Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change | Hacker News Reader

Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

pnas.org

208 pointslarsiusprime188 comments

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.

It always amazes me how such studies are simply left up to the academics, because clearly taking representative samples of the population will need some kind of help from the government to organise it

Probably just requires a bigger budget than most academics have. I got paid £50 to spend half an hour giving feedback on a new website, in a 1:1 conversation with a researcher. Granted the funding was from government, but Kantar did the organisation side.

I think it's not possible to do ethically or practically, because only some sorts of people will willingly subject themselves to the testing, examination and prodding of of social sciences, even when bribed. And if you tried to force it on them using a government, which would be unethical, you still have the practical problem of the data you get from people under duress being garbage.

There are many companies that specialize on this. Usually, it takes picking random people at many different streets, but does not require government intervention.

No, all you need to do is hire a professional polling company. They also have biases but they're far closer to providing representative samples than MT is. Academia doesn't do this because it's expensive and they have a cultural bias towards quantity over quality.

I saw another study on hn [1] that "showed that people found accountants and data analysts boring". However, this was all based on forms filled in by workers on MTurk and another crowd sourcing company...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30764152

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?

I think it's "Facebook/Google/Netflix."

That makes sense. Big Tech in general has data on billions.

NSA.

Assume you have the conversation of billions. Its pretty easy to design "Virtual experiments", that just play out or have played out as life plays out.

Select from Everyone

//Filter the Environment with constraint to avoid polution

where(Person.isAlcoholic and Person.Age.inRange(12,49))

//Define experimental condition

experimentOutcome(State.Change(Person.isAlcoholic) upon Person.Graph.Depth(1).Death)

Gets you all acoholics quitting after death of a nearby relative.

That way, you get almost pure data and archieve what neuro sciences and psychology could never dream off. To really know people better then they even ever knew themselves.

So sad, as this is "steering" technology, we will never get to see it. We do not even get to contemplate its existence.

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.

"You are Gul Dukat."

Cardassian, Kardashian, all the same to me!

‘Keeping up with the Cardassians’

I would seriously question my life choices.

I suspect that's exactly what most of those "quizzes" actually are.

I believe that's what Cambridge Analytica did.

> 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).

I don't think anyone under 35 years old cares who the Kardashians are either. I honestly can't figure out who does beyond people who are responsible for deciding what stories appear in various places.

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.

Unless you make survey taking a society wide, randomly sampled, civic duty -- like jury duty -- you're always going to be vulnerable to some biases.

You'd still get only a sub-niche of the population, just a different one -- the one that fills out nonsense quizes on facebook.

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 journals are carefully scrutinized for non-representative sampling.

If you can't conceive of how a person working at Mechanical Turk is overwhelmingly likely to just be a normal person, and not your weird conception of them, I'd encourage you to read Thinking Fast and Slow.

Contempt for scientists is not a good look.

I think his point is that it's impossible to normalise such a sample. For example if I sampled only toddlers about their attitudes to ice cream then there's no way to extrapolate from that sample to the general population, and it's the same thing for "people who are willing to fill in a survey for $2".

Understanding the need for representative samples is not the same as actually getting representative samples. It's not a problem of scientists being ignorant or lazy or even underfunded. They know what they need, and they simply cannot get it. They try to make do anyway, but the quality of their work still suffers because of these factors which are out of their control.

Not all fields of inquiry are equally tractable to the scientific method, so they should not be treated with equal reverence.

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."

Thanks. I had the impression this book and his work was widely regarded. I'll have to put a mental asterisk next to some of the stories I was blown away by.

The book not so much (despite its initial critical acclaim on continuing commercial success), but at least his research summarized within seems to be reproducible and his reputation is intact. The research on priming in particular, was reliant on low sample size studies, and was not reproducible.

Without getting into snark, your very own article bolsters my point:

> The replication crisis in psychology does not extend to every line of inquiry, and just a portion of the work described in Thinking, Fast and Slow has been cast in shadows. Kahneman and Tversky’s own research, for example, turns out to be resilient. Large-scale efforts to recreate their classic findings have so far been successful. One bias they discovered—people’s tendency to overvalue the first piece of information that they get, in what is known as the “anchoring effect”—not only passed a replication test, but turned out to be much stronger than Kahneman and Tversky thought.

What portion of the scientists in the book are represented by Kahneman and Tversky? The other scientists in the book did not go to great lengths to avoid sampling bias. The authors could not be relied on to spot it either.

