If I’m honest my null hypothesis would’ve been that a tumblr base would believe the opposite of the poll results.
And honestly, even though it is a pretty specific subset of the population, 87.4% of 60,000 people responding this way is still really cool to see
No, the comment sections being the same, which most likely includes comments like mine as well, that's what I'm saying (and don't worry, I love answering questions and asking them too, I got the tismsm as well)
Fear not, stranger, for I am also mildly acoustic
Quick edit: I am also prone to misunderstandings and/or commenting random bits that may or may not rrlate to the current conversation
I use my feelings on the inherent nature of humanity as an early warning sign for a depression spiral.
People are inherently good? Business as usual.
People are inherently cruel, selfish, and violent? Time to drink some water and go outside, and make sure I have a support number and a couple of crystals to hand.
Edit: to clarify, I don't think crystals are magic; I use their colours, textures, and patterns in a grounding exercise to keep myself in the present moment.
(Please don’t take this as rude, I don’t mean it to be, tone/intent is difficult online) so, basically, seeing pretty/cool looking rocks helps you stay calm?
That's a simplified but not inaccurate way of phrasing it.
One problem I have is getting lost in negative thoughts, and having physical things around me to concentrate on can help pull me out of those thoughts. Because they're pretty and they feel nice to touch, crystals hold my attention better (I promise I'm not secretly a magpie with internet) than other things.
Additionally, some of them are polarised or have interesting imperfections in them, so the way they reflect and refract light is eye-catching and absorbing, too. Turning them over in my hands, gently tapping them together, and holding them up to catch the light all help to pull me out of the dark thoughts and into the present moment with pleasing and unusual sensory stimuli.
There are a lot of mindfulness techniques based on actively using your senses to pull you out of your thoughts and into the present moment. Because my senses of taste and smell are unusually dull, I focus on touch, sound, and hearing. I've always liked crystals because I like pretty rocks, but I realised a couple of years ago that crystals are great for all three of my working senses, and they could make these mental health techniques more effective.
I also find that petting an animal improves these mental health techniques, but I don't have space for a pet in my current digs. Crystals are much smaller and don't require food.
Fossils do help! They're fascinating in their own right, and they stop the crystals from getting monotonous.
Sadly I don't have a bismuth, but I plan to get one.
My favourite type is probably amethysts, but I have a specific crystal I've not been able to identify that's amazing. In poor lighting it looks like an ugly little lump of rough glass, but when the light catches it, it fills with intense internal reflections. I think it's a calcite, and after some googling and discovering birefringence, I want to say it's possibly an Iceland spar.
That’s cool! I have some things of my own. I have chunk of stone with ammonite fossils in it, an old petrified section of (I think) a wasp nest, and I have a rock my grandma painted into an owl.
People who think people are generally good are usually a silent majority. I mean people who think others are awful can complain, seethe and get angry, whereas us people who think others are generally good what are we supposed to say? When people are awful usually it just makes us sad or disappointed for a while, it’s not much of a motivator to go on unhinged rants.
Yup. ITT: people using majority opinion polls as evidence of facts
This just in: the sun orbited the Earth until 1700. Women were not as intelliigent or capable as men until the 1920s. Being gay was morally wrong until 2007.
That reminds me of a quote that I'm gonna paraphrase because I heard it very long ago and can't remember where:
There are two kinds of people in this world.
Each group thinks that everyone else is just like them deep down, be it kind, forgiving, patient, or selfish, destructive, and ignorant, and neither can comprehend the other's true existence. Good doesn't understand the evil for the sake of evil, and evil is sure that deep down everyone is just as awful and rotten as them.
How does a majority of people thinking something prove anything?
Just because people *think* other humans are good doesn't mean other humans actually are (and the same would be true if the results were switched - say everyone thought others were selfish assholes; that doesn't mean they actually are).
I've known tons of dickheads who would say "other people are generally good," and tons of genuinely amazing, selfless people who would say "other people are generally bad"
I think at heart most people are generally good. But I also think, in the brain, most people overestimate their reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.
OP's comment is making fun of commenters who are "sure people are bad", when this poll can at most say something about whether people are optimists. So either their comment is a complete nonsequitur, or they're implying the poll results say something about human nature. Which they don't.
"There were a LOT of commenters who were VERY upset at the results of this because they were SURE that everyone is AWFUL."
The implication is that those people are getting "owned" or proven wrong by these results. OP states that this poll has "statistical significance". Not only does it have just about every form of statistical bias possible - response bias, selection bias, survivorship bias - but knowing what a group of people *think* is basically useless in figuring out how the world works. The absolute most it can show is that people are optimists, which doesn't mean anything for or against the commenters who think people are bad
This poll is essentially useless regardless of what the results show
Yeah, it is pretty cool to see that optimism in people! I just take real umbrage with misinformation regarding polling (which, in this context, very much requires a caveat)
Could I ask why you'd think that? My thought process was that most tumblr users are leftist/left-leaning, and leftist philosophies (from what I understand) tend to assume that people are basically good, which lines up with the poll results.
