Comment by lkbm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkbm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> How many people believe Pizzagate is real?

That's a question that made me want an answer. It seems that, as of 2016, it may have been a lot:

> Among the questions asked by pollsters was whether respondents believed that leaked emails stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager and published by WikiLeaks prior to the Nov. 8 election “contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse — what some people refer to as ‘Pizzagate.’ “

> ...

> Specifically, 9 percent of registered Republicans who responded to the question said the allegations were “definitely true,” coupled with 40 percent of Republicans casting the claim as “probably true.”[0]

A different December 2016 poll[1] also seems to put "yes"/"definitely" at it at 14%[1] with a lot of "maybes".

Given the margins in US Presidential elections, it seems like the answer is "enough to matter". (Not that I think PizzaGate turned anyone from voting for Clinton or to voting for Trump, but fake news stories probably swayed a lot of voters overall.)

[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/28/pizzagate-t...

[1] https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

A few thoughts here.

First, the difference between the two surveys is probably because they asked very different questions.

YouGov's question doesn't actually ask if Comet Pizza was a front for a sex ring, or if Clinton was involved in same. It only asks whether leaked email from Clinton staffers contained code words on the topic. It's still not something I think is true, but it appears that "yes" means "yes the memo with those code words existed" and "probably" means "the email probably existed and probably its wording was code for this stuff". Public Policy Polling asked about Clinton and the pizzeria being connected to a real ring, and consequently saw more 'no's.

Second, this looks like a Lizardman Constant thing. For those unfamiliar, PPP polls find that ~10% of Americans say lizardmen might be running the planet. Which means that any weird opinion showing up in polls may well get 10% just from indifference, trolling, or lunacy.

On the same poll, 5% of Obama supporters answered that yes, Obama was the anti-Christ. And here, 5% of Clinton supporters said that yes, she was involved in a child sex ring. If those people were sincere with both answers, I have some serious questions for them.

All of which is to say that this sort of polling produces nutty results no matter what you aim it at. The most interesting part to me is honestly the uncertainty numbers, which seem high enough to be 'real' answers. I could buy that we've reached a point where large swaths of electorate are willing to say "shit, anything's possible these days".

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-...

We must never forget that half of voters are even dumber than the average voter

That's not how averages work. If 9 people have an IQ of 100 and 1 has an IQ of 10, the average is 91. 9/10 people are still above that.

“Average” can mean “median”.

Also, human IQ is distributed in such a way that the mean is approximately also the median, which, by definition of IQ, is 100.

IQ is just a measure of intelligence mapped back on to a standard distribution with a mean of 100 and SD of 15. The mean equals the median of a standard distribution by definition.

The reality is if you measured absolute intelligence that it would not be a standard distribution (there are more people at the bottom than expected), but it would be close. The reason why is that intelligence is the result of tens of thousands of independent factors (mostly genes).

It does if IQ is a bell curve by definition, and it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com