Random Facts Generator

What the random facts generator does

You want something to say. At a dinner, in a lull, at the top of a presentation nobody wants to be at, or just to fill three minutes while the kettle boils.

This gives you one. Pull a batch and you will find a couple you already knew, a couple you did not, and at least one you will want to tell somebody about within the hour.

What follows is the thing nobody puts on a page like this. There is a very good reason these feel true when you read them, and that reason has nothing to do with whether they are.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One for a conversation. Ten if you are hunting for the good one.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

Why a fact feels true before you check it

Read one from the list. Notice what happened in your head. Somewhere in the first half second, before you thought about it at all, you decided whether to believe it.

That decision is not made on evidence. It is made on familiarity.

In 1977 three researchers, Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino, showed people a set of statements, waited a couple of weeks, then showed them a mix of old and new ones and asked which were true. The repeated statements got rated truer. Not the correct ones. The repeated ones. They called it the conference of referential validity, and everyone since has called it the illusory truth effect.

Fifty years of replication later, the findings have gone from interesting to slightly alarming.

It works after minutes, after weeks, and after months. It works on trivia, on adverts, and on political claims. It works on plausible statements and implausible ones about equally.

It works even when you are told, in advance and in plain language, that the source is unreliable.

And the worst one. In 2015 Lisa Fazio and her colleagues published a paper called Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth, and the title is the finding. Repeating a false statement made people rate it truer even when they already knew the correct answer. Knowing did not help. They had the right fact in their heads and the repetition still moved them.

So here is the honest position of this page. Everything on this list is going to feel true to you, and a decent chunk of that feeling is just the fact that you have heard it before. That is not a flaw in the facts. That is a flaw in the reader, and it is a flaw in all of us, and reading this paragraph will not fix it.

Which is the whole argument for checking things. Not because you are gullible. Because being smart demonstrably does not cover you.

What happens to a fact on its way to you

Facts do not arrive. They travel, and they lose things on the road.

The pattern is always the same. Somebody publishes something careful and hedged. Somebody else summarises it and drops the hedge, because the hedge is boring. Somebody turns the summary into a headline, and the headline drops the conditions. Somebody screenshots the headline. By the time it reaches you it is eight words long, has no author, no date, no place, and no maybe.

Watch what gets stripped, in order. First the caveat. Then the sample size. Then the year. Then the country. Then the word some. What survives is the shape of the thing, because the shape is what is fun.

There is a second failure that is stranger. Somebody writes an unsourced line on Wikipedia. A newspaper reads Wikipedia and prints it. Then somebody adds the newspaper as the citation on Wikipedia. Now the claim has a source, and the source is itself. Randall Munroe named this citogenesis, and once you have the word you start seeing it everywhere.

None of this needs a liar. Every single person in that chain was being helpful. The fact just got shorter and more confident at every step, which are the same direction.

The moth in the machine

Take one off the list and follow it all the way back. The first computer bug was an actual bug.

The moth is real. This is the good part. On the 9th of September 1947, a team working on the Harvard Mark II found a moth jammed in Relay 70, Panel F. They pulled it out, taped it into the logbook, and wrote a note beside it. The logbook is real. The moth is still stuck to the page. It is in the Smithsonian. You can look at it.

So far the fact is doing well.

Now the part that got lost. The word bug already meant a technical fault, and it had for about seventy years. Thomas Edison was using it in his letters in 1878 to describe faults in his inventions. Telegraph engineers used it. It was ordinary shop talk. Everybody in that room in 1947 already knew the word.

Which is exactly why they taped the moth in.

Read what they actually wrote in the log. First actual case of bug being found. That is a joke. It is only funny because the word already existed, and it only works if everyone reading it already used the word to mean something that was never an insect. The whole gag is the gap between the old meaning and this one moth.

Then the joke travelled. And a joke that travels loses the thing that made it a joke, because the setup is the boring part. Somewhere along the way first actual case of bug being found became the first bug was a real bug, and a punchline turned into an origin story.

So the fact is true and the fact is false and it is both at once. The moth happened. The moth did not name anything. And the version you know is what you get when you take a clever line from some engineers in 1947 and repeat it for eighty years until the cleverness falls off.

That is what most of these are. Not lies. Just jokes and studies and anecdotes that have been through too many hands.

Where these come from

The facts here come from a list our team put together and read through by hand. Press the button and one is picked out of it at random.

That is the whole mechanism, and it runs on your own device.

Checking one in thirty seconds

You do not need a library card. You need to ask a fact three questions, and most of them fall over on the first one.

Who said it first? Not who told you. Who is at the bottom of the pile. If you search and find twenty websites saying the identical sentence with the identical wording and none of them names a source, you have not found twenty sources. You have found one source and nineteen copies, and you cannot see the original from here.

When? A fact with no date is a fact you cannot check. Studies get overturned. Records get broken. The tallest, oldest, fastest and only anything is a claim with a timestamp on it, and the timestamp is the first thing to fall off.

What is the exact claim? This is where most of them die, and it is a small movement. Honey lasts a very long time is a fact. Honey never spoils is a slogan. Cows form preferential bonds with particular individuals is a finding. Cows have best friends is a headline. The true version and the fun version are usually one adjective apart, and the adjective is doing all the lying.

Two places that do this properly and show their working. Quote Investigator, for anything anybody supposedly said. Snopes, for everything else. Both will tell you when the answer is that nobody knows, which is the sign of people you can trust.

And if you cannot find the bottom of the pile in thirty seconds, that is a result too. Say it at dinner with an apparently in front of it. That word costs you nothing and it is the difference between passing on a fact and starting one.

Questions people ask

Are all of these true?

They are facts as they are commonly told, and the honest answer is that commonly told is doing some work in that sentence. Take the moth above. The event happened exactly as described and the conclusion people draw from it is wrong. That is not unusual. It is the normal condition of a fun fact. Treat anything here as the start of a search rather than the end of one, and you will get more out of it and be wrong less often.

Why do the wrong ones spread better?

Because they are better. Not truer, better. A fact that survives being retold a thousand times has been selected for exactly one trait, which is being repeatable, and repeatable means short, surprising, and free of conditions. Truth is not part of that filter. It is not opposed to it either. It is just not in the room. So the version of any story that reaches you is the version that was most fun to pass on, and fun and accurate come apart very early.

What is the best one to open with?

Not the most surprising. The one nearest the room. A fact lands when it is about something the listener can see or has touched, and dies when it needs a preamble. Wombats and the Eiffel Tower work at a dinner table. A number about vending machines does not, because the first thing anyone says is where did you get that, and you will not know.

Can I use these in a classroom?

Yes, and there is a better lesson in here than the facts. Give a class one of these and ask them to find the bottom of the pile. Half of them will fail, and that failure teaches more about how information works than any true fact will. The illusory truth research above is a good place to start them.

Is there one for funny facts or history?

There is. The random funny facts generator and the random history facts generator run on their own lists. History is the one to be most careful with, because a date makes a claim feel checked when nobody has checked it.

References

1. Hasher, L., Goldstein, D. and Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107 to 112. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(77)80012-1
2. Fazio, L. K., Brashier, N. M., Payne, B. K. and Marsh, E. J. (2015). Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993 to 1002. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000098
3. Fazio, L. K., Rand, D. G. and Pennycook, G. (2019). Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 26(5), 1705 to 1710. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01651-4
4. Pennycook, G., Cannon, T. D. and Rand, D. G. (2018). Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(12), 1865 to 1880. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000465
5. Vosoughi, S., Roy, D. and Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146 to 1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559
6. Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Log Book With Computer Bug. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_334663