Where truth goes to drown in numbers
In 1906, the North American Review published Mark Twain’s Chapters from My Autobiography. In it, Twain attributed a rather barbed aphorism to the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli:
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
The irony, of course, is that there’s no record of Disraeli ever saying any such thing. The quote itself is a statistical ghost — a misattribution that became a cultural monument. It warns us against distortion by numbers, even as it distorts the record through hearsay. A perfect ouroboros of deceit.
Time erodes precision the way wind scours inscriptions from stone. If words and facts aren’t nailed down in the very moment of their utterance, they begin to warp, mutate, and breed legends. The result is the human version of the Telephone Game: one person claims something, another repeats it, then another, until finally someone writes it down and—voilà—truth has become folklore. How certain can we really be that the original words were ever as recorded? We may have built a century-long myth upon a misunderstanding. And what better prologue could there be to the subject of statistics—the high priests of distortion masquerading as precision?
This post first appeared in 2019, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
The Disraeli quote has become shorthand for the seductive power of numbers, especially when they’re weaponized to lend authority to hollow arguments. Figures have a way of browbeating common sense. You needn’t have substance if you can wave a graph in someone’s face.
Big Tobacco mastered this alchemy with its notorious slogan: “Nine out of ten doctors recommend our brand.” The eugenicists did the same, weaponizing IQ scores to justify entire hierarchies of humanity. Numbers became the fig leaves of ideology, the arithmetic of prejudice. Policies once rooted in moral reasoning were re-planted in the soil of statistics, where they grew into weeds.
And yet, if amplification were all that numbers did—merely turning whispers into shouts—perhaps the damage would be limited. Those inclined to think critically might still claw through the data swamp to reach something resembling bedrock. Provided, of course, they possess the rarest modern tools: patience, literacy, and a working bullshit detector.
But here lies the problem. The supposed bedrock itself often turns out to be quicksand.
We live in a civilization hypnotized by the glow of spreadsheets. Every figure, every curve, every correlation is received as gospel—until the temple collapses. Think of Enron’s “earnings,” the Madoff “returns,” or Hwang Woo-suk’s miracle stem cells—entire empires built from celluloid data, their foundations made of vapor.
During my years in an energy trading company, I watched this worship firsthand. We had specialists—geniuses, in the mathematical sense—poring over market curves in search of correlations. They could model the financial future of entire nations in an afternoon, yet if you asked them about the actual physical commodities they were trading, you’d be met with glassy stares. To them, oil wasn’t a viscous hydrocarbon drawn from the bowels of the earth; it was a pixelated abstraction. The screen was the market; the market was the screen.
We call this progress. We celebrate our ability to quantify, calculate, and simulate. We have become so numerically literate that we can no longer count on our own eyes. And yet, beneath all that technological smugness, the human urge toward superstition still stirs like sediment in water. When push comes to shove, modern man reverts not to logic, but to ritual.
Those who know me know that I have no particular quarrel with belief systems. In normal times, I tolerate them all equally, so long as none trespass upon my autonomy. Most of the old religions, for all their pageantry and dogma, at least respected that invisible line between faith and coercion.
But a new creed has risen—an ideology so pervasive it barely recognizes itself as one. It claims moral supremacy while denying that it is, in fact, a belief system at all. Its catechism declares that mankind is inherently sinful; its gospel preaches deliverance through self-denial. Humanity, we are told, is the problem, and must be redeemed from its own existence.
This new faith borrows shamelessly from medieval theology. It has confession (your carbon footprint), indulgences (carbon credits), and public humiliation for heretics. Its priests are unelected, its sacraments bureaucratic, its doctrines buried in the footnotes of IPCC reports. It has all the trappings of religion except mercy.
According to this creed, every exhalation of CO₂ is a step toward apocalypse. To avert the end of the world, no measure—however draconian—can be considered excessive. My usual tolerance for belief ends here. For this is not faith; it is fanaticism in a lab coat.
And like all fanaticisms, it clings to a single number as its sacred relic: 97%.
We’ve all heard the incantation: “97% of scientists agree that humans cause catastrophic climate change.” That figure has been elevated to near-divine status, the Holy Grail of the climate crusade. It serves the same rhetorical purpose as “four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum”—a vague consensus paraded as immutable truth.
The public hears unanimity; the reality is chaos smoothed into conformity. The number is a slogan, not a statistic. A sound bite turned into a sacrament.
The origin story of this holy number traces back to 2004, to a paper by Naomi Oreskes. It was, to put it politely, not a masterpiece. Thinly researched, poorly structured, and largely ignored at the time. But mediocrity, in the right hands, can be repurposed into dogma.
