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Why you should be suspicious of "people on the street were more ignorant of X than Y" stories
I missed this in March: Mark Liberman of Language Log takes apart the "more people could name the Simpsons than First Amendment freedoms" story.
The people who could correctly name N First Amendment freedoms (I assume they didn't split freedom of religion into the establishment and free-exercise clauses) decreased monotonically with increasing N, whereas the Simpsons distribution was bimodal, with more people ignorant of even one Simpson than of one First Amendment freedom, but also a fairly large population who could name all of them. From these numbers it is possible to extract just about any message you want, especially if people repeating the story are inclined to garble the result in the desired direction.
The people who could correctly name N First Amendment freedoms (I assume they didn't split freedom of religion into the establishment and free-exercise clauses) decreased monotonically with increasing N, whereas the Simpsons distribution was bimodal, with more people ignorant of even one Simpson than of one First Amendment freedom, but also a fairly large population who could name all of them. From these numbers it is possible to extract just about any message you want, especially if people repeating the story are inclined to garble the result in the desired direction.
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Being unable to recall the contents of the Bill of Rights is considerably more forgiveable for the man on the street than it would be for a federal politician.
And yes, I'm always amused when people pretend the 10 Commandments are universal and moral, when the first three (in the Bible I have) are all, in essence, "Who's your Daddy?".
Oh, and they never mention that the Bible's prescribed punishments for breaking the 10 Commandments are usually death. In some cases, it could be metaphorical (though there's plenty of reason within the Old Testament to support a literal reading), but some are explicit e.g. if your husband or sibling comes home saying Let's worship other gods, you must be the first to stone said loved one.