Making Stuff Up

In the past few weeks, my wife and her sister have suggested that I make stuff up, and pass it off as the truth.

Of course, from my perspective I don't do this at all, but as I think about it, I think I know what is happening.

Sometimes I come up with an observation, or an opinion, and I don't say it very clearly, and it comes off like a statement of fact.

Other times, I am passing along something I read in a book, and agreeing with it, so I'm making someone else's opinion sound like a fact.

For example, in the book "Freakonomics", the authors make a case for legalized abortion having reduced the crime rate in the United States. They quote from detailed studies which analyze several economic and social factors, and which show a correlation between the rate of abortions in a large number of urban areas, and subsequent drops in crime rate 10 to 20 years later. The curve of drops in crime closely correlates to the curve of abortion rates.

I won't go into the idea further here, since I couldn't do a good of job as the authors, Steven Levitt, and Stephen Dubner, but mostly because that's not the point I'm discussing here.

I've discussed this idea with several friends, and I can see from the benefit of hindsight that I talked about the idea as if it were a fact, instead of an interesting correlation. I think that the idea has merit, and that it is a likely phenomenon that seems plausible, but neither of these observations means that it is a fact. I also believe the authors made a convincing argument, and I am convinced that there is some sort of link between the two phenomena. Again, that doesn't make it a fact.

My sister-in-law suggested another occurrence of this recently. I made some comments about calculating global carbon emissions. As I remember it I was just making an observation based on some ideas that had occurred to me just then. I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was something about a way to measure carbon emissions by inventorying all sources of carbon emissions. I must have made it sound like this was an obvious and easy thing. In reality it is tedious, uncertain, and incomplete. In essence, my statement was a hypothesis, and not meant to be fact.

I will be more careful in the way I speak in the future.