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adamisom comments on [Infographic] A reminder as to how far the rationality waterline can climb (at least, for the US). - Less Wrong
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The most frightening thing isn't that 14% of Americans think sound travels faster than light. The most frightening thing is that if you flipped a coin to decide whether to believe that statement or its converse, you'd land on 'speed: sound > light' half the time, in which case zero evidence impinges on the decision... which means you could just as easily have randomly believed 'speed: light > sound'.
Thus, at least 28% of Americans have no clue.
It gets worse when, rather than being a binary choice, there are several "choices" of alternative beliefs.
I'm not sure this quite follows, as it isn't clear that the 14% were guessing randomly... they might have been operating from some systematically wrong model. But I agree that it's likely.
To be fair, I also often wonder whether the people who take these tests are just picking random answers because they aren't at all invested in the test. Back when I was taking neuropsych evaluations after my stroke, there were a number of questions intended to detect malingering; I would like to believe that tests like those cited here have similar "checksum" questions built in and that reported results would take that into account, but in fact I don't.
Yeah - good point. I did realize that people probably do operate from a systematically wrong model---why not? But I figured that there are probably at least as many operating from a systematically wrong model that just happens to give them the right answer. I figured that if you were just guessing, with minimal information or reasoning (as opposed to none), it would more likely be biased towards the right answer.