tended to oppose capital punishment. Outwardly this does not make sense. I now tend to think that moral positions simply follow trends and are not necessarily based on profound logic. For over 30 years we’ve had a fashion for short, even shaved hair in males. However, it used to be very different: long hair was the fashion statement in my day. Likewise, I think people fall into ethical ruts, without really thinking through their standpoint. They adapt pro-life or pro-abortion without going deep into it. Philosophers often come up with thought experiments and I remember that someone pointed out that if the womb was transparent and we could see the developing baby, we would be reluctant to sanction abortion except in special cases (ie rape, incest). Someone else pointedly said we afford baby seal cubs more rights than the human foetus. ie we are appalled at the killing of hapless baby seals, but turn a blind eye to foetal destruction. Now I should point out that I have no religious beliefs and I take the view that women alone should general have the right to decide for themselves what to do, without interference from a male. I think Gloria Steinem was making a valid point when she asserted that if men could fall pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament! However, I still reckon ‘reproductive rights’ deserve greater ethical focus and are not clear cut.
Baby seals aren’t a microscopic pile of gametes.
Yes, obviously the fetus develops, but all but the most developed human fetuses are still not going to feel pain nor remember it. Essentially no mammal is that unresponsive. Whereas most people happily swat insects that are still in many ways more sapient and pose smaller risks.
Moreover, being anti-death penalty isn’t just about revering life. That’s obviously part of it, but it’s also about under what conditions one engages in retaliation, especially state-sanctioned retaliation against otherwise-captured people who are at the mercy of their captors. Abortion isn’t about retaliation.
So the two don’t actually share valences, unless one does as conservatives do and offers a simple maxim (“This is about the sanctity of life”) that one doesn’t believe. Because political conservatism is overwhelmingly sloppy thinking, easily available heuristics being overused.
Now, I do agree that it is a little telling that the moment we see “not a full person” for a fetus there is suddenly an impetus to say “therefore no rights whatsoever”. And it is telling to see animal rights advocates often extend so little consideration to a fetus.
But, again, the issue is more complex. While Richard isn’t convinced by the violinist argument (he offers the counter-example of conjoined twins which I think ignores the primacy of the woman’s body as opposed to the simultaneity of the twins sharing the body and the twins being equally sapient), I largely am. I think that a person has the right to expel an organism from their body, no matter the moral status of that organism. They cease to have any right afterward, and if a fetus could live and develop on its own, then that’d be a separate conversation.
Moreover, the abortion issue is also a pragmatic one. There is actually no pragmatic way to regulate womens’ bodies that actually lowers abortion, let alone doing so without horrible externalities. Even an anti-choicer who is not ignoring the evidence has to admit that lowering abortion can only be done by improving contraception, family planning and autonomous resources. (This is why I actually like the old Democratic slogan “Safe, legal and rare” for abortion: It is best for all parties if it’s a last resort, even if the slogan does have the downside of potentially shaming people for utilizing a right).
So the right-wing desire to use the state to control the body instead of trusting women to generally make the right decision is telling because it is wholly at odds with their individual freedom stance elsewhere. But that stance is a lie: The actual conservative ur-belief is that they want to bind but not protect the out-group and protect but not bind the in-group.
Notice that this is also a principle that death penalty advocates share. The death penalty is a poor deterrent and has immense negative externalities.
This is actually a general libertarian principle I think people in general are uncomfortable about. If your solution doesn’t work and makes other problems worse, your solution is a moral ill . It doesn’t matter how bad the problem is. And with both the death penalty and abortion (as well as drug wars, wars in general, etc.), the conservative mind routinely leaps from “This is a problem” to “Something has to be done about it”. (Again, unless it’s an issue that isn’t their folk communities’ issue, like gun deaths). It is the burden of those who want to create a regulation to not only prove that there is some kind of legitimate state interest in doing so but also that the regulation can feasibly work at an acceptable cost.
And building on what Fred said:
The Christian view becomes coherent, too, when you frame it within their actual (not purported) worldview:
All people are sinners and deserve whatever they get. Anyone who runs afoul of the law deserves to be killed (rage morality: the death penalty is supported with masturbatory glee, not reluctant remorse). Likewise women are sinners and deserve to be punished with children (rage morality: abortion counts as “getting away with it,” which raises the ire of “the obedient”; they have no actual sympathy for her or her children once born, which they are content to let starve).
It’s a self-centered rage morality, devoid of sympathy or concern. As such, there is no contradiction. It is entirely coherent that they would support state murder and at the same time oppose women escaping pregnancy.
