14 ms·

Study finds political bias skews perceptions of verifiable fact

79 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

cjbenedikt 6y ago
Is that news to anyone?
scythmic_waves 6y ago
I'm sorry, is this showing a _causal_ relationship between political bias and perceptions of reality? The headline and article make it sound like that, but it could just as easily be that your perception of reality causes your political bias. Or that some other thing causes both of them. I can't see the paper to be sure because it's behind a paywall.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sonofgod 6y ago
  https://sci-hub.tw/10.3386/w26675 https://sci-hub.tw/10.3386/w26675
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
What's with all these articles stating obvious stuff everyone already knows? I remember a month ago there was an article about how breathing can affect health, like that was news or something. It was on the front page.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  One of the big human problems in social science is that people are VERY happy to make explanatory narratives instantaneously on hearing a result... Which makes most results seem 'obvious' once reported. One trick to circumvent this is to report the OPPOSITE conclusion first, and then say, 'actually, it was the opposite' after the listener says 'well, duh.' In our own reading, it can be helpful to invert the conclusion and ask how surprising that would seem... In reality, we don't know until we test... We have a lot of stories and biases that we carry all over the place, some are useful, most are shorthand, and many will lead us to wrong conclusions.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > One trick to circumvent this is to report the OPPOSITE conclusion first, and then say, 'actually, it was the opposite' after the listener says 'well, duh.' Study finds political bias improves perception of verifiable facts. I don't think I heard a lot of "well, duh". > In reality, we don't know until we test... We have a lot of stories and biases that we carry all over the place, some are useful, most are shorthand, and many will lead us to wrong conclusions. And even when we test, we don't really know, because we don't know whether we're talking about the same thing. What does "immigrant" mean? Are you still an immigrant after having lived in the US for 30 years? Is a naturalized citizen still an immigrant, or does he cease to be an immigrant when he becomes a citizen? Do you consider the children of an immigrant to be an immigrant? If so, for how many generations? Are you absolutely sure that everybody you talk to answers these questions the same way you do? I'm often surprised how vague these political surveys are and how loose they play with language. And I'm even more surprised when they then use the data to make strong calls. I'm pretty sure if you define the words, you get different results, e.g. ask about "immigrants in the last 10 years", or say "immigrants who have not become citizens that immigrated in the last 80 years". When you only use vague terms, you're not really asking what people believe the numbers to be, you're asking what people understand the term to mean AND what they believe the numbers to be for that understanding. A current example is asking about racism, where it's no longer just academia where you might encounter something like "systemic effects disadvantaging local minority populations" as the working definition, while the average person might understand it closer to "discrimination based on race". You'll get very different responses based on what definition the person is working with, even when you ask about the same metric, e.g. "how often do you witness racism in your work place?"
    - klyrs 6y ago
      > Study finds political bias improves perception of verifiable facts. This is one way of flipping it. What if we go with Study finds conservative bias improves perception of verifiable facts. and Study finds liberal bias improves perception of verifiable facts. showing each to people who respectively identify with those labels? Then, I think we would see a lot of people going "well duh"
- srmatto 6y ago
  That's a very obtuse take of what I think is a more nuanced development. It's not as simple as "If you don't breathe, you die. Duh!" Regulating your breath can be used to regulate your body and mind. There are lots of different techniques that can regulate different things. Heck, let's totally avoid the "hippy dippy" stuff... Valsalva maneuver for example which is used to diagnose Dysautonomia by slowing your heartrate. Or how about the Navy SEALs box breathing to control cortisol levels? Boy am I glad we "waste our time" researching this stuff!
