While I’ve spent a bunch of time fact-checking these, I’m very interested in correcting any mistakes I may have inadvertently made. If you catch any mistakes, please let me know what I’m wrong about and what’s actually true.

Facts about the US that contradict commonly believed narratives:

1) Regarding political violence, the majority of Americans see it as…a big problem in society and as being “never justified” (liberals and conservatives agree on this), and the substantial majority view it as “always or usually unacceptable” to be happy about a public figure’s death.

2) The majority of murderers have…prior criminal history (e.g., arrests or convictions), and the substantial majority of homicides are committed by men under 45.

3) More than half of murder victims who were not murdered by a family member…also have prior criminal histories (though, of course, this doesn’t mean that they deserve to be murdered).

4) The majority of homicides are committed due to…personal arguments or are related to drug or gang activity, rather than random acts of violence.

5) School shootings kill…vastly fewer children annually than prosaic dangers like unsafe driving (though it’s a horrifying tragedy each time school shootings occur).

6) Mass murders (where 3 or more people are murdered at the same event) are most often…familicide, where a person kills their family, usually committing suicide afterward.

7) Regarding violence, since the 1990s, America has gotten…far less violent (while there was an uptick during the pandemic around 2020, it is still well below the 1990s peak).

8) Compared to alcohol, homicide leads to the death of…very few people (though it’s terrible whenever homicide occurs).

9) The majority of gun-related deaths are…suicides, not homicides.

10) In rural areas, the suicide rate (per million people) is…highest (urban areas actually have lower rates).

11) The vast majority of reported disappearances of children are…relatives taking a child (e.g., custody disputes) or runaways (rather than kidnappings).

12) Most rapes are carried out by…someone the victim already knows (though in about 1 in 5 cases, the perpetrator is a stranger).

13) Women experiencing sexual assault are not…at all uncommon (more than 20% of adult women have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives).

14) The most dangerous activity that is very common for people under 30 to engage in on a daily basis is…driving in cars.

15) Commercial airline crashes are…incredibly rare (despite the media attention), and commercial flights are far safer than driving per mile (whereas per hour they are closer to being on par).

16) For adults 25 to 35, the biggest killer is…accidental poisoning (which mostly consists of drug overdoses), not car accidents, and considering the whole adult population, opioid related deaths exceed deaths from motor vehicles.

17) Most personal bankruptcy is related to…sudden job loss or illness (which can simultaneously lead to large medical bills and loss of work).

18) The significant majority of federal taxes that the government collects come from…the top 20% of earners.

19) The percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax is…about 35% (though they still pay payroll taxes and sales taxes, and may pay property taxes and state taxes).

20) Regarding health insurance, the vast majority of Americans…are insured (about 90%), and while some people get extremely screwed by the system by being stuck with huge bills they can’t afford due to unavoidable medical challenges, most Americans say they are satisfied with their health insurance, even though they usually also say that the system overall is substantially flawed and needs significant reforms.

21) Most US federal government spending goes to…social security, health care (e.g., Medicaid/Medicare), military-related expenses (e.g., staff costs, veterans, vehicles), and interest payments on national debt (since interest rates have risen).

22) On average, legal immigrants commit crimes…at a lower rate than natural-born citizens.

23) Where immigration status is reliably recorded, undocumented immigrants have an incarceration rate…lower than that of U.S.-born residents.

24) It’s extremely rare that trans people…get murdered (of course, it’s a horrible tragedy when it does occur, and there are uncertainties around data collection); but current data indicates that suicide is a vastly more common life-threatening risk to trans people, and also, that trans people experience a substantially elevated risk of non-fatal violence compared to cis people.

25) Unarmed Black people who are stopped or engaged by the police have…an extremely low chance of being killed by those police (of course, it’s a horrendous tragedy when it does occur); however, Black people are substantially more likely than white people to be stopped by police without clear cause, and are far more likely than white people to be murdered by criminals.

26) Black Americans mostly want the level of police presence in their area…to stay unchanged (i.e., neither be decreased nor increased), with only about 1 in 5 wanting less policing, though most Black Americans do want other major changes to policing to be made.

