I have not enjoyed reading Ed Jong's pieces lately. I feel like he is completely out of step with mainstream normies.
I work in an elementary school as a nurse, and Covid/contact tracing had utterly consumed my life for awhile. But now? Nobody gives a shit anymore. In my little corner of Southwestern PA, anyway.
All of the heated fights and community unrest that was present in the Fall are over now. Nobody wants to be in a defensive crouch for years. The unspoken agreement seems to be that we all need to move on. Covid is here to stay, and we are not doing all the shenanigans anymore.
I think that's a very normal, human, earth animal way to deal with things.
As far as I can tell, Yong's only acknowledgments that COVID-19 "will eventually become endemic"—sorry, it already is— are in the context of not relaxing rules around NPIs:
"COVID will eventually become endemic—a term 'with so many definitions that it means almost nothing at all,' as my colleagues Katherine J. Wu and Jacob Stern wrote. 'The error I hear so often now is to use the notion of an endemic virus as a reason for abdication—to drop precautions quickly and not do the more important and difficult work of putting in place the societal measures that would make living with coronavirus more tolerable,' Ryan said." (Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-pandemic-immunocompromised-risk-vaccines/622094/.)
This is so frustratingly out of step with the very real need to figure out whether it's still possible to increase vaccine uptake and to rebuild trust around the safety and efficacy of vaccination in general.
I liked him a lot before Covid, he was one of the few staff writers at the Atlantic who didn't insert fatuous wokery into everything he wrote. But over the course of the pandemic he has slowly gone off the rails and become one of the worst Covid-clingers. I guess Covid has been very good to him and he's keeping that golden goose alive as long as possible.
I want more goodness and less badness and I would like it done by people doing things that are right and not doing things that are wrong. This is my very specific and practical policy position and if you can’t accept it you are a monster.
I saw a comedy show in L.A. in the late 90s at this small space with a lot of future and current stars, I remember Kathy Griffin and Janeane Garofalo were there, and it was very much a hangout vibe on a Sunday night.
About midway through the show, Dana Gould took the stage and opened with, I'd like to begin by maintaining the theme of the evening and declare that all bad things are wrong.
I think if you’re really passionate it gets easy to talk yourself into knots and forget to have an idea to fix things because it’s so much more seductive to be angry.
Ha, said the same thing basically before I read your comment...
[There's an interpretation here where basically people are saying "I want to do the good things" and "other people largely don't want to do the good things as much as me." It's really hard to take much away from this.]
I genuinely don’t know what value you get from surveys 99% of the time. Like I’ve had my arm twisted to fill them out for a discount or something that my wife values more than my time but I’ll be like “B seems good, I’ll just fill out all B’s.”
I have done consumer research before. There are some very simple methods to clean out this type of stuff to clean up the data a bit (e.g., checking for "straight-liners," response completions that are impossibly fast, etc.). Whether everyone does it, that's a different question, but there are methods
Unless I am missing something the "grassroots" option isn't even vaguely "progressive" in the political sense. The takeaway from the poll is that people want change, which yes? Of course they do? Wasn't that literally the ENTIRE point of each of the last two elections? If I thought progressive taxation was unfair and fracking was environmentally friendly relative to existing energy sources I would 1) be a pretty conservative Republican and 2) pick the grassroots (or even maybe the Fairer Future) option.
The entire piece seems predicated on the idea that Republicans want a less fair world, which is just so massively straw-manny. Fair is a relative term and there's TONS of evidence that suggest Republican voters in particular think their votes are the ones advancing economic and social fair-ness.
"To be clear, some of them are popular! Paid family leave and a robust government role in guaranteeing everyone has access to healthcare both poll well, as do some other progressive policies. I do think that as a policy proposal on a hot-button subject edges closer to reality it becomes quite policitized, meaning that people who support it in the abstract might come to view it as opposed to their political identity and flip-flop as a result."
