Question
What is fact vs opinion?
Quick Answer
A claim and its supporting evidence are different objects that should be stored separately.
Example: You write a note: 'Remote work increases productivity — Buffer's 2023 survey found 98% of respondents want to continue working remotely.' This note fuses a claim (remote work increases productivity) with evidence (a survey about preferences, which is not even evidence of productivity). Stored as one object, the claim inherits false credibility from the citation, and the evidence can never be reused to support a different claim. Separate them: one note states the claim, another records the survey finding, and a link connects them. Now you can see that the evidence doesn't actually support the claim — and you can link that same survey data to a different argument about employee preferences.
This concept is part of Atomicity and Decomposition in the How to Think curriculum.
Learn more in these lessons
- Separate claims from evidence
- Separate observations from interpretations
What you saw and what you concluded from it are distinct and must not be fused.