Doesn’t matter what topics or debates these are used in or who is right in those debates; the point is that these kind of charts are useless regardless of their content.

Sidenote: if you had “various metrics” why’d you post the least scientific one? Like bro, brain-dead “libertarians” could probably pull out some statistic or study that is more sound than this chart to support their idiotic bullshit. If a fellow anarchist tried to use a metric like this I’d call them out too even if I agreed with their point

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 14 points 4 days ago (12 children)

The questionaire is valid, though. It highlights differences in the system, in an easy to understand graph. If you want, here's another bunch of sources.

[–] AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com -3 points 4 days ago (11 children)

The only thing the questionnaire does, assuming it is built well, is show that when asked those questions people in different countries answered differently.

Did the Chinese populations sampled by the study respond more positively to those four questions more than the samples of other nations? Yes.

Can you assert that this is proof that china is more democratic and less authoritarian than those countries? NO.

At best, this study shows that public opinion of the government in china is higher than that of the other countries. Which definitely doesn’t mean all that much at all, for example I could ask half my family members and they’d say that things are better now under trump than they’ve ever been before. Is that the case? Absolutely not. Does that change their minds? No.

Now, the original article you linked seems much more soft science but the article it first mentions actually has more concrete data but still that data is on public opinion.

Unfortunately the democracy index site appears to be missing and “for sale”

If you could find me the actual questionnaire in mandarin so we could read it as it was presented and compare with the English version we could rule out some of the bias I presented earlier, but not all.

Lastly, kairos buddy, your argument was that a country (which many of the people you’re trying to persuade think is George Orwell big brother level controlling) isn’t authoritarian. Using polled data, especially that which was “implemented by a reputable domestic Chinese polling firm” is not going to hold much evidentiary worth to your target audience.

I’m not Anti-China, in fact I was and possibly still am thinking about taking a semester or internship out there; I only wanted to point out that you aren’t actually backing your argument up with any solid evidence especially with regards to your target audience.

I really am curious about the test though, especially since the democracy index paper is on a dead site, so if you could find it in Mandarin I’d be interested. If you could find a source on what “reputable polling firm” Harvard used I’d be interested in that too since the report didn’t actually mention the name..?

Oh and one last thing is that the article mentions “Furthermore, China outperforms the US and most European countries on these indicators – in fact, it has some of the strongest results in the world.” Fun statistical fact: outliers are a sign your sampling methodology is flawed, especially when the outliers are a set of samples and not just a singular data point.

From just the “my government serves the people” bars alone, it would appear the Chinese dataset is well beyond 1.5 standard deviations if the other three are so much lower and show such low variation. If this was a single data point, one would throw it out, but considering it is supposedly a longitudinal collection of samples it implies that there is a very strong influencing factor that is only largely affecting the Chinese survey takers.

If the pattern holds for many other metrics, then it implies this singular factor (or other factors) have significantly biased the Chinese samples. This doesn’t necessarily mean that factor is government intervention or bias from being raised in rhetoric from an authoritarian state, but it is statistically unlikely that this factor is simply due to china just somehow having a better democracy than every single country on earth (including all of its allies and enemies alike) by a statistically gigantic margin.

[–] techpeakedin1991@lemmy.ml 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Fun statistical fact: outliers are a sign your sampling methodology is flawed, especially when the outliers are a set of samples and not just a singular data point.

"This jet's speed is an outlier in this set of planes. Outliers mean the methodology must be invalid, so jets can't be faster than planes."

This is nonsense. China and the euros have fundamentally different political systems, there is no reason to suppose they should have similar outcomes. The whole point of the discussion is that China's system is superior, if you say that any data that supports that is an outlier, and therefore must be invalid you're just presupposing your conclusion.

On your other point about the usefulness of this data: while it is true that there can be many different explanations for the observed results, that just means that we need more evidence to show which system is more democratic, not that this evidence is useless. Saying that people's opinion of their own system is irrelevant is extremely chauvinistic. In the case of China, we can see the massive increase in quality of life of it's citizens, as well as a systematic overview of it's political structures like here. I've also heard the book Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners is good, but I haven't read it yet myself.

Furthermore, your point about manipulation of public opinion goes the other way, too. Where did the idea that China is authoritarian come from? People going to China and studying what life is like there, or media manipulation? Who do you think is more likely to be manipulated like that, the people living there who actually experience the political structures of China, or rando westerners whos only source of information is capitalist media? A simple poll like this is more than enough to debunk the people who think China is authoritarian based on nothing but vibes from capitalist media.

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