But this is where the devil is always in the details. If you asked my coworkers and me if we supported catered lunch being served in the breakroom every day, I'm sure that would be a very popular proposal. If the proposal becomes catered lunch being served in the breakroom every day BUT employer ends 401(k) match program or freeze planned salary increases in exchange, the polling would be expected to turn out very differently.
This is the danger or folly in pointing to very surface level polling results on individual outcomes as evidence that a 1,000+ page bill that does lots of things and costs an incomprehensible amount of money is de facto a winning political proposal.
Ed Yong's question framing is as tendentious as his use of polling.
"Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months?" Because the overwhelming majority of deaths occurred among unvaccinated people, and you can't make unvaccinated individuals get vaccinated by masking other individuals. (Especially when, as in my community, the majority of the people wearing masks are wearing the cloth ones that don't actually protect them.)
Yong's work is respected among some journalists and readers of the Atlantic, but it's less universally acclaimed among infectious-disease specialists and public-health experts. I wish, two years into this pandemic, the lay public were reading more relevant experts like Monica Gandhi and Joseph G. Allen. But as far as I can tell, most people who are still following pandemic news are just reading the writers who tell them what they want to hear. Ed Yong is really good at doing that for progressives. Other people are good at doing that for the anti-vaccine ivermectin enthusiasts. And round and round we go.
It really depends on the conservative. Consider how many people believe Trump won the election, meaning that most people *actually* prefered him... In my observation, the people who are least inclined to make the "everyone secretly agrees with us" argument are libertarians. To some extent I think they even pride themselves on having views that haven't caught on yet.
Edited because I misread your comment. It's a good comment, whoops.
You make a good point about the Trump election, although I'm not sure what to think about it. There seems to be a lot of doublethink, and people claiming that he won because "map looks red" or "Trump says he won" without having to conceptualize the vote share. There also might be a difference in the magnitudes of support being claimed in the two examples.
I love this comment, because it's dead-on. Republicans know their policy proposals are terrible for most people, which is why they don't have very many, and they dislike talking about those they DO have.
Ed Yong is Mr. Confirmation Bias. This phenomenon is unfortunately all too common in the mainstream media. A lefty writer scratches his head and asks himself, "How can I slice and dice the numbers and then add them up so they support my preferred policy options?" That is not a great starting point but there you have it.
But this only works one way. If a Trumper would massage the numbers in the direction of policy options she likes, the Ed Yongs of the world would rip her to shreds. Call it "pluralistic ignorance," perhaps.
Yong's approach reminds me of how many progressives imagine that there is much more popular support for the candidates and policies policies they like than there actually is. They cite demographic trends, they cherry-pick polls, etc.
One needs to cautiously approach the topic of public opinion, it is highly complex. An economist blogger friend of mine has argued there is no such thing as public opinion, given how people's answers are often contingent on the way questions are framed.
When a writer confidently asseverates that the numbers support what she/he favors, be highly skeptical.
Over at Slow Boring, Matt's written a fair bit about the attempts by progressives to pretend things are more popular than they are, hoping that reality will follow.
I'm always wary of any poll that requires people to identify themselves, or to take a position on an issue that isn't fundamental. I find most people's political opinions to be vague, inchoate, and often completely self-contradictory. I have little faith that the average person can produce from the strange alchemy of their political thinking any kind of real political stance, much less a coherent political philosophy.
It's for this reason that I dislike the term "moderate", because what does it really tell us? Is a Trump voter who also supports same-sex marriage moderate? (I knew someone like this.) What about someone who supports Medicare-for-All, but thinks abortion doctors should be put to death? Neither of those people sounds moderate to me.
"Hearted" for your first paragraph. One of the things that I feel like a lot of people in journalism miss in recent decades (presumably because they spend all day every day surrounded by college+ educated people) is what an absolute $h!t slurry the political thinking of people becomes as you move down the education ladder. I came to understand this when, shortly after graduating from college, I had a temp job where, other than the manager, no one else had a four-year college degree and probably a majority of people only had high school degrees (a few had associate degrees or would be classed as "some college"). On a daily basis I heard takes about politics and the economy that were jaw-dropping in either or both their ignorance of basic constitutional law, economic principles, etc. and wildly contradictory/mutually exclusive. I'm genuinely not kidding that I think for a solid 20% of the US population the President occupies a position indistinguishable from that of an ancient Mesopotamian god king and news reporting is simply the Oracle of Delphi delivered electronically.
