Did you know that a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds? It must be true, it’s all over the Internet! The oldest mention I can find of that factoid dates from 2009. At the time, the supposed source was the FBI, without any citation. Lately it’s usually Gartner, still with no citation.

Phantom statistics

Recently a customer asked me to include that “statistic” in an article. Fortunately, it wasn’t a requirement, just a suggestion. The customer also wanted all links to be no more than a year old, so citing a nine-year-old figure didn’t really seem like what they wanted. Even if the figure was once accurate, the theft rate is sure to have changed over the years.

We know about the echo chambers on Facebook and Twitter, but there are subtler ones everywhere on the Internet. They seem more plausible, since they’re on professionally run websites rather than social media. But a lot of these sites pay freelance writers at less than spectacular rates. To make a decent income, they can’t spend a huge amount of time researching each article. They come upon a plausible-looking statistic and use it. By doing this, they add to its plausibility for the next writer who comes along.

I get suspicious when I find unsourced statistics, and I usually spend a little time trying to find a more authoritative source. Sometimes an article links to an article which links to an article which may link to a good source — or to nothing. The 53-second number might have slipped past me, except that finding the 2009 article made it obviously outdated.

Phantom quotations

With quotations, it gets even worse. A Twitter account for writers recommended following Aristotle’s advice: “To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.” That quote is on dozens of quotation sites. No one ever says what work of his it comes from.

To me, it doesn’t even sound like Aristotle. He wrote academic textbooks that don’t contain many aphorisms. He was an elitist, and it’s unlikely he’d have recommended expressing oneself like the common people. He certainly didn’t do that himself.

It’s hard to prove that someone didn’t say something. Might Aristotle have said that to a friend? How would you prove he didn’t? People can make up and attribute any quotations they like. It’s safe to conclude that Aristotle didn’t say “A is A,” but only because his language was Greek. The closest he could have come would be “Alpha is Alpha.” Once as a joke I attributed “Don’t trust every attribution you see on the Internet” to George Washington. A friend pointed out that a contemporary person named George Washington could have said that.

It’s hard to verify statistics and quotations while keeping up a decent rate of productivity, but it’s necessary to be cautious, at least. If it feels wrong, it could be wrong, even if a hundred sites say it’s so. The hundredth person got it from the first 99.