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    Yes, when you regulate the supply of oxygen to an organ which uses oxygen for fuel, that organ's behavior will change.
- xkapastel 6y ago
  Breathing affecting health in that way was absolutely news to me. I'm very skeptical that you really could have predicted the results of that study before reading it. In fact, your post on that story was: > Did you all know that humans need oxygen to survive? And that the ways we consume oxygen can affect our health? It doesn't seem like you really understood what they were saying. It's much more complicated than this and doesn't warrant that sort of shallow dismissal.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    Human cells use oxygen for fuel. Breathing is the primary mechanism by which oxygen enters the cells. My teacher told me this stuff when I was a baby in elementary school.
    - dependenttypes 6y ago
      What is up with people just ignoring the content of the message that they are replying to and either repeating what they said before or reply to something that was never said? This seems to be more and more common in HN these days.
    - dagnabbit 6y ago
      Thank you for confirming that you did not read the research; and also that you are a snarky fucking asshole. Don't worry though, dang won't do anything to you because dang does not moderate white male assholes. Dang prefers silencing minorities.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      Wow, those scientists went to the wrong elementary school. You sound smart, they usually don't even let toddlers into elementary school, much less babies.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  I think the most interesting bit about this is how wrong _everyone_ is on the highlighted metrics. More data here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantcheva/files/slides_aea_v2.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantcheva/files/slides_ae... The extreme _regional_ wrongness about economic mobility is particularly interesting; people in places with higher mobility tend to somewhat downplay it; those in places with lower mobility tend to massively upplay it.
- awb 6y ago
  > obvious stuff everyone already knows Only about 40-60% of the US population votes, and I doubt a majority follow politics closely. Plus, kids grow up and need to learn things that seem obvious to older folks. Glad you knew this already, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's interesting to many others.
dfxm12 6y ago
It turns out those polled are not good at knowing verifiable facts like: What share of U.S. immigrants receive unemployment? What share of U.S. immigrants are Muslim? Why do people even hazard a guess at this stuff? Does your average Joe registered voter really think they have such a handle on immigration in their country that they think they know the religion of everyone coming in and who is receiving exactly what benefits? Talk about the Dunning–Kruger effect...
- sonofgod 6y ago
  Because they've been asked to. And I expect that if there's hesitation, the survey runners ask them to give their best guess. And if they don't guess, and move onto the next question, then they're eliminated from the aggregated results.
jakeogh 6y ago
from 1.75s to 4s, dv/dt of wtc7 == g p46 https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/NCSTAR/ncstar1a.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/NCSTAR/ncstar1a.pdf 21s video of angle 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRs6QCw7n6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRs6QCw7n6U
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Leary 6y ago
What share of US immigrants receive unemployment? Democrats: 25.6% Republicans: 27.1% Reality: 5.5% It seems the bigger bias comes from the general media than any particular party political bias.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- autokad 6y ago
  I can't believe they thought it was that high. I mean general unemployment is no where near 27% and you'd suspect that with threat of losing visa status, immigrants are more likelier to take a job they dont exactly grok.
  - black6 6y ago
    I would invite you to look at Shadow Stats for a real peek at unemployment numbers, not the “cooked” numbers from the BLS. http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...
  - uoaei 6y ago
    "grok" is defined as "comprehend the dynamics of" which I'm not sure you meant.
