Keeping truth's requirements close

Yahoo

10-03-2025

A child practices cursive writing exercises at home. After nearly dying out, cursive is making a comeback in public schools, with more than 20 states requiring it so far. (Wilfredo Lee/The Associated Press)
During a one-on-one parsing of his essay in an academic writing class, one of my college students last fall said to me with, I might add, a benign irreverence: 'Well, close enough.'
To which I said, 'Well … no.' Without a hint of irreverence, benign or otherwise.
My student's shrug of indifference was neither mean-spirited nor brimming with meaning. He was simply reflecting society's retreat from precision to an acceptance of 'close enough.' Bless his undergraduate heart, he was encapsulating this troublesome modern phenomenon: our lack of respect for being exact, a subset of the ongoing miasma of misinformation.
Cigars, horseshoes and hand grenades aside, close in such a misinformed world doesn't cut it. We should be demanding the truth, especially when we need it most: buying a home, making a medical decision or voting for a president.
From unintentional imprecision to blatant propaganda to campaigns of disinformation, we too often settle for close enough when we should be clamoring for clarity — not in-the-ballpark or close enough but actual commodities like real evidence and actual proof. To stay afloat in today's 'flooded zones' amid the just-made-up stuff, we need real details.
This is neither a scold nor an argument for some robotic, mechanical speech, which while perhaps clean and careful, lacks humanity. I'm saying only that if we insist and rely on microscopic tolerances in everything from the Keurigs that brew our morning coffee to the razors that keep us shorn to the 737s that fly us around the world, why not demand more rhetorical rigor and truth telling, particularly from leaders who write policies and craft legislation?
Close enough is far too often not enough, whether it's at a local school board meeting, in the Nebraska Legislature or even during a joint session of Congress where, as recently witnessed, elected leaders — who should know better — stood and cheered not simply their approval of a little linguistic license, but also a litany of out and out lies.
Three circumstances are working against us. That's the bad news. The good news is that each can be overcome. The first is our wont to diminish the work and wisdom of experts, particularly in science and academia. At the low end of this continuum is a community of online 'specialists,' who, armed with Google and a conspiratorial mindset, continue to disbelieve those with advanced degrees, years of experience and the respect of professional peers.
Sometimes, even the well-intentioned bypass expertise. When the Nebraska Legislature grappled with bills related to gender-affirming care, it passed laws despite the overwhelming testimony of health care professionals to the contrary. The 'post-truth' world dismisses empirical research for claims based on emotions or personal beliefs.
When facts lose their significance, the vague, the untrue and the nonsensical can't be far behind.
Related to our growing disdain for facts and science is confirmation bias, a cognitive condition that occurs when we give preference to and stronger trust to that which fits into what we already believe. In other words, we believe it more because we already believe it. We all do it. But consequences follow.
For example, if I already consider the federal government bloated, I'm more likely to believe Elon Musk's DOGE is finding hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse rather than the more accurate view that the savings being realized are at much lower numbers and are more likely the result of clerical or computer errors than fraud.
When numbers are thrown against the wall like spaghetti, rather than looking only for which ones stick, we should be paying more attention to those that don't.
Finally, the Illusory Truth Effect holds sway in our social media-driven world. That's the psychological occurrence that tricks us into believing that repetition equals truth, that lies must not be lies because we've heard them so often.
On the internet the most valuable commodity is a click. The Illusory Truth Effect translates clicks into truths, even when the opposite is true.
As has been written in this space before: If a 1,000 people say a stupid thing, it's still a stupid thing.
My student rewrote his essay … and without rolling his eyes — or at least not in front of me. The new draft, with more rigor and evidence, strengthened his argument. I'm not sure what lesson he learned, if any. But he never used that line on me again.
I only hope he — and the rest of us — understands that when truth is on the line, more than 'close enough' is required.
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