Are internet commentators representative of real people? Between the selection bias, trolling, and astroturfing, I would argue that one must assume they are not.
Yes. I don't believe anything I read on the internet. Or see on TV. Billions and billions are spent on brainwashing and propaganda. We (humans) eat that shit right up.
I wouldn’t want to force anyone to do anything they don’t want to do, but I think there were positive aspects to masks and lockdown I’d like to perpetuate. I have not been sick a single time in the past year and a half. Not even a little cold. I’d like it if everyone wore a mask and chose to social distance anytime there is the slightest chance they have a communicable disease like the cold. Unfortunately people are so selfish that that is highly unlikely.
And, as an introvert, lockdown did wonderful things for my mental health. I’ve been happier being locked down than I can remember being in decades. I hope things like remote work become a permanent thing.
I've also found lockdown suits my temperament! And yeah, if you have common cold, I agree that it's courteous to wear a mask indoors (which mainly protects others from your effusions, more than you from theirs).
And yeah, I'm in favour of social distancing, regardless of disease. I appreciate people I don't know respecting my space. How much space you prefer seems to be a social construct; I feel a bit invaded if a stranger comes closer than about 1m.
I sort of miss shaking hands with people I've just met. Elbow-bumps are absurd; nobody does it without irony.
Curfews prevent important positive social behaviour and incubate a fearful mindset that increases anxiety and depression. Animals are happiest when they are free even if it means risk. Take a look at caged animals, they lose their shit. Locking people inside is a net negative experience and detrimental to a healthy society.
You could extend this logic to other things that are forbidden. Some people want to slap women's butts on the street (very common in Eastern Europe) but if we outlaw that are we treating people like caged animals and increasing anxiety and depression?
Smells a lot like older people who have their families and personal networks and have had their fun thinking that young people should stay inside and not be a bother. Thing is, young people need to socialize in order find a mate, build their social circle, establish their careers and engage with formative experiences. It's unjust for old people to decide they should be locked up after dark.
1) People love drama
2) People say stuff they don't really mean just to perpetuate a drama in their otherwise predictable lives
3) Social media is a cancer on society
4) Statistics are sometimes nonsense
Whether it's people trolling or not understanding the question you can end up with some nonsensical percentages when you poll the public at large. I don't know if this effect has a name but I remember my statistics professor talking about this.
The name of one of the factors is "selection bias". The type of people willing to take the survey may be those that already feel strongly on the topic, meaning you get results that favor one or both extremes, with fewer in the middle. Or the survey delivery mechanism makes response from some population segments less likely:
Results collected purely online may not get as maney older people less comfortable with technology (although that's a dwindling group).
Results collected through email solicitation may not get as many younger respondents who don't use email as much.
A phone survey sent out during the day will miss many people who aren't home, which will skew the results by excluding many people who are already comfortable going out, shopping, back to work, etc and move results towards "permanent lockdown".
If you want fake stats to support a specific viewpoint it's much less risk and very easy to simply phrase everything as a leading question directed towards certain answers. Like an uncentered Likert scale:
1) Perfect 2) Great 3) Very Good 4) Good 5) Okay 6) Neutral 7) Poor
5 out of 7 options are positive and only 1 is negative.
As a bonus, the neutral & negative are listed last so you have to read through lesser positive options and the neutral before you get to the negative.
There's another cute (if unofficial) name for this that is slightly more specific than just "selection bias" which is (likely) what your professor was talking about: it's called the "lizardman constant"
Don’t forget that a significant fraction of them voted to leave the EU as a way of sending a message, not expecting that it could result in actually needing to leave the EU.
I can't read the OP: paywall. Does The Economist literally say that? I don't know how they came up with that - I don't believe anybody here is in favour of "permanent curfew" (a curfew is a ban on travelling during the hours of darkness; I guess they were referring to lockdown).
I imagine there is significant opposition, however, to the government's plan to lift lockdown more-or-less completely, in a couple of weeks, against the advice of his own scientific advisers. Maybe that's what The Economist is trying to say.
There's not really much point replying if you didn't read the article. Especially if you're trying to correct someone else. But yes, they did say that.
... about how many people they interviewed, exactly what questions they were asked (or whether these were open interviews), or how the sample were selected.
> A quarter say nightclubs and casinos should never reopen; almost two in ten would support an indefinite ban on leaving home after 10pm “without good reason”.
