That's a really good point about cars. It ties in with what I used to use as an example of availability bias with students: (not) paving over the forests. I found pretty reliably that if you ask students if we are paving over forests/wild lands they will almost all say yes. Then show them a satellite map and data on wild lands and whoops, nope. So why does it seem like that? Because most people only go where there are not wild places. Growing up in the middle of nowhere the vast amount of nowhere was always obvious, because you had to drive through it for a LONG time to go to a movie or a store.
There really is something to that. My dad used to work in a youth detention center out in the middle of nowhere. Most of their kids came from Allentown and Philly. One thing that was very common was for the inner city kids to be shocked that there were so many white people. Literally, they didn't realize there were that many white people in general. Far from realizing white people were the majority, they had just never seen that many to begin with because they didn't leave their neighborhoods much.
Now, that's an extreme case; juvenile delinquents are often ignorant like you wouldn't believe. (Not stupid necessarily, but they just don't know anything.) But still, if you can't go anywhere public transit doesn't go, you are going to have a very narrow view of the world, in a very specific way. Much more so if all your time in a different environment is as a tourist instead of a resident.
I'd say at least some of this has to do with differences in perspective based on location, but I'm skeptical that it's most of it. A good example is one you mentioned - police shootings of unarmed black men. If we think of a number that a city has to have to "feel like it has a lot of police shootings of unarmed black men", maybe we'd say five, or maybe we'd say ten. But in the first case we'd have four cities that "felt like they had a lot" and in the second case only two, and then we'd be completely out of unarmed shootings of black men for that year. Every other city would have zero.
So there has to be at least something else going on here; I generally favor "uncritical belief of things that make you feel moral". Ditto with the starving thing - they know it's not true or could know if they spent any mental time on it, but they don't - since the reason for that definitionally has to be outside of what they are observing.
I'd say that's part, definitely. I think just as much a belief that things have to be the way they are, and if their team wasn't in power things would be much worse, is the only thing keeping them from having to accept that their long held beliefs are wrong. Harmfully wrong.
It is a religion that peculiarly demands sacrifices of non-adherents while granting indulgences to the faithful. You don't ever see white wokesters sacrificing their own careers at the DEI altar.* That's someone else's duty.
*I don't recall any. Willing to be instructed more perfectly in this regard.
Good call... I missed that I wrote shooting unarmed black men then switched to police abuse in general after. I had meant to include both, specifically thinking of Baltimore with their litany of police abuse cases (not just shootings) and Philadelphia's notoriously corrupt police forces. Just shootings alone is a very small number, you are quite correct.
I agree with the "uncritical belief of things that make you feel moral" point as well, and I suspect that is a big part as well. I do think though that there is some honesty there as well, just the honesty of "I don't really leave my immediate area much, so I don't know what is happening other places. It's probably a lot like here, I guess." I think that ties in with your point, because the correct thing to think would be "Holy shit, I guess the politicians I keep voting for are incompetent or monsters, because things just stay bad!" but instead people believe they are good people who want good things, so there must be some other force keeping these problems from being solved, not just in their home city but all over.
Imagine confronting the truth that every vote you have ever cast to help people has actually resulted in the election of politicians who make everything worse, and needlessly so. Hell, I felt a bit guilty voting for Bush 2, although the alternative would have likely been much worse. Imagining the horror of coming to grips with "Everything you did was actively harming things" would be like Lovecraftian levels.
You write: "Leftist hyperbole is just parochialism"
"Parochialism is the state of mind, whereby one focuses on small sections of an issue rather than considering its wider context. More generally, it consists of being narrow in scope. In that respect, it is a synonym of "provincialism". It may, particularly when used pejoratively, be contrasted to universalism."
From my link:
"The midwit is incapable of drawing on multiple streams of information, from many different domains, to understand the novel information in the broader context of a system. To compensate, the midwit turns inward, focusing with increasing resolution and detail into the confines of the information itself. To the midwit, this is nuance. To the genius, he is missing the forest for the trees. To the idiot, he is gullible."
That is a very good article, thanks for the link! The bit about seeing the individual puzzle pieces in great detail but not trying to put them all together really struck a chord with me. I have often found myself pointing out to people that not everything they were saying could all be true at the same time precisely because not all the pieces fit. Compartmentalizing everything too much seems to be a common problem with the US educated.
My only argument against the article is that as much as I love Sherlock Holmes stories, he does make some BIG leaps now and again, such that there are many ways the evidence could be accounted for with very different stories. Still very good mystery writing, however! Probably my favorite mystery writer of the earlies.
Agreed, I have never seen a good way of teaching it, and honestly don't know how myself. The best expression of how to do it comes from Robin Hanson's adage that we should put all the evidence on the table and only then start to theorize so that we can account for all of it instead of making ad hoc rationalizations for a bit here and a bit there. Still, outside of practice and raw talent for it, I don't know how people get to synthetic thinking.
