In case you didn’t notice, the phrasing (“true American patriots”, “gotten so far off track”) is engineered to give the discrepancy highlighted found in the press release. The survey itself is interesting but it’s propaganda.
Even the political party which would be disincentivized by the phrasing to answer “yes” to the above question answered with a 11% positive rate. If we accept the discrepancy of the results being purely because of the engineered phrasing, then we have at least 22% of the population agreeing with committing violence in order to preserve their notion of what this country ought to be.
This is an isolated demand for rigor. Your post uses a tweet and your personal feelings as evidence for the fact that “perhaps 1-5%” of the population supports a communist violent revolt. Is your post propaganda because it only focuses on the fears of a left-wing revolt and not a right-wing one? It was likely influenced to be that way because that’s what you legitimately fear and are concerned about, and you’re trying to convince others of your opinion. That’s fine; I have no reason to believe that this post contains anything other than your true belief. The people writing the above survey question may have also had similar fears about a right-wing revolt, and phrased a question in a way that makes it less than perfectly useful for this analysis.
I mostly agree, and that’s why I said the results were still interesting. In fact, both numbers should be lower bounds; it says at least that 33% of conservatives are willing to tell surveyors they’d support violence. I would crowdfund a study similarly phrased so that left-wing respondents can say yes; I could imagine it coming up with 15%, 40%, 30%, but I don’t really know and I think I would have probably undershot it a few days ago. If the left and the right are equally bellacostic, then that would mean we’d expect a third of the country to support violence, not a fifth.
Perhaps I’m being partial, but I don’t think I’m making an isolated demand for rigor. It’s not a general critique of the methods of scientific polling as much as punching in the effects of the wind. If you had said “I see Facebook posts by conservatives making similar threats all the time’ I wouldn’t have had a problem with that. On the other hand, if I had said something like “well, you need a meta-analysis of different results by different polling companies before you can make that claim”, then that would of course be unfair because I’d have no a priori expectation that the further evidence would move away from the already established conclusion. In this case however we do have the ability to conclude that the study is biased based on mechanical details, so we can and should adjust our GPS coordinates.
I do, by the way, totally believe conservatives on the whole are more willing to use violence, mostly because they have a self image as political underdogs who have been shut out of large institutions like Hollywood/News media/Education by elites and have “no other option”. I’m more scared of communists because I think their extremists are more capable, and that might reflect a bias on my part.
In case you didn’t notice, the phrasing (“true American patriots”, “gotten so far off track”) is engineered to give the discrepancy highlighted found in the press release. The survey itself is interesting but it’s propaganda.
Even the political party which would be disincentivized by the phrasing to answer “yes” to the above question answered with a 11% positive rate. If we accept the discrepancy of the results being purely because of the engineered phrasing, then we have at least 22% of the population agreeing with committing violence in order to preserve their notion of what this country ought to be.
This is an isolated demand for rigor. Your post uses a tweet and your personal feelings as evidence for the fact that “perhaps 1-5%” of the population supports a communist violent revolt. Is your post propaganda because it only focuses on the fears of a left-wing revolt and not a right-wing one? It was likely influenced to be that way because that’s what you legitimately fear and are concerned about, and you’re trying to convince others of your opinion. That’s fine; I have no reason to believe that this post contains anything other than your true belief. The people writing the above survey question may have also had similar fears about a right-wing revolt, and phrased a question in a way that makes it less than perfectly useful for this analysis.
I mostly agree, and that’s why I said the results were still interesting. In fact, both numbers should be lower bounds; it says at least that 33% of conservatives are willing to tell surveyors they’d support violence. I would crowdfund a study similarly phrased so that left-wing respondents can say yes; I could imagine it coming up with 15%, 40%, 30%, but I don’t really know and I think I would have probably undershot it a few days ago. If the left and the right are equally bellacostic, then that would mean we’d expect a third of the country to support violence, not a fifth.
Perhaps I’m being partial, but I don’t think I’m making an isolated demand for rigor. It’s not a general critique of the methods of scientific polling as much as punching in the effects of the wind. If you had said “I see Facebook posts by conservatives making similar threats all the time’ I wouldn’t have had a problem with that. On the other hand, if I had said something like “well, you need a meta-analysis of different results by different polling companies before you can make that claim”, then that would of course be unfair because I’d have no a priori expectation that the further evidence would move away from the already established conclusion. In this case however we do have the ability to conclude that the study is biased based on mechanical details, so we can and should adjust our GPS coordinates.
I do, by the way, totally believe conservatives on the whole are more willing to use violence, mostly because they have a self image as political underdogs who have been shut out of large institutions like Hollywood/News media/Education by elites and have “no other option”. I’m more scared of communists because I think their extremists are more capable, and that might reflect a bias on my part.