Lizardman's constant is 4%

Public Policy Polling’s recent poll on conspiracy theories mostly showed up on my Facebook feed as “Four percent of Americans believe lizardmen are running the Earth”.

And then we get the people who put “Martian” as their nationality in psychology experiments. Because some men just want to watch the world burn.

The lesson from all three of the cases in this post seems clear. When we’re talking about very unpopular beliefs, polls can only give a weak signal. Any possible source of noise – jokesters, cognitive biases, or deliberate misbehavior – can easily overwhelm the signal. Therefore, polls that rely on detecting very weak signals should be taken with a grain of salt.