unfortunately you can't trust people's facts

Truth Sandwich (George Lakeoff, 2018?): trying to refute an idea can spread it, because your audience is probably not the audience that was first exposed. Another name is prebunking (but committing publicly to a position on something has dangers: if you turn out to be wrong, it will be harder to admit that).

Anecdote: its wise not to trust them unless you have checked an original source. All too often the story that you use to represent a situation in miniature was made up by a journalist in 1928 or an opera writer in 1782. See Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes for more details.

Predictions, like advice, often tell you more about the person giving them than about the world.

Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes (2010) “Distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit” http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2010/09/sceptical-rule-of-thumb.html

Confirmation Bias: Most people are much better at making up arguments for something they want to believe or against something they don’t want to believe than at finding the truth. This is one reason why academia is based around debates.

Identity Protection: most neurotypicals identify strongly with groups which they imagine themselves to be members of, and defend those groups against criticism. Those groups make up all kinds of stories about their origins and past actions and teach them as true. History is the science of discovering truth about the past, so it always conflicts

Power of Fiction: many people’s understanding of the world they live in owes a lot to fiction. Even if you know how something worked in a past society, someone in the past may have had different ideas if they had little or no direct experience. And many people still get their ideas about the past from Asterix comics or Shakespeare plays or computer

Defensiveness: its embarrassing to be wrong in public, so once you have publicly committed to a position its hard to change your mind.