I am realizing something that many, many intelligent people are guilty of - collecting and hoarding and accumulating crap, useless information. This is dangerous, because it feels like you're doing something useful, but you're not.
However, speaking personally - once I decide to start focusing and researching something systematically to get better at it, it gets harder to do. For instance, I taught myself statistics mostly using baseball stats. It was a fun, easy, harmless context to learn statistics.
I read lots of history and historical fiction. I read up lots on business and entrepreneurship. This is easy and fun and enjoyable.
But then, when I decide to really hone in, it becomes much harder. For instance, I'm doing some casual research on the history of insurgencies and asymmetrical warfare. This is the kind of thing I'd read all the time for fun, but now that I'm working on it systematically, it becomes a lot harder.
Likewise business and entrepreneurship - I read lots and lots on technology, financing, market research, marketing, etc. But now that I'm really nailing down one aspect for my next business, it becomes almost strenuous to work on that.
It's like... collecting and hoarding useless, unfocused information is for us what collecting and hoarding a bunch of useless consumer shit is for most people. I'd reckon that people that hang out here are smarter with money and less into buying junk, but, at least for me, I'm spending a lot of my time buying junk information.
Alright, back to reading about Tienanmen Square and Rome/Carthage and the Tet Offensive, and nailing down the buying criteria and budgets of the market I want to be in. Why it is so much easier to focus and collect crap mentally than to do it systematically on meaningful topics? Do you do this? I seriously doubt I'm the only one...
With respect to what reference class? taw took "falls of empires" and dismisses 100k casualties out of half a billion people (half a billion? [1]) as tantamount to "never happened". I took "the state of things before the USSR went away" and rate 100k casualties and 2M refugees out of the population in the region where this happened as "going to hell in a handbasket".
But if you look at anything from far enough away, you won't see it.
[1] Half a billion in Eastern Europe? Eastern Europe here means that part of Europe which was under the control of the USSR. Estimating this to be all the non-EU European countries, plus all former subject states of the USSR that joined the EU since 1989, minus Switzerland, I get less than 200M (source: various Wikipedia pages). Adding Ukraine (which I don't classify as part of Europe, though some might; certainly nowhere farther east counts) gets another 45M. Maybe taw is including the entire population of the USSR and its subject states in his reference class for "where this happened"?
Just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not taking a stand on either side; I'm not well-informed enough.