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Train wreak continues...
Well, got it half right.
Gaetz is gone.
Train hasn't left the station yet.Train wreak continues...
So did the Americans also have cognitive Bias when they elected Biden, or Obama, or Clinton ....Came across this article on "What do Americans think ?" or do they ?
Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love The People.
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Jonathan V. Last
1. Perceptions
Yesterday Jemele Hill recirculated a study YouGov did in 2022 about the gaps between people’s perceptions and reality.
YouGov asked a series of questions on “What percentage of Americans do you think are [fill in the blank]?” With the [blank] being all sorts of qualities: black, gay, Christian, left-handed, own a passport, etc.
The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:
We’ll get to the actual, in vivo percentages in a moment. First I want to point out the absurdity: 1-in-3 are gay/lesbian? Muslims and Jews make up 57 percent of the country? Blacks are 40 percent of the population?
- Transgender: 21 percent
- Muslim: 27 percent
- Jewish: 30 percent
- Black: 41 percent
- Live in New York City: 30 percent
- Gay or lesbian: 30 percent
Not to be crass, but if a third of the population is gay/lesbian then where are all the kids coming from?
If a quarter of the country is Muslim and a third is Jewish, then mosques plus synagogues would outnumber churches. Does anyone see more mosques and synagogues than churches as they drive around?
If 40 percent of the country is black then wouldn’t there be a lot more black people in Congress? I mean, there have only been 12 African-American senators ever.
You see what I mean: These perceptions do not square with any version of observable reality. Here the numbers as they actually exist in the real world:
We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.
- Transgender: 1 percent
- Muslim: 1 percent
- Jewish: 2 percent
- Black: 12 percent
- Live in New York City: 2 percent¹
- Gay or lesbian: 3 percent
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If you go down the list of characteristics YouGov asked people abut, you see a persistent mistake in one direction: Americans vastly overestimate the numbers of people in minority groups. And by “minority groups” I’m not just talking about racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. They wildly overestimate all kinds of minorities.
For instance, in addition to believing that 30 percent of the country lives in NYC, the average American thinks that 30 percent of the country lives in Texas and 32 percent lives in California.²
People think that 20 percent of the country makes $1 million (or more) per year (real number: less than 1 percent); that 54 percent of the country owns guns (real number: 32 percent); that 40 percent of the country served in the military (real number: 6 percent); and that 30 percent of the country is vegetarian (real number: 5 percent).
There’s something interesting going on here that speaks to a particularly American cognitive bias.
You might think that a normal bias would be to look around, see what is common in your experience, and extrapolate to believe that this is also for true of the rest of the world. Instead, we have the opposite.
People see very few of these characteristics in their everyday lives—and then decide that the rest of the world must be full of these minority groups they rarely encounter.
For someone living in a middle-class suburb of Cleveland, how many trans people, or Muslims, or millionaires do they meet on a daily basis? I’m guessing, just based on statistics, that the answer approaches zero.
But this average person takes the absence of those minority groups in their life and assumes that the rest of the country is chockablock with them.
That is a strange kind of bias. But wait—there’s more!
As YouGov kept going they found that people generally underestimate the size of majority populations. Here’s what they found on majority characteristics, where the number in blue is the percentage that people think exists and the number in red is the percentage that actually exists.
I would like to propose that this peculiar perception bias is indicative of something deep in the American psyche.
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2. Paranoia
American politics has long been driven by concerns about The Other.
Often The Other is based on race or ethnicity. Sometimes on wealth. Sometimes it’s about class.
These perception gaps suggest that Americans in the majority are deeply paranoid about their own position relative to The Other. They believe that people who are nothing like them make up some massive but invisible bloc, while the people who are very much like them—who they see every day at the store and in school—are more rare than they wish.
This distorted perception leads people in majorities to a combative, oppositional politics. They worry about being displaced by minorities they rarely encounter but fear are lurking somewhere, out there, in great masses.
Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 and he was looking at both the contemporary and the historical. Developments since then have mostly confirmed his thesis. I think we can take it as read that paranoia is an important component of American social and political life.
And if this is the case, then I would say that our bizarre perception bias is both symptom and cause. People are paranoid about The Other, which is why they believe that hordes of The Other must exist. And the belief that their own majority group is small while The Other is large feeds the underlying paranoia.
I’m not sure how democracy is supposed to work with a population that is this paranoid, confused, and oblivious to reality.
Maybe you have some ideas. If so, please discuss them—and our cognitive bias—in the comments.
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Liked by Jonathan V. Last
Those numbers actually square with my own neighborhood. Virtually everyone I know is a gay Muslim Jew who owns a gun.
Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love The People.www.thebulwark.com
I wonder if the good data scientist looked at another startling anomaly.This story has really surprised me. A Data scientist has been analysing the 2024 election results specifically in the swing states and believes there is something fishy about the voting. He believes there needs to be a hand recount at least a couple of states to check out a wildly anomalous number of votes where voters made only one vote on the Ballot - for Donald Trump. Every other down vote was empty.
How big was this anomaly ? 5-10 times larger than any previous time and surrounding states .
A data scientist, Stephen Spoonamore, strongly suspects a hack took place during the 2024 election. He speaks of tremendous numbers of “bullet votes” for Trump, occurring in just the swing states. A bullet vote is where there is only one selection in one race out of the entire ballot.
For example in Arizona and Nevada, 5% and 7% of the ballots were people who only voted for Trump.
He explains how easily it could occur particularly with the ability of Starlink, headed by Elon Musk. He also explains that a hand recount would clear this up.
Mr. Spoonamore is imploring Kamila Harris to request a HAND RECOUNT as only she can do. He states that a hand recount will determine the correct number of votes for the 2024 presidential election.
People interested in pushing for Harris to have a hand recount should contact SMARTELECTIONS.US
Stephen Spoonamore substack.com/@spoonamore
Stephen Spoonamore Twitter/Threads/BlueSky: @spoonamore SUBSCRIBE
Check out the video
This was covered on Planet America.Just after
I wonder if the good data scientist looked at another startling anomaly.
There was an extra 25 million votes in the 2020 election. Where did they all go?
Why did 25 million people in the US decide to vote in 2020 that had not voted in the previous elections, and then did not bother to vote in 2024?
Given that 2020 had lockdowns, limited travel, mail in voting and generally had an environment where voting would have been more difficult, how is this possible?
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There was another data digger who went into this with a little more granularity.
The psephologists have a list of what they call the bellwether counties.
In the same way that the election is often decided in the swing states, (this year Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvannia , all of which trump won), these are voting counties that have largely shifted with the changes from blue to red.
They are counties from all over the country.
As can be seen in the table going back to 1984 in every year bar 2020, the eventual winner of the election won at least 90% of these bellwether counties.
However, in 2020, Trump won 100% of these bellwether counties, and yet lost.
2024 they returned to normal, Trump won the election, and won 100% of these counties.
Both of these outcomes are such outliers from the norm, that it is amazing that the US election officials have not made some sort of investigation into what was so weird in 2020.
But then perhaps they already know.
Mick
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You saying they found an extra 25 million additional votes?This was covered on Planet America.
When the voting was completed there was actually additional votes overall. That information is based on partial results.
You saying they found an extra 25 million additional votes?
This would only answer part of the question.
I went to the US FEC where the results of all presidential elections are held.
The final certifed results had harris 72,197,031 some 9 million short of Biden in 2020.
Some may have gone to trump who finished on 77,302,580, but the total of 152,417,580 is still 6 million less than the 158,429,631 for the 2020 election.
Where were they prior to 2020?
In 2016 the total vote was 136.7 million
In 2020 it was 158.5 million, a difference of 22 million voters.
2020 still remains a statistical outlier in numbers voting.
Secondly, it does not answer the granular issue of the bellwether counties.
It is such an outlier that the odds are astronomical.
Mick
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