5% of Americans own a car but not a drivers licence.
Holy, holy, holy…they actually thought 21% of people are transgender? 1 in 5?? The only thing this proves is the polled Americans are stupid AF. 🙄🙄🙄
seems like they polled mostly boomers or conservatives.
They think almost 25% of people are trans?? Jesus fucking christ
It explains so much when it’s played up so heavily in talk shows, despite the reality always having been very minor. Honestly I didn’t realize me being gay was that much of a minority either. I kind of wish ADHD had been one in the list; if I remember the reality is like no more than 3-5% of the population but people assume it’s over diagnosed as hell and like…not really. Maybe when there was the initial “rush” of sorts for parents during the 90’s because of it seeming to help “unruly” kids, often just meaning imaginative or creative. In my case my parents didn’t even know until my kindergarten teacher told them I should get evaluated, and yep.
neurodivergence is seeing a boom in diagnoses because we now actually fucking diagnose neurodivergence instead of going “yeah the kid’s a retard dump em in the bin”
Oh for sure. It’s still only in that like 5% range but what I meant was folks treat it like it’s new and like…nah.
I hate it. I haven’t run into anyone directly doubting my ADHD at all lately, but as a kid I definitely faced that stigma from some other kids saying it’s “fake”, and I think one of the teachers even said it.
Or vice versa, people have that perception because the media and social networks fixate on it so much.
Frequently meaning well, but the attempt to be very inclusive creates for some crazy unrealisitc representations.
3% Atheists is such a bullshit number. There is a famous Pew poll, where they asked people two questions side by side, “are you an atheist” and “do you believe in any god”, and 4% answered no to the first one and something like 20% answered no to the second one.
I think “atheist” carries the connotations of being irreligeous, not just not believing in any gods. So some people may not believe in any gods, but maybe they do have some kind of spirituality, or believe in ghosts or something. Buddhism as a religion doesn’t mandate God-belief, though some schools do interact with devas. I’m unsure if any other religions don’t require gods to work, but even if they exist, I imagine they and Buddhists, despite not believing in any gods, will be very hesitant to describe themselves as “atheist.”
i’d say you can be atheist and believe in ghosts/spirits, that’s pretty different from divine beings
the core thing about divinity is power, power to do things or power to have done things in the past or future. spirits and ghosts generally have power comparable to living people, so the lack of obvious evidence for their existence isn’t anywhere near as big of an issue as with deities capable of altering the fabric of reality.
it’s not that incongrous that we’d fail to notice things that can barely interact with us, but an explicitly omnipotent and omniscient god? they can damn well write “hey ho here i am!” in the clouds.
I don’t disagree; that was never my point. My point is the term “atheist” carries a lot of baggage, that might make people not want to associate with it for many reasons that are unrelated to what the word actually means. Especially in the West where the term is severely maligned.
According to the same research, 1% of US adults are Buddhist, and they fall in a separate cathegory.
All the polls are weird, and very much depending on how you ask the question and how you slice the data.
But you’re right, the word atheist carries some baggage in a christian nationalist country, but that was kind of almost my point. So many people are afraid of the word atheist, but are “not religious, don’t believe in any gods, don’t follow any practices”, which is, actual textbook definition of the word.
Sounds about right, there’s a difference between atheism and agnosticism, which is what the 2nd question is asking.
This isn’t the difference. Agnosticism postulates that knowing if any god exist is categorically unanswerable. The matter of your personal believe is a parallel question entirely. “We cannot be sure, but I personally don’t believe any gods” makes an atheist, but so does “There is absolutely no evidence for any gods so I don’t believe any”. “We cannot be sure, but I personally believe in Sobek, may his sperm be neverending” makes a theist.
I think the bigger difference is “I don’t believe but I also don’t think others are wrong” is a kind of mentality often. I think that and people are used to seeing self-proclaimed atheists being assholes loudly and go “well I’m not that”. Atheism got fucked over by people who just want to be dicks to religious folks.
Here’s how I’m reading the questions:
“are you an atheist”. 4%
4% of respondents have a firm belief that gods do not exist. (atheist)
“do you believe in any god” 20%
20% of respondents do not believe in a god, but do not necessarily think they don’t exist either. They don’t have enough knowledge to form a belief, i.e. they don’t know. (agnostic)
Agnosticism is the separate category in that questioneer. Pew is weird about it, they just list every major religion and sect, then “other” then “agnostic”, “atheist”, and “nothing”, and you need to chose one, which might be the source of confusion, and I can’t see any good explanation on why do they do it like that. LIke I said, bullshit number. “Don’t believe in any gods, don’t follow any religion, not an agnostic” is an atheist, by definition. Separating it into “atheist” and “atheist but different word” can only serve one purpose, to dilute the numbers so christians don’t feel threatened by all the evil heathens.
