alt Hacker News90% of people might believe 2+2=5, but that doesn’t make them correct. Facts aren’t a majority rules scenario.
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The comment was specifically about "opinions" not "facts".
But facts in real life are rarely that isolated and provably correct or not. Something like Tylenol vs autism or Covid lab leak theory is hugely emotionally charged and people get bogged down in details and then questioning the experts and the expertise and then there's always the discussion of what even are experts. It's horribly exhausting and hey, what do you think about the ice wall theory? Facts in the real world are fuzzy and dependent on the bubble you inhabit. Does chocolate cause acne or heartburn or gout? Is a glass of wine bad for you? This is the Internet, so someone can chime in with a list of studies on the latest facts about whichever of those, but the question you have you ask yourself, is in what way does it matter how correct someone actually is? If I say the store is closed because it's going to snow, and I'm the store owner, and I'm totally wrong about that, it doesn't matter that I'm totally wrong because as the store owner, my store is closed. I look like an idiot tomorrow when it hasn't snowed, but me looking like an idiot doesn't open the store for you to buy what you need.
There's a saying, attributed to Max Planck: "science advances one funeral at a time". Sure, there's facts. Avogadro's number is a specific fact and is incontrovertible. But how about gravity? I mean, 9.8 m/s² is it and that's also a specific fact, but then you start looking up into the heavens and what's this dark energy and now there's dark matter and okay so MOND's been disproved?
Facts also have framing. If you pay attention to the incidence of crimes on the nightly news, it feels like society is falling apart, but then you look at the bigger picture and real statistics and things aren't actually that bad?
In the sloppy real world of facts that are messier than 2+2=4, we don't have anything to go on other than what most people around us believe, and because there's only so much time in the day, as humans we emotionally believe whatever we want. There are some crazies who have spreadsheets output facts for them to bet on, and they make a lot of money off of that, but they're a minority.
When is any discussion a simple fact? If it was, you could just list it on a static website.
I think the problem is that people get their incorrect world views from Reddit.