Public Policy Polling’s recent poll on conspiracy theories mostly showed up on my Facebook feed as “Four percent of Americans believe lizardmen are running the Earth”.
(of note, an additional 7% of Americans are “not sure” whether lizardmen are running the Earth or not.)
The lesson from all three of the cases in this post seems clear. When we’re talking about very unpopular beliefs, polls can only give a weak signal. Any possible source of noise – jokesters, cognitive biases, or deliberate misbehavior – can easily overwhelm the signal. Therefore, polls that rely on detecting very weak signals should be taken with a grain of salt.
in any poll you’re going to have like… 10-30% of people saying completely insane shit for a variety of reasons:
generally speaking, anytime you get over 65% of people to agree on a topic, that is overwhelming support for that position on that topic
Lizardman’s constant, an interesting short essay on this topic.
I am one of the 7%
Oh come on, they’d do a better job than the current mess.