    - shkkmo 6y ago
      That is a rather impoverished explanation of a complicated word. A closer description would be "to understand something on such a deep and personal level that the lines of identity between it and you blur." Here's a passage from the book that coined the term (as a word from an alien language) > Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Ididntdothis 6y ago
From what I can see the real problem is that most people don’t care about facts anymore. They just want to hear what they think anyway and the political parties are too happy to feed that. When you talk to left wingers and right wingers about the economy of the last ten years the left guys will tell you it was paradise until 2016 and then everything went to hell. The right wingers will tell you it was misery until 2016 and then the boom started. When you look at stock indices, unemployment or other charts you will see a steady rise over ten years. You won’t even see that the president has changed. But pointing that out is futile. Most people don’t want facts.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  I think if the current crisis has shown one thing it's the disconnect between the stock market and the economy.
- bytedude 6y ago
  Looks like the stock market was flat-lining by the end of Obama's term. https://www.macrotrends.net/1358/dow-jones-industrial-average-last-10-years https://www.macrotrends.net/1358/dow-jones-industrial-averag... You may not care about facts, but don't generalize too quickly.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    When I look at this chart I see ups and downs but overall a pretty steady upward trend. I don’t see eights years of Obama misery and then triumph under Trump. That was my point.
    - bytedude 6y ago
      Your point was that people don't care about facts, which you are proving in ironic fashion. Even when presented with evidence and facts, you fail to acknowledge it.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
rayiner 6y ago
The problem is that “verifiable fact” is actually very complicated in any context where you’re talking about politics. Two of the questions on the first graphic are about income mobility for people born in the bottom quantile. The graphic is correct, as far as it goes, but overlooks huge differences by race. While the average American born in the bottom 20% has a 7.8% chance of reaching the top 20%, that number is actually 25% for Asians. Or, take the fact that the US lags Denmark in inter generational income mobility. Which is true, but it’s also true that the difference is due mainly to taxes and transfers flattening the whole distribution instead of fundamental structural differences that enable more movement: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/09/23/denmerica-why-denmark-plus-america-could-be-the-mobility-utopia/amp https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/09.... Put differently, it’s not that the welfare system allows the son of a gardener to become an engineer, but that massive income redistribution reduces the disparity between gardeners and engineers. (For many Americans, that distinction could be dispositive in whether you support an expanded welfare system.) So take these facts the next step. The authors studied these things in the context of support for reducing income inequality. Isn’t there a very plausible argument here that the experience of poor Asians shows that there isn’t a systemic structural problem keeping people in the bottom 20%? Or, isn’t it plausible that the generous welfare state doesn’t really fundamentally change people’s’ trajectories, but just reduces the divergence between those trajectories? And if you teach people the first set of statistics but not the second, are you educating them to make up their own minds, or feeding them facts to support a preconceived notion? Stepping back: experts should certainly understand these facts. But what do we expect ordinary people to take away from them? Consider the work done by Piketty and Saez on income inequality: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/10/16850050/inequality-tax-return-data-saez-piketty https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/10/16850050/i.... Defining "income equality" actually is quite a quagmire. For example, in their 2003 work, P&S excluded the effect of tax transfers (such as the earned income tax credit) which significantly overstated the degree of inequality. Or, they mention that marginal tax rates were higher in the 1960s, but exclude the fact that the tax bases