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You're probably wrong about how things have changed (experimentalhistory.substack.com)
28 points by herbertl on Feb 10, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments


>150 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk

I absolutely cannot stand this sampling in psychological studies. It is not a good representation of the population

How in the heck don't researchers realize this? It's lazy, the easy way out to getting a sample to survey.


Who are the people you get when you use Amazon Mechanical Turk? Has anyone done an analysis on what spectrum of people work for it?


How in the heck don't researchers realize this?

It's lazy, the easy way out to getting a sample to survey.


This has been on my mind lately since I saw the paper originally.

I think the question for me is why people misestimate others' attitudes, and what that says about them.

For instance, if a group of people are getting more liberal but believe everyone is getting more conservative, is that a reflection of their mood?

I guess it raised a bunch of questions for me about how well surveys track things like mood and perceptions.


So... people are bad at organizing, don't live long enough to endure the slow pace of bureaucracy, and are apathetic anyway? Yeah? Why is this article so long?


> Here are a few things we all know are true:

> Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 thanks to a huge increase in anti-immigrant sentiment

> Nobody was worried about climate change in the 1990s, but now lots of people are freaking out about it

> Mass shootings have led to a spike in support for gun control

That's not my common understanding for any of these things, though they sound like forgotten hot takes from the perpetual news cycle. None of them even make sense.


The rest of the article is about how people's estimates of polls diverge from those same polls, but not why. Were people better at estimating polls or national sentiment thirty years ago?


A few things changed.

Pollsters realized that polls can impact the result of a election, people who lean for a particular candidate can be pushed over the edge with a poll that shows that candidate winning.

Half the country has been classified as deplorable and have learned to not express how they feel to others, it shows up at the ballot box but you don't see it when you survey.


> it shows up at the ballot box but you don't see it when you survey.

Does it really? Last Republican President to win the popular vote was 30 years ago. Longer than I’ve been alive…




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