To give a specific example from recent history: Are the unemployment numbers (and related statistics) accurate or not? And were they accurate or not 18 months a

To give a specific example from recent history: Are the unemployment numbers (and related statistics) accurate or not? And were they accurate or not 18 months ago? The reason many people get scared when you answer these questions with "no" is that it would mean the complete decoupling of politics from reality. Debates about policy have a long history, and they're not harmful. But when one side starts also making up their own facts, it becomes impossible to reason, and a Venezuela-style decline might follow. Logical reasoning with transitive trust networks could obviously be useful to re-establish a common reality. But while it might convince those that answered the two questions above with 'no' that the statistics are really compiled in good faith, no amount of reasoning will help with those answering "yes" to the first, and "no" to the second.