Earlier this week, I posted an article relating to making sure to get your facts straight before reacting to news, and I thought I should elaborate, as it is an interesting subject for me, and hopefully I might change some viewpoints.
Part of what inspired the follow up article was watching Penn and Teller : bullshit, and the episode was addressing the subject of violent video games, and their alleged effect on violent behaviour. They presented a few facts that bear consideration, one was the idea that many of the people making the claim that video games create violent behaviour make their claim based in part on the notion that the games were present in the homes of those committing violent acts, and that idea was refuted by pointing out that since the games are extremely common, making such a claim is no more factual than claiming that toothpaste creates violent behavior since it is also as prevalent. another point they made was that prior to violent video games, there were still mass killings, one 80 years before video games were invented.
The point of this is, when someone is screaming that the sky is falling, and they cite a statistic, you should look for a context, and determine if the risk they are screaming about is real. That is, if after checking their statistic in context, and you see that the odds of the risk affecting you are astronomically low, there probably isn't a problem.
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