This is key. There’s a very weird kind of knowing—somewhere between amnesia and willfully ignoring the problem—when bad data is aggregated into statistics, and those who know that the data is bad decide to rely on the statistics anyway, because it’s the best they have.
This can even be entirely honest. Even if everybody really does have common knowledge that X is a lie, they probably don’t agree on what the actual truth is, and acting as if the known lie X is true can be a compromise position to get stuff done, as long as X isn’t too far away from the truth.
This is key. There’s a very weird kind of knowing—somewhere between amnesia and willfully ignoring the problem—when bad data is aggregated into statistics, and those who know that the data is bad decide to rely on the statistics anyway, because it’s the best they have.
This can even be entirely honest. Even if everybody really does have common knowledge that X is a lie, they probably don’t agree on what the actual truth is, and acting as if the known lie X is true can be a compromise position to get stuff done, as long as X isn’t too far away from the truth.