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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

A remarkable number of them were around 50%. I guess we know ourselves pretty well! Although I wonder how many of those people are wrong, just counterbalanced by the other side also being wrong....

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And the rest show a humorous bias, like "75% say they are less conservative than average".

Probably not a humorous bias because the audience of a site like this is not average on some criterias.

Well that's humorous to me. /shrug/

Assuming majority of inputs are from HN, that makes sense. HN demographic is higher education level and younger than a given average population, two demographics that correlate to “not conservative”

> HN demographic is higher education level

"Do you believe the sites you frequent are visited by higher educated, more intelligent people than average"

Nervous shuffling of little green ghosts to the left.

I believe this site’s main referer is HN

I believe HN is mostly working age English speaking computer professionals - especially American software engineers

I believe that American software engineers are broadly educated to an above average level

This could be truthful if there is a biased data source.

Indeed, I willingly believe that the answers are truthful and that the source is biased. It's just a humorous window into the participation.

Could also be true in an unbiased datasource in a skewed distribution.

"60% say they are more average than average"

Or just random. I noticed that in the handful of questions I checked, I often thought: I'm about average (e.g. in hours of sleep), but I had to pick. That might bias towards 50%.

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