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 can’t drink too much water.
So… Not a true fact? The prompt was for true facts that are misleading out of context.
What you cited is just a common misconception, right?
Yep. My bad. Didn’t quite understand the question at first read. 🤭
By definition, too much of anything is bad. That’s why it’s too much, rather than a lot.
Newer cars are designed to crush more and easier than older cars.
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
I feel like crumple is a more accurate word here
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
A lie
Switching from a 5mpg truck to a 10mpg truck does more for the environment than switching from 40mpg car to a 55mpg car.
How is that misleading, isn’t it true?
More outrageous sounding, switching from a 5 mpg truck to a 10 mpg truck saves more gas than switching from a 50 mpg car to a 100 mpg car
I still don’t understand hot that statement is “misleading”?
Well a lot of people would think gaining 50 mpg is way better than gaining 5 mpg, since it’s 10x as much, but really it just shows that you can’t use mpg as a unit to compare like that
The ask was
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?
Environmental damage from emissions doesn’t care about relative efficiency, 15 free miles is objectively more than 5 free miles.
It you travel 50 miles at 5mpg, you use 10g of fuel At 10mpg you use 5g…a saving of 5g
40mpg uses 1.25g 55mpg uses 0.91g a saving of 0.34g much less of a saving.
Yeah but if you’re already driving the more efficient vehicles to begin with…
but if we are trying to save the world getting the lowest mpg vehicles off of the road first will have a stronger effect
if you already drive a 30mpg car and you are ready to upgrade then definitely look for better efficiency but I think we should have incentives in place to get cars that operate at for instance 16 mpg (my first car for instance, 1996 Chevy blazer, now deceased) replaced by even 10 year old models which are much more efficient
…you have made a smart choice, and can focus on reducing your other emissions!
but it’s not like a person in a 50mpg car is likely to drive 5 times as much per year as the person in a 10mpg truck. over consistent distances, improving the shitty mileage vehicle will save a lot more gas.
swapping a 5mpg truck for a 10mpg truck will save 10 gallons per hundred miles, while switching a 40mpg car for a 55mpg car will only save 0.68 gallons per hundred miles. even going from 5mpg to 6mpg would save more than that.
This is why the rest of the world uses l/100km (liters per 100 kilometers), the comparison is linear and thus comparable between different vehicles in a simple manner.
- 5mpg = 20g/100mi
- 10mpg = 10g/100mi
- 40mpg = 2.5g/100mi
- 55mpg = 1.82g/100mi
The difference between 10 and 20g is easy to see as a lot bigger than the difference between 2.5 to 1.82g. 15 is a much bigger number than 5, but that 15 is relative to the initial mpg rating
In fact going from 5mpg to 10mpg is better than going from 10mpg to 100mpg, a 10g saving vs a 9g saving…the more you know
And this is why l/100km is a better unit
You can see the moon from The Great Wall of China.
But the opposite is not true! At least, not with the naked eye.
The frequency with which I keep hearing this misconception repeated in popular media is boggling. Hell, I feel like I just heard it again recently in the new Star Trek.
Every year, traffic congestion wastes billions of gallons of gas.
explanation, since this one might be more confusing than most:
Traffic congestion does indeed waste gas. However, any place worth driving to is going to have congestion–driving without congestion is easy, fast, and comfortable, so people generally won’t take other options until roads become congested. Thus, congestion actually reduces gas usage overall, because it is only once areas become congested that people stop driving places.
Trying to avoid congestion, on the other hand, usually involves expanding roads, something which increases driving, and makes other forms of transportation less useful/comfortable, thus increasing gas usage overall.
shouldn’t your first post say congestion saves billions of gallons of gas?
no, since the misleadingly-true fact is still that congestion wastes gas - congestion is cars spending gas on going nowhere, so the gas is wasted
‘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 can’t trust you on this because you are using the words ‘true 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.
That’s a true fact!
What about “alternative facts”?
Oh how I miss the before times.
Natural language is inherently imprecise.
Boom, pedants shook.
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.
this must be one of those false facts
True facts.
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.
Every single rapist and murderer was found to have dihydrogen monoxide inside their body at the time they committed their crimes, and your friends and family may be using it recreationally without you knowing
I don’t think something you need to survive can be called being taken ‘recreationally’.
There are people who consume flavored crystal DHMO recreationally. Children even!
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.
People on HRT have a significantly higher mortality rate than people not on HRT
This one is great, I absolutely believe that conservatives would (and I’m sure do) pass it around like some profound statement.
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!
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.
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.)
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
Thunderstorms & lightning strikes can severely affect “cloud” computing!
Well yeah, where do you think the lightning is??
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”.
Waves only collapse into particles during an interaction with other particles.
Similarly, when people talk about electrons “moving through wires” or other conductors. The electrons are not moving, they are passing energy from one atom to the next but the electrons themselves are not moving.
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
To be fair, electrical engineers make a living by ignoring Maxwell’s equations and the real behavior of electricity (the analogy of electrons pushing each other to transmit energy is also wrong, just less wrong). At RF you can’t ignore them, and RF engineering is often known as black magic.
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.
Well they do move, but just incredibly slowly.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/350612/speed-of-electrons-in-a-wire
“Light propagates like a wave and interacts like a particle”
There is a greater than 5% chance that your death will be someone’s fault.
If you believe in God, it’s a 100% chance
What about the other 5% though?!
Non-preventable deaths are about 95%.
