What would be some fact that, while true, could be told in a context or way that is misinfomating or make the other person draw incorrect conclusions?
You are much more likely to die in a hospital than anywhere else.
I would assume if you needed to be hospitalized for any reason there is already a non-trivial increase in the possibility of mortality…
Wait until you hear the fatality rate for hospice residents
I don’t think this one is true, unless you mean it a different way than I’m interpreting it.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc1911892#:~:text=In 2003%2C a total of,%25)%20to%20534%2C714%20(20.8%25).
(This is the US)
This is minor one, but annoys me how comnmon this is: light is made out of litle packets of energy called photons.
Here is a good video on the topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=SDtAh9IwG-I (Too lazy didn’t watch: Light is an electromagnetc wave and is is not quantized. Only the interactions between atoms and light are quantized)
huh, I thought quantization of light(or energy really) came from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
I was under the impression that electromagnetic radiation is both a wave and a particle, and it’s known as the “wave particle duality”.
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The electrons are very much moving, even if at an incredibly slow pace of ~1cm/s. It’s just that they push the electrons ahead of them which puch the ones in front of then, etc. which makes electricity so fast.
It is however somewhat true for AC because there the electrons just get pushed back and forth 50/60 times per second, making them more or less stay in place
Well they do move, but just incredibly slowly.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/350612/speed-of-electrons-in-a-wire
In DC they actually are moving, but it’s something like a few millimeters per hour on average
Can confirm. Traffic is awful on the Beltway.
Since the invention of seatbelts there have been a larger number of serious injuries from car accidents.
This sounds like seatbelts are causing serious injury but in fact, these serious injuries used to be deaths. That statistics is never mentioned causing it to be misleading, just like they never mention how many bugles are in the car when an accident happens
This thread has a lot of potential, great for dining table debates
In places where more storks live, you also have more babies.
After the Corona lockdowns there was an increase in infections with the common cold. Researches tried to explain how this is connected to the immune system and a lot of people now assume you have to “train” your immune system with exposure to pathogens. Or that your immune system falls out of training (like a muscle) if you stop exposing it to pathogens regularly. A potentially dangerous misunderstanding.
People often draw false conclusions from reduced information about a fact. For example: Babies who are kept in one position for hours each day over weeks or months show developmental delay. For some reason this information got shortened so much that a lot of people (in Germany at least) now assume baby seats are hurting babies backs.
human and chimp DNA is 98.8 percent the same
Still interested in how similar cow or earthworm DNA is. I’d be unsurprised to find they’re also quite high.
Pigs (98%) and bananas (60%) are often quoted examples. Not sure about worms
https://thednatests.com/how-much-dna-do-humans-share-with-other-animals/
I don’t know the exact number, but, come on! Look at those guys! They are basically hairy humans with a slightly less complex system of communication.
Yep but the point is the 1.2% represent millions of gene pairs and the ones we share are not always present or expressed in the same way. So just sharing genes doesn’t necessarily mean were the same or they do the same thing.
Yeah chimps are one of our very few (very very) distant cousins left. But i think they rip more faces off than us
‘true fact’.
- Facts cannot be anything except for true.
- Anyone who uses the two words ‘true fact’ together cannot be trusted because they know neither the meaning of the word ‘true’ or the word ‘fact’.
Counterpoint: True Facts is a great series of humorous nature documentaries.
Imagine trying to move by riding a unicycle backwards and throwing up through a giant straw. That is how the nautilus do.
Oh how I miss the before times.
That’s a true fact!
I’m so sorry but it’s either/or & neither/nor. Gotta follow through with the negation.
That’s very negative, however I must concur that it’s a fact the correlative conjunctions were incorrectly placed to negate the possibilities.
Whether that fact is true or not is up to you.
Facts are just objective statements, which can be either true or false, but whichever they are it is objective and not dependant on the observer.
I mean, it’s a semantic argument, and semantics is subjective, but that’s probably how the people who say ‘true fact’ are defining fact.
No, a statement can be true or false. A fact is always true.
That’s why I clarified that the definition of any word, including the word fact, is subjective.
No it’s not or we’ll bicker over every word and square could mean triangle. We have agreed upon word definitions. That’s part of a language.
Language is constantly evolving. Deal with it.
That doesn’t mean that word definitions are absolutely not arbitrary nor subjective. They are agreed upon in a civilization at any given time. I don’t have to deal with anything.
Wearing your seatbelt increases your chances of dying from cancer.
This one is great! Made me think way too much
It increases your chance of drowning, but not for the reason people usually think.
How?
You’ll live longer.
A lie
Several (attempted) murderers have owned copies of The Catcher in the Rye.
One of my favorite Brian Regan bits kinda fits, maybe?
“In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. One thing led to another and the United States of America dropped two atomic bombs on the sovereign nation of Japan.”
Clumsy. Did they at least pick them up on the way out?
I love Brian Regan, but I haven’t heard this bit. What’s it from?
it’s from World War II
“Vending machines are more deadly than sharks”.
While it’s true that (at least for some years) more people are killed by vending machine accidents than shark attacks, your personal risk depends on what you do. If you’re a vending machine factory worker who never goes into the ocean, you’re far more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a shark. But if you live in a part of the world that doesn’t have vending machines and you swim in the ocean every day, the reverse is true.
However sharks have a huge PR issue and Spielberg regrets how Jaws is a big source of that
Wait, so you’re telling me that there are no vending machines in the ocean that are preying on people swimming in the water?
There may be, the ocean is deep and not thoroughly explored.
I think this is going to become a stock response for me
You’re scaring me! Just the thought of having a swim and then suddenly hearing a bag of chips getting stuck behind a glass panel sends shivers down my spine.
