Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%

The canonical post that coined 'Lizardman's Constant' — the ~4% of poll respondents who give absurd/malicious/confused answers (the '4% believe lizardmen run the world' poll), which sets a noise floor that overwhelms weak signals in polls of unpopular beliefs. Breaks the 4% into a taxonomy of jokesters (button-mashers, go-along-with-the-pollster types, 'watch the world burn' trolls), 'symbolic belief' / belief-as-attire ('Obama is the Anti-Christ' = 'Boo Obama'), and deliberate data-corruption (the Lewandowsky climate-conspiracy study + the 'Recursive Fury' saga). Conclusion: polls detecting very weak signals should be heavily discounted.

Quality 78 · Excellent. 78 — Excellent. A short but hugely influential post whose coinage 'Lizardman's Constant' entered the broad lexicon of pollsters, data journalists, and the rationalist community; Score A's adoption/impact weighting rewards this heavily. Held at the lower Excellent band because the post itself is brief and the Lewandowsky section is a partial tangent.

Claude’s paradigm shift 62 · Notable shift. 62 — Notable, edging Major. Naming the 4% noise-floor constant and the poll-noise insight was a fresh, widely-adopted contribution; the symbolic-belief piece builds on the LW sequences but the '4% constant' packaging is original.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. 3 — moderate. 'Lizardman's Constant' is genuinely used vocabulary in polling/data-journalism/rationalist discourse — one of the higher-reach SSC coinages, though still discourse-level rather than material change.

Humor 2/5 · Man of One Study. 2 — gate PASSES. A serious methodology post whose humor is load-bearing and notable: the jokester taxonomy ('watch the world burn') IS the explanation of the constant, plus the voting-booth Anti-Christ bit and the 'Recursive Fury chutzpah' — genuinely-funny-serious-piece tier (2), not primarily comedic.