Scott Alexander explores the concept of 'Lizardman's Constant' and its implications for interpreting poll results, especially those concerning unpopular beliefs.
Longer summary
Scott Alexander discusses the concept of 'Lizardman's Constant', which refers to the roughly 4% of respondents in polls who give outlandish or deliberately false answers. He explores this through three examples: a personal experience with survey responses, a poll about conspiracy theories, and a controversial study on climate change skepticism. The post argues that when dealing with unpopular beliefs, polls can only provide weak signals that are easily overwhelmed by noise from various sources, including jokesters, cognitive biases, and deliberate misbehavior. Scott concludes that polls relying on detecting very weak signals should be treated with skepticism.
Shorter summary