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I picked up this book – “Hell to Pay” by D.M. Giangreco as it reviewed the facts about the possible invasion of Japan by the U.S. in World War II.  I’ve always been interested in World War II and remember debating in a high school class on whether Truman should have dropped the bomb.  For many years there’s been a debate over whether Truman made the right decision and on what the potential casulties would be.

This book does a good job going over the facts in detail – to the point I was skipping some source material.  It presents a solid picture of how many casulties – both U.S. and Japanese would be involved in the invasion of Japan.  After reading the book I can easily see the U.S. suffering a million dead and many, many million of Japanese dying.  So for me, while it’s almost a deal with the devil, dropping the bomb was the right decision to attempt to avoid an even worse outcome in terms of death and destruction.

Instead of going over the book in detail (as you can read it) I wanted to comment on the trend I see in society to twist facts to purpose – instead of letting the facts rule.  The casulty estimates for the invasion of Japan has been something debated for many years – without the best scholarship.  It was interesting how the author noted that the claims of many, many WWII veterans of 500,000 deaths for an invasion were treated with derision.  The author’s research, using newly released evidence, underscores and makes this claim almost timid. 

I’m concerned that in society we’ve gotten the point where science and history have become tainted with agendas, politics, belief systems, etc.  The people doing research are humans – they have their own biases, interpretations, etc. – so it’s alway been a risk they will read into things something that’s really not there.  What concerns me is that their peers don’t seem to question like they used to – that everyone just agrees with the expected conclusions.   The debates over Global Warming show a dangerous tendency in those involved to not be willing to allow differing opinions.

Of course one of the dangers is when we mix empirical science (repeatable facts) with historical/predictive science – as if they are the same.  The first one is pretty objective – in that someone else can repeat the experiment – can show the same result.  The others – and this includes some areas of history – is more subjective as interpretations and suppositions have to be made – not all the data is there.  In a good sense this is why things keep changing – as we learn more – but what bugs me is that we weren’t honest in the first place of that it’s our best guess – not an empircal fact.

When we make decisions in our business and personal lives on poor data we often have poor results.  When we discount the nature of the data (say risk evaluation for financial firms) we also make poor decisions.  I think it’s important we stay honest with ourselves and others on what data we have and the quality of it.