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02669: Re: [WDDM] Democracy axioms

From: Joshua N Pritikin <jpritikin(at)pobox.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:47:10 -0700
Subject: Re: [WDDM] Democracy axioms

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 12:38:13PM -0500, Joshua Petersen wrote:
In some ways, initially, yes as only people interested in a topic will seek
it out at the beginning. However, as the topic comes more to the forefront,
people will seek it out from both sides. Further, the self-selected polls
are harder to corrupt.

Have you studied any statistics?

Many politicians and corporations have done 'random' polls designed to
get specific results. By controlling the way in which the people are
randomly contacted skews results (such as a poll on the street is more
likely to hit city people - in the U.S. that'd mean a higher
concentration of democrats, phone polls which are more likely to be
answered by people who have time on their hands - more less productive
members of society, etc., etc.)

Yes, obviously these factors matter. And in self-selected polls there is
basically no attempt to control for these distorting factors.

The strength of self-selected polling is that at no point does their
have to be a single entity controlling it.

Strength? You call that a strength?

Self-selected polling, however, is very good for determining the
*interest* in a topic.

According to who? That's your assertion. I am highly skeptical.

So when it comes to legislature and final votes, it shows that the
legislation being voted on is what's important enough to the people to
bring to all of their attention, which is really the whole point of
this stage of the process.

Yes

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Joshua N Pritikin <jpritikin(at)pobox.com>wrote:
Self-selected opinion polls are vastly inferior to randomly selected
opinion polls.


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