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.

  • frankfurt_schoolgirl [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    at least half” of people are LGBTQ.

    I unironically believe at least half of people are somewhere bisexual. I do have some bias however.

    It is scary how much people's opinions are based on literal fiction. The whole liberal idea of reading the news and voting as the pinnacle of democracy is so full of shit.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I believe something like that. If we lived in a futuristic communist society that had abolished strict gender norms and didn't disparage against nonconformance, more people would identify as sexually flexible. Stuff like beauty and gender aesthetics are culturally informed, so a futuristic society without such rigid cultural/legal demands on gender would probably have a majority of people be openly bisexual.

    • SuperZutsuki [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Without anti-LGBTQ programming from birth I think this would be true. There's just so much repression piled on people, though.