I don't see any point you made being bolstered. The anchoring effect you mention in another comment doesn't permit a scientist or statistician to throw their hands up in the air and say one mechanical turk group is as average as any other pseudo random group.

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.

> Even if you grant the idea that a person working at MTurk is just a normal person,

Just want to point out that surveys are not looking for "normal" participants. They need a representative sample which, given human diversity, would include many people who are "abnormal" across a wide array variables.

Do you have any data or evidence to support your claim that workers on Mechanical Turk are a representative sample of Americans? This is an extraordinary claim, given the incentives of the platform. Think like a hacker, or a poor person in India or Nigeria.

Anchoring effect. Read the section in Thinking Fast and Slow on the anchoring effect.

There's also the perennial problem that polls are not public opinion.

The biases within polls are legion and difficult to eliminate in any society with privacy provisions.

It's at least a small step up from when many studies of human behaviour were done on psychology freshmen.

Why would undergraduates be more representative of society than Mechanical Turk users? Surely the Turk users span a much wider range of age and geolocation.

I wrote about this problem a few years ago. Even more relevant today: https://www.psychstudio.com/articles/research-participation

Maybe if American society valued science the same we we value justice, we could compel people to occasionally participate in surveys and studies the way we compel them to participate in jury duty.

We see the latter as a fact of life and occasional annoyance for a cause greater than ourselves. Maybe we should treat a contribution to science the same way. Many countries require some military service of young people—we could ask people to contribute in all sorts of ways.

Maybe if social science was real science instead of quackery people would want to help.

If we didn't already have mandatory jury duty, I don't think there's a hope in hell that you could get a bill passed requiring it today. If you did manage to get a bill passed, I think the courts would almost certainly strike it down.

We have become much less keen on requiring people to work against their will. Jury duty is grandfathered in, but new things of that kind wouldn't be lightly accepted.

This is true of a lot of things. Imagine if libraries didn't exist and someone got the bright idea for one today. It would never fly.

In a world of open source and Wikipedia, that's a bold claim.

Those aren't funded by taxpayers like libraries are.

I don't know of anyone that considers jury duty an "annoyance for a cause greater than ourselves". Normal people know intuitively that it is a waste of time, that lawyers, cops, clerks, and judges are just running an extended grift on working people and the rest of society, and that nobody will be harmed by their lying their way out of having to miss work for 7 dollars a day.

What's the alternative? Professional jurors?

In great majority of countries there are no jurors, just judges.

I would say the opposite: shanghai citizens into serving as cops, prosecutors, judges, bailiffs, etc., so that there is some hope that they might influence the process instead of just being another material that the professionals process (like defendants).

Now you do. I just served jury duty this week, in fact, and believe it to be an important (and, yes, annoying) way of serving my country. I find your take disappointingly cynical.

It's important to remember that this same problem haunted historiography for at least 2 centuries, if not much more. At least from the 1700s, and lasting well into the 1900s, historians considered themselves the historians of events, rather than non-events. As such, they automatically gave too much weight to change. That a different approach was possible was not even considered until modern anthropology got going in the late 1800s. But credit for the big change in historiography is typically assigned to the Annales school and to Fernand Braudel in particular, and his concept of the "Longue durée":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_durée

"The longue durée is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist), concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and substitutes for elite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns."

We should not expect ordinary layman to get things right when professional historians, until recently, had a strong bias toward events (and even now, many still demonstrate this bias).

Interesting. Thanks for this perspective.

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.

It would hurt historians feelings to know that they are essentially just, what we call today, “hot takes” on history. It’s often well written and credentialed (appeal to authority), but ultimately it’s just one dude’s hot take on events.

For example, many people in America have a hot-take about what life is like in China. How? We heard it from somewhere, never lived a day there.

Can’t be that simple right? You say you heard it from a scholar?

Welp, hate to break it to ya, but unless you were there yourself, it’s just not 100% the truth.

It’s the main reason you’ll eventually see a book that says “we got Abraham Lincoln all wrong, let me tell you my hot take”. You’d have to read 30 of these hot takes before you can even mix the black and white into a gray truth (which the truth is, always gray).

Anyway, word on the street is the Queen is a saint. Give it a year, we’ll get the other hot take. Then another one.

Hate to break it to ya, but if you were there yourself that is just an anecdote or a single data point and doesn’t tell you a lot about the general population.

> It would hurt historians feelings to know that they are essentially just, what we call today, “hot takes” on history.

Interestingly, the actual historians I came accros would not be shocked by such claim at all. They do make their own claims of that sort.

However, arbitrary fans of Ancient Greece would be shocked.

