Americans overestimate the size of minority groups and underestimate the size of most majority groups

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.

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!

seems like they polled mostly boomers or conservatives.

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.

They think 21% are transgender too.... A lot of propaganda has gone through these people.

By the looks of it, it's 30% to NYC, 30% to Texas, and 30% to California. So 10% for literally everywhere else in the US. That's gotta be close, right?

It's shocking how bad normal people are with basic math

The other ~60% live in California and Texas respectively 😆

Well, that is pretty much how television seems to think things are...

I always thought it was weird how in so many shows that are targeted to a nationwide audience how often they seem to just assume some specific subway thing in NYC is something that their audience will instantly get and relate to.

They also believe they are a majority of the world population, which is incredibly obvious if you spend any time online (that theu believe that, not that they are that). Several times when I've said that the US population is 3% of the world population I've gotten replies saying that can't be true or that I and dumb for believing obviously false facts or obvious anti-American propaganda... Absolutely pathetic.

The way I read this graph is that the upper portion are people they want to oppress and the lower portion are people that they preserve is oppressing them.

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.

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!

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."

Sounds about right, there's a difference between atheism and agnosticism, which is what the 2nd question is asking.

4% answered no to the first one and something like 20% answered no to the second one.

Where did the other 76% go?

Innumerate

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

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.

If 21% of the population was trans, republicans ain't winning elections again.

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.

Yeah that's bananas. I wonder if people saying 1 in 5 people are trans even know a trans person

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.

Mississippi more like.

Feels like they polled an elementary school in Jersey

You mean the state with the highest ranked Pre-K-12 by US News and World Report? That Jersey?

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/prek-12

Errr, I mean "Lol Jersey sucks amirite?"

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.

I know Americans love Jesus a whole lot but really only 4%. That just seems crazy low

Depending on who is doing the polling, I'm not answering truthfully. I don't want proselytizing and I don't want to risk getting sent to any Aushwitz that they are building. I doubt I am alone.

There's kind of a lot of Christians here actually... Or at least apologists.

Yeah, I'd have thought there would be a lot more unions.

It's called propaganda! Relentless, unceasing bombardment of right wing brain rotting propaganda.

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.

I find myself wondering how these figures have changed over time. Did we actually get worse, or have we always been this fucking ignorant?

the systematic stupidification of the 2000 Americans polled in this study*

Before traveling to California, I had people in my neighborhood plead with me not to go because the whole state is a "disaster area" and that the cities are burning and that there are "drug needles everywhere you walk" and that I was putting my life and those of my loved ones in serious danger. They thought with 100% certainty that Los Angeles was completely on fire from looting and I was going to some kind of Mad Max hellscape. Without exaggeration. They wouldn't listen to reassurance and were genuinely worried.

Granted some of these people were older, they weren't suffering dementia and could still drive. They just park in front of FOX news all day, every day, 24-hours a day swallowing conservative propaganda. They also have algorithmic filtering on their facebook and twitter.

Our perspectives of each others worlds has been damaged beyond repair because of this filtering. We have it on the left/progressive side too, showing us a different reflection of a pandering, emotionally validating worldview. Not as malicious maybe, but we are all trapped.

Perhaps people confuse/conflate it with a more broader category, like https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/nearly-1-5-young-adults-say-they-re-not-straight-n1270003

Well, the survey does not show the distribution of answers. So my guess (it's a guess, not data) is the people living in densely populated areas answered lower numbers, and people living in rural or remote areas ridiculously overestimated the number of trans people based on how much of a big "issue" medias are making of them.

For sure. Many Americans are confused by percentages. They do not understand that 20% is equivalent to saying "in a room of 100 people, 20 of them are trans", and even if they did understand that, they wouldn't have the proactive reasoning to make sure their percentage estimates add up/overlap in a way that makes sense, e.g not implying that 20 people in the room are all Hispanic Asian atheist Catholic bisexual transgender millionaires.

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.

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.

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.

It's interesting to me that NYC, Jewish, and gay/lesbian all had the same wildly incorrect estimate on average.

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.

2000 Americans polled in this study*

Don't you know? The only city in the USA is either New York or Los Angleas or San Francisco. If its a movie about alien invasion then Washington, DC will also show up.

If its UK, the only city is London.

If its China, the only cities that exist are Beijing or Shanghai.

If its Japan, the only city that exist is Tokyo.

Welcome to Hollywood!

Well only 8% of the population lives outside California, Texas, and NYC.

If giving 110% is good, then giving over 148% is even better.

But I can believe it, it's not like they asked people to enumerate all at once, they presumably asked one at a time to estimate, and it's not like they are likely to try to reconcile those guesses with each other even if made in one sitting.

My grandma has a car but she doesn't drive anymore. Now, if she needs a ride somewhere, I can take her in her own car, since mine is far too low to the ground for her.

Its possible they have lost their licence and still own a car, or the car is just in their name.

What's not represented in the graph.. I think you'll find a large portion of agnostics and "cultural Christians". I.e. people who go to church because they're raised that way in their community expects it.

I think you are overestimating the intelligence required to get a degree in this country, also lots of intelligent people have religious beliefs of some level.

And most people who don't necessarily believe in god or practice any religion still respond to such questions with whatever religion they were born into because it's not important enough to them to take a hard stance like calling themselves atheist, or maybe they choose to be agnostic so they might not pick the atheist option.

My point is lots of factors go into surveys like these, they don't necessarily paint a super accurate picture, since any type of survey will have some external and internal biases and sampling issues baked into them

I'm extremely skeptical of any organized religion, where divine authority is asserted for the words said/written by some dudes, but I'm not going to close the door on something beyond what we can know.

But no one's guess carries any more weight than another, no person should be assumed to have an inherently more valid relationship with divinity than another.

So I have a bit of a vague faith, but not in any concrete concepts put forth by religion, since I have no reason to think their guess would be any better than a guess I could make on my own, and someone's ability to think otherwise seems a very dangerous reality.

It's not anything actionable, just more a hope that there's more to things than we see.

Being part of a Religion has social benefits, so don't be surprised if a lot of those non-Atheists don't trully believe it but participate in it because it's good for them or because of social pressure.

Certainly, and speaking in terms of Christians which is the ones I'm more familiar with, considering the number of people who actual strictly even just try to follow ALL the teachings of Jesus or even all of the 10 commandments, almost all "Religious" people pick and chose which parts they believe and which they don't.

(In modern society Greed and Envy by themselves are probably regularly broken by 99% of Christians).

Wait until you develop a chronic health issue and you discover how many so-called physicians jabber about god. It's fucking grim out there.

Because you don't need critical thinking skills for a degree.

Einstein believed in god.

Others are bringing up good points, but one of the biggest reasons is many people are idiot savants. Smart in one or two areas and complete fucking morons in everything else.

You shouldn't use "god" as a proper noun. No one being owns the concept of being a god. You're just legitimising Abrahamism, you're not helping the atheist cause. Helping Abrahamists erase polytheism doesn't lead to more atheism, it leads to more Abrahamists.

You don't need a license to own a car. You need one to drive it.