We have spent years worrying about misinformation: false claims, fabricated statistics, outright lies. That concern, while justified, now risks missing the deeper epistemic or ‘knowledge’ failure unfolding in public life. Increasingly, the problem is not that facts are wrong, but that facthood itself is being narrowed, stripped of context, and weaponized in ways that make reasoned disagreement impossible.
This is where decision-based evidence making meets Daniel Kahnemann’s quieter but equally corrosive failure: denominator neglect.
True but meaningless
Another Daniel — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s reminder that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts — assumed something that no longer reliably holds: that facts arrive intact, with their scale, probability, and relevance understood. In practice, facts now circulate as fragments, detached from base rates, denominators, and comparative context. What remains may be technically true and substantively meaningless.
Consider what happens when a single event is elevated to explanatory dominance.
- A vaccine adverse reaction is cited, without reference to how often it occurs relative to millions of doses administered.
- A crime committed by a non-citizen is highlighted, without reference to crime rates among citizens.
- A protest incident is isolated, without reference to the scale or frequency of similar events.
- A lottery ticket buyer wins a billion dollars.
- Someone who pays their first $14 monthly payment for life and health insurance with no medical scores a $250,000 payment.
The numerator is vivid; the denominator disappears.
A narrative strategy
This is not a statistical error in the narrow sense. It is a narrative strategy.
When base rates are ignored, probability collapses into anecdote. Risk becomes indistinguishable from certainty. The exceptional is made representative, and the representative is treated as inevitable. Facts shrink until they fit inside a single story, and then they are asked to carry conclusions far beyond their capacity.
This narrowing of facthood is especially visible in Canadian policy debates. We see it when incarceration is discussed solely through individual cases or headline incidents, detached from remand rates, sentencing practices, or demographic distributions. We see it in income security debates, where a single program’s tax status is cited without reference to interactions, clawbacks, or the proportion of recipients actually affected. We see it in homelessness discourse, where shelter counts or encampment complaints substitute for longitudinal data on churn, displacement, and outcomes.
In each case, facts are not disproven; they are both minimized and miniaturized.
Decision-making without a denominator
Decision-based evidence making thrives in this environment. Once a conclusion is fixed, the task becomes identifying the smallest defensible fact that can be made to stand in for the whole. The narrower the fact, the harder it is to refute. But the less it explains.
Denominator neglect allows this process to proceed without appearing irrational. After all, the cited fact is “true.” What is missing is the discipline to ask: true relative to what? how often? compared to whom? over what time horizon?
The consequences extend far beyond domestic policy. When probabilistic reasoning collapses, even foundational realities become contestable. Vaccines are framed as dangerous because harm exists, not because harm is probable. Climate events are dismissed because uncertainty remains, not because risk distributions are understood.
And at the geopolitical level, selective historical facts are elevated to deny the legitimacy of entire states—when leaders claim that a country “is not real,” what they are doing is stripping away the denominator of international law, historical continuity, and comparative state formation, leaving only a curated numerator that supports the desired conclusion.
This is not ignorance. It is epistemic (knowledge-based) opportunism.
Make probabilities explicit
What distinguishes irreducible facts from these narrowed claims is not certainty, but robustness under reframing. An irreducible fact survives when denominators are restored. It holds when probabilities are made explicit. It remains meaningful when placed alongside comparable cases.
Frame-dependent claims do not. They rely on omission.
Institutions that take evidence seriously understand this distinction. Courts separate fact from inference. Epidemiology insists on base rates. Good journalism verifies not only what happened, but how often, relative to what, and with what consequence. These practices do not eliminate disagreement; they discipline it.
Public discourse increasingly does the opposite. It treats vivid numerators as decisive facts, probabilities as evasions, and context as bias. In doing so, it erodes the shared epistemic ground on which democratic argument depends.
The denominator restores scale
The task, then, is not merely to defend facts, but to restore their scale. To insist that evidence be presented with its denominator intact. To refuse arguments that depend on shrinking reality until it fits a predetermined frame.
Facts should constrain our conclusions, not be sculpted to serve them. When denominators vanish, certainty rushes in. And when certainty outruns evidence, policy becomes performance, and disagreement becomes irresolvable.
This is not a call for technocracy. It is a call for humility in the pursuit of knowledge: the recognition that facts mean very little when we refuse to ask how representative they are, how likely they are, and what they sit alongside.
Without that discipline, we will continue to argue from facts that are true, narrow, and ultimately uninformative—while mistaking confidence for understanding.