were narrower, such that the actual average tax rate on the top 1% hasn't changed dramatically over the decades: https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high. And there are so many other confounding variables to account for. The immigrant population today is almost triple what it was in 1960. Because immigrants often start at the bottom of the ladder, an increasing immigrant share could make incomes seem stagnant even though they’re growing within each different demographic. You also need to account for household sizes, major differences in marriage rates, etc. There are an enormous number of variables. I'm not trying to take a side on this issue, I'm just using it as an example. These are issues of vast complexity. The facts are things experts can fight over. But do we really expect people to make political choices based on this information? Invocation of "facts" and "experts" have an intuitive appeal, but the "fact" is that for almost any disputed political issue, the facts are far from clear. So people use heuristics: ideologies, knee-jerk reactions, general principles, values. It's not clear to me that's wrong.
cycomanic 6y ago
What I don't quite understand is the article is arguing that left and right can't even agree on the facts and both are wrong. But when I look at the examples they are both wrong, but way "to the right" on the facts.
floren 6y ago
When asking "What percentage of US immigrants are Muslim", they saw 21% (D) and 25% (R). Not close to the actual number, but surprisingly close to the 24.1% of the world population who are Muslims. I guess both parties would be approximately correct if immigration was uniform across the entire world population! (I don't mean to imply anything meaningful by this, just that the answers for that question tickled a memory of world demographics)
tomp 6y ago
Clickbait title. Better title: political bias skews guesstimates that COULD be verified. Are we really surprised that people don't know by heart the percentages of income mobility statistics? Also, although the questions, as posed, are technically verifiable, that's not what people really care about - do I care about a statistic of income mobility that includes my parents (soon to be pensioners)? Not really; I care about future projections - the income mobility of myself, and my future kids. That's what policy bickering is about. Edit: the actual (not HN) title of the article is even more clickbait-y: When we can’t even agree on what is real
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  > One experiment showed that even when given an opportunity to learn the facts about immigrants in the U.S. for a nominal sum, those holding the most negative and most inaccurate perceptions were the least willing to pay. There's more to it than just what you pulled out.
djohnston 6y ago
this is why zuck is right
libbyc5 6y ago
So much for the wisdom of the crowds. Danes look like they have more accurate perceptions about immigration, but I'm not sure if that's actually an improvement for society. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/10/2/29 https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/10/2/29 Sometimes it's better to have uninformed priors if you want to give everyone an equal chance.
skeletor_999 6y ago
I think that the results of these types of surveys can be misleading, as they don't always ask if the respondent is unsure. Wouldn't it be better to ask them how knowledgeable they believe they are on a given topic before asking them about the exact numbers? Similarly, wouldn't it be better to ask them first about their support for a given policy change? Many of these answers will simply be guesses. I think it would be far more informing if these answers were broken down by people who believe they are knowledgeable or who support certain policies.
growlist 6y ago
I suppose you could turn it round and ask: why are certain groups so obsessed with forcing immigration on people that don't want it? Don't those people have a right not to have their minds changed by people with an agenda? Who decides what opinions are palatable or otherwise, and why are they seeking to subvert commonly held beliefs for their own benefit?
- gowld 6y ago
  >certain groups so obsessed with forcing immigration on people that don't want it? Are you referring to human traffickers?
  - growlist 6y ago
    I was thinking more the ideologues prevalent throughout virtually every major global institution and goverment. But there does seem to be evidence of NGOs and traffickers collaborating in the Mediterranean for example.

