Holy cow! These numbers are absolutely, brutally shocking to me. I honestly expected sports betting to be a small fraction of a percent of the general population, not t h i r t y—n i n e percent!! I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone I know IRL (Canada) even talk about sports betting, so this wasn’t on my radar at all. I was thinking of sports betting as some niche hobby by a few dedicated superfans, and definitely not something that over a third of the general population did last year.
Those raw numbers truly are a punch in the gut of my pre-existing worldview, hot damn. My initial reflex is that these numbers can’t possibly be real, nor the various charts talking about billions in “handles” and double-digit percent bankruptcies. But uh, I guess I’ll take your word for it. Holy shit, I’m reeling.
I feel like we’re the blind men with the elephant more often than we’d like to admit. A lot of the time when two people make conflicting claims about society, really they’re both right about their substrate of society and the world is just twice as big as either thought.
Another shocker for most people: 20 million people in the US live in trailer parks. People with similar life circumstances tend to accumulate in similar places, only see those places, and thus vastly underestimate the diversity of life experience. (This is also true of everything in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter)
Holy cow! These numbers are absolutely, brutally shocking to me. I honestly expected sports betting to be a small fraction of a percent of the general population, not t h i r t y—n i n e percent!! I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone I know IRL (Canada) even talk about sports betting, so this wasn’t on my radar at all. I was thinking of sports betting as some niche hobby by a few dedicated superfans, and definitely not something that over a third of the general population did last year.
Those raw numbers truly are a punch in the gut of my pre-existing worldview, hot damn. My initial reflex is that these numbers can’t possibly be real, nor the various charts talking about billions in “handles” and double-digit percent bankruptcies. But uh, I guess I’ll take your word for it. Holy shit, I’m reeling.
I feel like we’re the blind men with the elephant more often than we’d like to admit. A lot of the time when two people make conflicting claims about society, really they’re both right about their substrate of society and the world is just twice as big as either thought.
Another shocker for most people: 20 million people in the US live in trailer parks. People with similar life circumstances tend to accumulate in similar places, only see those places, and thus vastly underestimate the diversity of life experience. (This is also true of everything in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter)
I mostly agree, but it’s a double-digit percent increase in bankruptcies which ends up being (from the post)