Originally published at: GOP lunatic George Santos — less popular than moon landing conspiracy theories | Boing Boing
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I’m sorry, what?! I know there are people who believe this nonsense, but 10%? That means there’s probably someone I personally know who believes the Earth is flat. Several people, actually. That’s pretty disturbing. The Egyptians knew the Earth wasn’t flat, what, like 4,000 years ago?
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Hey, that’s just not fair.
He’s despised inside the halls of congress too.
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And mocked on Jeopardy! (apologies for linking to the NY Post’s YouTube, it’s the only place I could find the clip)
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I know 2 of them, so I guess the percentage is not that inaccurate.
But at least one of them believes every conspiracy theory going.
They are fully convinced that apples fall to the ground simply because they are heavier than air.
-sighs-
(When I say, know them, I have spoken to them in the past before my present-day technique of actively avoiding the idiots.)
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I suppose that 7% are the hardest of hard-core Republicans. The flat-Earthers are a sub-set of the Moon landing deniers, and I imagine Santos supporters are pretty much a sub-set of flat-Earthers. Venn diagram: circles inside circles.
I suspect we need to put “believe” in scare quotes. A certain percentage of flat-Earthers profess to believe in it to be deliberately perverse, also it depends how the survey was done*. There’s another 9%, according to the survey who “aren’t sure,” which is worrying.
*The same survey that shows 10% flat-Earthers only shows 8% who disagree the Earth is billions of years old - both where phrased as statements, “the Earth is (flat, not round/billions of years old)” and people had to agree, disagree or be unsure. Since studies normally show the flat Earth position is more fringe than being a young-Earth creationist, there’s a clear bias towards agreeing with the statements, even when obviously wrong. On the other hand, Trump supporters were far more likely to get these things wrong, so rising anti-science, anti-reality sentiment in US conservatism plays a big part, too, and younger people were more likely to accept conspiracies but acknowledge the age of the Earth.
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1 out of 10 Americans think the earth is flat? Color me flabbergasted. Say it ain’t so.
This appears to be the source of the “believe in flat earth / fake moon landing” statistic cited by CNN. I’m not a polling expert so I’ll leave it to others to analyze how credible the survey results are.
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That 10% may include two groups: Assholes who just want to mess with us in these polls. And those who simply join Flat-earther gatherings in order to score. So, I’m thinking — oh — 1%.
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I’m no statistics expert or anything, but I will never understand how a survey that only has 1,100 participants is in any way capable of being accurately extrapolated to the entire nation of 330,000,000 people. I don’t care how random your sampling is, that’s .00033% of the population. Plus this survey was online only, so there’s bound to have some impact on the accuracy. This is why I don’t trust polling anymore at all. I don’t even trust polling aggregators like 538.
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IIRC, isn’t this the reason he’d said he’d run for office in the first place?
If it’s a truly random selection, you don’t need that many. Stats gives you a range and the probability it’s within the range. The lower the percentage, the more you need to be accurate. 10% isn’t that small a number, so, relatively speaking, you need less to be accurate.
The key words in that are “truly random”, which goes with your other point. An online survey has a whole bunch of self selection. That warps things. You’re better off questioning the poll slant and how they got responses before questioning the count, especially with stuff in the double digit percentages and a thousand respondents.
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