79 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

Is that news to anyone?

I'm sorry, is this showing a _causal_ relationship between political bias and perceptions of reality? The headline and article make it sound like that, but it could just as easily be that your perception of reality causes your political bias. Or that some other thing causes both of them. I can't see the paper to be sure because it's behind a paywall.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sonofgod 6y ago
https://sci-hub.tw/10.3386/w26675 https://sci-hub.tw/10.3386/w26675

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

What's with all these articles stating obvious stuff everyone already knows? I remember a month ago there was an article about how breathing can affect health, like that was news or something. It was on the front page.

sdenton4 6y ago
One of the big human problems in social science is that people are VERY happy to make explanatory narratives instantaneously on hearing a result... Which makes most results seem 'obvious' once reported. One trick to circumvent this is to report the OPPOSITE conclusion first, and then say, 'actually, it was the opposite' after the listener says 'well, duh.' In our own reading, it can be helpful to invert the conclusion and ask how surprising that would seem... In reality, we don't know until we test... We have a lot of stories and biases that we carry all over the place, some are useful, most are shorthand, and many will lead us to wrong conclusions.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > One trick to circumvent this is to report the OPPOSITE conclusion first, and then say, 'actually, it was the opposite' after the listener says 'well, duh.' Study finds political bias improves perception of verifiable facts. I don't think I heard a lot of "well, duh". > In reality, we don't know until we test... We have a lot of stories and biases that we carry all over the place, some are useful, most are shorthand, and many will lead us to wrong conclusions. And even when we test, we don't really know, because we don't know whether we're talking about the same thing. What does "immigrant" mean? Are you still an immigrant after having lived in the US for 30 years? Is a naturalized citizen still an immigrant, or does he cease to be an immigrant when he becomes a citizen? Do you consider the children of an immigrant to be an immigrant? If so, for how many generations? Are you absolutely sure that everybody you talk to answers these questions the same way you do? I'm often surprised how vague these political surveys are and how loose they play with language. And I'm even more surprised when they then use the data to make strong calls. I'm pretty sure if you define the words, you get different results, e.g. ask about "immigrants in the last 10 years", or say "immigrants who have not become citizens that immigrated in the last 80 years". When you only use vague terms, you're not really asking what people believe the numbers to be, you're asking what people understand the term to mean AND what they believe the numbers to be for that understanding. A current example is asking about racism, where it's no longer just academia where you might encounter something like "systemic effects disadvantaging local minority populations" as the working definition, while the average person might understand it closer to "discrimination based on race". You'll get very different responses based on what definition the person is working with, even when you ask about the same metric, e.g. "how often do you witness racism in your work place?"
  - klyrs 6y ago
    > Study finds political bias improves perception of verifiable facts. This is one way of flipping it. What if we go with Study finds conservative bias improves perception of verifiable facts. and Study finds liberal bias improves perception of verifiable facts. showing each to people who respectively identify with those labels? Then, I think we would see a lot of people going "well duh"
srmatto 6y ago
That's a very obtuse take of what I think is a more nuanced development. It's not as simple as "If you don't breathe, you die. Duh!" Regulating your breath can be used to regulate your body and mind. There are lots of different techniques that can regulate different things. Heck, let's totally avoid the "hippy dippy" stuff... Valsalva maneuver for example which is used to diagnose Dysautonomia by slowing your heartrate. Or how about the Navy SEALs box breathing to control cortisol levels? Boy am I glad we "waste our time" researching this stuff!
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  Yes, when you regulate the supply of oxygen to an organ which uses oxygen for fuel, that organ's behavior will change.
xkapastel 6y ago
Breathing affecting health in that way was absolutely news to me. I'm very skeptical that you really could have predicted the results of that study before reading it. In fact, your post on that story was: > Did you all know that humans need oxygen to survive? And that the ways we consume oxygen can affect our health? It doesn't seem like you really understood what they were saying. It's much more complicated than this and doesn't warrant that sort of shallow dismissal.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  Human cells use oxygen for fuel. Breathing is the primary mechanism by which oxygen enters the cells. My teacher told me this stuff when I was a baby in elementary school.
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    What is up with people just ignoring the content of the message that they are replying to and either repeating what they said before or reply to something that was never said? This seems to be more and more common in HN these days.
  - dagnabbit 6y ago
    Thank you for confirming that you did not read the research; and also that you are a snarky fucking asshole. Don't worry though, dang won't do anything to you because dang does not moderate white male assholes. Dang prefers silencing minorities.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Wow, those scientists went to the wrong elementary school. You sound smart, they usually don't even let toddlers into elementary school, much less babies.
rsynnott 6y ago
I think the most interesting bit about this is how wrong _everyone_ is on the highlighted metrics. More data here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantcheva/files/slides_aea_v2.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantcheva/files/slides_ae... The extreme _regional_ wrongness about economic mobility is particularly interesting; people in places with higher mobility tend to somewhat downplay it; those in places with lower mobility tend to massively upplay it.
awb 6y ago
> obvious stuff everyone already knows Only about 40-60% of the US population votes, and I doubt a majority follow politics closely. Plus, kids grow up and need to learn things that seem obvious to older folks. Glad you knew this already, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's interesting to many others.

dfxm12 6y ago

It turns out those polled are not good at knowing verifiable facts like: What share of U.S. immigrants receive unemployment? What share of U.S. immigrants are Muslim? Why do people even hazard a guess at this stuff? Does your average Joe registered voter really think they have such a handle on immigration in their country that they think they know the religion of everyone coming in and who is receiving exactly what benefits? Talk about the Dunning–Kruger effect...

sonofgod 6y ago
Because they've been asked to. And I expect that if there's hesitation, the survey runners ask them to give their best guess. And if they don't guess, and move onto the next question, then they're eliminated from the aggregated results.