Yeah this is my experience too. A lot of "fans of history" who've never actually studied historiography make big bold claims about the limitations of the field like historians didn't learn that in their early 20s.

You can say the Earth is shaped like a cube, or like a sphere. Both are hot takes because it is in fact shaped like something we circularily (no pun intended) called a geoid.

Yet wouldn't you be more interested in listening to the "sphere" guy?

It’s complicated. We’re so sensory overloaded that I might wanna hear just how far the flat earth guy can take it.

Tall tales are a guilty pleasure for many. Clinically we call this conspiratorial thinking (or really clinically, paranoid schizophrenia?).

Some people really indulge in their campfire ghost stories. I would be interested in the “Lincoln actually loved slavery” lol, just want to see how far some asshole can take an idea.

I'm married to a historian.

I don't think this would hurt historians feelings. The idea that there are an infinity of different narratives one can express through the archive and that each author places part of themselves into the writing and that one can never achieve the TRUE HISTORICAL RECORD (TM) is not interesting or frustrating information for historians. They teach that shit in year one of grad school at the latest.

You will see books that are "here is my hot take on Lincoln" but you won't see them say "we got Lincoln all wrong." They'll simply see how their different view and analysis fits into the wider tapestry of historical writing.

Written history is just the most convenient artifact to elaborate his hypothesis upon, its not necessary, oral tradition isn't meaningfully distinct in his hypothesis, its just that its easier to parse change over time with written history.

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.

IMHO, this depends what you consider a "new" idea: ideas mutate and change, they are combined or applied in a different context but rarely (perhaps never) do they arise sui generis from nothing. Analogously, viruses mutate and change in their hosts, and at some point their lineage diverges enough that we declare it a "new" virus - but this is a categorization applied by an observer, and somewhat false.

Perhaps the earliest "ur ideas" were something like instinctive emotions. Even very simple creatures seek food and avoid noxious stimuli. Is hunger an idea? Maybe from hunger arose desire, and from desire arose searching, and from searching arose planning... Ad astra per fame.

Per famem, because per governs the accusative, right?

> 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.

The same way viruses change: usually recombination, but sometimes random mutation. Yes this happens in a human mind, just like viruses change within cells. The point is to focus on ideas as self-propagating and humans as merely vessels, rather than the other way around as people usually think about them.

We can apply this same notion of thinking to ideas like “mark neyer” or “the neyer family”. This closes the loop, though - who I am is both an idea and a substrate for ideas, at the same time.

There is no anti-memetics division!

interesting book on memes.

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%). (out of 51 different attitudes)

Maybe we can change the title. When I read this abstract I got the feeling that Americans just don't know what's going on. Which honestly makes far more sense. Things are changing rapidly recently. It especially makes sense when you consider we're isolating our social groups more (internet makes this easier but isn't a sole contributor) and so there would be a biased estimate for over estimation.

What's also really interesting is that going through some of these is that it seems that people in the 70's greatly underestimated many things. For example when asked about abortion with there was serious risk people estimated (in 72) that only 49% of people were in favor but actually 87% were in favor. Now perception has changed to 71 and actual to 90. Another example is concerns about climate change. In 1990 people estimated 28% were concerned but actually 61% were concerned. Now it is 65.5 vs 65.

If you just came here for the title it really does look like there is a lot more interesting data than what the title says. It does seem like some things we've gotten better at getting estimates on while others are more difficult. Worth at least looking at the figures. But definitely could be some interesting followup analysis.

Sorry, I based the submission title from a press repost, but wanted to link the original source, which apparently had a different title.

That shouldn't be permitted, otherwise everything can be submitted with any arbitrary title: you just submit the original with the title you used to link to it in your personal blog.

I'm copping to a goof is what I'm saying. I was submitting the article then thought, "oh, I should probably deep link the actual research article" but still used the original title I had typed in.

The rules are that you are supposed to keep the original title. OP linked a different title. You are allowed to edit within a small timeframe because we're humans and mistakes happen. Same goes with comments. We work on good faith here (another rule) and so don't abuse it. Bad faith actors do get warned. Dang is a dang good moderator and underappreciated for the amount of work he has.

I think you might be able to edit. I'm unsure, if not maybe Dang will come around and do it for you.

Is title editing a new feature? Little nervous, didn't expect it to rocket immediately to the #1 spot, trying my best not to get trouble in here

Not a new feature, you can fix it or if the time has passed, a mod will eventually fix it. But you're not going to get in trouble either for making an honest mistake or trying to fix it.

