Golf Sauce, The World’s Most Famous Baseball Player, and why we shouldn’t trust “facts”.

Yesterday, I read an article in The Oatmeal entitled “You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you”, and, as promised, I did not believe what it told me. The article’s premise was that we react emotionally to facts that we don’t like, and that we perceive these facts as threats in the same way we perceive physical threats. One of the articles’ main examples was that George Washington had dentures made from the teeth of slaves, an unnerving “fact”, and one that I will return to after I address two other issues: the invention of golf sauce, and the world’s most famous baseball player.

Golf Sauce, for those not living in South America, is a combination of ketchup and mayonnaise, used for many dishes that would use one or both of them. It is sweet, savory, greasy, fattening and hard to resist. The man who invented it, Doctor Luis Federico Leloir, was later awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The reader might have some objection to parts of the above paragraph, based on two grounds: first, how can one person be credited as the inventor of such a combination, when probably many bored and hungry people have decided to mix condiments together. In fact, for that matter, since mayonnaise and ketchup are going to be added to many of the same dishes, tasting them together is something that many people would have done. And people might also wonder why someone would receive a Nobel Prize for mixing two condiments together. And indeed, Doctor Luis Leloir’s Nobel Prize was given 50 years ago after his supposed invention of Golf Sauce, and was given for his research into the cellular metabolism of lactose, not for his culinary endeavors. And yet, I can say that it is a “fact” that the discoverer of Golf Sauce was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The second question is about the world’s most famous and recognizable professional baseball player. The player who has made the most money off of endorsements. The only player who has an Olympic Gold Medal and a NCAA championship. Although its subjectively hard to quantify “fame”, his face and name is easily the most recognizable across the world. If you mention this fact to people, they will attempt to answer: Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Pete Rose, Ken Griffey, Jr…
But the real answer to this question is a baseball player who never won a World Series. Or played in one. Actually, he never even played a major league game. Some of you might have already guessed, but if not, it is this guy:

Its a “fact” to say that Michael Jordan, the world’s most famous baseball player never made it to the major leagues, but your emotional reaction (which is probably irritation or annoyance) is probably more relevant than accepting the “facts” I told you.

So if you didn’t “believe” the facts I presented, I don’t blame you.

One of the key “facts” presented in the Oatmeal article, one of the facts that the author said is hard for people to accept emotionally, is that George Washington had dentures made from the teeth of slaves. And as he states, this knowledge causes us to recoil and question things. It is grisly, and it seems like an affront to basic human rights and decency to use a person’s body as material for dentures. We would want to know the context with which this happened. But even before looking at the context, what happens when we check his sources? (And, like most readers, I read the argument before checking the sources)

One of the sources, the second one listed, has a more complete explanation of where the dentures came from:

This is where the limitations of history come into play. The only documentation of which we are aware of George Washington purchasing teeth from slaves is a brief notation in his ledger books.1 The physical evidence, a pair of Washington’s dentures that includes human teeth, is part of the collection at Mount Vernon.2 As to the circumstances surrounding the creation of these dentures, the best historians can do is make an educated guess. Like all historical theories, this conclusion should be grounded in historical context, supplemental primary and secondary documents, and sound reasoning. But without further documentation, it is impossible to describe the scenario in definitive terms. We are not even entirely positive that the teeth whose price is recorded in the Ledger Book are the same as those in the dentures.

Another source notes that the line in the ledger book only states that the teeth were bought from “Negroes”, which could include free people. It is not a bad guess to say that Washington bought teeth for his dentures from slaves, and perhaps even forced his own slaves to give up their teeth. But some of the evidence points the other direction: the fact that he did pay for them shows that it was not a totally forced transaction (although given the times, it was also obviously very coercive in some ways).

The listed documentation states that George Washington bought teeth from “Negroes”, and that a pair of dentures traced to Washington contained human teeth. We don’t know that the sellers were slaves, we don’t know that they were George Washington’s slaves, we don’t know that those teeth are the teeth in the dentures, and we don’t even know whether the entry in the ledger book was legitimate. One of the articles is even entitled with “The Limitations of History”.

So, from an article that is about the uncertain ability of reconstructing history from uncertain documentation and artifacts, the author of the Oatmeal article gets “It is a fact that George Washington had dentures made from slave’s teeth”. Unlike asserting that Michael Jordan was an unsuccessful minor league baseball player, which is factually true but misses some important context, what The Oatmeal comic lists as an emotionally challenging fact is actually just speculation.

The comic also contains an explanation of this purported phenomena, the “Backfire Effect”, where people refuse to admit emotionally challenging facts. The supposed explanation is “The Amygdala regulates our fear of physical aggression, and is also activated while people are faced with emotionally challenging facts.” The complete neuroscientific basis of this belief is something that I don’t agree with in a simplified form, although I don’t feel qualified to argue the scientific merits. But the part I do agree with is that people don’t look at facts in isolation, but as part of an emotional context. When an overly enthusiastic salesperson is trying to sell us a piece of electronics, we probably spend more time studying the emotional demeanor of the salesperson than we do the “objective facts” that he might be telling us about the equipment.

And when someone tells us a “fact”, we might spend more time studying the purposes of the person than we do studying the fact. The article is a case in point: when I was reading it, I noticed more the tone of the article, which I would call smug, glib, and (at least) mildly condescending. And that did, indeed, color my view of the “facts” presented. Which is just as well, because as mentioned, this air of caution allowed me to look more critically at the “facts” being presented.

The context in which we accept facts comes from learned experiences, relations, inferences, common sense, values, and a host of other things. While I know that George Washington was a slave owner, I also know that he morally rejected slavery. Given this picture, it was hard for me to reconcile the most grisly version of the fact, that he stole teeth from his slaves. This is perhaps a sign that my context needs to change: my belief that (almost) all the Founding Fathers of the United States were opposed to slavery probably blinds me to the fact that they were still active participants in that system, and that system was more viscerally painful than we like to think about. The fact changes my context, but the fact also only makes sense in the context I already know.

In short, I believe that reluctance to accept “facts” as being solitary and indisputable truths that we have to rationally accept out of context. “Facts” should be examined, and our emotions are a great guide to which assertions should be inspected most. The article provided a good example, where my emotional dislike of the author’s tone led me to look at his statements deeper, and find them wanting even on the factual level he suggested.