Here's my systematic answer about 'questions'. First, broadly, a question is either falsifiable, or not. Even if it is hypothetically falsifiable, if it's not falsifiable in some reasonable time frame, or within some agreed upon framework for determining the "right" answer, then it's effectively not falsifiable. I think this question about if we're in a simulation is not falsifiable at the moment.<p>As an aside, if the question is falsifiable, then you don't want to simply ask people what they think. Asking people questions is usually a waste of time. Setting up an accurate poll is really hard. Even in good faith, anonymously, people will answer based on social norms and expectations. Knowing if you have an accurate population to poll is really hard, too. I think it's more reliable to set up a scenario where people can bet money or other another resource on the answer. You have to define how the "right" answer will be determined, and time box it. Assuming you set this up well, you might get some approximation about what people actually think about your question, and how confident they are in their assessment. It's still not foolproof, but it's meaningfully closer than just asking them.<p>For a question that's not falsifiable, or that you can't pin down a way to determine the "right" answer, such as if we're living in a simulation or not, there will be a small margin of people who will refuse to answer either way. A question that's not falsifiable is not a question at all. It's source material for fiction writers. This is a very small sliver of the population though. Most people will play along.<p>Among the remaining population (which is most people) you will get two broad groups. One doesn't think very hard about the question at all (if they did, they'd realize it was not falsifiable, and so kind of silly). These folks will split roughly along the proportion of the prevailing society at large. They're just answering whatever seems the most fun or heartwarming to them. It might be interesting to know, though. It'd tell you which way the "wind is blowing" so to speak.<p>The second group will actually think about the problem, and suspend their philosophical apprehensions about non-falsifiable questions, and kind of mull it over in their heads. They'll be willing to consider arguments. They might even (shudder) search the internet for articles or videos about it. The most you can ever hope for is that some of these folks have actual credentials or education in the field your question relates to, so their answers might actually even be credible. You won't know if they're credible or not though. And even if they have credentials, you probably don't have any way to judge the credibility of their credentials. But even still, they've given it some though, and are answering with a bit of investment. You'd probably like to know how this population sees the question, as it's the closest you can get to a "right" answer, given that the question is not falsifiable.<p>Here's the rub though. You have no way of separating the people who answer flippantly from the people who answer with some modicum of thought put into it. You can't know if somebody is trolling you, or a subject matter expert with decades of applicable scientific knowledge. And you can't judge a person's decades of scientific knowledge if (just as one example) their job depends on them answering a certain way. There are so many unknowns involved, that the proportion answering the question one way or another is basically noise. If I told you that half of people think gremlins are real, or that the God of the Bible is real, or that aliens are among us, I haven't really told you anything at all. It'd be like saying "I took this six sided die, rolled it, and it came up a 3. What does that mean?"