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.
This is true, but it's not necessarily the best rhetorical strategy, because you're correctly observing that these people's perceptions are based on vibes and propaganda rather than actual facts, and then trying to use facts to refute it, but if they don't care about facts, what's the point?
This is why we have PPB :theory-gary:
this
yeah but browbeating them with facts when they express views like that in your presence makes them less likely to do so in future which means that being around you is a safer place for trans people etc.
If they are less comfortable expressing these views they do slightly less harm with them
So does telling them to fuck off :think-about-it:
It's more like using personal experience to put it in a quantitative context.