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Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

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Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#121

Post by eliasmacpherson »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #108
somenameforme wrote: post #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 probl…

The need for representative sampling is something understood by first year undergraduates on first exposure to the concept. What you've written is the reddit equivalent of criticizing a study with "correlation does not imply causation". Yeah, scientists are familiar with the idea, believe it or not. Scientists in fact go to great lengths to ensure their sampling is representative, and studies published in good journa…

Without getting into a snark, that is not a particularly good book to recommend.

https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/kahneman-and-tversky-re...

"Taken all together, the chapters Schimmack looked at earned an average grade of C-minus."

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#122

Post by danuker »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #103
somenameforme wrote: post #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 probl…

Sorry, but the public social sciences are dead anyway. If you want to do research on humanity you go were the actual data is. FGN. Everything else is peanuts.

What is FGN?

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#123

Post by MichaelCollins »

autoexec wrote: post #104
lettergram wrote: post #47

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…

> 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. Media gets the most blame here I think. Fear gets views/clicks so they exaggerate and promote a victim mentality to the point where people believe there's a "war on Christmas". They also twist the meaning of words. It's easy for people to m…

Media plays a major role but they're not the root cause. Sure, the media exploit our fear for profit and likely make it worse in the process, but how could they do that if the fear didn't exist in us already? Kids in America have a 99% chance of making it to adulthood, but I think every good parent has a least some worry for their child despite that. This worry is probably part of the reason the odds are so good in the first place.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#124

Post by MichaelCollins »

inglor_cz wrote: post #90
mb7733 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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

Don't let the walkable city and cycling activists hear you say that. From the way they tell it, modern cars have become rampaging murder machines.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#125

Post by MichaelCollins »

plorkyeran wrote: post #71
dnissley wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed there is a tendency among folks on the left (and for all I know it's also true of folks on the right) where people who do as you say are cast out and labeled "centrists", creating a dynamic where internal criticism is silenced. I speak as someone who self-identified as on the left for many years, but no longer feels comfortable doing so because of how incurious and closed off to criticism the left has be…

"Internal criticism is silenced" is an... interesting view of the left. A more common view is that endless leftist infighting is one of the things that makes leftists ineffectual.

Insofar as that infighting takes the form of fighting over who is the most or trueist left, casting their opponents as not actually left, there is no contradiction here. The eagerness to use shibboleths, slips of tongue and anecdotal correlations to identify impostures who are merely pretending to be left for underhanded rhetorical reasons is an example of this. Crypto-fascists are the ultimate boogieman.

BTW it's not hard to find examples of the right doing this too.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#126

Post by SilverBirch »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #108
somenameforme wrote: post #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 probl…

The need for representative sampling is something understood by first year undergraduates on first exposure to the concept. What you've written is the reddit equivalent of criticizing a study with "correlation does not imply causation". Yeah, scientists are familiar with the idea, believe it or not. Scientists in fact go to great lengths to ensure their sampling is representative, and studies published in good journa…

Even if you grant the idea that a person working at MTurk is just a normal person, which personally I doubt. You have to contend with both the fact that they're highly likely to be lying about their identity in order to maximize the number of tasks they can be included in, and they're also likely giving trash answers in order to complete the survey as fast as possible. I spent a bit of time doing mturk for a while, and it was absolutely one of the first things I started to optimize - "How do I get through this survey quicker". It's incredibly difficult to earn minimum wage doing mturk, which brings us back to the idea that it's unlikely it's just an average normal person doing it.

It's absolutely possible to produce a rigorous statistical result from the data, but that's useless if the data is all lies.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#127

Post by michaelmrose »

impalallama wrote: post #51
godelski wrote: post #18

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…

The fact that it’s been 30 years and only 4% of people are more concerned about climate change is pretty damn grim

No post body was provided.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#128

Post by bryanrasmussen »

ForHackernews wrote: post #110
raspberry1337 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enlighten me, what does it mean that truth and knowledge are anonymous automata?

It sounds to me like a variant on the idea of a "meme" (in its original sense): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme Consider that ideas (even facts!) might be like mind-viruses: you could imagine they propagate themselves in human minds, but are not actually produced by those minds. What if human minds are just the substrate?

at some point some ideas have to be created by some individual human who then transfers it to others, if we do not agree that the idea created by the individual human is created in their mind then we have to come up with another explanation of what they are created in. If we assume that a new idea, never before propagated creates itself we should have an explanation for how that works, which memetics does not have a current explanation for.

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#129

Post by paganel »

imgabe wrote: post #106
somenameforme wrote: post #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 probl…

I wonder if you could get good survey data by disguising it as a Buzzfeed quiz on Facebook. Just make the title something like "Which Kardashian are you?", then ask whatever questions you want and randomly select a Kardashian at the end.

> quiz on Facebook

The current FB audience is already comprised of those that are over 35-40 years of age. As a early 40s guy myself I couldn't care less who the Kardashians are (I know the Kim lady, there was also a younger lady that did a Pepsi commercial and some former man that transitioned into a lady, Jenner I think?), but, ignoring that (let's say you could target me with sports-related quizzes), the fact still remains that Facebook the platform doesn't target the entire age-spectrum anymore (if it ever did).

Re: Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

#130

Post by comfypotato »

imgabe wrote: post #106
somenameforme wrote: post #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 probl…

I wonder if you could get good survey data by disguising it as a Buzzfeed quiz on Facebook. Just make the title something like "Which Kardashian are you?", then ask whatever questions you want and randomly select a Kardashian at the end.

As someone who has never taken, and will probably never take, a Buzzfeed quiz: I think it probably risks the same kind of sampling bias. Not sure what the best way to overcome this is. Joke: government mandated surveys with monetary punishments based on your net worth if you fail to take them.
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