Expert Opinion

Experts can earnestly tell a lie that they have convinced themselves is true, just because it was an easy-to-believe, coherent story that fit their narrative. It followed the evidence available to them at the time, but didn’t account for the whole story, which is much harder and more exhausting to dredge up.

And that’s not always the work of evil people. Most people come up with convincing lies they willingly share, because it’s convenient and rolls off the tongue, whereas extensive, often contradictory research could take an entire lifetime to sus out.

An expert can have a slightly off-kilter opinion based on their informed experience, that a journalist gets ahold of, skewing it slightly to make it more presentable, so they can get a “wow” from their audience, which then gets passed to thousands of readers, who then bring up a form of the “fact” at their next dinner party, like a game of telephone. If the misconstrued opinion does make its way back to the expert, who realizes something is off, the expert could make a statement saying they’ve been misrepresented, which is only seen by a handful of the audience now believing in the fact; but it’s too late, the idea is already in circulation and widely believed.

For example, there was a rumor about how you eat on average 8 spiders while you sleep, and it became widely circulated, but apparently it was made up as part of a story about how people will believe anything they read as a fact.