Why Our Statistics Always Lose

The Hopeful and Disastrous Power of Story

Never bring a statistic to a story fight. 

Idealists and deluded rationalists do, and they lose. They forget that numbers’ hold on homo sapien souls is ever tenuous, a second-best sort of leverage.

Well-intentioned people want rational arguments to win out; that’s how our minds work, at least in our better moments. But rationality is ever outnumbered on the battlefield of the human heart.

When a statistic goes into battle it squares off against an unruly gang: aggressive disinterest, cognitive bias, and a cocktail of hormones screaming against reality.

If facts are to triumph, they must recruit an imperfect ally — a story of lies.

Requiem For The Rationalists:

“In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason.” — James Madison, Federalist 55 (1788)

American policy wonks were ascendant after the fall of the Soviet Union. For twenty years Congress was unusually placid, candidates unusually polite, and decisions unusually fact-based. That didn’t last.

The last few years ripped off our rationalist veneer and revealed the stark truth beneath: emotion still buys votes. Facts were routed from the field as soon as politicians stopped giving them lip service and resorted to the populist screeds that have fueled politics since the demagogues of ancient Athens. In other words, our leaders again started telling divergent stories about the same reality.

Free trade, for instance, helped make America rich. It’s hard to argue with the numbers. But as long as politicians can point to an unemployed factory worker in the rustbelt struggling to feed his children, free trade will remain on its back foot.

Accurate wealth statistics can’t defeat the Rust Belt. Rational cost-benefit analyses will not penetrate the American skull. Only one thing will: a better story.

Unfortunately, the people with accurate facts often can’t weave a story to save their lives. They want to live in a rational world where fact-spinning isn’t necessary. They view “selling,” the truth through storytelling as distasteful, and so never develop the knack. But when they refuse to tell a story bolstering the truth, they cede the field to bad actors with no attachment to reality.

Weaving Stories of Lies

“A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men.”
— Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (1783)

Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari is sloppy with the facts. Most anthropologists say he oversimplifies and misrepresents human evolution and history. And yet it’s Harari who’s won this era’s take on humanity, not the truth-bearing anthropologists.

Harari’s best-seller may be inaccurate, but it’s an easy-to-digest hot take that flows beautifully and plays to the biases we already have. It’s seductive. We want it to be true. It’s a good story.

A good story is never a flawless representation of the truth, but a skewed approximation that can be useful for digesting it. The important question: what does the story do for us? What viewpoints does it carry along in its wake?

Those playing the Stoic Game of Life know reality, and facts, are value-neutral. They’re not good or bad. They just are. Only judgments burden reality with emotion, and what is judgment but the story we tell ourselves? So if life is just a story, why don’t we choose a more empowering ones that lead us toward better outcomes?

Statistic and Stories: Uncomfortable Bedmates

Effective moral thinkers try to see through their biases and perceive reality accurately. They understand the facts. They’ve read the cost-benefit analyses and know what must be done.

But they also know that every fact is an awkward, soft-voiced stammerer in front of an unruly mob. Unless a story acts as its bodyguard, rigs up the microphone, and glares the hecklers into silence, few will listen.

A fact needs to win over people who are bored, emotional, distracted by social media, and in need of someone to simplify abstractions into language a sixth grader can grasp. Only stories do that. Without stories, the truth gets stampeded.

Winston Churchill was well aware of this. After British forces were routed from France by the Nazis and German bombers started leveling London, he inhabited the same grim reality as his defeatist opponents. Yet Churchill found that by emphasizing some facts over others and wrapping them in a palatable story he could lay out a more hopeful path — defiance.

“Far be it from me to paint a rosy picture of the future,” Churchill said in a speech to the House of Commons. “Indeed, I do not think we should be justified in using any but the most sombre tones and colours while our people, our Empire and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley. But I should be failing in my duty if, on the other wise, I were not to convey the true impression, that a great nation is getting into its war stride.”

Churchill was an astute reframer of reality. He understood the incredible power of stories. He said:

“…the influence exercised over the human mind by apt analogies is and has always been immense,” he wrote. “Whether they translate an established truth into simple language or whether they adventurously aspire to reveal the unknown, they are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician. The effect upon the most cultivated audience is electrical.¹”

A Spoonful of Story Makes the Morality Go Down

“The most powerful person in the world is the story teller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” — Steve Jobs

Conglomerations of good people are not “good groups” but “mobs.” Even the rational and moral lose themselves when their labels are threatened. They turn into sheep in search of shepherds.

