The maybe-you-aren't-special heuristic

I'm going to make this one quick and messy (I really need a better phone dictation app) because my schedule is getting tight and when this happens, my idea-to-attention span ratio gets even worse than normal, but I want to make sure to get this point in print reasonably quickly because it's likely to feature in some upcoming and ongoing threads.

Everyone is aware of the dangers of assuming that your perspective is representative. There is, however, an opposite error in reasoning which largely goes undiscussed despite occurring frequently and being often just as dangerous.

If we limit ourselves to extremes, assuming that your experience is completely unrepresentative makes even less sense than assuming it's completely representative. If you picked a person at random out of the population, you wouldn't start out with the assumption that he or she was an outlier. You would certainly admit it was possible, after all, n = 1, but you would probably consider it more likely that he or she was somewhere closer to the mean.

At this point, we need to make the distinction between assuming a fact vs considering a possibility. While you shouldn't assume that what you see is what everyone else sees, unless you have some reason to think otherwise, you should always allow for the possibility.

One of the things that struck me listening to This American Life’s coverage of the 2008 financial crisis was that, at every stage of the process, people observed that their part of the system had extremely troubling problems but they were sure that this wasn’t representative of the system as a whole. They were, of course, wrong.

In an age of hype and AstroTurf, it becomes even more important to remember that you may not be the exception. When you find yourself having what seems to be an unusual reaction or holding a minority opinion you should remember that what seems to be a popular consensus is often a facade based on massive marketing and PR campaigns with budgets sometimes hitting the multi billion dollar mark.

I'm drawing a blank for musical accompaniment, so here's a catchy non sequitur for your weekend.