Two plus two equals four. We feel that truth in our bones. University of Colorado philosophy professor Michael Huemer roughly would say such a truth is intuitively or self-evidently obvious. The Objectivists would say it’s perceptually obvious; just hold up four fingers. A rejection of that truth makes us uneasy, even angry. In the Novel 1984, the authoritarian regime seeks to force the protagonist to believe that two plus two equals five, a clear sign of the regime’s moral and epistemic corruption.
I confidently can say things like “two plus two equals four,” “I perceive that I have two hands,” and “I had orange juice with breakfast this morning” (when I did). Most of the time, most people confidently and accurately assert such basic facts. Probably no one ever has told you they have four hands, and if someone did tell you that, you’d think they were just bullshitting you or maybe on acid or something.
I also confidently can state more complex and derivative truths such as “neither Tylenol nor vaccines cause autism,” “immigration is a net benefit,” and “free markets tend to be more efficient than politically planned markets.” The problem is that lots of people confidently assert the opposite.
When it comes to matters involving complex evidence and long chains of reasoning, people often struggle to know what’s true. Moreover, people often confidently make claims without having good reason to think they’re true. So we have to distinguish groundless confidence from reasonable confidence.
People often are biased, dogmatic, and tribalistic. They believe something, not because they have good evidence for it, but because it feels good to believe it. Often they build intellectual-sounding scaffolding to support their biases. Often they proclaim something to be true, regardless of the evidence, because they want to fit in with their friends or group.
You have a moral responsibility to say what is true, to align your assertions with the facts as best you can. Often the truth is “I don’t know” or “the evidence is unclear.” When you confidently assert something as true without having good reason for doing so, you’re doing something wrong. When you have some reason to doubt, you should say so.
Colorado cases of overconfidence
I want to discuss a few recent cases from Colorado that illustrate the problem of people getting out past their epistemic skis.
The case of James Genrich: “Genrich was convicted in 1993 on charges related to a series of bombings that killed” two people, CPR reports. The conviction was based largely on the testimony of an expert who claimed the “marks made on the exploded bombs could only have been made by tools owned by Genrich, ‘to the exclusion of all others.'” Although marks reasonably can be judged as consistent or not with some tool, the absolutist language clearly was a stretch. My read is that, discounting the overstated mark evidence, the case against Genrich was thin and circumstantial. Absent that stretched claim, a jury would have had a much harder time finding Genrich guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Genrich has won the right to a new trial, but, strangely, only for some of the charges.
Trump on Tina Peters: Donald Trump recently claimed that Governor Jared Polis “has unfairly incarcerated in solitary confinement a 73-year-old cancer stricken woman (A nine year term!), for attempting to fight Democratic Voter Fraud.” Trump is lying. There’s no evidence of organized Democratic voter fraud in Colorado. There have been a few individual cases of voter fraud, including a 2022 case involving a Republican voter. Peters was prosecuted by a Republican District Attorney and convicted by a jury for granting unauthorized access to voting equipment. Peters is 70, there’s no independent evidence she’s had a recurrence of cancer, and there’s no evidence she’s been placed in solitary confinement. Whether Polis should grant Peters clemency in any form is a separate question.
Scott Bottoms on sex trafficking rings: Scott Bottoms, a state representative and Republican candidate for governor, recently claimed, “Pedophilia runs through our House, our Senate, and our governor’s office. I’ve been working with the FBI for three years now, FBI outside the state of Colorado, because I do not trust CBI, state police or FBI in the State of Colorado. . . . [W]e are going to drop the boom the moment that I’m governor.” The supposed evidence for all this is, of course, secret. Bottoms later softened his statements. Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, another Republican running for governor, called out Bottoms for his evidence-free claims: “Either he’s made this story up or he’s been sitting on his hands for three years while the little kids are being trafficked and raped, apparently.”
CSI on sex trafficking: Contrasted with Bottoms’s sensationalist claims, the Common Sense Institute offers a sober and important paper on human trafficking in Colorado. But the report does overstate its findings in an important way. It starts out talking about “Colorado’s human trafficking” problem but then quickly switches to reports of trafficking. Here’s the problem: The number of reports depends heavily on the robustness of regional enforcement. It’s hard to know if law enforcement agencies in Colorado are catching a larger or smaller percent of actual perpetrators, relative to law enforcement elsewhere. So CSI’s remarks about state rankings must be taken with a grain of salt. Still, the report points to real and serious problems, with over 100 reported cases of human trafficking last year. The goal is not just to achieve fewer reported cases but fewer actual cases of trafficking, preferably with close to a 100% bust rate.
Sonya Jaquez Lewis’s forged letters: Former Senator Sonya Jaquez Lewis crossed the line to outright fabrication. She “was convicted . . . of attempting to influence a public servant and multiple counts of forgery for fabricating letters of support to the Colorado Senate Ethics Committee to try to avoid sanctions amid an investigation into her alleged mistreatment of Capitol aides,” the Sun reported. This was not just an innocent mistake or a case of letting one’s enthusiasm run ahead of the evidence. It was deliberate, calculated deception.
I’ve tried to present a range of cases from slight and forgivable overstatements to reckless comments to willful deceit. All of us risk falling into the trap of minor exaggeration. All of us can refrain from intentionally lying.
When making claims, we should try hard to tell the full truth and not distract from it. When evaluating claims, we should remember that the confidence of the speaker does not demonstrate the truth of the proposition. The world is full of confident-sounding bullshitters. We should strive to orient ourselves to truth over tribe.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