Found the button! Fixed ^_^ Sorry for the trouble

No worries, things happen. Good post btw.

I don't know the statistical tools to properly validate it, but to my eye, it looks like the study participants actually tend to do a solid job of estimating the rate of change within the past handful of years. Their awareness of the absolute values is more scattered, but their knowledge of very recent relative change is better than I would have guessed from the abstract.

> It especially makes sense when you consider we're isolating our social groups more

I wouldn't really pin this one on the internet. Consensus Spaces are the new normal, people have realized the dialogue is a waste of time at best and a trap to give the other side a soap box at worst. Everyone laughed at the lgbt community for it at first but the reality is that those same people took notes and realized that it was actually an extremely clever way to help propagate ideas amongst a target demographic. This strategy is popular irl and in cyberspace now (anyone coming from a college campus recently will have some experience with spaces designed to this attitude) it's just much easier/faster to make Consensus Spaces online.

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

I am a little confused by that. AFAIK climate change wasn't even discussed in popular culture 30 or so years ago. I wonder if they are equating "concerned with the environment" with climate change. The concern back in the day was pollution, nuclear waste, the ozone layer, the rainforest, species going extinct, etc. Perhaps my memory is poor.

> Another example is concerns about climate change

I'm not sure that measuring respondants expressing "concern about X" in isolation is a good metric. It costs nothing to express concern.

Aside: I'm afraid I can't stop thinking of Channel 4's Brass Eye show from 2001 about the (fictional) drug "cake" (https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/cake-channel-4-contro...

Instead, how about asking what respondants what steps they have taken - if any - in response to their concerns about X?

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

Yeah this does seem like a pretty significant bias. Though different than the normal significant bias of college age students that many of these frequently sample from.

I think the point is that people form their opinions based on what they think other people think.

Ok, changed now. Thanks!

Submitted title was "Study: Americans consistently overestimate how much culture has changed".

This seems to assume people are being honest on these polls, but we know they are not: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/upshot/americans-claim-to...

It's better to find a behavioral measure, like actual election results, to look at if at all possible.

> Belief in God has decreased only 10% over the past 60 years (3).

The linked poll shows a 17% decline?

The Gallup religion poll is self-reported.[1] But some of the questions asked are objective, such as "How often do you attend church or synagogue -- every week, almost every week, about once a month, seldom or never?" Self-reported church attendance in the US is about twice what churches report actually show up. (That info used to be on adherents.org, but the site is gone.)

Questions along those lines are tough to get answered well. Who asks makes a big difference. Phone surveys on drinking get quite different results if the people calling are drinkers or non-drinkers.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx

It was a mathematical error in this case. Whether or not the poll itself is meaningful is inconsequential.

I got asked to participate in a Gallup poll once. On numerous questions, my answer wasn't part of the "permitted" answers so they had to enter something only mildly related to my real opinion (and the interviewer kept badgering me to select one of the permitted answers, which was amusing).

These polls are unreliable from the outset, bad poll design defeats their accuracy even with well-meaning respondents. So nowadays, I just decline to participate.

May be I'm just wrong, but the plots do show some changes, but I don't know how much we can fault people for not knowing exact percentages. A lay person estimating 40% is close enough to 50% for me.

I have a theory that people also misjudge the root causes of change, which causes them to overestimate foundational shifts in attitude. Changes in attitudes can reflect technological or economic changes, without changes in moral philosophy. For example, a society based around knowledge work is inherently going to have different attitudes to women working than one based around manual labor in heavy industry, without necessarily any deeper differences in social philosophy. Similarly, I suspect the rapid increasing in acceptance of same sex marriage, from 27% in 1997 to over 70% today, has mostly to do dissemination of scientific knowledge than deeper changes in attitudes.

It’s interesting to see the plots of true change in opinions. There has been massive change in favor of gay rights, gender equality, marijuana legalization, and interracial marriage. On pretty much every other topic, change is negligible.

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.

> that people adopt what they believe to be the general trend, is what's truly frightening

We've known that for forever though. Advertising exploits that fact to great effect. A lot of people either go with the crowd or have viable alternatives crowded/drowned out by what's popular for being popular. It makes media consolidation a huge concern. It's also why the entertainment industry is so desperate to fight piracy. It's less about the sales figures than it is about the power to act as a gatekeeper that shapes our culture and dictates how/when we get access to it.

Just looking at the charts, I'm surprised by how accurately the trends were identified by the public. What the authors call "misperceptions" are in many cases just systematic errors in the absolute numbers, which frankly I would expect. The vast majority of the trend slopes are quite close to actual. I feel like the authors are reaching a bit for a controversial conclusion.

