It is definitely easier—the answer is more one dimensional, and for continuous questions there’s a lot more going back and forth between the cumulative distribution function and the probability density function, and thinking about corner cases.
E.g. For “When will the next supreme court vacancy arise” vs “will there be a vacancy by [year]”, in the former case you have to think about when a decision to retire might be timed, in the latter you just need to think about whether the judge will do it.
Other mechanisms—it’s possible the average binary question is more interesting or attention grabbing.
As for your second question, I looked at all the questions from 2019 and 2020 just now, and the median number of unique predictors on a binary question was 75, vs 38 for a continuous one. The mean was 97 vs 46. But this does not control for the questions being different. There were 942 continuous questions over the time window and 727 binary questions.
It is definitely easier—the answer is more one dimensional, and for continuous questions there’s a lot more going back and forth between the cumulative distribution function and the probability density function, and thinking about corner cases.
E.g. For “When will the next supreme court vacancy arise” vs “will there be a vacancy by [year]”, in the former case you have to think about when a decision to retire might be timed, in the latter you just need to think about whether the judge will do it.
Other mechanisms—it’s possible the average binary question is more interesting or attention grabbing.
As for your second question, I looked at all the questions from 2019 and 2020 just now, and the median number of unique predictors on a binary question was 75, vs 38 for a continuous one. The mean was 97 vs 46. But this does not control for the questions being different. There were 942 continuous questions over the time window and 727 binary questions.