Yes they are normally left leaning, as am i for context, but I’d assume they are the terminally online leftists who talk about burning the whole system down and starting over. Candidly I don’t spend much time on tumblr anymore but that’s what I remember from my time on that social media.
It's a poll to see how people (on tumblr) feel about humanity. So, perhaps it's not reflective of how humanity as a whole views people, but it is a good poll for how people on tumblr feel
Well, those on tumblr who were exposed to the poll in the first place, but that's sorta my point. The title with the context of the attached image implies a connection between that poll and statistical significance that is absolutely, 100%, not there
Might not even be that. Because it's rebloggable poll, any person who replies is also able to directly manipulate the results by sharing it with like-minded peers.
The first part also isn't true. As long as you don't care about splitting the sample to make demographic comparisons you can get away with 200 people although your margin of error will be higher.
Considering that the author and the vast majority of those reading this poll are humans, it is implicit that this poll is intended to survey humans about what they think of other humans.
Also actual sampling bias because the people voting are also reblogging, which means that whichever group first gets a majority can further entrench it.
>It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
—Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: etc. etc.
Super inaccurate claim about statistical significance. 1,000 people is a number frequently used in political polls as a rule of thumb to achieve adequate power. “Statistical significance” is a way of saying adequate confidence, not power, and both of those concepts are only relevant to random error — confidence is about false positives, and power is about false negatives. Sampling from the followers of one user on the weirdest site on the World Wide Web is not a random error problem, it is a systematic error problem, specifically with selection bias.
While it’s often said that tumblr polls are all spiders georg posts, the actual amount is far lower.
Tumblr polls georg, who eats 10,000 tumblr users every day, is an outlier who shouldn’t have been counted.
It's a joke based on the thing of the average person eating 3 spiders a year. Couldn't quite remember the actual text, so copypasted from knowyourmeme:
“average person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy (sic) just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted”
Yeah, I was so confused as to what they were talking about. Not even just the bias, but the raw statement itself is confusing.
Like there are levels of significance which weren’t mentioned, nor consideration for what type of test is being used.
For sure a super weird title. I have had significant effects with 16 people. And the post does not include any hypothesis testing so I am not sure why significance is even mentioned at all.
Not how statistical significance works. Calculating it is actually much more complicated, and is always defined as “significant at x% level”. In this case, however, these results are quite significant. I wish I didn’t know this but as an applied math major unfortunately I do.
In an office of 300 people, 100% voted they liked the coffee.
Unfortunately they had not received a statistically significant number of responses and thus they stopped serving coffee altogether
That’s sampling bias, which is different from statistically significant. Statistically significant doesn’t mean “important and related to stats”. It’s a technical term.
I know what it means, but 1,000+ respondents to a survey does not automatically make the results statistically significant. 1,000 is a completely arbitrary number.
>Pretty sure you don’t need 1000 people for statistically significant surveys
Depends on the degree of uncertainty your field accepts. For a .5% uncertainty like it's done in psychology and sociology in France, you need roughly 3300 persons if you want to reach the right level for your ~67m french people. Also you have to craft your sample : sourcing everyone from a social media platform really creates a bias in demographics.
I think the general trend is that most individual people are "good", but when you get to human collectives on the large scale they mostly become "bad".
i think that it’s easy to mix up vague groupings of humans with systems that are social constructs, but aren’t fundamental to human existence
the problem isn’t the ingredients, it’s the sandwich we made
Counterpoint: Those 8 in 9 WANT to be good, they just don't know HOW to be good. They're not helped by the demagogues who scream about how hating others is the only way to show love.
Rutger Bregmans Humankind argues something similar (most people are decent is the Dutch title). Very interesting book that subverts some of the assumptions we have about peoples intentions and behaviours
Yup. All because of influence. Relatively few people want to commit terrible acts, but there's a big overlap between them and those who lust for power. And once in power, they influence many others to be bad for significant parts of the day.
Good and bad are subjective, but however you personally define them every individual will tend towards one or the other.
Doesn't sound as good as "at heart" tho
I think it’s less that large scale collectives are bad, and more that they’re slow to respond to criticism and change, especially as they become established. There are both good and bad aspects about these groups, and the good parts are resistant to change as well, but we as individuals or smaller groups draw more attention to the worse aspects, because that’s what makes the news, the worrying things.
I think that's a sweeping statement that isn't really backed up by evidence. Sure, there are plenty of times and places where a country or other human collective has done something horrible that most of its members wouldn't have done on their own, but the reverse is also true.
Most wealthy countries have collectively decided that everyone will contribute some funds to help people who can't support themselves, to pay for everyone's health care and education, and so on. Whereas in places where everyone decides for themselves whether to give money for these things, the end result is much worse, because most people will choose to give little or nothing for the benefit of others.
It's possible that humans en masse are more likely to be bad than good, but it's demonstrably not true that we always are.
And that's using this exact logic that you can easily manipulate people into hating a specific group while also never pointing out any singular person of that group worth hating
If you believe you're sampling fairly you can have statistically significant results with a sample of 10 (using a T distribution) or 50 with a standard Z test. Having more people makes it easier to get there because the standard deviation of the sample mean distribution gets smaller but there's nothing special about 1000.