Do you need some kind of account to see this link? When I click it I get redirected to the home page with the same anchor but ?skip=true :(.

https://www.pnas.org/?skip=true#abstract

Works for me? Here's the DOI in any case: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107260119

I have the link: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107260119

If you're unable to see it maybe we can figure out some means to share.

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 shootings are far more common and dangerous than they actually are. 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.

Truly, most of our understanding is skewed in such a manner. That’s why ignoring anecdotal stories is so important for rational policy discussion. Unfortunately, mass media & social media (imo) is really making it impossible.

Our ability to understand risk is imperfect, and certaintainly divorced from actual risk numbers.

While perceptions based on media are surely a factor, its also based on our control over the risk.

Lots of people die in car accidents (presumably because they are bad drivers) but I am a good driver, therefore the risk for me is much lower or zero. I am in control therefore my perception of risk is reduced. What risk there is, I accept in return for the utility of a car.

Same for drugs - my kids are well brought up, and I'm a good parent, so the risk of an overdose is low, and I feel in control of that. Clearly lots of people balance the risk of an overdose against the utility of taking the drugs (and clearly they get it wrong a lot.)

School shootings have no (direct) utility. So I am both lacking in control, and there is no utility balance, I am concerned about this a lot more.

I see the solution as fewer guns, but that crosses over with the utility perceived by a large segment of society. Since they are unwilling to give up that utility we reach an impass.

School shootings are a side effect of gun ownership, which has a significant perceived utility to a large group of people. Those people implicitly accept that some people (including children) die in the service of that utility.

To them taking away guns is as ridiculous as taking away cars (which also kill people.) taking away cars is absurd right?

Of course perceived utility may not be real. Lots of people in the world live without guns. Lots live without cars. But these perceptions are hard, dare I say impossible, to change.

Note that the vast majority of child gun deaths are not from mass shootings. One third are intentional suicides. Most of the rest is kids accidentally shooting themselves or each other with guns that they gain access to.

(While we're at it, and in the vein of the article, gun-owning parents tend to drastically overestimate how well-behaved their kids are around guns, and thus allow them more access than is safe.)

>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.

You are talking about safety inside of a car, the activists are talking about safety outside of a car

Couldn’t find good stats for shootings and children but it looks like 1000 kids die each year in the US from car accidents so all it would take is 10 kids dying a year in shootings which doesn’t seem like many at all (just consider kids in street gangs etc).

‘Mass shooting’ has different definitions depending on country/agency. In the US I think it just means a shooting (not necessarily a death) involving more than 2 people.

That's two orders of magnitude, but your point stands. I think way fewer children die in car accidents than I imagined.

> 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 misunderstand how Americans feel about "immigrants" when that word is often used to mean both legal and illegal immigrants. I'd expect that distinction matters a lot when it comes to how people feel.

> we believe mass shootings are far more common and dangerous than they actually are. A child is ~100x more likely to die from a drug overdose than a mass shooting, and ~10x from a car crash.

I don't think anyone seriously thinks that sending their kid to school is more dangerous than a drug overdose or that school shootings are more common than car crashes. I think there's a greater outrage over kids killed in school shootings than in car accidents because cars have always been dangerous (and understandably so) so we accept those risks but there is no accepting that one risk of sending our children into a school is the possibility that a dozen or more will come out in body bags. It's an outrage every time.

Especially because children aren't supposed to have guns, and schools (who we have basically turned into full time babysitters for our nation's children) are supposed to protect them. It wouldn't matter if lightning strikes were a more common cause of death in children than school shootings, we'd still be more upset at the shootings since there's no expectation that thunderstorms producing lightning are safe, and very few of us feel that Zeus is supposed to be protecting their kids.

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.

> Easy example, we believe mass shootings are far more common and dangerous than they actually are. 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.

And all of those scenarios are less common than this one: The child doesn't die for any reason: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

I think we have a bias for focusing on rare tragedies than the common mundane outcomes.

Not to suggest culture=politics, but if you haven’t watched the Buckley-Vidal “debates” from the ‘68 election, you are missing out on some interesting history of the fight between American liberalism/socialism and libertarianism/conservatism.

"All Generalizations Are False."

[deleted]

The authors are using this an example of a widespread thing people think is true (that belief in god has gone from ubiquitous to uncommon), but that is not actually true (belief in god has decreased, but not by as much as people think), the subject of what the article measures.

The referenced GALLOP poll only asked if the respondents believe in God/believe in a God.