This is exactly where I think your niche lies for me Jesse. The ability to dive past the fluff and rhetoric, and contrast that with the actual contents and validity of the research.
Remember that when we're talking about "fact checkers" and the almighty integrity of the editorial process, that the original article tries to group two opposing and mutually incompatible views under the same umbrella, and to use this umbrella to argue for policy proposals opposed by largest group of respondents. That is the integrity brought by these institutions.
I love that I can come here and get the requisite levels of hemming and hawing, the kind of lack of certainty and limited extrapolation from presented data is actually a confidence builder for me. And I think this suits Jesse's personal temperament.
I really appreciate the masterclass in journalism we are getting from you, Jesse--the focus on use of statistics, close reading, and framing are really useful! I have admired Ed Yong's coverage throughout the pandemic, but I saw the use of this table as fundamentally flawed for the same reasons you did: "But of the four scenarios, the most popular one — by a smidgen — was actually “Grassroots leadership,” which called for building a better world but one with little government involvement. So of the group of about 80% of respondents who wanted a better world rather than the same world post–Covid, half of them weren’t interested in big government solutions—which would wipe out most of Yong’s preferred policies, unless I’m seriously missing something." I don’t think you are!
What Yong is seriously missing is not only the nuance that you pointed out about anxiety over returning the powers seized during Covid (something exacerbated by anyone following Trudeau’s current grab), but a real inability of (God….what do term do I use here to escape jargonny-bullshit) coastal elites (forgive me) to see the communities of “fly over country” with pity (the ignorance of not being able to “follow the science”) or disgust (deplorables barely recognizable as human)—or perhaps a blend of the two.
The way I understand the progressive agenda goes precisely against the Grassroots section of the table. So many rural communities already rely on their own very limited resources to solve their problems. Other than M-F medical offices, there is no “Prompt Care” or anything like that. The nearest hospitals are over 30 miles of winding country roads away--even though we have one of the largest state parks with a substantial trails for mountain bike and horseback riding (we don’t have a single equine vet who lives in the county either). The entire fire department in my township is 100% volunteer—really admirable in my opinion. These kind of community-based solutions obscure the collective possibilities of self-reliance only frustrated by mandates from a Washington office.
Something else that bugs me I might as well share here is the treatment of the vaccine hesitant. Why cannot we extend the same sympathy that we correctly give to communities of color who have serious trust issues of the FDA/CDC/Big Pharma to largely rural white populations who are in the midst of a deadly epidemic where they were targeted? Even just a glance at the way African Americans have been treated—highlights like Tuskegee and Sim’s horrific use of slave women to pioneer gynecology still shock me—to consistent disparities Yong pointed out—makes it really understandable that work needs to be done to build trust. Thanks to some committed truth seekers of various job descriptions, we know that Purdue Pharma with some collusion from the FDA intentionally targeted many we ridicule for their vaccine hesitancy—even mocking them with phrases like “pillbillies” & “hillbilly heroin.” In the complex moral calculus that determines which lives matter in the grander scheme of things, it is clear to many of my neighbors that theirs’ do not—or at least not much.
Sorry for the rant, but keep up the excellent work you are doing—even when it involves someone like Ed Yong who I deeply admire! It’s the only kind of scrutiny that keeps us all moving towards the truth!
"Now, that other point Yong raises about the discrepancy between people’s own policy goals and their prediction of others’ is certainly interesting, and it ties in to a lot of other findings that people aren’t good at judging others’ beliefs or intentions."
While these types of studies are interesting, they are better when they focus on easily discernable statements. For example, I believe in the lead up to 2016 there was a polling outfit that asked people who they planned to vote for, but also asked who they believed their neighbors planned to vote for. If I recall correctly, there was some interesting results that were more sanguine on Trump's chances of beating Clinton than most polls. The point is that this instrument worked largely because of how discrete the option set is.
