A Statement Is Not Fact

Scrutinizing Quotes

A statement is not fact because it may not be accurate. Why might something be inaccurate? It could be a quote out of context. It could be a quote which is not supported by an underlying study. Or it could be that it was supported by an underlying study, but the study actually investigates something which is quite different to what the statement claims.

So you often like to give quotes from famous people and think, well, if a famous person said this quote then it must be true. So one example is the claim that culture eats strategy for breakfast made by Peter Drucker, a business guru. And so people think, well, because Peter Drucker said it, it must be accurate. The culture of a company is even more important than its strategy.

But there’s a couple of problems with that statement. Number one is that Peter Drucker never actually said it. So it’s attributed to him, but none of his writings made that claim. But the more serious concern is even if he did make that claim, it doesn’t mean that it’s true if there’s not evidence behind it such as a large-scale study looking at the importance of culture and comparing it to strategy.

So sometimes we have this authority bias where if a famous person says it, we are willing to lap it up, evidence or no evidence, when in fact what should matter is the rigor of the evidence behind a statement, not the fame of the person claiming it.

Scrutinizing Context

There was an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine where the title was “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.” And that was an article cited by about one thousand six hundred and fifty different articles, and that was a major article in the overprescription of opioids in the United States and around the world. The opioid epidemic has led to at least six hundred and fifty thousand deaths in the US due to overdoses and millions of deaths around the world.

So why did people believe the article? Was the article a lie? Well, on the face of it, it wasn’t. If you go to the actual article, it was entitled “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.” It was not a misquote. But if you go one level deeper, this in fact was not a scientific study in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was a letter to the editor. And so this letter might have had no review, no scrutiny by anybody. And even if you think that that letter was accurate, the writer was backing it up with some science, what the writer did was they looked at hospitalized patients. So it may well be that opioids don’t lead to addiction if you’re in hospital and you’re given them in a controlled circumstance. But if you’re given this as an outpatient, maybe you do end up having an overdose.

So we often think that the solution to misinformation is to check the facts. So if somebody is quoting an article titled “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics” in the New England Journal of Medicine, we think the only thing we need to do is to check was there indeed an article with that title published in that journal. But what I’m highlighting is that that is not enough. And so anybody who quotes that article without giving the broader context of it being a letter and a study on only hospitalized patients is still giving a lie. So the solution is not just to check the facts, but go beyond this and look at the broader context.