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.
I remember seeing a stat once that was more Americans regularly talk to angels or ghosts than those who regularly talk with a trans person. One of my cousins told me "at least half" of people are LGBTQ. I asked him if half the people he knew are queer, then he clarified he meant places like California balance that number out.
I think a lot of Americans get into a trap where they consider their own immediate surroundings to be normal, yet separate from the wider world. There's a here and a there, and they influence one another, but they're on two sides of a barrier. Americans believe there's a wider world that's dangerous, confusing, and culturally incomprehensible compared to their own enclave. They live in little bubbles. They'll complain about murder rates in Chicago will living in an area with crime rates equal to anywhere else, just more spread out or with less media attention.
I think I'm mostly talking about suburban white people.
places like California balance that number out
Mystical Commiefornia, a place where everyone is gay and trans, but where gig workers can't get benefits.
I think a lot of Americans get into a trap where they consider their own immediate surroundings to be normal, yet separate from the wider world.
This is it. Everything I know is normal and correct. Everything else is weird and wrong
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.
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.
Without anti-LGBTQ programming from birth I think this would be true. There's just so much repression piled on people, though.
I live in one if the safest urban zip codes in the country, but when my father sees clients two counties over out in the sticks they act like there are roaving gangs of "thugs" that will eat, murder, and rape, in that order, any "real" anericans they can get their hands on. Like these people live in genuine fear with guns at the ready everywhere, dad has almost gotten shot on accident a couple times. These people are older and sit at home mainlining fox news and worse 24/7. And yes the crime rate is much higher outside the city. It is really bonkers how warped some people's view of the world is.
Most of my family is convinced there was a genuine civil war in 2020 where half the country broke off. They think California and Michigan and etc legit had a revolution and bombed their police stations and local governments and are now Mad Max style wastelands.
These people live in a paranoia hell of their own creation.
This is one reason why I am skeptical of the rights ability to actual fight any sort of organized civil conflict. Like I get that all Americans live in their own little epistemic bubbles, and that as a Marxist I am subject to my own biases and siloing, but I at least acknowledge this fact and TRY to have some material interaction with the real world. Like these people are fucking nuts, completely off in cloud coo coo land. Like the second they get their power grids knocked out I expect them to just tart fucking air holing each other out of sheer terror.
oh, no kidding. The organizational base of fascism in the US isn't like what Germany or Italy had, like disgruntled WW1 veterans or street gangs. The social base of fascism for Americans are white suburban guys in their mid 50s who own pool resurfacing businesses. There's no one to organize a conflict
The closest thing to a fascist civil conflict in recent American history was the January 6th capital riots and it was comically bad how disorganized it was. They didn't know what to do after meeting together, so it turned into a series of photo ops for their facebook feeds. One of the main organizers was arrested by the feds after the event, he was celebrating in a fucking Olive Garden. It's comical, the leader of this supposed revolutionary movement has to take a time out to get some unlimited breadsticks. And one of the main reasons they organized this thing? Someone roleplaying as a federal informant on 4chan.
The right lives and dies by their treats. They're infantilized beyond any capacity for mass movements. Oppression to them is when Applebee's tells them to wear a mask. Their social and economic theories are misspelled racial slurs typed under a Yahoo news article.
You think you typically serve a trans customer before 9am, and never noticed it?
You may be talking to somebody who believes all celebrities are secretly trans. Like, literally every single one of them. That's a thing chuds actually believe and get mad over.
It still works though. The trans bathroom meme goes that they always notice. So which is it?
The enemy is at once too weak and too strong with Terf characteristics
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
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.
It's also something I'd love better stats on just because no number I hear ever matches my life. I'm cis and I'm not even the token cis in a queer friend group, and even then approximately 20% of the people I'm friends with are trans. I hear people say only 1% of the population is trans and my gut reaction is that can't possibly be right, even if I know it's probably just selection bias or whatever
fwiw 1% sounds about right to me. I'm a middle aged southerner and I'm not aware if I know a single trans person.
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.
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.
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.
Off the top of my head people think we should stop giving away so much money to poorer countries.
I think America should stop giving aid to foreign countries because it's used as a trojan horse for foreign direct investment, deregulation, and anti-labor policies
Chuds think America should stop giving foreign aid to countries because they are racist
We are not the same :gigachad:
I think we should give aid but that aid should be productive instruments and agricultural machinery
:wojak-nooo: but if we give them direct aid their corrupt authoritartin regimes will just steal it! and if we give to the people they are too poor and stupid to use it!
:side-eye-1: :side-eye-2: :cia: don't look at us not like we helped the right wing government kill off it's entire professional education class
I'm getting the feeling that Americans might not trust percentages below double digits. They might not see that 1 percent means 1 in 100. They'll say 30% are Muslim because the actual value of around 1-2% of Americans being Muslim sounds so statistically inconsequential it may as well be zero.
I've had people tell me directly "A million people isn't that many." When they live in a town with 3,000 in it.
