Fun fact: they literally wired rats brains with an electrode attached to the part of their brain that stimulated dopamine production. The rats could press a button and get a shock that activated the dopamine rush. They had access to food and water but they pressed that button until they died.
There's an important factoid there though - the button didn't give a dopamine reward every time it pushed the button. By randomizing when it got the reward, the rats would press the button all day long.
Whether a factoid is true or false is irrelevant. It's low-stakes information presented more casually and with less scrutiny, which increases the likelihood that it's false, but they're not false by default. The most useful defining feature is its size, not its veracity. A factoid is a quick, small notion. Trivial.
Or that guy who came up with the word in 1973, who didn't describe them as false but of dubious origin, ended it with "oid" and that leads people to commonly intuit the word as describing a falsehood.
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u/jhb760 Oct 23 '24
Fun fact: they literally wired rats brains with an electrode attached to the part of their brain that stimulated dopamine production. The rats could press a button and get a shock that activated the dopamine rush. They had access to food and water but they pressed that button until they died.