Mildly Interesting

92 % of the population lives in either California, new York or Texas?

I wonder how much of MAGA knows the entire population of illegal immigrants is estimated at a WHOPPING 3% of our population.

What morons did they ask? Holy shit.

Wouldn't have guessed you guys would have more vegans than union members

Part of this is people obviously not thinking about one per hundred and just giving a random percentage like number. Everything is clustered around 25, and 50 percent. This isn't reasonably measuring much(if anything as I can assure you nobody believes 90 percent of people live in either Texas, California, or NYC). The headline should be "don't poll people by asking what they think about qualitatively and asking them to translate it into quantitative percentages because you'll receive nonsense." Trying to reach other conclusions from such absolute noise really is just making things up.

30% Jewish, 27% Muslim, 58% Christian, 33% atheist. A very odd mix to estimate.

Honestly the most shocking number to me is that 65% of Americans own a house. How can 62% have a household income "over $50,000" and 65% own a house? Is it all old people?

........ Honestly, this isn't too surprising with how saturated the media is with minority groups. Almost every show I see on various streaming products ends up having heavy LGBTQ+ plots rammed in, trans characters showin up, always a multicultural combo of characters and fewer and fewer generic CIS white people. When the media is constantly blasting you with minorities and minority issues, in a highly biased way, it's totally not surprising at all that people would start thinking they're a way bigger slice of the population.

Like someone once pointed out that there were more airplane pilots in North America than trans people. So imagine if every TV show you watched, suddenly had an airplane pilot show up and talk about airplanes a bunch, had whole episodes dedicated to his occupational trauma, regardless of what the main plot of the show may be. That would be more representative of the general public, than having trans people in every fucking show going on about trans trauma.

The math contributes some to this. Let's say the correct answer is 1%, and out of ten people, 9 of them guess 1% and the other guesses 51% - that one guess shifts the average from 1% to 6%. And if it's 1%, then there's no room for people to underestimate and bring the number back down, and the same is true of numbers close to 100%. The numbers closer to the middle don't necessarily mean that people were more correct on an individual level, but that some people overestimated and others underestimated and it came out closer to the right number. The graph ought to give information about the spread of errors and not just the raw average.

29% Asian? 🤣

I fucking wish

As an Asian American, I don't feel safe going to a red jurisdiction.

Hold up.

83% have a driver's license but 88% have a car?

So 5% of Americans either have a car for the hell of it, or they drive without a license?

And there's only 3% that are atheists? More people drive without a license than are atheists?

Excuse me?

If these numbers are correct, the US is more fucked than I thought.

the proportion who have at least a high school degree: estimate 65% vs. true 89%

the proportion who have an advanced degree: estimate 37% vs. true 12%

So basically what they guess is ±⅓ has no high school diploma and another ±⅓ has an advanced degree, while in reality ±^1^/~10~ doesn't have a high school diploma and ±^1^/~10~ has an advanced degree.

Meaning while in reality 77% does have a high school degree but not an advanced degree, the estimate is that only 28% does.

I did a quick check on one of the facts, the christian one, this says 70% in 2022 but i see 62% for 2022, which is a lot closer to the 58% estimate. Makes me feel a bit sketched out about possible cherry picking, but cool notion still.

Only 85% of the population owns a smartphone, I thought for sure it would be higher than that