85% Shinier!

My new shampoo promises to make my hair 85% shinier. In small print, actually, it qualifies that with the addition of “Get up to…” before the big claim but, still. I can’t wait to see.

But, you say – see what exactly? How will I know?

I won’t, of course. There is no practical way to determine if your hair is 35% or 50% or 82% different this week than it was last week unless it all falls out. Good grief.

Advertising hair products with un-verifiable claims is one thing, yet our news is full of equally soft “data” designed to alarm us, inspire us to some action, or justify some new social policy or law.

Recently I’ve seen reports of how “3 out of 5 children on the internet” are subject to some predator or other. How could that number have been determined? Is someone anonymously surveying children on the internet about sexual predators? I sure hope not! The end really wouldn’t justify the means, would it? Wouldn’t the ‘survey’ be part of the problem? And we know there are huge problems with ‘self-reporting’ from children – problems related to peer pressure, confused definitions, hiding other issues. Access to children for such inquiry is an ethical problem as well. Then just determining how many children are actually ON the internet is a researcher’s nightmare given variations in access, scheduling, location and probably several dozen other variables. I can’t imagine a reliable way to get at this information. And frankly, it just doesn’t pass the ‘believability’ test. I’ve been on the internet a lot myself, after all. (This is yet another set-up for policing and monitoring and 'controlling' the internet, isn't it? The end justifies the means?)

Or, we hear that “3 of every 4 people with HIV aren’t wearing a condom” because they don’t know they HAVE it, and then they are unknowingly passing disease on to their partners. Do we have a way to know, ourselves, when a person has HIV if they don’t know their own selves? I mean, huh?

These sorts of things can’t be verified; the issues can’t be quantified. Yes, we do have data collection methods that are sophisticated. But even complicated multi-variate statistical analysis has to have a starting point. Doesn’t it? Am I missing something here?

Try looking at the news in that light. We’ve made an awful lot of policy decisions - political, social, economic, medical decisions - based on ‘information’ that probably wasn’t information at all.

I’m worried about this. I don't think we are really getting shinier.