Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not wrong, but my priority is to ensure that my friends who rely on emotion-based arguments (fear of the unknown regarding the vaccines, dismissing the risks of covid and taking too few precautions as a result) to be safe and to not contribute to keeping the pandemic going. Going this deep into statistics would just lose them, because I'd come across as trying to intimidate them into taking my viewpoint on how…
>my friends who rely on emotion-based arguments Isn’t every argument based in emotion? Do unpalatable facts have a strong track record of success in arguments?
But some people's arguments are based exclusively on emotion.
And they tend to be very bad at estimating risk, because they literally can't tell the difference between one specific tragedy which triggers their emotions because it's reported in great deal, and millions of tragedies which don't trigger their emotions because they're reported as dry statistics.
If we were being less polite, we'd call this a form of cognitive handicap.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/ttu-pra04092...