jakeogh 6y ago

from 1.75s to 4s, dv/dt of wtc7 == g p46 https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/NCSTAR/ncstar1a.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/NCSTAR/ncstar1a.pdf 21s video of angle 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRs6QCw7n6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRs6QCw7n6U

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Leary 6y ago

What share of US immigrants receive unemployment? Democrats: 25.6% Republicans: 27.1% Reality: 5.5% It seems the bigger bias comes from the general media than any particular party political bias.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
autokad 6y ago
I can't believe they thought it was that high. I mean general unemployment is no where near 27% and you'd suspect that with threat of losing visa status, immigrants are more likelier to take a job they dont exactly grok.
- black6 6y ago
  I would invite you to look at Shadow Stats for a real peek at unemployment numbers, not the “cooked” numbers from the BLS. http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...
- uoaei 6y ago
  "grok" is defined as "comprehend the dynamics of" which I'm not sure you meant.
  - shkkmo 6y ago
    That is a rather impoverished explanation of a complicated word. A closer description would be "to understand something on such a deep and personal level that the lines of identity between it and you blur." Here's a passage from the book that coined the term (as a word from an alien language) > Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Ididntdothis 6y ago

From what I can see the real problem is that most people don’t care about facts anymore. They just want to hear what they think anyway and the political parties are too happy to feed that. When you talk to left wingers and right wingers about the economy of the last ten years the left guys will tell you it was paradise until 2016 and then everything went to hell. The right wingers will tell you it was misery until 2016 and then the boom started. When you look at stock indices, unemployment or other charts you will see a steady rise over ten years. You won’t even see that the president has changed. But pointing that out is futile. Most people don’t want facts.

cycomanic 6y ago
I think if the current crisis has shown one thing it's the disconnect between the stock market and the economy.
bytedude 6y ago
Looks like the stock market was flat-lining by the end of Obama's term. https://www.macrotrends.net/1358/dow-jones-industrial-average-last-10-years https://www.macrotrends.net/1358/dow-jones-industrial-averag... You may not care about facts, but don't generalize too quickly.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  When I look at this chart I see ups and downs but overall a pretty steady upward trend. I don’t see eights years of Obama misery and then triumph under Trump. That was my point.
  - bytedude 6y ago
    Your point was that people don't care about facts, which you are proving in ironic fashion. Even when presented with evidence and facts, you fail to acknowledge it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

rayiner 6y ago

The problem is that “verifiable fact” is actually very complicated in any context where you’re talking about politics. Two of the questions on the first graphic are about income mobility for people born in the bottom quantile. The graphic is correct, as far as it goes, but overlooks huge differences by race. While the average American born in the bottom 20% has a 7.8% chance of reaching the top 20%, that number is actually 25% for Asians. Or, take the fact that the US lags Denmark in inter generational income mobility. Which is true, but it’s also true that the difference is due mainly to taxes and transfers flattening the whole distribution instead of fundamental structural differences that enable more movement: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/09/23/denmerica-why-denmark-plus-america-could-be-the-mobility-utopia/amp https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/09.... Put differently, it’s not that the welfare system allows the son of a gardener to become an engineer, but that massive income redistribution reduces the disparity between gardeners and engineers. (For many Americans, that distinction could be dispositive in whether you support an expanded welfare system.) So take these facts the next step. The authors studied these things in the context of support for reducing income inequality. Isn’t there a very plausible argument here that the experience of poor Asians shows that there isn’t a systemic structural problem keeping people in the bottom 20%? Or, isn’t it plausible that the generous welfare state doesn’t really fundamentally change people’s’ trajectories, but just reduces the divergence between those trajectories? And if you teach people the first set of statistics but not the second, are you educating them to make up their own minds, or feeding them facts to support a preconceived notion? Stepping back: experts should certainly understand these facts. But what do we expect ordinary people to take away from them? Consider the work done by Piketty and Saez on income inequality: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/10/16850050/inequality-tax-return-data-saez-piketty https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/10/16850050/i.... Defining "income equality" actually is quite a quagmire. For example, in their 2003 work, P&S excluded the effect of tax transfers (such as the earned income tax credit) which significantly overstated the degree of inequality. Or, they mention that marginal tax rates were higher in the 1960s, but exclude the fact that the tax bases were narrower, such that the actual average tax rate on the top 1% hasn't changed dramatically over the decades: https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high. And there are so many other confounding variables to account for. The immigrant population today is almost triple what it was in 1960. Because immigrants often start at the bottom of the ladder, an increasing immigrant share could make incomes seem stagnant even though they’re growing within each different demographic. You also need to account for household sizes, major differences in marriage rates, etc. There are an enormous number of variables. I'm not trying to take a side on this issue, I'm just using it as an example. These are issues of vast complexity. The facts are things experts can fight over. But do we really expect people to make political choices based on this information? Invocation of "facts" and "experts" have an intuitive appeal, but the "fact" is that for almost any disputed political issue, the facts are far from clear. So people use heuristics: ideologies, knee-jerk reactions, general principles, values. It's not clear to me that's wrong.