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I don’t know if this counts, since it’s only a “true fact” if you are fine with carefully chosen words and the omission of crucial information…
But the 13-50 stat is dangerously misleading.
You know,
Black people make up 13% of the population, but 50% of the violent crime.
Note: these days, black people are 16% of the U.S. population. I’ll be referring to it as 16 from this point on.
Black people in America do, in fact, make up 50% of the murder arrests according to FBI crime statistics
That much is true.
But certain people tend to use this fact to assert that police officers are far more likely to be killed by black people than by white people. Therefore, the stats that show them brutalizing black people are a higher rate – since they fall short of that 50% number – are evidence that they hold back around black people to avoid appearing racist.
The users of this stat heavily imply black people are more violent and murder-prone, and hence a greater threat. The argument also carries with it an implied benefit to eugenics or a return to slavery (to anyone paying attention.)
But no one using this stat ever explores potential causes for the arrest rate disparity, instead letting their viewers assume it comes from “black culture” (if they are closeted racists) or “bad genes” (if they are open racists).
There’s no attention paid to the fact that black people make up over half of overturned wrongful convictions
There’s no attention paid to the stats further down in that same FBI crime stats table that make it clear that black people make up 25% of the nation’s drug arrests, despite making up close to 16% of the US’s total drug users. (Their population’s rate of drug use is within a margin of error of white people’s rate of drug use). It should be strange they make up such an outsized portion of the total drug arrests in this country.
There’s no attention paid to the fact that more than half of US murders go unsolved, meaning even assuming impartial sentencing and prosecution, we would only know black people committed 50% OF 50% of the murders – 25%. And in a country where 98% of the land is owned by white people and the public defender system is in shambles? Which demographic do you think would be overrepresented in the “unsolved murder” category? The murder arrest rate winds up just being a measure of which demographics can afford the best lawyers, rather than any proportional representation of each demographic’s tendencies.
There’s also no appreciation given for the fact that of the 511 felony murders committed against police from 2010 to 2019, 55 of them (or 10.8%) were committed by black people, meaning police are no more likely to get killed by a black person than a white person.
None of that. The people hawking this statistic intentionally lead their viewers to assume, “arrested for murder” is equivalent to “guilty of murder.” And that the entire demographic can be safely assumed to be more dangerous.
Excellent explanation, thanks.
My pleasure.
Omfg, thank you so much for this. I find it repulsive that pos 9gaggers post 50/13 as a mantra to every post that includes black people, but no one would really want to understand from where those numbers come up😡
The thing about this is that the kind of people who quote statistics like that typically don’t have an interest in all of that. They start with a racist assertion, then search for anything that appears to corroborate. They have no interest in actually understanding the statistic, they only care about it insofar as they believe it justifies their racism.
That, or they know it doesn’t and they’re purposely arguing in bad faith.
Yeah… that’s a pretty reasonable conclusion. It’s hard to just state outright though, when I live with the exact sort of person described in your comment.
It’s interesting: the people who are fine with calling an entire race murderous seem to take great umbrage at being considered “racist.”
It’s the r-word to them – a slur used to invalidate their concerns and diminish the importance of their well-being.
That their concerns ought to be invalidated – since they are the racist result of racist fear-mongering – is never well-received.
The real bottom line is that when you create an underclass of people whose neighborhoods get firebombed or bulldozed when they get too affluent (see e.g. “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa and Auburn Avenue (formerly “the richest Negro street in the world”) in Atanta, respectively) and had generations of absent fathers due to persecution for things like “vagrancy”, of course they’re going to stop giving a shit about laws that bind but do not protect them! It’s entirely rational that people systematically excluded from being able to get ahead while acting within the law, and whose behaviors are deliberately criminalized in order to target them, would end up committing crimes at higher rates than the people benefiting from their oppression did. In other words, even if it’s true that they actually commit crimes at higher rates (as opposed to being accused at higher rates or being less likely to avoid conviction, as you pointed out, which just make the statistical bias even worse by compounding on top), even that is disingenous because it ignores that the disparity is caused by classism and institutional racism, not anything intrinsic to their race itself. The fiction that it’s somehow their own fault is like a society-wide version of “stop hitting yourself.”
Oh 100% this. The main accomplishment of Tulsa and Auburn was keeping black people impoverished, and…
“About 60 [academic] papers show that a very common result of greater inequality is more violence, usually measured by homicide rates,” says Richard Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level and co-founder of the Equality Trust. - source
For as long as society insists on high inequality with one race forcefully held at the bottom, no rational person can expect that race to be peaceful.
It’s just… I have a hard time bringing this concept to the table in a debate with people who believe “personal responsibility” can somehow magically indemnify society against its impact on people.
In fact, I am generally speechless when debating such people. It’s such an alien worldview to me. How can personal responsibility actually make society irrelevant? And since when?
The kinds of people who spout the 13-50 argument basically believe NOTHING society does can increase or decrease murder (except, when convenient, being “too soft on children” or “soft on crime.”)
I’ve seen similar stuff multiple times, often with misquoted statistics. What many miss is that context is as important as stats.
This guy facts.
The average human has less than 2 arms.
Average arm has less than one human
Haha, that’s even weirder sounding.
And half a penis.
One testicle, and one boob
On average, humans have just under 3 inches of penis.
Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
Contributes to soil erosion.
Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
Everyone warns about DHMO, nobody knows about the dangers of hydric acid.
And even fewer people know about hydrogen hydroxide!
Or the fact that restaurants put poisons like Sodium and Chlorine in our foods.
