In every question that I tried so far, the correct answer was the happiest of the multiple choice options. For example, if the question is, 'how many kittens have a warm place to sleep?', they would offer,
10%
40%
70%
And of course the answer is 70%. They never offer,
I'm not saying they are too wide. I'm saying they are framed to show the situation positively. If you ask, 'what portion of the U.S. population has been infected with Coronavirus?' and present these options:
10%
25%
40%
The correct answer (~10%; I don't know exactly) looks positive - it's the lowest number. The following options have the opposite effect (IMHO):
Given their goal is to show that we have reasons to be more optimistic about the world, I think the quiz setup makes sense. It highlights that we can't even distinguish between optimistic 10% and pessimistic 50% for issues we regularly hear about in the news. I'm exaggerating here, but the 50% would have been obviously wrong but isn't because we didn't look at the data at all, instead made an assumption based on our perceptions. This hard hit is a good thing and fulfills the goal of the quiz.
But yes, choices of [1%, 10%, 20%] would likely make more people choose 10% than among [10%, 30%, 50%] when 10% is the right answer. Thanks for the insight.
The website and title here state the goal is to fight misinformation. In this post you state the goal is to show we have reasons to be optimistic about the world.
Which is it?
I'm not super convinced that the framing of the questions does provide reasons to be optimistic. Instead it comes across to me as a down-playing of issues of serious concern.
What is the evidence that your approach does increase optimism, and what is the evidence that such optimism is warranted?
Have you tried the alternate framing as suggested in above posts, perhaps A/B testing? This might give the lie to your assertion that people are "systematically" incorrect, which frankly I feel to be an overstatement.
Unfortunately I have the distinct feeling of wool being pulled over my eyes.
The misinformation is that people's belief of the world are based on statistics that were only true decades ago and haven't been updated. For example, the distinction between the developing and the developed world. The world has actually gotten better and we have reasons to be more optimistic.
However, I shouldn't have stated my own interpretation that way.
> a down-playing of issues of serious concern
Unless we really know the state of the world, we won't come up with the right solutions. For things that have improved, we should be optimistic and celebrate the successes. We keep hearing about the hunger problem in Africa, but did years of initiatives work or not? Are education programs really working or not? Are our efforts actually making the world better? We never seem to hear the success stories in media.
That doesn't mean we rest on our laurels and stop fixing the remaining issues.
As mentioned by other commenters, this stuff gets political real quick, and you should look at the framing effect [0].
I applaud any effort to fight misinformation, but I'm concerned that your agenda of optimism comes across as an attempt to sweep serious issues under the carpet.
I'd suggest reading some academic papers about how to conduct surveys, and how to interpret them.
Perhaps it was not clear enough, but I'm not associated with the project. The "agenda of optimism" is completely my interpretation as well.
As to the other concerns, this is not a traditional survey whose results are to be used seriously. The questions are meant to educate that many of us live with outdated notions of the state of the world. If you watch the talks, they show how even "experts" at the universities and world organizations such as the World Health Summit [0] fail to be better at the questions than a group of chimpanzees answering randomly.
I should have been more careful with my enthusiasm here. So the faults are all mine. I encourage everyone to explore the link and the talks and form their own opinion.
If you push someone to give you an answer to some question they don't know, that's different from someone that goes around thinking and acting as though they know the answer.
Only the latter seems like a real misconception to me.
People's estimates are informed by what they pick up (even subconsciously) from (social) media, books, movies, etc. And then they support initiatives/NGOs/government actions based on those beliefs.
Gapminder is an attempt to show how outdated our view of the world are. The first time I had come across Rosling's TED talk (see my other comment), it did strike me how little I had actively looked into the state of the world and how the state is more optimistic than one can conclude from doomscrolling [0].