27) Currently, much of the recycling that occurs…ends up being wasteful once you factor in all extra fuel burned in order to recycle those materials, the amount of “recycled material” that fails to actually be recycled, and alternative enviromental efforts goverment money spent on recyclying could have gone to instead; whether recycling is effective depends on the region as well as the type of material being recyled (e.g., aluminum is especially useful to recycle, whereas plastic recycling tends to be inefficient).

28) Our landfills are…mostly not close to running out of capacity (and when there are shortages, they are almost always local issues).

29) From a danger perspective, nuclear power is…extremely safe (especially when compared to many other sources of power, like coal), as well as very environmentally friendly (with almost no emissions and reliable solutions for storing the toxic waste produced); new reactor designs are dramatically safer than past ones, yet, nuclear power largely is stopped from being cost-effective due to excessive regulations that are extremely costly to comply with.

30) Almost all suffering that humans cause to domesticated land animals is due to…practices at large farms, such as tiny cages that animals spend almost their whole lives in, or being densely packed together in unpleasant conditions with little to no outdoor access and limited ability to engage in their natural behaviors.

31) Most individuals who experience homelessness are homeless for…less than 12 months, but most of the people you see living on city streets, who are typically the most visible homeless people, are experiencing longer-term homelessness.

32) The majority of people who experience chronic homelessness are either…experiencing a drug addiction or a significant mental health challenge, or both (though for some of these people, the addiction or mental health challenge occurred after homelessness began); a non-negligible percent (perhaps 20%, but estimates differ substantially) have neither challenge.

33) The primary causes of high housing prices are…factors that increase the costs of building new housing or that completely prevent it from being built (such as zoning, excessive regulations, lengthy approval processes, and local opposition), as well as, for popular places like New York City, net migration into those areas.

34) The majority of people in prison in the US at any given moment are there for…violent crimes, not non-violent drug-related crimes or victimless offenses – while the substantial majority of convictions are for non-violent crimes (since most crime is non-violent), violent crime typically carries much longer sentences.

35) Almost nobody who is charged with a crime goes to…trial (they mostly take plea bargains).

36) The significant majority of people who are charged with a serious crime and go to trial are…convicted.

37) Regarding the US federal minimum wage, very…few people actually get paid that amount (in part due to higher minimum wages that many states have, and in part due to naturally occurring labor market prices that are simply higher than the federal minimum).

This piece was first written on November 2, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 17, 2025.

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

I would say that the main difference between the healthy validation of emotions and the unhealthy version is that the healthy version is based on genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in the other person’s experience, whereas the unhealthy version involves a willingness to sacrifice those things in an attempt to make the other person immediately feel good.

At a more detailed level, I think the healthy way to validate other people’s feelings involves expressing the following ideas (but ONLY when these ideas are true).

Healthy Emotional Validation

1) Care: I care about you.

2) Willingness: I’m totally okay with you feeling this emotion right now in front of me.

3) Acceptance: I don’t think badly of you for feeling what you’re feeling.

4) Interest: I am interested in learning more about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it.

5) Compassion: I have compassion and/or empathy for your suffering and want you not to suffer (unless you want to suffer right now, in which case I want you to suffer only insofar and in the ways that seem appropriate to you, such as the suffering that most people feel is right to feel after the loss of a loved one).

6) Understanding of facts: I understand the facts of what happened in this situation (and if I don’t, I’m going to ask open-ended questions in an effort to understand it).

7) Understanding of feelings: I understand why you’re feeling this way (and if I don’t, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

8) Legitimization of feelings: I think it is totally reasonable that this combination of your situation, your beliefs about this situation, your thoughts, and your past experiences causes you to feel this way right now (and if I don’t see how the combination of your situation, beliefs, etc., lead to your emotion, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

While some of this is helpful to say aloud when a friend or loved one is upset, much of it will typically be expressed through body language, attention, attitude, presence, tone of voice, and so on. The main thing is that these ideas get expressed in a way that the other person receives them, whether that expression is verbal or non-verbal, explicit or implicit.

On the other hand, I think that it’s usually unhealthy to attempt to validate emotions when it’s done expressing the following ideas.

Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

1) Disingenuousness: you say things that you don’t really mean or believe, such as supporting their claims about what happened when you don’t believe those claims are true.

2) Emotional reasoning: you support the idea that whatever their emotional response is to the situation is a perfect guide to what actually occurred (e.g., if they feel angry at someone, that implies the other person must have done something objectively harmful, or if they feel they’ve lost someone they had a fight with, that means that person is gone forever).

3) Justification: you support or encourage harmful or self-destructive actions they took or are considering taking as a consequence of their negative feelings (e.g., normalizing them taking revenge on the person they are angry about or justifying why it is okay that they did so).

4) Absolving: you encourage the idea that they made no mistakes or behaved perfectly or that someone else is 100% to blame for the situation (unless, of course, you really believe this to be true). On this point, it is often the case that victims of crimes did nothing at all wrong, but this is much less commonly the case when it comes to, for instance, interpersonal conflict between romantic partners, which usually involves both parties having behaved imperfectly, though not necessarily to the same degree.

To recap, people often want emotional validation from their friends and loved ones when they are feeling upset. People are often confused, though, about what this means exactly. There are both healthy ways and unhealthy ways to do emotional validation. 

The healthy version is not always easy to do, but I think it is what we should aspire to when a friend or loved one wants emotional validation. 

To do the healthy version, aim to imbue your responses to their emotions with genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in their experiences. And avoid sacrificing those things just to make the other person feel good.

This piece was first written on October 1, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 11, 2023.

Disagreements can be caused by:

1. Facts. People have access to different information. One person has studied physics, another hasn’t. One has spent years reading American news sources, another, Chinese ones. Differing sources will expose people to different facts about the world, which can naturally lead to disagreement. People have had different personal experiences as well, which can lead them to have different world views.

2. Definitions. Words are used differently by different people. One says “God” to mean the god of the old testament, another uses it to mean a guiding force in the universe. One says “art” to mean what is considered valuable by the art establishment, another to refer to creative works that evoke emotion. Typically, people do not even know precisely what they themselves mean when they use words. This isn’t a problem most of the time, but can cause confusion in certain cases. Suppose I take a chair and table, cut them both in half, glue one half of the table to one half of the chair with the cut edges touching, and paint the whole thing gold. Is the object I’ve constructed a table, a chair, both or neither? Our usual usage of the words “chair” and “table” are not well specified in this case, so we have trouble answering the question. I don’t know precisely what you mean by “chair”, and I don’t even know precisely what I mean by it. When I hear the word it triggers associations, memories, an image, but not a precise definition. When people are using different definitions they frequently get into unproductive arguments about those definitions without realizing that they are merely using words differently. “That’s not art, it’s just an old urinal that someone found and put in a gallery.” “Of course it’s art, it’s hanging in a museum, and clearly evokes emotion in the viewer!”

3. Values. People value and care about different things. One person thinks that more life in the universe is inherently a good thing, and so is in favor of increasing the size of the population. Another would prefer less life to be created if that would keep the existing people happier. One man places value on being remembered after he is dead, while another person doesn’t value it because she knows she won’t be able to experience that state of the world. Utilitarians place value on the world containing less suffering, Kantians value a world where certain universal rules are not violated, many people place value on the survival of animals species (even in cases where their survival does not benefit human beings), and so forth. There is nothing strange about different minds producing different labels for what is valuable and what lacks value. It does occasionally happen though that a person’s values are logically inconsistent (for instance, the person claims to value X while disvaluing Y, without realizing that X and Y amount to the same thing). [Comment: Related to values are the issues of tastes, preferences and interests. If you have a taste for chocolate rather than mushrooms, then you have an interest in going to the chocolate store rather than the mushroom store. A disagreement might then ensue regarding which store you “should” go to between you and someone with the opposite preferences. When you say “should” here it may be merely expressing your preference, but the conversation can take the form of a disagreement over what to do.]