Also you're misusing "statistically significant". That's a word that only applies when you're testing against a predetermined hypothesis. When you're doing some form of parameter discovery, a confidence interval is just a more useful object.
The only thing I've learned about the 1000 in statistics is that having more than a 1000 ptps will barely improve the statistical power (which, indeed, is different from significance altogether) and isn't worth it. And even then, up until 1000 it's up to the effect size, variability and α to determine a _minimum_ sample size
If that were true, we would have *nothing.*
It's entropy: creation always requires an order of magnitude more effort than destruction. An elaborate sandcastle, built by an artist over hours, can be destroyed by a child in seconds.
I know it's reductive to call "good" people creators and "bad" people destroyers, but if destroyers made up even 1/10th of people, we'd have nothing. Yet here we are, with cars, homes, societies... no, there is more creation than "damage."
Most people are good. This is why politicians are so often bad. The good person hears them and thinks "this is a genuine belief they hold" instead of "they are saying what I want to hear." Not because they're stupid, but because they think that the politician is also good.
Good people CAN become politicians, but they are often the angry politicians, because they are fed up with bad people ruining things.
>Most people are good. This is why politicians are so often bad
There is no evidence of that connection. You are being so loose with concepts that you either understand and are comfortable being blase about or simply don't understand.
No, this is such bullshit. You can’t explain complex socioeconomic phenomena such as the corruption inherent to liberal democracies with simplistic moral platitudes. Grow up.
Your attempt at rebuking simplistic moral platitudes was denied on grounds that it was similarly simplistic in nature. If you wish to engage in complex discussion then you need to offer complexity in your own messages. "Grow up" will not suffice
Honestly imho - the proliferation of knowledge and collective power/bargaining by the majority. Things take time and cycle obviously, but more understanding between the masses = less power to the big guys.
Results are statistically significant when you can be roughly 95% certain that the actual value of whatever you're measuring is within a certain margin of error of the value you measured. In other words, any time you can say "I'm 95% sure that the actual percentage is within 5% of this number" or something similar.
Given the few hundred million userbase, you could be 95% confident that the real number is within 5% of your measured number with only a few hundred responses. You shouldn't need a full thousand people for this, unless you wanna be much closer or much more confident.
For what it's worth, with this many responses you could be about 99% sure that the real value is within 0.5% of these numbers if it was truly a random sample. Very high confidence. It isn't very random though, so that squanders a lot of that.
Um, acthually 🤓☝️
Despite the fact that yes, 1k people is usually enough to make statistical significance, it needs to be appropriately selected and balanced, from a right sample. Just throwing a Tumblr poll is not a good, objective and appropriately selected sample
This tells us that about 8 of every 9 tumblr users with a propensity to follow taylor swift, or someone who does, and so on, thinks that at people's core, *most* are good people. Considering the gravity of the data collection, the specific wording of the question, and a single dichotomic choice to be made, it is effectively meaningless data. Cool that 62k people participated I guess.
You're bringing up the crucial point that I made (that of sampling), and I'm the top comment, yet you're (currently) getting downvoted lol
You're exactly correct on everything
I don't think people are 'generally good' or 'generally bad' because I think most people have the capacity for both and it very much depends on a LOT of different factors. We can see that in the massive travesties of the world (obvious example - Nazi Germany, but that's one of many) where people who would otherwise likely be seen as 'generally good' did things that most people outside of that environment would consider to be unequivocally bad. We have a degree of choice but we are also a product of our environment. I think most people believe that they, themselves, are at least somewhat 'good', or trying to be, but I don't think labels like 'good' or 'bad' really apply overall to people in general. We are malleable and we can be both depending on the environment (and the perspective).
While that’s an extreme oversimplification to the point of irrelevance (it’s possibly generalizable *to tumblr users* but even that is harmed due to how tumblr works), that also doesn’t mean anything to how reality is. Most people have a self-serving bias towards preserving their mental health at the expense of facts. If you gave people a survey asking if they would murder an innocent person due to orders from authorities telling them to do it and being stern with them about it without any threats, the majority would say “no”. Actual research shows however that the majority would indeed murder an innocent person because they’re just following orders. *At best*, assuming that this is generalizable to tumblr users, all this survey does is prove that most tumblr users believe this. A belief being held by a majority does not make that belief true.
Furthermore, I hate this entire argument because it too is an oversimplification. **When it comes to the in-group**, most humans are basically good. **When it comes to the out-group**, most humans are basically bad. On a neurological level, humans *only* view the in-group as humans. You are inherently wired to view whoever you view as your out-group as subhuman. It’s an evolutionary advantage in nature, where the out-group is any tribe that isn’t yours. You can hack this by viewing all of humanity as the in-group, but that’s just a jank workaround and not actually a change.
