How to Mislead with Facts
This conversation isn&#x27;t formal enough to be meaningful.<p>If you want to talk meaningfully about how &quot;facts&quot; are used, you need to be able to invoke any notion at all of propositions and implications. It doesn&#x27;t matter if your implications are mathematical in nature or scientific in nature or just correlation, facts exist in the structure imposed by implication. And facts without an implication structure are <i>useless</i>.<p>In order to mislead with a &quot;true&quot; fact A, it needs to already be the case that there is a false fact of the form A implies B already sitting in there. The combination of a belief in A implies B (false) with this newly introduced belief A (true) yields a belief in B (false).<p>The essence of &quot;lying by telling the truth&quot; is then just finding these false implications, and exploiting them.<p>Fortunately, It&#x27;s much easier to fact check implications. If A implies B is false, then you just need to come up with an example of A and not B.<p>Unfortunately changes to belief do not always propagate reliably, and the combinatorial game is against the implication checkers. For any given true fact A there are as many potential false beliefs of the form A implies B as there are propositions B.<p>Fortunately, most humans make do with as few (quantified) implications as they can. Rules are hard to remember. Getting rid of false implications is much easier when you can replace them with &quot;true&quot; implications.<p>I suppose I am arguing then that the solution to all of this is education that doesn&#x27;t teach facts, but rather implications (which are themselves just higher order facts).