Comment by timr
1 day ago
> The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.
It's an interesting theory, and I almost want to agree, but I can assure you that the same approximate percentage of extremist idiots exist in real-world NYC as online. If you doubt me, go to the fountain in Washington Square Park pretty much whenever, and you will meet them.
Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
>Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
When you zoom in on a small area, sure. But globally? Pick a card and you'd have to squint to say most people are moderate on most issues.
Examples:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2015/11/18/global-support...
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...
OK, the first link was about free speech, and the third was about "support for authoritarianism". Of all the issues you could possibly cherry-pick, those are amongst the ones where I'd expect the most extreme polarization (Survey people if they like ice cream and puppies, and hate murder, while you're at it.)
As for the second one (about homosexuality), the article tells a fairly nuanced story about polarization across countries, with rising overall support, and a lot of countries...in the middle. That bar chart mid-way down the article looks exactly like what I'd expect.
> When you zoom in on a small area, sure. But globally?
Yes. The bigger the population, the more I expect to see a bell curve. Central limit theorem.
> Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
Moderate-ness is, more or less, a fallacy. People believe that since we have A and B that the correct answer must be somewhere in the middle - intuitively, you would think, somewhere really in the middle. Like if I want fried chicken, but my friend wants to eat-in to get something healthy, then the right answer is getting something out to eat that's somewhat healthy.
So, people who are unaware on issues are "naturally" moderate, because intuitively it seems to make a lot of sense.
But, not actually. If we just look at history, choose virtually any point, when are the moderates right? Almost never. The 3/5ths compromise was shit, for instance. Civil Unions? Remember those? Yeah, that was stupid and we should've just given homosexuals marriage. I mean, what were moderates saying during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s? I'll give you a hint... it was not good. Yeah, that aged like milk too.
You would think, given the history of failure that is moderate policy, people might be a tad hesitant to be moderate on an issue. You would think, they might dig deeper.
But no. We all have this idea that this point in time, and in this particular place, is unique. Our politics, now, are much different. No no, you see, it's not the same. This time we are right.
Of course, this is slightly better than social conservatism, which has a track record of always being bad. Forever. In every culture. Across the entire globe. But no guys, this time it's right! Never mind Confucianism or whatever, this is different!
Polling can’t even accurately figure out if people are going to vote R or D two weeks from the poll. Color me skeptical that public opinion polling in anything more complex is more accurate and not simply used to itself shape public perception and opinion.
Even polling “experts” like Silver regularly make huge misses on binary questions (his Florida bet) let alone stuff like the Selzer poll. It’s really hard to take any complex issue polling seriously. It’s a tough sell to convince me that sure, these binary choice election polls with a verifiable result (the election) are wrong, but totally unverifiable public opinion polling with possibly framed questions represent reality.
That's actually an indication that what I'm saying is true. Polls aren't sensitive to pick up the subtle differences that divide the two-party system in the USA.
For all that the people in the tails of the distributions want to believe otherwise, the difference between "red state" and "blue state" is a few percentage points, nationwide.
These polls are just asking “who are you going to vote for”, there’s no subtlety to them - and the Selzer poll was still off by 16 points. Nate Silver after all his polling meta analysis bet 100k that Trump would win Florida narrowly at best. He won it by 15 points.
They aren’t deducing voting behavior from your positions. They are just asking you who you were going to vote for and they can’t get it right.
Given those facts, I can’t see any reason to believe even the results of a fraught question like “do you consider yourself a moderate?”