That's a really good point about cars. It ties in with what I used to use as an example of availability bias with students: (not) paving over the forests. I found pretty reliably that if you ask students if we are paving over forests/wild lands they will almost all say yes. Then show them a satellite map and data on wild lands and whoops, nope. So why does it seem like that? Because most people only go where there are not wild places. Growing up in the middle of nowhere the vast amount of nowhere was always obvious, because you had to drive through it for a LONG time to go to a movie or a store.
So you're saying the problem is not the homeless, it's the carless!
There really is something to that. My dad used to work in a youth detention center out in the middle of nowhere. Most of their kids came from Allentown and Philly. One thing that was very common was for the inner city kids to be shocked that there were so many white people. Literally, they didn't realize there were that many white people in general. Far from realizing white people were the majority, they had just never seen that many to begin with because they didn't leave their neighborhoods much.
Now, that's an extreme case; juvenile delinquents are often ignorant like you wouldn't believe. (Not stupid necessarily, but they just don't know anything.) But still, if you can't go anywhere public transit doesn't go, you are going to have a very narrow view of the world, in a very specific way. Much more so if all your time in a different environment is as a tourist instead of a resident.
I'd say at least some of this has to do with differences in perspective based on location, but I'm skeptical that it's most of it. A good example is one you mentioned - police shootings of unarmed black men. If we think of a number that a city has to have to "feel like it has a lot of police shootings of unarmed black men", maybe we'd say five, or maybe we'd say ten. But in the first case we'd have four cities that "felt like they had a lot" and in the second case only two, and then we'd be completely out of unarmed shootings of black men for that year. Every other city would have zero.
So there has to be at least something else going on here; I generally favor "uncritical belief of things that make you feel moral". Ditto with the starving thing - they know it's not true or could know if they spent any mental time on it, but they don't - since the reason for that definitionally has to be outside of what they are observing.
I'd say that's part, definitely. I think just as much a belief that things have to be the way they are, and if their team wasn't in power things would be much worse, is the only thing keeping them from having to accept that their long held beliefs are wrong. Harmfully wrong.
It is a religion that peculiarly demands sacrifices of non-adherents while granting indulgences to the faithful. You don't ever see white wokesters sacrificing their own careers at the DEI altar.* That's someone else's duty.
*I don't recall any. Willing to be instructed more perfectly in this regard.
Good call... I missed that I wrote shooting unarmed black men then switched to police abuse in general after. I had meant to include both, specifically thinking of Baltimore with their litany of police abuse cases (not just shootings) and Philadelphia's notoriously corrupt police forces. Just shootings alone is a very small number, you are quite correct.
I agree with the "uncritical belief of things that make you feel moral" point as well, and I suspect that is a big part as well. I do think though that there is some honesty there as well, just the honesty of "I don't really leave my immediate area much, so I don't know what is happening other places. It's probably a lot like here, I guess." I think that ties in with your point, because the correct thing to think would be "Holy shit, I guess the politicians I keep voting for are incompetent or monsters, because things just stay bad!" but instead people believe they are good people who want good things, so there must be some other force keeping these problems from being solved, not just in their home city but all over.
Imagine confronting the truth that every vote you have ever cast to help people has actually resulted in the election of politicians who make everything worse, and needlessly so. Hell, I felt a bit guilty voting for Bush 2, although the alternative would have likely been much worse. Imagining the horror of coming to grips with "Everything you did was actively harming things" would be like Lovecraftian levels.
Reminded me strongly of this piece: https://theredqueen.substack.com/p/its-a-midwit-world-and-were-living
You write: "Leftist hyperbole is just parochialism"
"Parochialism is the state of mind, whereby one focuses on small sections of an issue rather than considering its wider context. More generally, it consists of being narrow in scope. In that respect, it is a synonym of "provincialism". It may, particularly when used pejoratively, be contrasted to universalism."
From my link:
"The midwit is incapable of drawing on multiple streams of information, from many different domains, to understand the novel information in the broader context of a system. To compensate, the midwit turns inward, focusing with increasing resolution and detail into the confines of the information itself. To the midwit, this is nuance. To the genius, he is missing the forest for the trees. To the idiot, he is gullible."
That is a very good article, thanks for the link! The bit about seeing the individual puzzle pieces in great detail but not trying to put them all together really struck a chord with me. I have often found myself pointing out to people that not everything they were saying could all be true at the same time precisely because not all the pieces fit. Compartmentalizing everything too much seems to be a common problem with the US educated.
My only argument against the article is that as much as I love Sherlock Holmes stories, he does make some BIG leaps now and again, such that there are many ways the evidence could be accounted for with very different stories. Still very good mystery writing, however! Probably my favorite mystery writer of the earlies.
Agreed, I have never seen a good way of teaching it, and honestly don't know how myself. The best expression of how to do it comes from Robin Hanson's adage that we should put all the evidence on the table and only then start to theorize so that we can account for all of it instead of making ad hoc rationalizations for a bit here and a bit there. Still, outside of practice and raw talent for it, I don't know how people get to synthetic thinking.