False belief: That in the U.S. the death penalty was cheaper than life in prison.
Believing this wasn’t rational. I didn’t take such basic steps as looking up the costs surrounding executions or life imprisonment. Executions get much more appeals, trials and legal attention.
False belief: That in the U.S. deaths by firearm are generally homicides, not suicides.
Believing this also wasn’t rational. I didn’t take such basic steps as looking up available death statistics.
Actually, looking through things potentially on the list for me, a lot of them seem to have the following general form:
1: Something is asserted.
2: I think: ‘Yeah, that sounds plausible.’
3: I don’t bother to look up any data about it, I just move myself to the believe column.
4: Later, someone else reports data about it.
5: I’m surprised that my earlier beliefs were wrong.
I’ve since became more skeptical of believing things based on just assertions, (I can even recall a recent instance where an assertion popped up on TV which my wife believed, but which I was skeptical of and which upon looking it up we found data didn’t support it and that they were massively overstating their case)
But I can definitely recall beliefs that I have had in the past that were fundamentally just assertion based and the followed the above pattern.
False belief: That in the U.S. deaths by firearm are generally homicides, not suicides.
I would have expected accidents to lead that metric. A quick check of the actual data says it’s negligible. Time to rescind my support for gun lock laws (except perhaps to reduce the likelihood that people purchase guns in the first place).
False belief: That in the U.S. deaths by firearm are generally homicides, not suicides.
This never occurred to me until now. It’s not something I find at all surprising. It’s just that I’ve never heard anyone talk about gun control and suicide, so it wasn’t something that I ever considered related to the issue of gun control.
It’s just that I’ve never heard anyone talk about gun control and suicide, so it wasn’t something that I ever considered related to the issue of gun control.
Heh. That’s conclusive evidence that you’ve ever heard only one side of the gun control debate.
The anti-gun side widely uses “gun deaths” numbers which, as you just found out, contain suicides. The pro-gun side subtracts the suicides to get to actual “homicide using a gun” numbers. That’s a very early and basic point in the debate.
You’ve just found that a major component of this debate was completely foreign to you. Now you’ve quickly decided that it’s so silly you should make fun of it. Use the Try Harder, Luke.
Most of the debate is foreign to me. I’ve heard general arguments, but I’ve never once bothered to look into the numbers. I am not ignorant of the debate because I was irrationally assuming no additional information exists. I am ignorant because I never felt the need to stop being ignorant.
If you think the average person who kills themselves with a gun is even in the ballpark of the reference class that the word “euthanasia” suggests, your intuition about the latter needs recalibrating.
People commit suicide opportunistically, not (generally) in a planned-out way. So it makes sense that Democrats, who favor government interference in life choices for the greater good, support something that reduces your opportunity space for suicide.
Of course, Republicans also support government interference in life choices for the greater good, just for different things (abortion, birth control access, sexual health education access, etc.). Really, it doesn’t matter whether the beliefs are consistent, because nobody really thinks about this and few if any people who are debating gun control bring up these topics.
Thinking about this comment reminds me of an important point.
I do have a smartphone in my pocket and I can look up that information in seconds, quicker than I can type this post.
I don’t recall exactly when I shifted that belief, but I think it was before I had a smartphone, which means that looking it up would probably take at least minutes, instead of seconds, which may be coloring me thinking now ‘I should have just looked up some facts.’
Regardless of the status of beliefs about facts about the U.S. death penalty in particular, I agree there exist certain facts that are worth seconds looking into, that aren’t worth minutes looking into (or any other appropriate combination of time increments)
Believing this wasn’t rational. I didn’t take such basic steps as looking up the costs
Believing a proposition X with some probability, without checking it, isn’t irrational. I’m very confident that the core of the moon isn’t made of cheese, even though no one has ever checked that. The whole point of theorizing is to jump from a limited number of empirical observations to general statements about the world.
False belief: That in the U.S. the death penalty was cheaper than life in prison.
Believing this wasn’t rational. I didn’t take such basic steps as looking up the costs surrounding executions or life imprisonment. Executions get much more appeals, trials and legal attention.
