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Alejandro1 comments on Rationality Quotes December 2012 - Less Wrong
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Devil's advocate time:
They don't know nothing about it. They know two things. 1. It's a debt reduction plan 2. It's named after Panetta and Burns
Here are some reasons to oppose the plan, based on the above knowledge:
We don't need a debt reduction plan, just keep doing what we're doing and it will sort itself out.
I like another existing plan, and this is not that one, so I oppose it.
I've heard of Panetta and (s)he's a complete douchebag. Anything they've come up with is clearly junk.
I haven't even heard of either of them, so what the heck would they know about debt reduction?
They're from different parties, there's no way they could have come up with something sensible.
I've heard 10 different plans described, and surely this is one of them. I can't remember which one this is, but I hated all of them so I must oppose this too.
And of course you can make a very similar set of reasons to support it. Not trying to rationalise people's stupidity or make excuses for them as such, just present the opposing argument in all its glory. Ok maybe making excuses for them is exactly what I'm doing. But honestly, how many of your political opinions, as a percentage, including all those that you don't know you have until asked, are really much better than the reasons above?
If you were being polled about an unfamiliar plan, would you more likely think that a) the pollster was asking you about a fictional plan, or b) that the pollster was doing a genuine survey, and that you just hadn't heard about that plan yet? Granted, forming an opinion about something in the absence of any knowledge, just because someone asked you for your opinion, is another matter entirely.
This might be a distinction without a difference. The trick was to get people to think they knew about some topic X well enough to profess an opinion on it, even though in fact they didn't know the first thing about X. Making sure that X doesn't exist is just a cheap way to implement this trick.
I would think b), and say that.
Isn't it damning either way, and this dilemma the point of the setup?
Depending on the phrasing and any specifics of the plan presented to me, I might conclude that it was not only fictional but deliberate FUD; that sort of misdirection's not unheard of. If I were given nothing but a label, though, I'd likely assume B.
The actual question was "Do you support or oppose the Panetta-Burns plan?" (The previous question was "... the Bowles-Simpson plan?") So you could infer that the two were related, and possibly partisan/opposing plans, but not much more than that.
Thanks for linking to the full results, very interesting.
I was surprised at first glance by:
both because I assumed more people had heard of him (which shows, I guess, I live in a bubble and don't correct enough for it), and because I had assumed a more favorable score, with perhaps only extreme Republicans having an unfavorable opinion. I guess I was failing to take into account that the kind of people who follow polls with so much dedication to have heard of Silver are almost all committed partisans.
Nitpick: 'not sure' isn't the same as 'haven't heard of him'. There are lots of things I know about that I don't have an opinion on.
This maybe makes more sense in an open thread than as a rationality quote.
This certainly is interesting. While at a glance, really bad metacognition looks like the chief culprit, there are other explanations. For example, they could be confusing Panetta-Burns with something else they've heard of. I'd be curious in particular if the poll asked the same people about Panetta-Burns it asked about Simpson-Bowles. One could conceive of someone not remembering the name and thinking that is what was being talked about. Also, this may to some extent be purely a demonstration that people don't like to look ignorant, and so they've said yes, but that that vocalized knowledge wouldn't have any impact on their actual behavior.
What intrigues me the most is not that people said they knew of it, but that they had a formed opinion for or against. If they didn't ask about Simpson-Bowles to the same people, then maybe as you suggest people had an opinion on S-B but misremembered and thought that this was the topic. But if they did, then the only explanation I can think of is that 8% of the people have such a strong positive prior for "bipartisan plans devised by a Clinton Chief of Staff/former western Republican Senator combo” that they agree with them without knowing what they are, and the reverse is true for 17% of the people.