Just Facts
Polls and surveys are indispensable tools for discovering valuable information, but we need to understand their inner workings in order to assess their accuracy.
A script of this video, documentation of every fact in it, and “Genius Notes” to help you apply these skills are available at https://www.justfactsacademy.org/polls
There is a dangerous hole in the U.S. education system: students are learning what to think instead of how to think. Be part of the solution by taking this free course at Just Facts Academy and sharing it with others: https://www.justfactsacademy.org/
“…but we need to understand….”
Not on my list of needs. Food, water, shelter are needs.
How is that for critical thinking?
The biggest problem with opinion surveys is that they survey opinions.
The majority of Americans might believe that global warming is a big threat to human existence, and that ghosts and angels exist, but they are almost certainly wrong.
Opinion surveys only help policy makers craft policies that will be popular, but almost certainly doomed to failure. Socialism for example.
Therefore, all opinion surveys have no valid value. One should discount them on principal, unless you’re trying to sell something.
Facts are far more interesting and useful than opinions.
That’s exactly what’s happening
And that’s what they’re selling – popularism
“Facts are far more interesting and useful than opinions.”
Except to politicians who prefer to know opinions over facts.
Opinions are facts about the people who hold them. Happily roughly half of Americans are skeptical of AGW. That is an important fact.
Yes, an important fact that so many skeptics lamentably don’t grasp. Voters decide, albeit indirectly, on climate policy based on their OPINIONS, not facts. Even when they claim to be basing their decisions on facts and they are sincerely attempting to do so, they are necessarily basing their decisions on their opinion of what is factual and what is not.
If the skeptical case is based on scientific facts alone, it could be absolutely correct and at the same time overwhelmingly rejected by the public. We must wake up to the fact that emotional appeals cannot be effectively countered merely with facts.
Yes. We must all start emitting as much CO2 as possible. If we are not emitting twice as much CO2 by 2030, we are doomed! We must glue our hands to wind turbine blades to stop this madness! We could also splash red paint on stuff.
But if we do the former, the latter won’t be necessary.
My sarcometer may be on the fritz, Thomas, but I can’t detect your intent.
We don’t need to emit any more or less CO2, although either way it’s harmless and indeed more is better for the biosphere.
What we need to counter emotional unhinged fantasy narratives about Climate Change ™ is a few emotional appeals of our own highlighting the facts that skeptics have been trying and failing to convey for decades. Fear of starvation, chaos, war, hordes of starving pillagers, freezing in the dark.
“….skeptical….”
Yes David, in my cohort of 250 or so friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, the only educated ones who are believers in CAGW, oddly, are school teachers, consisting of about 1/2 a dozen of that cohort, plus a few others who consider “reality TV” to be reality, so tells you something about their gullibility. All of the others seem to be of the opinion that it’s good the temperature went up a degree since the Little Ice Age, unless they lie to me at BBQ’s and gatherings to make me go away (quite possible)…My grandmother used to say “don’t talk politics or religion” socially. I have now added CC to that 😝.
But, it makes one wonder why a Political Party would push CC as part of the swing-vote-capture strategy.
The biggest problem with opinion surveys is that they survey opinions.
thats your opinion
Opinion surveys only help policy makers craft policies that will be popular, but almost certainly doomed to failure. Socialism for example.
so ya tax cuts wouls be popular, “certainly doomed to failure” err nope
ending affirmative action would be popular…
lets face it, you were stumped for something to say until you thought wait a minute socialism is popular, therefore, opinion surveys must be bad.
thats your logic
Socialism is popular, and it always fails.
Facts over opinions and feelings every time. Talking of feelings, the heatwave in Europe has passed the UK by.
It’s a bog standard – disappointing – summer; cool and wet. Our climate boffins are feeling pretty miffed. I wonder what they’ll attribute that to?
On the Beeb this morning they were saying that the jet stream has come south and is keeping high pressure over southern Europe and low pressure over the British Isles. They’re probably not far wrong. In other words, “It’s weather, not climate” once again.
No crisis here!
and have you ever heard such fluster and garbage.. “The Jet Stream”
1/ The location of the jet is an effect – NOT the cause
2/ At this, the warmest time of the Northern Hemisphere year, the jet stream should be a million miles high and a million miles north – it has completely no business racing across Europe where it is.
3/ The jet stream is an intensely cold thing
See the attached = today’s UK storm forecast… wtf is air THAT COLD doing here at this time of the year?