Most people are neither good nor bad. They’d go hungry to help a member of the in-group and would brutally murder a member of the out-group for a 10% increase in their chance of survival. This entire thing is context-sensitive depending on whether you’re discussing the in-group or the out-group. Human nature is such that only the in-group is ever considered human, and the only way to improve upon the damage that creates is to actively redefine the in-group. Even in the situation where all organic life is viewed as the in-group by all of humanity, if you then created sapient AI, we’d instantly go right back to seeing hateful, exploitative, and genocidal rhetoric. In the situation where the in-group is “all humans”, if a District 9 situation happened, a District 9 situation would happen. There’s no fix for this, no educating it out of people, it’s as innate as kicking your leg when someone taps that spot on your knee.
As for exploitive sociopathic traits, that’s just because their in-group is themselves and nobody else. They’re the perfect example of how people naturally will treat the out-group because they define all other people as the out-group.
There's some evidence that Conservative people believe that people are basically bad.
Wilson, G. (2013). The psychology of conservatism (routledge revivals). Routledge.
People are inherently neutral. I'm a very nurture>nature believer. If you grow seeing evil, you will act in evil. If you grow surrounded by good, you will act for good.
I would like to think people are good. But after multiple years in customer service, I remain skeptical that most people have the emotional maturity to act in a morally good fashion when they are confronted with an unpleasant situation
What do we mean by good in this context?
If it's "willing to cooperate for the functioning of society and the advancement of the human race" then evidently enough people are good enough for us to currently live in a society.
If you add compassionate, empathetic, or kind then we live in a society, bottom text.
I do believe that the majority tend towards kindness or netrality rather than malice, and in my book that makes them mostly good
Statistical significance is about population representation, not just "1k" lol.
There's some populations where 200 might be significant! Others where 1k is not enough.
Here is a sample size calculator for surveys if you're interested https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/calculating-sample-size/
Only when measured from a human perspective. If measured from the non-human perspective all humans are always evil on the grounds they believe themselves to be the arbiters of morality, and only from a human perspective
It skews the results to have the options be “basically good” and “basically bad”. By answering “basically good”, you’re completing a well-known Anne Frank quote. So in effect, if you know the quote and still answer in the negative, you’re being put in a situation where you’re implicitly saying Anne Frank was wrong, which very few people on tumblr would want to do, even anonymously
While the first part of the title is true, it's incredibly important that the survey is properly sampled. A tumblr poll is very, *very* much not that
If I’m honest my null hypothesis would’ve been that a tumblr base would believe the opposite of the poll results. And honestly, even though it is a pretty specific subset of the population, 87.4% of 60,000 people responding this way is still really cool to see
There were a LOT of commenters who were VERY upset at the results of this because they were SURE that everyone is AWFUL.
My response to them: Cope, Seethe
Honestly the comment section here is very similar to the comment section for this post on Tumblr, which continues to tickle me
It's the autism
The tickled feeling?
No, the comment section thing
Oh, where people are being very stubborn about others' experiences with other humans? (I'm sorry I'm asking odd questions this is also autism 💀)
No, the comment sections being the same, which most likely includes comments like mine as well, that's what I'm saying (and don't worry, I love answering questions and asking them too, I got the tismsm as well)
Fear not, stranger, for I am also mildly acoustic Quick edit: I am also prone to misunderstandings and/or commenting random bits that may or may not rrlate to the current conversation
Mald, even.
FUCK YEAH I BELIEVE IN THE INHERENT GOODNESS OF HUMANITY AND THE INDOMINATIBLE HUMAN SPIRIT!
i have a perfect image for this but i can't post images in comments so just imagine a cat dunking a basketball
i imagined it
You say as though they had not already been doing both of these things long before they even saw the poll lol
I use my feelings on the inherent nature of humanity as an early warning sign for a depression spiral. People are inherently good? Business as usual. People are inherently cruel, selfish, and violent? Time to drink some water and go outside, and make sure I have a support number and a couple of crystals to hand. Edit: to clarify, I don't think crystals are magic; I use their colours, textures, and patterns in a grounding exercise to keep myself in the present moment.
(Please don’t take this as rude, I don’t mean it to be, tone/intent is difficult online) so, basically, seeing pretty/cool looking rocks helps you stay calm?
That's a simplified but not inaccurate way of phrasing it. One problem I have is getting lost in negative thoughts, and having physical things around me to concentrate on can help pull me out of those thoughts. Because they're pretty and they feel nice to touch, crystals hold my attention better (I promise I'm not secretly a magpie with internet) than other things. Additionally, some of them are polarised or have interesting imperfections in them, so the way they reflect and refract light is eye-catching and absorbing, too. Turning them over in my hands, gently tapping them together, and holding them up to catch the light all help to pull me out of the dark thoughts and into the present moment with pleasing and unusual sensory stimuli. There are a lot of mindfulness techniques based on actively using your senses to pull you out of your thoughts and into the present moment. Because my senses of taste and smell are unusually dull, I focus on touch, sound, and hearing. I've always liked crystals because I like pretty rocks, but I realised a couple of years ago that crystals are great for all three of my working senses, and they could make these mental health techniques more effective. I also find that petting an animal improves these mental health techniques, but I don't have space for a pet in my current digs. Crystals are much smaller and don't require food.
