The Americans according to the Americans
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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When the media lies to you all day you tend to get a warped perception of reality.
I'm torn between interpreting this as NPCs being NPCs and people just being really horrible at estimating using numbers.
Have you ever once seen any statistic at all where the general public was good at estimating it? Even something as simple as estimating lengths of time. I can't tell you how many times someone has described a two second interval as "half a minute", which would make them off by more than a factor of fifteen. Almost everyone I know does it.
Or how about a topical issue, the gas crisis? Every time gas goes up, there's a surge of new Prius buyers, even though if gas went from $2 to $8 and stayed there permanently, an average person would only be saving like $200 a month on gas, which means it would take over 12 years to break even.
Never trust an untrained person to be able to process numbers.
It's probably a combination of both. People aren't good with estimating numbers, but when almost every bit of western entertainment media shows disproportionately large amounts of minorities and LGBTQAHFKANSHDNADHSJ people, it definitely doesn't help.
It's hypereality.
The media didn't lie to anyone about the number of left-handed people. I think people just aren't good at estimating these things.
Well, kinda. The media talks about minorities non-stop. As such people overestimate how many of them there are.
I would like to see how these numbers compare to non-western countries that don't prioritize "diversity" or raising minority voices to be equal with the majority. I remember watching Sesame Street and learning that left-handed people are just as as normal as right-handed people and we shouldn't bully people because of differences. Even something as harmless as that makes us more "conscious" of those differences, and we might assume they represent a large segment of the population. Han Chinese don't give a shit about any of that and will bully anyone they please. Ask an Arab how many gays are in his country and he will say 0%.
and that 0% is still too high for him