Meanwhile , Southern Europe seemingly roasts – a European climate Sputnik thought it saw ground/soil/dirt temperatures of 60°C recently in Central Southern Spain.
Fine maybe yes very lovely – what else can you expect in a desert
The desert is hot because cold dry air aloft is falling (onto S Europe)
That air is heated by lapse rate/Fohn effect as it descends
That air is coming from the UK thunderstorms – they are lifting moist warm air and it dries and cools as it goes
But but but you say, UK is cool, Spain is hot and “hot air rises”
Everybody knows that Hot Air Rises so why is the air over Spain not rising while the UK air should be falling?
But it’s rising and making T-storms!!!
Because that air over ‘Spain’, despite being hot, has less buoyancy than the warm & moist air over the UK – rising air over the UK gets priority
It is that once temp gets above 20 or 25°C, the density of moist humid air plummets – it becomes incredibly buoyant – much more so than dry air at 40 and 50°C..
That is what’s driving the UK ‘cool’ and S Europe ‘hot’
We any closer to understanding how ….
Water controls climate,How deserts are Cold PlacesDeserts are self-reinforcing places – once you’ve made one you’re fuggedIt is the simple basic mechanical physical property of water vapour that Makes ClimateCO₂ science is fantastically contrived nonsense and complete garbage……that what CO₂ Science **thinks**is a +ve feedback is the most powerfully negative one you’ll come upon anywhereAnd there it is, playing out beautifully over Europe right now’Someone’ really does want to start thinking about putting those ploughs away and cultivating a few (more) perennial plants.
Such as trees. Or cow-pastures
Peta – I think we’re in danger of talking at cross-purposes here. I’d have thought that the position/course/whatever, at any particular time, of the high-altitude “winds” that are known as the jet-stream are the cause; the effect is the weather that this brings about. Whatever its temperature is irrelevant; it affects the WEATHER (which is the point I as trying to make).
Flanders and Swann provided us with a historical record of “UK climate in the 1950s”, in popular lyrical form, in their “Song of the Weather”.
Two couplets (out of 12) are
and
How much “climate change” has occurred in the UK from the 1950s up to 2023 ?
It’s a bit warmer, but not that much warmer
It was a lot warmer in 1976.
“It’s a bog standard – disappointing – summer; cool and wet.”
As long as you don’t include June as summer.
There is public opinion and then there is the public opinion on public opinion, shaped by the publication of alleged polls.
If you trust US MSM, European people, esp. French population hates Trump and the US conservatives.
If you trust the muh Russia people, much support was seen for Kyle Rittenhouse in European twitterverse. What gives? Is that another Russian interference operation? No, it’s actually twitterverse in Europe supporting Kyle Rittenhouse, not the MSM narrative.
There simply isn’t massive hate for US conservatives in Europe.
Why would the French people support ostensible France lovers in US liberal media, who actually despise real France, as:
So obviously these polls showing very poor opinion of Trump and conservatives by people in Europe do not match reality. We live in phonyland.
Also Story tip: It depends where you hold your poll, see the science of geopsychology, explains why northeast us has the most climate anxiety
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/geopsychology-regional-personality-variation/
First step? Find out who is paying for the results. The people paying get what they pay for. Polls and surveys have not been legitimate since the ’90s, all skewed towards what the people PAYING for the results want those results to be. ” I am paying you $1mil for these results, I don’t get the results I am paying for and you don’t get the $1mil. Son of a bitch, got the results I paid for.”
Well, not exactly. They can’t refuse to pay, but to be more accurate, ‘I’m paying you a million dollars a year to run these surveys that prove my ideology. If I don’t get what I am paying for, the contract won’t be renewed.’
Exactly, give me what I paid for, or you don’t get paid. All polls and surveys are crap, lies, propaganda. Period. Full stop.
I would not go so far as to say that all polls are propaganda and crap.
Yes, most polls have some degree of a bias but some polling companies sell their product to those who just want to know the true current state of public opinion. Those companies have a stake in being seen as the most reliable as opposed to getting a desired result.
I’ll give you that sometimes a poll is commissioned by a partisan and not released because it doesn’t give the desired result. But that poll will still have to be paid for and maybe others will still need to be paid for if already contracted. It’s reasonable to assume that the pollster would try to avoid disappointing the customer if possible, though. That’s why most people discount polls commissioned by a partisan. They are less interested in accuracy than in how favorable the result is.
