Yostivanich

One of the argu­ments that I hear for why peo­ple express an –ism belief (racism, sex­ism, ageism, etc), is that they had this expe­ri­ence with this one per­son and you know that must be how every­one of that par­tic­u­lar group is. I love this kind of rea­son­ing it’s so illog­i­cal it’s almost funny and yet peo­ple do it all the time.

Venn Dia­gram: Subsets

Math­e­mat­ics will let you know that a sub­set is not always equal or the same as the larger set con­tained in it.

So why is that peo­ple assume that it is? Who knows, I sus­pect it has some­thing to do with the same rea­son we are bad at assess­ing on an intu­itive level risk.

Be that as it may, maybe it would be fair for peo­ple who make those sort of assump­tions that a sub­set is the whole set to decide that white Amer­i­cans are out to destroy Amer­ica, or that Chris­tians want to kill peo­ple and blow up build­ings. Yet we don’t assume that because it just isn’t true.

So do you still think the one is the many and that many is all or is it pos­si­ble that it just isn’t true?