• LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

Examples of Unreliability in Internet Polls

captainballs

Bluelighter
Joined
Sep 21, 2004
Messages
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I found this on wikipedia after an extended follow the rabbit hole session, in Modern Library 100 Best Novels, a poll that was not done on the internet:

Ulysses by James Joyce topped the list, followed by The Great Gatsby and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The most recent novel in the list is Ironweed (1983) by William Kennedy, and the oldest is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which was actually first published in 1899. Joseph Conrad has four novels on the list, the most of any author. William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, Henry James, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh each have three. There are ten other authors with two.

Compare that with the following paragraph, taken from Reader's List 100 Best Novels, which was an internet poll taken in 1999:

In an unscientific poll, over 200,000 self-selected voters [2] indicated four of the ten best novels of the 20th century were written by Ayn Rand. Pulp science fiction writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard had three novels in the top ten. The Reader's Poll has been used as an example of the unreliability of internet polls.

Look at that. Two of the world's most prolific verified trolls would be given a lot of undeserved credit for their posts in the literature forum if the internet had its way. This example made me laugh, I hope there are more.
 
obviously, the first list is probably comprised of stifling, over-analytical, and overly political academics from famous universities and critic circles. These kinds of people will always be the deciders of what society finds important or valuable, no matter how decentralized society gets. these are the "voices that matter," and ironically, given their ability to rise through the ranks of human society by kissing ass and paying lip service to other people who rose through the ranks of society, they are probably the best equipped to mesh popular opinion and historical opinion of quality together to make accurate judgments with regard to what belongs in both categories.

When you let people select themselves as a means of promoting democracy, you naturally get people who feel like their opinions matter the most - the loud minority, i.e. the people extolling the virtues of Atlas Shrugged because it's like porn to them.
 
Public internet polls are inherently chock full of selection bias, and need to always be taken with a massive grain of salt. Very little in the way of conclusions can be pulled from them, other than "from the people polled, x% said y". No extrapolations to the population at large are valid, due to the massive bias.

Unfortunately, it seems like the population at large don't understand that, along with how most statistics actually work. But that's no surprise; statistics, beyond the level of "this is what a mean is" generally isn't taught until university. Hell, even my chemical technologist (trade school, not uni educated) colleague doesn't know what a p-score is, much less how it's generated.
 
Maybe I should have posted this in the lounge. Godammit, someone post some ridiculously wrong internet polls so I can get my laugh on.
 
Here's one that should be interesting; it's not "wrong", but it shows how different Internet poll results can be from those by other methods.

The results of a June 23, 2011 poll on whether marijuana should be legal: 91% yes, 5% no, 4% for medical use only. That this is a result from a site that's about as right-wing as Fox News is interesting.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43510348

Gallup poll on legalizing marijuana from 2009, through a phone survey: 54% no, 44% yes.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/123728/U.S.-Support-Legalizing-Marijuana-Reaches-New-High.aspx

The link is worth checking out, since it also breaks down support and opposition by region and political alignment. It would be interesting to see how these results would compare with say, a written poll...
 
That's part of the thing with internet polls: once word gets out, people interested in a certain viewpoint will often rally to skew the results in their favour. I'd bet good money that most of the people in that Fox poll were not regular viewers/users of the site.
 
^I have a theory about Fox news: it is people like you and me who watch it and follow it who are the majority of its viewership, the minority being actual "right wingers." I've always found it funny that the anchors, too busy cheerleading the station with asides about Fox News being incredibly "powerful" and "respected," don't realize that popularity in this age is fleeting and similar to the "popularity" of a train wreck (because of all the stopped cars).
 
As in, people just watch it ironically? Interesting...

Oh, and I presume you mean, hypothesis, not theory, yes? [/pedant]
 
I've been out of school long enough to forget the difference, especially when i'm spewing subjective bullshit :D.

I don't get the feeling that people are watching it ironically after some observation. People who have suddenly found themselves older after a haze of youth, like myself and some other people on this board, think about Fox News historically. We've seen it rise through the ranks by trolling the shit out of planet earth, and we look to our right and left to laugh with everyone else who is glued to the screen, only to find that the other people are just watching the news. Fox news is a lot like a dictatorship in that it can survive through generations so long as it has money. Eventually, you and me will look like the ridiculous conservatives for chirping on and on about how Fox News is a right wing joke, similar to how a lot of 60's idealists are laughed at now because of the obvious hopelessness of their message.

Basically, it's not that Fox News is considered bad and stupid, thereby attracting clever, ironic viewers. It's that Fox News is a media powerhouse built on aesthetics, and the network has a history of attracting viewers who don't know why they're watching it but continue to do so. In a way it's like an art, what they do on a daily basis, even though it is absolutely embarrassing to watch with any perspective.
 
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Weird conspiracy theory tangent coming that may potentially derail this thread, but I have been pondering this for a little while:

Speaking of Fox News, and by extension, Rupert Murdoch, I've noticed that most of the forums I visit that are large enough to have a CE&P type of forum tend to be overwhelming liberal in population, with relatively reasonable conservatives except for a couple of guys (not trying to single anybody out, but SubDude really struck as a super-conservative beyond reality type, so I am singling out). Most forums have these token super-cons.