We can pine for a world where people lead themselves, or we can acknowledge that there will always be mobs and someone will lead them. The fact-based can cede leadership to ignorant storytellers, or they can weave their own tales to lead the mob to a better place.

There are few better examples of this than Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher. When his trusted general Avidius Cassius proclaimed himself emperor and launched a civil war, Marcus lost the eastern empire and its veteran legions overnight.

Cassius claimed Marcus wasn’t slaughtering the Germans with quite enough ardor. The emperor was a weak and unmanly ruler, and no true Roman. Cassius called Marcus, “a philosophical old woman.” He was a peacenik. A dove.

This was untrue. Marcus vigorously defended his people during the Parthian and Marcomanic invasions before going on the offensive and ending the wars. But facts and numbers don’t matter — stories do, and Cassisus wove one that appealed to a people tired of high taxes, the ravages of the Antonine Plague, and wars that dragged on and on.

Marcus was balancing on a knife’s edge. The capital was in chaos. A few more defections and the emperor would be done for. The expedient thing would be doubling down on the martial stereotype, swearing bloody vengeance, and marching to war before anyone else defected. I’m sure that’s what Marcus’s advisors suggested. But the emperor thought bloody vengeance violated the virtues he’d practiced all his life. So he summoned his troops and gave them a speech for the ages. What he said was incredibly risky and brave. I’m not sure any speech has been less expedient or more ambitious in its attempt to weave a better story about reality.

Marcus told his soldiers they were going to double down on virtue!

“For great is the prize of war and of victory — a prize such as no one among men has ever won — of which I shall be deprived. And what is that? To forgive a man who has done wrong, to be still a friend to one who has trodden friendship underfoot, to continue faithful to one who has broken faith…”

…For surely all goodness has not yet entirely perished from among men, but there is still in us a remnant of the ancient virtue. However, if anyone should disbelieve it, that merely strengthens my desire, in order that men may see accomplished with their own eyes what no one would believe could come to pass. For this would be the one profit I could gain from my present troubles, if I were able to bring the matter to an honourable conclusion, and show all the world that there is a right way to deal even with civil war.².”

Although he prepared his army for war, Marcus wanted to forgive Cassius. He told the senate to rescind their order sentencing traitors to death and confiscating their property — any rebels who laid down their arms would be pardoned and brought back into the fold, including Cassius.

When word of Marcus’s clemency order reached Cassius’s army a clique of officers turned against the usurper and killed him. The war was over before a single battle was fought. We might read Marcus’s unlikely clemency as a stroke of genius. Perhaps he was a master of realpolitik. But what is certain is that he looked at the same set of facts and wove a better story that lined up with the virtues he held so dear. It’s hard to argue with the outcome.

The Sugarcoated Story

Any story is something of a lie, or an imperfect interpretation of the truth. At best, it’s an approximation of reality. But some imperfect tales accurately convey the true heart of the matter. Some are based, as the Stoics would have it, in virtue.

Our scientists now regularly reel off alarming statistics about the degradation of nature and the extinction of precious species. It’s easy to shrug and move on. But when David Attenborough narrates the plight of some sad polar bears, half the audience is reduced to tears before the end. That’s the power of a well-told story.

Few of us read our insurance policy contracts, but if Morgan Freeman offered to narrate mine with his usual style and flair, he’d have my attention. My failure to care about important legal details is unfortunate, and even dangerous, but that’s reality. Morgan Freeman making it entertaining for me is also reality.

Yes, facts matter. But style and rhetoric do even more. For most of humanity, the truth means little if it’s not well-packaged.

I don’t want to sugarcoat this. If you’re deluded but weave great stories you’ll probably win. If truth is on your side but your messaging is inept, you’ll probably lose. But if you’ve got both the best story and those pesky statistics backing you up, almost nothing can stand against you.

May the better story win.

1. Churchill, Winston. The Scaffolding of Rhetoric (1897), from The Churchill Documents, Volume 2.

2. Delphi Complete Works of Marcus Aurelius.