My considerable experience as a trusted advisor to top-level executives and their senior management teams has provided me with extensive proof that even the smartest, most well-educated people very often mistake bluntly articulated opinions for statements of actual facts.
And it gets worse. Alfred Korzybski taught that the proper functioning of each human nervous system requires its owner to acquire and maintain 'consciousness of abstracting', which effectively prevents confusing or reversing the naturally-occuring neuro-linguistic order of:
- submicroscopic organism-as-a-whole scientific events
- objects
- labels
- descriptions
- inferences
- higher-order abstractions
- more higher-order abstractions, etc., etc.
Whenever you operate or proceed without 'consciousness of abstracting' it becomes impossible to accurately perceive/understand important happenings in the real world and to take full advantage of the best-available courses of action for helping you accomplish what you want, avoid what you dread and change what you don't like.