any average person knows this

I would venture to suggest that perhaps Eurobarometer polls might be more-representative of the population than your circle of friends and family.

I remember the first time I saw a poll as to the percentage of people here in the US that believed in ghosts and was very surprised. If you’d asked me prior to seeing poll data, I’d have guessed that the number would be below 1%.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/28/do-ghosts-exist-41-percent-americans-say-yes/8580577002/

This year’s results showed a slight drop in Americans who say ghosts are real. In 2019, 4 in 10 Americans believed in ghosts, and more than 46% agreed that supernatural beings exist. In this year’s survey, about 41% of adults said they believe in ghosts.

Slate Star Codex had an article a while back about the remarkable impact of social bubbles. It was really talking about how people isolate themselves into “political bubbles” of Democrats and Republicans, and how people in each camp should be more tolerant of each other. But I think that one can generalize the mathematical side of what the article was talking about, that one can have a social circle that is statistically insanely not-representative of the population as a whole, because of tendency of people with similar viewpoints to cluster.

A quote from the article:

There are cer­tain the­o­ries of dark mat­ter where it barely in­ter­acts with the reg­u­lar world at all, such that we could have a dark mat­ter planet ex­actly co-​incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark mat­ter peo­ple are walk­ing all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark mat­ter city, maybe a few me­ters away from me a dark mat­ter blog­ger is writ­ing on his dark mat­ter com­puter about how weird it would be if there was a light mat­ter per­son he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about con­ser­v­a­tives.

I don’t mean the sort of light-​matter con­ser­v­a­tives who go around com­plain­ing about Big Gov­ern­ment and oc­ca­sion­ally vot­ing for Rom­ney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take cre­ation­ists. Ac­cord­ing to Gallup polls, about 46% of Amer­i­cans are cre­ation­ists. Not just in the sense of be­liev­ing God helped guide evo­lu­tion. I mean they think evo­lu­tion is a vile athe­ist lie and God cre­ated hu­mans ex­actly as they exist right now. That’s half the coun­try.

And I don’t have a sin­gle one of those peo­ple in my so­cial cir­cle. It’s not be­cause I’m de­lib­er­ately avoid­ing them; I’m pretty live-​and-let-live po­lit­i­cally, I wouldn’t os­tra­cize some­one just for some weird be­liefs. And yet, even though I prob­a­bly know about a hun­dred fifty peo­ple, I am pretty con­fi­dent that not one of them is cre­ation­ist. Odds of this hap­pen­ing by chance? 1⁄2^150 = 1⁄10^45 = ap­prox­i­mately the chance of pick­ing a par­tic­u­lar atom if you are ran­domly se­lect­ing among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty per­cent of Amer­i­cans want to ban gay mar­riage. I think if I re­ally stretch it, maybe ten of my top hun­dred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less as­tro­nom­i­cally un­likely; the odds are a mere one to one hun­dred quin­til­lion against.

Peo­ple like to talk about so­cial bub­bles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hun­dred quin­til­lion. The only metaphor that seems re­ally ap­pro­pri­ate is the bizarre dark mat­ter world.