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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

How the heck someone put Iran in South America? Just a little exposure to everyday media should give you enough to rule out that completely. That's such a basic geography understanding.

This completely blows my mind.

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I'm pretty sure this was just an internet survey that people didn't answer seriously. About 1% of the clicks are in the water and a lot of answers are in North America. I have trouble believing anyone is that ignorant.

Lizardman's constant https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

Far more alarming is that so many US voted marked The United States as Iran.

I'm curious about the little cluster inside the US around Oklahoma or Kansas

I think that's just likely the perceived geographic center of the US. Meaning they just were clicking on the US, not a specific area of it.

There's a similar center cluster in Australia.

How the heck someone put Iran in the US?

With any public opinion survey there's going to be a certain amount of "noise" results. You can't _force_ people to give serious answers. But if your methodology is sound (Morning Consult's certainly is) then they will tend to cancel each other out.

You can't force people to give serious answers, but you can incentivize them to do so. My guess is that the results would be dramatically better if the respondents were paid for correct answers.

That would incentivize respondents to cheat and look it up. I think you'd find that would make the results much worse.

Given that it's a completely nonsense answer among the outliers, I wouldn't be as concerned as to with the people that put it in the Balkans or confuse it with Turkey.

I guess the same way somebody would put Iran in the middle of the ocean

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