Pew Research conducted a similar study and found that 90% of respondents believe in a higher power, which echos GALLOP, but only 56% believe in God as described in the Bible.

It's not clear what percentage of people believed in the Bible's God 60 years ago, but if we, for argument's sake, assume 90-100% then 56% support now is comparatively uncommon. Under those assumptions, it would be quite reasonable to think that religious culture has changed dramatically.

The key takeaway here is that communication is hard and that data is easy to twist.

And they overestimate how badly the “other” political party is ruining the country when they’re in power.

The economic effects of the policies shriek for themselves.

I don't know about that. Something like an executive order can have effects years after someone is gone, momentum builds and it takes effort for a successor to undo it.

To say nothing about lifetime court appointments. Not just in the supreme court either.

Any examples? IIRC, many such orders signed by Trump were immediately undone or at the very least drastically watered down by Biden.

The Patriot Act was an executive order

Are you sure? Because I distinctly remember only Senator Feingold voting against it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

The Patriot Act is law, enacted by the 107th United States Congress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

You can tell because of the word “act” which refer to it being a formal legislative action.

https://www.state.gov/executive-order-13224/

What about it? EO 13224 is not the Patriot Act.

The patriot act was passed by congress and signed by the president in 2001, and the last provisions expired in 2020.

No.

>The Act passed the House by a vote of 357–66, the Act passed the Senate with a vote of 98–1.

Not an executive order, but what led to the 2009 financial crisis was mostly done under the Clinton administration.

Honestly I think this is something us humans are really bad at (well we're known to be bad at this). Understanding causal effects through time. Not only are we bad at understanding causal facts but we're really bad at being forward thinking and understanding temporal phenomena.

But I think the main point that the gp is making is that most of the things that happen under a president aren't really felt till well after they have left office. Many wins that presidents have are due to effects from former presidents. Like both Obama and Trump got praised for high S&P 500 values at the beginning of their presidencies. Obama came in after a big crash. There's also no way Trump could be a causal factor for growth in the first 3 months of his presidency. You can't really have that kind of effect that early on. Yes these presidents contributed to these markets, but it would be naive to say that the growth was because of them. Or we can look at the long lasting effects of Regan. Or even Civil Rights and Johnson. While there was more immediate consequences under both these presidents there were also very long term effects that we still see today.

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 almost exactly reversed - Carter did the deregulating but the benefits were not seen until Reagan was in power.

See https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/much-of-what-youve-heard-a... for a reference.

The post you are responding to is probably referring to the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. According to some, that act (signed by Clinton) was (somewhat) responsible for the financial crash. But this is certainly a matter of dispute.

To expand, this law allowed investment banks (e.g. Goldman) and commercial banks (e.g. Washington Mutual) to do what the other could. Effectively this allowed the mortgage backed securities that were a major player in the financial crisis to be created. There were a lot of other issues that contributed to the crisis, but (as far as I'm aware) the main mechanism used would not have been possible without this deregulation.

Eh. It allowed banks to have in house investment banks. They still needed to have walls that dealt with conflicts of interest between the two. Whether the walls work all the time can be disputed.

But you seem to have offered no substantial link to the existence of MBS securities and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. so your conclusion, that arbitrary deregulation, lead to the existence of MBS securities should be even more disputed.

MBS are probably more clearly linked to the complete takeover of the mortgage market by the government. if you turn debt into a commodity you can divide it up however you want. and you turn debt into a commodity by guaranteeing it.

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?

Other banks were also buying US based securities.

But you also seem to be assuming that there was a single causal factor or that people are claiming there is a single causal factor. Neither of these are true. There were many factors at play.

My only claim with Clinton was that he did things that helped lead to the events and people do not attribute that to him because he was not the acting head of state. My claim was not about a singular causality, and that would be a pretty bad faith read.

Fair question.

Canada did suffer during the 2007-8 crisis, though its banking system didn't collapse as the US system did.

The reasons suggested are various. I'm not an expert on either the US or Canadian experiences, though some quick searches suggest a few explanations, including an overall different regulatory and banking environment in Canada (far more centralised to the Federal government rather than distributed to numerous states). NBER and a few other sources look promising.

So there are things that happened under Clinton that have been posited as contributing to the financial crash, so the guy who was President for the last 8 years leading up to the crash must be blameless.

Yeah, not buying it. There are lots of things that happened under Bush that are also posited as contributing to the crash. And 8 years is more than long enough for Bush's policies to have contributed.

> so the guy who was President for the last 8 years leading up to the crash must be blameless.

