I've done hundreds of polls on a variety of topics in the past, so I have a decent idea of the demographics of my sample (modulo twitter algo). It's significantly more male than female, tech crowd is overrepresented, and I'd say fairly centrist both culturally and economically.
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Here's the link to the poll on sentiment about Wokehttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1081336198612668417 …
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And here's the link to the poll about IDWhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1081304318139985920 …
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Why these two? From a variety of conversations, Woke and "Intellectual Dark Web" (IDW) are the two *intellectual* positions people seem to most often have in mind when they refer to "radicals" on other side, and most often have admitted (to me) closet support for one or other.
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It's useful to contrast sentiments about these two rather than their respective direct-action/populist street level supporters (desired or not) because they are sets of ideas rather than sets of he-said/she-said trigger events.
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A possibly worthwhile exercise for people on both sides to ask is: why are there so many people willing to offer closet support but not card-carrying support? And why are there so many people in neutral and adversarial?
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Note that there is no necessary anti-correlation here. I know from anecdotal evidence that many people voted adversarial on BOTH polls. These are the "dislike radicals on both sides" people.
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It's certainly possible to improve how I probed these sentiments. Someone suggested I should have asked about "closet adversary" which is a very good suggestion, but I felt neutral was a more important option to present, and that "adversarial" covered it well enough.
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But the broad conclusions are fairly unmistakeable: the polarization is real, there are strong incentives for preference falsification on both sides (the closet support option) and there is significant active *dislike* for each side.
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If you're a card-carrying partisan of either Woke/IDW, you're probably inclined to think of a) the closet supporters (23-27%) as either vulnerable or cowardly b) the adversaries as fundamentally evil (29-33%) and neutrals as apathetic assholes (29% - 30%).
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I have opinions on all of this of course, but I'm limiting myself to drawing obvious and conservative conclusions from the polls here. One thing I'd caution against: I wouldn't dismiss these polls as unscientific twitter bullshit with a blackbox algorithm in the sampling.
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I've been doing this long enough (and am better at it than you probably realize) that I have a decent sense of what the twitter gods do and do not distort with how polls show up in feeds. If you are inclined to dismiss because "methodology" you're likely wrong.
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I'll throw one speculative question out for you all to ask yourselves based on anecdotal evidence, that the poll DOESN'T shed light on: Who is falsifying their preferences about supporting these idea sets?
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It is tempting to draw the caricatured obvious conclusion: that the closet supporters of IDW are all mediocre white males afraid of vulnerability to woke, and the closet woke supporters are all code-switching women and minorities in white-male-dominated situations...
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I would strongly advise against drawing that conclusion. From my own anecdotal evidence I know for a fact that the picture is a good deal muddier than that. There are unexpected people in the preference-falsifying sets on both sides.
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End of conversation
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