Category Archives: Society

“False Consensus” & the “Majority Illusion”

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Since I was a kid, I would read anything that end up near my hands.  Old newspapers, magazines, medical books, mechanical engineer manuals, old enciclopedias, everything.

So I keep doing this as a matter of fact, i click and go to places in the metaverse that most people have never been or would not even venture there. For me it became obvious that I can read anything I want, most sites, even those closed have always a way to get in, a promotion, a special key, a partnership that exposes their content and a lot of them have RSS feeds that is easy to bring into your own site.

While I was doing this during my moments of rest from work, I have the 24/7 video feed from the Political Conventions to watch. First the Republican and now the Democrat. Think of this, two full weeks of so many speeches, so many concepts to dig on.  It is like having a kid in a candy store.

Then it hit me that almost all of them, both sides seem to be totally disconnected from the real world, their assumptions and what they believed to be truth were totally far away from what the rest of Americans and the rest of the world are living day to day.

There are very smart people dedicated to analyze social behavior, people like me that have a specialization in Sociology, just they have more time in their hands and have been able to

  •  “Majority illusion”
    • When people are convinced that what is common among their friends and relatives, co-workers, sports club, etc. is more common than it actually is in the rest of the world, they enter this amazing zone.  
    • Constant visitors and some permanent residents here are Presidents, Prime Ministers, CEO’s and a lot of those that fall into the famous Marie-Antoinette (bride of France’s King Louis XVI)  “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” … 
    • What happen in the augmented networking capacity that the WEB has brought is that this illusion is causing even more people, to reach wrong conclusions about how common a behavior is, leading them to accept as a norm a behavior that is globally rare.
    • This is why a very small amount people can create a big BOOM and send it as a a global issue, bu also it also helps to understand why observations and inferences individuals make of their peers are often incorrect.
  • “False Consensus”
    • The “False Consensus” effect arises when individuals overestimate the prevalence of their own features in the population, believing their type to be more common. Thus, Democrats believe that most people are also Democrats, while Republicans think that the majority are Republican.
  • “Pluralistic Ignorance” is another social perception bias. This effect arises in situations when individuals incorrectly believe that a majority believes something or accept as absolute rules that themselves do not share.

This America seems to apply to everything.. that is why we can have fake news, fake friends, fake personas, fake everything and they will be believed and followed..

 

Is the USA becoming a POLICE STATE?

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I remember the times when people around the world used to admire how American will respect and trust their Police. when I was a kid, growing up in Mexico City and traveling around the country and Central America, my Father will always remind us to be careful specially with the Police and to never approach them unless there was an adult with me. Police in many countries around the world is perceived as “Pirates with the King’s license”… For many years

We used to fight against ANY State where police could detain you for any reason, that will hit you and beat you for just watching them the wrong way.

There was this dream among many around the Globe that now they all became corrupt, the typical first step for any “Police State” that we talk and hated so much about Communism. Our US scholars used to call the regimes of URSS, China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, etc. the “POLICE STATES”.

USA history of intervention to bring down so many governments because they have NO respect for the locals and the heads of those States have decided that they were THE LAW. In must cases POLICE or ARMY was not worried about the safety of society but they were defending a condition that allows them to become above the LAW.

Some will say that this POLICE or ARMIES acquired a life of their own imposing their own laws and became a rogue body inside those countries.

We seem to be heading the same way.

Once again, our best and finest NYPD – the way Giuliani, Bloomberg, Bush, etc. called the best int eh country- have attacked again. Like a POLICE MOB, they move and beat the hell out of a single person. How are we supposed to trust the efficiency and training of our Police if they can not deal with ONE single person ? This finest POLICE men and women – video is clear both participate equally – are the same that are not able to find those in motorcycles ( some of them police on their free day) attacking and scaring a little girl when they hit his father and his mother. Of course that will be too much to ask, they are not going after their own. That is exactly the definition of the MOB or a POLICE STATE.

Ironic, as these “brave” men and women were piled on top of one man, pummeling him into the ground, the brave and finest NYPD look nervous and concerned about being surrounded and outnumbered by an angry (but non-violent) crowd.

The video is very clear, when our Police have to always beat people, outnumber them, we should all be concerned.  When our children look at this, what is going to be their reaction when a member of the Police Department in an y City in the US , ask them to stop ? If it was me I will be running…

I remember how many bystanders were beaten by the NYPD during Mr. Bloomberg Dictatorship ( yes, he was that at the helm of NYC, he modified the local laws so he can reelect himself an extra period, just like the same people the US fights around the world, Chavez or Maduro in Venezuela, La Junta in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile, Mao in China, Stalin and Lenin in the USSR) just because they were in the wrong place, during the Occupy Wall Street movement?   The Police didn’t came as Heroes except for the Bankers and the Wall Street Tycoons – useless leaders at running their own companies that the Government had to intervene and save them – that sounds to me like so much government intervention, but of course our friends at Fox News won’t see it that way.  Government, too much of it, is ok as long as it defend the CAPITAL, not the SOCIETY.

I was reminded by so many people that in the US you can NOT demonstrate freely, you need a permit, but we think that the Chinese Government is wrong because one guy started a demonstration in front of the Tanks in Tiananmen or because a large number of people in HongKong decided to demonstrate and were taken out of a Park – sounds familiar Mr. Bloomberg?- or we decide to bomb a whole country because the local government decides to “control popular demonstrations”… of course as long as it happens in other places is wrong but we will NOT accept people demonstrating against ANYTHING popular in the US without beaten them and making sure they are hospitalized or even dead by choking.

According to the WashingPost 559 people shot dead by police this year, that is much more than crazy people going into theaters or schools or public places armed and shooting randomly.

We are in the brink of a revolution : REMEMBER THAT THE WOLF LIVES UNTIL WE SAY BASTA!!