I ANSWER UNPLEASANT QUESTIONS AS TRUTHFULLY AS POSSIBLE
You know, I answer controversial topics, because that’s my job, and I know the data. And so I’ve ended up being one of the people that counter-signals anti-everything.
So I sort of get angry now when I get asked to respond to questions like this, only to have my posts redacted by someone *helping to preserve ignorance and deceit* under the guise of protecting people from uncomfortable truths. In other words, protecting their market for falsehoods from correction. Because that is what all of us do. We all seek information that confirms our priors, because our priors reflect our age, gender, class, ethnic, racial evolutionary strategies. And it would be against evolution’s interests for us to seek the truth, rather than whatever is in the interest of our reproductive strategy
The main stream media tells stories that advance the postmodern (anti-aristocratic, meaning paternal, meaning anti-western, anti-meritocratic ) narrative. There are very good economic reasons for doing so. There are very good secular religious reasons for doing so.
There are a lot of self defense shootings, perhaps daily, but they media doesn’t report it so that they aren’t seen as advancing the use of violence.
Black on white hate crime is rarely reported. White on black hate crime is over-reported. The media tries to cast mass killers as conservative, yet as far as I know, all mass killers are liberals. The media tried to report that conservatives were less intelligent. This turns out to be an artifact of the population sizes, not reality. (There are a lot of self-identifying conservatives, and few self identifying liberals). For example, republicans are smarter than democrats, but liberals are smarter than conservatives. Libertarians are the smartest of all. THey’re just statistically insignificant.
I would go into the reasons for this but that’s for another time.
Research “False Consensus Bias”, and all the other social cognitive biases.
- The business (like Quora, FB, Google,), the media, academy(including schools) and the government produce ‘stories’ that sell. Not truths. BEcause they all have ‘customers’ to satisfy by ‘marketing’. And in exchange for producing that marketing, they obtain ‘power’. Economic power, academic power, and political power.
- There is a greater market for comforting falsehoods than uncomfortable truths.
- It is much cheaper to produce comforting falsehoods than produce uncomfortable truths.
- Cheap and comforting falsehoods spread faster than expensive and uncomfortable truths.
- It is (usually) prohibitively expensive to falsify (reverse) desirable falsehoods with undesirable truths.
But for some of us, out of statistical consequence, uncomfortable truths are precisely what advance our reproductive strategies. And so we soldier onward, as does everyone else.
And those of us who understand science, economics, and history are forever the victims of the many who understand none of them.