But there’s an additional problem here. People overestimate foreign aid, and these polling methods exaggerate how much they overestimate. In the KFF data, the majority of respondents said it was below 20%, and the largest decile by far was 0-10%. KFF said that average was 26%, but their own data show that this isn’t what most people actually believe; it’s an artifact of using the wrong statistic.
the KFF data shows that the median respondent thinks foreign aid is somewhere in the 11-20% of the budget, so reporting the average is roughly 2.4 to 1.3 times an overestimate of the median belief. but reporting the average is what most people do, because most people are not very numerically literate, which is what the poll itself shows!
you’re missing the point by splitting hairs about whether the geometric average is more useful than the arithmetic mean, because the poll really does show that the public overestimates the foreign aid bugdet. the bigger issue at play is that opinion polling the public produces crazy results, like [the lizardman constant](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/). or i would guess that people are not thinking that hard, and that if you offered them $10 if their answer was close to the real result, the median would become more accurate.
the KFF data shows that the median respondent thinks foreign aid is somewhere in the 11-20% of the budget, so reporting the average is roughly 2.4 to 1.3 times an overestimate of the median belief. but reporting the average is what most people do, because most people are not very numerically literate, which is what the poll itself shows!
you’re missing the point by splitting hairs about whether the geometric average is more useful than the arithmetic mean, because the poll really does show that the public overestimates the foreign aid bugdet. the bigger issue at play is that opinion polling the public produces crazy results, like [the lizardman constant](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/). or i would guess that people are not thinking that hard, and that if you offered them $10 if their answer was close to the real result, the median would become more accurate.