In my experience people who express this kind of view (a slightly-sweeping, slightly-cynical take on the prevalence of shitty people) also tend to be epistemically overconfident of their grasp on social situations. For example, my opinion of the following quote is that it sounds contrived (Not contrived for the blog post, but contrived in the sense that the "brought the hair with her" hypothesis is itself contrived).
> My experience serving/bartending in restaurants was the same... As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision.
My take is that there's less shitty people and more shitty Bayesians :)
So if I found a hair in my meal, I'd let my server know. It's gross, but it happens This woman found a hair in her meal and threw a fit. Whether she planted it or not (which is definitely a thing people do), she was not being reasonable in that situation.
I agree she was being unreasonable. The article claims that 3%-5% of people are "terrible" and "just wanted to be mean, nasty, selfish brutes" and the quote I used was used by the author as evidence for that claim. The author takes a situation where someone was being unreasonable and then throws in a hypothesis based on tenuous reasoning.
I mentioned it in a comment elsewhere in the discussion, but I've got one coworker who is just a terrible person, another that treats others terribly when he isn't getting his way, and used to have a third who would treat his reports like crap if they didn't worship the ground he walked on. I've got a couple family members who are just unabashedly nasty to everyone. There's a couple more who are just awful to service workers because they think they're lesser for the work they do. Those are just the people I have to directly deal with on a regular basis.
The author apparently logged the number of people who were jerks over the course of a given time and and that's how they came up with the numbers they used. Whether those people are awful all of the time, who knows. I know there's a number of people in my life who are just terrible people all of the time. Of course, they think they're the nicest people in the world and are the victims in every situation.
The lesson in the article is to be decent to everyone and if someone's nasty in return, ignore it and focus on the people you can help. The numbers aren't necessarily the point, but from my experience, it's a reasonable estimate.
> My experience serving/bartending in restaurants was the same... As an example: one time a lady threw a huge fit about a 2-3 inch smooth brown hair being in her meal when her server was a blond girl and the entire kitchen staff were 35+ year-old Mexicans/ African Americans with completely shaved heads. Now I'm not saying this woman brought the hair into the restaurant and planted it in her meal... but I know for a fact it couldn't have been from any of our staff in the restaurant, so you can make your own decision.
My take is that there's less shitty people and more shitty Bayesians :)