So a group of us were at lunch, talking in awe of Nate Silver and his predictions of the race.
One of the English members told us a story about a race in the UK, in which the Labor was comfortably ahead by more than 10 points. Enough so, that everyone stayed home and the Conservatives won, bringing in Margaret Thatcher for her first election.
He sat smugly, with most everyone appropriately impressed. It didn’t sound legitimate, though, so I started to speculate that maybe the polling was off, etc. Nope. He was absolutely sure that this was the story.
I could have been nice. I could have just nodded and got up and went for more coffee. That is what a polite person would do. At least I think that’s what a polite person would do, I’ve never been that polite.
But no. I had to pull out the iphone and google Margaret Thatcher. Wiki was the first hit and within ten seconds we had the real story.
In my old age, at least I’m mellowing out to just pointing out that the story doesn’t seem to be the case. . .
He might have been thinking of the 1970 election, which the Conservatives (led then by Ted Heath) won despite the fact that Labour (led by incumbent Prime Minister Harold Wilson) had had a fairly comfortable lead in the polls until about the day before voting took place. News about polls was not distributed quite so frenetically in those days, and few people were aware that a couple of last-minute polls showed a sharp swing to the Conservatives until after the actual election results were in.
I have to do this with my mother constantly. I call it “Snopesing Mom.” She exaggerates everything, she believes stuff she’s told and then adds to it. You can’t have a conversation with my mother without Google.
He’s most likely thinking of the 1992 election, actually. That was one where Labour were genuinely expected to win according to the pollsters, right up to the last day.
Somebody came in here last Friday all fired up over the union thing (work crews not being allowed to help with Sandy because they weren’t union). I googled it, and found how she wasn’t even 1% in the right.
I debated for quite a while. Should I say something? After all I knew it was coming from her husband, who is quite…convinced of everything the Right says. Including hating Muslims. And I’m pretty sure he thought I was Muslim for a while.
But I like my coworker well enough. In the end, I sent her a link to snopes, casually, without making a big deal about it.
I hate when people parrot back things they’ve heard without ever digging deeper.
When stuff like this comes up, I usually just say “Well that’s interesting. How about them Red Sox?” But last week I felt compelled to say “I don’t care how rich and powerful the one world government is, they can’t actually create a hurricane.”
A day later, I figured out what was bothering me. There were three of us discussing Nate Silver and how polling has changed and he jumped into our conversation with that hijack. OK, now I feel better about calling him on it.
This looks like it could be a possibility. Looking at Wiki (what, I’m not going to fact check a thread on fact checking?:dubious:) it says
this then could have been misremembered, exaggerated and combined with Thatcher’s win (“storyfied”) to give it more impact.
I know a guy who says he’s writing a book on nuclear power, and can’t say more the six words without one being wrong. After fact checking him to death, I simply stopped talking to him.
I was talking to my wife about this, and she says she never has these type of conversations. Is this a Men are from Mars thing or just Tokyo Bayer is a geek and has weird friends?
It really depends how wrong your friends are. If anybody cared enough, they could easily correct everybody on just about anything. Even experts in a field use abstractions and simplifications (i.e. a professor doing a “physics of cooking” for a fair and assuming a spherical egg) that technically are wrong. Even beyond that, everybody has stories that they heard a long time ago that sounded plausible at the time but they couldn’t fact check for whatever reason. Some people will just through it out there expecting others will correct them if it’s wrong, others will keep quiet until they know it’s true, and a whole host of other things.
If you frequently encounter just completely blatantly wrong facts then, yeah, it’s probably a quirk of the company you keep, but it only takes the slightest bit of effort to find dozens of things to correct in even a very well read and informed conversation.
ETA: I do this to people and it’s really hard to not do it. It’s one of those things where if I say something wrong I don’t mind being corrected (as long as you’re not a dick about it) because I like learning new things. A lot of people take it as you obstructing their conversation or calling them stupid or some other attack on their character. I know my mom sees it as “know-it-all” behavior, or me trying to “shut her down” in a conversation when I’m just trying to correct misconceptions because the truth about various matters is often pretty interesting. You really have to be careful about doing it too much with some people though.
Romney was so clearly far ahead in all the polls and so certain to win (just like Dewey in 1948) that so many Republicans saw that, and got complacent, and didn’t bother to vote because Romney was so clearly going to win - - - Result: Obama won! Suprise!
Oh, wait . . . But the polls didn’t say that Romney was so clearly far ahead, did they? Certainly not anything Nate Silver ever said! Hmmmm . . .
Ah, but those Republicans were all so busy paying attention to Fox, Rush, Tramp, Rove, etc., and all the echo-chamber-generated polls that those guys were spouting (all saying that Romney really really was so clearly far ahead) - - -
Oops. So some Republicans got complacent, stayed home, and - - - Surprise!
It all fits together, see? There was this thread just recently, asking if all those conservative talking heads were secretly rooting for Obama, just so they could have their man in the White House to rant and hate, that being their lucrative livelihoods! These guys are smart!
Maybe, but of course that election did not result in a change of government, whereas the 1970 one did. (Neither of them, of course, resulted in Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister.)
One of my fellow German friends on Facebook linked to the Daily Currant article about Bush accidentally voting for Obama. We don’t like Bush over here and believe he’s stupid, and we’ve also never heard of the Daily Currant, so apparently to him it didn’t seem too out there. I pointed out that the Daily Currant is a satirical website, to which he replied: “That doesn’t make the story any less true, does it?” I said “Well, yeah, it kinda does - made up is the opposite of true, unless you’re using true in a philosophical sense…”
There was a guy that I used to work with who would repeat urban legends like they were true. I called him on it numerous times, even sending links to snopes. Didn’t stop him, though, as he kept repeating the same urban legends like the truth. He couldn’t pass up a good story, true or not.
After a while I realized that his stories fell into a few categories:
–made up out of whole cloth
–commonly known urban legends
–parroting right wing radio/TV/blogs
–stories told the way that he wished they would have happened, not how they actually occurred
I stopped associating with him after I realized how demented he was. He was also a grade A asshole.
For completeness, the two urban legends he told the most often:
–Arnold Palmer’s wife on a talk show claiming that she kisses his balls for good luck before a tournament.
–One of the Gabor sisters on Johnny Carson with a cat in her lap. She asks if he wants to pet her pussy, he says sure, just move the cat.