4. Signaling. Sometimes people disagree (or claim to disagree) merely to signal information to others. For instance, they might say they disagree with someone they don’t like to demonstrate their dislike, or they might agree with someone they like to make that person like them more. They might say that Shakespeare wrote fantastic plays not because they enjoy reading those plays, but because they want to be respected for being a literary intellectual. They might say that they love the Yankees because that makes them more accepted by their group of friends.

5. Failures of logic. If the people on one or both sides of argument are engaging in logical fallacies or other failures of reasoning, they may end up disagreeing as a result. One person may argue that individual humans will never be able to live for more than 200 years because it has never happened before, while another will claim that we will definitely one day have lifespans longer than 200 years having extrapolated from the increase in longevity over the past 10,000 years. Since both sides have fallacious reasoning in this case, there is no reason to expect them to agree (unless their false logic just happens to lead them in the same direction). We can also include in this category the case where one person doesn’t have sufficient reasoning ability to understand an argument, and so is unable to properly evaluate it. Then, that person may disagree with the conclusion of the argument as a consequence of the argument being inaccessible to them.

6. Competition. Sometimes disagreement is simply about scoring points for our side, at the expense of the other side. In political disagreement, the underlying goal may be to have your own group look good (e.g. to increase support for your group) or to have the other group look bad (e.g. to weaken their power or even humiliate them). For groups within organizations, disagreement may really be about a power struggle: which group should be able to make decisions about which things, and what magnitude of resources should be allocated to each group? We also may just dislike an individual person, and so deny facts that would make them look good, or claim something that makes them look bad. When we are having a disagreement with a person from another group about a standard topic on which our group and their group tend to fight, we should apply some skepticism and wonder whether the disagreement really has to do with the truth at all, or if it’s more accurate to think of it as a battle over group status, esteem or resources.

7. Information processing methods. If people use different methods for processing information, they may end up disagreeing, even if the methods that each person relies on is quite reasonable. Brains do not perfectly update the strength of beliefs when encountering new information. Given limited computational resources, and the constraint that our brains evolved via natural selection, approximations like imperfect updating of credence are to be expected. If two brains both have pretty good but imperfect methods of updating beliefs based on evidence, they may end up disagreeing, even though they are both about as reliable as one another. When we reason explicitly information processing disagreements can also arise. For instance, if we want to estimate the chance that a friend will cancel on us for dinner, it is not obvious how we should weight our knowledge about how often friends cancel on us in general, compared to our knowledge about how often this particular friend has canceled on us. We have more data on all of our friends, which makes that estimate more reliable, but the data on this particular friend is more relevant to the particular case. Ideally, all of the known information should be combined in some way, but one can reasonably disagree about the best way to do this.

8. Default beliefs. If you were to design an intelligent being, it would start off with certain beliefs (implicitly, if not explicitly) and it would be silly, if not impossible, to have it start by assigning a precisely equal probability to every possible state of the world. If the prior/default knowledge of two intelligent beings differs, they may come to different conclusions, even when they processed information in precisely the same way and have access to all the same information. If a human baby, an alien baby, and a robot were raised in precisely the same environment, they might end up believing substantively different things about the world merely because their brains have different built in assumptions. Their brains might, for instance, start out assuming different things about the nature of other intelligent beings.

9. Self-interest. On a basic level, Bob probably cares about Bob’s well being more than he cares about Karen’s, and Karen probably cares about Karen’s well being more than she cares about Bob’s. While Bob and Karen may explain a disagreement in other, less self interested terms (e.g. “I think it’s best for the company if we move offices”), it could simply be that they are each acting self interestedly and have different interests. More subtly though, it often happens that people’s brains will make it hard for them to see the truth, because the truth will have negative consequences for them. Take, for instance, the case of someone raised their entire life in an extreme cult. If they encounter evidence that the cult’s beliefs are false, they are likely to experience intense anxiety, because finding out and believing that the cult is wrong could have very severe negative consequences for them, such as causing them to be cut off from all of the people they love. Hence, there may be intense psychological pressure not to think about this evidence anymore, or to come up with a rationalization for why the evidence must be wrong, which will be immediately rewarding by eliminating the anxiety. Effectively, your brain may not let you see the truth because it anticipates the negative consequences from doing so, and it is trying to protect you from those consequences.