The example here suffers from the same issue as the questions respondents are selecting themselves. There are so many moving parts to the questions that it's hard to sift through whether there's any false perceptions about majority opinion. There's an interpretation here where basically people are saying "I want to do the good things" and "other people largely don't want to do the good things as much as me." It's really hard to take much away from this.
An additional point in terms of analyzing a lot of surveys progressives point to to claim widespread public support for progressive policies is to consider whether various words in the survey questions are susceptible to multiple interpretations. A particular common one I see is surveys that ask about things using the terms "fair," "equitable," etc. Those are progressive code words these days, but I can guarantee you that virtually all American conservatives and libertarians would historically describe their positions using those same terms, although the last couple years or so the point about the meaning of equity/equitable/etc. has gotten beaten on enough in the mainstream media about meaning "equality of outcome" that I think at least a slim majority of American conservatives and libertarian might now recognize what was being implied if equity/equitable/etc. is used in a question.
With the specific wording in the survey Yong was referring to, confusion over "fair" maybe was avoided, but I think many other surveys don't include enough other elaborating language around the term.
I have not enjoyed reading Ed Jong's pieces lately. I feel like he is completely out of step with mainstream normies.
I work in an elementary school as a nurse, and Covid/contact tracing had utterly consumed my life for awhile. But now? Nobody gives a shit anymore. In my little corner of Southwestern PA, anyway.
All of the heated fights and community unrest that was present in the Fall are over now. Nobody wants to be in a defensive crouch for years. The unspoken agreement seems to be that we all need to move on. Covid is here to stay, and we are not doing all the shenanigans anymore.
I think that's a very normal, human, earth animal way to deal with things.
As far as I can tell, Yong's only acknowledgments that COVID-19 "will eventually become endemic"—sorry, it already is— are in the context of not relaxing rules around NPIs:
"COVID will eventually become endemic—a term 'with so many definitions that it means almost nothing at all,' as my colleagues Katherine J. Wu and Jacob Stern wrote. 'The error I hear so often now is to use the notion of an endemic virus as a reason for abdication—to drop precautions quickly and not do the more important and difficult work of putting in place the societal measures that would make living with coronavirus more tolerable,' Ryan said." (Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-pandemic-immunocompromised-risk-vaccines/622094/.)
This is so frustratingly out of step with the very real need to figure out whether it's still possible to increase vaccine uptake and to rebuild trust around the safety and efficacy of vaccination in general.
I liked him a lot before Covid, he was one of the few staff writers at the Atlantic who didn't insert fatuous wokery into everything he wrote. But over the course of the pandemic he has slowly gone off the rails and become one of the worst Covid-clingers. I guess Covid has been very good to him and he's keeping that golden goose alive as long as possible.
That's exactly what I was thinking! He gets paid to keep this going in his stories, and won't let it go.
Covid Derengement Syndrome - got to those who dodged Trump Derangement Syndrome
The vast majority of the 1000+ people dying are those who chose to forgo the vaccine.
Yes, not all of them. But we accept <100 deaths a day in a country of 330 million with no problem.
(And we can't blame every death on Trump any more.)
I love that last sentence! We need more "normal, human, earth animal" approaches to everything!!!!
I want more goodness and less badness and I would like it done by people doing things that are right and not doing things that are wrong. This is my very specific and practical policy position and if you can’t accept it you are a monster.
I saw a comedy show in L.A. in the late 90s at this small space with a lot of future and current stars, I remember Kathy Griffin and Janeane Garofalo were there, and it was very much a hangout vibe on a Sunday night.
About midway through the show, Dana Gould took the stage and opened with, I'd like to begin by maintaining the theme of the evening and declare that all bad things are wrong.
I have thought of that line every few days since.
I think if you’re really passionate it gets easy to talk yourself into knots and forget to have an idea to fix things because it’s so much more seductive to be angry.
