Rule #117: Trust but Verify
You kids know that I tend to tell my stories and make statements that appear to be based on fact, but are colored by my opinion. My dad used to do this at the dinner table—he’d quote aspects of social studies, math, and science as fact, and do it in such a convincing way that you left the meal certain he was telling the truth.
For the most part he was, but when the facts didn’t support his arguments, he’d slightly change them. For better or worse, I inherited this unique skill set—creating my own reality for the benefit of a good story.
It was a lot more fun up until the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1990, and even more fun before Jerry Yang launched Yahoo in 1994. Instead of requiring a trip to the library to fact-check me, you can now test all the stories with a simple search. This makes telling a good story increasingly hard.
That was bad enough, but then the information we had available started to include intentionally misleading or wrong facts. Trusted sources of information were being eaten up by “user-created” data in places like Wikipedia. Now it’s possible to be fact-checked with incorrect or intentionally false information that looks real.
I love satirical websites like The Onion with their “made to look real” stories, and I find it hysterical when “real” news outlets pick up one of their stories and re-report it as fact. Unfortunately, this has started happening weekly, not just a couple of times a year. That kind of laziness in fact-checking by reporters is not as funny—and often dangerous.
Take, for example, the National COVID-19 team saying that deaths from COVID-19 could be as high as 240,000 people. Pretty scary.
But let’s put that number in perspective. In 2017—the most recent year with complete data—there were 2.8 million deaths in the U.S. The top causes were:
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Heart disease: 647,000
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Cancer: 599,000
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Accidents (car crashes and the like): 170,000
On top of that, respiratory illnesses accounted for 160,000 deaths, and diabetes for 84,000.
So here’s the context: if all 240,000 projected COVID-19 deaths were people who otherwise would not have died that year, it would represent about an 8.5% increase in the national death rate. But health officials pointed out that many of those deaths would overlap with people already vulnerable to other conditions. The net effect might be closer to 50,000–75,000 additional deaths—still serious, but not as catastrophic as the raw number makes it sound.
The point of all this is that in this world of fluid information and “storytellers” who look like credible sources, we need to adopt a trust but verify position on everything we read or hear.
When I took a journalism course (back when there was journalism), we were taught that every story needed to have credible sources, and those sources had to be verified. Check and re-check, and never believe anything as fact without proof from multiple sources.
In this new age of COVID-19—and whatever crisis comes next—we need to behave like good journalists: checking sources, verifying, and re-verifying. I’ve learned through this crisis not only not to trust any single source on its own, but also not to trust my own instincts. So it’s up to each of us to be our own guardian of the truth, searching for it and not just for an answer that agrees with our opinion.
With that said, I need you to give your old man a break, just as I did with your grandfather. Sometimes stories are better with the facts changed a bit—and far more interesting. The fish grows bigger with each retelling, but it’s far more exciting to catch. There’s a difference between humoring your dad’s stories and relying on news from a cable channel.
So remember Rule #117: trust, but verify—whether it’s your old man’s fish story or the evening news.
Love, Dad