I have continued to neglect this blog, but as I've managed to make at least one post in each of the past few years, I didn't want to let 2021 go by without posting anything. The following is something I recently wrote after noticing a common thread in the claims and arguments made by anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, anti-immigrant xenophobes and so forth.
One defining characteristic of right wing extremists (and left wing extremists as well - but they are far less numerous and influential, and usually can be safely ignored) is an inability to grasp nuance. A related deficiency is a complete inability to understand the concept of statistical odds and their importance in evaluating information about public matters. This can be seen over and over again in relation to a wide variety of issues. For example, they experience a few cold days or even a cold winter in their particular location, and they claim that it proves the world is not heating up. They hear about a few isolated instances of undocumented immigrants committing crimes and they claim it proves immigrants in general are a dangerous threat. They read about a tiny handful of people voting illegally and declare voter fraud to be rampant. A very tiny minority of people happen to die shortly after receiving a covid-19 vaccine, and they claim that all of them were killed by the vaccine. Similarly, a few vaccinated individuals die of covid-19 and they claim it proves that vaccines are useless. In every one of these cases, the actual statistics prove the exact opposite of what they claim, but they insist on treating statistical outliers as absolute proof of their beliefs.
This total failure to understand numbers also appears in their arguments in favor of whatever irresponsible behavior they want to engage in. This is most clearly seen recently in arguments about vaccines and mask wearing. They will say things like, "If you have been vaccinated/are wearing a mask, why should you care about what I do? Isn't your mask/vaccine supposed to protect you?" But of course masks and vaccines, like seat belts, motorcycle helmets, and bullet proof vests, do not offer absolute and total protection, they just greatly reduce the odds of the danger in question affecting you. Other people's behavior also affects those odds, in a very substantial way when it comes to a contagious virus. Even a person who is fully vaccinated and wears a mask in public will have higher odds of catching the virus and possible becoming seriously ill if they are repeatedly exposed to unvaccinated, unmasked carriers of the virus. A poor grasp of the concept of relative odds is also seen in arguments about other issues. For instance, while scientists generally won't say that a particular weather event is "caused" by climate change, they will say that climate change increases the odds of certain events occurring or increases their severity. So of course heat waves, droughts and hurricanes have always occurred and would still be occurring even if we hadn't altered the climate. But global heating has caused increased the chances of such event happening and made them more severe.
Going back to issues related to the pandemic, we frequently see right wing idiots and other anti-vaxxers make claims about thousands of people dying from the Covid-19 vaccines. Even if these claims were true, it would be clear from the relative numbers (number of deaths/number of Covid-19 cases versus number of deaths/number of people vaccinated) that getting Covid-19 is far, far more dangerous than getting vaccinated. But the claims themselves show a failure to understand (or a deliberate misuse of) basic statistics. Hundreds of thousands of people die every day. If you randomly select a group of a million people, it is guaranteed that some of them will die in the next few days. At this point, the vaccine has been given to billions around the world, and over two hundred million in the US. So statistically speaking, we would expect some of them to have died soon after getting the vaccine. That doesn't mean the vaccine had anything to do with their deaths. In fact, if out of all those vaccinated *no one* died within a week of getting the vaccine, that would mean the vaccine was not only safe but was some kind of miraculous protection against death. Of course in reality it only protects against death from Covid-19 (and even there it is not quite 100% protection), so it couldn't stop other things from killing those who got it. But anyone who attributes all deaths that happened to occur soon after vaccination to the shots is guilty of either an extremely poor grasp of statistics or malicious falsehood.
For another example, there is claims about voter fraud, which I already mentioned above. I once saw someone trying to argue that voter fraud was rampant by listing dozens of supposed cases. While that might have swayed someone who didn't stop to think about it, just a little thought was enough to show the flaws in this "evidence". Even assuming that every case was genuine, by the poster's own account these cases occurred over a span of a number of years (I forget the exact time period, but it was about a decade, or even more). In that period many tens of millions of votes were cast in national elections. Even a few hundred cases of actual voter fraud would have had a completely negligible impact on the results of those elections. But again, an inability to understand numbers could lead some people to a conclusion that is contrary to reality.