Ha, said the same thing basically before I read your comment...
[There's an interpretation here where basically people are saying "I want to do the good things" and "other people largely don't want to do the good things as much as me." It's really hard to take much away from this.]
I genuinely don’t know what value you get from surveys 99% of the time. Like I’ve had my arm twisted to fill them out for a discount or something that my wife values more than my time but I’ll be like “B seems good, I’ll just fill out all B’s.”
I have done consumer research before. There are some very simple methods to clean out this type of stuff to clean up the data a bit (e.g., checking for "straight-liners," response completions that are impossibly fast, etc.). Whether everyone does it, that's a different question, but there are methods
Unless I am missing something the "grassroots" option isn't even vaguely "progressive" in the political sense. The takeaway from the poll is that people want change, which yes? Of course they do? Wasn't that literally the ENTIRE point of each of the last two elections? If I thought progressive taxation was unfair and fracking was environmentally friendly relative to existing energy sources I would 1) be a pretty conservative Republican and 2) pick the grassroots (or even maybe the Fairer Future) option.
The entire piece seems predicated on the idea that Republicans want a less fair world, which is just so massively straw-manny. Fair is a relative term and there's TONS of evidence that suggest Republican voters in particular think their votes are the ones advancing economic and social fair-ness.
"To be clear, some of them are popular! Paid family leave and a robust government role in guaranteeing everyone has access to healthcare both poll well, as do some other progressive policies. I do think that as a policy proposal on a hot-button subject edges closer to reality it becomes quite policitized, meaning that people who support it in the abstract might come to view it as opposed to their political identity and flip-flop as a result."
But this is where the devil is always in the details. If you asked my coworkers and me if we supported catered lunch being served in the breakroom every day, I'm sure that would be a very popular proposal. If the proposal becomes catered lunch being served in the breakroom every day BUT employer ends 401(k) match program or freeze planned salary increases in exchange, the polling would be expected to turn out very differently.
This is the danger or folly in pointing to very surface level polling results on individual outcomes as evidence that a 1,000+ page bill that does lots of things and costs an incomprehensible amount of money is de facto a winning political proposal.
Ed Yong's question framing is as tendentious as his use of polling.
"Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months?" Because the overwhelming majority of deaths occurred among unvaccinated people, and you can't make unvaccinated individuals get vaccinated by masking other individuals. (Especially when, as in my community, the majority of the people wearing masks are wearing the cloth ones that don't actually protect them.)
Yong's work is respected among some journalists and readers of the Atlantic, but it's less universally acclaimed among infectious-disease specialists and public-health experts. I wish, two years into this pandemic, the lay public were reading more relevant experts like Monica Gandhi and Joseph G. Allen. But as far as I can tell, most people who are still following pandemic news are just reading the writers who tell them what they want to hear. Ed Yong is really good at doing that for progressives. Other people are good at doing that for the anti-vaccine ivermectin enthusiasts. And round and round we go.
Say what you want about conservatives (and I want to say a lot), but they aren't convinced that everyone else is secretly on their side.
It really depends on the conservative. Consider how many people believe Trump won the election, meaning that most people *actually* prefered him... In my observation, the people who are least inclined to make the "everyone secretly agrees with us" argument are libertarians. To some extent I think they even pride themselves on having views that haven't caught on yet.
Edited because I misread your comment. It's a good comment, whoops.
You make a good point about the Trump election, although I'm not sure what to think about it. There seems to be a lot of doublethink, and people claiming that he won because "map looks red" or "Trump says he won" without having to conceptualize the vote share. There also might be a difference in the magnitudes of support being claimed in the two examples.
I love this comment, because it's dead-on. Republicans know their policy proposals are terrible for most people, which is why they don't have very many, and they dislike talking about those they DO have.
Well, you just proved Casper's point
Ed Yong is Mr. Confirmation Bias. This phenomenon is unfortunately all too common in the mainstream media. A lefty writer scratches his head and asks himself, "How can I slice and dice the numbers and then add them up so they support my preferred policy options?" That is not a great starting point but there you have it.