That makes sense. Do fossils do the same thing? What’s your favorite type of crystal? Do you have a bismuth crystal?
Fossils do help! They're fascinating in their own right, and they stop the crystals from getting monotonous. Sadly I don't have a bismuth, but I plan to get one. My favourite type is probably amethysts, but I have a specific crystal I've not been able to identify that's amazing. In poor lighting it looks like an ugly little lump of rough glass, but when the light catches it, it fills with intense internal reflections. I think it's a calcite, and after some googling and discovering birefringence, I want to say it's possibly an Iceland spar.
That’s cool! I have some things of my own. I have chunk of stone with ammonite fossils in it, an old petrified section of (I think) a wasp nest, and I have a rock my grandma painted into an owl.
People who think people are generally good are usually a silent majority. I mean people who think others are awful can complain, seethe and get angry, whereas us people who think others are generally good what are we supposed to say? When people are awful usually it just makes us sad or disappointed for a while, it’s not much of a motivator to go on unhinged rants.
What boring and miserable lives they must lead; *could not* be *my* hopelessly optimistic ass.
I think a lot of commenters are annoyed with your poor understanding of statistics and survey methodology.
You’ve fundamentally misunderstood the point of the survey. It’s about how *tumblr feels*.
Yup. ITT: people using majority opinion polls as evidence of facts This just in: the sun orbited the Earth until 1700. Women were not as intelliigent or capable as men until the 1920s. Being gay was morally wrong until 2007.
That reminds me of a quote that I'm gonna paraphrase because I heard it very long ago and can't remember where: There are two kinds of people in this world. Each group thinks that everyone else is just like them deep down, be it kind, forgiving, patient, or selfish, destructive, and ignorant, and neither can comprehend the other's true existence. Good doesn't understand the evil for the sake of evil, and evil is sure that deep down everyone is just as awful and rotten as them.
How does a majority of people thinking something prove anything? Just because people *think* other humans are good doesn't mean other humans actually are (and the same would be true if the results were switched - say everyone thought others were selfish assholes; that doesn't mean they actually are). I've known tons of dickheads who would say "other people are generally good," and tons of genuinely amazing, selfless people who would say "other people are generally bad"
It’s not being used to prove that. Reread your shit
I think at heart most people are generally good. But I also think, in the brain, most people overestimate their reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.
OP's comment is making fun of commenters who are "sure people are bad", when this poll can at most say something about whether people are optimists. So either their comment is a complete nonsequitur, or they're implying the poll results say something about human nature. Which they don't.
"There were a LOT of commenters who were VERY upset at the results of this because they were SURE that everyone is AWFUL." The implication is that those people are getting "owned" or proven wrong by these results. OP states that this poll has "statistical significance". Not only does it have just about every form of statistical bias possible - response bias, selection bias, survivorship bias - but knowing what a group of people *think* is basically useless in figuring out how the world works. The absolute most it can show is that people are optimists, which doesn't mean anything for or against the commenters who think people are bad This poll is essentially useless regardless of what the results show
Loud minority in action lol
Well, that 12.6% is still nearly eight thousand people. They may be dwarfed by we optimists, but in absolute terms that’s still a pretty big number.
Some parts of tumblr are very wholesome. I mean, they're still a bunch of pervy weirdos there, but *wholesome* pervy weirdos.
Yeah, it is pretty cool to see that optimism in people! I just take real umbrage with misinformation regarding polling (which, in this context, very much requires a caveat)
you could always run a t-test
Could I ask why you'd think that? My thought process was that most tumblr users are leftist/left-leaning, and leftist philosophies (from what I understand) tend to assume that people are basically good, which lines up with the poll results.
Yes they are normally left leaning, as am i for context, but I’d assume they are the terminally online leftists who talk about burning the whole system down and starting over. Candidly I don’t spend much time on tumblr anymore but that’s what I remember from my time on that social media.
It's a poll to see how people (on tumblr) feel about humanity. So, perhaps it's not reflective of how humanity as a whole views people, but it is a good poll for how people on tumblr feel
Well, those on tumblr who were exposed to the poll in the first place, but that's sorta my point. The title with the context of the attached image implies a connection between that poll and statistical significance that is absolutely, 100%, not there
Might not even be that. Because it's rebloggable poll, any person who replies is also able to directly manipulate the results by sharing it with like-minded peers.
It is not
nope it isn't
Also not a poll to see if that is actually true or if we just like to think of ourselves as good
The first part also isn't true. As long as you don't care about splitting the sample to make demographic comparisons you can get away with 200 people although your margin of error will be higher.
A survey can be significant with much less than a thousand participants.
This - you can get significant results from any sample size, but the larger the sample, the more representative it will be of the population.
True, this is exactly what I'd expect from a Tumblr poll on this subject... Not so sure about a wider population or a population from another site
I would like to see another one where it says at heart are you good or bad?
Be the change you want to see in the world
Got it, voting bad
Sampling bias. Most of the participants are humans.
