WTH, Americans think that 30% of the country lives in NYC?
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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They think 21% are transgender too.... A lot of propaganda has gone through these people.
“Transvestigation” is fucking insane and there are a lot of people who are convinced that many celebrities are secretly trans.
I think it mostly started with disgusting conspiracies about Michelle Obama (they literally believe that Sasha and Malia were kidnapped, even have specific missing children they think they are). Alex Jones and his ilk think Michelle was born Michael.
This was a thing that developed I think late in his presidency, then it expanded to several other figures. My favorite is Donald Glover as a trans man - I’ll gladly welcome Childish Gambino into my community.
It’s a serious “Q anon” type mentally ill worldview.
Donald Glover as a trans man? I'm currious what makes them think that? Either way, dudes a fucking legend and is welcome in any community I'm in.
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By the looks of it, it's 30% to NYC, 30% to Texas, and 30% to California. So 10% for literally everywhere else in the US. That's gotta be close, right?
I'd totally get that for polling people outside of North America. It's just shocking to see it from people who have probably been to NYC or at least another major metro area -- which would instantly falsify a 30% number for NYC.
Why assume most Americans have seen NYC or other major cities though? Most of us don't ever make enough money to travel this country's hard-to-imagine-how-big-it-actually-is vastness, or even enough to leave our hometowns for longer than a couple days before financial woes start nipping at the mind, if not worse.
This is not to say I think it's a reasonable conclusion to think 30% of our population is in any of these three areas of course. That is silly and requires a very skewed view of things (which, lucky us, is easily provided by any number of increasingly 'official' seeming news sources that really just deal in intentional fear mongering and reductionism). Most people tend to believe whatever is put before them, and we have a system that has been explicitly set up to present false images of reality to US citizens. Propaganda to keep the propaganda machine running, right? As unreasonable as it is, it also makes sense that people could be duped into believing it because this system so many of us are stick within is hellbent on ensuring that we are intentionally conditioned out of the ability to know better by adulthood. It doesn't work on everyone, but it works well enough that's it's perpetuation is currently one of the highest yielding economies this foolish country has to offer.
The line of thought that seems obvious and reasonable to you and me has been intentionally beaten out of countless people here before they even had a chance to understand how to think rationally. I don't know how to fix these things. It is just so obvious to me from this inside vantage that the stupidity of our country is one that has been intentionally manufactured and amplified at the expense of us, the actual people the same system depends on and revolves around keeping ignorant.
Sorry for the rant. Many Americans are dumb. Most of the ones that are never had a real option to be anything else because of how fucked things are here. That's not intended as an excuse, but as an attempt at an explanation tbc
Most of us don’t ever make enough money to travel this country’s hard-to-imagine-how-big-it-actually-is vastness, or even enough to leave our hometowns for longer than a couple days before financial woes start nipping at the mind, if not worse.
This is completely contradicted by the data:
"The average American has visited 16 states besides the one where they currently live, a new YouGov survey finds. Older Americans are likelier to have visited more states than younger Americans. 32% of Americans 65 or older say they've visited at least 30 states [. . .]" link
The working poor don’t participate in yougov that much.
Many rural areas in the US still don't even have internet access except for the wealthiest homes/neighborhoods among them. And, as we share this exchange, many more are actively ontheir way to losing access to the same, simply because, regardless of the cost on us, our government has decided to put that money into the pockets of people that do not need it. I grew up in an area where the internet was assumed to be only for the wealthy because things were just that stuck in time due to the blatant misallocation of government funding and the greedy fucks that ensured things would be this way. That's the same government that ran this poll, right? So if we both know, for different reasons and in different ways, that this government can not be trusted, why trust them to give you accurate data on this topic?
The issue with data points like this is that they imply an assumption of completion that simply can not actually exist because of how incredibly large our population is. There is no way to wrangle all of these cats into taking the same singular poll in order to get truly accurate numbers, so accepting these numbers without any skepticism is, at best, an assumption based on a lack of information, much like how some people can believe that a disproportionate amount of people live in unreasonably small areas. Think about the people in those underpriveleged rural areas I mentioned up top. How many of them do you believe were asked or invited to take this poll? How many of them never had a chance to due to lack of access? How many do you think chose not to participate because of their frustration with how things are and the people that made it this way? How many do you think refused because they just couldnt care less?Why assume that these factors should not be considered when trying to get a clear and true understanding of how things are here for the common people?
Sitcoms fucked us up
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It's shocking how bad normal people are with basic math
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Only 3% Atheists... And all of them are here on Lemmy.
I know Americans love Jesus a whole lot but really only 4%. That just seems crazy low
I think it's because people are still uncomfortable answering "atheist" on questionnaires and polls. It's easier to say "no religious affiliation", and most people are probably agnostic instead of atheist anyway.
You're right. This survey lists 29 % of Americans as "Religiously unaffiliated". Of those 5 % are Atheists, 6 % Agnostic and 19 % "Nothing in particular".
I wouldn't answer atheist because I feel that's as much a belief as any religion. I'm agnostic. The most undecided choice possible.
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These estimates are bananas, this only shows the systematic stupidification of Americans is highly successful.
