Mind Reading is a Social Problem
This is a short essay on politics, social policy, and logical fallacies. If you think mind reading is another name for telepathy, your not wrong. Mind reading is also a logical fallacy in which we believe we know what other people are thinking.
You don’t know what people are thinking. You have little chance of guessing what complete strangers are thinking. You have even less chance of characterizing the minds of a large group you’ve never studied in anything like a scientific way.
Believing otherwise leads to some unfortunate consequences, or at least that’s a risk. Let’s see what that statement means by looking at mind reading about a couple of timely social issues in the United States.
Liberals Want All the Guns
Liberals think all conservatives are afraid “assault weapons” will be banned this year and all firearms will be banned next year. That’s because liberals want to disarm the public. They are both reading minds and quote mining old statements by liberal politicians.
In truth, people on the Left have a range of views on gun control. Some of them likely would ban private ownership of firearms if they could. What percentage though? Is it 2% or 25%? Pundits and hard-Right politicians need the percentage to be as high as possible, so they will lie. If Mark Levin says Democrats want all the guns and doesn’t present any polling data, he is lying. If you repeat that kind of feverish nonsense, then you are participating in a lie. In the days of Google, it is a bit hard to excuse a competent adult who shares feverish nonsense about people on the other end of the political spectrum.
It is equally unlikely that Lucy Liberal or Paul Progressive want all your guns. If they make statements in support of banning “assault weapons” it does not mean they are after ALL the guns. Anyone who encourages you to think otherwise is lying to you, perhaps on purpose. (I’ll defend this kind of statement in future posts; for now, just know people like this always have an agenda). Some liberals make these lies easy to tell by saying ignorant or outlandish things.
Liberals Want Open Borders:
See, you’ve read the mind of every liberal in the country and realized they all want open borders. All liberals believe the country should stop trying to control immigration and stop trying to deport illegal immigrants. They probably think the country deserves to be flooded by drugs, gang members, and disease-ridden vagrants. Right? You should know that’s all nonsense.
Maybe all Republicans secretly had immigrants, at least the Brown people, and want to run them out of the country. Or maybe you’ve been pretending to be a mind reader and inferred as much. You can get anything out of a few irate, cherry-picked rants. People say things without thinking, or write them. Anyone who wants to pick out a theme will be able to. Liberals will be able to find evidence that all conservatives hate immigrants. Conservatives will be able to find proof that all liberals want everyone’s guns.
Mind Reading and Downward Spirals:
Accusations fly both ways. Conservatives don’t care about dead kids. Liberals don’t care about our borders. Some people write that stuff, others just think it. Either way, drawing wild and irrational conclusions like that can turn someone off the idea of rational discussion. In those examples, neither side really knows anything. They know a few comments that a sample of liberals or conservatives shared. They extrapolate from there and feel they’ve read minds. They haven’t. Neither have you.
Knowing What People Really Think:
Getting at what conservatives really think about immigration or liberals really think about gun ownership isn’t all that tough. Pew, Gallup, and others publish polls. Ignore activists and the scientifically illiterate to explore that polling data. Doing so might not dispel any illusions of reading minds, but it might help. You might even decide that reading some random comments or watching a couple of YouTube videos hasn’t taught you anything.
