In 1970 George Akerlof published a short paper about second-hand cars. Three journals had turned it down, one on the grounds that if it were true, economics would be different. It later won a Nobel.
The argument is almost boringly simple. If the seller knows more about quality than the buyer, and the buyer has no way to check, the buyer will only ever offer an average price. An honest seller with a genuinely good car cannot get a fair price for it, so that seller leaves the market. As the good ones leave, the true average falls. The price the buyer is willing to offer falls with it. The good ones keep leaving.
The conclusion is the part worth carrying around. An unverifiable claim does not just fail to persuade. It degrades the market it was made in.
Which is roughly where we all are now
The word for the modern version arrived in 1986, when Jay Westerveld wrote an essay about the cards hotels put in bathrooms asking guests to reuse their towels for the good of the environment, in buildings that were expanding onto the reef. Greenwashing.
Nearly forty years on, the vocabulary of virtue is so cheap that its presence carries almost no information. Conscious. Mindful. Responsibly sourced. Thoughtfully made. Sustainable. Not one of them is checkable, and all of them are free, which is the same sentence twice.
The predictable result is that the sentence a careful brand most wants to say is now the sentence nobody can hear. That is not a communication problem. It is the lemons market, arriving on schedule.
The only exit
There is one way out and it is unglamorous. Say the smaller thing that happens to be true.
A specific claim is worse marketing and better evidence. It has edges, so it can be wrong, so it can be checked, and being checkable is the entire value. Grown at 1,100 metres, washed, is duller than extraordinary, and it is the only one of the two that costs us anything to say.
It also means saying nothing where there is nothing yet to say. A gap on a page is not tidiness and it is not modesty. Where the evidence is thinner than the claim usually made, the absence is the honest form of the claim, and the smaller claim is the one that goes in its place.
The uncomfortable half
Proof cuts both ways or it is not proof. If the checkable number turns out to be unimpressive, the number still goes on the bag. A rule that only applies when it flatters you is not a rule, it is a marketing preference wearing a rule's clothing.
Vance Packard was writing about this in 1957, when he described an advertising industry learning to address the buyer beneath the buyer, the one who does not want information. He was right that it works. He was describing a technique, not endorsing it, and the technique is now the water everybody swims in.
What a fact does for a nervous person
Here is the part that surprised us. Specificity was supposed to be the intimidating register, the one for people who already know things. It is the opposite.
A fact is the cheapest thing on a page to receive. You do not need any expertise to check a number, or to notice that it is missing. You need a great deal of expertise to evaluate an adjective, and the adjective is what was there before.