It's called propaganda! Relentless, unceasing bombardment of right wing brain rotting propaganda.
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88% own a car, but only 82% have a license? Interesting
You don't need a license to own a car. You need one to drive it.
You need one to drive it
legally
There are people, especially in the rural south, who own and operate a vehicle without a license.
Sometimes even congressmen
Something like 40% of drivers in San Antonio, Texas are unlicensed. The one time I’ve gotten in an accident, it was an uninsured, unlicensed driver.
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Americans believe 20% of the people have an income of over 1 million dollars and ~~20%~~ 30%of Americans live in NYC. Am I reading this chart wrong?
?????
NYC has a population of what? 10 million people? So they think there's only 30 million people living in the states?
NYC stood out to me too. We think 3 out of 10 people in the US live in NYC??? Lmaooo. I think a big part of it is that we just generally don't comprehend statistics because some of these numbers are wild.
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The 42% are democrats and 47% are republicans is the true surprise. That is a huge difference even though it might not seem like it.
Well, I have been a registered Republican as long as I have been voting.
And have been voting straight Democrat for over a decade now.
I wonder if there are more like me?
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33% have a college degree yet only 3% are atheist. That's batshit crazy. I can't imagine having the critical thinking skills needed for a degree and not using those skills to figure out that god is a fairy tale.
Yes I know lots of educated people are religious - I had several christian professors when I was studying mathematics / computer science. That doesn't make it any less crazy to me.
What's not represented in the graph.. I think you'll find a large portion of agnostics and "cultural Christians". I.e. people who go to church because they're raised that way in their community expects it.
Even if you don't go to church if you were raised going to church and then stopped, you still might call yourself a [cultural] Christian.
Also being atheist has a bad reputation attached to it for some people, so someone who meets the definition might not self identify as one.
Similarly I expect that's also why there are a fewer percentage of Democrats than there are Republicans. I may have voted down ballot for only Democrats, but am I a DNC supporting Democrat? Not really.
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People just have no idea what numbers mean. And, look at how education works here, who could blame them?
Reminder that a McDonald's new burger campaign failed because people thought a ⅓ lb burger was smaller than a ¼ lb burger.
They really should have started selling ⅕ lb burgers to make up for their losses
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Here's the methodology according to the YouGov website:
Methodology: This article includes findings from two U.S. News surveys conducted by YouGov on two nationally representative samples of 1,000 U.S. adult citizens interviewed online from January 14-20, 2022. The first survey included questions on groups involving race, education, income, family, gender, and sexuality, while the second survey included questions on religion, politics, and other miscellaneous groups. The samples were weighted according to gender, age, race, and education based on the 2018 American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as 2016 and 2020 Presidential votes (or non-votes). Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. citizens. Real proportions were taken from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, YouGov’s internal poll results, and the results of other well-established polling firms. Most estimates were collected within the past three years; the oldest is from 2009. Because the real estimates presented cover a range of time periods, they may differ from actual population sizes at the time our survey was conducted.
Sample size of 1000 is absolutely nothing for so many detailed/granular questions. Let alone then weighing the few sub-groups etc.
It seems the real thing this survey shows is most Americans are fucking dumb.
So looking at that chart the average person thinks that (roughly), one in four people are native American, one in four people are Asian, two in five people are black as well as two in five people being Hispanic. Or to use the given percentages the average American thinks that 136% of Americans are non-white. I suppose that explains a lot of the "white genocide" hysteria.
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Part of this is people obviously not thinking about one per hundred and just giving a random percentage like number. Everything is clustered around 25, and 50 percent. This isn't reasonably measuring much(if anything as I can assure you nobody believes 90 percent of people live in either Texas, California, or NYC). The headline should be "don't poll people by asking what they think about qualitatively and asking them to translate it into quantitative percentages because you'll receive nonsense." Trying to reach other conclusions from such absolute noise really is just making things up.
Wouldn't have guessed you guys would have more vegans than union members
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I unfortunately have to downvote this as this is far too interesting to be mildly interesting.
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Only 85% of the population owns a smartphone, I thought for sure it would be higher than that
15% of the population are under 12 and almost 5% are over 80.
ed: actually, it seems like "85%" is just bullshit. Probably closer to 95% Wondering if this might not be a decade+ old chart.
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I wonder how much of MAGA knows the entire population of illegal immigrants is estimated at a WHOPPING 3% of our population.
the proportion who have at least a high school degree: estimate 65% vs. true 89%
the proportion who have an advanced degree: estimate 37% vs. true 12%
So basically what they guess is ±⅓ has no high school diploma and another ±⅓ has an advanced degree, while in reality ±^1^/~10~ doesn't have a high school diploma and ±^1^/~10~ has an advanced degree.
Meaning while in reality 77% does have a high school degree but not an advanced degree, the estimate is that only 28% does.
Honestly the most shocking number to me is that 65% of Americans own a house. How can 62% have a household income "over $50,000" and 65% own a house? Is it all old people?
A lot of older generations own a house pretty much
It's easier to put into perspective when you look at how much cheaper houses were before they got bought up by private equity
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