Would it really be that surprising that there's that many people who don't go to nightclubs or casinos? If it doesn't affect you after all.
Sure, it is not surprising that so many people don’t go to nightclubs, but it would be surprising that so many people without any empathy are ready to ban anything that doesn’t affect them.
Noisy nightclubs shouldn't be allowed in residential areas (oh, really??!!)
People with a bad attitude about other people having fun don't have any reasonable complaint, unless the fun-lovers are causing them a problem. Then the fun has to stop, or go somewhere else.
Yeah exactly, this is glossed over. The UK govt and many CEOs have been erring on the side of wanting "work from work" to come back. The choice for workers then is: continue restrictions and get remote working or end restrictions and be forced back into commuting etc. In this light 18% doesn't seem as high.
I attribute it mostly to a noise issue: Those who live the closest to pubs/clubs and other high noise generation venues noticed the quiet difference during lockdown and wistfully wish for more.
We are already currently in a situation where "safety" trumps everything. People willingly prioritizing physical health in exchange for negative mental health, relationships, being with their dying loved ones, losing jobs, higher cost of living, and freedom in general.
I'm having a hard time parsing your comment. You're saying prioritizing physical health is a net negative and you'd rather trade that for better mental health?
Wouldn't bad physical health generally lead to a worse mental state?
Airplane hijackings and bombings used to be a relatively frequent occurrence. One can argue that the security is not worth the loss of freedom (e.g. not being able to bring a gun on a plane). But it doesn’t seem to follow that the security is merely theater.
As a former TSA agent, it's most definitely theater. We used to practice by trying to hide something and see if we could get through. The xray operator didn't stand a chance even when they knew it was coming. This was over 10 years ago so maybe it's improved? I doubt it.
In 2015, agents with Department of Homeland Security posing as passengers snuck fake explosives through the security lines of several of the nation’s busiest airports. During the test, TSA officers missed 67 of the 70 fake weapons that went through the checks – a failure rate of 95%.
I wonder if the TSA has some signaling effect though apart from the actual efficacy of the security theatre. Even if it catches things rarely, the fact that it exists makes people more aware and potentially look out more for abnormal behavior in airports (and catching some things some times still probably acts as a deterrent - at least more so than not having the security theatre around)
if terrorists want to inflict as much damage and terror as possible wouldn’t they just blow up a (typically huge) line before the security? I think they actually did just that in Moscow airport once.
18% seems high but don’t underestimate paranoia and/or selfishness.
A lot of older people aren’t ever out past 10pm (I’m in my late thirties and I rarely am!) and have been convinced by tabloid newspapers that youths/immigrants/criminals/[delete as applicable] are doing all kinds of awful things at night time. Best to keep everyone indoors so that we’re all safe, eh?
If you go to bed at 10pm, why would you not want a curfew? For many people, 'back to normal' also means drunk people shouting under their windows in the middle of the night.
Now, a curfew sounds drastic, and I suspect many people are saying they are for it tongue in cheek. However, what's wrong with wanting to keep some of the positive aspects of the last year? Why go 'back to normal' when we can go forward to something better?
Having everyone home by 10pm would automatically curb a lot of anti-social and gang behaviour. Especially with a police blitz, scooping up anyone without a good excuse.
Not saying it's really desirable, worthwhile, or even feasible... But that's probably why some want it. Some places get pretty unpleasant after dark.
I have another personal angle on this: I'm not very social. I do enjoy conversation or dinner or visits with friends or coworkers, occasionally, but not the constant barrage of invitations, events and obligations that was normal before the pandemic. So while I understand things will eventually go back to that normal for the obvious benefit of the majority, personally it feels like the end of a long, quiet vacation that I will remember and miss.
So I'm pushing back on people that want me to meet or party too soon. I'm writing this minutes after my second vaccine dose so it won't be long before my own kind of freedom runs out.
I personally didn't feel much like it was a vacation since I still had to go into the office[0], but I will miss the way the default behavior was for people to avoid each other on the street and absolutely no one attempted to start an impromptu conversation with me.
[0] except for the brief period where basically every employee had COVID, gee, how did that happen?
Could this be propaganda intended to normalize the idea of complete top-down control over every area of life? We all need to wake up while we still can. It’s one thing to be a shut-in as a matter of your own individual choice - but this large of a % of people supposedly wanting it imposed on everyone else? In the UK of all places? I smell a rat.
