Good morning, John.

A couple of months ago,  I embarked on a project I decided to start keeping track of every time  that I believed something outright, and then later discovered that the thing  that I believed was either not quite right or, like, really totally wrong. And today, not because it's not embarrassing,  but because I feel like it's useful, I'm going to go through four of those things.

Let's start with the one that I believed that was most incorrect. It's this graph showing the cost of rent and household income. And I saw it on TikTok at animation with, like,  a fun song showing how rent and income had dramatically diverged since the 1990s.

This aligns with my understanding of how things have gone. And though I was shocked to see how much they had diverged, I did not question it. Turns out, however,  that this sentence at the  bottom here is incorrect.

In this graph, income was adjusted for inflation, but rent was not. And that is, like, the majority of the reason that they diverged.  Now, I can really only speculate on how this graph got created. My guess is that it was a mistake, like they made the graph.  It was a mistake and it went super viral because it showed a really dramatic thing.

The more outrageous thing  is going to go more viral.  If there was a similar graph, which would show a divergence,  but not one as dramatic, it would not go as viral or viral at all. So my guess is that this was just a mistake that went viral once,  and then it went viral over and over again because people saw that if they post this graph,  it would go viral. Now, a more useful thing to look at is just rent as a percentage of income,  which, since the year 2000 anyway, has increased quite a lot,  and then it skyrocketed in 2022 and 2023.

So it's not like there's nothing here. And this also, of course, varies a lot  depending on what part of the country you're in. And it is useful to note that the places where it has gone up the most  are the places with the  largest homeless population.

We hear a lot about how homelessness is a problem of this or that or this or that. It is a problem of a lack of homes. When there are more people than there are homes, the cost of housing goes up a lot,  and the people who have the least end up without a home.

Homelessness is a problem of a lack of homes. Please advocate for the construction  of new homes in your community. Thing number two,  there was a fairly large Twitter storm one day because Jane Goodall advocated  for reducing the global  population to 500 million people.

I accepted this because I know a lot of old school environmentalist types  who advocate loudly for population reduction, and I did not like it. Now, I agree that the earth cannot handle an infinite number of humans,  but we see that population growth goes down when people are in  more equitable societies that  have more resources for them.  So we should focus on that. Whereas the active tense of   reducing populations is, for me, a red flag.  People should be granted their own destinies,  not paternalistically controlled  by well meaning outsiders.

I actually looked up the tweet that I saw and it said that she said,  we can solve all of the world's problems  if we reduce the world population to where it was 500 years ago. Thing is, she never said this. I actually ended up googling this  a couple of months afterward because someone said something nice about Jane Goodall.

And I was like, yeah, except for that thing that she said. But it turns out I was fine with having the information put in my head,  but when I put it in someone else's head, I felt a little weird about it. So I went to check just in case.

And here is a clip of what she actually said. Jane Goodall: We cannot hide away from human population growth  because it underlies so  many of the other problems.  All these things we talk  about wouldn't be a problem  if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.

Hank: And here's a clip of what  she had just said before that. Jane Goodall: If we can't do something to improve the lives of these people,  we have no hope of even trying to save the chimpanzees. It just won't work. And so it was in 1994   that the Jane Goodall Institute began its program, take care,  or Takari, as it's known in the twelve villages around the  small combination national park.

Not a bunch of arrogant white people going into a poor African village   and telling them what were going to do. But a very small, handpicked group of   eight local Tanzanians going into the villages  and asking them what they thought we could do to help them.

Hank: And these are just true things that a person heard and took an implication from,  and then attributed the implication to Jane Goodall when she did not say it. Whether she meant to imply  it is entirely subjective.  From my read, she did not. Number three, John Stewart is a guy  who I trust a lot. And here is a clip of John Stewart talking about taxes in America.

John Stewart: We got to be the most taxed people in the world.  What do we got there, really? 8% is the average tax burden.

Hank: And I watched this and I was like,  wow, that is much lower  than I thought it would be. But I'm watching a thing that aligns with my perspectives from a guy who I trust,  and I just moved on. And then I came across a TikTok from a guy who was like, this is not right. And I watched it.

And indeed it is not. And I should have known this  because I know that the average  tax burden in the US is 25%. I've read that a bunch of times.

But it turns out there's some fine print on this.  This is the average tax burden for a one earner married couple with two children.  And if that sounds really specific to you, that's because that's really specific. He also had just talked about sales taxes and property taxes and gas taxes,  but those numbers are not included in this 8%. This is just the federal income tax for the average married couple  with one earner and two children, which is not most families in America.

