# Random facts can come back to bite you

Consider the post [Ads Don't Work That Way](https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/) by Kevin Simler on Melting Asphalt. It contrasts a couple of different mechanisms by which advertising might work, including:

*   Emotional inception - manipulating your feelings towards a product via conditioning
*   Raising awareness - making you aware of a product or its features
*   Cultural imprinting - creating a societal association for a product, to allow people to use the product to associate themselves with this same association

The details are described in the post, and I'm sure that Kevin Simler describes the theory much better than I could. However, they are not very important, as I am not bringing up this post to make a point about advertising. Instead, I want to zoom in on an argument Kevin makes:

> ### UNDERHANDED ADVERTISING
> 
> Consider this one for Corona:
> 
> ![corona_ad](https://meltingasphalt.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/corona_ad-600x336.jpg)
> 
> Whatever's going on here, it's not about awareness, persuasion, promises, or honest signaling. In fact this image is almost completely devoid of *information* in the most literal sense. As Steven Pinker defines it, information is "a correlation between two things that is produced by a lawful process (as opposed to coming about by sheer chance)." In this case, the image is so *arbitrary* that it can't be conveying any information about Corona *per se*, as distinct from any other beer. Corona wasn't specifically designed for the beach, nor does 'beach-worthiness' emerge from any distinguishing features of Corona. You could swap in a Budweiser or Heineken and no "information" would be lost.

This seems obviously true. After all, what inherent connection could there possibly be between Corona and a sunny beach? In a footnote in the post, Kevin admits that there is a slight cultural/circumstantial/contextual factor, but that's not enough to change the core point of the post; the Corona/beach connection is obviously fairly arbitrary.

Except... now, years later, I've watched this YouTube video on the channel called "Food Theory":

In it, MatPat explains that beers can get "skunked" when hit by sunlight. However, it turns out that Corona beer is uniquely designed such that skunking *improves* its taste, unlike other beers which it worsens. Therefore, there actually *is* a genuine non-arbitrary connection between the Corona brand and drinking beer on the beach.

This was a completely random fact that I hadn't expected to jump out. I guess [reality has a surprising amount of detail](http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail). But it makes the development and description of these broad social science theories annoying and difficult.

Obviously Kevin Simler didn't know about Corona's skunking properties when writing his post about advertising, and I didn't know about them when reading it. If his readers had said "This example is unconvincing, because you haven't shown there to be no special relationship between Corona and the beach.", there's not much he could have done; there could be any number of connections, and it's hard to know if you've enumerated all the important ones. So it would be really hard to disprove the objection. But at the same time, as we can see now, the objection would have been *right*.

One solution to this would be to become an expert on everything you talk about, so you know even the most obscure potentially relevant facts. But that's not practical. Another solution would be to accept being wrong - but I often get the impression that these sorts of things lead to people being wrong *a lot*. A third solution is [to talk about narrower things](https://carcinisation.com/2020/01/27/ignorance-a-skilled-practice/), so you can specialize more into getting them right. Alternatively, maybe we could keep making sweeping generalizations, but only from things we have a lot of familiarity with? I don't know what the best solution is, and it's probably highly context-dependent, but it seems like a problem to consider.

*Thanks to Justis Mills for proofreading and feedback.*