Viral Polls Are Not Representative Polls
kevinreuning.com
kevinreuning.com
Curious whether the effect survives controlling for pollster. Some pollsters have consistent house effects and some have much bigger followings, so part of the slope could be "polls from well-known outfits get reposted more" rather than "favorable margins get reposted more".
Polls are the first step in a pipeline that effectively turns money into votes. The better that pipeline functions, the worse our democracy functions. Let the only accurate poll be the election itself.
To answer your question, you volunteer locally so that you're involved in the process, or you encourage somebody that you trust to do so, or somebody they trust, etc... You validate it by doing it validly.
Also, yes, we can and should be volunteering locally. AND ALSO we can have independent statistical review.
What? You’re stating this like it’s self-evident, but I don’t follow.
Wouldn't polling data be the place you'd start when it comes to making that decision?
We're already here and I think personal informantion, behaviors, etc collected from social media and corporations would be the bigger threat than the polling itself.
But that's a whole endeavor. Ignoring or lying when some research company wants to know about your political beliefs is a nice easy start.
Something about trying to deliberately distort the public about the likely status of an election also just feels icky to me. Likely to cause more harm than good.
> I'll give you a gift card if you tell me how you're going to vote tomorrow
and:
> I want to represent you well, lets talk about what's important to you
I wouldn't propose we interfere with the latter. Or is the former truly useful for improving the quality of representation? It seems to me like it's really only good for improving ad targeting. Any representative worth their salt can find a way to get feedback from their constituency without requiring the people to participate in a cold call from a research company whose objectives are unknown.
Surfacing understanding of the electorates beliefs and desires is good but double edged. I think we can balance it out with yet other strategies and don't agree with GP's cynicism here but it's worth taking on directly.
It's just clearer communication to state your position plainly rather than bedazzling it with a bunch of disclaimers.
True, but that's not the only party which can use this. The people themselves can use it to build better coalitions and to hold representatives accountable for acting against their will.
Expecting people to share their political leanings with any stranger who asks without encouraging them to make a friend/foe determination beforehand seems like it opens the playing field to interference just as well as it does to good faith feedback. Surely we can find a way to bias this interaction in the right direction somehow.
When I try to imagine the ideal case, it comes to me from somebody I know personally and see face-to-face regularly. Somebody who knows and trusts the candidate (perhaps transitively, for a hop or two). Somebody who wouldn't do the same at the behest of some billionaire looking to protect some shady project of theirs that's unfolding in my region.
Like, the information should flow back to leadership along a social graph that resembles the structure of the coalition we're building together. If not exactly peer to peer, from a transport perspective, then at least in a way that is authenticated by the presence of those peers.
I figure the tools of the successful revolutionary become the tools of the new government, so whatever it is it's gotta be useful for a small minority that wants to coordinate in the face of a sophisticated adversary, and then once it grows up it's gotta be useful for carrying out the bureaucratic business of a government. Unless it survives that transition with its trustworthiness intact, it won't be seen by the masses as trustworthy enough for the job. People just aren't that keen on trusting computers on the say-so of nerds like us, they need to see it succeed under stress.
So for starters I imagine an ocean of Sybil identities controlled by an enemy. Some of these will be trying to get info about your intentions so they can interfere (polling of one kind). Also you'll need to coordinate with comrades without making your entire trust graph known to all parties (polling of the other kind).
It'll never get to the point where coalitions are large if it doesn't function well when they're small, and at that phase you gotta be choosy about who you share info with because you're not yet a government but rather a threat to the existing one.
It takes extensive work to get around that problem alone, let alone "viral" and other worthless push-polls - work that even the very best in the industry, at the highest level, can make major mistakes on.
When they are 3 or 4 percentage points off they are ripped to shreds.
The polls for the recent Brazil elections were about 49% for Lula, the result was 52%, that's a 3 point difference, not a massive error margin. With brexit the polling pointed to about 52% for remain, actual result was 48%.
But those are proper polling companies, not worthless online ones.
Do you have one example of a poll that isn't?
But most polls I see are from professional pollsters like Pew or YouGov? For them, correcting for this is opinion polls 101. That's why you see "representative sample". They're not just randomly polling 1000 people and taking the average. They're adjusting for a bunch of other demographic factors as well.
In order to account for that, you need you know how many people who are less likely to respond are voting for that candidate. And then you're back to square one.
This is why professional polls have had a consistent bias over the last few years, as this hidden unobservable factor's effect has gotten stronger and stronger.
Doing a proper poll is expensive and (frankly) most of the time is pretty predictable or you can get 90% of the results with 10% of the effort, and most times you don't actually care about the results because you're building it to get a result you want anyway.
(Interestingly enough elections themselves almost by definition have notable discrepancies to a "true" perfect sampling; but it's usually overcome by the sheer volume.)
If you're trying to do a scientific poll that is not about an election, it can become exponentially harder unless you can find independent ways to obtain data that helps you adjust (like home ownership, which is reported to the government).
