Monday, February 24, 2020

Does polling provide an accurate reflection of what we think - who do you trust to explain what is important to you?

Three examples of polling figures that at first glance could be surprising:

From Today's USA Today:



Which seems to conflict with one from a YouTube video I saw recently from one of my new favourite YouTubers: Johnny Harris on his latest vlog called Why People Think the World is Flat, Johnny shows a poll from Yougov...



Wow.

And finally, I found this while searching for Sanders  (funny many links to belt sanders were mixed with the politician) on DuckDuckGo this morning. 



I'm sure behind each of these are other stories of question bias, statistics and assumptions.  For example, I quickly found an article explaining the extraordinary flat earther numbers - "No, One-Third of Millennials Don't Actually Think Earth Is Flat.

These are all contributing artifacts to what I've been paying attention lately - we live in highly complex time and place and very few people truly understand the things they see in the news, see on their favourite YouTube channels, or skim books about economics or the reasons why they have such strong opinions about science, religion, politics or Lizzo.

Who do you trust to explain what is important to you?

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