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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

How on earth do you wind up at 20% of the population being transgender, 30% being gay/lesbian, and 30% being bisexual? Even if you combine all those into one group, it just doesn't make any sense on the face of it. The medians are a bit better, at 12, 24, and 24, but either this poll is ridiculously, incredibly badly done, or I've absolutely no idea how to think about my fellow person anymore.

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Look how tightly the data is clustered around 50%. There are almost no questions for which people did not guess closer to 50% than the correct answer. Did they give people sliders with 50% as the default value? There's a maximum amount I'm willing to fuck with your ui to answer 50 questions. 1 percent is pretty difficult to hit on a slider.

If correct answers take more work to enter, then I expect there to be fewer correct answers.

There was a deepfake experiment on the site recently asking people to use a slider to estimate their confidence that a particular video, audio or text clip was faked. That used a slider between -100 confidence and 100 confidence, and I really sincerely doubt that anyone spend any amount of time thinking about what number they entered. It was just a way to introduce noise.

This seems both credible and reassuring

I actually thought about the difference between my percentage ratings :(

I'm sorry to have libeled you then.

TFA offers one reason:

uncertainty-based rescaling — leads people to systematically overestimate the size of small values and underestimate the size of large values.

Basically, when you're not sure what the actual number is, you tend to anchor your guess on 50%, not 0% or 100%.

By guessing, and being asked a bunch of questions without inter-question context.

It’s just people going “probably a small number”, being asked to quantify that, and throwing out 20-30% because that feels like one.

Not far off from how much airtime / mindshare their ideas get.

I suspect the same way you arrive at all Trump supporters being racist, the problems of the country being the fault of conspiracy theorists, etc: heuristics, combined with a cultural aversion to understanding how the human mind works.

Even the medians seem outrageously high.... just some basic life experience would suggest they're all low % across the board. Heck my personal guess was sub-1% up to maybe 1% for each category you mentioned.

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