• 207 Posts
  • 2.11K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 17th, 2023

help-circle



  • Oh yes, liberals absolutely are way worse about this, but I do see it even with actual leftists. It feels like with “centrists,” the deal seems to be what you described: a sort of “well, certainly the leopards won’t eat my face, and I don’t like messing with the status quo because it works well enough for me.” However, with some leftists, it seems to be more about an optimistic view of “the human condition” and an assumption that people are, by and large, good and want to do good (even to folks they don’t know).

    I’m a degrowth anarchist myself, and since I live in Finland, I get to enjoy proportional representation. I vote for a democratic socialist party that is at least reasonably close to my values and actually has a chance of landing parliament seats and governmental positions. Over the decades, I’ve noted that many “actual” leftist voters and politicians are maybe a bit… well, let’s say a bit too upbeat about what sort of animal Homo sapiens actually is. These are folks who genuinely do care about “woke” stuff like intersectionality and put in the work towards really changing things, but who seem to think that deep down, everybody wants a just, more equal society and not a hierarchical hellhole where the “strong” dominate some “lesser” social classes (foreigners, poor people, whatever)


  • People don’t give precise percentages though when surveyed. They might round to typical fractions like 1/4, 1/3, or they might round to 10 or 20 percent.

    Nobody is saying “hmm, I estimate that it would be approximately 37 percent”.

    Of course the wisdom of the crowd does wonders for smoothing those coarse estimates, but still, if the crowd is +/- 10 of the real percentage value, I’d say they’re pretty much on the money.

    Oh yes absolutely, people would definitely just “eyeball” their estimate and the percentages we see in the graphs are population (well, sample) level averages, but I’d still say that the differences between these average estimates and actual reality are by and large much worse that “on the money”. To illustrate, if the estimate for some country was eg. 30% and the real proportion 40%, the relative error – off by a factor of 1.33 – would be smaller than if the estimate is 12% and the real value 2% – off by a factor of 6 – even though both have a 10 point error.

    So eg Poles’ and Argentinians’ estimates are both 12 percentage points off, but because Poland’s immigrant population is smaller that means that they overestimated its real size by 650% and so their estimate was 7.5x higher, but Argentinians were “only” off by 460% / 5.6x. 'Strayans were off by 7 points, but their relative error was only around 23%, which is still almost a 1/4 error and their estimate looks like it was the best out of these. The average global error was 100%, so on average people think there’s 2x as many immigrants as there actually are, and characterizing that as “pretty much on the money” is, well, maybe a bit generous



  • If Trump was just a normal businessman, he never would have gotten elected. His base likes the horribleness. They think he will be horrible only to people they feel deserve it.

    So many on the left seem to think that deep down people are good, and that if they just knew all the horrible shit conservatives are saying and planning they wouldn’t vote for them. There’s just this near-total refusal to acknowledge that for a scarily large proportion of the population, that horrible shit is their reason for voting for conservatives, and not only will pointing it out not help, trying to educate them generally just won’t work.









  • Thank you ❤️

    Yeah the colors are all there, the buildings in that area have a sort of copper-like cladding on them so they’re pretty funky just by themselves, and people really seem to like wild room lighting. I actually just realized I never did an sRGB conversion of this so I don’t know how it looks on most monitors.

    Here’s the original unedited version:

    Just looks a bit more subdued compared to how vividly orange everything there is when using the Mark I Eyeballs