I've found it easier to try and explain things through comparison, like I've used the comparison there are about as many trans people in America as there are people born with ginger hair and freckles. There are about as many Muslims as there are people who live in NYC. That works way better to give perspective than numbers from experience.
I’ve had people tell me directly “A million people isn’t that many.”
I can guess what conversation resulted in that quote
I hear it when talking about disasters, like how many Americans died of covid. Is that what you were thinking of?
Uncritical support to the trans Muslims destroying the American empire
I think Americans just suck at math. There needs to be a class just on Fermi estimates.
It's called "availability bias." basically, when we are repeatedly exposed to information or recent examples of a thing, our brain over-estimates the things frequency. It's so easy to think of, there MUST be a lot of it!
This ignores the conundrum that we're stupid meat with electricity running through it, not perfectly rational computers, so just because some thing XYZ is easy to recall absolutely does not mean XYZ is common. It could be that we just had a weird string of encounters that are otherwise largely random, it could be a media empire calling attention to XYZ (completely self aware of availability bias btw), it could be that XYZ that are 'outside the ordinary' by nature just stick out in our minds. No matter the cause for our easy recall, it does nothing to affect the actual numbers of XYZ in the world. It requires conscious awareness and correction of this bias to compensate for it, but it and many others just seem like built in patterns of reasoning or heuristics our brain can't help itself but make.
Teaching critical thinking and encouraging others to confront and compensate for biases/heuristics/just sloppy thinking is very important in literally every regard, but especially politically. Finding a way to introduce these lessons is something you should definitely do!
stupid meat with electricity running through it,
Cyberpunk :CommiePOGGERS:
unironically the best use for a cyber implant in future communism is to have an AI fact checker/leaning module with instant on demand brain access
We have that now, it's called a smartphone, the only problem is that the fact checker is programmed to lie to you.
We as humans are really bad at estimates, somehow americans are even worse though.
I liked a book. It was written by greg Egan. I forget which one, Permutation City maybe. Thr dominant culture had five genders. They were a spectrum so the center was agender, and out from there were nominally male/female where they were people that had a gender but really didn't think much of it. He guessed that portion with at best nominal gender like 60% in his book. Which I realize was fiction, but always felt right to me. He was an accademic mathamatician so he probably new more gender diverse people than normal though.
too bad we can't get stats from the ancient cultures that accepted and/or venerated trans people and had clear social and religious roles for them. ishtar's priesthood only permitted fem presenting for example even if it was for a specific period of time.
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:
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
It's more like using personal experience to put it in a quantitative context.
Whatever it is, it should be higher. I like this idea, I'm just the sicko that conservatives are afraid of.
TBF 95% of the left doesn't even exist, the next 4.5% are FBI plants, the next 0.25% CIA, then remaining is the girl reading this right now.
I honestly think 1 out 8 people are trans if you account for agender, demigenders, and nonbinary male/female identities. In a transphobic cisnormative society, an AMAB demimale would think they're male, and they probably wouldn't realize they're actually demimale instead of male. Ditto for AFAB demifemales. Most agenders I've seen online are AFAB, and there's no real reason to believe that agenders are somehow biased towards AFAB instead of AMAB. Most likely, a greater chunk of AMAB agenders self-identify as male.
Gender being a social construct, I wouldn't be surprised if most people just adopt the gender they get assigned and don't feel very strongly about it. Like if we snapped our fingers and all AMABs became AFABS and vice versa, most people would probably just switch over without missing a beat.
I've always felt that was basically true. I don't know about dysphoria, that magic swap might cause a lot of that or something. But as far as comfort in the role, I could just as easily be a woman, I really don't feel like being a man is an important part of my identity.
Last I saw the data, based on self identification, was .6% of the population was "trans," put in quotes because it wasn't totally clear what that included I think it included nonbinary people though. Personally I think that if you got rid of all social stigma, probably ~5% would identify as "hard" trans with another ~5% as some variation of "softer" trans identity; using hard and soft here not to distinguish specific kinds of gender variance but more of how strongly a person feels about their gendered identity as not conforming to their assigned gender.
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.
NASA's budget for example. I think it's something like 0.3% of the federal budget. But if you ask the typical nutbar right-winger they'll probably say ~30%.
It's similar when a agency is the reticle of right-wing rage. Say PBS did something unforgivable like mention the word "trans" and the clip went viral in the right-wing outrage machine. They'll say funding must be immediately end. And they'll say PBS gets some totally insane number like ~20% of the federal budget. Enough it's - I have no idea at all - I'll guess ~0.01%.
All of public broadcasting combined is a bit under 0.01% of normal previous budgets, but even that is now shrinking as military, police, and alphabet agency budgets are ballooning and the rest of spending isn't.
Government public broadcasting is filtered through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and then divided up between NPR, PBS/APT, PRI/PRX, and APM. That public funding only makes up like 10-15% of funding for those programs, with the rest being made up of corporate and citizen donation.
