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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Yeah, the odd responses from men are a signal they're not asking the right questions. Probably because they're not even allowed to think what questions might be relevant to young men.

Possibly, but your comment seems to in a way belittle the men involved because they may have chosen a different side from you ("because they're not even allowed to think...")--as if, in a world were they (allowed) to think as you do, in other words the correct way, their responses would be different. I'm not sure this kind of dismissal is productive or holds any hope of understanding the different perspectives out there.

Edit: I misunderstood the point being made.

"Because they're not even allowed to think" is belittling the WSJ writers and poll-creators, not the interviewed men.

To do the homework, the WSJ's 2024 numbers come from an series of internally-run poll. While I can't get the questions of all of them or breakdowns by gender, I can find the relevant parts for Feb 2024, and the split between Q12A and Q12B is... demonstrative in a lot of ways.

How did you get the report? Archive.is couldn't even get me past the paywall on this one. Is there a better way now?

That makes more sense.

I should have been more careful with the they, my bad

Sorry could you help me understand what you are implying at the end with the link? I couldn’t even find 12B in the doc

Sorry, Q13 Split B, on page 6. I'd confused the numbering system since Split B would not have been asked Q12.

Half of the response group (Split A) were asked

"What issue is most important to you when thinking about who you will vote for in the 2024 Presidential election?"

They gave answers in 30ish categories, with 9% giving some category outside of those answers, and 3% giving no answer. The other half were asked :

"Some people feel so strongly about an issue that they won’t vote for a candidate if they disagree with them on that issue. Of the following issues, what is the one issue you most strongly feel you couldn’t vote for a candidate who disagrees with you about it? If it’s another issue or if you do not feel strongly enough about any of the issues to determine your vote, please just say so."

They gave answers in only 15 categories, with 7% other, and 12% no answer. For individual answers, there are wide spreads -- 20% of split B thought abortion so important that they mostly strongly felt and could not vote for a politician that disagreed with them, while only 8% said it was the single most important question. In Split B, the closest I can find is the 1% that were categorized as "Inflation".

Some variation from one split to the next isn't unusual -- it's hard to get a perfectly random sample -- but the gap here is vast, and not especially coherent. Some of this probably the different question wording, especially the dropped importance of the economy-focused answers for Split B. But another portion probably reflects merged or split answers, especially for things like "Freedom and Rights", "Foreign Policy (general)".

And that's the open-ended question, where the poll subject had the most control over matters. If the WSJ article is really coming down from the latter questions that are thumbs-up or thumbs-down on specific matters (which they almost certainly must be, given the numbers the WSJ infographic uses), this gets even uglier. There's a lot of questions, even ones fairly high on Q12/Q13, that weren't investigated in later question at all.

Absolutely, because the procedural manipulation of science, polling, etc. starts with who gets to who gets to select the default hypothesis and areas of research.

The people who pick a list of polling questions like "how concerned are you that not enough is being done about the looming Climate Crisis?" aren't interested in understanding what their subjects are actually thinking.
At worst they're push-polling, at best they sat around in an office full of identical people picking questions from a hat full of NPR headline printouts. They definitely deserve ridicule for not caring to think about asking the right questions, and not even noticing they're asking the wrong ones.

Ah, I see what you're saying. That makes sense.

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