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Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

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Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All federal judges are lifetime. https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/about-federal-jud... https://thehill.com/regulation/3631564-five-things-to-know-a...

That's what I was pointing out, friend. HN is one of those internet communities where people reply with what I read as an aggressive tone, but they agree with me, and it's as if they are angrily correcting me but they didn't realize I was saying their same thing. Is that just my perception?

I wasn't being aggressive, I was filing in the blanks for others that might be interested.

Your comment encouraged me do the research myself (I didn't remember who else was lifetime from my high school classes in the late 80's) and I figured I'd share that, as well as, give another link that explains a bit more context to what I felt you left out.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#83

I think this is a product of mass social media and mass media. Effectively, we amplify propaganda one way or another. It leads to false impressions and we are unable to make decisions based off real information. This survey (which imo is not very robust) simply highlights the fact we are uninformed as a population. This is a failure primarily of our news media (the big 5) and education. Easy example, we believe mass…

>A child is ~100x more likely to die from a drug overdose than a mass shooting, and ~10x from a car crash. Yet our perception is skewed because of what we see in the news / shared.

Wait, I have the opposite reaction to the car crash comparison. Is that accurate? It blows my mind that the odds of a child in the US dying in a mass shooting is only a single order of magnitude less than the chance they die in a car crash...

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#84
There is a severe demographic problem with this study (among others). A current trend in the social sciences is using Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific to run surveys. These sites are based around paying people pennies to compete menial tasks (like complete surveys), and populated with large numbers of "professional" menial task executers. This study offered the big bucks of $1.50 - $2.25. There are two major problems with this:

1) It doesn't matter how you normalize a sample when that sample is a niche subsample of society to begin with. This has always been a problem with the social sciences which previously relied heavily on undergraduates in social science classes, but that is going to at least be much closer to something like a representative sample than Amazon Mechanical Turk or Prolific can offer.

2) The people carrying out the tasks are motivated primarily by blazing through as many studies as possible while doing the bare minimum to get paid, and many fail at even that. In this study ctrl+f for "attention check." To this study's credit, they at least included numerous attention checks, but it emphasizes the issue. On average about 1 out of 6 participants were excluded for failing to correctly answer questions along the lines of "Please select C as the answer to this question."

Journals are likely indulging this because it's going to generate endless "impact" (which is increasingly becoming a euphemism for clickbait), but it's undermining the entire field more than ever before.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#85

The actual title is > Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change Not "Study: Americans consistently overestimate how much culture has changed." And from the abstract > Participants overestimated the amount of change on 29 attitudes (57%), underestimated change on 10 attitudes (20%), estimated change in the wrong direction on 10 attitudes (20%), and estimated change correctly on only two attitudes (4%). (o…

Look at the methods. The most accurate title would be: "Americans taking online surveys for pennies consistently overestimate how much culture has changed." I went into more detail here [1], but the sample is based on Amazon Mechanical Turk/Prolific. This survey is not just only Americans (or at least those that can pass for such; they had to be able to answer: "students in their second year of high school are called sophomores, that granola would be an unusual dish to serve at a Fourth of July barbecue, and that dialing 911 connects the caller to emergency services"), but an extremely biased subset of such.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32775623

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#86
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chronically misunderstood, early Michel Foucault goes one step forward than this and asks "Why not just remove the human as catalyst of truth entirely? What if humans are just the canvas for knowledges rather than the other way around?" Another way to look at his hypothesis: what if truth and knowledge are no differently anonymous automata than the processes of biological evolution with respect to individuals?

The ancient greeks did not have this relationship to (written) knowledge. Greeks had to have a human vouch for the validity of the written document. Tying truth to written history is noble but also flawed.

[deleted]

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#87
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what you think happened under the Clinton era to cause the financial crash of 2009. Most of the immediate things, such as the housing boom driven by easy lending policies, happened under Bush. So I'd need a reference to support that idea. However I'll give you another one. Most people's impression is that Carter destroyed the economy and Reagan's deregulation saved the day. But actually the facts are a…

Not OP, but the Glass-Steagall Act was repealled in 1999, under then-president Bill Clinton, and is posited as a substantial contributor to the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_the_repeal_of_the... > https://web.archive.org/web/20111019192852/http://prospect.o... >

Canada had no equivalent of the Glass-Steagall Act, but its banks didn't suffer like the US banks did. Why would the seperation of commercial and investment banks only be important in the United States and not in other countries?

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#89
When I read it correctly, then one should correct these misperceptions in long-term attitude change when the resulting political mindset runs counter to one's own...

The fact stated at the beginning, that people adopt what they believe to be the general trend, is what's truly frightening since it can so easily be exploited by mass media and algorithms.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#90
post #83

I think this is a product of mass social media and mass media. Effectively, we amplify propaganda one way or another. It leads to false impressions and we are unable to make decisions based off real information. This survey (which imo is not very robust) simply highlights the fact we are uninformed as a population. This is a failure primarily of our news media (the big 5) and education. Easy example, we believe mass…

>A child is ~100x more likely to die from a drug overdose than a mass shooting, and ~10x from a car crash. Yet our perception is skewed because of what we see in the news / shared. Wait, I have the opposite reaction to the car crash comparison. Is that accurate? It blows my mind that the odds of a child in the US dying in a mass shooting is only a single order of magnitude less than the chance they die in a car crash…

Both car safety and emergency medicine have got a lot better over time.

In Czechia, the death toll from car crashes is one third of what it used to be at the end of the last century. And people definitely do not drive less.

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