NAA Link: Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Proofiness’ : NPR

Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Proofiness’ : NPR.

Clearly, I need to buy and read this book.  By analogy with Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” (the quality of stuff that feels true in the gut), Charles Seife coins “proofiness” to describe statements that feel like evidence, that feel decisive.  The author’s story about the museum tour guide (by far the best story I know involving the number 65,000,058) is a personal favorite, one that I tell often.  This is really a story about how the human mind intuitively deals with numbers and numerical information, and the intuitive weaknesses that exposes.