cycomanic 6y ago

What I don't quite understand is the article is arguing that left and right can't even agree on the facts and both are wrong. But when I look at the examples they are both wrong, but way "to the right" on the facts.

floren 6y ago

When asking "What percentage of US immigrants are Muslim", they saw 21% (D) and 25% (R). Not close to the actual number, but surprisingly close to the 24.1% of the world population who are Muslims. I guess both parties would be approximately correct if immigration was uniform across the entire world population! (I don't mean to imply anything meaningful by this, just that the answers for that question tickled a memory of world demographics)

tomp 6y ago

Clickbait title. Better title: political bias skews guesstimates that COULD be verified. Are we really surprised that people don't know by heart the percentages of income mobility statistics? Also, although the questions, as posed, are technically verifiable, that's not what people really care about - do I care about a statistic of income mobility that includes my parents (soon to be pensioners)? Not really; I care about future projections - the income mobility of myself, and my future kids. That's what policy bickering is about. Edit: the actual (not HN) title of the article is even more clickbait-y: When we can’t even agree on what is real

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> One experiment showed that even when given an opportunity to learn the facts about immigrants in the U.S. for a nominal sum, those holding the most negative and most inaccurate perceptions were the least willing to pay. There's more to it than just what you pulled out.

djohnston 6y ago

this is why zuck is right

libbyc5 6y ago

So much for the wisdom of the crowds. Danes look like they have more accurate perceptions about immigration, but I'm not sure if that's actually an improvement for society. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/10/2/29 https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/10/2/29 Sometimes it's better to have uninformed priors if you want to give everyone an equal chance.

skeletor_999 6y ago

I think that the results of these types of surveys can be misleading, as they don't always ask if the respondent is unsure. Wouldn't it be better to ask them how knowledgeable they believe they are on a given topic before asking them about the exact numbers? Similarly, wouldn't it be better to ask them first about their support for a given policy change? Many of these answers will simply be guesses. I think it would be far more informing if these answers were broken down by people who believe they are knowledgeable or who support certain policies.

growlist 6y ago

I suppose you could turn it round and ask: why are certain groups so obsessed with forcing immigration on people that don't want it? Don't those people have a right not to have their minds changed by people with an agenda? Who decides what opinions are palatable or otherwise, and why are they seeking to subvert commonly held beliefs for their own benefit?

gowld 6y ago
>certain groups so obsessed with forcing immigration on people that don't want it? Are you referring to human traffickers?
- growlist 6y ago
  I was thinking more the ideologues prevalent throughout virtually every major global institution and goverment. But there does seem to be evidence of NGOs and traffickers collaborating in the Mediterranean for example.