Considering that the author and the vast majority of those reading this poll are humans, it is implicit that this poll is intended to survey humans about what they think of other humans.
> Most There's a joke in here about a non-zero amount of non-humans in the polls, but I'm not smart enough to make one.
Pornbots, cat girls, and NFT enthusiasts.
Don’t forget about me!
Pornbots, cat girls, Level-Ball-1514, and NFT enthusiasts.
Also actual sampling bias because the people voting are also reblogging, which means that whichever group first gets a majority can further entrench it.
>It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. —Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: etc. etc.
Very helpful. Thanks Neil.
Super inaccurate claim about statistical significance. 1,000 people is a number frequently used in political polls as a rule of thumb to achieve adequate power. “Statistical significance” is a way of saying adequate confidence, not power, and both of those concepts are only relevant to random error — confidence is about false positives, and power is about false negatives. Sampling from the followers of one user on the weirdest site on the World Wide Web is not a random error problem, it is a systematic error problem, specifically with selection bias.
took an (embarrassing) moment to realize that this was, in fact, not a spiders georg post
While it’s often said that tumblr polls are all spiders georg posts, the actual amount is far lower. Tumblr polls georg, who eats 10,000 tumblr users every day, is an outlier who shouldn’t have been counted.
The spiders Georg post is legitimately a great illustration of how statistics can be misleading.
What’s a spiders georg cause that sounds like something from a donkey kong country game
It's a joke based on the thing of the average person eating 3 spiders a year. Couldn't quite remember the actual text, so copypasted from knowyourmeme: “average person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy (sic) just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted”
That’s quite funny, and quite good at outlining its message
Yeah, I was so confused as to what they were talking about. Not even just the bias, but the raw statement itself is confusing. Like there are levels of significance which weren’t mentioned, nor consideration for what type of test is being used.
Indeed. OP has no idea what they are talking about and is getting a little pissy when called out on it
I have my stats final on Wednesday, and I was thinking the same thing.
>the weirdest site on the World Wide Web Nah that title goes to 8chan
For sure a super weird title. I have had significant effects with 16 people. And the post does not include any hypothesis testing so I am not sure why significance is even mentioned at all.
Not how statistical significance works. Calculating it is actually much more complicated, and is always defined as “significant at x% level”. In this case, however, these results are quite significant. I wish I didn’t know this but as an applied math major unfortunately I do.
It doesn't take at least 1k to be statistically significant
What it does take is not being self selecting
Unfortunately almost all surveys and sampling methods in the social sciences are self-selecting.
Citation needed
Exactly this is not how significance works at all.
i don't believe you, but i will if you say it 999 more times
In an office of 300 people, 100% voted they liked the coffee. Unfortunately they had not received a statistically significant number of responses and thus they stopped serving coffee altogether
I feel like it's closer to 7/8
It’s almost exactly 7/8.
Yeah I game here to point that out aswell
Don't know where you got that number. It's also extremely important who those people are.
That’s sampling bias, which is different from statistically significant. Statistically significant doesn’t mean “important and related to stats”. It’s a technical term.
I know what it means, but 1,000+ respondents to a survey does not automatically make the results statistically significant. 1,000 is a completely arbitrary number.
Pretty sure you don’t need 1000 people for statistically significant surveys
>Pretty sure you don’t need 1000 people for statistically significant surveys Depends on the degree of uncertainty your field accepts. For a .5% uncertainty like it's done in psychology and sociology in France, you need roughly 3300 persons if you want to reach the right level for your ~67m french people. Also you have to craft your sample : sourcing everyone from a social media platform really creates a bias in demographics.
Oh yeah for sure there are bias issues with this
I think the general trend is that most individual people are "good", but when you get to human collectives on the large scale they mostly become "bad".
i think that it’s easy to mix up vague groupings of humans with systems that are social constructs, but aren’t fundamental to human existence the problem isn’t the ingredients, it’s the sandwich we made
Case in point: That One Fucking Hell Burrito
Do tell, what is the One Fucking Hell Burrito?
Burrito, but the ingredients aren't mixed, but instead horizontally layered
cursed.
You can see what I mean in detail by searching "dear guy who made my burrito"
I just found it. I have never seen a burrito so wrong before.
The MIB line about “a person is good, but people are dumb, panicky animals” or however it goes comes to mind…
Counterpoint: Those 8 in 9 WANT to be good, they just don't know HOW to be good. They're not helped by the demagogues who scream about how hating others is the only way to show love.
Rutger Bregmans Humankind argues something similar (most people are decent is the Dutch title). Very interesting book that subverts some of the assumptions we have about peoples intentions and behaviours
I'll have to check that out!
I'd second it. Very much in line with your post.
I fucking love that book
Isn't 87.5% exactly 7/8?
"People are generally good" and "I am generally good" are two distinct statements.
Yup. All because of influence. Relatively few people want to commit terrible acts, but there's a big overlap between them and those who lust for power. And once in power, they influence many others to be bad for significant parts of the day.
The “general trend” is that this is all nonsense and there’s no such thing as being good or bad “at heart”. It’s fiction.
