> The choices are deliberately wide.

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):

  1%
  2%
  10%

I see your point.

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 goal is to fight misinformation

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.