BBC Comedy Greats
10 HN mentions · mentioned in 9 months, 2022–2026
3:30 · 661K views · Sep 27, 2021
A Yes, Prime Minister scene in which Sir Humphrey shows how leading questions can make a poll produce either answer on national service.
Linked whenever surveys or polls are suspected of manipulation through question wording.
10 comments from Hacker News
> kind of a fringe take (PS: I just finished watching the movie Her and am in a weird place) I thought we are closer to robot soldiers, Geoffrey Hinton said US army wants to have 50% robots by 2030, seems strange to invest in human soldiers when they are gonna have T-800 fairly soon. Is there some populist reason for conscription, or perhaps a weird twist to get into UBI? Reminded me of this episode of Yes, Prime Minister: this video are you worried about the raising crime amongst teenagers, do you think there is a lack of discipline in schools, do you think our young people lack authority and leadership in their lives, would you be in favor of introducing national service? are you worried about the danger of war, are you worried about the growth of armaments, do you think there is danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill, do you think its wrong to force people to take up arms against their will? would you oppose the reintroduction of national service?
It's all about how you ask the question; there would be a lot of people who want a thing _called_ small government, because they have been told that that is a good thing, but the _benefits_ of big government (ideally without the _costs_ of big government, but realistically most people in the US do not care about the deficit; if they did Trump would already have been deposed). Sir Humphrey summarises it fairly well, as usual: this video
Yes Minister covers it well: this video Tell them you're going to have their messages scanned on behalf of the government and nobody wants it. Tell them you're going to introduce measures for online safety and to crack down on child abuse, and everybody wants it. Unless you're pre-informed on the issues, whoever presents it to you can just pick the side that gets you to the answer they want.
When talking surveys, it's always imperative to bring up this scene from Yes, Prime Minister which describes how these surveys work - this video For reference, National Service was a national conscription service between 1949 and 1963. Since then a lot of conservative-leaning folks have been clammering about saying that bringing it back would fix the badly behaving youth.
Is it popular? I’m a parent and none of my parent friends like it. I suspect this law isn’t popular. Just the messaging of doing nothing is more unpopular. So it gets spun as this is popular. this video