Opinion polling is serious business. If the Simulacron-3 hypothesis is correct, we are all fragments of source code, and those telephone consumer polls that interrupt our dinners are the reason why our simulated reality occupies a sprawling mainframe computer in a higher-level reality... to save its operators the expense of running their own polls. It would be a very bad thing if consumer researchers cut too many corners, stratifying the samples according to models as a substitute for sample size, or simply making up results or repeating the results of someone else's polls with a slight shift to accommodate the expectations of their customers. We would lose any value to the real world. At worst they would pull the plug on the computer. Let us hope they are content with seamlessly deleting the offending personality modules, in the manner of unpopular Republican presidents who never existed.It follows that we can trust the results of polling during the 1980 US presidential election. They are not hard to obtain. Carter trailed Reagan for the last five months:
So here's today's report from the Daily Telegraph, reprinted in Wellington's paper of note because readers start complaining if the editors fill space with Lorem Ipsum for more than a few days running.
Below: AK after 3 bottles of Pooter's Porter dem-
onstrates why the Politics Club has a 2-bottle limit
onstrates why the Politics Club has a 2-bottle limit
Bullshitting like this makes sense for US media with their core activity of swaying how Americans vote... but why the UK Torygraph? There is nothing to be gained by lying to its readers, however much they might prefer Romney rather than the incumbent as the next POTUS. It is almost as if newspapers are not to provide people with information, but to shelter them from it.
NOT LIKE BLOGS.
* Leiber F. (1960). Mariana.
5 comments:
Simulated reality, eh? Matrix or treats!
"It is almost as if newspapers are not to provide people with information, but to shelter them from it."
And they do a damned fine job.
~
I never lie on my blog. Cuss like a fucking sailor, mock my friends, ridicule passers-by sure; but never LIE.
Bullshitting like this makes sense for US media with their core activity of swaying how Americans vote... but why the UK Torygraph?
They're English. The probability is they've just got it wrong and do not care.
Yes, that is the simplest explanation. But despite all the evidence, I cling to my romantic belief that journalists retain some vestige of intellectual curiosity, and have some positive motivation other than "laziness and apathy" -- however machiavellian it may be -- when they go glaringly counterfactual. I am such an idealist.
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