Responding to Saturday’s letter “Schwab needs to turn the channel,” I want to make this clarification. The writer suggested some ideas for Mr. Schwab to “soothe his worried mind.” The one that most notably strikes me as clearly wrong is:

“Facts are like statistics: You can make them do or say anything you want. Indeed a fact is only a fact when somebody accepts it as such.”

This is not a “factual” statement. A fact is indeed a fact because it has been either well researched and/or scientifically proven.

What, I believe, the writer really is talking about is an opinion. An opinion may be accepted or not, based on one’s belief or view of the world, but a fact must be disproven or shown to be contrary to current evidence. So, facts don’t exist because people “believe” them to be true, they are true until proven otherwise.

Michael Dahlstrom

Everett