People: What Are They Like?

Last week I asked you to answer a poll question about whether you know what you want or struggle to get what you want – thanks very much to the 170+ (!) people who responded.

It's part of an idea I've had for a long time, which is: there's so many interesting things about how people think/feel/are that I don't actually know, and huge categories of questions that I feel like nobody talks about. Most of my questions are about small-ish internal social phenomena that are kind of hard to pin down, or which I assumed were True For Everyone until I brought them up with someone who felt the opposite.

So I'm making a Thing: essentially it's a weekly poll where you get one (1) question and then one (1) prediction for how other people will answer. I'm calling it People: What Are They Like?

It'll come out through atvbt but as a separate newsletter: you can subscribe or unsubscribe from each of the three newsletters (this one + the normal blogposts + the interactive online widgets) at your leisure, just click the link at the bottom of this post if you'd like to opt out.

Next week's question is here, and last week's results are below.

Let me know if you have thoughts/questions/comments of course!

Last week's question:

Thinking about your life as a whole, which of the following feels more true to you

Your prediction for other people's answers were:

What's the breakdown by people's own answer, I hear you ask? The answer is "eh": basically both sides estimated their own side was a 54% majority, where in practice the "know what I want, struggle to get it" group were a 53% majority in this sample. So that group technically predicted the outcome correctly, but I'm wondering if "my group is a slight majority" will just be a recurring feature of predictions regardless of the truth; hopefully in future I'll have better tech to analyze this kind of thing.

There were very many interesting comments, I've uploaded those (anonymously) to the post below.

One common comment I'll mention here: a few people asked for a third / other / neither option. I deliberately didn't provide one because I feel like "other" provides too easy an out, I actually wanted to see what people would answer when forced to choose which feels "more true" for them. One thing I've learned from game design is that people often want to bail early on any discomfort, and will take an out if offered, but if they're forced by the design to sit for another 10 seconds they actually make some interesting discoveries. Feel free to argue about this in the comments, or if you have ideas for how I can get the best of both, etc.