Mmm, in that case just sounds like unreliable data.
4% answered no to the first one and something like 20% answered no to the second one.
Where did the other 76% go?
It’s an overlapping numbers from different questioneers. A bunch people for example are christians who never been to church and don’t believe in a christian god.
Okay but Americans are numerically illiterate.
… Honestly, this isn’t too surprising with how saturated the media is with minority groups. Almost every show I see on various streaming products ends up having heavy LGBTQ+ plots rammed in, trans characters showin up, always a multicultural combo of characters and fewer and fewer generic CIS white people. When the media is constantly blasting you with minorities and minority issues, in a highly biased way, it’s totally not surprising at all that people would start thinking they’re a way bigger slice of the population.
Like someone once pointed out that there were more airplane pilots in North America than trans people. So imagine if every TV show you watched, suddenly had an airplane pilot show up and talk about airplanes a bunch, had whole episodes dedicated to his occupational trauma, regardless of what the main plot of the show may be. That would be more representative of the general public, than having trans people in every fucking show going on about trans trauma.
its called corporate virtue signalling, or rainbow capitalism, alot of people complained how it ruins shows, and i do agree, its a distraction from poor writing and plots.
It’s also used as a deflection of criticism. “Oh you don’t like my show? Racist! Homophobe! Transphobe!” These accusations used to work quite effectively but they were so overused that people have kind of become numb to them now.
Yeah – agreed. I tried watching “The Magicians” because it was highly recommended. No CIS white male characters in the show really. They had a white bisexual guy who spent a lot of time sleeping with gay dudes. Wasn’t much of an issue / commented on for the first few seasons, and it was ‘ok’ viewing, if sorta stupid. But then in season 3 and 4 they were super heavy handed in breaking the fourth wall and saying cis white guys who identified with just that one bisexual white guy character were being racist/sexist for not looking at other characters, in part because that character gets killed off in season 4.
Why they thought that their cis white guy audience was going to identify with a bi-sexual neuro-divergent sort, one who’d spent like an entire (time loopy) life time with his gay lover, I’m not sure. But the heavy handed 4th wall breaking to talk-down to that audience demographic did end up making me not bother with seasons 5.
It seems you weren’t the only one who didn’t like that. The show was cancelled after season 5. We see this again and again. The Rings of Power. Sex Education. She-Hulk. Willow. Velma. Doctor Who. Ms. Marvel. Batwoman. The Wheel of Time. Writers who don’t respect the source material, or think movies and shows are a soapbox instead of a medium for entertainment and creativity.
ISAIP basically became a virtue signalling show in the recent seasons, it was so cringe, let alone the actors are all wierd now too rob and kaitlyn.
seems like a terrible shows, if it only revolves around bisexual/ straight porn fetish tropes, and now about “magicians”. Old trek knew how to make it subtle and not ruin the plot(though they were well aware of overly sensitive audience in the 90s,) they did in a way it dint affect the plot, arcs. nutrek is all that, kurtzman ruined it.
I agree. Undoubtedly someone is going to get very mad with your opinion and intentionally miss the point. Representation is fine. Shoehorning a specific minority into every plot line then beating the viewer over the head with the most juvenile and hamfisted messaging imaginable isn’t helping anyone. It just makes for bad content. We have many examples of women and minorities in movies and shows written well for decades. It’s only quite recently that writers appear to value representation and ideological messaging over the story, and I think for that they deserve criticism.
Every show and movie has become a preachy soapbox. It’s fucking tiring and you just want to turn it off because you suddenly get slapped in the face with irrelevant “causes” instead of just zoning out and being entertained. The suspension of disbelief gets exhausted at yet another 110lb hottie thrashing a 6’-4 steroid monster that could backhand her across the room in real life.
You’re right! They should bring back Wings!
These estimates are bananas, this only shows the systematic stupidification of Americans is highly successful.
It’s called propaganda! Relentless, unceasing bombardment of right wing brain rotting propaganda.