False belief: That in the U.S. deaths by firearm are generally homicides, not suicides.
Believing this also wasn’t rational. I didn’t take such basic steps as looking up available death statistics.
Actually, looking through things potentially on the list for me, a lot of them seem to have the following general form:
1: Something is asserted.
2: I think: ‘Yeah, that sounds plausible.’
3: I don’t bother to look up any data about it, I just move myself to the believe column.
4: Later, someone else reports data about it.
5: I’m surprised that my earlier beliefs were wrong.
I’ve since became more skeptical of believing things based on just assertions, (I can even recall a recent instance where an assertion popped up on TV which my wife believed, but which I was skeptical of and which upon looking it up we found data didn’t support it and that they were massively overstating their case)
But I can definitely recall beliefs that I have had in the past that were fundamentally just assertion based and the followed the above pattern.
I can’t up-vote this enough. This is such a useful pastern to understand.
I would have expected accidents to lead that metric. A quick check of the actual data says it’s negligible. Time to rescind my support for gun lock laws (except perhaps to reduce the likelihood that people purchase guns in the first place).
This never occurred to me until now. It’s not something I find at all surprising. It’s just that I’ve never heard anyone talk about gun control and suicide, so it wasn’t something that I ever considered related to the issue of gun control.
Heh. That’s conclusive evidence that you’ve ever heard only one side of the gun control debate.
The anti-gun side widely uses “gun deaths” numbers which, as you just found out, contain suicides. The pro-gun side subtracts the suicides to get to actual “homicide using a gun” numbers. That’s a very early and basic point in the debate.
So the blues, who are in favor of euthanasia, count suicides as a problem, and the reds, who are against it, do not? Ironic.
You’ve just found that a major component of this debate was completely foreign to you. Now you’ve quickly decided that it’s so silly you should make fun of it. Use the Try Harder, Luke.
Most of the debate is foreign to me. I’ve heard general arguments, but I’ve never once bothered to look into the numbers. I am not ignorant of the debate because I was irrationally assuming no additional information exists. I am ignorant because I never felt the need to stop being ignorant.
If you think the average person who kills themselves with a gun is even in the ballpark of the reference class that the word “euthanasia” suggests, your intuition about the latter needs recalibrating.
Or maybe your intuition about the former needs recalibrating.
Not really. It’s just demagoguery, dark arts. A bigger number is more useful as a heavy blunt object to beat your opponent over the head with.
Well most of the arguments I heard against euthanasia are slippery slope arguments that euthanasia will lead to increasingly less voluntary euthanasia.
Blues are not uniformly in favor of euthanasia; I’d call that a Grey cluster belief, largely.
Well, means matter, as the saying gos: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/
People commit suicide opportunistically, not (generally) in a planned-out way. So it makes sense that Democrats, who favor government interference in life choices for the greater good, support something that reduces your opportunity space for suicide.
Of course, Republicans also support government interference in life choices for the greater good, just for different things (abortion, birth control access, sexual health education access, etc.). Really, it doesn’t matter whether the beliefs are consistent, because nobody really thinks about this and few if any people who are debating gun control bring up these topics.
Being ignorant of certain facts isn’t being irrational.
Thinking about this comment reminds me of an important point.
I do have a smartphone in my pocket and I can look up that information in seconds, quicker than I can type this post.
I don’t recall exactly when I shifted that belief, but I think it was before I had a smartphone, which means that looking it up would probably take at least minutes, instead of seconds, which may be coloring me thinking now ‘I should have just looked up some facts.’
Regardless of the status of beliefs about facts about the U.S. death penalty in particular, I agree there exist certain facts that are worth seconds looking into, that aren’t worth minutes looking into (or any other appropriate combination of time increments)
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
See Rational ignorance.
Believing a proposition X with some probability, without checking it, isn’t irrational. I’m very confident that the core of the moon isn’t made of cheese, even though no one has ever checked that. The whole point of theorizing is to jump from a limited number of empirical observations to general statements about the world.