Enter John Cook and his collaborators. In 2013, they attempted to quantify consensus on anthropogenic climate change (ACC). They gathered over 12,000 scientific papers, trimmed that down—by methods still unclear—to precisely 11,944 abstracts, and handed them to 24 anonymous “citizens” for classification.
These 24 mystery judges were tasked with sorting thousands of technical abstracts into categories of belief or doubt. We do not know their qualifications. We do not know their biases. We do not know whether they even understood what they were reading. Cook never clarified. Half of them classified more than 90% of the abstracts, while the other half barely scratched 600. The process, opaque as a Vatican conclave, produced the following divine revelation:
- 64 papers explicitly supported anthropogenic climate change (ACC).
- 2,910 showed some trace of support as interpreted by the classifiers.
- 7,930 made no reference to ACC whatsoever.
- 40 expressed doubts.
- 54 were said to refute ACC—though many of their authors protested they’d been misrepresented.
- 24 explicitly rejected it.
To arrive at the now-famous 97%, Cook simply ignored the 7,930 papers that took no position. He then compared the remaining 3,896 “pro-ACC” papers to 118 “against,” and—voilà—97.06%.
A miracle of arithmetic.
In truth, only 32.6% of the total papers expressed even partial support for ACC, and when independent reviewers David Henderson and Alex Epstein reclassified the same data with transparent criteria, they found that a mere 64 papers—about 1.6%—actually supported the thesis. But by then, the number had escaped the lab.
Politicians, activists, and journalists leapt upon it like a dog on a heat-struck scent. Finally, a talisman! A single, simple statistic that rendered all further thought unnecessary. Consensus, quantified.
And what, exactly, is consensus? A word that flatters mediocrity, embalms thought, and turns inquiry into liturgy. Consensus is comfort masquerading as truth.
History is littered with its victims. The phlogiston theory was once unquestionable. Alfred Wegener’s continental drift was a joke. Barry Marshall had to literally infect himself with H. pylori to prove ulcers weren’t psychosomatic. Every age has its heresies, and every heresy eventually becomes orthodoxy—until it too is overturned.
The Royal Society once warned us, “Nullius in verba”—take nobody’s word for it. But that motto has been replaced by its modern inversion: “97% agree, therefore shut up.”
Which brings us to another decaying relic of the modern scientific faith: peer review. Once intended as a safeguard against error, it now serves as an instrument of conformity.
In theory, peer review weeds out the unsound. In practice, it resembles a medieval guild protecting its privileges—anonymous reviewers policing ideological boundaries, journals chasing fashionable citations, universities chasing grant money. To dissent is to invite professional suicide.
Question the consensus, and you will discover how quickly the word “peer” becomes euphemistic. Careers vanish, reputations implode, and funding evaporates. The modern heretic doesn’t face the stake; he faces unemployment, social excommunication, and the slow erasure of his professional existence.
Consider history’s parade of “peer-reviewed” blunders: bloodletting as medical therapy, the geocentric universe, the ether that supposedly carried light, and the early scientific consensus that flight was impossible. Each one certified by experts, blessed by reviewers, and disastrously wrong.
Today, we have traded parchment for spreadsheets, but the ritual remains unchanged. Once a falsehood resonates with the zeitgeist, it becomes relic. Data becomes dogma. To question it is to commit blasphemy.
Ask Judith Curry, who resigned her tenured chair after years of vilification. Ask Peter Ridd, dismissed for questioning coral reef studies. Ask Tim Ball, dragged through the courts by Michael Mann and branded a heretic even after winning. These are not fringe contrarians—they are mainstream scientists who refused to kneel.
We once fought wars to rid ourselves of ideological tyranny. We like to imagine that we learned something from that ordeal. But remove the uniforms and the banners, and the mechanism remains. The modern zealot wears a lab coat, not an armband. His weapons are models and metrics. His scriptures are PDFs stamped “peer reviewed.”
And the obedient masses chant the numbers without understanding them.
The deeper tragedy is not that data is manipulated—it always has been—but that our civilization has forgotten what truth feels like. We outsource judgment to graphs and authority to institutions. We no longer read, we believe.
Perhaps Valery Alexeyevich Legasov, the Soviet scientist who exposed the truth behind the Chernobyl disaster, said it best:
“Because of our secrets and our lies—they are practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
His words, born in the ashes of Chernobyl, echo with grim resonance in our age of climate orthodoxy. We may congratulate ourselves for “saving the planet,” but truth still keeps its ledger. The interest on those debts compounds silently, invisibly, until one day—inevitably—it must be paid in full.
And when that reckoning comes, it will not be numbers that save us.
