Short Take: The Tyranny of Bad Estimations

Whether it’s the Spotlight Effect or any of a dozen other biases, the fact is that people are remarkably bad at estimating. Remember the survey wherein progressives were asked how many unarmed black people were killed by police each year?

Overall, nearly half of surveyed liberals [sic] (44 percent) estimated roughly between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men were killed…

The hard number is 27, and of that 27, a vetting of the details may distinguish which were justified and which were wrong.

While 27 may be bad enough, when the spotlight shines too hard on an issue, it creates a false impression that it’s far more pervasive than it is. It’s not that wrongful police shootings aren’t horrible, but that they are blown grossly out of proportion.

As it turns out, this isn’t limited to cop killings. We are shockingly bad at our estimation of most demographics.

And the list continues.

There are two critical points to be made of our national misapprehension of demographics. First, we can’t fix problems when our grasp of the problem is wildly skewed by grossly over or under-inflated estimates of the demographic affected. We perceive a fantasy problem rather than the depth of an actual problem.

Second, we, as a nation, have dedicated ourselves to addressing issues that are believed to be of such broad impact that it involves a substantial portion of our population. It doesn’t. And not even the minority involved has a firm grasp on its own demographic.

Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39%, closer to the real figure of 12%.

This doesn’t mean racial discrimination isn’t a serious issue, but that its extent, and efforts to address it, are premised on a wildly false belief that a privileged minority is oppressing a majority. We can’t solve problems when our understanding of the problem is so absurdly wrong. If you care enough to try to fix societal problems, the best place to start is with facts and a firm grounding in reality.