Young people did better than old people in this quiz. The older article mentions many more characteristics associated with how well people did on the quiz.
Hmmm. The answers were blatantly obvious to me and I’m not exactly young. Not sure how these would trip anyone up. Perhaps they should have filtered for “CC Posters” as well as political party.
All statements seemed obviously either factual or opinion and I got all 10 right. It’s somewhat scary how many people get it wrong because the statements didn’t seem particularly nuanced. It is hopeful that young people are better at it, I guess.
Ummm – call me stupid, but I got one wrong – the one regarding “Spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget.” I thought defense spending is the biggest federal expenditure. I guess not?
I agree with romani. This has to do with education level, not age.
I didn’t know whether all the factual statements were correct, but I thought they were statements one could prove true or false and so labeled them as factual. That’s how I got a perfect score, not by necessarily knowing all the answers.
Maybe defense is the biggest expenditure? That’s my understanding? I can look it up. There is an answer, and the answer isn’t really open to debate… unless you include peripheral, maybe long-term costs that don’t show up on a government budget spreadsheet.
If it’s correct that factual statements can be true or false, then it’s necessary to judge the source of the statement to decide whether to believe it, or do my own research. Then it’s a leap of faith to believe the researchers, because sometimes data is honestly or deliberately miss-reported or misinterpreted.
eta. I’ve been thinking about all this way too much the last two years trying to understand what’s going on. It would surely help if I had had more education.
eta2. My neighbors without college degrees don’t necessarily believe the all same factual statements I do but it isn’t clear to me this has anything to do with differences in levels of education. We believe different sources.
My daughter had a school unit on distinguishing fact from opinion. If that is general, it may partly explain the difference in the scores of young and old.
I also thought that the statements were transparently either factual or opinion. I classified a statement as factual if it was falsifiable, drawing on Popperian philosophy of science (where I am not otherwise a big fan). This led to a perfect score.
Young people apparently did better than older people (among the crowd surveyed). It occurs to me that defense spending may have been the largest part of the budget in the past, and now it is Social Security, Medicare, etc. That might partly explain the distribution of answers to that question. The idea of peripheral costs that would not be classified as “defense,” but that actually are defense-related is an interesting one–I don’t know how those would stack up. This could potentially make fact vs. opinion much trickier on that question, because of a lack of agreement on which peripheral costs should count.
I got 9/10 and I am old. Like @VeryHappy, I thought that the defense budget was the largest single element of our spending. I also didn’t consider that an opinion statement, but a factual statement that was either accurate or inaccurate.
It seems to me that we believe or disbelieve some factual statements based on our opinions. Someone’s birthplace is a fact. However, it is possible to falsify a birth certificate. I have an opinion as to whether the document is legitimate or not.
Quantmech?
This gives me a headache but I really would like to understand it all. If possible.
I think the confusion for some people would be because they believe a statement to be false, so they categorized it as opinion even though it is a factual type of statement(whether true or not). For instance, the question about birthplace should be a factual statement and I marked it as such, though I do not believe it to be a true statement(and neither would most people I know). I resisted the urge to answer based on what I believe and instead answered based on whether it is a statement that should be able to be verified, therefore a factual statement, but I am guessing that there are many people who answer simply based on their agreement with the statements.
“eta. I’ve been thinking about all this way too much the last two years trying to understand what’s going on. It would surely help if I had had more education.”
Education is part of it, but access to unbiased information also plays a role. For the past couple of years one of the discussions my family has at the dinner table is daily events and also what types of bias we see in the reporting of those events. Focusing on this issue - bias in reporting - has caused us to look at all sources more critically and to find that sadly there hasn’t yet been a single source that hasn’t shown some bias in reporting. Sometimes it’s as simple as “loaded” language or a headline that implies something that the information in the article doesn’t support, sometimes it’s editorial content presented as information. The discovery that bias is so common has prompted all of us to instinctively apply skepticism to any single article and instead seek information from multiple sources before forming personal opinions or conclusions on any issue. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s cumbersome and I can see how people who receive their “news” from one or a few sources may have impressions that are closer to opinion than fact.
I think there’s a market opening for a service that rates articles based on bias. Not a new source of news, but instead a review service. Over time, the ratings would make it obvious which news sources provide information without bias so people could rely more on those sources.
I would like to see the same quiz broken down by primary source of news. Do you get most of your news from CNN? Fox? NPR? the NYT? Your hometown paper? MSNBC? Breitbart? Huffpo?
I also answered not based on if i knew something was correct for sure but if it could be prover true or false. The one I got wrong was about ISIS where is said “significant amount” - I was thinking maybe a significant amount couldn’t be quantified, like what is significant to one person may not be to another? Oh well, 9 out of 10 is not bad.