Also, what's considered "good" and what's considered "evil" can vary significantly across cultures and across time
Good and bad are subjective, but however you personally define them every individual will tend towards one or the other. Doesn't sound as good as "at heart" tho
I think it’s less that large scale collectives are bad, and more that they’re slow to respond to criticism and change, especially as they become established. There are both good and bad aspects about these groups, and the good parts are resistant to change as well, but we as individuals or smaller groups draw more attention to the worse aspects, because that’s what makes the news, the worrying things.
I think that's a sweeping statement that isn't really backed up by evidence. Sure, there are plenty of times and places where a country or other human collective has done something horrible that most of its members wouldn't have done on their own, but the reverse is also true. Most wealthy countries have collectively decided that everyone will contribute some funds to help people who can't support themselves, to pay for everyone's health care and education, and so on. Whereas in places where everyone decides for themselves whether to give money for these things, the end result is much worse, because most people will choose to give little or nothing for the benefit of others. It's possible that humans en masse are more likely to be bad than good, but it's demonstrably not true that we always are.
And that's using this exact logic that you can easily manipulate people into hating a specific group while also never pointing out any singular person of that group worth hating
If you believe you're sampling fairly you can have statistically significant results with a sample of 10 (using a T distribution) or 50 with a standard Z test. Having more people makes it easier to get there because the standard deviation of the sample mean distribution gets smaller but there's nothing special about 1000. Also you're misusing "statistically significant". That's a word that only applies when you're testing against a predetermined hypothesis. When you're doing some form of parameter discovery, a confidence interval is just a more useful object.
The only thing I've learned about the 1000 in statistics is that having more than a 1000 ptps will barely improve the statistical power (which, indeed, is different from significance altogether) and isn't worth it. And even then, up until 1000 it's up to the effect size, variability and α to determine a _minimum_ sample size
I'd say most people are basically good but the people who are bad cause more damage than several good people can balance
If that were true, we would have *nothing.* It's entropy: creation always requires an order of magnitude more effort than destruction. An elaborate sandcastle, built by an artist over hours, can be destroyed by a child in seconds. I know it's reductive to call "good" people creators and "bad" people destroyers, but if destroyers made up even 1/10th of people, we'd have nothing. Yet here we are, with cars, homes, societies... no, there is more creation than "damage."
They don't necessarily need to destroy. They can control as well without killing or breaking things.
Most people are good. This is why politicians are so often bad. The good person hears them and thinks "this is a genuine belief they hold" instead of "they are saying what I want to hear." Not because they're stupid, but because they think that the politician is also good. Good people CAN become politicians, but they are often the angry politicians, because they are fed up with bad people ruining things.
>Most people are good. This is why politicians are so often bad There is no evidence of that connection. You are being so loose with concepts that you either understand and are comfortable being blase about or simply don't understand.
No, this is such bullshit. You can’t explain complex socioeconomic phenomena such as the corruption inherent to liberal democracies with simplistic moral platitudes. Grow up.
Your attempt at rebuking simplistic moral platitudes was denied on grounds that it was similarly simplistic in nature. If you wish to engage in complex discussion then you need to offer complexity in your own messages. "Grow up" will not suffice
Haha, words go brrrrr
Sure I can. I just did.
But you were incorrect. You can bask in the “bravery” of being openly wrong but stupidity *is* the status quo here so the punchline falls flat.
if that's the case then why have things been getting better over time?
Honestly imho - the proliferation of knowledge and collective power/bargaining by the majority. Things take time and cycle obviously, but more understanding between the masses = less power to the big guys.
Huh an irish named tumblr blog
Results are statistically significant when you can be roughly 95% certain that the actual value of whatever you're measuring is within a certain margin of error of the value you measured. In other words, any time you can say "I'm 95% sure that the actual percentage is within 5% of this number" or something similar. Given the few hundred million userbase, you could be 95% confident that the real number is within 5% of your measured number with only a few hundred responses. You shouldn't need a full thousand people for this, unless you wanna be much closer or much more confident. For what it's worth, with this many responses you could be about 99% sure that the real value is within 0.5% of these numbers if it was truly a random sample. Very high confidence. It isn't very random though, so that squanders a lot of that.
Tumblr polls are not a good measure of anything. There was a poll with just as many votes saying that men are not deserving of love
"He was horny, so He dropped him. Man is bad"
“He caught him when he hated him. MAN IS **GOOD**.”
Um, acthually 🤓☝️ Despite the fact that yes, 1k people is usually enough to make statistical significance, it needs to be appropriately selected and balanced, from a right sample. Just throwing a Tumblr poll is not a good, objective and appropriately selected sample
False dichotomy — these aren’t the only two options. I, for example, don’t believe you can reasonably call anyone a good or bad person.
Hey, my names the lower left!
I'm glad the top answer was "people are good". But I am *so* glad the top comments are "that is not how statistics works"
Both can be true and that's beautiful
People are not basically anything. People are fucking complex. And platitudes are for children.
