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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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This is new information to me and a great example of the internet having a positive role in my life. I wish it was all this way. Thanks for the mini-lesson.
Okay but have you actually looked it up to make sure it's true? Never trust facts from random comments, no matter how reasonable they seem to be.
...but but but it's got that air of Truthiness to it.
Truth is in the eye of the beholder
The Beholder: "Ahh! Get it out! Get it out! I got Truth stuck in my eye again! It hurts! The Truth hurts!!"
Why would they lie? Come one, it's Tyler! They'd never lie.
This is generally how "folksy wisdom" keeps getting passed down generation to generation until it ends up in a farmer's almanac.
It sounds reasonable, and so gets taken for true even though it has no (that I'm aware) actual scientific evidence to back it up.
It's a causation fallacy. ie) correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Just because two things are statistically correlated, doesn't mean that one causes the other.
It's like if I were to say "Hey, The midwest has higher instances of heart disease. Therefore moving to the the midwest will give you heart disease." It's not true.
The two things are correlated, certainly, in that the mid-west folks probably for the most part has a much fattier diet, and are less likely to engage in healthier eating habits. But just the simple act of being in the midwest isn't a cause of heart disease.
Correlation does not equal Causation. Print it on a card and keep it in your pocket please. People not grasping that concept and passing off folksy anecdotes as "wisdom" has been the cause of too much suffering.
All true, but it's even worse: sometimes some of the cited facts are plainly wrong. Taking your example, it could be that the midwest actually has the same heart disease statistics as anywhere else. Just because someone told you something confidently doesn't mean it's true. "95% of statistics is made up on the spot".
So maybe "dogs have a much shorter digestive tract" is already wrong? Maybe they have roughly the same length as us? And maybe "[things with parasites] have a much smaller chance of making a dog sick than they do humans" is also wrong? If you care about the truthfulness, you'd have to look that up too. And then you'd have to find that there's causation between the two.
But all that said, I agree with another reply: "It’s a really low-risk bit of information, whether true or false. [...] there’s no harm in taking in low-stakes stuff". So no need to be paranoid about every little tidbit of info, just the things that matter to you.
Love your comment.
I actually got curious and tried to fact check this but then realized I had no way of knowing which sites really offered actual advice to such an inane little fact, or were just making shit up. :(
When the stakes are this low and I don't really care that much, I just move on. Anything that I care about I do like to verify.
It's a really low-risk bit of information, whether true or false. It's good practice to be aware of what we accept as true, though there's no harm in taking in low-stakes stuff imo
I was gonna include that in my reply but didn't want to make it into an essay.
And put EFFORT into it? Fuck no.
Why look it up when I could just run some tests myself and find out if it's true