The UK would honestly be the first western country I would expect this from. It still stretches the imagination, but the UK always seems to be the first to propose legislated restrictions for the good of its own population.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadI do.
If we had taken this seriously form day one we would not be in this position.
But I knew this would happen in April 2020 because all the historical evidence and my own personal experience suggested it would. lol.
We don't stand a chance. lol.
In fact, the permanent curfew is the lowest permanent item from the chart in the article.
And, as an introvert, lockdown did wonderful things for my mental health. I’ve been happier being locked down than I can remember being in decades. I hope things like remote work become a permanent thing.
And yeah, I'm in favour of social distancing, regardless of disease. I appreciate people I don't know respecting my space. How much space you prefer seems to be a social construct; I feel a bit invaded if a stranger comes closer than about 1m.
I sort of miss shaking hands with people I've just met. Elbow-bumps are absurd; nobody does it without irony.
Yessir.
Hacker News sometimes too.
Results collected purely online may not get as maney older people less comfortable with technology (although that's a dwindling group).
Results collected through email solicitation may not get as many younger respondents who don't use email as much.
A phone survey sent out during the day will miss many people who aren't home, which will skew the results by excluding many people who are already comfortable going out, shopping, back to work, etc and move results towards "permanent lockdown".
1) Perfect 2) Great 3) Very Good 4) Good 5) Okay 6) Neutral 7) Poor
5 out of 7 options are positive and only 1 is negative. As a bonus, the neutral & negative are listed last so you have to read through lesser positive options and the neutral before you get to the negative.
The name is originally based from the polling "results" of this article: https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
And (imo, aptly) named by Scott Alexander in https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
I can't read the OP: paywall. Does The Economist literally say that? I don't know how they came up with that - I don't believe anybody here is in favour of "permanent curfew" (a curfew is a ban on travelling during the hours of darkness; I guess they were referring to lockdown).
I imagine there is significant opposition, however, to the government's plan to lift lockdown more-or-less completely, in a couple of weeks, against the advice of his own scientific advisers. Maybe that's what The Economist is trying to say.
"To what extent, if at all, would you support or oppose each of the following rules being in place permanently, regardless of the risk from COVID-19?"
"Having a curfew against leaving home after 10PM without a good reason": 19%
https://archive.is/8xmAd
I've had a look at the Ipsos Mori results.
I can't find any information here...
https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...
... about how many people they interviewed, exactly what questions they were asked (or whether these were open interviews), or how the sample were selected.
It's not a real paywall. Just disable javascript and it's fine to read.
Or, you can read it here:
https://archive.is/emQBV
Would it really be that surprising that there's that many people who don't go to nightclubs or casinos? If it doesn't affect you after all.
https://archive.is/emQBV
Noisy nightclubs shouldn't be allowed in residential areas (oh, really??!!)
People with a bad attitude about other people having fun don't have any reasonable complaint, unless the fun-lovers are causing them a problem. Then the fun has to stop, or go somewhere else.
This isn't hard.
Wouldn't bad physical health generally lead to a worse mental state?
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/20/politics/tsa-whistleblower-ai...
In 2015, agents with Department of Homeland Security posing as passengers snuck fake explosives through the security lines of several of the nation’s busiest airports. During the test, TSA officers missed 67 of the 70 fake weapons that went through the checks – a failure rate of 95%.
But to add some perspective on the situation in the UK here is our (surprisingly good) government data website: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
As you can see, infections/day have been ~doubling every ~2 weeks for the last ~6.
And here is a letter in The Lancet from scientists opposing the imminent end of all restrictions: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
A lot of older people aren’t ever out past 10pm (I’m in my late thirties and I rarely am!) and have been convinced by tabloid newspapers that youths/immigrants/criminals/[delete as applicable] are doing all kinds of awful things at night time. Best to keep everyone indoors so that we’re all safe, eh?
Now, a curfew sounds drastic, and I suspect many people are saying they are for it tongue in cheek. However, what's wrong with wanting to keep some of the positive aspects of the last year? Why go 'back to normal' when we can go forward to something better?
Not saying it's really desirable, worthwhile, or even feasible... But that's probably why some want it. Some places get pretty unpleasant after dark.
So I'm pushing back on people that want me to meet or party too soon. I'm writing this minutes after my second vaccine dose so it won't be long before my own kind of freedom runs out.
[0] except for the brief period where basically every employee had COVID, gee, how did that happen?
I expected less bias from The Economist.