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.

  • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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%.

    these are the people too stupid to realise that if we stopped giving aid to africa we couldn't coerce them into giving us their natural resources. Conservatives genuinely seem to think that Africa give us all their stuff because they want to.

    It's great incompetance at empire management to not consider American and EU foreign policy to be nothing more than violent gangsterism. I think to be a truly effective imperialist you should read Marxist theory because the sheer incompetance of the monsters we have now is staggering

    • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      My pet theory is that the successful monsters are the septuagenarian and older politicians and businessmen (and I gendered that on purpose). Nothing against older folks, but you can't be running on all cylinders when you're way past average life expectancy. The ghouls running show now are their failsons. And their failsons' failsons.

      We are now witnesses to Western Meritocracy: evil motherfuckers running the show at every level, who aren't even good at being evil.