However, I found it strange when places were overwhelmingly conservative. I would tell the same people the same shit, and they would acknowledge that I was right about this point or that point, but then take the conversation in another direction, sticking to their original conservative nature but conceding one thing or another here or there. All reasonable.

But then, like a month later, the same guy would bring up previously erroneous points that he knew and acknowledged were erroneous when faced with factual information. I always thought these were just crazy people, and stopped participating in discussion, because politics pisses me off enough as it is and I can't say the same shit over and over and over and over again.

Where it really got weird is where I began picking up viruses from these websites, in fact, most users did. Even those who used firefox. These were several prominent websites, attacked by exploiting the vulnerabilities in the advertisements and whatnot. At this point, it was brought up that all of these overwhelmingly right leaning websites were subsidiaries of Mr. Murdoch himself, and likely targeted for political reasons.

Once I realized that all of these websites (I'm only talking about 3 here), which were not directly related to politics but contained discussion halls for politics in them were owned by Murdoch, and in the wave of Rolling Stone reports about Psy-Ops by the US Military gone awry I began to wonder: are these people for real? Does the Fox News propaganda machine actually stretch as far as sending corporate operatives into websites in order to deliberately take over CE&P forums by being overwhelmingly conservative? I mean, these people literally change their opinions every single time Fox News does, at that exact moment.

I don't know, this might be the craziest thing I have ever posted, much less seriously considered, but I wanted to bring it up as a point of discussion somewhere, as it is a question that bugs me and it does seem entirely plausible. It also does have some kind of relation to this thread, as these same groups could be responsible for hijacking internet polls of all kinds.

Thoughts, anyone?
 
What I find most telling about Ailes is that he first used the media for propaganda as Nixon's campaign manager when first elected. All the stuff in RS is true. Fox's programming is marketing genius. Ailes' agenda is not much different from other rich peoples. They want more money and all the stuff. They pass off their get-richer-quicker scheme as 'freedom' from government control, etc. It disgusts me and I wonder why more people aren't as angry as me. Ailes uses Fox purely to satisfy his agenda. It's bad enough it's on 24 hrs on one channel, but I read that he gives free stories and newsflashes created specifically for this purpose to all the major news outlets. They scoop up as much as they can from Fox. Everybody else charges. They happily send Ailes' self-serving slant worldwide and each step further legitimizes Fox's propaganda as credible news. This is how people are manipulated. It's infuriating.
 
Weird conspiracy theory tangent coming that may potentially derail this thread, but I have been pondering this for a little while:

Speaking of Fox News, and by extension, Rupert Murdoch, I've noticed that most of the forums I visit that are large enough to have a CE&P type of forum tend to be overwhelming liberal in population, with relatively reasonable conservatives except for a couple of guys (not trying to single anybody out, but SubDude really struck as a super-conservative beyond reality type, so I am singling out). Most forums have these token super-cons.

However, I found it strange when places were overwhelmingly conservative. I would tell the same people the same shit, and they would acknowledge that I was right about this point or that point, but then take the conversation in another direction, sticking to their original conservative nature but conceding one thing or another here or there. All reasonable.

But then, like a month later, the same guy would bring up previously erroneous points that he knew and acknowledged were erroneous when faced with factual information. I always thought these were just crazy people, and stopped participating in discussion, because politics pisses me off enough as it is and I can't say the same shit over and over and over and over again.

Where it really got weird is where I began picking up viruses from these websites, in fact, most users did. Even those who used firefox. These were several prominent websites, attacked by exploiting the vulnerabilities in the advertisements and whatnot. At this point, it was brought up that all of these overwhelmingly right leaning websites were subsidiaries of Mr. Murdoch himself, and likely targeted for political reasons.

Once I realized that all of these websites (I'm only talking about 3 here), which were not directly related to politics but contained discussion halls for politics in them were owned by Murdoch, and in the wave of Rolling Stone reports about Psy-Ops by the US Military gone awry I began to wonder: are these people for real? Does the Fox News propaganda machine actually stretch as far as sending corporate operatives into websites in order to deliberately take over CE&P forums by being overwhelmingly conservative? I mean, these people literally change their opinions every single time Fox News does, at that exact moment.

I don't know, this might be the craziest thing I have ever posted, much less seriously considered, but I wanted to bring it up as a point of discussion somewhere, as it is a question that bugs me and it does seem entirely plausible. It also does have some kind of relation to this thread, as these same groups could be responsible for hijacking internet polls of all kinds.

Thoughts, anyone?

If you take a more innocent perspective, and consider attempts to push a certain mindset as marketing as opposed to political indoctrination, attempts to plant users on a board can be seen as a natural extension of traditional promotion. It is very reasonable for any entity, political or business (or both), to use all available means of self promotion to maintain its power. Some tactics might be viewed as trite and obvious to people who eye such organizations suspiciously, but that doesn't mean they aren't worth a try.
 
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