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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

A lot of comments are coming down on the result as “the methodology must be wrong”, and I feel they are expecting people to give mostly reasonable answers. Except the target of the survey is perception, so just a mental image disconnected with any reality.

Perception is usually wildly off, in particular when affecting political positions, and as noted in the article that’s not the first survey to come up with similar results. The Ipsos one [0] has French guessing 30% of population as Muslims (vs 7.5 for reality) for instance.

[0] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/perceptions-are-not-reality-what...

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Yeah, kinda weird that everybody is so focused on inconsistencies. These questions directly relate to underlying assumptions for support for various public policies. Does HN think people have coherent views on public policies?

We are all biased toward thinking we personally hold coherent views.

We’re also biased toward thinking we’re average in our capabilities (amongst our in-groups, at least).

So it would stand to reason that those biases compose to believing our entire in-group, on average, holds coherent views.

We’re rarely wise enough to estimate our own margins of error, nor self-aware enough to know our own actual capabilities relative to others.

I suspect there is also a race component to the numbers being so wildly off. It’s something that I actually have noticed a lot over the years.

About 15 years ago when I was in high school, I asked a classmate “without looking around, how many Asians do you think are in this class right now” (he had just ranted about how the Chinese were taking over everything). He estimated 70%. There were 4 out of around 30 or so. a lady who I later found out was extremely racist once told me quite confidently that NYC was >90% black.

Expecting 30% of the US to live in NYC does strike me as particularly wild hah

The interesting thing is that the equivalent is actually true for Japan and South Korea. The metro populations of Tokyo and Seoul are enormous relative to national population.

Yes. This trend is also true on a global scale.

Looking at the stats[0] for 240 countries, 70+ have 20% of their population in the capital city, 41 of them having above 30% of the population.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_capitals_by_p...

New York City isn’t even the capital city of New York State.

Capitals in the US are often not the most populous city.

Or that one in FIVE people are transgender.

In their minds nearly every single person who is not christian is transgender. Must be a wild world for them.

I doubt that is the case. But rather what the media has been pushing. When half of the cast of every show created today is minority members it is easy for the public to assume that is representative of the nation.

This is too facile a response, I know people like this who are not Christian, and they are many times immigrants.

While these people don't meet very many transgender people, the media gives them the impression that this is because they live in a bubble, which for immigrants is often true. They estimate based on the assumption that their experience is very far from representative. They have the same impression of the number of homosexuals, and they usually know several, but they also get the impression that average Americans know far more than they do. I've lived in immigrant communities for a long time and this has been an amusing point of confusion for decades.

Overestimating their prevalence is generally considered more polite than underestimating their prevalence, so people sandbag on the overestimation side. It is similar to if you asked people how old you are or how much you weigh; they will always sandbag to the more socially flattering side of their true estimate.

I come from a Muslim country, and I never had any Christian think I was transgender. In fact I suspect Muslim Americans probably have the same misconceptions as Christians about how many transgender people there are.

In my experience, the liberal white non-Christians I know are just as ignorant about minorities, they just have different priors. A friend of mine thought Vietnamese people supported Trump to get back at America for the Vietnam War. This is a highly educated person. It’s like COVID—conservatives vastly underestimate the effectiveness of vaccines, while liberals vastly overestimate their risk of hospitalization and death. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/briefing/atlanta-shooting....

I think Izzydata’s take is close to reality, and the majority of people probably haven’t thought at all about what transgenders are.

They see them in the news, but don’t care enough to mentally separate them from LGBQ for instance.

Given the ratios in the communities I participate in, I'd also overestimate how many people in the general population are transgender.

And another 30% in Texas, and 32% in California. So 8% spread across the rest of the nation... It would seem we drastically oberestimate the number of Jewish asian Texans.

> The Ipsos one [0] has French guessing 30% of population as Muslims (vs 7.5 for reality) for instance.

Looking at prison population, 30% is actually significantly under the real figure (close to 50%).

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/opinion/the-mill-of-musli...

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