Q coo ca-choo

Humans suck. Not at everything, but at some things that really matter. Like analyzing risk. We spend billions, maybe trillions of dollars if you count the forever wars in which we are currently engaged, trying to prevent "terrorism" which, relatively speaking, is not a very big risk for most of us. Okay, if you live in Iraq you may have something to worry about.

Globally, diarrhea is far more likely to kill you. Or just being a child under 5 years old. In America,  driving a car or eating too many french fries will probably get you. But nobody advocates going to war against automobile companies, or fast food chains, even though they kill vastly more people than terrorists.

Global Death Toll

Graph courtesy of Oxfam

Why do we suck so badly at making rational decisions based on actual data? Well, "Fixed Mindsets" for one. We just plain use the wrong methods for calculating risks. We rely on habitual logical processes, even if they are inappropriate for solving the existing problem at hand.

The reason I've been thinking about this tendency to make poor decisions based on faulty assumptions informed by the full array of cognitive bias is because recently a friend started rambling about something called QAnon. Now this guy has a bit of a tendency to believe moderately nonsensical stuff like that chiropractors are medical doctors, that fluoride causes men to grow breasts and that vaccination causes autism, all of which are, pardon my French, complete bullshit. So I wasn't entirely surprised to hear that he's being drawn into some new Trump-based, right-wing conspiracy theory. But what he started to describe far exceeded anything I could have imagined. I mean this is some seriously wacko stuff.

In order to comprehend it, you apparently have to spend all of your waking hours on the internet. Ain't nobody got time for that, as they say. Here's a handy chart that explains it:

Rube Goldberg to the Information Desk. Calling Rube Goldberg...

If, like me, you don't care enough to do your own research, Jim Jefferies has interviewed a few prominent Qanon "researchers". See it and weep.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/bpzs3w/taking-a-deep-dive-into-qanon-s-claims

Fun to laugh at whack jobs, but it is sobering to think, as the piece indicates, that one of them currently occupies the white house. ZOG help us all.