Do explain…
Social Media
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There are some errors in the “correct” numbers For example, note that the respondents estimated that 89% of Americans have a high school diploma or higher. Yet the chart says the real figure is 65%. But doesn’t that seem odd to you? Do you think on average 35% of people drop out of high school?No, the source of this error is that the question is poorly worded. 90% of Americans 25 or older have a college degree. The graphic indicates the poll asked specifically about adults. And it seems the respondents had the correct answer, about 90%.I don’t know where they get the figure that only 65% of adults have a high school degree. My best estimate is that they mixed up “the percentage of adults with a high school degree” and “the percent of people with a high school degree.” The latter would count all current K12 students, as they obviously don’t have their diploma yet.This is one item that really stood as an obvious and glaring error. And if I can see this one, I wonder if other numbers in either the ‘correct’ responses or the respondents’ results are just due to poor or incorrect phrasing/interpretation of questions.I have two master’s degrees, have spent years teaching undergraduate engineering courses, am working on a dual-major PhD in engineering…and I…apparently…cannot read a plot.
The fact that you recognized your error and were able to immediately correct it, rather than double down on being wrong or some shit, implies that you’re a somewhat intelligent person
Check the color of the dots, my friend. Red is the true value, blue is the survey participants’ estimate.
I’m a scientist! :D
Appreciate the skepticism regardless!
I find myself wondering how these figures have changed over time. Did we actually get worse, or have we always been this fucking ignorant?
I would estimate we are 25 percent worse.
25% worse over what time period?
the systematic stupidification of the 2000 Americans polled in this study*
they estimated 21% of the population are trans, lol I wish 😂
If 21% of the population was trans, republicans ain’t winning elections again.
You underestimate the proportion of dumb people. Trans people can also be dumb.
Yeah that’s bananas. I wonder if people saying 1 in 5 people are trans even know a trans person
I mean I guess you’re joking, but nevertheless I think it’s a bad thing to hope that every fifth person gets born into a body their mind doesn’t agree with.
eh I’m trans, and now that I’ve transitioned, it’s largely a neutral experience, neither good nor bad, it just is. But in my comment I meant that I think society (broadly) wouldn’t be nearly as transphobic if every 5th person was trans.
I unfortunately have to downvote this as this is far too interesting to be mildly interesting.
This is extremely interesting and illuminating. The kind of thing I’ve been interested in my whole adult life.
I grudgingly have to upvote you for being accurate even though the information is creating great discussions.
It was definitely a reluctant downvote from my side as well. But I feel this community is honestly abused and not living up to its name with the amount of “VeryInteresting” content.
Americans believe 20% of the people have an income of over 1 million dollars and
20%30%of Americans live in NYC. Am I reading this chart wrong????
NYC has a population of what? 10 million people? So they think there’s only 30 million people living in the states?
NYC stood out to me too. We think 3 out of 10 people in the US live in NYC??? Lmaooo. I think a big part of it is that we just generally don’t comprehend statistics because some of these numbers are wild.
How many of these questions had you really, truly considered before?
I speculate that most Americans just don’t think about these things that in depth and, when asked, throw out a number without giving due consideration.
Don’t attribute to stupidity what can be adequately explained by laziness
Im very sorry, but I cannot in any sane logical line of reasoning think as to why people would say 1/3 Americans live in New York, even if they just blurted out a random number
Stupidity?
If you’re already stupid and you get asked the question, and then don’t even bother to give it due consideration, it’s entirely plausible you just blurt out a number.
It does also say these are averages so it’d be interesting to see a scatter plot of all respondents.
Stupidity?
That is what I was getting, yes
I cannot in any sane logical line of reasoning
Ah, I guess I was thrown by this since it didn’t require insanity or illogical reasoning to come up with “stupidity”.
Yes, however as you were implying that a more reasonable explanation lied in the responder’s laziness, I was also implying that any reason other than stupidity was requiring of some mental gymnastics
Maybe because NYC(and LA) are stupidly over represented in the media.
Well, most of US media is made in, or by companies in, those two cities.
And?
That would be why they have more representation.
You can’t even say they NYC is over represented in media because that’s where it’s filmed. A lot of NYC sitcoms are filmed in LA. The reason is just urban narcissism. I’ve outright heard a new yorker say that NYC is the cultural center of America and even tried to credit NYC with popularizing pizza in the US.
A lot of the companies that produce them are from NYC though. Also Pizza was popularized, in the US, from immigrants in NYC, and while america having a single cultural center isn’t really thing, if you had to pick one A LOT of people would choose it.
I have a lot of doubt over the graph just based on how they average the results. You’re bound to get people guessing super high or super low, which would skew if they were just getting the mean.
The blue numbers are completely absurd. 30% live in Texas, 32% in California, 30% in NYC. And 20% with a household income over 1 million? I know a couple who are top seniors at Google & Apple, respectively, and while I think they may be over 500k annually, I doubt it’s a million. And I definitely know they are far from the median.