But this only works one way. If a Trumper would massage the numbers in the direction of policy options she likes, the Ed Yongs of the world would rip her to shreds. Call it "pluralistic ignorance," perhaps.
Yong's approach reminds me of how many progressives imagine that there is much more popular support for the candidates and policies policies they like than there actually is. They cite demographic trends, they cherry-pick polls, etc.
One needs to cautiously approach the topic of public opinion, it is highly complex. An economist blogger friend of mine has argued there is no such thing as public opinion, given how people's answers are often contingent on the way questions are framed.
When a writer confidently asseverates that the numbers support what she/he favors, be highly skeptical.
Over at Slow Boring, Matt's written a fair bit about the attempts by progressives to pretend things are more popular than they are, hoping that reality will follow.
"Do you support this goal?"
90% of people: YES!
"Do you support the necessary taxes or policies or trade-offs to achieve this goal?"
90% of people: NO WAY!
That's the TL;DR19CFE (Too Long; Didn't Read 19th Century French Economists) version of Frederic Bastiat's essay, "The State": https://www.panarchy.org/bastiat/state.1848.html
I'm always wary of any poll that requires people to identify themselves, or to take a position on an issue that isn't fundamental. I find most people's political opinions to be vague, inchoate, and often completely self-contradictory. I have little faith that the average person can produce from the strange alchemy of their political thinking any kind of real political stance, much less a coherent political philosophy.
It's for this reason that I dislike the term "moderate", because what does it really tell us? Is a Trump voter who also supports same-sex marriage moderate? (I knew someone like this.) What about someone who supports Medicare-for-All, but thinks abortion doctors should be put to death? Neither of those people sounds moderate to me.
"Hearted" for your first paragraph. One of the things that I feel like a lot of people in journalism miss in recent decades (presumably because they spend all day every day surrounded by college+ educated people) is what an absolute $h!t slurry the political thinking of people becomes as you move down the education ladder. I came to understand this when, shortly after graduating from college, I had a temp job where, other than the manager, no one else had a four-year college degree and probably a majority of people only had high school degrees (a few had associate degrees or would be classed as "some college"). On a daily basis I heard takes about politics and the economy that were jaw-dropping in either or both their ignorance of basic constitutional law, economic principles, etc. and wildly contradictory/mutually exclusive. I'm genuinely not kidding that I think for a solid 20% of the US population the President occupies a position indistinguishable from that of an ancient Mesopotamian god king and news reporting is simply the Oracle of Delphi delivered electronically.
This is exactly where I think your niche lies for me Jesse. The ability to dive past the fluff and rhetoric, and contrast that with the actual contents and validity of the research.
Remember that when we're talking about "fact checkers" and the almighty integrity of the editorial process, that the original article tries to group two opposing and mutually incompatible views under the same umbrella, and to use this umbrella to argue for policy proposals opposed by largest group of respondents. That is the integrity brought by these institutions.
I love that I can come here and get the requisite levels of hemming and hawing, the kind of lack of certainty and limited extrapolation from presented data is actually a confidence builder for me. And I think this suits Jesse's personal temperament.
I really appreciate the masterclass in journalism we are getting from you, Jesse--the focus on use of statistics, close reading, and framing are really useful! I have admired Ed Yong's coverage throughout the pandemic, but I saw the use of this table as fundamentally flawed for the same reasons you did: "But of the four scenarios, the most popular one — by a smidgen — was actually “Grassroots leadership,” which called for building a better world but one with little government involvement. So of the group of about 80% of respondents who wanted a better world rather than the same world post–Covid, half of them weren’t interested in big government solutions—which would wipe out most of Yong’s preferred policies, unless I’m seriously missing something." I don’t think you are!
What Yong is seriously missing is not only the nuance that you pointed out about anxiety over returning the powers seized during Covid (something exacerbated by anyone following Trudeau’s current grab), but a real inability of (God….what do term do I use here to escape jargonny-bullshit) coastal elites (forgive me) to see the communities of “fly over country” with pity (the ignorance of not being able to “follow the science”) or disgust (deplorables barely recognizable as human)—or perhaps a blend of the two.
