{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"80,000 Hours Podcast","title":"#121 – Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit's fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":11058,"description":"If you read polls saying that the public supports a carbon tax, should you believe them? According to today's guest — journalist and blogger Matthew Yglesias — it's complicated, but probably not. \r\n\r\nLinks to learn more, summary and full transcript.\r\n\r\nInterpreting opinion polls about specific policies can be a challenge, and it's easy to trick yourself into believing what you want to believe. Matthew invented a term for a particular type of self-delusion called the 'pundit's fallacy': \"the belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively.\" \r\n\r\nIf we want to advocate not just for ideas that would be good if implemented, but ideas that have a real shot at getting implemented, we should do our best to understand public opinion as it really is. \r\n\r\nThe least trustworthy polls are published by think tanks and advocacy campaigns that would love to make their preferred policy seem popular. These surveys can be designed to nudge respondents toward the desired result — for example, by tinkering with question wording and order or shifting how participants are sampled. And if a poll produces the 'wrong answer', there's no need to publish it at all, so the 'publication bias' with these sorts of surveys is large. \r\n\r\nMatthew says polling run by firms or researchers without any particular desired outcome can be taken more seriously. But the results that we ought to give by far the most weight are those from professional political campaigns trying to win votes and get their candidate elected because they have both the expertise to do polling properly, and a very strong incentive to understand what the public really thinks. \r\n\r\nThe problem is, campaigns run these expensive surveys because they think that having exclusive access to reliable information will give them a competitive advantage. As a result, they often don’t publish the findings, and instead use them to shape what their candidate says and...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/VO1STE7hN95RRg9QdLo4soV2VhhbR9PF5ZZlRhDYcwE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQxNDAyLzE2ODM1/NDQ1NDAtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}