The "survey-taker" here was the people being asked. It wasn't administered by a human surveyor; people were completing an online form. I just went and looked at

The "survey-taker" here was the people being asked. It wasn't administered by a human surveyor; people were completing an online form. I just went and looked at our online signup form, and I've had to collect entry errors on three of the last twenty submissions. If the only source we had for the percentage of the population that was religiously Jewish was a poll, then yes, I would say you should take that number with a hefty grain of salt. But that isn't the only data we have. We have data from many polls, the census, back-of-the-napkin estimates based on the number of places of worship and average attendance, past demographic knowledge, fertility rates and immigration, and so on. Even then, there's substantial error in those estimates - the US Census Bureau itself, arguably the most sophisticated demographic operation in the history of mankind, estimates that they double-counted ("erroneous enumeration") roughly ten million Americans, shrugged and went "yeah someone probably lives there" ("whole-person imputation") for another eight million, and missed eighteen million [1]. And that's just for total population (they think the error is larger among subgroups). And numbers for trans people are highly variable (by as much as 1.5 orders of magnitude) among major sources I'm aware of. For example, the Williams Institute [2] finds ~1.5% trans ID among young people (a third of Pew's number), and binary trans people outnumbering nonbinary ones 2:1 (inverting Pew's ratio). The Canadian census shows <1% [3] among young people. And corroborating sources are harder to get, both because there's a lot of disagreement about who exactly "counts" (Pew uses "transgender" and "nonbinary" as separate categories, the Williams Institute considers the latter a subset of the former) and because corroborating evidence is often only available for subsets of the population (like people who sought medical care related to their identity). So yeah, I stand by what I said: a single survey does not tell you very much about a rare subgroup, in this or any other context. It is data, but it should be taken with a substantial grain of salt, especially when it comes to a group like trans people whose boundaries are fuzzy and highly controversial even internally. Certainly I don't think the statistical MOE tells even close to the full story, since it doesn't even for MUCH simpler questions (typical polling error in elections is ~twice the MOE on a much more clearly-defined question, for example). [1] https://www.prb.org/resources/how-accurate-was-the-2020-census-and-why-should-you-care/#:~:text=The%20PES%20estimated%20a%20net,2010%20to%205.8%25%20in%202020 https://www.prb.org/resources/how-accurate-was-the-2020-cens.... [2] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Tr... [3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm?HPA=1 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220...