Interesting. A couple of days ago, videos were circulating of passengers cheering on airplanes in mid-flight when it was announced that the mask requirement had been deemed illegal. Passengers cheering, flight attendants singing - lots of happiness.
Then, yesterday, a poll comes out showing that the American public is still largely in support of masking while traveling on planes, trains, and buses. As so often happens, I saw the headline, thought, "That seems improbable. I wonder if I should click through."
And of course did not. This is the epistemic dilemma when the press is unreliable in its commitment to accurate reporting. You ignore that which seems improbable at the peril of succumbing to confirmation bias.
If you click through, you spend ten minutes finding the errors. I don't have the time to error check all the errors in the mainstream media. A Sisyphean task if there ever was one. All I need to know is whether the report is usefully true and you statistically are more likely to be correct by assuming that the report is erroneous.
Fortunately, today, someone posts their dig into the poll behind the 56% support masks on airplanes headline. I was correct to assume that the headline was not usefully true.
This AP poll, predictably ballyhooed by the mask-loving press today, "feels" wrong based on anecdotes from around the nation this week. Well, digging into the numbers and methodology, it very likely IS wrong, or at the least unreliable. I dug in a bit. It's suspect. 🧵 https://t.co/Et25Rh6EAu
— Matt, Pre-School Diploma 😀 (@statomattic) April 21, 2022
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