Mike Lorrey wrote,
> THEY correct for what THEY, in their biased opinions, is the correct
> level of their own bias. I hope you are objective enough to recognise
> how impossible this sort of scheme is to have any sort of accuracy.
Not exactly. I am objective enough to recognize that ALL people have
biases. ALL research is biased. This is the basis of the scientific method.
We must try to contrive double-blind studies to keep the researcher from
influencing the results. We must publish our methods so that others can
critique and see if we skewed the results. I am not saying that the liberal
media is not guilty of this bias.
> Its like asking police to accurately measure how much police brutality
> there is, or the Chinese how much human rights violations there is in
> China. You are guaranteed to get bad results.
I agree that self-reporting never works. I think you are stretching the
point to claim that the liberal media and the liberal presidential candidate
are the same group, and therefore we can't trust the news media to report
the election results. This would be like saying that the Bush campaign
leader in Florida was the same as the supervisor of elections in Florida and
therefore we can't trust her vote tallies. There may be bias, but there are
enough double-checks and independent observers to keep all sides well
informed.
> Did I say 'conspiracy'? No, I did not, so I think that it is you who is
> assuming things here. I think that it is perfectly normal for people who
> a) are vested in their own opinions to a high degree (as political
> activists generally are), b) think people like themselves are more
> honest, friendly, and trustworthy, and c) dislike people they disagree
> with, will tend to conciously or subconciously behave at an exit poll in
> a way which is biased in favor of their own side.
This does not seem to match your next paragraph. Above, you seem to concede
natural bias and unintended data skewing. Below you state that Democrats or
more likely to deliberately fake poll results than Republicans. I may have
assumed too much when I used the word "conspiracy" to describe your view
below.
> I also am of the opinion that Democrats generally feel more strongly
> that they and their allies are more 'hard done by', that their opponents
> 'owe them something' for past sins (as per the reparations and other
> issues), and thus, as individuals, are more amenable to subtly skewing
> the results they collect by cherry picking poll subjects.
In any event, we seem to agree on proper polling procedures and problems.
We differ only in the intent and severity of the problems. I think we both
would like to see newscaster not call elections before voting is completed.
(On a different topic, how do we enforce this without more government
regulations? In a totally free and libertarian society, wouldn't anybody be
free to poll and publish polling whenever they wanted? Isn't this
wide-spread freedom in this area what we have now. I'm not sure my desire
to suppress polling data during an election can be reconciled with
libertarianism. Damn, no wonder I'm only "medium-core"!)
-- Harvey Newstrom <http://HarveyNewstrom.com> <http://Newstaff.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:06 MDT