It’s interesting to me that NYC, Jewish, and gay/lesbian all had the same wildly incorrect estimate on average.
2000 Americans polled in this study*
Americans believe a single city (New York) represents 30% of the American population?
Forget that. They think one out of their first 3 friends they have is gay. Assuming they’re straight that means 50% of their friends are gay. Fuck that means they think 25% of their first 4 friends are trans.
Math is not their strong point apparently
TBF if you join random chat groups to meet people you might find abkut that proportion, but not roaming the parks and streets, no.
Another third lives in all of Texas?
I was kind of curious if this was close to true in any countries with higher urban population densities and the first one I checked was Japan since it has a rural depopulation issue and Tokyo is a pretty populous city and… it was right on the money. Japan’s pop is ~124 million and Tokyo’s is ~ 37 million. So roughly 30% of Japan’s population lives in one city/metro area. Not that this means anything for US population distribution, but I suppose it’s not THAT crazy to think the numbers could be in that ballpark if you weren’t really thinking about it too hard.
64% of icelanders live in the capital region, which is like two thirds of the US living in maine
People think 30% of the U.S population lives in New York?
Sometimes you see data and just know that the methodology had to have been shit.
The average response thought 30% of the US was in NY?! No fucking chance.
Maybe the average person is stupid
You can drop the “maybe.”
That’s what actually brought me to the comments. The fuck? OK, so now NYC pop is about 10mil, non-NYC NY is about 10 mil, and non-NYC NYC metro is about 10 mil. How do you get even 30 mil to represent 30% of 350mil? Confuse it with the Iranian population of 92mil? And 30% is the average of the responses!
How incredible to see the effect of political messaging on citizen/voter perception. It is that the exaggerations, lies, and outrage marketing clearly have an outsized effect. I wouldn’t say the US population is dumb. But I would say the manipulation of perception is too much for the average person to do their own research and come up with unbiased facts.
***To those dismissing this based on inconsistencies between topics, you can’t make those comparisons. There is some blending of data in the methodology that is appropriate in order to look at the range. This is only about the gap between perception and reality, and a stack rank.
The average person is easily manipulated by propaganda. Highly intelligent people who should know better are easily manipulated by propaganda. This is why propaganda is so dangerous and should be tightly controlled.
A great ideal so long as you’re the one in charge of deciding what propaganda is.
Most of Western Europe has severe limits on advertising. They ban things like comparative advertising and don’t even allow advertising for prescription medication.
It is not about deciding what propaganda is allowed, it is about setting up regulations to prevent misinformation.
Our current model in the US is the good will outweigh the bad. That people will be able determine the truth and ignore lies. This is of course poppycock.
Unfortunately propaganda works really well and if you allow misogynists and Nazis to have a mouthpiece their numbers will grow.
Control is not a bad thing, those that push toxic freedom and “free speech” have moved the goalposts so far it is hard to believe. We have been so propagandized to it is hard to separate reality from the lies at times.
The truth is propaganda, misinformation, and public relations are working to sow discontent and manipulate people and it is wrong. We are supposed to protect people, not throw them to the richest wolves who convince them that they should enjoy getting eaten.
It seems the real thing this survey shows is most Americans are fucking dumb.
To be fair, the information they have access to suggests a much more diverse situation than reality. So it’s understandable to be reluctant to recognize that any group might dominate the majority so much or that a well recognized minority population is actually so small. You’d have to study up the specific numbers, which are usually less important to keep track of than the relative subjective realitiies associated with each group.
True, but also, how could anyone think 30% of people in the US, a population of nearly 350,000,000, live in New York City. That would dwarf the population of even Tokyo, the most densely populated metropolitan area in the world.
That’s crazy.
As someone who tries to keep the vague number in mind, it would be strange to me as well, but I suspect a large number of people don’t really try to keep even the vague numbers in mind about how many people are about or how many people realistically could reside in a place like NYC.
They track the rough oversimplifications. Like “barely anyone lives in the middle of the country”, and every TV show they see in the US either has a bunch of background people in NYC or LA, or is in the middle of nowhere with a town seemingly made up of mere dozens of people. They might know that “millions” live in the US and also, “millions” live in NYC, so same “ballpark” if they aren’t keeping track of the specifics. They’d probably believe 10 million in NYC and 50 million nationwide.
This is presuming they bother to follow through on the specific math rather than merely roughly throwing out a percentage.
Only 4% union members - no wonder the US is so fucked for workers
Yeah, I’d have thought there would be a lot more unions.