Worth reading a little book by Bobby Duffy ex CEO of Mori Polls entitled “The Perils of Perception, or why we are wrong about nearly everything”. It highlights the degree to which the responses in polls asking questions on hard facts get wildly incorrect answers, in whichever country they are posed.
Questions on the trend in deaths caused by natural disasters were answered with horrendous overstatement everywhere. As in all cases he cited one probable cause of this false perception as Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Type One’ thinking, which is heavily influenced by exposure to media and other influences. More specifically, in the case of natural disasters he postulates that we are programmed to rapidly forget past natural disasters as a survival mechanism passed on from those of our early ancestors in the African Savannah who had the ability to concentrate on immediate threats and thus survive. Thus, we view the past through rose tinted glasses.
The fact that during the primary of the French right and center, with the victory of conservative François Fillon, there was a conspiracy, is clear and undeniable, yet nobody but me ever mention it. It’s so transparent: the French RINO Alain Juppé was well placed then he felt because of a fake rumor about great Mosquée which did not exist, made up by the French alt right. But the news was not fake. And the news what not a news, nobody heard of it except those following alt right social media accounts.
So we have:
So it’s clear we have here a multi layer conspiracy, with MSM intentionally hurting Juppé by a phony publication of a fraudulent debunking of phony fake news, but Juppé was crashing well before, for no discernable reason, proving that Juppé good polls were fake and that the crash was just the French pollsters conspiring to stop their conspiration to promote Juppé in the primary.
It’s a TRIPLE conspiracy. If it sounds crazy or costly, bear in mind that there is no cheaper thing. My explanation is perfect: Juppé was promoted as an islamo compatible RINO alternative to Fillon, but when the deep state got an affair on Fillon, they decided to pull their conspiracy to support Juppé, letting Fillon win the primary to then by crushed by a phony diversion of funds to his wife (the funds would have went to Fillon party, “Les républicains” anyway, the funds would never state in state coffer). Fillon lawyer went to the media to ineptly argue “separation of powers” to protect him, when the affair was POLITICAL. The lawyer clearly was not support Fillon.
I have spent weeks trying to find a cheaper thing. I know I’m right.
French polls = fraud.
The French usual conspitards are too inept to denounce any of that.
I read twitter A LOT and there is something VERY phony in US political twitterverse. So many account have lots of icons, describe themselves as “political junky” or something junky (who the hell does that in real life?), the opinions expressed have even less entropy than those of “normal” account.
Of course I am not saying that political opinions are well “thermalized”, on the contrary they have high correlations between orthogonal matters: voters opinions on different matters often resemble the ones of some opinion leader; people are rarely in extreme disagreement on at least essential political subject with every significant group. But opinions are copy paste of the points promoted by a leader, for normal people.
So I think there is a significant effort to animate social media with fake personas to give an apparence of widespread support for Dem talking points. Real support for Dems must be quite low for such animation to take place.
I rarely feel that in France, although some pro LFI (French inept labor with a French Jeremy Corbyn as leader) accounts are funny, most are as inept as they are real.
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” – W. Edwards Deming
Standing on the shoulders of dead giants is so boring. You have to read their writings in order to do that because they aren’t interviewed on TV by the popular talking heads.
I agree with the author’s criticism of modern education. From Kindergarten through graduate school, our youngsters are taught what to think, not how to think critically. This provides them with limited tools for analysis of complex problems. Just debate a current university student on something important. In most cases, they do not understand how to evaluate evidence, and thus believe their opinions to be factual because a professor said it. Begin introducing real evidence into the discussion, and count how many times you hear “I’ll have to check that out.” In most cases, the actual number of probative attempts will be zero, because research into sources is part of critical thinking, and that is education to which our youngsters have been insufficiently exposed.
That said, I disagree with Thomas’ assertions (Comments section, below) that belief in angels and ghosts is “almost certainly wrong”. If you apply critical analysis to this statement, you quickly realize that Thomas cannot prove his assertion. The most he can state is that he does not believe the various citations in the new and old Testament, various personal experiences and other sources. Being the recipient of a vision once in my life, I can state unequivocally that I believe in life outside of our direct observation. There is no right or wrong to be associated with my belief, or the similar beliefs of others. To say otherwise is to argue like a Democrat, i.e.., like the professors who teach our kids.
Hope it was a damsel with a dulcimer…