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by coreyisthename 1620 days ago
And how woefully undereducated and uninformed - or willfully ignorant (maybe even dumb) - a large percentage of the population is.
3 comments

I am reminded of this story:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/04/08/less-ameri...

(also here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/0...

)

Most people answering a 2014 poll (hopefully uniformly sampled) could not locate Ukraine on a map of the world, with many placing it in Africa, East Asia, Greenland or even the US; but the more interesting part was that the farther from its actual location was people's guess, the more they were supportive of US military intervention in Ukraine.

> And how woefully undereducated and uninformed - or willfully ignorant (maybe even dumb) - a large percentage of the population is.

A couple of people-on-the-street interviews will never ever give you an accurate representation of "a large percentage of the population".

Edit: see also this comment- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889236

In my less pessimistic moments I like to think that many are not quite that uninformed and the interviewers find enough by sheer numbers interviewed.

What gets me is how easily inexperienced people are led to saying exactly what the interviewer wants. And it is blatant: they don't even pretend that isn't what they are doing on live news anymore.