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Facts without the corresponding counter are incredibly powerful at being "accurate" but still swaying opinion towards a bad take. Modern media abuses this. The

Facts without the corresponding counter are incredibly powerful at being "accurate" but still swaying opinion towards a bad take. Modern media abuses this. There are facts to support most viewpoints, but most can also be readily attributed to other factors. However, when presented in certain lenses it's near impossible to tell who is correct (without going off and doing independent research).

makomk 6y ago
Careful use of facts can even convince people of things that are out-and-out untrue. For example, at least for a while everyone on HN seemed convinced that the US coronavirus testing program must obviously have been sabotaged because we couldn't even catch up with South Korea in tests per capita - people kept on pointing to that one specific fact, even though it wasn't true and hadn't been in a good while. This was the result of hard, deliberate work by the American media. It started when America genuinely was behind South Korea and the media pointed to this as the reason they'd supposedly contained the coronavirus without locking down (they hadn't, of course). Then when the US started catching up with South Korea, passing them in both total tests and testing rate per capita, all the usual publications ran fact checks insisting it was false to claim that the US was testing more people for coronavirus because they'd tested less people per capita. When even that was passed, the media carefully avoided mentioning it, using other comparisons such as test positivity rate to argue that the US coronavirus testing was still behind South Korea. (In reality this wasn't actually measuring the scale of coronavirus testing at all - South Korea had reached that low positivity rate by using a partial lockdown to drop the number of cases and were coming to the end of that lockdown.) Anyone Googling for information on the false claim would find only the outdated fact checks, which even their authors must've known weren't going to be true for long given the trajectory back then. Not only that, when Trump pointed out in a press conference that in reality the US had passed South Korea in this, the New York Times even ran a news headline claiming he was lying... and if you read the article, their basis for claiming this was that there were still a few other countries carrying out more coronavirus tests per capita than the US. (Which was technically true but irrelevant, particularly since most of the larger ones also had worse coronavirus outbreaks than the US so it clearly wasn't doing them much good.)

makomk 6y ago

Careful use of facts can even convince people of things that are out-and-out untrue. For example, at least for a while everyone on HN seemed convinced that the US coronavirus testing program must obviously have been sabotaged because we couldn't even catch up with South Korea in tests per capita - people kept on pointing to that one specific fact, even though it wasn't true and hadn't been in a good while. This was the result of hard, deliberate work by the American media. It started when America genuinely was behind South Korea and the media pointed to this as the reason they'd supposedly contained the coronavirus without locking down (they hadn't, of course). Then when the US started catching up with South Korea, passing them in both total tests and testing rate per capita, all the usual publications ran fact checks insisting it was false to claim that the US was testing more people for coronavirus because they'd tested less people per capita. When even that was passed, the media carefully avoided mentioning it, using other comparisons such as test positivity rate to argue that the US coronavirus testing was still behind South Korea. (In reality this wasn't actually measuring the scale of coronavirus testing at all - South Korea had reached that low positivity rate by using a partial lockdown to drop the number of cases and were coming to the end of that lockdown.) Anyone Googling for information on the false claim would find only the outdated fact checks, which even their authors must've known weren't going to be true for long given the trajectory back then. Not only that, when Trump pointed out in a press conference that in reality the US had passed South Korea in this, the New York Times even ran a news headline claiming he was lying... and if you read the article, their basis for claiming this was that there were still a few other countries carrying out more coronavirus tests per capita than the US. (Which was technically true but irrelevant, particularly since most of the larger ones also had worse coronavirus outbreaks than the US so it clearly wasn't doing them much good.)