“Here’s the deal: the world population of Jews falls within the margin of error of the Chinese census, and everyone hates us.”

{12} It is easy to overlook how unrepresentative—often wildly unrepresentative—our personal “samples” often are. Actually, very few if any of us really know a representative sample of other people. Yet we constantly generalize about other people as a group, such as when we make claims about “human nature,” or even how our town might vote in the nex

It is sad truth that conclusions from such samples, biased or too small or both, lie behind much of what we read or think we know.

The outcome of having a dense network is insidious but powerful. It means only the narratives which can go viral do go viral. The collective epistemic commons becomes filled with those narratives which outcompete the others and muscle their way to the top. It means that at a time of unprecedented low unemployment, high wages, high standard of livin

One difference that continues to animate the dynamics of many regions is religion. No religion claims a majority of the world’s people. Nearly a third of the world’s population, or 2.3 billion people, are Christians, while close to a quarter of humanity, 1.8 billion people, are Muslims. Just over 1 billion are Hindus, nearly 500 million are Buddhis

Jews are only 2 percent of the United States population, but they are the target of 50 percent of national religion-based hate crimes.