[ExI] kruger dunning again

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] kruger dunning again

 

>…A huge amount of American grassroots political rhetoric makes enormously more sense when you realize that a significant number of lower-income Americans actually genuinely believe that the billionaire class, collectively, has enough money to give American citizen tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly not even miss it.

 

>…This was made obvious a few months ago when a newscaster overestimated Bloomberg's campaign spending (or underestimated the American population, or both) by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, and it went unnoticed by the overwhelming majority of the media class, and their audience.

 

>…If you genuinely believe that, then yes, it follows without a lot of mental gymnastics that the giga-rich /actually are/ reptilians in human skin [or may as well be] playing games with the lives of billions for profit and perverted fun.

 

>…Innumeracy may be the root, if not of all evil, at least of all discontent… Darin

 

 

 

 

 

Hi Darin your theory holds up, with the exception of:  

 

… a significant number of lower-income Americans actually genuinely believe…

 

Neither the lead anchor at NBC News Brian Williams and the NY Times editorial board member Mara Gray are lower-income Americans.  It would be difficult to find people with income so low they could make this six orders of magnitude error, present it with such sincere gravitas and not realize it:

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1235816570602975233

 

They kept the joke alive, with a warning to the viewer:  The following media includes potentially sensitive content.

 

(…heeeeeeehehehehehehheheeeeeeeeee…)

 

Oh mercy, sensitive content!  Flee to safe space, immediately!

 

These are the people responsible for shaping the news narrative.  OK then.

 

Wait, do let me retract, that is unjustified generalization.  Not all news people are this dumb.  Clearly these two are, and the camera crew, the lighting crew, the producers, all missed this enormous flub.

 

We did this to ourselves, with the language.  Having rhyming words for our big numbers was a mistake.  The guy (don’t recall the name) who won California’s nomination to run for POTUS often conflated “millionehs and billionehs” as if they were the same thing.  These are two very different things.  Google street view, Santa Clara County, there you will see enormous smeared-out residential neighborhoods, ordinary suburban dwellings, mow the lawn in ten minutes, your car stretches from the garage door to the sidewalk, just ordinary proletariat dwellings.  Then go into Zillow and note that all these homes are worth over a million dollars, none of them even close to a billion.

 

Here’s a screen shot from Sunnyvale, which isn’t even the trendy-spendy-high-endy part of the valley, just pokey little Sunnyvale.

 



 

California nominated a guy who demonized them.  He never had anything good to say about millionehs and billionehs.  Perhaps the locals failed to realize everyone who owns any of these tightly-packed homes likely has a net worth over a million dollars.

 

spike

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200511/32a56262/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 81716 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200511/32a56262/attachment-0001.jpg>