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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's avatar

I forgot to incorporate the best study.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.13017

By the same authors, who then reanalyzed an even larger compilation of studies to find more support for the same conclusion I arrived at. Mea culpa.

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Performative Bafflement's avatar

> I think that many very important things happen in the world, which the public is never informed about

I think that politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions

I think that government agencies closely monitor all citizens

These are *terrible* "conspiracy mindset" questions. I mean, these are 3/5 of the questions and they're obviously and factually true.

1. Tons of important things MUST happen in the world that the average person never hears about - there's ~200 countries and ~8B people. One in a million events are happening to people 8,000 times a day. Most people don't care about what's happening in other neighborhoods or states, much less other countries, and TV shows are in the business of showing the highly selected set of what retains eyeballs and attention, so this is obviously true.

2. Politicians couldn't possibly tell you the true motives for their decisions, the only time they even attempt anything like this is in 5 second sound bites, and "true motives" can't fit into that amount of time / information.

3. PRISM and 5 Eyes is a thing, the NSA confirmed it, and everyone just shrugged and went back to drinking their gallons of mountain dew while watching 8 hours a day of TV, or whatever regular people do. Yes, literally everything you do on your phone or computer is tracked and logged forever, and they admitted it.

I really don't know if this is evidence that these question makers are dumb or wanted their answers to slant a certain way, but it's certainly evidence that they didn't think carefully about the factual status of possible answers to their questions.

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