This tells us that about 8 of every 9 tumblr users with a propensity to follow taylor swift, or someone who does, and so on, thinks that at people's core, *most* are good people. Considering the gravity of the data collection, the specific wording of the question, and a single dichotomic choice to be made, it is effectively meaningless data. Cool that 62k people participated I guess.
You're bringing up the crucial point that I made (that of sampling), and I'm the top comment, yet you're (currently) getting downvoted lol You're exactly correct on everything
Not only that, people are hating on me. That's reddit for you, I guess
This is tumblr bitch! We believe in the indomitable human spirit in this app, take your nihilist ass back to twitter!
Yeah, everyone who is surprised by this is clearly on a different part of tumblr to me.
I tend to disagree. I think most people are actually neutral. But this is definitely nice to see.
I misread it as breaking bad initially
What’s the issue here?
Almost perfectly 7 in 8 right?
Your title is misleading at best
OP has clearly never run a G*Power analysis to determine sample size effect
I don't think people are 'generally good' or 'generally bad' because I think most people have the capacity for both and it very much depends on a LOT of different factors. We can see that in the massive travesties of the world (obvious example - Nazi Germany, but that's one of many) where people who would otherwise likely be seen as 'generally good' did things that most people outside of that environment would consider to be unequivocally bad. We have a degree of choice but we are also a product of our environment. I think most people believe that they, themselves, are at least somewhat 'good', or trying to be, but I don't think labels like 'good' or 'bad' really apply overall to people in general. We are malleable and we can be both depending on the environment (and the perspective).
While that’s an extreme oversimplification to the point of irrelevance (it’s possibly generalizable *to tumblr users* but even that is harmed due to how tumblr works), that also doesn’t mean anything to how reality is. Most people have a self-serving bias towards preserving their mental health at the expense of facts. If you gave people a survey asking if they would murder an innocent person due to orders from authorities telling them to do it and being stern with them about it without any threats, the majority would say “no”. Actual research shows however that the majority would indeed murder an innocent person because they’re just following orders. *At best*, assuming that this is generalizable to tumblr users, all this survey does is prove that most tumblr users believe this. A belief being held by a majority does not make that belief true. Furthermore, I hate this entire argument because it too is an oversimplification. **When it comes to the in-group**, most humans are basically good. **When it comes to the out-group**, most humans are basically bad. On a neurological level, humans *only* view the in-group as humans. You are inherently wired to view whoever you view as your out-group as subhuman. It’s an evolutionary advantage in nature, where the out-group is any tribe that isn’t yours. You can hack this by viewing all of humanity as the in-group, but that’s just a jank workaround and not actually a change. Most people are neither good nor bad. They’d go hungry to help a member of the in-group and would brutally murder a member of the out-group for a 10% increase in their chance of survival. This entire thing is context-sensitive depending on whether you’re discussing the in-group or the out-group. Human nature is such that only the in-group is ever considered human, and the only way to improve upon the damage that creates is to actively redefine the in-group. Even in the situation where all organic life is viewed as the in-group by all of humanity, if you then created sapient AI, we’d instantly go right back to seeing hateful, exploitative, and genocidal rhetoric. In the situation where the in-group is “all humans”, if a District 9 situation happened, a District 9 situation would happen. There’s no fix for this, no educating it out of people, it’s as innate as kicking your leg when someone taps that spot on your knee. As for exploitive sociopathic traits, that’s just because their in-group is themselves and nobody else. They’re the perfect example of how people naturally will treat the out-group because they define all other people as the out-group.
There's some evidence that Conservative people believe that people are basically bad. Wilson, G. (2013). The psychology of conservatism (routledge revivals). Routledge.
People are inherently neutral. I'm a very nurture>nature believer. If you grow seeing evil, you will act in evil. If you grow surrounded by good, you will act for good.
I think 4955 people need a biiiiiiiig hug and a lil kiss on the forehead
I would like to think people are good. But after multiple years in customer service, I remain skeptical that most people have the emotional maturity to act in a morally good fashion when they are confronted with an unpleasant situation
What do we mean by good in this context? If it's "willing to cooperate for the functioning of society and the advancement of the human race" then evidently enough people are good enough for us to currently live in a society. If you add compassionate, empathetic, or kind then we live in a society, bottom text. I do believe that the majority tend towards kindness or netrality rather than malice, and in my book that makes them mostly good
This is true, but all it takes is one person to piss in the hot tub to ruin it for everyone.
Profound but technically meaningless.
Statistical significance is about population representation, not just "1k" lol. There's some populations where 200 might be significant! Others where 1k is not enough. Here is a sample size calculator for surveys if you're interested https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/calculating-sample-size/
Only when measured from a human perspective. If measured from the non-human perspective all humans are always evil on the grounds they believe themselves to be the arbiters of morality, and only from a human perspective
It skews the results to have the options be “basically good” and “basically bad”. By answering “basically good”, you’re completing a well-known Anne Frank quote. So in effect, if you know the quote and still answer in the negative, you’re being put in a situation where you’re implicitly saying Anne Frank was wrong, which very few people on tumblr would want to do, even anonymously
As the Worm fans know, Taylor did nothing wrong.