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?
As ice cream sales in the United States increase, so do deaths in in developed parts of Africa.
I use this fact to explain to students how true information can be used to mislead people into drawing wild, deranged conclusions.
The commonality in these events is the rise in temperature during the summer. But if you leave that out, there’s an absurd argument to be made about how purchasing ice cream is inherently evil.
I don’t think it’s an amazing example of what OP is talking about, but as an example, I like how simple and easy to follow it is. Great for junior high level kids.
According to a new study published by the University of Berchul, eating ice cream can make you be in risk of drowning.
Is this related to correlation is not causation?
Correlation at least tries to imply they’re related. As lottery sales go up in your household so does credit card debt. Not always a cause but they’re related
You’re looking for spurious correlations which is when numbers have no business even being used in a comparison
Wearing your seatbelt increases your chances of dying from cancer.
This one is great! Made me think way too much
Light roasted coffee has more caffeine than dark roasted coffee.
Technically, per bean, more of the caffeine is cooked out of the dark roast. However, other things are also roasted out of a dark roast to the point that the individual beans are also lighter and smaller. When brewing coffee, usually you either weigh your dose of beans out, or you use a scoop for some consistency. Either method will result in more dark roast beans ultimately making it into the brew than would with a (larger, heavier) light roast.
Typically, this more than cancels out the reduced caffeine content per bean, so a brew of dark roast coffee still typically has more caffeine in it.
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.
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 at 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 13% 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 that a small portion of the perpetrators of drug crimes make up such an outsized portion of the total drug arrests in this country. But the disparity doesn’t even get a mention.
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 able to afford the best defense, avoiding conviction even when guilty, and ending up overrepresented in the “unsolved murder” category? If only 50% of murders end in a conviction, that means every murderer who walks into a courtroom has a solid chance at getting away with it. Even more solid if the murderer belongs to the richest race. The murder arrest rate by race winds up just being a measure of which demographics can afford the best lawyers, rather than any proportional representation of each demographic’s tendencies.
They mention 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 50% of the murder arrests is equivalent to 50% of the total murders. The entire demographic is assumed to be more dangerous.
I’ve seen similar stuff multiple times, often with misquoted statistics. What many miss is that context is as important as stats.
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.
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😡
This guy facts.
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.”)
People use to say that you cant lie with statistics, but is a common practice to use statistics to lie.
We can take the infamous 41% suicide rate for trans people. Transphobes throw that out like a killing move implying that trans people are inherently unhappy and being trans is a mental illness (which is not true).
The reality is that the suicide rate is so high because of transphobia, kids getting thrown out of home, homelessness, unable to find a job, staying at the closet to avoid social consecuences, etc.
Trans people who live in more open and accepting environments are way less likely to be depressed and commit suicide. In progresive areas where trans people are more accepted the suicide rate is nowhere near 41%.
Dihydrogen Monoxide, commonly used in laundry detergent and other cleaning supplies, is also present in Subway sandwiches
FACT: 100% of people that consume Dihydrogen Monoxide die.
Wrong, a mortality of 94.5% has been shown not even close to 100%.
One could say that people who haven’t died yet don’t have a cause of death yet so they can’t be counted.
You are much more likely to die in a hospital than anywhere else.
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)
When people say a politician “raised taxes.” More often than not it’s a tax that does not apply to 99.99% of the population and they raised it from 0.000001% to 0.000002%
But boy do those campaign ads look good
Similarly, when a politician says they cut taxes, middle class tax cuts are almost always intend to “sunset”. That is, eventually, those tax cuts are designed to reverse themselves over time.
Maybe in the US. Most tax cuts that happen in Canada at least don’t tend to have an expiry. Although new governments do tend to reverse previous government’s tax policy. Although it tends to apply to tax policy across the board.
I’ve never lost a professional MMA match
“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.
The average human has less than 2 arms.
And half a penis.
On average, humans have just under 3 inches of penis.
Average arm has less than one human
Haha, that’s even weirder sounding.
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?
Women have smaller brains than men.
I mean, yes. Women as a population are physically smaller than men as a population.
Women have smaller fingers than men. Smaller eyes. Smaller lungs. There is no “gotcha” that smaller skeletal frames with smaller skulls contain, by volume, a smaller organ.
Doesnt mean every man’s brain is larger than every woman’s brain either.
Doesn’t mean men are smarter than women.
It’s just a statistic, that while true, doesn’t imply what some people think it does.
Many years ago I worked as an analyst at a small VC firm. My boss, who was a raging misogynist prick and liked to date College freshmen, LOVED this fact (and any other Manosphere bullshit he could find about women being inferior to men). He was such an unbelievable stereotype, he could have stepped out of a sitcom.
Yeah I mean, neanderthals had bigger brains than humans, and they were no smarter than we are (as far as we know.)
Also a blue whale’s brain is four times the size of a human brain and they don’t even know how to drive.
We don’t really know where blue whales go a lot of the time, so I think that’s a bit of an assumption there.
I’m assuming down.
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.
‘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’.
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.
Oh how I miss the before times.
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.