The way I understand the progressive agenda goes precisely against the Grassroots section of the table. So many rural communities already rely on their own very limited resources to solve their problems. Other than M-F medical offices, there is no “Prompt Care” or anything like that. The nearest hospitals are over 30 miles of winding country roads away--even though we have one of the largest state parks with a substantial trails for mountain bike and horseback riding (we don’t have a single equine vet who lives in the county either). The entire fire department in my township is 100% volunteer—really admirable in my opinion. These kind of community-based solutions obscure the collective possibilities of self-reliance only frustrated by mandates from a Washington office.
Something else that bugs me I might as well share here is the treatment of the vaccine hesitant. Why cannot we extend the same sympathy that we correctly give to communities of color who have serious trust issues of the FDA/CDC/Big Pharma to largely rural white populations who are in the midst of a deadly epidemic where they were targeted? Even just a glance at the way African Americans have been treated—highlights like Tuskegee and Sim’s horrific use of slave women to pioneer gynecology still shock me—to consistent disparities Yong pointed out—makes it really understandable that work needs to be done to build trust. Thanks to some committed truth seekers of various job descriptions, we know that Purdue Pharma with some collusion from the FDA intentionally targeted many we ridicule for their vaccine hesitancy—even mocking them with phrases like “pillbillies” & “hillbilly heroin.” In the complex moral calculus that determines which lives matter in the grander scheme of things, it is clear to many of my neighbors that theirs’ do not—or at least not much.
Sorry for the rant, but keep up the excellent work you are doing—even when it involves someone like Ed Yong who I deeply admire! It’s the only kind of scrutiny that keeps us all moving towards the truth!
The percentages on the Distribution of Power breakdown add up to 101.7%.
Norm McDonald explained this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWR4X_JsgMw
"Now, that other point Yong raises about the discrepancy between people’s own policy goals and their prediction of others’ is certainly interesting, and it ties in to a lot of other findings that people aren’t good at judging others’ beliefs or intentions."
While these types of studies are interesting, they are better when they focus on easily discernable statements. For example, I believe in the lead up to 2016 there was a polling outfit that asked people who they planned to vote for, but also asked who they believed their neighbors planned to vote for. If I recall correctly, there was some interesting results that were more sanguine on Trump's chances of beating Clinton than most polls. The point is that this instrument worked largely because of how discrete the option set is.
The example here suffers from the same issue as the questions respondents are selecting themselves. There are so many moving parts to the questions that it's hard to sift through whether there's any false perceptions about majority opinion. There's an interpretation here where basically people are saying "I want to do the good things" and "other people largely don't want to do the good things as much as me." It's really hard to take much away from this.
Lovely piece, articulating why I dislike activist journalism & people in general being intellectually jerked around by their values-based feels.
This thread today from Nate Cohn also pretty clearly shows this
https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1502273666612183042
Headline number:
59% of people think Biden is making the right decisions in Ukraine. 41% think wrong (on a right/wrong)
Ask approve/disapprove of handling, disapprove jumps up to 49%, and the 59% drops to 43%, with 8% "not sure".
An additional point in terms of analyzing a lot of surveys progressives point to to claim widespread public support for progressive policies is to consider whether various words in the survey questions are susceptible to multiple interpretations. A particular common one I see is surveys that ask about things using the terms "fair," "equitable," etc. Those are progressive code words these days, but I can guarantee you that virtually all American conservatives and libertarians would historically describe their positions using those same terms, although the last couple years or so the point about the meaning of equity/equitable/etc. has gotten beaten on enough in the mainstream media about meaning "equality of outcome" that I think at least a slim majority of American conservatives and libertarian might now recognize what was being implied if equity/equitable/etc. is used in a question.
With the specific wording in the survey Yong was referring to, confusion over "fair" maybe was avoided, but I think many other surveys don't include enough other elaborating language around the term.