That's not the argument being made. The argument being made is that actions under a president outlast the president and have to be considered as part of their legacy. Bush isn't blameless but that also doesn't mean Clinton gets off Scot-free.

The argument is about how attribution to current events doesn't solely lie upon the current acting head of state.

Saying "blameless" overstated the case.

But the comment I was responding to said:

> ...what led to the 2009 financial crisis was mostly done under the Clinton administration...

That goes well beyond "Clinton doesn't get off Scot-free" all of the way to, "Clinton should get most of the blame."

I'm firmly in agreement that Clinton contributed. But I'm going to need serious convincing that what he did was more important than, say, failing to enforce regulations against fraudulent advertising on subprime mortgages. Or blocking the 2005 GSE reform bill which would have allowed more action before that problem blew out of control.

> "Clinton should get most of the blame."

I apologize, this was not my intent.

godelski's already responded to their intent.

I was simply answering the question as to what might have been referred to as occurring during the Clinton administration. Not its overall significance in subsequent events.

Took a while to end 'stay in Mexico' had to go through courts iirc.

Seems like a lot of the drilling and EPA stuff has been gummed up in courts too

Interesting article link below talking about Biden's push and the problem with R partisan judges.

and the potential that if an order goes too far, court is given opportunity to make a broad and lasting ruling that would limit powers. I can very easily see this happening.

https://time.com/6205771/trump-judges-biden-executive-orders...

This is one prime example I was thinking of when I wrote the comment, but I was waiting for someone else to say it.

I have vague memories of other things, like maybe some Bush orders that didn't get a swift or easy rollback with Obama ... But that was longer ago.

But I think more broadly and nonpartisan, a law passed by Congress or an executive order by the president that is done when someone feels they have a mandate... Often sets broad policy for years and outlasts the mandate. More than most people understand. I think this contradicts the easy, oversimplified statement people like to make that elections don't matter and the parties and candidates are interchangable.

All federal judges are lifetime.

https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/about-federal-jud...

https://thehill.com/regulation/3631564-five-things-to-know-a...

From https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-governm...

Federal judges can only be removed through impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction in the Senate. Judges and Justices serve no fixed term — they serve until their death, retirement, or conviction by the Senate.

So retirement is an option, which is what I am guessing most choose.

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.

Ok, thank you. The internet is funny. Neutral tones can come across as aggressive. Aggression, generally, though, can totally be all in the head of the perceiver.

Oh, it isn't just the internet that's funny, overall society/humanity is this way - we are swimming in it daily, and complain about it endlessly.

I sometimes wonder if the reason no one seems super interested in fixing things is because we've been living in it for so long, we instinctively write it off as being "just the way it is" &/or "there's nothing you can do about it".

Stuff is literally engineered to create that sort of thinking.

Case in point: trying to find a contact number, is intentionally buried on websites.

Oh for sure....but I am speaking extremely broadly....society and culture (two things that cover pretty much everything humans do), both "Western" and international.

We live on a planet, that much seems mostly agreed upon...and, we do various things in a various way(s), "that's how it is"...and, it produces the results we see around us (which some people think are great, others not so much).

We could try doing things massively differently than the way we do now and see what results that has. Or heck, we could even imagine doing things other ways, and imagine what results that might produce. Of course, people typically lose control of their imaginations when doing this...but maybe we should try not doing that.

The reality runtime we are in seems to afford us substantial optionality for experimentation - I propose we take advantage of this option.

Oh yeah, i know it's not just the internet either. Notice i said "the internet is that way", then, the next sentence describes "aggression" generically, without specifiers. Kind of intentionally worded that way.

But i do think the internet, and maybe programmer communities especially, have a tendency to be dry and confrontational, focused on debate or correcting other people.

Is there a difference in the 2 major parties anymore? I seriously don't know which parry you're referring to.

The only people I ever see asking that are right-wing pundits trying to convince left-leaning voters not to bother voting, and occasionally burned-out centrists who've fallen for it.

I've never seen a serious left-wing voter/activist/politician come out with the claim that "well, the right are just as bad as we are".

"We are not so different, you and I" is always the last-ditch claim of the villain, knowing that they have no moral ground to stand on, trying to drag down the people who are trying to do better for not being perfect. And it's bullshit. Always has been, always will be.

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 become.

"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.

Those are not contradictory. Without the ability to criticize others, different groups can each claim to be "the left", and they don't have the ability to work through their differences to unify.

There would be no need to silence internal criticism if it wasn't there.

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.

> 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.

