Comment by extraisland
2 days ago
He is trying to cast the illusion that anyone that doesn't believe the YouGov polling on here (e.g. me) is suffering from cognitive bias.
While that is possible, it doesn't negate the fact I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov.
> I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov
You have secret reasons to suspect all polling?
If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
> If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
It's well-understood that leading questions and phrasing will get you any response to a poll that you want. That being the case, what good are any of them? They're only telling you something about how the issue was put rather than anything about the true preferences of the population.
> What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
I’d still call that statistical illiteracy. Polling, as a cohort, contains information. It’s dispersed across polls and concentrated among quality pollsters.
It’s never definitive. But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because we haven’t actually been to Andromeda.
> what good are any of them?
If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow and what policies they could pass that would be popular, polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can build a coalition around, and which to abandon because the people most passionate about them cannot bother to vote, polling is helpful.
> rather than anything about the true preferences of the population
They’re telling you how people think when they communicate and act. What is in their heads is unknowable. At the end of the day, I care how they will vote (and if they will vote) and if they will call (or are even capable of calling) they’re elected if pissed off or enthralled. Everything else is philosophical.
At the end of the day, whether by poll or advert, information is introduced to a population in a biased form because it’s promulgated by biased actors. Knowing which way that bias is trending and resonating is useful.
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It isn't about something not agreeing with my vibes. I don't appreciate when people put words in my mouth. I never said all. I obviously meant some.
Firstly in my original post I stated why I don't believe YouGov to be accurate. It isn't just me that has an issue with thier polling.
Secondly, It is well known that many people are swayed by peer pressure and/or what is perceived to be popular. Therefore if you can manipulate polling to show something is popular, then it can sway people that are more influenced by peer pressure/on the fence.
Often in advertising they will site a stat about customer satisfaction. In the small print it will state the sample size or the methodology and it is often hilariously unrepresentative. Obviously they are relying on people not reading the fine print and being statistically illiterate.
Politicians, governments and corporations have been using various tactics throughout the 20th and 21st century to sway public opinion, both home and abroad to their favour.
This issue has divisive for years and has historically had a huge amount of push back. You can see this in the surge of VPN downloads (which is a form of protest against these laws), the popularity of content covering this issue.
Are you against any kind of content restriction whatsoever or just porn?
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