To be clear, the difference is congruence with reality. So there is no moral equivalence. Only one of these positions is actually coherent. Fetuses don’t have minds; and people are minds (no mind, no person). So killing an actual person (a measurably inevitable outcome with the death penalty) is not factually equivalent to killing a merely potential person. Even if one’s objection to the death penalty is based on not becoming what you oppose (and not just eliminating the side effect of so many innocent people being roped in and killed); the reality basis is the same: they are talking about killing actual people; while anti-abortionists are obsessed with non-existent and merely potential people (indeed, placing a non-existent and merely potential person over the actually existent person who is pregnant with them). And indeed, mostly because of superstitious nonsense about gods and souls and divine laws (tribal taboo logic; not reality-based).
To be precise, the Y axes are not flipped. Each line increases in the same direction. In fact, it is not unusual, for purposes of brevity, to show trends with different Y scales on the left and right sides of the same graph. However, it is most certainly dishonest to omit them to hide that fact that one is drawing a purely propagandistic shape.
Oh no, the y axis on the left counts up, and the y axis on the right counts down.
That’s what “flipped” means.
Compare with the corrected graph below.
Reversing the y axis on each side is precisely what allows the arrows to cross each other. Rectify that (keep a fixed y axis) and that doesn’t happen.
Also employed here – related to your second and third points, and rectified in Gelman’s chart – is the ubiquitous technique of excluding the zero of the Y axis, thereby making the slope of, and proportions within, each line meaningless in its own right, let alone in comparison to the other line.
Excellent piece. Unfortunately there is a lot of disinformation going on using misleading statistics and it takes skill (and effort) to debunk it. Even more unfortunate is that most people do not even get to the level of looking into the graph. They are already satisfied with the statement being made and do not need more data at all. The curse of the internet and algorithms is that people are fed what they want to read and steered away from what they might not like just to increase the money made from advertising.
I believe I just saw you make an argument elsewhere that you should aim above what you desire as a bargaining strategy, which seems to make sense. So from that perspective a starting point of “no rights whatsoever” wouldn’t necessarily be all that strange, and perhaps quite a bit better starting point than some 5-6 months which is the actual “no rights whatsoever can be argued in any reasonable way whatsoever” point (i.e., brain stem), especially when you consider that who would even think about an abortion at 7 or 8 months except for a person with medical issues?
And finally, when I last checked there was quite a strong correlation between more liberal abortion terms and fewer abortions,[1] perhaps most notably the Netherlands. It goes without saying that both have the same root cause (mostly proper sex education) rather than one causing the other, but anyone actually concerned about abortions would immediately copy whatever the Netherlands is doing[2] instead of repeating counterfactual nonsense about restricting access to abortions.
[1] The US being an outlier, at least until recently. More surprisingly I understand sex ed is not much better in more liberal states like Illinois than it is in Florida — er, again until recently.
[2] Nothing very special. We were first taught most of the stuff directly related to sexual intercourse around 10-12 if I recall correctly, but discussion of the general subject starts earlier. Most kids aren’t doing anything with it yet (or at least I didn’t) but that’s the kind of thing that prevents unintended pregnancies and STDs.
So I actually do ultimately think that the trimester system is probably a reasonable compromise, but again, it’s not just about the moral status of the fetus. The whole point of the violinist argument is that a government mandate to maintain even a fully-fledged human being who had become medically dependent on another by that other is at least somewhat perverse.
Also, as we’ve seen, any restriction has precisely the downside that it creates a framework for more restriction and for confusion on the part of peoples’ rights. So there’s a libertarian argument even for 6 months and on to say that, precisely because most people won’t and the exceptions where they would are so dire, zero restrictions may just make sense, precisely to prevent fuckery in edge cases. The slope actually seems to be slippery here.
And absolutely agreed on the pragmatic reality. And, again, it is telling that here, supposed small government conservatives abandon the “Trust people to make good decisions without government getting in their way” logic, precisely where there is extensive statistical evidence to back it up . Because even if the correlation ultimately has a lot to do with better health care and more education, that still shows precisely the point that if you give people good options, they’ll actually generally do the compassionate thing.
Where I differ somewhat from some pro-choicers is that I think that an attack by a third party on a fetus or even an embryo should be treated more seriously than a mere property crime. There was an SVU episode that helped convince me of this about the destruction of frozen embryos and the damage it did. That wasn’t the same as those people losing an expensive car: These were people who had a trust in a future that was ripped from them.
Apologies, I think I may have messed up the reply to function (as in I thought I clicked it but I guess I didn’t).
I used to be a strong supporter of Planned Parenthood until I read articles like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/29/planned-parenthoods-false-stat-thousands-women-died-every-year-before-roe/ I doubt WaPo publishes stuff like that anymore, given its huge swing to the Left. Also, the co-founder of NARAL also became pro-life and denounced his former organization. https://www.priestsforlife.org/testimonies/1130-testimony-of-dr-bernard-nathanson-co-founder-of-naral- Then there’s the even more significant fact that Norma McCorvey herself worked hard to see Roe eventually overturned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc_TgP3QLE4&ab_channel=WarThemedRevolution of course, the “unbiased” media powers had to include a “fact-check” and “health info” on top of the video and any others she appears in to criticize Roe vs. Wade. When both the woman behind Roe and the co-founder of NARAL reverse course, there’s something to the pro-life position, even if exceptions should be made. Interestingly, I still never see pictures or video “testimony” of Arab Muslim or Desi women for pro-choice ads, but only white and black women. Though to be fair, I never see those demographics represented in pro-life ads, either, so it comes across as an issue not for “recent” immigrants or their descendants, but solely for whites and blacks.
