This is the third of n many result posts for the second survey I hosted. Click here for part one on the podcast & meditation, and here for part two on evaluating intellectuals. In particular, check out part 0 which covers the first three questions on the politics section. (And reminder that you can also check out my working file if you prefer to have no commentary, or even the raw data.)

Question 25: What is your opinion of Donald Trump (as president)?

This is another duplicate from the first survey.

So far, the duplicate questions have received consistently very similar results, and this is no exception.

Donald Trump’s mean approval is 3,63 and his median approval is Very unfavorable based on 270 responses. He’s less popular than the new intro music, but less popular than Jordan Peterson.

Question 26: Is it accurate to claim that Trump makes a lot of factually false statements?

Others:

Understatement

This is a simple fact one can validate through his quotes.

He says out loud things other politicians don’t that we know all politicians do (example; every 2020 candidate except trump pledged to not use oppo research from foreign powers. Some might not, but Trump is the only one who said he wouldn’t pledge against this. Is he the only dishonest one, or is the only one being truthful?)

No opinion

Yes, but I don’t think he means or understands most of what he says that would be subject to criticisms of factual inaccuracy.

Question 27: What is your opinion of The Young Turks Network, broadly speaking?

For those who don’t know, TyT is a very progressive, very popular news show that streams every weekday for two hours live over the internet. Its main host is Cenk Uygur, who has a fairly bad history with Sam.

I think these results are quite remarkable, given how left-leaning this community is (82% identify as left or far left on social issues, and 63% on economic issues).

The Your Turks Network’s mean approval is 2,74 and their median approval is Unfavorable, based on 206 responses. They are more popular than Donald Trump, but less popular than The new intro music.

Other: Slightly favorable, but mostly unsure – not enough exposure

Question 28: What is your opinion of Ana Kasparian?



Ana Kasparian is another one of the three main hosts (along with Cenk). She has a mean approval of 2.13 and a median approval of Neutral, based on 157 responses. She is more popular than Jordan Peterson, but less popular than Sam distancing himself from some specific people on the right. (And with that, this joke is just about done.)

A bunch of people have wondered why I singled out Ana Kasparian. The short answer is that I think TyT’s three main hosts are all really smart people compared to most pundits out there, and yet TyT is being remarkably toxic most of the time. If the problem is systemic, then approval of any one host would be higher than approval of the entire network. And I didn’t want to pick Cenk because of his aforementioned history with Sam.

I won two out of three predictions on this one. I predicted that Ana’s favorability would be higher than TyT’s (90%), -by at least 0.5 (70%), -by at least 1 (50%). It’s “higher” by 0.61. Of course, there are other reasons why it would be higher, such as the fact that she’s a human being and TyT an organization.

Question 29: What is your opinion on a federal minimum wage?

Another repeat question. Old results:

Still quite similar – the new approval is slightly lower.

Like last time, I’m mostly interested in the correlation between not liking minimum wage and being worried about extinction risk from Artificial Intelligence. Last time, that correlation was weak but (I think) significant (and positive). However, that will have to wait for another post.

Question 30: Can we be confident (>95%) that Global Warming is real and either caused or substantially accelerated by human activity?

Have absolute numbers for this one, since they’re quite impressive. I lost a prediction here; I predicted with 60% confidence that between 80% and 95% of respondents would say “Yes” here. It is, in fact, 97.4%. I guess it makes sense: the people who like Sam should believe climate change is real (he’s very clear on that), and the people who don’t like Sam seem almost all to be on the left (the first survey has some evidence backing this), so they’re likely to believe in climate change, too.

I’m sure there are people who think that Sam’s audience sympathizes with climate change skepticism. If you ever meet them, show them this post.