Facts, interests, and appeals

Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor said, “personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see.” Einstein said, “it is the theory that decides what we can observe.” It is clear then that framing is all important to how we see things. And while it is obvious we are partial to start, we always end up arguing over the facts.

Can we actually be objective and reasonable? Human-caused climate change can hardly be more objective; it is proven, yet 40% or more of Americans disbelieve it. Wolves and other top predators are proven to make healthier ecosystems, yet rural ranchers and hunters can’t seem to agree.

What’s happening here is that people’s personal interests are getting in the way of facts and objectivity.

Locally this dynamic is illustrated by the CEQA EIR process. One party, the applicant, produces a professional, legal treatise proposing that all is good. People who don’t want the project make an appeal and they assert, with legal weight, that all is not good. The arbiters of the case, the city council, just as often agree with one party as the other. It’s a battle of facts presented in partial ways. EIR facts skew one way or another according to various interests and relative scales of merits.

At the end of the day, political and values considerations inevitably bleed into what some call a factual decision.

Unfortunately for EIRs, public policy, and humanity, these political and values aspects tend to allow the justification of courses of action that are harmful, unfair, and unsustainable. Facts have consequences and are not simply relative. One danger with the relativistic tack of my arguments here, is to create a false equivalence with policies that create serious harm. This is where harmful “facts” have to be called out for the damaging interests they represent.

Harm and fairness considerations are a great can of worms that skew what facts can be. Is harm to earth ecosystems equivalent to harm to a big industry like coal? Is pollution and its health consequences for people and the planet somehow to be allowed because to not control it causes harm to polluters? This is where we see facts clearly bleed into political and economic agendas. One would hope that reasonable people could weigh some objective merits here… but from what I see, reason and science are under assault, these days there isn’t even any pretending to be objective.

This opens up into our legal system and how judges interpret the law, and why control of the Supreme Court is so important. Literalists, activists? In the end, all bring to bear a particular biased interpretation. The top court in the US is thoroughly biased and politicized and there is no reason to assume that every decision all the way down the line to every city hall in the country is not politicized as well.

For “the law” and the constitution, there are literalist or developmental ways to interpret. Biblical and constitutional literalists, in my way of thinking, abdicate the very qualities of reason and judgment that are humanity’s greatest adaptation. The literal interpretation is supposed to be fact forever, frozen in time, no development, no adaptation allowed.

An intelligent person is supposed to believe all public policy is or could be based on “the facts?” Hardly. It would be nice if we could all be objective and share the same look at the data, but we don’t. Therefore, it is worth being wary of those who relentlessly appeal to the facts without disclosing their biases and interests.

Instead of navigating a merit-based system, what we end up with is the reflection of prior assumptions, about what particular parties believe is right and good. And why do they believe things are right and good here, and bad and wrong over there? Because they have culture, and culture steeps a person’s views, and dies them in cultural wool. People end up not being able to see outside of what they are, what they learned and were imprinted with. This is why humanity has endless conflict, and why the Tower of Babel metaphor is so apt.

At one time, the unifying aspects of culture were adaptive. Those that had religion and other unifying, group solidifying features, survived better than ones who didn’t. What were facts or not didn’t matter, because in a small group of 50 people, you were either on the same team or you were out of there. We evolved to be intolerant of the other guys, this is dyed into our cultural wool, but now in a world where it is adaptive to get along and plan ahead as a larger unit than 50 people, our stone age training goes against us.

Here in Sonoma, we argue about everything and all invested parties see the source of local troubles as originating in other’s malfeasance, ignorance or hubris. It’s easy to blame the other guys and to assume if you could just get rid of them, then the problems would be solved. The only trouble is, we are all the same, just different flavors of the same thing. Get rid of one, another will pop up in their place. Just like with basketball, you can’t win with talent alone, there has to be a culture that brings the raw capabilities together and makes the whole larger than the sum of its parts.

In Sonoma, one major point of arguing is over the level of tourism and economic development, who benefits, who pays the costs, and who gets to decide the scope of what will be happening? I see the process dominated by a few folks who control a lot of money, and who jobber the game all to their advantage while the little guys all get the short end of the stick. The money folks talk about community benefits, trickle down etc. This is the same national debate we’ve been having for years, how and to what extent to regulate and control the economy? If there were facts, wouldn’t we have agreed on them by now? If the facts say that trickle down works, where’s the beef? Why the housing crisis? Why the low wages?

In seeking to enforce facts and the truths of this moneyed status quo, city council member Edwards, and Mayor Agrimonti, have proposed that the city appeal fee be raised to $10,000 and that 50 signatures be required to be produced. This as opposed to a $400 fee and one appellant. This is a position supported by the most reactionary, free market elements in town: no appeals, unless of course, their interest happen to get the short end of the stick… This proposal seeks to, undemocratically, put up a roadblock to the facts and truths of a certain segment of the population.

If you can’t win with facts, take control of the system, like the Trump EPA, with a complete absence of science.

Fighting about facts and the truth is a never-ending battle. In the end, it would be better to have a pow wow and have all the different parties agree on what Sonoma and the world should be like, and then everyone get something, and a compromise reached. This is ideally what will be coming with the new General Plan process.

The definition of dumb is doing the same thing over and over with no measurable result. This is what we get with endless arguing about the facts. We’ll never learn what we don’t want to know.

In academics, top-level discourse calls for the disclosure of bias right up front. A strong argument demands dealing with the other guys’ thesis head on. The real trick to finessing all of this in a public policy context, is to be able to state the other guys’ interests as if you truly understand. If you internalize alternate views, you can maybe even weigh the merits of a case in an impartial way.

I’m confident that the facts I point to will stand up on a reasonable scale of merits in local public policy disputes. But in order for myself, and other parties to be heard, and for us to transcend the battle of alternative facts, there has to be a willingness to allow new orders to emerge. But, since people don’t want to lose control, or feel like they are losing, or maybe they are literalists, the whole pattern keeps going around like a dysfunctional relationship.

What we need then, is not more battles of facts, but counseling on how to get along.