But also, specifically, this was that household during the pandemic  when the government was  giving many families money. And that counted as their tax money coming back to them. So their effective rate was lower, which is a little weird, because, like,  an 8% tax rate is so low that anyone above the US poverty line  knows that they pay way more than 8% in taxes.

They see it come out of  their paychecks every month.  So it seems weird to try to get that stat to slip under the radar,  especially because as a percentage of DDP, our tax burden globally is low. You don't have to make anything up about it. All right, last one.

And it's a doozy.  I only included to show how messy it could be. I am a huge fan of the National Oceanic  and Atmospheric Administration. It's a great use of my tax dollars.  And they provide data on the number of natural disasters that do more  than a billion dollars in damage per year.

This is a graph created by the good people  at Scientific American of those data. And when I looked at this, my brain said,  look at all of the damage  that climate change is doing. Now, this is not what NOAA said, and it's not what the article said,  it's what my brain said.

And it's also what people on Twitter were saying.  And I had no reason to question that interpretation or even notice  that the article was not about how climate change was causing more billion dollar disasters. It was about how we need to be more prepared for handling natural disasters. But the conversation on Twitter was  about how climate change was increasing the number of billion dollar disasters.

And then other people on Twitter started saying, no, NOAA and Scientific American are lying to you.  And when I read their arguments, I was like, oh, my gosh, they're right. Since 1980, the number of people  living in America has increased  from 230,000,000 to 340,000,000. And those people work and they shop and they go to school and they live in houses  and they buy things on Amazon.com.

And all of that requires buildings. Noah's numbers adjust for inflation, but they do not adjust for the fact  that more than half of the buildings in the US were built after 1980. This graph is a better reflection of the total value of buildings in America  than it is of climate disasters.

And it's so bad and annoying that NOAA and Scientific American,  two extremely reputable institutions, would misrepresent these data. But they didn't do that. People on Twitter misrepresented the data as showing something it didn't say.  And then people attributed that misrepresentation to NOAA and Scientific American.  And John, I'm gonna be honest with you.

I didn't realize that until   I was making this video. I had to come back and reshoot this part.  And I had gotten a haircut in the meantime. So first I believed a lie that my brain told me  by looking at a graph that  didn't say what I thought.

It said that the sole reason the graph was increasing was climate change.  That's part of the reason why. It's not all of the reason why.  And then I believed a lie  that Twitter users told me,  that it was not told to me by my own brain or by other people on Twitter.  The lie was told to me, no, by the government and by Scientific American.  And then I was like, maybe  disasters aren't even increasing,  but they are, especially heavy  rainfall events and heat waves. John, I don't love this!  Quick note, all four of these things  are examples of misinformation.  From the more progressive side, this is a sampling bias,  because this video is about  wrong things that I believed.

And I'm going to be less skeptical of stuff that aligns with my worldview.  I'm a little bit uncomfortable doing this because I think people could misconstrue it,  but I'm dealing with that because I think that very few people watching  this video think that misinformation is a bigger problem on the left than on the right,  not least because data clearly show it is a bigger problem on the right.  Final note, I'm really kind of happy with how this came together,  because these are examples of varying fakeness of varying kinds. There's a wrong graph. There's cherry picked data, there's a misattributed quote  and a fact that doesn't say exactly what it sounds like it said.  I've heard the Internet referred to as a challenging information landscape.

And like, yeah, yeah, I mean, I feel like  I'm pretty good at this and  I fail at it all the time.  I will run to go fact check something  that I disagree with and I  will not do that with stuff  that aligns with my previous  conception of the world. That's just going to be a bias that we all have to deal with and live  with and work through. And yes, sometimes I feel like,  what does it matter if somebody's saying a graph is saying something that it  isn't actually saying, or that this graph is making people  sort of active and excited and enthusiastic about making the kinds of change  I want to see in my country, even if it's not right, what does it matter?

And I think a lot of people think that way, and I think a lot of people who disagree  with me on a lot of topics  definitely think that way. But for who I am and where I sit and what I do, I have to attempt to have  a very strong alliance to the truth. And the incentives of like,  the social Internet's content recommendation systems make that hard for all of us.  And I don't know what to do about that-- except to try very hard to have  an alliance to the truth. and also to in a year,   that is going to be bad touch as much grass as I possibly can.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.