Suppose that two intelligences (people, aliens, A.I.s, etc.) exchange information about their beliefs, and their reasons for having those beliefs. If they start with the same default beliefs, employ the same information processing methods, do not make errors when they explicitly reason, are able to follow each other’s reasoning, share the same values, use the same definitions, and have access to the same facts (for instance due to exchanging factual information with each other), then you should expect those two intelligence to reach agreement.

Note, however, that these nine categories of disagreement are not entirely independent from each other. For instance, the distinction between bad information processing methods and illogical argumentation can blur. A poor choice of definitions can also be a form of illogical thinking when those definitions are meaningless (“Let’s define a squircle to be a square circle”). And the distinction between default beliefs and built in information processing methods can be fuzzy as well, since the effectiveness of information processing methods may depend on assumptions those methods make about the environment. It is also a possibility that there are disagreements which arise that aren’t due to any of the nine reasons listed above (should any other types of disagreements occur to you, please post them in the comments below!).

Let’s see how this categorization system can help us understand real world debates. As our example we’ll use the debate about when abortion should be legal (a convenient choice because this debate has many facets and great complexity), taking into account the arguments frequently used by liberals and conservatives in the United States. A 2006 survey found that 60% of self-described “liberal democrats” thought that “abortion should be generally available”, versus 17% of self-described “conservative republicans”. Furthermore, 68% of these conservative republicans thought it should be either “illegal with few exceptions” or “never permitted” versus 23% of the liberal democrats. We’ll stick to considering this debate in terms of the first six reasons listed above that cause people disagree, since these six are often very useful frames of analysis.

1. Facts. Liberals and conservatives tend to be exposed to different information. For instance, it would not be surprising if liberals were more likely to hear about ways in which women are negatively impacted by not having access to abortions, while Conservatives were more likely to hear about women who regret having had abortions. Most of us tend to spend time with people that share many of our beliefs, and to read news from sources that are at least somewhat aligned with those beliefs. That means that the facts and ideas we hear tend to support what we already think is true. We should expect the friends and news sources of liberals to propagate more information supporting liberal values, and likewise for the friends and news sources of conservatives. Even google reinforces this tendency, when we happen to structure our queries in such a way that the results confirm our beliefs, and when Google automatically customizes our search results to be drawn from sources that are similar to those that we visit frequently.

The obvious solution to disagreements over facts is to exchange information with those you disagree with. This works well when people on the other side of the debate trust your sources as much as you do, and when they are willing to allow facts to change their minds. In practice, both of these assumptions are frequently violated. People commonly disregard information that contradicts their own beliefs, and latch onto the information that supports what they already think. When you encounter someone doing this, you can try asking the other person “what information WOULD make you change your mind about this issue, if that information were actually true?” That at least has a chance of getting the person to pre-commit to changing his or her mind if the relevant information can be found.

2. Definitions. The abortion debate is frequently phrased in terms of whether a fetus can be said to be a “person” (or, similarly, a “human being”), with the argument going “It is wrong to kill a person, so if a fetus is a person, killing it is wrong.” This would seem to imply that if we can just decide whether a fetus is a person then the question will be answered. But this begs the question of what we mean by “person.” We all agree with that Barack Obama is a person, but the usual definition we use for person isn’t clear cut enough to decide whether that word applies to the fetus case. And even if it were clear cut, it wouldn’t matter. The underlying question is not whether a fetus is a person, but whether we place disvalue on the death of fetuses, and if so, how much, and why. Phrasing the question in terms of whether a fetus has the status of person is bound to lead to disagreement, since intuitions about what “person” means differ quite substantially, and when one person says “a fetus is a person” and another says “a fetus is not a person” they may well not being using the word person to mean the same thing.

A handy trick for helping to resolve disputes over definitions is to taboo your words. Basically, this means replacing any confusing or fuzzy words with other words that get more closely at what you are trying to say. So, rather than “person” say “being that can suffer”, or “creature that cares about whether it lives or dies”, or “thing that is or one day will be an adult human”, or whatever else it is that you are really trying to denote with that word. In other words, if you’re stuck debating whether something is or is not a person, ban the word “person” from the conversation and use a more descriptive phrase. Now see if that allows the conversation to move forward.

