I agree that twitter is not a representative example of public opinion. However, opinions widely held on twitter are widely represented in the public, and therefore need to be understood and addressed. If you find 99/100 people in a neighborhood are Jewish, that doesn’t mean the city is 99% Jewish. But it does mean there are enough Jewis…
I agree that twitter is not a representative example of public opinion. However, opinions widely held on twitter are widely represented in the public, and therefore need to be understood and addressed. If you find 99/100 people in a neighborhood are Jewish, that doesn’t mean the city is 99% Jewish. But it does mean there are enough Jewish people in the city that we can’t proceed assuming they aren’t here.
I don’t think that anyone who is thinking critically and choosing their words carefully will generalize it to a whole political party. But I do think there is a valid observation that on twitter one party has a larger set of members who are engaging in the logical fallacy with more frequency and to a more absurd extent than the other party.
Is every Republican therefore guilty? No. Is every Democrat therefore innocent? Of course not.
But it’s reasonable to extrapolate that twitter is representative in this particular way of what non-twits are thinking. Right now it’s happening a lot on the right, in extreme and ridiculous ways. And we don’t see the same thing to the same degree from the left.
I agree that twitter is not a representative example of public opinion. However, opinions widely held on twitter are widely represented in the public, and therefore need to be understood and addressed. If you find 99/100 people in a neighborhood are Jewish, that doesn’t mean the city is 99% Jewish. But it does mean there are enough Jewish people in the city that we can’t proceed assuming they aren’t here.
And those viewpoints should be analyzed and understood. Not, generalized to entire political parties representing tens of millions of people (R or D).
I don’t think that anyone who is thinking critically and choosing their words carefully will generalize it to a whole political party. But I do think there is a valid observation that on twitter one party has a larger set of members who are engaging in the logical fallacy with more frequency and to a more absurd extent than the other party.
Is every Republican therefore guilty? No. Is every Democrat therefore innocent? Of course not.
But it’s reasonable to extrapolate that twitter is representative in this particular way of what non-twits are thinking. Right now it’s happening a lot on the right, in extreme and ridiculous ways. And we don’t see the same thing to the same degree from the left.