I believe this is not true, because at least ESS (European Social Survey) corrects for non-response, although how exactly is beyond my understanding of survey analysis. Each country reports the response rate as well. See [^1] section 3. Although ESS is much larger survey than simple opinion poll, there are political affiliation questions too (`^prtv.*$` variables).
[^1]: https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/sites/default/files/202...
Sometimes this works out alright. But sometimes not. Too many factors in the universe to model. Never enough power to look at all them even if you knew what they all were. It works well when a few dominant factors are present but when its a million latent factors with technically every pairwise interacting relationship present in some degree, good luck.
Professional polls are either accurate or have a good reason afterwards why they weren’t.
Why not? If they poll the same question (e.g. political party) repeatedly (e.g. in many elections) eventually you could build some kind of model of which parties poll-answerers are more likely to skew towards, or how much they shift compared to non-answerers. Not fundamentally a different process from other ways of removing bias from polls.
Yes - they are aware of that.
My point is --> this problem is the most basic and fundamental problem that is the focus of every pollsters existence <--
Asking questions is extremely easy.
Getting a 'truly random sample' is extremely hard.
Trying to factor in those things is 100% of the work, that's what they do, it's their job.
Some are better, some are lazier, some have better data, some are individuals, some are teams so it varies hugely.
When the conditions are controlled they'll have a better idea than otherwise.
Their job is not 'asking questions' it's 'figuring out how to get random samples'.
The entire world works around the legitimacy of authority.
Yes - the quality varies, and pollsters don't have a high degree of institutional authority.
But some do.
If you want to learn about 'institutional legitimacy' - go visilt Pew.
Pew is an extremely well regarded institution. They are extremely good at polling. Go look at their methods.
They are a long running institution with serious professionals, big budgets, people who really know waht they are talkinga bout.
It's the difference between getting diagnosis from 'a neighbour' vs a 'doctor' but in this case there is no specific qualification.
Some 'respected pollsters' are basically insiders who have been doing it for a long time, with relationships and credibility - others, more institutional.
Check out Pew, they are probably he closest thing to institutional professional as possible.
Political polling is inherently hard - they will be the first to admit.
There is a lot of public data on past elections that anyone can analyze and see exactly how accurate polls have been in the past. If you're expecting polls to be a perfectly accurate prediction then you are misunderstanding their purpose. What they are great at is giving a probabilistic estimate of the outcome, within a certain range.
It's likely that any key race you care about next week will end up within 4 points of the current polling average. It's extremely likely that it will end up within 8 points. That's useful information!
The entire objective of a polls is to get a probabilistic sample. That's the whole thing. Anything that deviates that ... creates problematic outcome.
Right and supposedly middle (this doesn't exist) media does the same.
That means we gotta find the average as you suggested.
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Side note
> Given that Musk has absolutely destroyed the Twitter API for academic use
Why bring up Musk, when you can simply say, "Twitter lowered Academic API rate limit because ...". You sound like you need someone to blame not professional and politically motivated (yes the post is about the political poll but this shows the "bias" and his supposed poll will be biased depending on how he gathered data).
Twitter would have the same way of generating metrics for the justification as you are trying to justify the flaw in the poll outcome.
Most likely the decision is based on their internal metrics/dashboard report
This was in line with long standing behaviors in this space [1].
Musk bought Twitter in 2022. In 2023, they began substantially restricting API access versus how it had been for years.
It is not unfair at all to look at that timeline, look at Musk's acquisition as the biggest change that had happened to the company in that timeframe, and draw a relationship.
[0] https://newsonline.library.vanderbilt.edu/2021/03/use-twitte...
- CNN doesn't do polling, they have firms do that
- All reputable firms try get valid results, they have professionals, they know who they are talking to and the limits. What we see in the last 2-3 weeks of the elections are the polls they want to release however, those that err in one direction or another.
- They definitely accommodate for misrepresentation samples - if more of their respondents indicate 'registered republicans' than in the general public they will adjust.
- It's very hard to measure 1) the people that are hard to reach and statistically more likely to not trust pollsters and 2) likelihood of actual voting aka enthusiasm.
- there are plenty of centrist institutions and pollsters
- It's fair to call out Elon because he's making the policies
Twitter is just a bad way to measure anything except for the Zeitgeist of Twitter readers.
Some I do not really agree, as reputable firms != trustworthy polls.
e.g. Check out Times magainzes "Best Inventions of the Year, John Termus" (https://time.com/collection/best-inventions/2026/apple-iphon...) wtf is that. Time magazine might be "reputable" but whatever they discuss is not trustworthy given Appl duo being crap.
I do. I don't remember that at all. I think you might have some odd definition of completely wrong though.
But please, by all means, share these 100% wrong polls that showed, for example, Trump having 0% chance of winning. Most of the polls I saw were fairly accurate within their margin of error and made it clear the race was tight (which, in the end, it was). And nothing I've seen has changed that, but if you have polls from CNN specifically that you can point to, by all means.