3. Values. Some people place negative value on suffering, and believe that aborting a fetus is wrong if it causes the fetus to suffer, and that it is not wrong if there is no suffering. Others place negative value on the death of conscious entities, and so oppose abortion at the point that a fetus can reasonably be said to be conscious. Still others oppose depriving a being of its potential for future experiences, and so are anti-abortion on these grounds. Some people value rights, and believe the mother’s right to look out for her own interests trump those of the fetus until the point when the baby is self aware enough to get rights of its own. Still others value the life of anything that will become a human being, which includes fetuses.

Even though people can value different things without either of them being wrong, it still is sometimes possible to change what people are willing to say they value. For instance, you can try to demonstrate to them that one of their values conflicts with another of their values, which can cause one of those values to shift. Or you can try to show them that they do in fact value something that they claim not to, and prove it by means of an extreme example designed to provoke emotion.

4. Signaling. Abortion debates sometimes devolve into claims that those in favor of abortions are “against life” or that those opposed are necessarily “against women”. Obviously those who are pro abortion almost never actually want fetuses to die, they just want the mother to have a choice of whether to give birth. Likewise, there are of course reasons one may oppose abortion due to concerns about the loss of life of the fetus while simultaneously supporting rights for women more generally. When we use phrases like “against life” or “against women” they typically serve to demonstrate our group identity, and label the other side as bad guys. They say a lot about our emotional reactions and how we want our side and the other side to be viewed, but little about what the other side actually believes.

5. Failures of logic. Bad arguments are a prominent part of the abortion debates. Some such arguments fail because they rely on the ambiguity of words and assumptions that are left unexplained. For instance: “fetuses are human life, and human life is sacred, so killing fetuses is wrong.” Some take logical leaps that are not sufficiently filled in: “since an early term fetus can’t survive without the mother’s body, it is the mother’s choice whether to kill it”. Other arguments are true, but don’t demonstrate the claim they are used to support: “abortion is dangerous to mothers because it caries health risks”. Of course, this leaves out the fact that child birth itself carries substantial risks to the mother. Other arguments lead to question begging: “A women has a right to control what happens to her body, so she is justified in having abortions.” Where does this right come from, and if there is such a right, why does it trump other rights that might come into play in this case?

Convincing other people that their arguments are illogical, and identifying failed logic in our own arguments can be quite hard. A helpful tactic for dealing with illogic in others is to ask them to clarify their argument, rather than outright attacking it. For instance, saying “could you explain why X implies Y, as I’m having trouble seeing the connection” rather than saying “X doesn’t imply Y, you idiot.” Generally, the more people feel attacked, the more they feel they need to defend themselves, and the more likely it is that discussions with them will devolve into fights. Another useful technique, if you’re having trouble making headway, is to rephrase your disagreement with them. If they claim “X or Y” must be true, rather than just saying “that isn’t right” for the third time, you can try “Can you think of any other possibilities besides X and Y? Because I’m not convinced that one of them has to be true.” Or if someone says “X implies Y” and you’re quite sure it doesn’t, you can ask “so if Y were not true, you think that would imply that X is not true?” This helps people look at their own claims from a different angle, which may make them realize problems in their arguments that they didn’t identify before.

6. Group Competition. At first glance the argument may be about abortion legalization, but is it really about abortion legalization? Or is it more about trying to show that the other group is bad, for instance by trying to demonstrate they have no respect for women’s rights, or that they have no respect for the rights of the unborn? It may be that this is better understood as a fight about whose group is good or bad, or an attempt to increase group membership (if the disagreement is carried out in the public sphere), rather than a debate over what’s true.

When we encounter a complex and difficult to resolve disagreement, we can gain insight into why it is occurring and how it might be resolved by considering the roles of the nine (and particularly, the first six) fundamental reasons for disagreement: (1) facts, (2) definitions, (3) values, (4) signaling, (5) failures of logic, (6) group competition, (7) information processing methods, (8) default beliefs, and (9) self-interest.