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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Survey questions like this are implicitly about belief, whether you spell it out or not. Of course the answers aren't always truthful, for a variety of reasons, but I don't think you can make the answers more reliable simply by inserting “do you believe”, and conversely, they aren't less reliable when that was only implied.

Try it yourself. Answer the following questions:

  1. How old are you?
  2. How old do you believe you are?

Or:

  1. What did you have for breakfast?
  2. What do you believe you had for breakfast?

Or:

  1. Are you open-minded?
  2. Do you believe you are open-minded?

Or:

  1. Do you frequently argue with strangers on the internet?
  2. Do you believe you frequently argue with strangers on the internet?

Seriously, answer these. Was there any question pair where the second answer differed from the first? And if not for you, why would you think that inserting “do you believe” changes anyone else's answer?

Well yeah, the fact that basically everyone would answer those questions with the same answer, despite the fact that those questions ask 2 fundamentally different things - the former being a question about objective reality and the latter being about subjective perception - was kind of the entire point I was making.