SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.
If you do the math, that works out to 16.4 million misinformed, milk-drinking people. The equivalent of the population of Pennsylvania (and then some!) does not know that chocolate milk is milk, cocoa and sugar.
[...] For decades, observers in agriculture, nutrition and education have griped that many Americans are basically agriculturally illiterate. They don't know where food is grown, how it gets to stores — or even, in the case of chocolate milk, what's in it.
[...] Upton and other educators are quick to caution that these conclusions don't apply across the board. Studies have shown that people who live in agricultural communities tend to know a bit more about where their food comes from, as do people with higher education levels and household incomes.
[...] In some ways, this ignorance is perfectly logical. The writer and historian Ann Vileisis has argued that it developed in lockstep with the industrial food system.
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:02AM (4 children)
I think properly surveying is hard, but a competent surveying company is quite able to produce accurate(ish) results, or they would be out of business by now. This is why companies hire them to do (unpublished) surveys (for internal use only).
Part of knowing how to produce accurate results is understanding how your results can be skewed, and how you need to compensate for those factors.
This means that
a) you can hire a competent (but unethical) company to produce whatever survey result you'd like to publish
and also that
b) lots of incompetent people are conducting surveys with no clue about the huge bias of their outcomes, and every so often one of their "results" is interesting enough to make the news
e.g.:
Where do you think chocolate milk comes from?
1) white cows
2) brown cows
3) Other/I don't know
(bonus points: even omit option 1)
I tried to track down the actual survey, but only got as far as it being "a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy", but could find any mention of it on their site [usdairy.com] :-(
Anecdote I'd like to spew: I actually knew someone who believed (after a bit of convincing) Milka chocolate was made from milk of special Swiss purple cows.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:03AM (1 child)
You can measure someone's penis size, so you can see if they were lying/exaggerating. How do you objectively determine that someone really believes X? Most of the time you can't, which makes this unscientific. You can't just assume that people aren't lying/actually know the answer; there is no science in that.
I'm not sure why you think that incompetent surveying companies would automatically go out of business. If they can generate plenty of headlines and fool enough suckers, it often doesn't matter how nonsensical their methods are. For things that can be objectively measured (at the time of the survey or later), this is different, but the media and public eat up pseudoscience.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:41PM
Case in point: Religion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:59PM
That depends on what's their actual business.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @10:26PM
What makes you think that? They only have to convince people that their results are good enough to be useful, it doesn't have to actually be true. They might even believe it themselves.
However many people build businesses based on bullshit, and manage to stay in business (see homeopaths for one example).