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?
The introduction of seatbelt legislation lead to an increase in nonfatal vehicular injuries
Similarly, the introduction of metal helmets for soldiers corresponded with an increase of head injuries.
Body armor in the second Gulf war contributed greatly to an increased rate of amputations on soldiers.
Ah, survivor bias. Reminds me of analysis of damage to bombers in WW2. Data showed most damage was done to the wings and body of planes. The tail, cockpit and engines were rarely damaged. They responded by reinforcing those areas that were frequently damaged.
However they were only observing bombers that made it back to base and so data on planes that were shot down was missing. Luckily someone did eventually realise this and so the research could be used as evidence that strikes to the areas rarely recorded indicated a downed plane.
When metal helmets were introduced in the middle of WW1, head injuries went up!
those damn seatbelts!
test
Test back
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.
Yup, I had to explain this to so many people when I sold coffee. Nobody believed me at all. I explained that dark roast had more of the caffeine cooked out of it.
If I remember correctly, dark roast was also originally devised to hide bad-quality coffee beans. Nowadays it is often implied that darker roasts are better, which actually isn’t necessarily the case.
Implied where? All the coffee snobs ik ow drink lighter roasts and derogatorily call dark roasts “supermarket coffee”
I think it’s more a marketing push from commercial brands and chain coffee places. Most of them will brand their products as “rich” or “bold”
Can confirm. Source: am coffee snob.
Dark roasts have a more consistent taste/flavor and it has a longer shelf life, so it’s easier to know what you’re getting. If you want to taste the variety of flavors coffee can have, you’ll go for fresher lighter roasts.
Oh shit I’ve repeated this to people and confidently claimed I can “feel” the difference with light roasts. Brains are stupid.
“Brain make people dumb” – says the brain. How can I trust it?
How far does this conspiracy go!?
This is actually very interesting and I had no idea. Thanks!
This is actually very interesting and I had no idea. Thanks!
This is actually very interesting and I had no idea. Thanks!
This is actually very interesting and I had no idea. Thanks!
I’ve honestly never thought of that. Guess that’s why I’ve not been able to feel a real difference in my morning coffee when I use different roasts. I always thought “well it can’t be losing that much caffeine because it doesn’t feel any different than my medium or light roasts.”
This is actually very interesting and I had no idea. Thanks!
new comment
I’ve never lost a professional MMA match
The Seattle Mariners have never lost a World Series game
Neither have the Seattle SuperSonics.
test
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.
And sooooooo many voting Americans hear this and vote Republican.
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.
Maybe we can agree on “100% of people who died consumed dihydrogen monoxide beforehand”.
Except for the ones that didn’t.
It can even be found in unborn babies!
They even put it into the water supply.
Everyone who has died has ingested dihydrogen monoxide.
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 – far more likely to be killed by black people than by white people – are actually holding 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). So 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, and in a country where 98% of the land is owned by white people and the public defender system is in shambles? Well, 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.
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.
You just became my first saved post on lemmy because this is such a succinct and well cited comment to counteract that bullshit. I just want to be able to pull up your links when I’m in a debate.
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.
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 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.”)
You can see the moon from The Great Wall of China.
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)
deleted by creator
Newer cars are designed to crush more and easier than older cars.
I feel like crumple is a more accurate word here
And EVs will crush even more due to a lack of engine.
For anyone curious about this, it’s a safety feature. The front of a car is called the “crumple zone” — it’s designed to crumple up in an impact, which absorbs a lot of the energy and means the cabin (the place where humans are) will experience significantly lower forces.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone
People on HRT have a significantly higher mortality rate than people not on HRT
In a similar vein, people on puberty blockers have a higher mortality rate.
(Because those medications are used in combination with other treatments to help treat certain cancers.)
I don’t get it… I dumb.
HRT is short for Hormone Replacement Therapy, a treatment many transgender people use to feel more aligned with their gender identity. It’s been proven to increase mental health, and has a low regret rate. However, it is correlated with higher mortality because trans people overall have a higher mortality rate and HRT is primarily used by trans people.
A more extreme example of the same thing would be “People on chemotherapy have a higher chance of dying from cancer than people not on chemotherapy.” It’s true, but only because people without cancer don’t tend to enter chemotherapy.
Trans people on HRT may have a slightly higher mortality rate (the suicide rate declines significantly with HRT), but OPs statement is true because most people on HRT are cisgender and old - estrogen is a common treatment for menopause symptoms and products like androgel are specifically marketed to cis men with age related decline in testosterone.
My bad, I didn’t know HRT was a term used outside of transgender healthcare. Thank you for the info!
Cis people have been getting gender affirming care for a while, it just wasn’t called that until trans people pointed out that’s what it was. On the flip side, this means that we largely already know the effects of HRT (caveats apply) so they’re not new drugs that haven’t been tried.
HRT was originally used to treat menopausal women at risk for osteoporosis, who are at higher risk due to being old.
I’m aware that transgenders also have a higher than otherwise expected mortality (whether taking hormones or not), but they may not be numerous enough to move the needle against millions of old women.
This one is great, I absolutely believe that conservatives would (and I’m sure do) pass it around like some profound statement.
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)
deleted by creator
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
In DC they actually are moving, but it’s something like a few millimeters per hour on average
What about in the other States?
huh, I thought quantization of light(or energy really) came from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
human and chimp DNA is 98.8 percent the same
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.
Those who took the covid vaccine have a mortality death rate of 9.172/1000 in the USA.
2023 USA death rate is 9.172/1000 so I guess that lines up.
I have a badly grazed knee, so I guess I’m the 0.172 it’s wild that they know.
I was told it would kill me? Any day now…
Centrifugal force does not exist
“A laughable claim, Mister Bond, perpetuated by overzealous teachers of science. Simply construct Newton’s laws into a rotating system and you will see a centrifugal force term appear as plain as day.” https://xkcd.com/123/
Do you seriously expect me to do this while strapped to a centrifuge?
It does, it’s just called a different thing. Centripetal force is exactly the same thing as what most people assume centrifugal force means.
Ahem AKSHULLY
The centripetal force is the one that is directed directly towards the center (hence its name) of the virtual circle your object is rotating about (the blue arrow in this diagram). It is the “physical” force that acts on the object to make it follow a circular path, except it isn’t because that force doesn’t exist either, it’s just a convenient model for billions of billions (of…) of fundamental particles interacting together in probabilistic ways that, statistically, makes the thingamabob go round the imaginary point.
The centrifugal force is, as Black Hat eloquently puts it, the force that appears when you use the rotating object as the frame of reference (which is like saying that the entire world revolves around the object). This isn’t any more or less “correct” than using the ground as the frame of reference (in fact the ground itself is an accelerating frame of reference, which is why the Coriolis effect is a thing, it just is almost never significant except in weather-related applications and using the ground as a frame of reference is usually more useful than a “more stable” frame of reference like the solar system, or the milky way, or whatever, because honestly calculating train arrival times relative to saggitarius A* means that all trains are going about 225000 m/s which is just a pain in the ass to deal with let’s be real).
If you’re trying to build, say, “gravitational rings” for a sci-fi space station, then talking about the “centrifugal force” (which is proportional to the velocity arrow in the previous diagram) is a whole lot more relevant to the people you’re providing fake gravity to than saying “well akshully the force that you feel keeping your feet on the ground of the station doesn’t exist, you just exist in an accelerating frame of reference”.