As for political parties, I still get blocked whenever I point out to pro-choice advocates that Harry Blackmun was appointed by Republican president Nixon and that Mitt Romney did nothing to oppose abortion while he was governor, neither did Reagan when he was governor. I also have to explain that the Nation of Islam officially opposes abortion while most Protestant denominations do not. That doesn’t sit well with the “allies” who insist that everyone critical of the pro-choice position is a “white evangelical Christian”. Of course, the main reason the Catholic Church opposes abortion today is due to the fact that almost no college educated whites believe in it anymore, which, again noting the irony, is why they only hire (mostly) whites to protest outside of abortion clinics, rather than minorities who come from the same communities that the imported priests do. This also ties in to the (modern) Catholic Church’s view of migrants: the bishop in Columbus, Ohio, basically put out a blanket statement saying that all refugees are welcome, not only due to his own abject ignorance of the subject, but also in part because he believes that the pews will be filled if Haitians and Hispanics get wind that the Church is on “their side” (even though Islam is on the rise in Latino/A communities, both in South American and in the US, not to mention that many are Hindus, Buddhists, and Atheists).
Being in favor of open borders is one thing, but it’s clear that the bishops and pope have an ulterior motive. The Catholic Church for decades told poor Africans and Haitians that any birth control (not just abortion) is morally wrong and a grave sin. Opposing the killing of the unborn is good, but statistics show that condom use drives down abortion rates, as does teaching sex ed outside of a Catholic institution. I did some research two years ago that showed that women with Ph.Ds made up the smallest demographic of women who had abortions. I emailed that finding multiple times to both Catholic and Protestant priests, but, two years later, I still have not received a response. Teaching Peter Singer at the graduate level is, ironically, a better way to prevent abortion than the deranged teachings of John Paul II.
Your logic is off.
First, I think you are confusing Leana Wen with “Planned Parenthood.” Wen is no longer president of PlanP. And no official position of PlanP was ever that the deathcount was “thousands” a year before Roe, only that there were documented deaths averted by Roe (as even the factchecker admits).
I also don’t grasp why some random person once in pro-choice arena becoming an anti-choice nutcase argues for that nutcase’s position, or has anything at all to do with the value of PlanP as a health clinic, which performs millions of services, not millions of abortions; and is merely increasingly the only place left where abortions can be sought.
And you do know Kamala Harris is a Desi woman, right?
Oh, God, I totally forgot about another detail that is both subtle and critical.
How an issue is framed is absolutely critical. One trick that data can do is make you think you are making a comparison that you actually care about when in reality you should be asking a different question. As the Alt-Right Playbook points out, bad arguments are bait. They get you to spend time engaging with someone on a topic that lets you concede implicit assumptions without you having stated, “Putting aside that you’re already wrong for X reason, even if we put that aside, here’s Y and Z”.
Chaffetz compared these four data points because he wanted to make us think in terms of PP having a relative shift in services.
The implicit assumption, the argument he never even really had to make as a result of using such a shockingly dishonest graph, is, “If Planned Parenthood were indeed changing their relative focus to a greater number of abortions, the taxpayer should cut their funding”.
A lot of pro-lifers would agree with that.
Until you put it this way.
“Should the government cut or eliminate funding to an organization that, every year, performed almost a million highly-essential cancer screening and prevention actions?”
Suddenly, a lot of moderate pro-lifers would balk. Yes, they’re doing abortions, but they’re legally able to do that. Let’s get abortion under control and not stop essential services.
Put aside that Chaffetz had not proven that this was actually an organizational objective (such that it easily could change back in upcoming years) nor had he done the reasonable thing and said “I am worried that you may not be providing these essential services, can we get a commitment to raise those numbers?” (which then may have let Ms. Richards actually realize what he was doing and explain that their net non-abortion services had remained constant, and maybe even corrected him on the misleading implication of his bad source). By presenting the graph this way, he had made it seem like it was actually relevant that PP’s non-abortion services had declined at all, when, even if they had, they still would be a major health care provider and so cutting funding to them would still be perverse, even to many pro-lifers .
When Flint Dibble went into his debate with Hancock, he insisted on going first. He knew that he could not let Hancock presuppose the frame. Prebunk, not debunk. Obviously Cecile Richards couldn’t do that because of the forum, but none of us need to make that mistake.