[lbo-talk] Americans pissed, sez Greenberg

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Tue Oct 30 14:10:50 PDT 2007


Carl Remick wrote:
>...polls show that Americans think their private lives are just
>ducky, but they also think the wheels are coming off the nation as a
>whole.
>
>If that isn't proof positive that Americans are dumber than shit, I
>don't know what would qualify....

This statement combines two lamentable fallacies:

1.) It ignores the framing effect of the questions in order to see a "contradiction" between overall answers. But if the "happiness" question is posed in strictly personal terms, there is no contradiction for someone to answer "personally happy" to that question and (for someone else who would also give the same answer) "politically unhappy" to a question posed in strictly political terms.

2.) It ignores the overlap factor. If 70 percent say "the wheels are coming off the nation as a whole" and, say, 70 percent say that they are reasonably happy in their private lives, then the "contradiction," even disregarding the nonparallelism of the questions, may well apply to no more than 40 percent of the poll respondents.

Shane Mage

"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.

When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)



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