Can Bad Number Sense Amplify Deadly Hate?
Here's a dire reason to be curious about the numbers around you
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Number sense is a recurring topic here at Range Widely.
I’ve written about how estimation skills can help you assay breaking news, and last week I wrote about how basic number sense led this newsletter to correct a peer-reviewed paper.
This weekend, after an 18-year-old White man drove into a Black community in Buffalo and live-streamed himself fatally shooting 10 people at a supermarket, I wondered whether bad number sense can, in the extreme, amplify deadly hate.
“Replacement Theory”
According to law enforcement officials, the shooter posted a 180-page manifesto online just before he went on his murder spree. The manifesto is centered on so-called “replacement theory,” the idea that White Americans are being replaced by minorities — in this shooter’s case, specifically by Blacks and Jews — and will cede their political power.
According to The Buffalo News, the shooter took to replacement theory “when he was 16 and pandemic boredom drove him into the darker corners of the web.” As the shooter himself put it: “I never even saw this information until I found these sites.”
Among the information he found was a replacement-theory manifesto written by a 2019 shooter in New Zealand, who killed 51 Muslim worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch.
Estimates So Bad They Might Be Dangerous
Replacement theory is a fear-stoking ideology. I’m not particularly interested in discussing that claim further.
But I do wonder if an actual understanding of demographics might make it harder for one to be radicalized around this particular “theory.”
At the end of this sentence, please stop reading for a moment and estimate the percentage of the U.S. population that is composed of Muslims. Take at least a few seconds to think…
Seriously, just guess; nobody’s grading you.
In the Ipsos 2016 “Perils of Perception” study, the average American guess was 17%. The actual answer is 1%. That is a startling magnitude of error.
Let’s say you meant to make the three-hour drive from New York City to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (to check out the incredible Midtown Scholar Bookstore, naturally) and overshot by that magnitude, going 17 times the actual distance. You’d end up in Los Angeles.
While we’re at it, what percentage of the American population is Black? Jewish? Make a guess! Again, you’re not getting graded, and according to a psychological finding known as the “generation effect,” you’ll better retain the correct information if you struggle to come up with your own answer first.
Answers:
-Black people make up 13.4% of the U.S. population.
-Jewish people make up 2.4% of the U.S. population, and about 0.2% of global population. (The shooter who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 was also into replacement theory.)
I think people's awareness of the numerical context of their world has a major impact on, for example, what they’re afraid of, and how they view inequality. I’ve been in rooms of 0.1-percenters who talk about the 1% as if they’re someone else.
On that note, the Ipsos study asked: “What percentage of total household wealth do you think the least wealthy 70% own?”
The average American answer was 28%. The correct answer: 7%.
Be Curious About The Numbers Around You
Morning Brew (probably my favorite newsletter, alongside Eric Barker’s Barking Up the Wrong Tree) noted that replacement theory, “once a far-right fringe concept…has been increasingly cited on cable news.”
According to a poll conducted in December by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, one in three American adults “believes an effort is underway to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.”
If there is such a plot afoot, it’s not going so well. According to data from the Census Bureau, immigrants make up a smaller percentage of the American population than they did in the late 19th century.
Our values around not killing people obviously shouldn’t depend on how prevalent those people are. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if these killers would be more resistant to radicalization if, while spelunking the internet, they became as curious about the numbers around them as they are about finding reasons to hate people.
I think we should all strive to develop number sense for our world, especially because it’s so easy now to find basic data with a few seconds of search. Perhaps familiarizing young people with the numbers around them would also be a great thing to do in school, year after year.
If you’re interested in improving your number sense, just spend a few minutes searching for a relevant number next time a news story intrigues you. Or just peruse the best website on the internet, Our World in Data.
No need to be perfect with your number sense, but I think there is an urgent need to be curious.
Thank you for reading. If you think this post might help counteract the dangers of bad number sense, please share it. (Tag me on Twitter or Instagram so I can thank you.)
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Until next time…
David