> You're right that neither survey asks the correct question
I don't recall saying this. This is getting complex, so let's recap:
GGP: "No, American is not collapsing"
GP: "There are people who believe that America is collapsing if Roe v Wade isn’t overturned."
There are multiple ways to interpret this, and I've been referring to it in the sense of, "for them, overturning Roe vs Wade means America isn't collapsing."
P: "A quite small minority".
Meaning, if I've used the correct interpretation, "quite a small minority think America will collapse if Roe vs Wade isn't overturned."
You could say that both camps who believe America is collapsing is "quite a small minority" of Americans. However, I was interpreting the statement in the sense of, "quite a small minority of the set of people who believe America is collapsing."
From the most recent Gallup poll, a third of people wanted the court to overturn Roe vs Wade. My point was that if the subset of those who believe America is collapsing is politically divided in a similar ratio as the superset (those polled about wanting/not wanting Roe vs Wade overturned), then we wouldn't expect either to be a very small minority, since 30% isn't close to a very small minority.
You can't take a survey question about support for Roe and turn it into "some number of people who strongly disagree with Roe must believe that America is collapsing". A survey question that measured that would be worded something like "Do you agree with this statement: the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v Wade is evidence of America's collapse" (although this is pretty much a push poll question). You're extrapolating, which is another way of saying "using evidence of thing A to assert thing B, for which you have no evidence".
> You can't take a survey question about support for Roe and turn it into "some number of people who strongly disagree with Roe must believe that America is collapsing".
Agreed. Just because someone strongly disagrees or agrees with Roe doesn't mean they must believe that America is collapsing with or without it.
You agree that there exists Americans who believe that America's collapsing, right? As the article's author said, there have always been people who believe this ("doomers"). He quoted some from Twitter.
Assuming you agree that there is some population of doomers, within that set there must exist those who think upholding/removing Roe contributes to America's collapse. Why wouldn't that subset of people be divided in a similar ratio as the population at large is divided on whether or not they think the courts should uphold Roe?
> Why wouldn't that subset of people be divided in a similar ratio as the population at large is divided on whether or not they think the courts should uphold Roe?
It might be; it might not be. There's no way to know from the survey you linked.
Since there are people who believe America is collapsing and consider the abortion ruling a reason why, we're trying to decide which is true:
A) Those who think overturning Roe has to do with the collapse are a great majority and those who think upholding it has to do with the collapse is a great minority, or vice versa.
B) The ratio from both camps is not that one sided, and neither could be described "a great minority."
You're saying that we can't know anything about whether 'B' is more likely than 'A' based on what the Gallup poll you linked that questions the population on whether they want Roe upheld or not.
I disagree. I believe it gives us a bayesian prior for the distribution of the population's attitudes. I think it's reasonable to expect that someone who thinks America is collapsing partly due to Roe being issue will likely think it's due to upholding it if they also believe they think Roe should be upheld. Why would a person think America is collapsing if Roe is upheld also believe Roe should be overturned? That wouldn't make sense.
Since the population we're focusing on is a subset of that distribution, and since no other evidence has been given for why this distribution should differ, then case 'B' seems more likely.
> I disagree. I believe it gives us a bayesian prior for the distribution of the population's attitudes.
Sorry, I know I'm being obnoxious. The reason I'm really sticking on the survey point is that people are very hard to survey. They have a lot of contradictory opinions ("I support banning preexisting conditions, banning lifetime caps on care, and banning junk insurance plans, even if it means I have to get insurance, like it says in the ACA, but I super hate Obamacare"), and are deeply, deeply ignorant. Here's a poll from 2010 where 41% of respondents couldn't name Joe Biden as VP in an open ended question [0], coincidentally also the poll that destroyed my faith in an informed citizenry.
Tons and tons of thought goes into the way questions are phrased, because it has huge effects on outcomes, and if you want any kind of longitudinality you can never, ever change it (which is why we still have right direction vs wrong track despite its asymmetry).
So if that's where we're starting, to pile on with a junk pollster asking an irrelevant question is like, I don't know, turning a hose on a drowning dog. Public opinion is very, very hard to discern, you certainly can't make blasé claims, no matter how much you really want to believe they obey Bayes' theorems (they definitely don't, see every election poll ever taken).
I don't recall saying this. This is getting complex, so let's recap:
GGP: "No, American is not collapsing"
GP: "There are people who believe that America is collapsing if Roe v Wade isn’t overturned."
There are multiple ways to interpret this, and I've been referring to it in the sense of, "for them, overturning Roe vs Wade means America isn't collapsing."
P: "A quite small minority".
Meaning, if I've used the correct interpretation, "quite a small minority think America will collapse if Roe vs Wade isn't overturned."
You could say that both camps who believe America is collapsing is "quite a small minority" of Americans. However, I was interpreting the statement in the sense of, "quite a small minority of the set of people who believe America is collapsing."
From the most recent Gallup poll, a third of people wanted the court to overturn Roe vs Wade. My point was that if the subset of those who believe America is collapsing is politically divided in a similar ratio as the superset (those polled about wanting/not wanting Roe vs Wade overturned), then we wouldn't expect either to be a very small minority, since 30% isn't close to a very small minority.