This account new and suddenly posting a suspicious amount in short time. Possible bot.

A survey or poll is different from a vote. You’re right that unless we ask every single person in a group we don’t know precisely how that entire group would answer. But this irrelevant, being able to establish patterns in smaller sample groups and extended them to larger population is one of the the cornerstone of science and knowledge.

An engineer needs to know how much weight a specific size and shape of lumber can safely take. They can’t test the indvidual beam to breaking point and still use it. So they test other similar sized pieces of wood, under similar conditions, and generalise. This can be done well, or done poorly, depending on how well they can isolate confounding effects.

So with a survey, if I just ask 100 people I know, it’s would be a decent survey of the beliefs of my social circle, but it would be a poor survey of national beliefs, because my friends are not a balanced representative sample of the wider population. That’s why most polling / surveying uses methods to try and achieve a sample that is actually representative. When done well, these ensure the survey respondents correspond to the demographics of a population (gender, education, religion, location, health, etc).

Obviously this approach has its limitations, and can be done poorly, but there’s a bunch of research and evidence for what methods help achieve more accurate results. Saying “this poll can’t be accurate because they didn’t ask me” is like saying “I don’t know if the sun will rise tomorrow”. You’re right, we won’t know for sure until we actually see it rise, but we can infer from past events and confidently predict the likely outcome.

If you want to say “this survey isn’t accurate because it uses an older demographic model that has been shown to be ineffective at representing contemporary attitudal choices” or “this survey is inaccurate because it only controls for age, race and gender, but didn’t account for patterns of social media usage which are highly relevant” that’s fine, that’s engaging with the methodology. But if the problem is “they didn’t ask everyone so it’s wrong” it really seems like you don’t know how surveys works.

And the single video that isn’t a “Sponsored” ad is still from Red Bull, and basically an ad.

I’m assuming you know how surveys work? If you’re genuinely interested in their data sampling methodology, you can easily find it on the website of the company that conducted the survey (who are named on the infographic).

I’m not making any big claims about YouGov and their reliability or freedom from bias, but this isn’t just some random unsourced poll, so props to whoever made the infographic for bothering to include a source.

Intresting! If anyone has unpaywalled version I’d like to read more.

I do think it’s odd that a billionaire has basically payed to have his own vice-president (I don’t think many people would argue that Vance was an obvious choice apart from as a puppet of Thiel) and that billionaire is overtly apocalyptically bonkers, but the press barely cover it.

I’ve seen mention that Thiel had been discussing the antichrist in lectures. Butt with all this talk of AI bubbles and the insane amounts of money being funneled into the industry, here’s a extremely rich and powerful man, who has basically groomed the VP (alongside all the other influence his wealth gives him) who is making wild messianic claims about AI and accusing any opposition to it as the work of Satan! That’s insane!

Imagine that when Bush was trying to get support for the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld was going around giving lectures on the Crusades and the role of Isreal in the Apocalypse. Sure, there was and is support for stuff like that in fundamentalist evangelical churches, but it wasn’t the avowed belief of the inner circle of the US government. And if it was, I don’t think Britain would have gone along with a literal holy war. Is that really the stage we’re at? I use to read about the 3rd Reich and finding it implausible that they were actually making policy decisions based on a invented hodgepodge of occult nonsense, but now it’s starting to be believable.

Was there a specific event that coincided with the blackout? I don’t know the details of current US events, just that they’re crazy and depressing.