As to whether the right also does it, Eric Greitens literally released an ad showing him "RINO hunting" with a rifle (RINO meaning "Republican In Name Only"). Leftists may infight, but at least we know how to use our words.

(As compared, for example, to the 1960s and 1970s, where bombing was a much more common tool of the left. I'll definitely take the verbal infighting.)

>As compared, for example, to the 1960s and 1970s, where bombing was a much more common tool of the left.

I'm a youngin, can you provide examples you are thinking of when you say this?

Most prominently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

I think "centrist" and "moderates" are pretty bad terms. They are usually used to capture anyone that doesn't fall cleanly into the two main parties. Which honestly, is a very diverse group. One such issue (of many) with this is that many anti-authoritarian people fall into this camp. It does make sense that these people get burned out as there has been no representation for them in decades and their major concerns have only grown ever stronger and seem nigh impossible now. The right did capture some of these people (re Tea Party) until they typically find out they are hoodwinked. Now the left is capturing some of these people because Trump was the personification of authority. Still, I don't think these people feel represented and I don't think you should dismiss them so easily.

They're both authoritarian but one obviously leans left, and the other, right.

Only one has targeted attacks of human rights of minorities.

The only minority worth protecting beyond reproach of politics are those afflicted with poverty. I have found both parties incompetent in this regard.

800k shacks with outlets in LA for the homeless. The complete dismissal of the responsibility we have as a society to rehabilitate people in the prison system. the absolute abandonment of native americans that ultimately lead to an institution of sexual abuse. Unions run the schools but the worst outcomes happen in urban cities, which leads to violence.

the problems we face are complex. and I think we would do better to lean inwards than rely on looking to the fringes for our philosophical goals.

>The only minority worth protecting beyond reproach of politics are those afflicted with poverty.

>complete dismissal of the responsibility we have as a society to rehabilitate people in the prison system

>absolute abandonment of native americans

>Unions run the schools

I am NOT AT ALL dismissing the problems of poverty, native americans, prisoners nor unions but that is some janky, janky phrasing.

Am I the only one getting a "and you are lynching negros"[1] vibe here?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

And what does: "rely on looking to the fringes for our philosophical goals" even mean, anyway?

> The only minority worth protecting beyond reproach of politics are those afflicted with poverty. I have found both parties incompetent in this regard.

How do you think we, the people, can make a really meaningful impact to change this?

I think a secular/scientific version of some of the ideas contained within religions like Buddhism could move the needle substantially:

https://mindwithcare.com/buddha-teachings-part-one-four-nobl...

elect better people into congress

I would guess cities on average have better schools than rural areas.

GIANT differences and anyone pretending not is usually acting in bad faith.

- abortion - environment (or you know that global warming is real and caused by humans) - LGBTQ rights - race & equity - immigration & treatment of asylum seekers - role of Fed & state regulators in markets, like energy markets (tx) - taxes - workers rights - federal govt powers

could go on and on but that's not the point of your comment is it

support for democracy and the rule of law also comes to mind

It's funny how 15 years ago, if we asked for this study, the perception of which party that description belongs to would likely be flipped.

Well not funny. More sad and terrifying.

No I don't think it would. Republicans always say they are for law and order and democrats aren't. Democrats usually say that they are for some form of light reform to prisons or justice, but often vote for more aggressive policies to not be called "lawless" or some nonesense.

The difference is, republicans have always been lying about being the party of law and order. Whether through Nixon, or Iran-Contra, or everything that happened with trump (which most republicans just pretend didn't happen), they've always said that the law should apply, and then ignored it for their own.

Spot on in terms of the whole ethos of the modern Republican: it's me me me. No capacity for empathy.

No government hand outs. Unless it's fossil fuel subsidies for Mr. Koch.

Socialized medicine is evil. Unless my company is stealing hundreds of millions from our government/medicare (and then I became a US Senator)

Abortion is bad. Except in my instance, but it's ok because I'm not one of those girls. Or my life is in danger!

Copy pasta from Reddit, but it rings true more often than not: any accusation is an admission.

Literally just read an op-ed from conservative crying about Democrats banning books... Seriously

Is clairvoyance "good faith"? Is it optimal?

Yes, there is a difference between the two parties and you know it.

One supports the Jan 6th insurrection attempt and the other doesn't. One supports bodily autonomy and the other doesn't.

That's only two examples, but enough to make the point that yes, there are indeed differences.

> Significance

> People change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others’ changes. These misperceptions may bedevil people’s efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones.

People can't follow the herd if they don't know where the herd is going.

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