And here I was thinking this was proved beyond any reasonable doubt when 4chan users spoofed the Time Magazine person of the year poll of 2009 to spell out "MARBLECAKE, ALSO THE GAME" by the initials of the top winners:
This is evidence, but it would be a mistake to think that high profile online contests would have the same dynamics as low profile online polling. 4chan is characterized by an insane level of effort on the specific jokes that they care about. But they don't care about a random poll nearly as much as they care about big stunts like this.
Online polls being easy to manipulate makes it so weird to me that the European Central Bank made an online poll on what the new Euro bank note design should be. (Participants did not have to identify themselves in any way.) I wonder if the results will at all be taken into consideration in the following decision-making process.
In that case there was heavy pre-selection und strict rules for submissions even before that. So they were probably fine with any of the presented choices winning and the "poll" is really just PR.
In fairness I think a lot of people (me included) genuinely thought that would be an entertaining name for the ship, so the polling result wasn't necessarily wrong per se.
The bit about 10% of respondents claiming they had visited the International Space Station was funny. Reminded me of this nugget[0], which for people unfamiliar with the subject doesn't mean that 20% of Jews believe in Jesus... it means that 20% of the respondents to the poll were either deranged or confused, and self-identity as Jewish for no clear reason. It's analogous to "1 in 5 vegans say they eat meat."
Something like 290 people have visited the ISS. If they all answered the survey and if the survey size was around 2900, then the 10% figure would be correct.
From time to time we've battled multiple ideas around polling and tech within my friend circles, because there really isn't "reliable" way of knowing "what people want" when it comes to government's decision makings. It's such a hard "reach and incentives" problem, that asking for an opinion, might change the opinion itself as well, depended on the questioning. That being said, it would be cool to see real opinions of people on general matters, rather than heavily sampled versions of it.
I have no sympathy for polls. Y'all sending SMS unsolicited is in violation of the TCPA, and I'm not going to respond to an organization that has so little respect for me.
Also by "straight-liners," as we call them: people who just click items in a straight line to finish asap. And then there are the nonsense respondents. Don't trust poll data.
I cannot find the paper again, but a small group of women giving birth in the US healthcare system do self report as virgins. There is not protecting for misunderstandings or malicious intent, even in person.
You need to though. If you only do phone call polls you're only going to poll people with (landline?) phones who answer (random?) calls and have the time/enthusiasm to respond when you call. That heavily skews demographics.
A lot of people will only do online polling, and it's by far the easiest way to cover a lot of demographics (need to supplement with other methods as well if you don't want a poll of "internet users" - but that is a far larger and varied group than most other methods would produce)
Getting a different error is great! Then if you do an online poll and a phone poll, you can combine the results to get a composite poll that's more accurate than either method alone.
Both oversample people that want to take polls, that's the problem.
In fact, online polls are worse because you now have to make sure the "people" answering are actually people and are actually able to influence whatever polling data you're trying to gather.
They've gone from gathering a dataset that's been becoming less reliable to one that is even less reliable.
Betting markets are even less representative. People who trade on politics are usually rich conservative men with a risk taking mindset and more likely to be active crypto users or work in finance. It's a totally different user base from normal polls.
The point of markets isn't to recruit a diverse user base, it's to create an incentive structure that punishes bad predictions and rewards good predictions.
https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-it...
Or when Kim Jong Un won in 2012, spelling out "KJUGASCHAMBER":
https://observer.com/2012/12/4chan-successfully-votes-kim-jo...
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