There's this thing in public opinion where whatever people are mad about, they also overestimate how common it is by like a crazy amount.

Off the top of my head people think we should stop giving away so much money to poorer countries. Ask them how much of the budget goes to aid, they'll say something nuts like 20% when it's actually like 1%.

I haven't done this experiment in person but I bet I'd get a pretty ludicrous answer if we asked what percent of us are trans.

And it'd be pretty easy to debunk too. "oh you think it's 10%? So count the next ten customers to walk in. You think you typically serve a trans customer before 9am, and never noticed it?"

"......uh well maybe not 1/10. Maybe more like 1/100".

Where this is all going: you can convince a person that they are off by a crazy large amount fairly easily but you can never ever convince a person they're wrong.

Does this mean convincing people to be less enthusiastic about their wrong opinion is more viable than getting them to abandon wrong opinions?

Next time my facebook coworker screeds on the mythical girl who identifies as a cat and carries a litter box to school, I'm going to test his estimates. I bet I can't change his mind but I bet I can get him to be quieter.

  • RNAi [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I get the intent, but then ¿if trans people were a larger percent, then it would be okay to whine about their existence?

    In the case of dipshits frothing about "burglars filling the cities" [wink wink nudge nudge], it's good to remind them they are fucking idiots cuz there's NOT that many criminals and they are scaremonged to remain in their stupid suburbs antagonizing what people in the cities want. But trans people aren't criminals, be them a lot or a few their existence isn't something bad.

    • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah. Informed, ideologically committed transphobes typically do know the population stats, and will bring them up to argue that we shouldn't be "bending over backwards" for such a tiny minority of people.

    • supdog [e/em/eir,ey/em]
      ·
      2 years ago

      If trans people were 20% of the population then they'd overestimate that they were 40%.

      Anyway we probably agree that you can't really change a mind short of :stalin-gun-1:

      This is kind of a workaround for changing a mind. I'm trying to nullify their enthusiasm.

      On the one hand you might think that that's a half measure, a compromise. But then we are in the middle of a moral panic and in that sense, it's not a compromise, it's a full on direct assault because moral panic feeds off the exaggeration. If it didn't have excess enthusiasm then it wouldn't be a moral panic.