Judges think that police detectives have a sixth sense when it comes to sniffing out a perp on the street with a gun.  Why?  Because in every case that comes before them, some cop, despite having no objective basis whatsoever (recognizing the “furtive movements” is a total sham offered to appease the search and seizure gods), came up with a gun.  Or drugs. Or something proving that cops are so special that they can smell crime a mile away.

This is the “availability heuristic,”  Mike at Crime & Federalism wrote about it the other day (and does so with some regularity).  Then Jeff Lipshaw wrote about it at PrawfsBlawg too.  And as someone who adores such concepts, I started giving it some thought as well. 

The availability heuristic is a cognitive bias that makes us believe that x is more or less likely based upon our last experience with x.  See Wiki entry. (“The availability heuristic is a phenomenon (which can result in a cognitive bias) in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.”)

Or as Lipshaw puts it, a behavioral psychology phenomenon where the “conclusion [is] based on the availability, not the correctness, of the data.”   One of the aspects of writing stuff here that’s come to bug me is that new readers, or the day tripper (the reader who comes upon a single post because of an interest in a particular case or issue) believe that nothing existed prior to (or beyond) whatever it is they’ve read. 

SJ has been around for a little more than three years, but during that time I’ve written more than 3000 posts covering a fairly broad spectrum of things and ideas.  Yet, I’m defined in the eyes of readers/commenters by whatever shows up on the front page, or possibly just above the fold.  If it happens to be in favor of, or critical of, something with which the reader agrees, I’m the cat’s meow.  If it happened to skewer a sacred cow, I’m the mean, crabby old man.  If it addresses a nuanced detail of a broader subject, they want to explain to me their vision of the broader issue.  As if I hadn’t written about it a dozen (or a hundred) times before in similarly nuanced detail.

The internet is a big place, with people of all heights and hair colors able to access a computer and come across posts of interest.  Some come here because they are criminal defense lawyers and have some interest in the subject matter.  Others just to see if they can grab some backlink juice for their hemorrhoid treatment.  Others to show how smart they are.  If you think there are a lot of comments that come across the screen, you have no idea of how many I trash in the process.  Some because they are just blitheringly stupid, and others because they are offensive or annoying, at least to me.

Newbies on the internet, and particularly in the blawgosphere, think they’ve invented the place in their first few minutes online.  Some are good writers, but lousy thinkers.  There are a lot of lousy thinkers out there, but they don’t necessarily see it.  Pretty much everybody thinks they’re brilliant, and to the extent that others don’t appreciate them, it’s because everyone else is stupid.  Maybe that’s my problem as well. 

To each new person who shows up here, it’s the dawn of a brand new day.  Nothing exists before they arrived, and they feel empowered to tell me what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong.  When I tell them to go fly a kite, they tell me what a jerk I am.  After all, from their perspective, they’ve done me a great favor by correcting the error of my ways by imparting their brilliance.  I’m not sufficiently appreciative.

It’s bad enough that people come here to try to jump on my soapbox and give their spiel.  Some, whether lawyers or not, write some incredibly banal crap, and I’m torn about whether to allow it, whether to call them on it or whether to ignore it.  For those who have followed my posts for some time, they know where I stand on many of these matters, but the person who doesn’t thinks my allowing some idiotic comment to pass without response suggests that I agree with it, or can’t muster response to it.  Mind you, stupid people find the stupid comments of other stupid people far more persuasive than others. 

It’s tiresome, trying to deal with the availability heuristic.  If I wrote less, it would be less tiresome, but I write what I want, and as often as I want, and on whatever subject I want, and then find myself having to deal with the detritus.  My reality is that I address conclusions based on this phenomenon when I feel like it, and ignore it when I don’t.  Of course, this gives rise to a completely new round of erroneous conclusions, based upon whatever my last reaction was, and just becomes increasingly tiresome.

Before you jump to whatever brilliant conclusion you believe to be justified by whatever it is you just read, without regard to the 3000+ things that I’ve written beforehand and about which you know nothing, do me a favor and make sure your fly is zipped.  I couldn’t bear to think that I ponder what to do about your brilliance while you’re walking around with your fly down.

Postscript to Norm:  Yes, Norm, I know this is self-indulgent, but I’m allowed the occasional wallow.   So give me a break.