Similarly poor logic is seen in anti-immigrant rhetoric. Xenophobes will point to cases of violent crimes committed by undocumented people to fearmonger about immigrants as a whole. But there are over ten million undocumented people in the US, so of course out of all those people, there will be a few who commit serious crimes. But statistics show that on average, immigrants are actually less likely to commit major crimes than native-born Americans. It's just that people don't use examples of crimes committed by native-born Americans to make broad claims about natives -- unless of course we're talking about Black Americans, in which case some of the same people who fearmonger about immigrants will claim crime cases involving Black people prove that they are "criminally prone". Interestingly, these people do the opposite when police officers commit egregious acts; first they will bend over backwards to defend them, but if even they are forced to admit that in this case a police officer has committed an indefensible act, they will claim it's just one "bad apple". Even ignoring the fact that the original saying is "one bad apple spoils the bunch" and that unlike the situation with a group like immigrants, with police officers we are dealing with an institution where bad behavior can easily become part of a common culture, it is ridiculous that the same people who want to punish all immigrants for the crimes of a few not only reject the very possibility that the crimes of a few police officers might be indictive of a wider problem, they fight even holding those "bad apples" accountable. But then even their usual blanket defense of the police gets dropped when the latter act in opposition to right wing extremists, as in the case of the assault on the Capitol at the beginning of this year.
Another example of right wingers using isolated cases to paint with a broad brush in a law and order context is the Black Lives Matters protests last year. The vast majority of those protests were totally peaceful, and where violent clashes did take place, they were in many cases instigated by the police or in a few instances right wing provocateurs. But because there were a few cases of rioting and looting by protesters, the right built a narrative in which America's cities were aflame due to rampaging Black Lives Matter protesters and "antifa", another group that they have turned into a bogeyman that bears very little resemblance to the reality.
When climate change is mentioned, you will sometimes see deniers make sarcastic comments about everybody holding their breath to reduce CO2, even though the exhalations of all the humans in the world contribute a negligible amount to the overall carbon budget. More commonly, as I mentioned above, they'll use cold weather in some place as "evidence" that the world is not warming, when of course global heating doesn't mean that cold weather or even record-setting cold will never occur, just that in any given year, far more new record highs will be set than record lows, which is in fact what has been occurring (of course, major alterations in climate may even cause certain regions to become colder overall, even as most of the world becomes hotter). And since the warming trend has become so obvious that even deniers are finding it harder to act as if it isn't happening, many of them have now shifted to claiming that humans are not responsible, because, as they say, the climate is "always changing". But this again demonstrates an ignorance of the actual numbers involved as well a basic failure of logic. The latter comes from the fallacy in claiming that because climate change has happened from non-human causes, that somehow proves that humans can't cause it. Many other phenomenon, such as wildfires, happened before humans existed, but obviously that doesn't mean humans never cause them. But the other point is that while climate change has happened before, on Earth and on other planets, the changes that are occurring now are unnaturally rapid and correlate very closely to the dramatic increase in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere resulting from human actions.
Among more recent examples, other than absurd claims about Covid 19 and the vaccines against it, there was another situation where the extreme right has themselves talked about "statistical odds" in making outrageous assertions, and that was the 2020 presidential election. Some guy who had studied math but was not a professional mathematician or statistician of any sort claimed that he had found trends in the vote count that were mathematically improbable on a scale of a quadrillion to one or some other absurdly exaggerated number, and this claim was spread all over by right wing conspiracy theorists. But it wasn't necessary to be a math expert to find such claims extremely dubious. Both the final vote counts and the way the results in different states trended in first one direction and then another were entirely consistent with polling, past results and pre-election predictions (most prominently, that in places where mail-in ballots were counted later, the initial results would favor the orange idiot, but later results would favor Biden). In every election, there are sudden shifts in the numbers when results start coming in from places that strongly favor one candidate. For example, if results from rural voting precincts come in first, the Republican may take a large lead, but then when urban precincts start reporting, the Democrat may quickly catch up and leap ahead. This is completely normal and anything but "statistically improbable". Nor was the huge number of votes for Biden surprising, considering the strong motivation felt by a majority of the country's people to vote the former guy out of office. If any number related to the election struck me as improbable, it was the number of votes for the latter. How that many people could look at the corruption and utter incompetence on display in the previous four years and actually come out to vote for more of it is difficult to fathom - but then so are the failures in basic logic that I've discussed here.
Naturally, it would be unreasonable to expect the average person to have enough knowledge to make precise judgments about statistical odds in any given situation. But in the cases above, what we see is complete failure to grasp even the most basic concepts involved, the sort of thing that anyone with a modicum of common sense should be able to understand. I have written before about the importance of critical thinking ability, and how the lack of it is at the root of many of the problems we face today. This is a subset of that. Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to diagnose the problem than it is to solve it. But if a way can be found to educate at least the majority of people to better understand these concepts, it would go a long way toward reducing the problems we face.
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